It was a strange night. Approaching Goldsmiths Hall, we spy three protesters, carrying placards saying “Who is John Galt?” After attempting to talk to one, it becomes unnervingly clear they're actors, paid by the organisers, with a photographer on hand nearby documenting attendees' reaction. Once inside, the compere, from the Adam Smith Institute, steps onstage and welcomes us: “Congratulations, you have made the rational choice, and here we are in a cathedral of gold”. Lars Seier Christensen, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Danish investment bank Saxo takes the podium, to deliver the annual Ayn Rand lecture, this year titled “Ayn Rand: More Relevant Now Than Ever” - no question mark, notably: there's no room for dithering in a Randian world.
The event, the second annual lecture dedicated to the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, who conceived of "Objectivism" - a philosophy that espouses laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral social system - was organised by the Adam Smith Institute, a libertarian think tank that promotes liberal, free-market policies and views. (“Who is John Galt?” is a question repeatedly asked in her novel Atlas Shrugged.) Christensen is transparent from the start, upbraiding the assembled bankers and free marketeers for “failing to advance the moral cause of capitalism”. The assembled brethren, for there are impressively few women in attendance, nod in agreement. Amongst the bulk of the talk, what feels like a self-help lesson for financiers, are a few bones thrown to cheer the already bullish crowd. “By having decided to work for a living, instead of begging or stealing, you are already a source of pride,” he tells them, “The good thing is that capitalism brings people, by their own choice, together.”
Throughout the speech, echoed in cheers and murmurs from the room, is a visceral hatred of politicians and political institutions. Christensen opines that it is “only in an emotional, irrational world” politicians survive at all, presuming a society ruled by business would be the only acceptable option to him and his comrades. In a country that's bailed numerous banks out, and been subject to deep welfare cuts through austerity measures, it's startling to hear Christensen say “Banks are under fire, helpless to resist. I feel we are approaching the end of banking as a private industry. Then our problems will begin”. His nightmare vision of a world about to slip into socialism doesn't seem to correspond to the messages outside of the room, especially not to anyone struggling to buy a home as the property market in London experiences a much discussed boom.
His senior colleagues have all been given copies of Atlas Shrugged, and instructed to live their life by Rand's Seven Virtues: rationality, productiveness, pride, independence, integrity, honesty and justice. Everyone Christensen admires appears to be a devotee of Rand. A few years before the crash, everyone was reading Atlas Shrugged – a colleague marched into his office after a holiday, and threw a copy on his desk, instructing him to read it. That the financial crash showed Rand's thinking had serious, obvious flaws is brushed aside quickly: the problem isn't capitalism, we're told. It's that full, unbridled, “pure” capitalism has never been allowed to flourish.
The elephant in the room, and one that people I meet afterwards curtly avoid, is Alan Greenspan. On the bus home, I read Gillian Tett's interview with the former Federal Reserve chair, in which he admits that a lot of his thinking during his career was misplaced. He's been reading behavioural economics, even flirting with Keynes, and seems to accept that his blithe belief in free-market economics, bolstered by his close friendship with Ayn Rand, may have stopped him seeing the 2008 financial crisis coming. There's no room for doubt with the bankers I speak to, though. Their belief in the free market is unshakeable: one man I meet, in a voice so posh it's almost beyond pastiche, tells me “I just love the markets”. The answer to capitalism's problems, I'm told repeatedly, in the wine reception afterwards, is that we just need more of it. A healthcare professional complains that the public will never allow the full destruction of the NHS, but they “can work towards it”.
As we're leaving, each of us is handed a copy of Atlas Shrugged. Like the event and the copious glasses of wine, the book's free: a fact that surely has their Objectivist pin-up spinning in her grave. But it's clear that this is a propaganda exercise, and a semi-religious rally for the bruised egos of the free marketeers here. The most worrying aside came when Christensen tells the room that so few people contact their local politicians, that it's imperative Randians do so – his employees, he says, send nearly 5000 letters in Denmark a year. The language used in the speech, and by the men sipping wine in ill-fitting pin-striped suits afterwards, is of war and battle. They're keen to win the propaganda war, and won't budge an inch if they can help it.
