We all live in the world of Ayn Rand, egomaniac godmother of libertarianism. Can fiction help us navigate it?

Love her or loathe her, Ayn Rand is an undeniably influential figure. Her contemporary admirers range from celebrities – Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Rob Lowe – to politicians, including Donald Trump. Cultural commentator Lisa Duggan has called her “the ultimate mean girl”.

Rand was implacably opposed to all forms of altruism, social welfare programs and governmental oversight. She also harboured a lifelong hatred of communism. She was “one of the first American writers to celebrate the creative possibilities of modern capitalism and to emphasize the economic value of independent thought,” according to intellectual biographer Jennifer Burns.

And while Rand founded a philosophical movement, Objectivism, which privileged the “concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life”, her ideas are not the key to her influence. Her “blockbuster” novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), lie “at the heart of her incalculable impact,” as Duggan writes.

Trump has said of The Fountainhead: “That book relates to … everything.” He told a journalist in 2016 that its depiction of the tyranny of groupthink reflects “what is happening here”.

The attitude of John Galt, hero of Rand’s best known book, Atlas Shrugged, is best summed up by his famous credo: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Of course, this has since become a rallying cry for libertarian politicians and thinkers.

Atlas Shrugged attracted largely negative reviews on publication: Time called its philosophy “ludicrously naïve” and the Atlantic Monthly said it “might be mildly described as execrable claptrap”. But for Gregory Salmieri, co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to Ayn Rand (2016), the Russian-born American philosopher is “one of the most important intellectual voices in our culture”.

Rand’s celebration of egotism and rapacious capitalism remains resonant today. But there’s another way she resonates with today’s culture, too. In the McCarthy-era witch trials of the 1950s, she denounced supposed communist sympathisers, participating in the very kind of public shaming that is often identified with cancel culture.

Rand’s enthusiastic participation in these public show trials may seem surprising at first glance, especially as it appears to conflict with her reputation as a libertarian champion of free speech and individual rights.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised. Even the loudest advocates of free expression sometimes engage in silencing others. Think, for example, of self-proclaimed free-speech absolutist (and Rand fan) Elon Musk’s tendency to suspend journalists from X when they publish articles he doesn’t agree with.

This inherent contradiction – where defenders of individual liberty may also attempt to suppress opposing voices – continues to resonate in today’s political and cultural landscape, as a glance at the online swamp formerly known as Twitter demonstrates.

Cancel culture: battle or moral panic?

“Cancel culture has upended lives, ruined careers, undermined companies, hindered the production of knowledge, destroyed trust in institutions, and plunged us into an ever-worsening culture war,” argue researchers Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott in The Cancelling of the American Mind (2023). They believe cancel culture is “part of a dysfunctional way members of our society have learned to argue and battle for power, status, and dominance”.

Adrian Daub, author of the new book The Cancel Culture Panic (2024) disagrees. He sees the anxiety over cancel culture as a form of moral or ideological panic – one that distorts societal shifts by selectively focusing on certain examples, while conveniently overlooking others.

He says it keeps us from finding solutions to real problems by distorting “real problems like a carnival mirror – problems of labor and job security, problems of our semi-digital public space, problems of accountability and surveillance”.

These complex, often bitterly oppositional debates have long since spilled over from the academy into popular culture.

The many creative works that explore cancel culture differ in approach and tone. But they all focus on the dynamics of cultural conflict – and the often unpredictable consequences of public shaming in an increasingly censorious age.

We see this in recent films like Todd Field’s Tár (2022), where accusations of misconduct lead to a famous conductor’s public downfall, and Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario (2023), where an ordinary professor becomes a viral sensation, only to have his fame curdle as his public image unravels.

Cancel culture is also central to two recent satirical novels that explore the trials and tribulations of cancel culture: Australian Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn and American author Lionel Shriver’s Mania, both released locally this year.

The shadow of Ayn Rand, with her philosophy of uncompromising individualism and rampant egotism, looms large over both these books.

We’re all pretending not to be selfish

People often revisit and reinterpret works by controversial authors from the past, trying to find “redeeming qualities” despite their problematic views.

