‘Brat Summer’ was this year’s hot trend, but singer Charli XCX has finally declared it over. Don’t despair, though – as the nights begin to draw in, ‘Ayn Rand Autumn‘ is dawning in Brat Summer’s place!
I’ll be honest here – ‘Ayn Rand Autumn’ started a fun ploy in the Adam Smith Institute office to promote our upcoming annual Ayn Rand lecture. But there is a genuine imperative for us to embrace the spirit of Ayn Rand. Hear me out on this one.
Scarred from a traumatic upbringing in Soviet Russia, Rand recognised that, even with the best of intentions, an interventionist state inevitably leads to a loss of freedom. Her uncompromising views on this serve as the perfect antidote to the nanny state.
The term nanny state may have become a cliché, but in Rand’s book ‘The Fountainhead’, it was a real character embodied by the back-biting malevolence of Ellsworth Toohey. Posing as an architecture critic, Toohey is a parasitic and paternalistic cult leader.
It’s worth emphasising that no party has been immune from the charms of the nanny state. Even the Conservative Party, under various Prime Ministers, introduced calorie counts on menus, banned disposable vapes and introduced the generational smoking ban.
But now the managerialists want to go even further, ridding outdoor smoking from a host of public places! If their plans get the green light, we could see this time-honoured tradition erased everywhere from small parks to outside nightclubs.
Rand would have been appalled by these attempts to criminalise the drunken cig. As a lifelong smoker, she keenly understood their appeal. For Rand, cigarettes, like skyscrapers, were a symbol of freedom – of man’s bodily autonomy and aspiration to greatness.
Reflecting on the habit, Rand mused:
I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours.
Don’t get me wrong, Ayn Rand Autumn’s scope is deeper than cigarette advocacy. Rand believed that the role of government was to protect rights, not to protect us from our own bad decisions.
Certainly, she would have been equally outraged by the host of similar ‘public health’ initiatives the new Government has committed itself to. Banning young people from buying energy drinks and beefing up vaping regulation to name just a few.
As the leaves turn brown and the nights get longer, could these bureaucratic intrusions give the Government the illusion that they’re ‘making a difference’ in a tough fiscal situation?
For Rand, the impulse to ban arises from a statist system where pencil-pushers assume tacit responsibility for the details of our everyday lives.
Setting aside the fact that smokers save the NHS money, this argument demonstrates how more government leads to less liberty. When the state provides our healthcare, it can justify controlling our health, issuing diktats on everything from diet to exercise.
Whether it’s speech, fun or taxes, socialism sublimates the aims of the individual to the goals of the collective. Under the cold light of objectivism, new regulations turn into nothing more than the morality of the cave.
Where ‘Brat Summer’ celebrated the messy glory of everyday life, updating the party girl aesthetic for 2024, ‘Ayn Rand Autumn’ serves to protect the very liberties that allowed it to happen. This autumn, I don’t care how many calories are in my latte, pumpkin-spiced of course.
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