Bobby Fischer’s death immediately reminded me of only one thing. Ayn Rand’s ‘An Open letter to Boris Spassky’!
I can’t claim myself to be a great fan of Ayn Rand. Don’t know why, but I have found the books extremely dry. But years ago, I never had the courage to claim so, because it was fashionable to say that I read Ayn Rand and sprinkle your conversations with a few quotes from here or there. That was the time, where you felt that you need to conform to peer groups’ thoughts as a mandate. No such pressure now. In fact, being a non-conformist is more fashion now.
Having said all that, there is still one piece by her which I regard as the finest and in a way opened up my eyes towards communism. I grew up with a steady dose of communism with my brother being a party member and New Century Book house sold high quality print books at a very low cost. It was Ya Perelman’s ‘Mathematics can be fun’ that created a huge interest for Maths in me. And the Soviets were anyway claiming that all inventions of the West were done by them earlier, albeit secretly. But for a 14 year old, it was plain heroism. So, I was an ardent communist myself. If communism involved printing good books and selling at cheap cost, even today I will vote for the Communists. Anyway, one thing that changed my outlook on Soviet Russia and Communism was this Ayn Rand’s article. A chess match between a prodigal, eccentric Free world citizen and a highly organized genius of the Communist world was billed as a battle between Capitalism and Communism. Fischer won of course!
But the best that happened because of the series is this letter. Here I reprint it!
An Open Letter to Boris Spassky
Dear Comrade Spassky:
I have been watching with great interest your world chess championship match with Bobby Fischer. I am not a chess enthusiast or even a player, and know only the rudiments of the game. I am a novelist-philosopher by profession.
But I watched some of your games, reproduced play by play on television, and found them to be a fascinating demonstration of the enormous complexity of thought and planning required of a chess player--a demonstration of how many considerations he has to bear in mind, how many factors to integrate, how many contingencies to be prepared for, how far ahead to see and plan. It was obvious that you and your opponent had to have an unusual intellectual capacity.
Then I was struck by the realization that the game itself and the players' exercise of mental virtuosity are made possible by the metaphysical absolutism of the reality with which they deal. The game is ruled by the Law of Identity and its corollary, the Law of Causality. Each piece is what it is: a queen is a queen, a bishop is a bishop--and the actions each can perform are determined by it's nature: a queen can move any distance in any open line, straight or diagonal, a bishop cannot; a rook can move from one side of the board to the other, a pawn cannot; etc. Their identities and the rules of their movements are immutable--and this enables the player's mind to devise a complex, long-range strategy, so that the game depends on nothing but the power of his (and his opponent's) ingenuity.
This led me to some questions that I should like to ask you.
1.. Would you be able to play if, at a crucial moment--when, after hours of brain-wrenching effort, you had succeeded in cornering your opponent--an unknown, arbitrary power suddenly changed the rules of the game in his favor, allowing, say, his bishops to move like queens? You would not be able to continue? Yet out in the living world, this is the law of your country--and this is the condition in which your countrymen are expected, not to play, but to live.
2.. Would you be able to play if the rules of chess were updated to conform to a dialectic reality, in which opposites merge--so that, at a crucial moment, your queen turned suddenly from White to Black, becoming the queen of your opponent; and then turned Gray, belonging to both of you? You would not be able to continue? Yet in the living world, this is the view of reality your countrymen are taught to accept, to absorb, and to live by.
3.. Would you be able to play if you had to play by teamwork--i.e., if you were forbidden to think or act alone and had to play not with a group of advisers, but with a team that determined your every move by vote? Since, as champion, you would be the best mind among them, how much time and effort would you have to spend persuading the team that your strategy is the best? Would you be likely to succeed? And what would you do if some pragmatist, range-of-the-moment mentalities voted to grab an opponent's knight at the price of a checkmate to you three moves later? You would not be able to continue? Yet in the living world, this is the theoretical ideal of your country, and this is the method by which it proposes to deal (someday) with scientific research, industrial production, and every other kind of activity
required for man's survival.
