Ayn Rand Identified the Toohey Strategy Used to Corrupt Institutions

Ayn Rand Identified the Toohey Strategy Used to Corrupt Institutions

By Edward Hudgins

Why is much of the news media today dedicated to censorship and promoting an anti-liberty “narrative” rather than to openly reporting objective information and serious views from different perspectives? Some eight decades ago, in her novel The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand offered a prescient insight into how media can be corrupted and liberty lost, an insight that helps explain our situation today.

‍Who controls the news?

In that novel, Gail Wynand is the publisher of the newspaper the Banner, which appeals to the lowest common denominator to build circulation and, thus, give Wynand personal power and influence. His own personal tastes, however, are high-level; he saves the trash for what he sees as the unwashed masses.

Some of the trash he flings at them is Ellsworth Toohey, a pseudo-deep thinking and architectural critic who uses his regular column to bloviate on every manner of social and culture issue. He is dedicated to tearing down achievers and human greatness. One of his chief targets is Howard Roark, the innovative architect of highest integrity.

Wynand leaves running the paper to his editor. Toohey, “generously” offers to take the burden of picking most new hires off the editor’s shoulders by suggesting workers for various positions, all Toohey’s friends of course.

When a controversy concerning Roark erupts and the Banner’s readers, led by Toohey, are calling for Roark to be jailed, Wynand, now a friend of Roark, who designed  Wynand’s own house, decides to fire Toohey and use his paper for once to stand up for integrity. The staff, all mid- and lower-level workers who are Toohey’s cronies, sharing his dogma of destroying human greatness, go on strike, forcing Wynand to damn Roark to save his paper. Wynand did not have the power; Toohey did.

‍The Toohey strategy today

Fast forward to today. In 2020, New York Times employees forced the enabler publisher to push out opinion page editor James Bennet for publishing a piece by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) that called for troops to patrol burning cities after the Floyd murder—some states already had the National Guard doing this—even though Bennet also published “Defund the police” pieces. Can’t allow open discussion that contradicts a Woke narrative and offends violent thugs! In 2023, Washington Post employees forced publishers to censor a cartoon of a Hamas leader using children as a human shield. Can’t offend terrorist butchers by highlighting exactly what they do! 

In the entertainment realm, Disney World workers in Florida demanded that their enabler bosses, who wanted to stay out of local public policy issues, declare war on the state because of a law— inaccurately labeled “Don’t say gay”—that said teachers should not discuss sexual issues with kids in kindergarten to third grade, a war which, sadly, has stoked the other extreme. Can’t get in the way of sexualizing the most innocent and vulnerable in our society!

While such publishers and entertainment moguls do not have an ultimate level of integrity of a Wynand, in these cases they were trying to do the right thing. But the real power was in the hands of employees dedicated to censorship and dogma. It was the Toohey strategy! But the moral poison is not from a single Toohey but, rather, from tens of thousands of professors on college campuses and others in positions of influence.

‍Our ideas and long marches through institutions

Ayn Rand understood that ideas do not float in some ethereal Platonic realm but, rather, are manifest in the minds and morals of flesh-and-blood individuals, guiding them, for better or worse, in their choices and actions. In the 1930s, Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci argued that capitalists keep control of the world by controlling institutions. In 1967, German Communist Rudi Dutschke offered a strategy for overthrowing liberty by having Marxists and fellow travelers—flesh-and-blood individuals!—join as employees of government and other organizations, a strategy labeled the “long march through the institutions,” named after Mao Zedong’s physical long march to take over China.

Those of us who love reason, liberty and the Enlightenment foundations of our civilization must have a strategy for our own “long march.” Individuals involved in exponential technologies, which are driving the economy, social organizations, public policies, and culture, are an obvious target audience. So many of them are serious about creating a better world and understand that freedom to innovate is essential. They want to develop biotech with AI to cure the diseases that plague humanity and to even slow, stop, or reverse aging itself. They want to use AI and nanotech to cut production costs and invent new goods and services to spur an almost unimaged creation of wealth that will enrich all. They want to replace the current schooling system that is disconnected from the need to provide talent for our exponential future with one that nurtures creative minds and “robot-proof” individuals in a fast-changing economy.

A world of such individuals, their self-esteem including their role in creating a culture of optimism, purpose, joy in achievement, and hope, would, over time, relegate the Toohey’s of the world and their morally sick soulmates to the dustbin of history!

Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., is founder of the Human Achievement Alliance, an expert on future technology policy , and an advocate of a pro-reason and liberty culture.  He is the former executive director of the Atlas Society, and his career includes stints at the Heritage Foundation, Joint Economic Committee of Congress, the Cato Institute, and the Heartland Institute.

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Edward Hudgins, Ph.D.
Human Achievement Alliance, Inc.
12 Scandia Way, Rockville, Maryland 20850
301-502-6593
www.humanachievementalliance.org