Freiman, whose first novel, Inappropriation (2018), was longlisted for the Miles Franklin, is curious why this kind of reappraisal hasn’t happened for Rand – whose books continue to sell by the bucketload.

Rand’s work is “worth exploring”, as she says, because “we are all pretending not to be selfish, individualistic, slightly narcissistic people”.

I feel like nobody’s tried to do that because we’re still living in the nightmare of the capitalist world that she envisaged.

Freiman centres The Book of Ayn, her second novel, on an unreliable narrator, Anna, who becomes obsessed with Ayn Rand after being “cancelled”.

Yet the author is candid in her criticism of Rand’s overstuffed fictions.

They are vehicles for her ideology, and they’re not well-written. So to me, when I see an Ayn Rand book on someone’s shelf […] I think, “Oh, this person doesn’t know a good book.”

Anna begins the novel (which was published in the US, by a US publisher, long before it was released in Australia), acknowledging she is a contrarian. The label has also been applied to Freiman herself, who told the Australian earlier this year that the framing of Inappropriation, a satire of identity politics, carefully avoided the novel’s subject. “They were afraid to say it was a satire of identity politics […] because they were afraid of cancel culture, ironically.”

While The Book of Ayn did not initially get an Australian release, it was prominently featured in US literary and cultural outlets, including the New York Times, the New Yorker and The Daily Show – and Freiman was a guest at this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival.

In The Book of Ayn, Anna says:

Maybe the verboten felt more alive; maybe it just got me more attention. Maybe they were the same thing. Whichever it was, the culture had now changed.

After nearly 40 years of self-declared bad behaviour, Anna lands herself in hot water after publishing a satire on America’s opioid crisis, castigated by the New York Times as irredeemably “classist”. Anna, who has been living rent-free in a swanky Madison Avenue pied-à-terre, admits (to the reader, at least) she knew she was courting controversy:

I’d known that scatological humor was now banned from descriptions of the rural poor; that you were no longer allowed to write about the working class if you’d gone to a Manhattan prep school; that “Mountain Dew” was an unacceptable punch line. But there were so many new rules – all set by college students paying two hundred thousand dollars for their humanism.

The New York Times labels Anna a narcissist. This shocks and confuses her: she had always assumed “narcissists were very attractive people who couldn’t admit when they were wrong, and I possessed neither of those qualities”.

Bruised and bewildered, she starts to burn her remaining social bridges. Having been turfed out of a female genital mutilation awareness luncheon for expressing the opinion that the clitoris is actually “privileged”, she randomly bumps into an Ayn Rand walking tour huddled on the corner of Lexington Avenue. The group is “looking up at a telephone pole where a hawk was tearing into the body of a bloody pigeon”.

Intrigued, Anna follows this group of “quiet, stoic people who appeared to believe that the planet was actually cooling” into a nearby Starbucks. She asks them about Rand, about whom she knows next to nothing, bar

that she was the godmother of American libertarianism who had written two very long, didactic novels. I had always considered her the gateway drug for bad husbands to quit their jobs and start online stock trading.

Growing giddy on heresy

Returning home, Anna reads up on the founder of Objectivism. She finds herself inexorably drawn to Rand’s idiosyncratic take on life, the world, and everything in it:

She said that selfishness was a form of care; that self-responsibility was the ultimate freedom. Her ideas had the uncanny chime of paradox. The dizzy zing of the counterintuitive. She wasn’t funny but I enjoyed her thoughts like I enjoyed jokes. Like anything audacious; true because it’s wrong.

Growing giddy on her “new heresy,” Anna sets off on an increasingly bizarre – and very funny – journey of self discovery, age-inappropriate romance, and re-cancellation. Her adventure culminates in an “ego suicide” workshop on the Greek island of Lesvos, the experience of which leaves her anxious that the only thing she’s now capable of writing is Eat, Pray, Love as “narrated by Humbert Humbert”.

Freiman has no problem acknowledging Rand “was basically the worst person I could write a book about, which really appealed to me”. By the same token, she appreciates that

it is the conflict between selfishness and altruism that is Ayn Rand’s whole philosophy that I feel is kind of distilled in the artistic temperament, in the artist’s personality […] And narcissism plays into that really beautifully and is also funny.

