The latest episode in the fierce drama unfolding between ride-renting services Lyft and Uber is certainly distasteful. It’s also puzzling. As my friend Rogo pointed out:
“Uber can’t be killed by Lyft given its far superior resources. And it makes no sense for Uber to actually try to finish off its smaller competitor”
…due to the regulatory battle which they share an interest in fighting together.
I am sure the Travis worshippers credit some insanely brilliant strategic design to this behavior and I look forward to learning what it is if it can help us see a picture more noble than the sleaze that has been exposed thus far. Barring that, I’ll defer to what many say is the source of such conscienceless, greed-absolving behavior: yes, that scourge known as “Objectivism.”
The irony is that for as much as this ideology professes rationality, it is basically a pretense to cloak and justify the basest of human selfishness. Even Rand herself inadvertently exposed how conflicted this pure-rationality paradigm is (when a lover rebuffed her advances – what, love in the realm of the rational? – she later dismissed his “ugly actions and irrational behavior in his private life”).
In today’s iteration of this immature, unsophisticated world view, greed and hubris appear to be compelling a CEO to behaviors that (ironically) just aren’t rational. This is all in the name of ‘winning’ and encouraged at any cost when there is a one-dimensional focus on monetary returns that ignores the complexities of legal and human frameworks that underpin any economic activity.
If this were merely a warped personal philosophy, I could move on. But it’s had (and sadly as we’ve seen this week, continues to have) too much impact for me to ignore.
