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buttonholedlife · 5 years ago

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A "Free Market" Future of Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Techno-Fascist Background of Neo-Eugenic Transhumanism

A 50% of century earlier, Yale Instructor of Anatomy Jose Manuel Rodríguez Delgado Jr. published a compound of his groundbreaking study on neural-implant technology. Organizing approximately twenty years of his lab experiments on individual as well as animal topics, Delgado's Bodily Management of the Thoughts: Toward a Psychocivilized Culturechronicled that

It is reasonable to speculate that in the future the stimoceiver may supply the vital web link from guy to pc to male, with an equivalent feedback between neurons and guitars which embodies a brand new alignment for the health care command of neurophysiological features [1].

Now, fifty years eventually in 2019, Delgado's futurist conjectures have come true as numerous Huge Tech firms, such as Elon Odor's Neuralink and Sign Zuckerberg's Facebook, are producing as well as industrying the next production of "stimoceivers," or "brain-computer interfaces," for business consumption.

The benefits of such "brain potato chips" variety coming from clinical devices that may handle nerve problems, including epilepsy and depression, to cognitive improvements which can easily "improve" individual mind electrical power so that it may user interface with the synthetically intelligent supercomputers which will definitely drive the worldwide economy in the new grow older of digitally automated staffs. Nonetheless, beneath these utopian-futurist leads, the present "free-trade" development of brain-machine interfaces is absolutely nothing less than the "free-market" expansion of Jose' Delgado's eugenicist goal happen true: a disturbing vision of a transhumanist advancement that neo-eugenically merges people and computers in to a new droid species.

Buyer beware: if you're considering "plugging in" to human-machine interfaces linked to the "world wide web of whatever," you could change your thoughts after thinking about the techno-fascist history of eugenics and also social design that has fueled the corporatist development of human-computer user interfaces.

Facebook Mind-Reading Technologies:

Facebook's Structure 8 research-and-development amenities has actually been engineering brain-computer user interfaces under the former Directorship of Regina Dugan, who formerly worked with the Protection Advanced Investigation Job Agency (DARPA) of the US military. On April 19, 2017, Dugan showcased a Facebook-patented brain-machine user interface that makes it possible for the user to kind on a computer system display only through believing. Based upon this thought-to-text medical, the Facebook company intends to evolve this prototype to ensure that it can easily allow "human brain clicks " which regulate virtual-reality and augmented-reality modern technologies.

Dugan has promised that the Facebook firm is actually "not talking concerning translating your random thought and feelings. That may be greater than some of us look after to recognize." Such a pledge is actually hard to think offered the fact that Facebook is a data-mining corporation that generates revenues by siphoning and selling the private information of everyone that uses the business's social-media platform. Undoubtedly, Facebook's social-media network is actually also an active attendee in the residential security operations of the Central Cleverness Force (CIA). Together, Facebook founder and also CEO Result Zuckerberg was contacted us to prove just before US Congress concerning his social-media company's complicity in the Cambridge Analytica election-tampering ordeal.

Essentially, Facebook possesses a scurvy reputation for preventing the privacy desires of its customers. It is affordable to suspect that Facebook's human-computer user interfaces will track, record, as well as sell an individual's cognitive-behavioral metadata installed in the electrochemical algorithms of his or even her neurobiological "pep talk" as well as "believed" transmissions (just like Facebook's social-media platform tracks, histories, and sells a person's cognitive-behavioral metadata embedded in his or her mental account which is actually accumulated coming from his or even her social-media posts).

Elon Musk's Neuro-Technocracy:

Elon Musk's Neuralink enterprise lately gave a push launch showcasing the 1st prototypes of the provider's "mind chips," referred to as "neural shoelaces," which Odor points out will definitely link to an "app" that "basically Bluetooths to your phone."

Back in September 6, 2018, Musk looked on the Joe Rogan Expertise podcast where he announced that his Neuralink organization will definitely be actually making integrated circuits which will certainly allow the individual brain to interface along with synthetically intelligent supercomputers. According to Odor, neural-lace computer potato chips "could be implanted in the individual mind, with the eventual function of aiding people combine along with software application and equal advancements in synthetic cleverness. These augmentations can enhance mind or even permit for additional straight interfacing with computer."

