A is A? Nope.

[Added January 2019]

I always enjoy receiving thoughtful emails from Rand fans who disagree with my take on "Atlas Shrugged" -- even if we don't agree on many things, there is always something to learn from the interaction. I especially appreciated one writer who emailed me last year to explain some of the key things that he got from the book, the first of which was:

>> 1. A is A. A thing is that which it is and to claim otherwise is to deny reality....which is insanity.

I'm glad he called this out because it is really at the core of Rand's worldview: a belief that everything in the world has only a single meaning, and that anyone who recognizes a meaning other than your own is denying an "objective" reality. This statement is appealing because it seems true by definition (isn't something always itself?), and it provides an assurance that whenever you see something differently than another person, you are always right and they are always wrong. But baked into the "A is A" perspective are subjective value judgments that are hopelessly flawed.

Consider something as seemingly simple as a chair. Someone may look at this object and say: "That thing is a chair, which is something to sit on, and anyone who says otherwise is denying reality." And yet, that chair means/meant/will mean different things to different people:

• • For the person who designed it: it was a work of artistic creativity and/or an assigned project.

  • For the people at the factory who built it: it was what they did at work that day to earn a living.

  • For the company that made it: it was a product to sell.

  • For the distributor that bought it from the company: it was an order to place, then inventory to store, then a sale to process.

  • For the furniture store that put it on its floor: it was a sample of its catalog, a sales tool, a piece of inventory, a sale.

  • For the accountants at the manufacturer, the distributor, and the store (and the banks that provide them credit): it was variously an entry in their books as raw materials, inventory, accounts receivable, accounts payable, sales, cost of goods sold, etc.

  • For the person who finally bought it: it is a thing to sit on ... and a thing to climb on to reach higher places, and a piece of home decoration, and a signifier of style/taste/aspiration/wealth, and possibly many other things (TV stand, bookshelf support, cat's bed, etc.).

  • If it's a very good chair, a museum may someday display it as an exhibit.

  • For the next generation of chair designers: it is an inspiration.

  • For a trash hauler: it will be a piece of garbage.

  • For a recycling center: it will be a source of materials.

Someone like Rand would object that at all of these points it is still undeniably a chair, yet if we define a chair as "something for a person to sit on," it is clear that it serves that purpose in only one of the many situations described above. Also, if it's a particularly artistic "chair" (or a tiny chair, or a thorny chair, or a paper chair, etc.), it may go its entire existence without ever being sat on. So what is the "A" here? What is the undeniable truth of the object that transcends context and renders perspective meaningless? Beyond the physical truth of molecules and atoms and chemical composition, the thing we call "chair" has only the meanings that we give to it (and we're not even dealing here with the issue that people from different cultures and different centuries have sat on very different things, which we may not even recognize as "chairs"). To simply repeat "chair is chair" is to deny the existence of any perspective but one's own (and the validity of any human who disagrees), and as the above life-cycle makes clear, that is a mistake. Sometimes your A is my B, and that doesn't make either of us wrong.

Another furniture-related example: Jeff Bezos' desk. The Amazon founder famously uses a desk that he constructed himself from a door attached to four 4 x 4 pieces of wood, a move necessitated by his lack of funds when he initially started his company. So is it a desk, or is it still a door? Or is it a door that has been repurposed as a desk? Since Amazon long ago had enough money to provide its CEO with a proper desk, I would argue that the thing we refer to as Jeff Bezos' desk isn't even a piece of furniture: it is a symbol of the behemoth corporation's humble beginnings, and as such its purpose is to inspire employee loyalty or generate sympathy for the company rather than to prop up Bezos' computer or give him a surface to write on (which is the general purpose of the object we call "desk"). The physical reality of the object has not changed in the past 25 years, but the meaning of that object today is completely different than it was when that exact same slab of wood was bolted to hinges in the doorway of a house some decades ago.

If you really want to get into this stuff, check out the sociological concept of symbolic interactionism, which posits that it is the subjective perception of reality that drives our decisions and our actions, rather than any objective reality (or, in words familiar to every first-year Sociology student: if you believe a situation is real, it becomes real in its consequences). From the domain of philosophy, check out the Ship of Thesus paradox, the best version of which I have heard goes something like this:

A boat named Argo sets off to sail around the world. At each stop along the way, the Argo crew replaces bits of the ship with new parts as repairs are needed, and the ship takes on new crew as original members depart. By the time the Argo returns home, every piece of the boat, and every crew member that was on it when it left port, have been replaced. So is it still the Argo? And if it isn't, when did it stop being the Argo? Meanwhile, a second ship named Beagle leaves the same port a month after the Argo on the same itinerary. It also replaces parts and crew along the way, using the original parts shed by the Argo and taking on the original members of the Argo crew, such that by the time it arrives home it is made entirely of old Argo parts and is crewed entirely by the Argo's original crew. Is it still the Beagle? Or is it now the Argo? And if it is the Argo, then what is the first ship?

What is the undeniable "A" here? How can something always be fully itself when it is always changing?

These may seem like pointless mental exercises, but they reveal something fundamental about the Randian worldview: it is based entirely on ignorance. It is very easy to say that a chair is always a chair – or that a desk/door is always a desk/door, or that a ship is always the same ship -- when you have no idea how it was made, how it can change over time, or the non-obvious roles that it can have in the lives of people who are not you. To disprove "A is A" – and the rest of Rand's "philosophy" – all you need is a little life experience, a little empathy, and a little common sense; once you have those, the entire Randian worldview crumbles.