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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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It’s Christmas Eve, and over-the-air TV stations around the country are playing Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Meanwhile, a thread on Reddit’s Movies sub is having an actual rational discussion of the film’s exploration of economics after the OP identifies it as socialist propaganda.

Of course, the OP is not alone. Ayn Rand herself is said to have identified IAWL as a vehicle for socialist thought, specifically a class war between unrepentant valueless rapacious businessmen versus class heroes of the working class, written by Communist sympathizers and socialists within the movie industry.

Or did she?

An article from The Atlas Society reveals she said nothing about IAWL, and despised the House Un-American Activities Committee as publicity-seeking partisans:

For the record, while Rand did testify at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1947 as a Friendly Witness, she did so under subpoena. She seems to have considered the appearance a formality, and she scheduled her testimony to take place during a business trip, sandwiching her HUAC appearance between research for Atlas Shrugged and over a dozen interviews with journalists from major media outlets to discuss her own writing. The only movies that she discussed in front of the committee were The Song of Russia, which she considered such blatant Soviet propaganda that it was hardly worth mentioning, and The Best Years of Our Lives. The latter film she criticized because the banker, Al Stevenson, played by Frederic March, is praised for lending without collateral. It is interesting to think about Al Stevenson in relation to the fictional Eugene Lawson, one of Rand’s characters from Atlas Shrugged, whose humanitarianism bankrupted the Community National Bank in Wisconsin.

While Rand-haters like to claim that she took offense at the depiction of Mr. Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore, in It’s a Wonderful Life, there is no evidence that she was concerned for the reputation of the miserly banker, and it is difficult to believe that she would have defended him. On the contrary Potter bears a resemblance to Mayor Bascom of Rome, Wisconsin, a chiseler of Rand’s own creation, again from Atlas Shrugged, for whom she really did have contempt.

In any case, as an Objectivist-influenced thinker, it’s great for me to be able to point at It’s A Wonderful Life as an example of the paradox of Randian selfishness. It was selfish for George Bailey to save his brother from the pond at risk of his own life: he wanted a world where his brother was alive, and selfishly didn’t care if his parents lost both boys if he failed. He selfishly put off his honeymoon when the market crashed to save the family business he inherited.

In each case, his choices added the kind of irreplaceable value to the life he wanted, despite costing him his dreams of going to big places and making big things for big people to admire. If those big dreams were genuinely his values, he’d have worked for them with his whole heart instead; he’d have selfishly spent time and money to headhunt a like-minded soul to run the S&L, sell the business, and go to architect school next to Howard Roark.

I hope that each and every one of you have a merry Christmas, without resentments, without loss or pain, because I value each of you for daring to selfishly stand up for your highest values: truth, purpose, and communication between minds, with the intent to make the world you want.

I always thought the movie was about the importance of community and it wasn’t very hidden. Isn’t the angels entire visit at the end about all the great things George did for the community? The final scene is the community giving back to him. This is in contrast to Potter who only cares about money.

Isn’t the angels entire visit at the end about all the great things George did for the community?

Not quite how I would have framed it but yes. George's key character trait is that he has consistently put others before himself. Even when he is at his lowest point and considering suicide, part of his motivation is that the life insurance pay-out will at least secure his wife and kids' near-term future. Clarence the angel's core message/goal is to convince George turn away from despair because the world is a better place with George in it.

This definition of selfish can include pretty much every traditional moral act of selflessness. “Jesus sacrificed his Life because he selfishly wanted a world where his Father was pleased and Man freed from sin.” It’s clearer to understand selfishness in the traditional understanding as a zero-sum decision which helps oneself at the expense of helping another. Attempting to save one’s brother is thus selfless, as the word is most clearly used, as it comes from a selfless desire to save the life of another at peril to oneself.

Complexity does develop when we ask: “is it most moral and for the greater good to selflessly attempt to save another every time, even if there’s a 55% chance both die, meaning that over 100 iterations it’s certainly causing greater loss of life?”

And the answer to this I still say yes, the selfless act is still greater, because (1) such acts inspire the whole of society, (2) such acts make each member of the society feel safer, knowing he can trust the other, (3) the emotional impetus of the act is heroic and good, and in crises we usually behave according to our emotional intuition.

Thus the paradox of selfishness: what aspect of a choice is essential to accurately calling it selfish or selfless? It seems to me there are three main metrics to use when judging any choice:

  • Who benefits? (higher status? better experiences? more resources? freer agency? The chooser, the person it impacts, or no one?)

  • Who does it cost? (lower status? worse experiences? lowered utility? restricted agency? How much?)

  • Do any of these parties consider the trade of cost / benefit to be fair or unfair?

To boil a multidimensional cost/benefit analysis down to a simple binary may be handy for a rule of thumb, but it’s absurd to make hard-and-fast judgments of any choice’s morality simply by whether the person making the choice is not one of its major beneficiaries.

But beyond all of that, Rand made crystal clear the poison is not in the simplification but in the implication. She found it utterly repugnant that anyone should disdain the self because it is the self. The glory of the human spirit is that we build tools to solve problems, our problems, and often find win-win solutions to do so, including arpeggiating serial win-win-wins through market forces. She praised and elevated people who knew how much they were truly worth and despised anyone who insisted on producers sacrificing their potential and resources for short-term wins for people who squander their potential. It was selfish of her to want a society where people with potential succeed and build great things to use or inspiring art to admire; thus, she heralded selfishness.

Taking it all back to Bedford Falls and George Bailey, George performed righteous and heroic acts, wherever they were on the axis of selfish or selfless, whether he benefited himself or vicariously through people he valued, whether he himself knew the positive consequences or not, whether they inspired anyone or not. If more Bedforders lived honestly for their values, and their values were focused on greatness and not mediocrity, perhaps George wouldn’t have wanted to leave his small town for bigger things. What ate away at George was the sense that he was the only one who could fix things, and it always felt unfair how much he was called upon to give away resources, status, and opportunities for positive experiences. But he gave anyway, because the world he cared about would be worse if he didn’t.

George was almost fooled into insurance suicide by a society which recognized no transcendence in his life and character, only a slight and momentary increase in its own values extracted from his death. That’s the kind of selflessness Rand railed against, whether it be a man or an entire country: that he should value his life less than his death.

This definition of selfish can include pretty much every traditional moral act of selflessness.

Rand had a very idiosyncratic definition of "selfish". I've always wondered if it was something to do with the way the words translate, interpreted with autistic literalism. But she just means "beneficial to you, in a fully contextual, long-term sense." In her view, screwing over others in short term winnings is ultimately counterproductive, and harmful to your long-term self-interest. In her use of the terms, a "sacrifice" is something that you wouldn't willingly trade away without duress. The classic example is the virgin sacrificed to the Volcano God. Obviously the village would rather have a healthy young person than no health young person. They only "sacrifice" that person under the perceived threat of violence from the Volcano God. Conversely, Jesus was voluntarily paying a cost, much as I would be if I went hungry to feed my kids. I value their health above my own, which means that harming my direct interests to benefit theirs is within the Randian conception of "selfish".

I'm surprised people think it's socialist, the hero is a literal banker and it makes the case for loans very clearly positive. I don't know how you can build a leftist worldview on such a foundation unless leftism includes free markets and capital investment.

Yeah it always seemed like a pro new deal if anything. The S&L would have been struggle free in a world where Fannie Mae and the FHLB provided liquidity.

Man that Reddit thread was such a mess. Debates over the definition of words (particularly old, broad words like socialism) are fruitless.

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