Odor even further preached that" [s] ome high transmission capacity interface to the human brain will definitely be one thing that assists accomplish a teamwork between individual and device knowledge and also perhaps deals with the command problem as well as the usefulness concern." For Musk, "fabricated standard cleverness [AGI]," or able to recognize AI, are going to quickly become "smarter than the most intelligent human on planet"; and also human creatures will come to be "worthless" unless our team neo-eugenically update in to transhuman-AI critters. In the course of the job interview with Joe Rogan, Musk literally mentioned, "if you can't beat it [AI], join it."

Odor, that is likewise the Chief Executive Officer of the Tesla electric auto provider, may champion his hi-tech neuro-brain implants as the evolutionary rescuer of humankind which will rescue the mankinds coming from being rendered obsolete by artificially smart machines. The ubiquitous merging of humankind with corporate equipments births a disconcerting similarity to the fascistic programs of Musk's grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, that was actually the Investigation Director of Canada's Technocracy Inc.: a techno-fascistic non-governmental company that was actually outlawed through the Canadian government in 1940 as a result of to anxieties that The Technocrats were sketching to "topple the government as well as the constitution of this country [ Canada] by power" [2]. Musk's gramps, Haldeman, was actually arrested due to his Technocracy registration, though he was actually later acquitted.

These techno-fascist backstories responsible for the Facebook as well as Neuralink companies suffice to result in worry regarding the firms' fashionable new brain-computer interfaces that are currently being industried. The befuddling techno-fascist past history of these recently commercialized brain-machine user interfaces presents all the way back to the "founding father" of neural-implant technology themself: Jose Manuel Rodríguez Delgado Jr., whose research study at Yale has been helped through the surprise hand of the Nazi-sympathizing top secret society known as The Purchase of Head and also Bone tissues.

In 1946, Delgado was chosen as an analysis fellow at the Yale School of Medicine's Anatomy Team where he later ended up being a professor from 1950 to 1974. Shortly after the very first year of Delgado's investigation alliance, in 1947, the Yale Educational Institution Council was set up "as a consultatory body system to the President of the College for the objective of studying and bring in suggestions on particular aspects of Educational institution life," including "important planning for the sciences, [and] developments at the Institution of Medication." A founding member of the Yale Authorities was Skull-and-Bonesman Frank Davis Ashburn, who offered on the authorities coming from 1947 to 1954 while Delgado was actually administering his neuroscience experiments at Yale [3]. It costs noting that Bonesman Frank Davis as well as his papa Percy Moreau Ashburn, that was actually a United States Military College Lecturer of Medical Health, co-authored The Scores of Death: A Medical Background of the Invasion of The United States, which chronicles how the spread of health condition contributed to the colonization of the America's by International settlers.

In short, in 1947, Bonesman Frank Ashburn, that was a scholar of case history, helped discovered and work the Yale Council to oversee "tactical preparing for the scientific researches ... at the Institution of Medicine" approximately one year after was actually Delgado worked with at the Institution of Medication, in 1946, to pioneer his transhumanist brain-implant surgical treatments.

As Delgado proceeded his transhumanist stimoceiver analysis at Yale coming from 1954 to 1965, Bonesman Charles Stafford Gage was actually the Treasurer of Yale Educational Institution [4]. As A Result, Bonesman Gage would have supervised of the Treasury Team which, depending on to the Yale website, "is actually accountable for sustaining the College's operating checking account, for observing the University's daily money role, for processing all in-coming and also out-going domestic and international cable transfers, [ and also for] the business of petty money funds." Gage would certainly have looked after the financing of Delgado's electronic brain-implant practices at Yale.

Altogether, throughout the years of Bonesman Ashburn at the Yale Council (1947-1954) and also Bonesman Gage at the Yale Treasury (1954-1965), Delgado's advanced study into neo-eugenic neuro-technologies was administratively as well as financially guided due to the hidden finger of The Order of Cranium and also Bone tissues.

