The destructive power of dogma

From a Slate essay titled ‘How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood‘

As I was painting a cardboard owl, my father asked me to come inside the house. He and his new wife sat me down at the dinner table with grave faces.

“We were wondering if you would petition to be emancipated,” he said in his lawyer voice.

“What does that mean?” I asked, picking at the mauve paint on my hands. I later discovered that for most kids, declaring emancipation is an extreme measure — something you do if your parents are crack addicts or deadbeats.

“You would need to become financially independent,” he said. “You could work for me at my law firm and pay rent to live here.”

This was my moment of truth as an objectivist. If I believed in the glory of the individual, I would’ve signed the petition papers then and there. But as much as Rand’s novels had taught me to believe in meritocracy, they had not prepared me to go it alone financially and emotionally. I began to cry and refused.

I find Objectivism and Libertarianism as compelling as Marxism: all assume predictable, rational, game & rule type following behavior from everyone to work… and fall apart if someone doesn’t follow the rules (in Marxism there are people aren’t incentivized to work hard for a vague greater good, in Libertarianism no one has been able to explain how you’d fix the problem of a white southerner refusing to sell a black man something because he was a racist, even it was against his economic interest. Many voters consistently act against their own economic interests because they’re terrified of foreigners). But voters and people are radically irrational (The Myth of the Rational Voter is seriously a must read) and I get why that appeals to some, but I find the strains of thought that hew strictly to dogmas extraordinarily damaging.

Humans want un-rational things. We’re messy and complex, and simple dogmas reduce you to inflexible tyranny, particularly on the personal level. Sometimes, when it involves people, things that should work don’t.

That’s actually why, as an immigrant, I absolutely adore the messy, fucked up, complicated, always changing, frustrating politics of my adoptive country. Having grown up in a situation where a handful of people got to adopt the ‘fix’ of their choosing, I’m generally wary of any one group getting their way in absolution, even if its a group I agree with.

Filed under the topic Uncategorized on April 12th 2011 at 12:41 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.