How Bad Writing Destroyed the World : Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis

How Bad Writing Destroyed the World : Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis
ISBN: 9781501313110
Publication Date: 6 October 2016

How Bad Writing Destroyed the World is the story of how bad writers brought their novels to extra-literary life with devastating consequences for real people. In tracing the surprising literary contributions to the origins of the financial crisis of 2008-2009, it pays special attention to the destructive ethics of selfishness propagated by the novels of Ayn Rand and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, as well as the attempts to counter this ideology by writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov.

A congressional investigation into the financial crisis placed the blame squarely on Alan Greenspan and his deregulatory policies of the 1990s and early 2000s. Greenspan, a disciple of Ayn Rand, had been trying to put Rand's Objectivism, as presented in her novel Atlas Shrugged, into practice. The main thrust of Objectivism-the idea that the best society is one built upon the rational (and unregulated) pursuit of self-interest-Rand borrowed from Nikolai Chernyshevsky, particularly his novelWhat's to be Done? (1863). This novel, which presents the philosophy of Rational Egoism, was enormously popular and influential when Rand was growing up in Russia. In tracing these and other connections,How Bad Writing Destroyed the World combines literary history with intellectual history to present a controversial argument about the harm caused by hawking the "virtues of selfishness" in literature.