Robert Jensen ScheerPost
Book Excerpt for This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning
John Stuart Mill long ago warned that when we are so certain of the truth of an idea that we reject discussion, that idea—even if it is true—“will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”
After nearly seven decades on Earth, I can see that at various times I gave in to that temptation. As I age, I hope I’m getting better at recognizing that most everything is debatable. But in those decades, I’ve often been too cocky. The first, and in some ways most embarrassing, example of my unwarranted intellectual arrogance came with wholehearted embrace of the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
When I tell friends that for four or five years in my mid-20s I read everything Rand had written and was a hardcore Objectivist, they are perplexed. Today I am a critic of most every intellectual claim and political position that Rand endorsed.
I am not the only person who has moved from one political framework to another, sometimes to a diametrically opposed viewpoint. It’s more common for people to move from the left to the right, but such shifts happen across the ideological landscape. But after lots of introspection, I can identify reasons why Rand’s ideas were attractive to me as a young man.
First, what were those ideas? Rand’s harsh libertarian politics were based on a rejection of altruism and a celebration of ethical egoism. In RandWorld, the best and the brightest should break free of the constraints of the less intelligent and insufficiently industrious masses. Great Men (and almost all the heroes in her novels were men) should refuse to be dragged down by any sense of mutual obligation, beyond that which is freely chosen and based on rational self-interest. Reason should trump emotion. Individuals trump communities. In RandWorld, caring about others just because they are fellow human beings is a weakness.
Why would that philosophy be attractive to me? I am not, and never aspired to be, a Great Man. I have no exceptional abilities and no heroic qualities. I think of myself as a hard worker, but not to a degree that makes me special. But in retrospect, I can see that there was one aspect of Rand’s picture of the world that appealed to me: The protagonists in her novels were self-creations, not weighed down by family or culture. Her heroes were free-floating, able not only to survive but to thrive without complicating connections to others. They defined themselves, by themselves.
Although I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I yearned to be free of my past, of my parents, of the as-yet-unacknowledged traumatic childhood that shaped me, which I write about at some length in my new book, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning. I wanted to create myself ex nihilo, from nothing, as some believed God created the universe. I wanted to be free, not just politically but psychologically.
Eventually I figured out the basic problem with Rand’s philosophy: She couldn’t accept the kind of being that human beings are. Our species came to dominate the globe not by exalting competition with each other but by cooperating in the small band-level societies in which we evolved. The world isn’t divided into the makers and the takers but instead comprises a sometimes delightful and sometimes frustrating mix of talents and temperaments, all necessary to build a healthy society. (Well, almost all temperaments are necessary; we could do without the narcissists, especially in leadership positions.) Trying to repress empathy is not only morally questionable but also psychologically impossible for all but sociopaths. And we aren’t purely rational beings who can eliminate our emotions from decision making; human reason and emotion are intertwined in ways that defy separation.
Even the most objective Objectivist couldn’t make the philosophy work, evidenced perhaps most clearly by Rand’s personal life, which was a train wreck, no different than many of us but made stranger because she pretended that she could rationally explain her often nonrational emotional choices. It appears she hung on to her beliefs until her death, never really accepting the kind of creatures we are.
My highly speculative assumption is that she was so scared of, and scarred by, some aspects of the real world—perhaps the inevitable pain of loss and rejection, the reality that others will hurt us and we will hurt others—that she took refuge in a conception of the world that she imagined offered protection. Ironically, it might be her sensitivity to the pain of the world that led her to a philosophy that ignored the pain of others. She apparently never felt sorry for anyone, but after I learned more about her life it was hard for me not to feel sorry for her. (End of armchair psychoanalysis of someone I never met.) Whatever the case, it’s good to remember that fear can, and often does, drive us all to nonrational places.
But what seems obvious to me now was invisible to me then. A lot of attention, positive and negative, has always been paid to Rand’s celebration and justification of greed and wealth, but that was never my attraction to her books. I never wanted to be rich, never have been particularly greedy. I think she’s popular with lots of disaffected young people, especially young men—the kind of person I was in my 20s—because she peddled the promise of a life without difficult emotional encumbrances, with no need for organic community connections. Her books offer the illusion that we can, by force of individual will, escape all the messiness of living with others and control who we are, no matter what our histories. My embrace of her philosophy was not an indication of strength but of fear.
I drifted away from Rand’s writing and started constructing a worldview that allowed me to face, rather than run from, my own fears and the collective fears of the culture. But for those few years, I took Rand’s philosophy as unchallengeable truth, my first—but, sadly, not last—experience with dead dogma. No one can honestly claim to be immune from the temptation to be sure they are right, but I hope I’m getting better at avoiding it. In my new book, I put aside the desire to prove I’m right in favor of exploring our quest for meaning, which rarely yields right and wrong answers.
—-
Robert Jensen is Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. His book This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning will be published by Blue Ear Books in September 2026. Jensen is also the author of It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics (Olive Branch Press, 2024). More information at https://robertwjensen.org/ or email rjensen@austin.utexas.edu.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.