4.. Would you be able to play if the cumbersome mechanism of teamwork were streamlined, and your moves were dictated simply by a man standing behind you, with a gun pressed to your back--a man who would not explain or argue, his gun being his only argument and sole qualification? You would not be able to start, let alone continue, playing? Yet in the living world, this is the practical policy under which men live--and die--in your country.
5.. Would you be able to play--or to enjoy the professional understanding, interest, and acclaim of an international Chess Federation--if the rules of the game were splintered, and you played by "proletarian" rules while your opponent played by "bourgeois" rules? Would you say that such "polyrulism" is more preposterous than polylogism? Yet in the living world, your country professes to seek global harmony and understanding, while proclaiming that she follows "proletarian" logic and that others follow "bourgeois" logic, or "Aryan" logic, or "third-world" logic, etc.
6.. Would you be able to play if the rules of the game remained as they are at present, with one exception: that the pawns were declared to be the most valuable and non-expendable pieces (since they may symbolize the masses) which had to be protected at the price of sacrificing the more efficacious pieces (the individuals)? You might claim a draw on the answer to this one--since it is not only your country, but the whole living world that accept this sort of rule in morality.
7.. Would you care to play, if the rules of the game remained unchanged, but the distribution of rewards were altered in accordance with egalitarian principles: if the prizes, the honors, the fame were given not to the winner, but to the loser--if wining were regarded as a symptom of selfishness, and the winner were penalized for the crime of possessing a superior intelligence, the penalty consisting in suspension for a year, in order to give others a chance? Would you and your opponent try playing not to win, but to lose? What would this do to your mind?
You do not have to answer me, Comrade. You are not free to speak or even to think of such questions--and I know the answers. No, you would not be able to play under any of the conditions listed above. It is to escape this category of phenomena that you fled into the world of chess.
Oh yes, Comrade, chess is an escape--an escape from reality. It is an "out," a kind of "make-work" for a man of higher than average intelligence who was afraid to live, but could not leave his mind unemployed and devoted it to a placebo--thus surrendering to others the living world he had rejected as too hard to understand.
Please do not take this to mean that I object to games as such: games are an important part of man's life, they provide a necessary rest, and chess may do so for men who live under the constant pressure of purposeful work. Besides, some games--such as sports contests, for instance--offer us an opportunity to see certain human skills developed to a level of perfection.
But what would you think of a world champion runner who, in real life, moved about in a wheelchair? Or of a champion high jumper who crawled about on all fours? You, the chess professionals, are taken as exponents of the most precious of human skills: intellectual power--yet that power deserts you beyond the confines of the sixty-four squares of a chessboard, leaving you confused, anxious, and helplessly unfocused. Because, you see, the chessboard is not a training ground, but a substitute for reality.
A gifted, precocious youth often finds himself bewildered by the world: it is people that he cannot understand, it is their inexplicable, contradictory, messy behavior that frightens him. The enemy he rightly senses, but does not choose to fight, is human irrationality. He withdraws, gives up, and runs, looking for some sanctuary where his mind would be appreciated--and he falls into the booby trap of chess.
You, the chess professionals, live in a special world--a safe, protected, orderly world, in which all the great, fundamental principles of existence are so firmly established and obeyed that you do not even have to be aware of them. (They are the principles involved in my seven questions.) You do not know that these principles are the preconditions of your game--and you do not have to recognize them when you encounter them, or their breach, in reality. In your world, you do not have to be concerned with them: all you have to do is think.
The process of thinking is man's basic means of survival. The pleasure of performing this process successfully--of experiencing the efficacy of one's own mind--is the most profound pleasure possible to men, and it is their deepest need, on any level of intelligence, great or small. So one can understand what attracts you to chess: you believe that you have found a world in which all irrelevant obstacles have been eliminated, and nothing matters, but the pure, triumphant exercise of your mind's powers. But have you, Comrade?