This nuanced take on things is, I think, characteristic of Freiman’s writing in general. It informs her take on the politics of cancel culture, which she refuses to see in purely negative terms. For instance, it can, as Freiman affirms, help to shift the cultural needle and, occasionally, move us towards new forms of “enlightenment” – provided we are at least willing to hear each other out.

Freiman is emphatic on this point. She is searching for something “deeper than just a kind of knee-jerk, reactive response”. She is, moreover, “always looking for the person who everyone else disagrees with and trying to see the place that I might agree with them”.

This, in turn, chimes with her understanding of the power of satire as a genre. Freiman maintains that when it comes to satire,

self-exposure is just part of the deal. You get energy from a type of writing that’s very close to opining, and so you have to accept the brunt of your readers’ disagreement.

A satire, she believes, is “a kind of argument, though not – in the best cases – one that seeks to drive home a definitive point”. She acknowledges that ideas are ultimately replaced by human complexity – something that unfolds, by degrees, in The Book of Ayn. “But obviously, it’s a risky time to be a satirist.”

“The thing I’m trying to do is to say something that feels true to me,” Freiman insists, “and if that means that I’m going to offend a few people, then that’s OK.”

Provocative. Empathetic. Risky. These are three reasons why, if you’ve yet to do so, you should really spend some time getting to know Lexi Freiman and The Book of Ayn.

‘Mindless’ herd behaviour?

Self-described iconoclast Lionel Shriver has been, at her own estimate, the target of multiple attempted cancellations – including one in Australia in 2016, after she delivered a speech on Fiction and Identity Politics at the Brisbane Writers Festival while wearing a sombrero.

Her speech prompted some affronted audience members to storm out – and sparked worldwide media debate, including accusations of promoting racial supremacy.

Shriver’s argument essentially boiled down to the belief that “the last thing fiction writers need is restrictions on what belongs to us”. Her attendant idea that “writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats” was literally illustrated by her headwear.

In a subsequent interview with Time, she said:

The whole notion of re-enfencing ourselves into little groups, first off, encourages pigeonholing. It means that we don’t read books about people who are different; we just read books about people who are just like us.

She continued: “we all the more think of each other in terms of membership of a collective”. Shriver has reservations about collectives and collective behaviour. In her collected essays, she writes:

Herd behaviour is by nature mindless. Parties to modern excommunication never seem to make measured decisions on the merits for themselves […] but race blindly to join the stampede.

What if calling someone stupid was illegal?

These ideas reverberate throughout Mania, a dystopian novel that riffs on George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). It is set in an alternative version of the 2010s, against a backdrop of heightened societal sensitivity to mental ability. Its cover tagline is: “what if calling someone stupid was illegal?”

The novel tells the tale of Pearson Converse, a untenured English academic and contrarian living in a quiet college town in Pennsylvania with her partner Wade, who works as a tree surgeon, and their three children.

Mania opens with a phone call from school. Pearson’s eldest, the intellectually precocious Darwin, has been accused of bullying: he “ridiculed one of his classmates” and “employed language we consider unacceptable in a supportive environment, and which I will not repeat”. Darwin has been caught using the term “dummy”, now considered a reprehensible slur – and is suspended for it.

In 2010, in Shriver’s fictional universe, the improbably named Carswell Dreyfus-Boxford published a “game-changing, era-defining” book, titled “The Calumny of IQ: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight”.

“At best,” Pearson recalls somewhat dismissively,

the ambitious got through the set-piece introduction of forty pages, full of heartrending anecdotes of capable young people whose self-esteem was crushed by an early diagnosis of subpar intelligence.

Despite being “widely ridiculed” upon initial publication, The Calumny of IQ quickly started to gain traction in certain circles. Though the “cerebral elite” at first “lampooned the notion that stupidity is a fiction as exceptionally stupid”, their “sharpest tacks”, the novel tells us, “jumped on the fashionable bandwagon first”.

Thus, the Mental Parity movement was born. As the critic Laura Miller observes, this imaginary ideology “not only borrows from the left’s obsession with egalitarianism, safetyism and language hygiene but also draws on the right’s mistrust of expertise and credentialism”. She points out that the novel’s critique “could have bipartisan appeal if it weren’t so patently absurd”.

