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Aside from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the most famous critics of the Soviet system was Ayn Rand, who emigrated to America in the early twentieth century and became one of the most influential philosophers of her generation. One of the focuses of her work, which she saw as a continuation of the Romantic tradition, emphasized humankind’s free will and our ability to choose values, to work towards them, and to gain satisfaction from achieving those goals. The position that she took in her opus, which seemed bombastic or exaggerated to many until recently, was that anybody who even remotely espoused leftist and collectivist ideals was a villainous looter who refused to take part in the rational process of valuation and productive labor.
The heart of the issue, to Rand, was a metaphysical and ethical one. The looters in her stories wanted to deny reality and expected others to pick up the tab – much like the collectivist neo-Marxists are expecting society to do now. By denying reality, Rand said that they were attempting to steal from other people and exploit their good faith. The righteous person, in Rand’s philosophical framework, can be described as a trader, an inventor, a laborer, an artist, and an intellectual to whatever degree they are able – vocations that are often idealized or featured in her work.
Additionally, Rand’s diagnosis of Marxists remains that they were afraid of being individuals, which caused them to conform radically to outlandish and irresponsible ideas. Indeed, in the overstructured and colonized environment many Western children inhabit, lacking sufficient developmental supports in childhood and the kinds of life coaching only available to wealthy elites, it can be difficult to explore one’s own values, develop a consistent philosophy by which to live life, and develop a plan to work towards those goals and values.
Underlying Rand’s ideas is a belief in a definite and knowable reality, a product of the Enlightenment and scientific project she championed in her work. This stood in stark contrast to the postmodernist position, which holds that reality is socially constructed and nobody can ever know anything objectively. In such a subjective and quicksilver-like world, one’s ability to get their needs met is not based on productive labor, which would implicitly require interactions with reality and a consistent philosophy to support them, but rather one’s ability to manipulate others into meeting their needs.
This is the fundamental mindset behind Marxism, which rejects the outright competition of the free market and replaces it with social competition based on conformity to increasingly complexified values. This is also the key driver behind the continual expansion of the queer demographic to include disturbingly specific sub-identities such as the ampukodo, someone who believes they are a child amputee. Failure to adhere to social conventions when addressing such demographics results in expulsion from the group, akin to the Soviet gulag treatment or the public confessions favored by the Chinese communists. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 91)
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