During the course of his years at Yale, Delgado worked together along with Frank Ervin as well as Vernon Mark, that wrote the 1970 book, Brutality as well as the Brain. In this particular manual, Delgado's co-workers posited a eugenicist idea that the purported riotous inclinations of inner-city African Americans can be "quelled" by implanting city afro-americans with brain-chip stimoceivers as well as other electronic neuro-technologies. It costs noting below that Delgado's practices on digital "mind stimulation" were financed due to the Office of Naval Study as well as the Aviation Service Aeromedical Laboratory of the US armed force.

As a lecturer of the Yale Institution of Medication, Delgado was supported through his investigation partner Hannibal Hamlin, who assisted him conduct surgical practices on mental individuals at the State Healthcare Facility for Mental Diseases in Howard, Rhode Island, where Delgado and Hamlin implanted electronic units in to the human brains of people to study the abilities of neuro-technological thoughts command. In Delgado's Bodily Command of the Mind, he composes,

Hannibal Hamlin, themself a graduate of Yale Medical University, happens to become the daddy of Charles B. Hamlin, that was inducted in to the Yale Purchase of Head as well as Bone fragments in 1961 [6]. Charles B. would certainly occupy the mantle of his papa Hannibal as Charles became a performing orthopedic surgeon who opened up many "palm facilities" that concentrate on hand surgeries, consisting of "nerves ... repair or renovation" surgical operations. Holding the neo-eugenic lantern for Jose' Delgado and Hannibal Hamlin, Bonesman Charles B. performed many prosthetic-implant surgical treatments to assist people recover "considerable functional loss" of their possessions.

Right now resigned, Charles B. remains to ensure other transhumanist clinical advancements, including neuro-engineering through stalk cell treatment as well as genetics editing and enhancing:

It deserves keeping in mind that the United States Fda (FDA) submitted a 2008 file which records that Charles B. dedicated "serious violations of Title 21, Regulation of Federal Laws (21 CFR) Part 812 - Investigational Tool Exceptions, Component 50 - Defense of Individual Topics, and Section 520(g) (21 U.S.C. 360j(g)) of the Show." Especially, Charles Hamlin neglected to abide by FDA regulations pertaining to moral criteria for carrying out medical procedures involving "a device as that condition is actually defined in area 201(h) of the Federal Meals, Drug, and Cosmetic Show (the Act), 21 U.S.C. 32(h)."

Depending on to part 201(h), such an unit is actually a determined as

[i] ntended to impact the construct or any kind of feature of the body of man or even various other pets, as well as which carries out certainly not achieve its main intended functions with chemical activity within or even on the body of male or other pets as well as which is certainly not dependent upon being actually metabolized for the achievement of its key designated purposes. The condition "tool" carries out not include software features omitted pursuant to section 520(o).

Specifically, the FDA document files that Hamlin's trying outs a 201(h) gadget committed the observing "breakdowns":

" [F] ailure to await FDA approval before making it possible for topics to join the examination."

"Breakdown to guarantee that updated consent is acquired ... as well as failure to appropriately record well informed approval."

"Failure to carry out the examination in conformity along with the investigational strategy."

"Breakdown to ready and also submit total, accurate and also quick records of unanticipated unfavorable results."

It needs to also be actually kept in mind that The Order of Cranium and also Bone fragments surrounds neurosurgeon, Eric Leuthardt: an additional transhumanist pioneer that performs human brain surgeries which implant integrated circuit into human brains for the functions of managing cerebral-nervous handicaps. At Washington College of St. Louis, Missouri, where Leuthardt administers his transhumanist brain-chip surgical treatments, Bonesman Regis James O'Keefe is the Chair of Orthopedic Surgical Procedure [7]. Also, alongside professor Leuthardt and also Bonesman O'Keefe, there is Bonesman Bryan Fitch Myers, who is actually the Patrick and also Happiness Williamson Endowed Seat in Cardiothoracic Surgery at Washington University Institution of Medicine [8].

Depending on to the Massachusetts Principle of Modern Technology Evaluation, the Bones-acquainted "Leuthardt believes that in the next many years such [mind] implants will feel like cosmetic surgery or designs, taken on with barely a reservation." Leuthardt also wrote a transhumanist scientific research fiction story, "a techno-thriller referred to as Reddish Adversary 4, [through which] 90 percent of people have actually elected to acquire personal computer equipment implanted directly into their minds."