Signs supporting “cognitive neutrality” pop up on suburban lawns. The New York Times crossword suddenly disappears. Everything begins to unravel.

The suspiciously articulate Barack Obama is one of the first public casualties. “Never having gotten the memo about suppressing that silver tongue,” Pearson laments, “he still deliberately rubbed the popular nose in his own articulacy”. Declaring him an electoral liability, the Democrats stage an internal coup and unceremoniously oust him from the White House.

They replace him with “the impressively unimpressive” Joe Biden, whose “delectably leaden” oratorical style proves a hit with voters captivated by “cognitive egalitarianism”.

This decision brings disastrous consequences – most notably, paving the way for the 2016 election of Donald Trump (who runs as a Democrat). “Whatever you think of his policies,” Pearson notes, “the big galoot has radically transformed the template for high office in the United States”.

From this point on, we read, it is a given that in order for a political figure to be considered a presidential contender,

he or she will necessarily be badly educated, uninformed, poorly spoken, crass, oblivious to the rest the world, unattractive and preferably fat, unsolicitous of advice from the more experienced, suspicious of expertise, inclined to violate constitutional due process if only from perfect ignorance of the Constitution, self-regarding without justification, and boastful about what once would have been perceived as his or her shortcomings.

Pearson testifies to America’s steady and systematic decline, including imploding healthcare (“wrong doses of anaesthetic and infections from inadequate care”) and education. International students turn their backs on American universities, leaving the sector financially exposed. Domestic students start reporting their teachers for acts of “cognitive bigotry” and similar ideological transgressions.

Much to her horror (if not surprise), the nonconformist Pearson finds herself the subject of scrutiny from her own students. In one of her creative writing classes, Pearson rants about the rank hypocrisy of it all:

Are you people really so stupid that you believe this claptrap about “everyone being as smart as everyone else,” or are you cynically playing along with a lie that you know is a lie?

She calls the US “a laughingstock!” and warns: “China and Russia think we’re retards, And they’re right!”

Complexity vs point-scoring

Pearson’s diatribe, which leads to her cancellation, is emblematic of Mania as a whole. Harangues of this sort, which quickly become tiresome, dilute the novel’s satirical impact. It brings to mind the overwrought rhetorical flourishes of Ayn Rand’s prose. Indeed, this intemperate passage could almost have been lifted verbatim from the pages of Atlas Shrugged.

Rand’s hero, John Galt, an egotistical scientist and inventor, is given to lengthy, impassioned speeches about the virtue of selfishness, the dangers of collectivism, and the innate superiority of the elite. As Lexi Freiman says, you have to be “a bit into” what Rand’s saying “to plow through 1,000 pages”. She calls it “belabored […] relentless and exhausting” and of course, “didactic”.

Freiman is spot on here. And as I write, I can’t help but think of my own experience with Shriver’s Mania. As with Rand, Shriver’s prose is weighed down by a barrage of ideological rants that overwhelm the story, sacrificing nuance and narrative in favour of blunt, often exhausting polemics. To be perfectly honest, it left me questioning who the novel was intended for.

Pearson’s rhetoric does not align exactly with Galt’s unfettered enthusiasm for laissez-faire capitalism. But her outrage at a world that increasingly prizes “uncredentialed mediocrity” and enforces “cognitive equality” echoes what we can describe as a peculiarly Randian disdain for anything that undermines individual brilliance or suppresses intellectual achievement.

Shriver, who makes no bones about her libertarian sensibility, has claimed she doesn’t “sit around reading Ayn Rand novels”. However, with its consistent embrace of individualist ideals and critiques of collectivism, I find, as do others, the parallels between Shriver’s recent work and Rand’s infamous novels hard to ignore.

While Freiman is alive to the complexities and contradictions of cancel culture, Shriver seems intent on delivering a straightforward ideological message, which renders her work, much like Rand’s, a relentless – and ultimately fruitless – exercise in polemical point-scoring.

One of these writers proffers a useful critique of our present predicament and narcissistic tendencies, and gestures towards a more nuanced understanding of our shared societal challenges.