Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Movement in-fighting and schisms

Here is an example of a phenomenon that has long puzzled me: Nasty in-group fighting. In The Rise of Neo-Kantianism, Klaus Christian Köhnke asks:

What can “explain one of the most distressing features of the neo-Kantians: the fierceness and bitterness of their polemics, the nastiness of their ad hominem arguments, which destroyed personal friendships and decent collegial relations? Heinrich Rickert (Heidelberg) wrote to Paul Natorp (Marburg): ‘Just because we critical idealists agree on fundamentals, we have to take the knives to each other” (Cambridge University Press 1991, p. x).

It’s easier to understand demonizing the far opposition, i.e., those whose beliefs and values are alien to your own. But it’s harder to understand demonizing those with whom you agree on 99% of key issues. Why does the 1% disagreement drives some to paroxysms of anger, bitter infighting, and denunciation?

The infighting dynamic crops up in a variety of types of movements across history — political movements (e.g., the Marxists), educational movements (e.g., the Montessorians), architectural (e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright’s followers), philosophical (e.g., Objectivists), semi-scientific (e.g., Freudians), and of course most religious movements.

Heinrich Rickert above stated it as an imperative: The closer the agreement, the worse the fighting. Why is that so?

* Is it that we expect or hope for more from those close to us, so disagreements are more crushingly disappointing?
* Is it that those close to us have more power to hurt us, so disagreements lead to defensive over-reactions?
* Is it that movements are social, so disagreements are opportunities for in-group status advancement or for signaling one’s status and alliances?

I can understand the phenomenon more easily within systems that have strong faith-and-authority epistemological traditions. Such groups do not make reasoning and healthy argument habitual, so it makes sense that their members would not be able to handle questioning and disagreement well.

But that makes more puzzling the in-fighting among rational belief systems, i.e., those that explicitly identify and urge productive argument and discovery skills. In those groups, is the descent to nastiness simply a failure of character? Or are there strong psychological and social-psychological dispositions that even rational belief systems have a hard time overcoming? Or is the initial impression great amounts of infighting distorted — that actually most of the group’s members handle the disagreements productively and in proportion, while only a few noisy participants drown them out and drag down the discussion?

A related question about leadership: Does a movement’s leader typically contribute to the in-fighting problem, or do the followers do it all by and to themselves?

One datum: In discussing Freud’s fractious movement, Howard Gardner tells this sad anecdote:

“Less happily, their involvements with Freud proved costly for some individuals, particularly those who had broken with him. Freud’s young protege Victor Tausk, despondent over his recent rupture with the unforgiving Freud, committed suicide; of the earlier followers, at least six others ultimately did the same. These facts represent our first evidence of the casualties that tend to befall those within the orbit of highly creative individuals” (Creating Minds, p. 82).

But I was struck by this contrasting datum about Frank Lloyd Wright’s circle, as recalled by Ayn Rand after a visit:

“She long remembered her indignation over the attitude of hero worship and servitude that Wright was famous for instilling in his ‘Fellowship,’ made up of tuition-paying students. They cooked, served meals, and cleaned. They ate at tables set a step or two below the dais on which Wright and his guests and family dined, and they consumed a plainer diet. Their drawings, she noted, were undistinguished and imitative of Wright. ‘What was tragic was that he didn’t want any of that,’ Rand told a friend in 1961. ‘He was trying to get intellectual independence [out of] them during the general discussions, but he didn’t get anything except ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’ and recitals of formulas from his writing.’ She compared them to medieval serfs.” (Anne Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, pp. 169-170). And of course some of Rand’s followers have behaved that way too.

Nietzsche said that one must always forgive an intellectual his first generation of followers. It seems a sorry truth of history that those who grow up directly in the shadow of a genius have special difficulties with becoming independent.

So it is still a puzzle in my mind. Great matters demand great thinking and great passion — and great character in the exercise of both.

About justifiable, virtuous anger, Aristotle stated the ideal best — to be able to “feel anger on the right grounds and against the right persons, and also in the right manner and at the right moment and for the right length of time” (Nicomachean Ethics 4.5, 1125b 31). That is indeed the challenge.

Kindle version of my Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics

My essay on “Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics” is now available in e-book format.

The essay has gotten very good mileage, so to speak, since being first published in The Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy. It has been translated into German and Korean, and in English it is available at the Social Science Research Network and in a monograph edition at Amazon.

The abstract: “Most traditional systems of business ethics hold that business is essentially amoral or immoral. Such systems share a common assumption: that conflicts of interest—either because of scarce resources or innate human badness or sin—are basic to the human condition. That assumption of fundamental conflict is rejected in Ayn Rand’s system of ethics. Rand, by contrast, emphasizes the power of human reason to shape one’s character and beliefs, and it makes fundamental reason’s power to develop new resources and cultivate win-win social relationships. In this essay, Stephen Hicks applies Rand’s radical ethical perspective to key issues in business ethics and contrasts it to those perspectives based on the assumption of the amorality or immorality of business.”

For my other publications in this area, see my Business and Economic Ethics page.

Philosophy “vertically”: integrating positions into systems

Stephen Hicks here presents philosophy metaphorically “vertically,” discussing how the major philosophies compare to each other as integrated systems. This is from Part 6 of Professor Hicks’s Philosophy of Education course.