A Eugenics by Some Other Title:

The concept of transhumanism was coined through Julian Huxley, that was actually the brother of Aldous Huxley: the writer of the dystopic Brave New World. In Julian's 1957 New Bottles for New Red Or White Wine, he created a chapter entitled "Transhumanism," which proclaims "'I care about transhumanism'... a new sort of presence, as different from ours as our own is actually coming from that of Peking [prehistoric] man" [9]. For Julian Huxley, who was a President of the English Eugenics Culture, transhumanism is actually the height of a "medical eugenics," venture that requires a brand-new form of "advancement" in which pure organic assortment is actually changed with an artificial technical collection that merges people and also makers in to a brand new robot types.

As the first Director General of the United Nations Educational Scientific as well as Cultural Institution (UNESCO), Huxley authored UNESCO's 1948 purpose statement, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Own Ideology, which calls for a worldwide eugenics plan:" [i] t is actually, however, essential that eugenics must be delivered totally within the perimeters of science, for, as presently indicated, in the certainly not quite small future the issue of strengthening the average quality of human creatures is actually likely to come to be emergency; and this can simply be performed through applying the findings of a definitely clinical eugenics" [10]. This founding UNESCO documentation asserts that techno-eugenic" [ e] volution in the human market comprises primarily of modifications such as culture, in devices and equipments ... [I] t resides in social organisation, in equipments, and in ideas that individual advancement is actually primarily made show" [11].

It needs to be taken note that as Director General of UNESCO, Huxley collaborated with the very first United States delegate to rest on the controling panel of UNESCO, Bonesman Archibald MacLeish, who authored the Prelude to the UNESCO Constitution [12]. Various other straps in between globalist eugenics as well as The Purchase of Head and Bones are connected through Bonesman Percy Rockefeller's uncle [Thirteen], John D. Rockefeller, that utilized his tax-exempt Rockefeller Foundation to pour cash into Nazi eugenics jobs at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, as well as Eugenics; the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry; and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research Study [14]. The Rockefeller Base also paid out large amounts to United States eugenics companies including Charles Davenport's Cold weather Spring Port Place for Experimental Development, which was actually set up through an additional Burglar Baron charity: the Carnegie Institute where Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman was its own 1st Head of state [15].

Davenport's Cold Spring season Harbor eugenics research laboratory was eventually merged along with the Eugenics Report Workplace, which rose along with considerable contributions of loan and also land coming from railway tycoon E. H. Harriman's spouse, Mary Williamson Harriman(ne'e Averell), who was actually the mama of Bonesmen W. Averell Harriman and E. Roland Harriman [16]. E. Roland would later help in paying for the Nazi-eugenic requisition of Germany through his influence at Union Financial Enterprise (UBC), which directed capital to Hitler with one of the Fuhrer's primary financial underwriters: the German industrialist manager of UBC, Fritz Thyssen, whose fellow-Nazi banking partners, H. J. Kouwenhoven as well as J. L. Guinter, rested on the UBC Panel of Supervisors alongside E. Roland and also his fellow Bonesmen, Knight Woolley and also Prescott Bush, the latter of whom was actually the dad of Bonesman George H. W. Plant and also the gramps of Bonesman George W. Plant [17]. According to a 1989 Louisville Courier-Journal short article, there is actually a space in the Holy place of The Order on the Yale grounds whereby the Bones fragments "Tomb" residences "a little Nazi temple inside, [and] one space on the 2nd floor has a lot of swastikas, type of an SS manly iconography" [18].

On Second Idea?

From The Order of Skull and Bone Tissues to DARPA to Technocracy Inc., the past history responsible for transhumanist brain-computer user interfaces is actually a black heritage of militarized, techno-fascist eugenics. Today, Facebook's as well as Neuralink's human-computer interfaces are being publicized as hi-tech commodities that are actually manufactured for the "higher excellent" of improving cognition as well as administering health care aid for individuals along with epilepsy, depression, and also various other neurological specials needs.

