About the price of freedom and the concept of "Global Warming".
The most
profound moment in the movie “Iron Man 2” may be the scene in which Tony Stark addresses
the crowd that’s present in a congressional
hearing while the representative of the state, in this case some senator,
hassles him over the illegal use of dangerous weapons for his own private
benefit and argues that he should hand over the technology, in order that the
general public can benefit from it. Stark’s defense boils down to one sentence:
“I’ve successfully privatized world peace.” After this he makes a double peace
sign, let us bear in mind that he is an arms developer, and adds victoriously: “what
more do you want? For now!” After this he puts on his sunglasses and struts out of the room.
According
to Kyle Smith, a New York post blogger, the ideology behind the Iron Man movies
is one reminiscent to the writings of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was a libertarian
ideologist, I believe one couldn’t go so far as to call her a philosopher as
some do and the “philosophical” current of objectivism hardly merits the label I
just gave it, that believed that to pursue one’s own happiness is the only
ethical thing to do and that the only political system consistent with this is
the kind of pre-Keynesian capitalism that we could describe as neo-liberal or
laissez-faire. It is not very obvious to me if Justin Theroux, the screenwriter
of Iron Man, was very familiar with the writings of miss Rand, but if he wasn’t
he did make use of the psychological appeal that her ideas have to a lot of
North-Americans and to lots of people all over the world. The appeal derives from
the amoral notion that strong individuals have every right to dominate almost
everybody, and certainly everybody weaker than them, and that the state has no
business in limiting the actions of the extraordinarily enterprising human
beings. In this way everybody is made totally responsible for his own destiny:
if you fail, if you are not successful, you have to submit and kneel before the
stronger, for nobody is privileged to intervene when the strong want something.
Rand described this as leading a heroic lifestyle, giving yourself to the
fullest and trying everything to become successful, to achieve some acclaim, in
short, to be happy is your only moral duty. So, arguing in this way, the moguls
of Halliburton were entirely justified in using the war and the civilians of
Iraq to become wealthier and more powerful. Tony Stark is entirely justified in
keeping the dangerous Iron Man technology his and becoming even wealthier
because of it. The strong appeal is of course that if you try hard enough,
whatever layer of society you originate from, you can become one of the
dominant few and have almost unlimited power. This golden incentive should
drive the masses to excel, so that each one for himself becomes beneficial to
society. But underneath it all, there is something that tends to be overlooked:
one man’s meat is always another man’s poison.
We should
examine what this use of “beneficial to society” exactly means. We would expect
it to mean two rather connected things.
- Beneficial to the greatest number of people, bearing in mind that not everybody can benefitted all the time.
- Leading to a kind of lifestyle or attitude that strengthens the beneficiality as understood under number 1 at least with the greatest number of people.
About 1 we
can be pretty clear pretty fast: the libertarian doctrine of Ayn Rand doesn’t
achieve this kind of beneficiality, at all. It would of course all be good and
well when the kind of millionaire like Tony Stark were a real life human being.
But human beings of such ethical proportion don’t exist, nobody is a perfect
Robin Hood, as he is in the movie. So in the struggle for power there will be
ugly scenes, even entire populations will be sacrificed. If we just take a
closer look at the wars in Iraq we can see this quite clearly. Who benefitted
from this excellent exercise in free market economics but some enterprises and
their CEO’s? The answer is nobody. Not the American soldier, the American
civilians that had sons and daughters in the service and certainly not the
Iraqi people, who got shot at, bombed the crap out of and were generally more
abused under American siege than at any other time its history.
But maybe Randian
libertarians will concede all this. After all the attitude of the individual in
this Weltanschauung is not to be moral
in the sense of keeping others in mind. “You can’t keep others in mind, because
no one will be able to do anything anymore”, they will retort. So even when
things happen that aren’t very beneficial as understood in the first sense we
explored, they should be as understood in the second sense. Let us briefly
examine this.
