As, in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand approached the end of her prowl along the corridors of the doomed Taggart Comet, she encountered, in Bedroom A, Car No. 14, yet another professor, a class of people for whom she had a very special contempt. This one was “a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind—how do you know that the tunnel is dangerous?—no reality—how can you prove that the tunnel exists?—no logic—why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power?—no principles—why should you be bound by the law of cause-and-effect?”
The first thing one might say about this is that if, in real life, Rand ever encountered any such person, she was uniquely favoured by fate. Few of the rest of us can have had that privilege, and not even the fictional political, business and academic villains of Atlas Shrugged would have espoused such a ‘philosophy’. Their actions and motives were all too understandable, since they involved the seizure of the very real property of the ‘reasonable men’ (the most unreal characters in the whole book) for their own very real and selfish purposes.
What can be said about this particular passage is that it abundantly reflects Rand’s own tenuous grasp on reality. The Second World War was at its height in 1943 when she began work on Atlas Shrugged, and the first draft was completed in 1946, a year after it was over. In discussing the first victim described of the Winston disaster, the ‘professor of sociology in Car No 1’, I noted that there cannot have been many people at that time who believed, together with him, that the individual characters of people such as Hitler and Stalin had no influence on events. There can have been even fewer, even among those who had been living relatively sheltered lives in California, who believed that the events themselves had no reality.
But nothing, it seems, could be allowed to interfere with Rand’s relentless denial of reality. Or her hatred of academia.