Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” states: “In the course of conversation with John D. Rockefeller, Santayana mentioned Spain’s population; and the millionaire [billionaire], after a pause murmured, ‘I must tell them at the office that they don’t sell enough oil in Spain.’ Here in one sentence leered the ugliness and barrenness of the modern age. ‘I saw in my mind’s eye,’ adds Santayana, ‘the ideal of the monopolist. All nations must consume the same things, in proportion to their population. All mankind will then form a perfect democracy, supplied with rations from a single center of administration, as is for their benefit; since they will then secure everything assigned to them at the lowest possible price.’ This utilitarian utopia, prophesied by Henry and Brooks Adams as the triumph of the cheapest, starves the realm of spirit and the realm of art as no other dominion can. The culmination of liberalism, the fulfillment of the aspirations of Bentham and Mill, and of the French and American democratic spokesmen, it is also the completion of capitalism. It is communism. Rockefeller and Marx were merely two agents of the same social force—an appetite cruelly inimical to human individuation, by which man has struggled up to reason and art.”
No person in business speaks like this. Latching on to what they perceive as crude parlance, both Santayana and Kirk completely misunderstand the intuitive process of a creative mind in business. They see only a dystopian attack on spirituality—the central reproach of classical conservatism, that business, nay, liberalism, is life without God.
Ayn Rand has a better understanding. In “Atlas Shrugged,” she makes the point that creative industrialists and creative artists are one and the same mind—except that industrialists know it and artists don’t.
Artist Diego Rivera felt at ease in the company of industrialist John D. Rockefeller. Sensing a kindred spirit, Rockefeller asked Rivera to paint the interior of Rockefeller Center. Rivera, a communist, was given carte blanche to paint a mural at the center of capitalism.
Rockefeller later made one request: “Take out the portrait of Lenin. It’s the equivalent to a portrait of Hitler.”
Frida Kahlo said absolutely not. Let them destroy your work before I let you change your mind—which is what happened. Great art was sacrificed for a principle—that the sun goes around the earth, that communism is the future: see 30 million executed in Russia, 30 million in China, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in North Korea; and 15,000 to 17,000 in Cuba, lined up, shot in the head one by one by Che Guevarra, who showed no mercy to home and factory owners who refused to turn over their life’s work, their property.
Why Cuba? Cubans are the most entrepreneurial people in Latin America. Had the revolution not turned communist, Cuba today instead of Miami would be the financial center of Latin America.
In this sense, Cubans are the descendants of Christopher Columbus, an entrepreneurial mind that sailed for commerce, for profit, to cut the cost of importing spices by finding a shortcut from Europe to Indonesia (betting the world was round). Under pressure to repay Spain for those three ships, despite his misgivings about hurting an obviously gentle population, Columbus pressured that population to reveal where they were hiding the gold (which didn’t exist). The pressure turned to torture.
Have we judged Columbus too harshly? Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne at a very young age. She was a daughter of Henry VIII, and agents of the Pope attempted to kill her. Under pressure, against her nature, she allowed the torturing of plotting traitors and spies, to compel them to reveal who else was behind those attempts.
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein would not reveal the whereabouts of his nuclear weapons (which didn’t exist). Fearing another 9/11, we tortured Saudi and Afghani terrorists at Guantanamo Prison in Cuba—to reveal whom and where their comrades were.
In jettisoning Christopher Columbus, we minimize the importance of the discovery of the New World, a milestone in world history.
Ayn Rand wrote, “For if there is a more tragic fool than the businessman who doesn’t know that he’s an exponent of man’s highest creative spirit—it’s the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy.”
Diego Rivera wrote, “I believe in order to make an American art, a real American art, [it] will be necessary [to have] this blending of the art of the Indian, the Mexican, the Eskimo, with the kind of urge which makes the machine, the inventions in the material side of life, which is also the artistic urge—the same urge primally but in a different form of expression.”
