who ruthlessly consolidated power in the Soviet Union following the death of Lenin, was also intent on Doing What He Wilt. Stalin and Hitler’s politics are considered to be opposing ideologies, but their two totalitarian states could be remarkably similar in practice. As the old Russian joke goes, capitalism was the exploitation of man by man, whereas communism was the reverse.
The most important similarity between the two dictators was their willingness to kill thousands, then tens of thousands, then millions of people. Both executed their own citizens not becauseof what they had done, but because of who they were. It was explained that some were killed for being Jewish or Slavic and some were killed for being bourgeoisie, but the ultimate reason for their deaths was that Russia and Germany had been rebuilt as monolithic states that obeyed the absolute will of Stalin or Hitler.
When the day came for Stalin and Hitler to attempt to impose their will on each other, the result was as dark as any event in history. The clash of these two dictators was symbolically represented by the Battle of Stalingrad, the largest and bloodiest single battle in the history of war. Russian determination to halt the German advance at Stalingrad ultimately turned the tide of the war on the eastern front and prevented the Nazis from reaching the Crimean oilfields, but about a million and a half people were killed in the process.
The clash between Hitler and Stalin takes the use of force to impose individual will to its logical conclusion, and shows it to be doomed and unconscionable. Thankfully, few people took individualism to such extreme lengths. People are generally practical. Even dedicated libertarians don’t argue for their right to drive on whichever side of the road they feel like, for example. Demanding the freedom to drive on both sides of the road would not be worth the trouble, especially for those with any emotional attachment to their lives, their car, or to any friends and family who might be travelling with them. Individualism is not usually the pursuit of total freedom, but a debate about how much personal liberty needs to be surrendered.
Individualism can inspire people to remove themselves from tyranny, rather than inflict tyranny on others. When Rosa Parks decided she was not going to give up her seat, as others dictated that she should, on a racially segregated bus in Alabama in 1955, we see that individualism can be bound by an innate sense of morality, and that an individual act can crystallise a larger communal struggle.
Nevertheless, Rand and her followers promoted complete fundamental selfishness as both rational and moral. The followers of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan recognised that selfishness was morally problematic and evil, but openly admitted that this waswhat they liked about it. Rand’s followers, in contrast, took the moral high ground and argued that it was only through dedicated self-interest that mankind could reach its full potential.
A common analogy used to justify selfishness was the ‘invisible hand’ which, according to the great Scottish Enlightenment economist Adam Smith, guided stock markets. This was a metaphor for the way in which the accumulation of all the individual, selfish actions in the market produced stability and benefited society. Another analogy was how the blind action of natural selection stabilised the larger ecosystem, especially using the gene-centred view of evolution developed in the 1950s and 1960s by the English biologist W.D. Hamilton and others. This view was popularised by the Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller
The Selfish Gene
. Dawkins’s title was another metaphor, for he did not believe that genes were consciously acting in a selfish way. Rather, blind acts of genetic replication inadvertently led to a stable and thriving ecosystem.
In the early 1950s the American mathematician John Nash studied competitive,
The most important similarity between the two dictators was their willingness to kill thousands, then tens of thousands, then millions of people. Both executed their own citizens not becauseof what they had done, but because of who they were. It was explained that some were killed for being Jewish or Slavic and some were killed for being bourgeoisie, but the ultimate reason for their deaths was that Russia and Germany had been rebuilt as monolithic states that obeyed the absolute will of Stalin or Hitler.
When the day came for Stalin and Hitler to attempt to impose their will on each other, the result was as dark as any event in history. The clash of these two dictators was symbolically represented by the Battle of Stalingrad, the largest and bloodiest single battle in the history of war. Russian determination to halt the German advance at Stalingrad ultimately turned the tide of the war on the eastern front and prevented the Nazis from reaching the Crimean oilfields, but about a million and a half people were killed in the process.
The clash between Hitler and Stalin takes the use of force to impose individual will to its logical conclusion, and shows it to be doomed and unconscionable. Thankfully, few people took individualism to such extreme lengths. People are generally practical. Even dedicated libertarians don’t argue for their right to drive on whichever side of the road they feel like, for example. Demanding the freedom to drive on both sides of the road would not be worth the trouble, especially for those with any emotional attachment to their lives, their car, or to any friends and family who might be travelling with them. Individualism is not usually the pursuit of total freedom, but a debate about how much personal liberty needs to be surrendered.
Individualism can inspire people to remove themselves from tyranny, rather than inflict tyranny on others. When Rosa Parks decided she was not going to give up her seat, as others dictated that she should, on a racially segregated bus in Alabama in 1955, we see that individualism can be bound by an innate sense of morality, and that an individual act can crystallise a larger communal struggle.
Nevertheless, Rand and her followers promoted complete fundamental selfishness as both rational and moral. The followers of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan recognised that selfishness was morally problematic and evil, but openly admitted that this waswhat they liked about it. Rand’s followers, in contrast, took the moral high ground and argued that it was only through dedicated self-interest that mankind could reach its full potential.
A common analogy used to justify selfishness was the ‘invisible hand’ which, according to the great Scottish Enlightenment economist Adam Smith, guided stock markets. This was a metaphor for the way in which the accumulation of all the individual, selfish actions in the market produced stability and benefited society. Another analogy was how the blind action of natural selection stabilised the larger ecosystem, especially using the gene-centred view of evolution developed in the 1950s and 1960s by the English biologist W.D. Hamilton and others. This view was popularised by the Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller
The Selfish Gene
. Dawkins’s title was another metaphor, for he did not believe that genes were consciously acting in a selfish way. Rather, blind acts of genetic replication inadvertently led to a stable and thriving ecosystem.
In the early 1950s the American mathematician John Nash studied competitive,
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