2020.01.12 a note about Neil

I was shocked, and saddened, by reading the news, this past Friday January 10, of the dead of Neil Peart earlier in the week. I could write much about this, but I feel the need to write a short note about something that I read that I found very disturbing, and annoying, following this.

On the page of a connection on Facebook, I read the following:

As much as I always enjoy listening to Rush, and always liked Neil Peart’s drumming, I NEVER understood their fascination for the infamous author Ayn Rand. Even more puzzling when you consider that Geddy Lee’s parents almost fell victims to the Holocaust… Very strange….

There is so much wrong with this that I have trouble knowing where to start.

What was written there, unfortunately, is not a new item, and was reflected in the item that my distant musical friend Trygve “shared” with that post, a link to an absolute rubbish article from The Guardian in the UK, the kind of nonsense that would be best described as a character assassination piece, among many other things that could be said, none of them complimentary.

The kind of nonsense involved started with the small little note on the back cover artwork of the album LP 2112 from Rush back in 1976, when Peart and bandmates were young men in their early twenties, with a note about a dedication to “the genius of Ayn Rand”.

For a start, it’s obvious that quite a lot of this problem stemmed (and apparently still does) from some serious misunderstanding of the writing of Ayn Rand, which came with a whole philosophical system that ended up being named “Objectivism”, which raises a whole topic of its own. That is, that it came with contradictions that were just part of the problems with Rand, some of her philosophy, and the people who became ardent followers.

This stuff has been well covered, long ago, yet many people seem to have missed it. Neil Peart, and his bandmates expressed their admiration for some of Ayn Rand’s writing, back in that period, with the interest coming from Peart’s interest initially, and his turning of his bandmates’ attention to all that. The interest, and appreciation, was fairly simple. They liked the ideas, especially in the novel The Fountainhead, of individual freedom, thinking for yourself, following your sense of values, and in particular, in their circumstances at the time, of artistic freedom, directing your own path and work. That was in a period when the band was struggling to make their way in the business of music, with people around them, especially record company management, pressuring them to conform to some ideas about what the band should be doing, including telling them they should mold themselves to conform to some simpler ideas of rock music as it was in the mid-seventies, to be some chugging boogie band, to be like, I don’t know, Bad Company or Foghat or something, when they had much more imaginative and ambitious ideas in mind.

I will not try to do some summary of either that book I mentioned, or Ayn Rand’s philosophy. I will say that there is as much to cover in addressing misunderstandings of all that, and also all the problems with the philosophy itself, as there is in the philosophical ideas therein. I, myself, read Rand’s work, several books of both fiction and non-fiction books that addressed her general philosophy, as a young man, around the age of 20, back in the late seventies (the guys in Rush are older than I by some years). I found much of it interesting, and valuable and valid, and I also realized, before very long, that there was also an awful lot wrong with Rand’s ideas and writing, something that was reinforced for me seeing, in the years since, how so many people made themselves some sort of Ayn Rand disciples, and both adopted notions put forth by Rand that had serious problems, and also distorted what she said to suit themselves.

It was clear, decades ago, made clear by Neil Peart himself and his bandmates, in interviews, that while there were basic ideas they liked and found valuable and valid in Ayn Rand’s writing, they realized there were many problems with all that, and largely moved away from any kind of dedicated following of Ayn Rand as some kind of philosophical guide, realizing those flaws.

I have read assorted articles with comments about all that from Peart, and to a lesser extent from Geddy Lee, who was not quite as ardent a fan of Ayn Rand in the first place, talking about how they had liked and believed in some basic ideas in Rand’s writing, about individual freedom, about dealing with reality in a rational way, but had moved well away from being some kind of Ayn Rand fanboys, or “Ayn Rand acolytes”, long ago.

They realized that there were many problems with what Rand thought and wrote, they realized how easily even the better and more valid thinking was so badly distorted by many people, how it could be very destructive in turning some people into something that could be described as a malignant narcissism, which, it’s interesting and important to note, is a term that was used by Rush a few years ago as a title for an instrument piece of music they did. People are still going on about “the fascination with Ayn Rand” of Neil Peart specifically, and more generally applied to Rush as a whole, when they left all that behind decades ago.

Making it all much worse, complicating things much more, was the kind of notion presented in that article from The Guardian, from over 40 years ago, that the general philosophy of Ayn Rand was some kind of extreme Right-Wing political philosophy, and taking it further, was full-on fascist. That was an absurdity, a pretty severe one, that can only be described as hopelessly stupid, or simply ignorant. For all its problems, Rand’s “Objectivist” philosophy quite correctly regarded communism and fascism as not some kinds of polar opposites, as some seem to think, but opposite sides of the same toxic and destructive coin, of differing political systems that were both, in basic essence, “collectivist”, in the sense of individual people being of no importance other than being simply cogs in some massive system of government where the people were subservient servants of an authoritarian ruling repressive government.

I know that Geddy Lee, in particular, was appalled, puzzled, and extremely offended that people were writing and talking about them as being some kind of fascists or even Nazi sympathizers because they liked some writing about a philosophy about individual freedom, which, among other things, went on at some length about the evils of both communism and fascism. Such an idea could only happen as a consequence of some serious and profound misunderstanding, and Geddy Lee, the son of Polish Jews who met when they were both prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, found all that particularly outrageous, and just plain idiotic.

It all gets worse in the complications of misunderstanding, as people who, as I said earlier, managed to avoid the simple valid truths and simple principles that actually were valid in Ayn Rand’s writing and turn it into an awful destructive philosophy that let them follow notions that they were the most important beings in the world, that nothing else mattered except them, and so on. Complicating things even more, people who label themselves “Libertarian”, with a political philosophy about individual freedom, of government that leaves people alone and lets them be free to live their own lives, the classic philosophy of “live and let live”, somehow, absurdly, get labeled as “extreme Right Wing”, and, then, we get all the following nonsense about being some kind of fascists, when the actual philosophical principles are about as far away from fascist as you can get. I don’t know how people can get this sort of thing confused, failing to understand that “right-wing” political systems are all about authoritarian repressive government imposing conformity to the ruling powers, militaristic jingoism, and all kinds of nastiness, even getting into religious authoritarian aspects and so on (an official state religion and conformity and obedience and so on). But, then, aside from all that, there are all kinds of other complications, such as people in the “Libertarian” camp who get into simplistic thinking that goes something like “less government equals more freedom, so no government at all means total freedom”, and assorted problems where lack of government oversight keeping things just and fair and sensible with a regard for everybody can obviously lead to a different kind of dysfunction, some kind of oligarchy or feudalism.

This could go on for some time. But, not wanting to write an entire book, about all of the above, plus all the absurd nonsense I have been writing about here, in the topic of what I have been calling “bipolar political disorder”, all the insanity of political nonsense among people adopting simplistic non-thinking about what they think of as “Left” and “Right” and “Liberal” and “Conservative” and all that, none of that lunacy should warp people’s ideas about a particular man who deserves much better than to be grossly misunderstood and maligned after his passing.