Partying with Britain’s New Randian Ubermensch

CEO of Saxo Bank, Lars Christensen 

On Tuesday, I went to a talk by the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) called “Ayn Rand: More Relevant Now than Ever”. Rand was a novelist-philosopher who came up with “the morality of rational self-interest”, which basically translates to “we all have a duty to do whatever the fuck we want and to hell with everyone else”.

In London’s luxurious Goldsmith’s Hall – a grand, old building near St Paul’s Cathedral – a few hundred white men in sharp suits turned up to learn why it’s OK to be super-rich and selfish. It was the second annual Ayn Rand lecture, hosted by neoliberal think-tank the Adam Smith Institute. I was in a temple of the free market. 

The speaker was the CEO of Saxo Bank, Lars Seier Christensen. As the head of an investment bank based in socialist Denmark, Christensen is particularly enraged by high taxation, social welfare and banking regulation. “The world is on the wrong track,” he told us. “A malady that has long beset Europe is currently spreading to the US”. Apparently we are experiencing a “socialist revival” to which “Ayn Rand is the only answer”.

Rand was an amphetamine-addicted writer of trashy potboilers. Yet her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged has been ranked the second most influential book after the Bible. The book gained fame for advocating her philosophy of objectivism, which advances “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life.”

Rand’s New York apartment parties mixed sex with politics and she counted Alan Greenspan, then US Federal Reserve Chair, in her inner circle. (He insists he was only there for the free market philosophy, but no one believes him.) The New York Times dubbed her the “novelist laureate” of the Reagan administration, and since her death she’s become even more of a right-wing pin up. Atlas Shrugged sales soared after the financial crash. Her biographer Jennifer Burns describes her as “the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right”.

The audience at Goldsmith’s Hall (Photo by Dawn Foster)

Christensen said he first found Rand as an “insecure” 37-year-old businessman. He had been searching for a “moral argument for capitalism”, and when a colleague gave him a copy of Atlas Shrugged he was saved. In the novel, all the wealthy people refuse to pay taxes, reject government regulations and disappear. Society duly collapses, thus showing the world’s dependence on the rich. The highest god in the Randian universe is profit.

Since reading the novel, Christensen runs Saxo Bank Rand-style and all senior employees are expected to have read the novel. It doesn’t stop there. The business has given out over 15,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged and counting. The CEO aims to convert “young people”, “entrepreneurs” and “the new political movements” to the philosophy. They’re obviously trying new tactics; bizarrely, they had apparently paid young, good-looking actors to stand outside the hall with signs asking “Who is John Galt?” – the name of the novel’s protagonist.

I was treated fantastically as a potential new convert. My ticket was free, as was a copy of Atlas Shrugged and limitless post-talk booze. Surprising, for an event dedicated to the Goddess of the Market. Grazing on canapés with a young Tory policy adviser and a man whose “money was in race horses”, I was told that tonight’s talk was “nothing” in comparison to last year’s, delivered by John Allison, former CEO of BB&T Corporation, a US bank that operates over 1,800 financial centres.

Apparently BB&T were applying objectivism before Saxo Bank had even heard of it. Allison, reportedly, was “the real deal”. And, I was asked, hadn’t I caught the LSE talk on Monday by Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute? I should join the email list so I didn’t miss out again, I was instructed.

One of the good-looking actresses paid to stand outside and hold a sign

Everyone there was friendly. Desperately friendly. Randians can see that, since the 2008 financial crisis, the unquestioning belief in the superiority of capitalism as an organising system has been forcefully undermined. Faced with the destruction wreaked by market chaos and state austerity, many of capitalism’s former champions have turned apologists, claiming it as a “necessary evil”. The Atlas Shrugged project aims to reassert the moral supremacy of unregulated, laissez-faire “complete” capitalism.

The ARI, headquartered in California, has 40 members of staff dedicated to spreading the word and its Chair is a former Managing Director of Goldman Sachs. But it’s not only the banking sector; the Republican Party is riddled with Randians. It’s no surprise, for example, that Congressman and Tea Party sympathiser Paul Ryan credited Ayn Rand as the reason he got into public service. Or that John “real deal” Allison now heads the Cato Institute, a think-tank with major influence on US policy. They should remember, however, that hardline Randians don’t believe in public service. As Christensen put it, politicians are only needed in “an emotional, irrational world”. In the Ayn Rand utopia of absolute market dominance, the state is no longer required.

America remains the heartland of Atlas Shrugged. But for how long? Telegraph lead writer Alex Singleton has urged David Cameron to read Ayn Rand. But not because he believes our Prime Minister isn’t influenced by her ideas; Singleton quoted Rand: “The moral treason of the ‘conservative’ leaders lies in the fact that they are hiding behind… camouflage.”

In fact, the Coalition’s effort to shrink the British state in an unprecedented transfer of public institutions and services into private hands looks distinctly Randian. They wouldn’t be so bold as to credit Ayn, of course, but – as we saw this week in Goldsmith’s Hall and at the LSE – London’s objectivists are coming out of the woodwork. They mean to wage a moral war on all those who denounce the evils of capitalism. They are a strange army – a horde of pale, flabby men in patent leather shoes, political wonks, pink-eyed traders, investment bankers, IT nerds and City AM hacks. It’s difficult to be terrified, but this could be the new breed of ubermensch. 

Follow Niki on Twitter: @NikiSethSmith

More on Rand and capitalism:

Felix Martin Told Me What Money Is

This Guy Took Out a Gigantic Loan to Destroy the Financial System

I Signed Up For the Ayn Rand Fan Club Dating Site