Courtroom Drama, Ayn Rand, and Your Local Theatre - Page 3

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Nov 5, 1999

Textual critics will have no use for the rest of this article because the play itself is certainly good and the hidden truth and the conflict it causes is clear and tight. Still, I believe it is interesting when the whole idea of the play completely contrasts the philosophy for which the playwright is famous. For many of us, explaining Rand's philosophy may become more concise if we begin by considering what it is not. Rand is not a skeptic and not an existentialist. If existentialism is the belief that existence is before essence, in other words that what we do determines our beliefs and morals, then Rand's objectivism is the opposite, contending that we should pattern our beliefs through a self-interested logic that determines our actions and morals. Decisions should be based on facts rather than loyalty or gratuitous justifications. Furthermore, humans have the ability to know the truth through the facts we are given, and as her philosophy states absolutely, "facts are facts." The Ayn Rand Institute has done a remarkable job or presenting this philosophy on the website.

Regardless of your stance for or against this philosophy, you have to see some deconstruction of the philosophy by the text of this play. When some facts are presented that point to the banker father-in-law Whitfield as the actual murderer, the prosecutor reminds the jury that all we have as evidence is the words of an ex-convict (a witness for the defense) and a well-respected banker (a witness for the prosecution). Surely facts are semantically facts, but when we have to base our logical decision on opposing facts witnessed by two motivated humans, we can't claim that we have assembled any absolute, objective truth. In the end, the jury of Andre's peers, who in this theatrical sense are actually the audience members' peers, have to pull the often contradictory evidence together to form some type of decision.

My favorite quote from the Ayn Rand's essay on the site mentioned above argues that laissez-faire capitalism is the most objective system because "[i]t is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others." Forgive me if I am slightly skeptical, but I find it difficult to believe that laissez-faire capitalism, even if it is the best system known to man, helps end violence. For example, in a play called Night of January Sixteen, somebody has been murdered, not for altruistic or religious philosophy but for self-interested monetary greed and possibly for lust. In fact, these same ethics probably caused two murders. Regardless of who committed the murders, a gangster has played some part in either murdering the victim or at least in obscuring the facts that the jury must use to shape reality.

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