“Under
socialism no flowers bloom”, proponents of unrestricted free market capitalism
are prone to saying, and they might add, “because they have no more incentives
to bloom.” Of course it is widely recognized and acknowledged that motivation
and the lack thereof was a big problem under the extremes of Sovjet and other
communistic regimes. If you cannot in some way distinguish yourself by the
fruits of your labour, there is no more motivation to work. But it needn’t be so
extreme. Tony Stark giving up his potential weapons of mass destruction and
sharing an inch of his power with the powers of state doesn’t seem to be a case
of taking all the incentives to work away. It seems more likely that the recent
crisis that came about by people doing everything they can to become wealthy,
things such as high risk speculation, and the government not really doing
anything about it took more incentives of more people to ever work again away
than would have happened if the government would’ve intervened and would’ve
said: “hey wait a minute mister Rich Guy, you can’t play with people’s money
like that.” It sounds moronically simple, bordering on parody, but that’s
because it really is that moronically simple.
Why does
one try so hard to sell the idea that one is bringing freedom to a region by
means of war? In a truly open Randian world it would be enough if an
individual, out of his own desire to be happy, starts a war and enough people
are willing to die for this individuals egocentric reasons. But the world is
not truly open Randian and, fortunately, a lot of people don’t share the
libertarian outlook on the accepted paths of voluntarism. So there will always
be an appeal to beneficiality in our
second sense of the word. In a lot of cases one can obviously see that the war
didn’t bring any immediate goods to the nation under attack. But we are
constantly reminded that we have to keep in mind that it is all for the best,
in the long run. This is an attitude that is very reminiscent of colonialism.
It is saying, really: “We know what’s
best for a foreign nation, trust us, we’re the super moral Robin Hood, and the
other one is the villain. We aim to liberate not to enslave, even if we do
enslave. Oh, and we will make some profit along the way. But hey, what can you
expect? “ One should always be wary when one hears the word freedom uttered in
the context of war, look for the economical incentive first, a lot of times it
will be there for the taking.
We briefly
went over the argument of beneficiality in a Randian governed world and we can
conclude that there’s nothing to be said for it. Let’s get back to “Iron Man 2”.
Tony Stark is a very appealing character, he has dozens of beautiful women, he
is eccentric, he is a risk takes, a daredevil and he drives formula 1 cars. He
is a lot more appealing than the pig nosed senator who tries to take his
property away in the movie, and probably goes home to his stew cooking wife and
his 2,5 children at the end of the day. Also: the first character is obviously
false and surreal, a grotesque exaggeration of what every millionaire would
want himself to be. The senator seems real. The question that remains is this
one: when making our ideological choices, and getting our incentives in life,
who do what do want to model ourselves to, fantastic fancy or something more
real? Some will pick the first, because they like to and because they can.
Maybe their existence isn’t fun and they rather prefer running away from it.
They should consider the following.
There was another author who oft wrote about
living heroically, like miss Rand did, but in a more existential way. For him
living heroically was making your choices and rolling your rock up the mountain,
much like Sisyphus in the myth, even if you know life to be an absurd place, in
which everything that is labeled as ‘culture’ is just a fantasy, a man made
creation. The name of the author is Albert Camus and he also claims that if you
don’t live life to the fullest there is no point in living it, and you are
wiser to commit suicide. This is true, everybody should live life to the
fullest. But if the toil of the factory worker is ultimately absurd and
meaningless, so is the speculation and strategy of the millionaire. The
absurdist condition of existence allows us to pick our examples freely, we don’t
have an obligation to societal success, it being a fraud, just like other
frauds. The way in which we pick our heroes and examples becomes a result of
our own inclinations and personalities. Some will have naturally warm
inclinations toward others, others won’t. Beneficiality as in our previous
definitions now depends on how many people are inclined warmly towards one
another. As we grow to care more for each other, society grows more caring. If
we don’t, society stagnates, perhaps declines. That is the real thing that is
at stake, that is the only possible meaning the word ‘progress’ can have. It’s
not about technology, money or even health care, it’s about warmth. Maybe we
can use global warming here in a more positive way than it is usually used.
This is a long way of the egotistic and solitary heroic perspective on living
of Ayn Rand, but I think it’s a more valuable one.
