Dave and I came to libertarianism by similar paths, growing up reading Robert Heinlein’s individualist-oriented science fiction and then discovering Ayn Rand’s writings. It was many discussions and debates with my MIT YAF friends that persuaded me to finally read Atlas Shrugged in the summer of ’64, a summer during which I spent many evenings distributing Goldwater literature door-to-door in the Miami area where I grew up.
Now, I grew up reading some Robert Heinlein. But I could tell by my early 20's that he bullshitted for a living, and I didn't consider him a serious thinker. The libertarian themes in Heinlein's stories might have some relation to real life, but he mixes them up with fantasy material about, say, Martian woo-woo powers, interstellar travel and promiscuous polyamorous families. So which parts in these stories did Heinlein, who drew a disability pension from his service in the U.S. Navy and probably got his (socialized) health care through the VA (unless the new biography about him indicates otherwise), intend for us to take as practical ideas?
I read Ayn Rand's novels in my late 20's, and they struck me as verbose comic books without the pictures, though not without a few good things in them like her celebration of productive work. Though in Rand's case, she experienced the process of extracting wealth from nature vicariously and imaginatively, since she preferred to stay indoors and write about fictional producers instead of producing herself.
The stories about Nolan's Bildung strike me as a bit odd, because he apparently came from a comfortable middle-class American background, and he lacked the traumatic experiences with the existing order which often show up in the biographies of people who become political radicals and revolutionaries. For example, Vladimir Lenin's radicalization probably dates from the age of 17, when the Russian government executed his older brother for a botched attempt at assassinating Tsar Alexander III. Che Guevara's radicalization reportedly resulted from witnessing the poverty and degradation of Latin America during his training as a medical student. Even on the libertarian side, Ayn Rand's radicalization had a basis in real grievances against the hardships inflicted upon her and her family by the Bolshevik regime, including the confiscation of her father's business.
But in David Nolan's case? He grew up with a full stomach, clothes on his back, education, health care, electricity and a decent place to live, in a relatively free country where plenty of people around the world still want to migrate to; he got to go to an elite university (MIT); and he read some dodgy pulp novels at an age before men's judgment usually matures (the mid 20's, according to the evidence accumulated by auto insurance companies). Yet the novels counteracted his empirical reality, and he decided just from Heinlein's and Rand's published fantasy lives that the existing political system screwed him over and required the formation of a new political party and ideology to make things right.
Setting aside the question of libertarianism as an idea, does this make any sense?
Nolan's behavior reminds me of the whiny white, middle-class teenagers living in L.A. in the 1950's in the film Rebel Without a Cause. Anne Frank would have gladly changed places with Natalie Wood's well nourished, bathed and attractively clothed character, who says something like "You call this living?" upon first meeting James Dean's character.
David Nolan, who apparently couldn't see how good he had it in life, asked himself early on something like Natalie Wood's question, and then spent the rest of his existence pursuing a political vision which, frankly, most Americans don't find that compelling, even if they've read the same novels which influenced Nolan. I just find Nolan's story underwhelming for some reason.
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