To be certain, the future of neural-implant computer-tech might guarantee an utopian new grow older of scientific miracles that merge people and also devices in to an internet-of-everything "Singularity." Where the electronic rubber comes across the silicon roadway to an unnaturally smart cyborg future, the sordid past of technocratically weaponized eugenics might discover up to the current fork in the road where humankind determines whether to take a "fantastic leap forward" and also "develop" right into a brand new species that "upgrades" its own biology with electronic devices.

Caveat emptor: consuming transhumanist technological products that are classified as "utopian" may cause dystopian side-effects.

References:

[1] Jose' M. R. Delgado, Physical Command of the Thoughts: Towards a Psychocivilized Society(The Big Apple: Harper Colophon, 1969), 90-91.

[2] Joseph C. Keating Jr. and Scott Haldeman, "Joshua N Haldeman, DC: the Canadian Years, 1926-1950," Publication of the Canadian Chiropractic Association39 no. 3 (1995 ): 172-186.

[3] Kris Millegan, Fleshing Out Brain as well as Bone Fragments: Examinations into United States's Most Highly effective Top secret Culture, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2003), 637.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Jose' M. R. Delgado, Physical Management of the Thoughts: Towards a Psychocivilized Culture(Nyc: Harper Colophon, 1969), 217.

[6] Kris Millegan, Fleshing Out Brain and also Bone Fragments: Investigations into United States's Many Strong Top secret Culture, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2003), 658.

[7] Antony C. Sutton, America's Top secret Building: An Introduction to the Purchase of Brain and Bones, Upgraded Reprint, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2002), 299.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Red Or White Wine(London: Chatto & & Windus, 1957), 17.

[10] Ibid, UNESCO: Its Own Objective and Its Theory(Washington D. C.: Public Issues Push, 1948), 42.

[11] Ibid, 9-10.

[12] Archibald MacLeish and Henri Chapeau, "Unesco," Notice of the American Organization of College Professors (1915-1955) 32 no. 4 (1946 ): 605-620.

Antony C. Sutton, America's Secret Building: An Overview to the Order of Brain as well as Bones, Upgraded Replication, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2002), 27.

Krishna R. Dronamraju, If I Am to become Born in mind: The Lifestyle and Works of Julian Huxley with Selected Correspondence(Waterway Side, NJ: Planet Scientific Printing, 1993), 68.

[Thirteen] Antony C. Sutton, United States's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Purchase of Cranium and also Bone tissues, Improved Reprint, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2002), 290.

[14] Edwin Black,Battle Against the Weak: Eugenics and also United States's Campaign to Make an Expert Race(The Big Apple: 4 Walls 8 Windows, 2003), 283.

[15] Antony C. Sutton, The United States's Secret Business: An Overview to the Order of Skull and also Bone tissues, Updated Replication, (Walterville, OR: Trine Time, 2002), 285.

David Madsen, "Daniel Coit Gilman at the Carnegie Company of Washington," History of Education Quarterly9 no. 2 (1969 ): 154-186.

Edwin Afro-american,War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Project to Create a Master Race(New York: 4 Walls Eight Microsoft Window, 2003), 36, 41.

[16] Antony C. Sutton, The United States's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Purchase of Cranium and Bones, Improved Reprint, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2002), 291, 292.

Daniel J. Kevles, By Eugenics: Genetics and also usings Individual Genetics(New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 54-55.

James D. Watson, "Genes and also Politics," Davenport's Goals: 21st Century Representations on Heredity as well as Eugenics, eds. Jan A. Witkowski and John R. Inglis (Cold Springtime Port, NY: Cold Spring Season Harbor Lab Press, 2008), 1.

[17] Antony C. Sutton, United States's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Brain and Bones, Upgraded Replication, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2002), 126, 165-170.

Ibid, Exchange and the Rise of Hitler: The Impressive True Account of the United States Financiers Who Moneyed the Nazis(The Golden State: Clairview, 1976), 103, 107, 25-26, 57, 99, 102, 103, 106, 112-114, 141.

[18] Steven M. L. Aronson, "The Bonesmen's Connect: President's, Artists, Pundits as well as Pinkos Possess Sworn Loyalty to Head as well as Bone fragments, Yale's Rich and Powerful Secret Culture, and also the absolute most Exclusive University Club of All. What's All That Nazi Stuff Carrying Out in the Clubhouse?," Louisville Courier-Journal, October 8, 1989, estimated in Fleshing Out Brain and also Bone Fragments: Investigations into America's A lot of Effective Secret Culture, ed. Kris Millegan (OR: Trine Day, 2003), 140.

