I received a number of e-mails...

...in regard to my post yesterday on Ayn Rand and David Brooks. I realize now that in the midst of all that manic posting, I should have slowed down a little and explained myself better. Let me take another "bite at the apple," as they say in Washington these days.

First of all, I should have addressed the piece to all "followers of Ayn Rand, libertarians and laissez-faire capitalists," because the first sentence I highlighted is directed to all of them:

We had a financial regime based on the notion that bankers are rational creatures who wouldn’t do anything stupid en masse.

The notion that people are rational is an article of faith among Objectivists, the followers of Ayn Rand. (And, yes, I used the word "faith.") And one of the central tenets of libertarianism is that the private sector doesn't need regulation because rational businessmen would never do anything that would harm their businesses. Brooks points out that businessmen are not always rational. And a further inference from this is that their irrational behavior can have harmful consequences for the rest of us. For example, that widget maker in your town may have been driven out of business had the banks been allowed to fail in 2008.

The next sentence highlighted:

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature.

This speaks to one of my biggest problems with Objectivism -- it's too simplistic, too dogmatic and just not consistent with reality. Humans and human behavior are endlessly complex and there's really very little we know. Better to be humble in the face of a vast and mysterious universe than to act, like Ayn Rand, as though it's all very simple.

Finally,

...we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

If there's one thing I've decided in the last few years or so, it's that man hasn't evolved nearly as much as we'd like to think. Also, we have much more in common with animals than Objectivists would like to believe. By this I mean that the Randian notion of people as rational, self-sufficient individuals is just not true. We are herd animals, part of (and dependent on) the group -- or collective -- as Rand (and Paul Ryan) would put it.

If you'd like more elaboration on this topic, check out Charlie Rose's interview of David Brooks. It's really interesting.