The Idiocy of the Ryan-Rand World

Leon Wieseltier:

WHAT, THEN, is so terrible about self-reliance? Nothing, unless it is promoted into an absolutism, into a cult of sacred egotism, into an “Invictus”-like illusion. (That is another classic of ego-swelling adolescent literature.) The more people do for themselves, the better. The more they assume responsibility for the course of their lives, the better. Who denies these noble banalities? Our agency is the clearest expression of our freedom. We possess extraordinary powers. It is miraculous what the works of human hands have accomplished, except that it is the opposite of miracle, because we are not supernatural beings.
But Ryan’s concept of self-reliance, the gospel of John Galt (“you are your own highest value ... as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul ...”), is devoid of all humility—it is the very vainglory against which the Bible, Ryan’s ultimate book, warned. My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth! Ryan may have disavowed Rand’s atheism, but he has not quite escaped her revolt against human finitude, her deification of the individual. This radical individualism is a delusion of impotence made over into a delusion of omnipotence.
It is also, analytically, a colossal mistake. The splendid isolation of the trader, the builder, the innovator, the entrepreneur, the superman, does not exist. It is one of the many flattering legends that successful people in this country devise about themselves. (Like the legend that success is a proof of personal virtue.) The individual—even the individualist individual—is always situated densely in the customs and the conventions of society. Where is Burke when you need him? And where are the otherwise ubiquitous metaphors of the network and the web? If, for conservatives, the market can serve as a model for society, surely it is because the market is web-like, society-wide, a social entity, a thicket of bonds and connections and influences in which creativity flourishes not least because it is enabled and implemented by others who, gratefully or opportunistically, recognize it. Competition is itself a kind of social compact, and in this sense a kind of cooperation.

Yes, even the markets are a society of people who have to cooperate.  But maybe that is one of the major reasons our financial and economic systems are in a shambles.  Too many people are acting in an unenlightened self-interest, instead of the enlightened self-interest that Henry Ford showed when he bid up his workers' wages.  Are people too unwilling to help somebody else out, knowing those same people might help them out too?  When we can close ourselves off in a hermetically sealed world where we only interact with people like ourselves, I can see that we might fall into that trap.  But that is what it is, a trap.  The Ryan philosophy is a really weak justification for pure selfishness, nothing more.  Trying to combine that selfishness with any form of Christianity seriously damages both capitalism and Christianity.  But that doesn't stop Ryan or the GOP.