John Klyczekhas an MA in English and has educated college unsupported claims and analysis line of reasoning for over seven years. His literary scholarship focuses on the past history of international eugenics and Aldous Huxley's dystopic book, Brave New Globe. He is the writer of University Globe Purchase: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education And Learning(TrineDay Books); as well as he isa contributor to the Centre for Analysis on Globalization, OpEdNews, the Intrepid Record, the Dissident Voice,the Protestor Post, Information With Viewpoints, The Saker,and Natural Headlines. His site is details/

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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“SOUNDS GREAT on paper.” That’s a phrase I heard a lot as a kid in the late ’70s, usually when my parents and their friends were talking about communism. Certainly an earthly paradise as depicted in the writings of Trotsky or Lenin, but — shame, isn’t it? — communism did not seem to actually work in real life.

The notion that something could sound smart in theory and not work out in practice applies just as well to another product of early 20th-century Russian thought: the individual-over-the-masses, market-worshipping libertarianism philosophy that comes from Ayn Rand. It’s been carried on, after Rand’s 1982 passing, by American acolytes including Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and, probably, someone you went to high school with.

The fact that the libertarian wonderland of absolute sexual and economic freedom only ever worked in Rand’s melodramatic novels and helium-voiced Rush songs — that her philosophy of “Objectivism” has never been successfully applied to actual governance — does not seem to cross the minds of libertarian true-believers. And to many of them, it seems not to matter: a fealty to Rand, to heroic ideas of intellectual superiority and capitalism’s grandeur, is more important than what puny mortals consider political or intellectual reality. If you try arguing sense with them, you’ll quickly wish you hadn’t.

Why should we care, then, about a discredited goofball ideology from deep within the last century? Because Ayn Rand–style libertarianism has probably never been more assertive in American politics than it is today.

What once seemed like the golden age of Rand turned out only to be a warm-up. In the 1950s, you could go to Objectivist salons in New York, where sycophants like Greenspan and future self-esteem guru Nathaniel Branden would gather round the goddess to luxuriate in every word (in some cases, the connection was more than purely intellectual: Branden was one of the polyamorous Rand’s numerous younger boyfriends). In the ’60s and ’70s, you could attend vaguely countercultural conventions across the nation where men would shout conspiracy theories and women would emulate their heroine by wearing broaches shaped like dollar signs. For a while, the Christianity-and-Cold-War strand of the American right headed by William F. Buckley Jr. marginalized the libertarians for their atheism and noninterventionist stance. From the evidence of 1971’s inside-the-whale memoir, Jerome Tuccille’s It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, this movement was hardly built on solid intellectual ground. The abundance of selfish children driving the ship, part–Veruca Salt, part–Mike Teavee, made this seem like the kind of cult sure to wither of its own ridiculousness.

But with the Reagan Revolution, libertarianism was brought indoors, and the direct-mail New Right that accompanied the movement relied heavily on anti-government dogma. In many parts of the United States — the Sun Belt, the boys’ club of billionaires who fancy themselves self-made heroes, and various enclaves in the capital — Rand’s vision established its second beachhead.

And gradually, the discredited movement that tended to attract nerds and know-it-alls became part of the political mainstream.

“I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents,” outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan told the Weekly Standard, “and I make all my interns read it.” He only backed away from Rand when her atheism caused him image problems with God-fearing Republicans, who, if they looked closely, would see that Objectivism is almost exactly the opposite of what’s preached by the Biblical Jesus.

In fact, several of the key Republican young guns are Fountainhead-adjacent. Senator Rand Paul is not only the son of longtime libertarian crank and Texas Congressman Ron Paul (he of the racist newsletters). The younger Paul is such an Atlas Shrugged–pounder that a rumor flourished for years that his first name came from the family’s favorite author.

