how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word “I” could give it up and not know what they lost.
Rand fused the fear of collectivism with a kind of lost-cause conservatism that was generally popular during the “wilderness years,” the time between 1932 and 1968 in which conservatives found themselves generally out of step with the American mainstream. Conservatism during those years consisted, as the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, less of ideas than of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Such gestures of retreat, melancholia, isolation, and a serious persecution complex are all over Rand’s fiction and public persona. Gestures of revulsion and disgust, gestures that combine schoolyard taunts and a pretty thin skin.
Silicon Valley’s youth obsession has allowed Rand’s ideas to thrive in an environment that would on first glance seem politically inimical. Whenever Rand rears her head in Silicon Valley, it’s not so much in the form of an idea but in the “irritable mental gestures” seeking to resemble ideas that Trilling wrote about. And it is in unexpected places. Certainly, there are dyed-in-the-wool objectivists in the tech industry. There’s Peter Thiel, who seems to have grown up on a mix of Atlas Shrugged and The Silmarillion; there’s Sam Altman of Y Combinator fame; there’s Travis Kalanick, whose Twitter avatar used to be the cover of The Fountainhead. There’s Steve Jobs, who was inspired by Rand in his youth, according to his Apple cofounder, Steve Wozniak. But far more frequently, Rand’s ideas have started wearing the native garb of Northern California. They come with the crunchy flavor of the counterculture; they talk about team-building and making the world a better place.
The problem-solving acumen of Elon Musk, for instance, speaks to the billionaire’s sense of responsibility toward others and his planet. But it is always also animated by a kind of impatience with governments, with experts, with any large collective group having an accumulated sense of how best to do certain things. Rather than let cave divers strategize, based on past experience, how to rescue some kids from a cave in Thailand, Musk will come up with a robot that’ll do them one better, and he’ll do it all by himself. Musk, in other words, pulled off the seemingly impossible trick of giving compassion a Randian hue.
Ever wonder what philosophy animates popular Pixar films like The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Wall-E? Think of young Dash Parr (the Incredibles’ son) being told that “everyone is special” and harrumphing that that’s “another way of saying no one is.” About the idea that it is the business of special people to be special, and of their lessers to get out of their way. The Incredibles is kind of admirable for the bluntness with which it advocates that inequality is natural, or deserved, and should be affirmed. Pixar films, especially the ones directed by Brad Bird, frequently mimic Rand’s tendency to have her villains pander down to the masses and up to the financial, academic, and taste-making elite at once.
But that message gets mixed with other trace elements characteristic of the hippiefied version of Rand you see in the colorful office parks along U.S. 101. In Ratatouille it’s the enduring myth of self-realization. Ratatouille is about a rat who wants to be a chef, and who is in fact a natural talent. But he’s also, you know, a rat—his entire clan of rats like to stuff themselves with garbage, and he’s up against a snobby gatekeeper critic named Anton Ego. The film’s ethos is encapsulated by the famed chef Auguste Gusteau claiming “anyone can cook”; and the main character, Remy, spends the entire film proving himself Gusteau’s worthy, if unlikely, successor. But the film is deceptive, for Ratatouille proves Gusteau’s words only by tweaking them. In reality, the film is saying that if you’re a superspecial rat with God-given talent, you ought to be treated like the genius you are, no matter who you are. In the end, Ego probably summarizes the film’s central premise better: “Not everyone can become a great artist. But a great artist can come from anywhere.”
Again and again, Pixar indulges the tropes of flip-flop-wearing Northern California but ends up with something that sounds a lot like Ayn Rand. For a big-budget Disney production, Wall-E gets pretty brutal in its takedown of consumer capitalism. Thanks to the efforts of a giant corporation, Buy n Large, humanity has been reduced to large indolent blobs, driving around in jazzy chairs in a Carnival Cruise–style spaceship, waited on by subservient robots. But you get the sense that the film doesn’t direct its anger toward the big, bad corporation behind it all—instead, it spends most of its time lampooning the consumers who allowed themselves to be brainwashed by it. The cultural critic and blogger Mark Fisher has called this the film’s “gestural anti-capitalism,” and it is characteristic of Silicon Valley Randians: they are disgusted not so much by the manipulators as by the manipulated. This is how tech entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel manage to be both vocal opponents of elites and hugely elitist: if you’re dumb enough to buy what I’m selling, he seems to think, you really shouldn’t be voting.
Even when Silicon Valley went all in on Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016, a lot of the techies seemed to profoundly misunderstand the senator from Vermont. You’d talk to
