There is a rather good article on Ayn Rand called Mrs. Logic at NYmag.com. The author, Sam Anderson, is an admitted ex-devotee but he keeps a careful path in the article between the good and the bad. It’s hard to do with people like Ayn Rand.

What strikes me about human lone wolves – people like Ayn Rand and Christopher McCandless – is not so much them, but their followers.  I mean there will always be those who are mad hatters.  The world is very hard on some of us, and sometimes we simply cannot cope with what happens.  Rand’s terrible childhood, McCandless’ schizophrenia, these are things that made them what they were, and because of what they were – the madness, the intelligence and the ferocious desire – they became our mad hatters.

They were both lone wolves. In McCandless’ case he actually ran off to the wilderness, but in Rand’s, she just did it metaphorically. She ran off into the mythological wilderness of rampant individualism. Neither imagined wilderness actually exists.

The thing about wolves is that they are social creatures. Lone wolves are an aberration. They tend to have either short lives (as in the old ones driven out) or they are lone only long enough to find new territory and new pack mates. A wolf on its own for long does not do well. It does not hunt as well, for example, since large ungulates are favourite prey and those need other wolves to score. A lone wolf cannot make new new wolves. It also tends to be far more dangerous than a pack wolf, and since it has trouble hunting, it often turns to scavenging for food. This is something to aspire to?

We all know what happened to McCandless, but what about his followers?  What does it mean that a bevy of young (largely) men show up to find his bus each year?  Why is madness such as this compelling? What is it about being a social species that is so very hard to realize or to tolerate?

As for Rand followers – well according to the article Greenspan was one, and we know what impact he has had on our world, and we know how well the Rand-type economic philosophies have worked out for us as a group. What amazes me is that she still has followers.  But it’s the same set of questions really. What is it about being interdependent as a species that is so very hard to grock?

We are pack animals much as wolves are. To accomplish things we require each other.  Apparently even Rand needed others to help her get started, despite her protestations to the contrary.  Needing others in not optional with us.  Whatever it is that we accomplish as individuals (and of course these are real accomplishments), we were enabled because of an enormous social net built by others. There are no Rockefellers without workers and without the laws, goods, communication networks, transportation networks, etc to make it possible to gather wealth.  All those laws, goods and networks were put in place and kept in place by others. That’s just how it is to be human.  I mean McCandless had to get to the north on roads created by vast networks of the very social forces he sought to elude.

Yet we do pretend that we can go it alone.  All those fantasies of “self made men” for example. My favourite exposé of this kind of ideal was written by Louisa May Alcott and is called “Transcendental Wild Oats“. The wild ideas of her father and his cohorts of going it alone in some sort of transcendental purity and human splendor were all predicated on a complete lack of understanding of the work it takes to accomplish a day.  Their assumptions that all the day-to-day stuff – like food procurement, preparation, warm sleeping places, light to read and write by, places to shit and pee, clean and habitable facilities – that these things just sort of happen, never ceases to amaze me. How easy is it to plan to change to world if there isn’t someone there keeping the lamps burning? And revolutionaries rarely do the wick-trimming themselves. If they did, they wouldn’t have time left to revolutionize.

All this goes to say is that lone wolves are a consequence and fact of packdom but they are a limited phenomena. What makes a wolf is its pack. It’s the same for us. To pretend otherwise, as Greenspan has shown us, does us no good in the end.