Now Online: ‘The Anatomy of Compromise’

Compromise runs deep in our culture. We praise diplomats who negotiate with authoritarian regimes, politicians who “find common ground,” and the friend who counsels “meeting halfway” with someone we know is wrong. The case for compromise is framed as a practical one: holding firm gets nothing done, while giving ground gets results.

Ayn Rand thought this view deserved a closer look. In “The Anatomy of Compromise,” now available online for the first time, she examines what happens when two sides holding opposing principles attempt to collaborate, and why the consequences are devastating.

Rand identifies three rules governing the outcome of such collaboration. The first: in any conflict between two parties who share the same basic principles, the more consistent one wins. As an example, she points to the Republicans and Democrats, both driven by their shared commitment to altruism toward ever-greater statism. The Republican advocacy of different means to the same ends is powerless to stop the Democrats.

Rand’s other rules explain why only the evil and irrational side benefits from such compromises. Her dissection of how the United Nations lends moral sanction to dictatorships is striking. So is her argument for the urgent need for the rational side of any conflict to define its principles openly, lest it cede the advantage to its opponent. Readers wondering why decades of attempts to negotiate with Iran keep failing — and why the latest round will likely fare no better — will find her argument illuminating.

You can now read “The Anatomy of Compromise” here, or find it in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Find a passage from the beginning of the article below.

A major symptom of a man’s — or a culture’s — intellectual and moral disintegration is the shrinking of vision and goals to the concrete-bound range of the immediate moment. This means: the progressive disappearance of abstractions from a man’s mental processes or from a society’s concerns. The manifestation of a disintegrating consciousness is the inability to think and act in terms of principles.

A principle is “a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend.” Thus a principle is an abstraction which subsumes a great number of concretes. It is only by means of principles that one can set one’s long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment. It is only principles that enable a man to plan his future and to achieve it.

The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sordid, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.

You can read her full essay here, or in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.