BY STEWART SLATER

One of things which strikes me as I look back on the later stages of my education was how much time was spent learning to do things which I merely needed to understand. Knowing what a standard deviation is and what it tells me is certainly useful but I have never found the need to calculate one myself. Ditto, inventory valuation methods, the more abstruse options strategies and indeed, almost everything I had drummed into me in the early days of my career in the City.

The ideas of Ayn Rand fall into a similar category – it is useful to know what she thought (if for no other reason than that every American right-winger seems to have had a Randian period) but actually reading her books is both inessential and inadvisable. For she wrote a lot and she wrote badly (tu quoque, some might say), her interminable novels going on and on and on. And on. (Thirty years after the fact, now is probably a good time to confess to the friend who sent it to me that I gave up on Atlas Shrugged halfway through before I even got to the infamous 60-page speech delivered by her hero, John Galt).

Designed as vehicles to promote her “philosophy” (few actual philosophers would honour it with the title) of Objectivism, Rand’s novels tell the stories of heroic individuals pursuing their rational self-interest while facing opposition from established, bureaucratic foes (“wreakers” as she terms them in Atlas Shrugged, just in case anyone missed which side she was on). In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, an innovative architect, finally wins out after sabotage from the establishment (and another interminable speech) while Atlas Shrugged concludes with the government collapsing after the “productive” members of society withdraw their labour and remove themselves to “Galt’s Gulch”. “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as his moral purpose in life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

One can look back though history since the Industrial Revolution and see various figures whom Rand would probably have seen as embodying her heroic archetype. Brunel. Rockefeller. The American Railroad Barons. But today, the person who would most float her boat would probably be Elon Musk. His involvement in the founding of PayPal, the dominant means for internet transactions, Tesla, the first purely electric car company and SpaceX, a pioneering space company, mark him out as someone whose activity has changed the world and the lives of its inhabitants, and he has made shedloads of cash to boot (there is, in Rand’s world, no nobility in poverty).

Like any good Randian hero, he is also less than popular with the authorities. A few months ago, the EU accused his social media platform X of breaching its online content rules to which he responded with a threat to sue. In the run-up to his recent live-streamed interview with Donald Trump, the Commissioner for the Internal Market felt the need to issue a public letter warning of the platform’s duties with regards to the dissemination of harmful content – presumably hurty words spoken by the bad orange man – and drew ire for appearing to interfere in the American election, the self-styled “regulatory superpower” having not yet gained the power to regulate the voting choices of 300mn non-citizens in another continent.

M. Breton was, unfortunately, not alone. The Commissioner of the Met appeared to suggest in an interview that Musk might be extradited to Britain over his comments on the recent unrest here.  I am no lawyer but I am a little sceptical that the Special Relationship is Special enough for an American court to override the First Amendment rights of an American citizen in America just to assuage the bruised feelings of a “top cop” and “#TwoTier Keir”. But that might be me.

Like every Randian hero, Musk is hated by the guardians of the established order because he is a threat to that order. Roark threatens the architectural elite by wanting to build in a new style while Hank Rearden’s catchily-named “Rearden metal” has the potential in Atlas Shrugged to replace steel. Musk offers a platform for information to circulate without control and has a disconcerting willingness to criticise publicly those whom the electorate criticise privately. Those whose achievements do least to foster respect are usually those quickest to demand it. But enough about Sadiq Khan.

From his side, the contempt he feels for them (the meme he used to reply to M Breton might be described as pithy or vulgar according to your own personal propensity to clutch pearls) is, like John Galt’s, clear. All that is left for him to enter Rand’s pages is the love of a good woman. And a very long speech.

We do not need to accept Rand’s philosophy (very few people do after the age of about 20) to think that she had, in some cases, a point. For the tension in her novels is the tension between two distinct groups whom we might term “builders” and “bureaucrats”. The former, fixated on the future, take risk to make the future better. The latter, haunted by the past, avoid risk to prevent things becoming worse. To the former, moving fast and breaking things is good because it allows lessons to be learned and progress to be made. To the latter, it is bad because it involves breaking things, making the world worse, if only in the short term.

Musk is a “builder” par excellence – every rocket blow-up a source of information to help build a future in which no rocket blows up. His opponents are “bureaucrats”, the gap between civilisation and barbarism “a sheet of glass.” All it takes to bring back John Buchan’s “reign of Saturn” is “a touch here, a push there”. Or an infelicitous tweet. To the E.U., a world without the E.U. is a world in which Europe descends back into a bellum omnium contra omnes. To Labour, Britain without a Labour government is a land of bearbaiting, rapine and racial slaughter. To him, justice be done though the heavens fall, to them, the heavens must stand, even if justice may not be done.

But Musk is not just a builder, he is an American. By citizenship and inclination if not by ancestry. For the New World and the Old differ in their attitudes to success. Polling a few years ago showed Americans (and Brits to a lesser extent) looking up to entrepreneurs and down on the heads of large businesses. The former were go-getting risk-takers bending the future to their will, the latter creatures of the system who had politicked their way to the peak. In Europe, the results were the opposite, smooth operators who could build consensus within the existing framework attracting respect, those seeking to smash it for their own (and others’) profit, opprobrium. Rand is popular in America because her heroes are America’s heroes. She is not in Europe because the continent’s heroes are her villains.

That Musk and the establishment should come into conflict is, therefore, no surprise. It would be a surprise if they hadn’t. But if Europe wants to be a force in the future, rather than attack him, it should ask why it has no Musks of its own. Our leaders may pride themselves on being reasonable men and women but as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, it is the unreasonable man on whom progress depends.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.