Ayn Rand’s “Global Balkanization”

You’ve seen the signs. Overseas, Russia invokes bloodlines and ancestral claims to wage war on Ukraine. In the U.S., figures like J.D. Vance promote a heritage-based nationalism that elevates lineage above shared ideas. Meanwhile, the left carves society into racial and cultural blocs, demanding policies based on group guilt.

But you may not be able to explain how and why this keeps happening. In a 1977 Ford Hall Forum talk, Ayn Rand identified the roots of this trend and what must be done to stop it. The essay based on that talk, “Global Balkanization,” is now available online for the first time.

Rand calls a spade a spade: the “ethnicity” and heritage so many champion is just racism dressed in tradition, and a society that embraces it is primed for “permanent tribal warfare.” This is not, in her view, a matter of isolated bad actors — it’s the logical product of an entire cultural direction.

What sets this essay apart is its philosophical dissection of a cultural problem. Rand exposes the irrationalist and collectivist ideas that fuel tribalism by promoting a mixed economy that manufactures pressure groups, rewarding their leaders, and by locking in the divisions now threatening to tear civilization apart.

Her warning is as urgent now as it was nearly fifty years ago — and it’s now easier than ever to read the essay and consider what it will take to halt the trend before it’s too late.

Find a passage from the beginning of the article below.

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Have you ever wondered about the process of the collapse of a civilization? Not the cause of the collapse — the ultimate cause is always philosophical — but the process, the specific means by which the accumulated knowledge and achievements of centuries vanish from the earth?

The possibility of the collapse of Western civilization is not easy to imagine or to believe. Most people do not quite believe it — in spite of all the horror movies about the end of the world in a nuclear blast. But of course the world has never been destroyed by a sudden catastrophe. Man-made catastrophes of that size are not sudden; they are the result of a long, slow, gradual process, which can be observed in advance.

Let me remind you — as I have said many times before — that there is no such thing as historical determinism. The world does not have to continue moving toward disaster. But unless men change their philosophical direction — which they still have time to do — the collapse will come. And if you want to know the specific process that will bring it about, that process — the beginning of the end — is visible today.

Read the full essay here.

Also available in the book Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.