In Silicon Valley, billionaires are working to put the “liberal” back into libertarian — at least, the 18th-century “classical liberalism” cooked up before industrialization, widespread racial tension, and modern finance capitalism. For all their quoting of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, it makes their retro version of Objectivism about as useful for 21st-century life as an 18th-century telescope. The Randed-out Peter Thiel, whose commitment to free speech did not keep him from suing a major media company into oblivion, is perhaps the most prominent Valley libertarian. But he’s hardly alone: if you wondered why Elon Musk was selling flamethrowers, just remember he’s another guy who loves freedom.

Besides the true-believers, reactionary wackjobs often stop over at Galt’s Gulch on their way to even scarier neighborhoods. Mike Enoch — born Mike Peinovich — is a racist and anti-Semite beloved on the alt-right for his The Right Stuff blog and the popular podcast The Daily Shoah. On his journey from leftist extremism to far-right derangement, he was energized by the work of Rand, Murray Rothbard, and economist Ludwig von Mises; his libertarian blog sported posts like “Socialist is Selfish” and “Taxation is Theft.”

Similarly, the polite Midwestern Nazi profiled by The New York Times, Tony Hovater, was a vaguely leftish heavy-metal drummer until he discovered libertarianism. He was, in fact, radicalized by what he considers the Republican Party’s perfidious treatment of libertarian hero Ron Paul; today he reads numerous Rand-y academics for intellectual guidance.

Then there’s Robert Mercer, one of the invisible rich people who has more influence on world affairs than just about everyone you know put together. Mercer, who helped fund Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidential race, and, for years, Breitbart News, is also the father of Rebekah Mercer. A toxic rich girl par excellence, Rebekah is known to Politico as “the most powerful woman in GOP politics” and to others as the first lady of the alt-right. (She recently sowed a rift on the right by cutting off Steve Bannon’s paychecks following his tussle with President Trump.)

Even in this charmless crowd, Robert Mercer’s obnoxiousness stands out. The Citizens United decision has unleashed people like Mercer — secretive gazillionaires whose expenditures are often untraceable despite the way they remake our shared reality. “In my view, Trump wouldn’t be President if not for Bob,” an old colleague of Mercer’s told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.

Oh, and then there are Charles and David Koch. “Suddenly, a random billionaire can change politics and public policy,” election watchdog and registered Republican Trevor Potter told Mayer, “to sweep everything else off the table — even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views.” And, as of this fall, the Kochs now effectively own Time magazine as well as a bunch of other publications ranging from Sports Illustrated to the retro British rock magazine Uncut.

And Charles Koch’s foundation has given something like $200 million to colleges and universities, in many cases to appoint pro-business, anti-government scholars to institutions like Chapman University.

The Kochs’ defenders talk about libertarians as some kind of oppressed minority. But unlike most other right-of-center subcultures, libertarians are woven into the nation’s intellectual and cultural mainstream. If you went to a liberal arts college, live in a big city and read The New York Times or Washington Post, follow indie-rock bands and watch trendy shows on HBO, you probably don’t know many evangelical Christians. You could very well spend your days with very little contact with war-mongering neoconservatives. The rural/working-class/NRA side of Caucasian conservatism is likely something you experience mostly through Hillbilly Elegy or reruns of the now-cancelled Roseanne. Libertarians, by contrast, are everywhere. Go on Facebook, and some former friend from childhood is lecturing you about the free market.

We are now, many decades after the germination of Rand’s cult of personality, in a world where a Library of Congress survey deems Atlas Shrugged the most influential book next to the Bible. As the GOP, Wall Street, the intellectual plutocracy of think tanks and foundations, and Silicon Valley grow in coming years, expect to see the influence of this group and its ideas grow and stretch.

Despite numerous parallels with Scientology, Objectivism is not just sitting still, getting weirder while remaining confined to a few thousand worshippers. We have not yet reached Peak Libertarian. So where do these goofy ideas come from, and what effect might they have?

A partial answer — both rigorously told and incomplete — comes from a recent book, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World, by Wellesley College comp-lit professor Adam Weiner.

Weiner’s key insight is connecting Rand’s ideas — and the Russian literary intellectual lineage she emerged from — with the 2008 financial collapse. “By programming Alan Greenspan with objectivism and, literally, walking him into the highest circles of government, Rand had effectively chucked a ticking time bomb into the boiler room of the US economy,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “I am choosing my metaphor deliberately: as I will show, infiltration and bomb-throwing were revolutionary methods that shaped the tradition on which Rand was consciously or unconsciously drawing.”

