Dostoevsky, Rand, and the Myth of Utopia

"[T]he Christian well knows that the newness which we await in its fullness at the Lord's second coming has been present since the creation of the world." - St. Pope John Paul II

Matthew Feeney via Unsplash

As a teenager, I went through a protracted Ayn Rand phase. I don’t know if I ever considered myself an Objectivist, as Rand’s devotees call themselves, but I felt wise to the evils of Marxism and socialism. I tried to talk to anyone who would listen about my political theories, which made me very popular (ha! Just kidding). I read Rand’s books with enthusiasm and even won honorable mentions in several Rand-focused essay contests.

I rejected Rand’s worldview a long time ago, though I still strongly oppose Marxism and socialism. The problem with Rand is that her fundamentally atheist conception of the world mirrored Marxism. Lacking a deity, Objectivism and Marxism attempt to deify man, insisting that we can cure the human condition if we implement the correct system.

Ayn Rand believed absolutely in individual merit. Though she was far from liberal, she presaged many progressive cultural trends in her conviction that other people, particularly one’s family, are burdens. Her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged portrays its protagonists’ relations as stupid, evil, or often both. This makes sense. After all, the Objectivist paternoster is “I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”¹ If one lives by a central tenet of egoism, one’s sick spouse or elderly mother cannot be anything but a burden.

Rand’s preoccupation with egoism - with what she would have called “The Virtue of Selfishness”² - also informed her dispiriting view of human suffering. At one point, John Galt - the semi-mythical hero of Atlas Shrugged - declares “It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.”³

I think this was intended as a jab against what we may today call “the victim mentality,” but it also illustrates Rand’s impoverished understanding of virtue. The benefit of suffering is that it can make us better - in truth, trying to cast aside suffering as much as possible is probably a path to misery.

Of all Rand’s aphorisms, though, I think the most telling is the following: “Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”⁴

Rand believed that humanity could escape the shackles of obligation by embracing her version of obsessively self-absorbed capitalism. Rand believed that casting off obligations to others freed man to rise on his own merits, which represented ultimate fulfillment.

Likewise, Marxists believe that “the revolution” can defeat human nature. While famous theorists like Marx, Engels, and Lenin rejected the “Utopian” label, this was because Utopianism represented a specific strand of Marxist thought minimizing the importance of violent revolution.⁵ Most Marxist theorists do believe that the central conflict of human history is class warfare and that Communist ideals can resolve this struggle and create an ideal society. Frieidrich Engels envisioned Communist society as an earthly paradise in which poverty and sadness disappear:⁶

The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country – these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property.

Objectivism and Marxism, then, are two sides of the same coin. As Joe Carter wrote for First Things, Objectivism “is still just another utopian dream, a transvalued Marxism.” He observes that Rand’s modern-day acolytes “act as if Adam Smith’s invisible hand has the Midas’ touch; that it can alchemically transform the vice of avarice into the great goods of capitalism.”⁷

Maclin Horton offers an even more insightful critique of Rand via his review of Atlas Shrugged:

“Several hundred pages into the book I noted to myself that it contained no love, no children, and no humor. […] [L]ike everyone who denies that there is something fundamentally and inherently amiss in the human condition, something that no mere idea or program can remedy, she ends up as one more proof of the truth she denies.”⁸

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I consider Dostoevsky a much better writer and thinker than Rand, but he was not immune from this tendency to envision an earthly utopia.

Dostoevsky believed that the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the Russian nation, would play the central role in the salvation of humanity. He believed that one day, the Russian state would become the Church (crucially, not vice-versa) and that Russia would then save the world from the fatal errors of the West, including socialism, Catholicism, and Protestantism.⁹

Dostoevsky’s view is more hopeful than Rand’s or Marx’s, but ultimately exhibits the same flawed premise - the notion that something like Heaven, a utopia, could ever exist on Earth.

I remember that when I first read St. Pope John Paul II’s encyclical “Centesimus Annus,” I was alarmed by his assertion that the Catholic Church has no political model to recommend to the world. With the passion of a new convert, which I was at the time, I felt Church had the answer to everything. So I was disturbed when I read the following:¹⁰

The Church has no models to present; models that are real and truly effective can only arise within the framework of different historical situations, through the efforts of all those who responsibly confront concrete problems in all their social, economic, political and cultural aspects, as these interact with one another…

I thought, “how can the Church have no models to propose?” I knew we must trust the Church to tell us how to live, so this confused me.

It was Dostoevsky who later illuminated this sentence for me. In writing about the interplay between Church and State, Dostoevsky observed that Jesus Himself rejected political power. In fact, Dostoevsky noted that such power was the third temptation of the devil. It stands to reason, then, that although the Church advocates principles, she does not advocate models. The Church is in a crucial sense above politics, which is fundamentally worldly.

Had I read the encyclical more closely, I would have seen that JPII points this out himself:¹¹

Man cannot give himself to a purely human plan for reality, to an abstract ideal or to a false utopia. As a person, he can give himself to another person or to other persons, and ultimately to God, who is the author of his being and who alone can fully accept his gift.

In other words, while certain forms of government are better than others, we will never achieve paradise even through the best of policies. Christians must accept the tension raised by two truths - the fact we must serve our fellow man and the fact that our world is absolutely broken.

Only one person can solve this problem, and He isn’t on the ballot. Instead he dwells in the tabernacle until the day when He returns and this world passes away. Only then can we know Paradise.

1. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, (New York: Penguin Group, 1999) Part III, Chapter I.

2. https://aynrand.org/novels/the-virtue-of-selfishness/?nab=0.

3. Ibid., Part III, Chapter V.

4. Ibid., Part III, Chapter I.

5. See generally, e.g., https://www.marxists.org/subject/utopian/index.htm; "Utopian Socialism." Encyclopedia Britannica, June 8, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/money/utopian-socialism.

6. Friedrich Engels, “The Principles of Communism,” (1847), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm.

7. Joe Carter, Ayn Rand, Shrugged, First Things (8 Jun. 2011), https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/06/ayn-rand-shrugged.

8. See Christopher Blosser, On the Naivete of Ayn Rand, First Things, (25 Aug. 2009) https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/08/on-the-naivety-of-ayn-rand.

9. I wrote about this in greater detail here.

10. St. Pope John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus” (1 May 1991), https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html.

11. Id.