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Gail Wynand’s power strategy (Part 1)

Like Peter Keating, Gail Wynand pursues a use-and-be-used career strategy. Wynand uses strong-arm tactics when necessary in building up his newspaper’s market; he manipulates his employees with money to break their integrity; he fires those like Dominique who refuse to bend; and he lets the lowest-common-denominator of public taste dictate the content of the newspaper he works so hard to build up. Like Keating, he acquires plenty of money and a position at the top of his profession’s social hierarchy.

So why is Wynand not just another Keating-type character? Why isn’t he literarily redundant to the development of the theme of The Fountainhead? Because Rand develops Wynand as more consciously aware of the strategy he is pursuing and of the risks it poses to his soul; consequently, Rand also develops Wynand as pursuing deliberate strategies to insulate himself from those risks.

Keating semi-consciously manipulates and meanders through life and ends up a selfless wreck of a man. Wynand consciously sees that risk but believes that he can achieve his goals in a corrupt world—and keep his soul intact enough to enjoy them—if :

1. He gets the right kind of power over other people.
2. He keeps a rigid separation of his work life and his personal life.

On the right kind of social power. Keating’s social power is based on schmoozing and lying. Wynand’s social power is based on money. Wynand makes a judgment here: a life of lying and schmoozing one’s way to the top is to commit to fakery and to losing one’s personal sense of what’s real and what’s illusory. By contrast, money as Wynand uses it is more honest. Wynand doesn’t fake; he is upfront when tempting employees with money to break their integrity, for example, or when trading the Stoneridge commission for Dominique. Keating will kiss you on the cheek, so to speak, while stabbing you in the back. Wynand will look you in the eye and straight-up make you an outrageous bribe.

On separating the public and the personal. Keating never figures out how to define his own personal values and draw his lines and so ends up letting himself be manipulated in his core values. Wynand defines his own personal values and ruthlessly resists all incursions upon them. He cultivates his own tastes in art, builds up his own collection of masterpieces, and keeps his art gallery off limits to the grubby masses. He spends significant time on his yacht, wandering the world at will, and again cultivating an oasis of meaningful privacy against a sordid world.

Wynand is thus a compromise character: In dealing with the external social world, he plays brilliantly the mutually-corrupting power-struggle game; but in his internal private life, he is committed to independence and integrity.

He is like Keating when at The Banner but like Roark when in his art gallery or on his yacht.

He is Roarkian in his ability to visual the end: doing things his own way according to his own highest independent standards. But he is Keating-esque in his judgment of the means necessary to achieve his ends: corrupting others and selling oneself in a base world to get power.

The next question: Does Wynand’s strategy work?

The increasing(ly clear) relevance of Ayn Rand

“Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life,” as this Facebook group points out.

Many intelligent observers have noted the connection, which has led to sharply increased sales of Atlas and prominent coverage of Atlas’s themes in Business Week, Forbes, the New York Times, the Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and other major publications. And from across the pond comes this British magazine’s tribute and commentary on Ayn Rand’s significance. (Thanks to Bob H. for the link.)

Amity Shlaes’s recent piece in Bloomberg is well worth reading: Atlas Is Shrugging With a Growing Load. Shlaes is the author of a recent history of the Great Depression and so is well positioned to offer commentary on our times. A pair of key quotations from Shlaes’s piece:

On punitive taxation: “In 1986, a year when Atlas Shrugged sold between 60,000 and 80,000 copies, the top 1 percent of earners paid 26 percent of the income tax. By 2000, that 1 percent was paying 37 percent, and Atlas Shrugged sales were at 120,000. By 2006, the top 1 percent carried 40 percent of the burden.”

On government fiat money and deficit financing, quoting Rand: “Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’”

Today’s events are a consequence of political, economic, and, more importantly, philosophical principles adopted by the most influential thinkers and doers of the last several generations. The antidote, accordingly, requires that this and the next generation’s most influential thinkers and doers change their philosophical course.

For follow-up material on Rand’s philosophical analysis of the roots of the crisis and the antidote, I recommend the following.

For general readers, here is my introductory overview of Ayn Rand’s biography and ethics at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

For all readers, here are two recent anthologies of essays on Atlas Shrugged, one edited by Professor Edward Younkins and the other edited by Professor Robert Mayhew.

For a technical, book-length discussion of Rand’s ethical theory, here is Tara Smith’s Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics. For further discussion of Professor Smith’s book, here is my review [pdf], published in Philosophy in Review, and Carrie Ann Biondi’s extended review [pdf], published in the most recent issue of Reason Papers.

For a philosophically-informed analysis of the crisis by a top-level financial professional, I recommend John Allison’s analysis. Allison is Chairman of BB&T and one of the great businessmen of our generation. Evidence: BB&T is one of the major banks that is still very healthy. Like Todd Zywicki, I recently heard Allison speak on the origins of the financial crisis and how BB&T avoided being sucked into the mess, and I recommend his analysis highly.

As we are suffering through yet another hard experiential lesson about collectivism and enforced altruism, let’s resolve to learn the lesson clearly and in principle so that the next generation will see more encouraging signs like these.

Greiner and Kinni’s “Ayn Rand and Business”

My review of Donna Greiner and Theodore Kinni’s Ayn Rand and Business in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 4:2, Spring 2003.

“Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics” published

Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics [pdf]

Originally published in The Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy 3:1 (Winter 2003), pp. 1-26.

Also available online at the Social Science Research Network and in a monograph edition from Amazon.com.

Also available in Korean and German translation.
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“Ayn Rand” at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Ayn Rand
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2001.