Most historical changes have some kind of intellectual root, for better and worse; kudos to Weiner for tracing how a series of bad ideas and clumsy prose led the nation to the Great Recession. But Weiner, a scholar of Russian literature, appears to be far more interested in one of Rand’s antecedents than Rand herself. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the revolutionary socialist best known for his 1863 novel What Is To Be Done?, written while its author was imprisoned in a St. Petersburg fortress, is his true subject. The book famously inspired Lenin’s world-shaking pamphlet of the same name.

There’s one small problem with this premise, and one large one. Weiner shrewdly anticipates the first: how could a man of the extreme left — who helped inspire the terrorists who coalesced around the Russian Revolution — simultaneously provide the intellectual foundation for the godmother of the market-worshipping right? He finds the common denominator in Chernyshevsky’s notion of “rational egoism,” which Weiner describes as the idea that “the rational pursuit of selfish gain on the part of each individual must give rise to the ideal form of society.”

Sound familiar? This chimes almost exactly with Rand’s “virtue of selfishness” — the bedrock of her pseudo-philosophy of unchecked capitalism, minimalist government, and rugged individualism pursued by übermensch heroes. “The main heirs of Chernyshevsky’s bumbling, illogical aesthetic,” Weiner writes, “were the Soviet-mandated novels of socialist realism and the ‘capitalist realism’ of Ayn Rand.”

Weiner deftly handled the contradiction here: a bad novel could not only become ideologically potent, but it could also inspire people who would not recognize each other as fellow travelers.

Yet Weiner’s book lives up to neither its title nor its subtitle, “Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis.” Weiner’s final chapter, “In the graveyard of bad ideas,” returns to Rand’s biography — she grew up in St. Petersburg and watched as the Bolsheviks looted her family’s possessions — and intellectual roots. But it feels like an addendum, however skillfully told, to a reasonably lucid and well-researched book about an influential but not very good 19th-century Russian novelist.

In connecting Rand — and contemporary American libertarianism — to an extremist strain of pre-revolutionary Russian thought, Weiner does help clarify this bizarre lineage, its combination of heartland America Firstism with something clearly alien to our Constitution and its mostly British political origins. Ayn Rand is not just Adam Smith in a screenwriter’s bungalow — she’s coming from somewhere different from classical liberalism.

The book Weiner seemed to be delivering — offering the intellectual history of either kook libertarianism, or the 2008 crash, or both — still needs to be written. Until then, the second edition of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind — released in November, this time under the subtitle “Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump” — does a skillful job connecting philosophers, historians, and economists of the past with our recent rightward turn. His chapter on Ayn Rand and libertarianism, in specific, offers much of what Weiner’s volume promises and fails to provide.

“Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabobov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand,” Robin begins. “The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.” Robin, a political professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, starts with pre-revolutionary Russia, but considers Rand’s real birthplace to be Hollywood, where she landed in 1926 and was quickly recruited by Cecil B. DeMille. “For where else but in the dream factory could Rand have learned how to make dreams — about America, capitalism, and herself?”

And Rand’s us-versus-them formulation of the stalwart genius against the “moochers” and “looters” — revived by Mitt Romney in his “makers” versus “takers” speech — is textbook vulgar Nietzscheanism. It also helps explain the appeal of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead to misunderstood adolescents who dream themselves the übermensch.

Rand’s novels heroize — in the same campy way she learned from Russian operettas and Hollywood movies — defiant, comically masculine builders like architect Howard Roark and engineer/inventor John Galt. It feels somehow inevitable that the recent libertarian, anti-government, pro-business strain on the American right would lead us to a man who seems right out of her pages: the defiant, comically masculine real estate developer Donald Trump.

The real history of Ayn Rand’s bad ideas — their roots, their trajectory, their collateral damage — can’t be contained in any book, however good or bad. It’s all unfolding around us, as her zombie devours the Republican Party and soon, the rest of us, with no sign of abating.

Scott Timberg is the editor of The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles and author of Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

Banner image by Erik Fitzpatrick.

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