When I look back at my days as a teenager, I find that my memories are clouded in a wistful bundle of possibilities. I don’t recall the mundane dreariness of studying for exams, nor do I remember coping with my mother’s middle-class insecurities. I have even forgotten the slights I suffered at the hands of status-conscious snobs in school. What, however, I remember is the expectation of a grand future, the promise of an indefinable brilliance that was in our grasp.
We lived in the idealistic 1950s of Jawaharlal Nehru’s dreams and we passionately believed in his democratic and socialist vision of a modern and just India. Saints had created India (in Andrè Malraux’s words) and this had happened in the shadows of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Not only had we escaped the World Wars but we had also become free without shedding much blood, thanks mostly to Mahatma Gandhi. Yes, half a million had died during Partition but it wasn’t state-sponsored violence as in China, Russia, Japan and Europe. Since we were addicted to peace, we felt that we had been rewarded with democracy.
As the years went by, I discovered that Nehru’s economic path was taking us to a dead end. I became a manager in a private company and soon found myself trapped in a thick jungle of Kafkaesque bureaucratic controls of the Licence Raj. Having set out to create socialism, we had created statism.
Oddly enough, Ayn Rand played a part in my teenage dreams. I discovered her novel, The Fountainhead, and could not help but be seduced by Howard Roark, who was as American as Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield. He was determined, he defied authority, hated mediocrity and did not seek the world’s praise. He was completely different from the heroes of our socialist dreams. When I went to college, I forgot Rand. If her name came up in undergraduate conversations, I followed my friends in dismissing her as a writer of potboilers and propaganda. Like everyone else I preferred Karl Marx to Adam Smith. The new discipline of “development economics” also taught us that poor nations could only rise out of poverty through massive investment by the state. There was no place for Howard Roark in this scheme.
I am reminded of Rand today because of a recent biography of hers by Anne Heller (Ayn Rand and the World She Made). Heller is successful, I think, because she is not an advocate of Rand’s ideas. An executive editor at Conde Nast, she was earlier fiction editor at Esquire and Redbook. Her biography made me think why I became a libertarian and a supporter of free enterprise. This book also served as a mirror, making me conscious of the flaws that I shared with Rand, in particular my excessive self-regard, and my insatiable desire to be “somebody”.
Rand grew up as Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, an awkward and wilful Russian Jewish prodigy. Her excessive self-absorption and protest against any form of collectivism were rooted in her family’s suffering in Russia. Her father owned a prosperous pharmacy in St Petersburg. She and her two sisters grew up in an upper middle class home with a cook, a maid, a nurse and a Belgian governess. Rand made good use of her advantages but disapproved of her mother’s status anxiety.
It was dangerous to be a Jew in Russia, and as the economy deteriorated during World War I, the Czar grew more repressive and the brunt of popular anger fell upon Russia’s five million Jews. Czarist gangs roamed the countryside, spreading rumours that Jewish profiteering was responsible for war losses and shortages. The war created unimagined hardships and led to the revolution. After the war, Lenin’s government initiated the notorious Red Terror, encouraging acts of proletarian plunder against the city’s bourgeoisie, and 12-year-old Rand was in the family store when Bolshevik soldiers arrived, brandishing guns. In an instant, her father was out of business and out of work. Her anger at seeing her father’s helpless face stayed with her all her life.
Rand escaped to America by lying to a US consular official. Ironically, she would become famous for celebrating honesty and integrity as indispensable virtues of the capitalist hero. In America, she began life as a middling script writer in Hollywood, where she encountered the same envy, conformity and mediocrity that she had loathed in Russia. She found “collectivist motivation” by which ordinary people sought life’s meaning outside themselves. It reinforced the grand theme of her life: the exceptional individual against the mob.
Unlike Rand, I came to admire free enterprise after decades of living under the inefficiency of Nehru’s “mixed economy”. Whereas I turned against state control for economic reasons, Rand came to free enterprise from her Russian experience. I rebelled against the inefficiency of socialism; she revolted against its lack of human freedom and individuality.
Rand understood that free markets brought phenomenal productivity and prosperity, but to her it was a side effect. The real deal was that capitalism gave a person’s “natural, healthy egoism” the freedom to enrich itself and others. I am not able to go as far as Rand did in embracing individualism as a creed; nor am I a votary of unbridled, laissez faire capitalism. Unlike Rand, I set great store by enlightened regulation of the market — regulation that brings transparency in transactions, ensures competition, catches crooks, but does not kill the animal spirits of entrepreneurs. Like the ancient Greeks, Rand looked to human reason to distinguish the moral from the immoral to guide and protect human beings in this uncertain world. I look to the ancient Indian idea of dharma. My idea of capitalism has been tempered by my encounter with the epic, Mahabharata.
Capitalism is still trying to find a comfortable home in India, so players in the Indian market have a great responsibility to act with restraint. “Restraint” is one of the meanings of dharma. So is “balance”. If human beings act with restraint, there is balance in society and the cosmos. Thus, there are many paths to liberty and each society will inevitably find its own. No one wants state ownership of production anymore where the absence of competition corrodes the character even more, as Rand pointed out. Since it is in man’s nature to desire, to seek freedom, dharma teaches us to learn to live with human imperfection and temper liberty with regulation.
Gurcharan Das is the author of The Difficulty of Being Good: On the subtle art of dharma