Unlike algebra, chess does not represent the abstraction--the basic pattern--of mental effort; it represents the opposite: it focuses mental effort on a set of concretes, and demands such complex calculations that a mind has no room for anything else. By creating an illusion of action and struggle, chess reduces the professional player's mind to an uncritical, unvaluing passivity toward life. Chess removes the motor of intellectual effort--the question "What for?"--and leaves a somewhat frightening phenomenon: intellectual effort devoid of purpose.
If--for any number of reasons, psychological or existential--a man comes to believe that the living world is closed to him, that he has nothing to seek or to achieve, that no action is possible, then chess becomes his antidote, the means of drugging his own rebellious mind that refuses fully to believe it and to stand still. This, Comrade, is the reason why chess has always been so popular in your country, before and since it's present regime--and why there have not been many American masters. You see, in this country, men are still free to act.
Because the rulers of your country have proclaimed this championship match to be an ideological issue, a contest between Russia and America, I am rooting for Bobby to win--and so are all of my friends. The reason why this match has aroused an unprecedented interest in our country is the longstanding frustration and indignation of the American people at your country's policy of attacks, rovocations, and hooligan insolence--and at our own government's overtolerant, overcourteous patience. There is a widespread desire in our country to see Soviet Russia beaten in any way, shape or form, and--since we are all sick and tired of the global clashes among the faceless, anonymous masses of collective--the almost medieval drama of two individual knights fighting the battle of good against evil, appeals to us symbolically. (But this, of course, is only a symbol; you are not necessarily the voluntary defender of evil--for all we know, you might be as much its victim as the rest of the world.)
Bobby Fischer's behavior, however, mars the symbolism--but it is a clear example of the clash between a chess expert's mind, and reality. This confident, disciplined, and obviously brilliant player falls to pieces when he has to deal with the real world. He throws tantrums like a child, breaks agreements, makes arbitrary demands, and indulges in the kind of whim worship one touch of which in the playing of chess would disqualify him for a high-school tournament. Thus he brings to the real world the very evil that made him escape it: irrationality. A man who is afraid to sign a letter, who fears any firm commitment, who seeks the guidance of the arbitrary edicts of a mystic sect in order to learn how to live his life--is not a great, confident mind, but a tragically helpless victim, torn by acute anxiety and, perhaps, by a sense of treason to what might have been a great potential.
But, you may wish to say, the principles of reason are not applicable beyond the limit of a chessboard, they are merely a human invention, they are impotent against the chaos outside, they have no chance in the real world. If this were true, none of us would have survived nor even been born, because the human species would have perished long ago. If, under irrational rules, like the ones I listed above, men could not even play a game, how could they live? It is not reason, but irrationality that is a human invention--or, rather, a default.
Nature (reality) is just as absolutist as chess, and her rules (laws) are just as immutable (more so)--but her rules and their applications are much, much more complex, and have to be discovered by man. And just as a man may memorize the rules of chess, but has to use his own mind in order to apply them, i.e., in order to play well--so each man has to use his own mind in order to apply the rules of nature, i.e., in order to live successfully. A long time ago, the grandmaster of all grandmasters gave us the basic principles of the method by which one discovers the rules of nature and life. His name was Aristotle.
Would you have wanted to escape into chess, if you lived in a society based on Aristotelian principles? It would be a country where the rules were objective, firm and clear, where you could use the power of your mind to its fullest extent, on any scale you wished, where you would gain rewards for your achievements, and men who chose to be irrational would not have the power to stop you nor to harm anyone but themselves. Such a social system could not be devised, you say? But it was devised, and it came close to full existence--only, the mentalities whose level was playing jacks or craps, the men with the guns and their witch doctors, did not want mankind to know it. It was called Capitalism.
But on this issue, Comrade, you may claim a draw: your country does not know the meaning of that word--and, today, most people in our country do not know it either.
Sincerely,
Ayn Rand
Sep. 11, 1972
