Don't Idolize People

Sometimes we have the desire to find a person who has profound insight and follow them, listening to their every word like it is holy revelation. We look for this infallible saint among religious figures, philosophers, leaders of social movements, and famous entrepreneurs. In my own life, I grew up in among American Conservative Christian culture, and I believed they had all the answers. Then I started to see the flaws in that ideology, and I discovered Sam Harris, who seemed to have all the answers Christianity didn’t.

But then I started noticing Sam’s blind spots, and I searched again, finding other wise thinkers, including Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein, and Sean Carroll. And while all of these people have good ideas worth listening to, they also all have blind spots and ideas that are not so much worth listening to. And so I discovered something that should be obvious, but is not so easy to act as though we believe: No one has all the answers. No one is worth pledging our intellect to follow.

So how do we gain knowledge and wisdom without falling prey to the same pitfalls as the people we follow? The answer is to listen to many different people who come at ideas from different angles, and not to dismiss their ideas just because they are different from the way we think. We learn to evaluate their ideas, take wisdom where we find it, and leave foolishness behind.

As someone who seeks out new perspectives, especially ones I am told not to listen to, I am one of the few people who have read both Ayn Rand and Karl Marx. Both of these thinkers have a lot of bad ideas, but they also both have some good ideas worth listening to.

Rand’s big idea that hooks so many people is the idea of living rationally. To choose goals for one’s life and work toward those goals using reason, not tradition or peer pressure or rules or authority. This is a very empowering way of thinking, which I admit I have not done well in my life so far, and am working at doing better.

However, that’s about the only idea of Rand’s that’s worth anything. Claiming to have bridged the is-ought gap and discovered objective symbolism and ideals is just bad philosophy, and to declare that people who do not live rationally are not worthy of partaking in the bounty of life is despicable. These ideas are the mark of someone who is full of herself trying to seize power and control the social narrative.

Marx is infamous for being the communism guy who inspired the totalitarian takeover of Russia and China and caused the collapse of many smaller countries. This means Marx is bad, right?

Not so fast. Marx identified a lot of legitimate problems with capitalism, some of which are still relevant today. For starters, he identified the problem of inequality of opportunity. In his day, it was much more rigid, with two distinct classes: the bourgeoisie, who owned factories, fields, and natural resource deposits; and the proletariat, who worked the fields, factories, mines, and stores in exchange for enough money to buy enough food to go back to work the next day.

These days it is easier for a factory worker or truck driver to rise up the ranks, get a good recommendation, and start their own business. But it is still hard, and relies on all kinds of factors out of the person’s control, like health, access to education, good connections, an encouraging environment, and natural talent. A sad fact of our economy is that the less money someone has, the harder it is to make money, and the less educated someone is, the harder it is to get more education. Forces are at play to keep those at the bottom of the economy poor.

Marx is considered the father of Social Conflict Theory, the idea that we humans divide ourselves into groups and those groups compete with one another for resources and status. Marx himself was a reductionist, saying all of human history is class conflict, which is clearly not correct, but it is equally clear that social conflict does play a significant role in history, and it is an essential lens for studying social science and for trying to resolve social issues.

For Marx and Rand alike, we should do what we do with all thinkers; take the good and leave the bad. The same is true for Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michel Foucault, Søren Kierkegaard, the writers of the American Constitution, Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius. All have wisdom worth listening to, and all have pitfalls we can fall into if we follow them too zealously.