The Passion of James Valliant's Criticism, Part V
by Neil Parille

In chapter four of The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics, James Valliant takes issue with what he alleges is the financial, intellectual and personal exploitation of Ayn Rand by Nathaniel and Barbara Branden which culminated in the 1968 break. Both Brandens concede that they deceived Rand about Nathaniel’s personal life but deny any financial or intellectual exploitation of her.

As is well known, Rand publicly denounced the Brandens in “To Whom It May Concern” (“TWIMC”). Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, in separate responses, replied to Rand. (Rand then said nothing further on the subject.) This at least gives readers the ability to make a limited “common sense” evaluation of the charges, although it is ultimately difficult to come to firm conclusions without having access to primary source material and interviews. Valliant, who had complete access to the Ayn Rand Archives, is of little help here. He doesn’t supplement his critique of the Brandens’ books with any previously unreleased interviews. He does mention in the endnotes that he has reviewed certain letters and documents in the Archives (such as the business plan Barbara Branden drew up in 1968 for a new lecture service) but doesn’t reproduce them or discuss their contents.

Lies and More Lies

According to Valliant, Rand’s defense in “TWIMC” was accurate whereas the Brandens’ responses were “dishonest . . . relying on direct personal slander.” (PARC, p. 90.) However, Valliant concedes that “Rand was not telling her readers everything.” (PARC, p. 95.)

It is evident from reading “TWIMC” that there was an undisclosed “personal” matter that provided the backdrop for the dispute. For example, Rand says that she was “shocked to discover that he [Branden] was consistently failing to apply to his own personal life. . . the fundamental principles of Objectivism . . . .” She says that Barbara Branden later disclosed that Branden “suddenly confessed that Mr. Branden had been concealing from me certain ugly actions . . . in his private life . . . .” (TWIMC, pp. 3-4.)

Although Rand did not say what these “ugly actions” were, she did reference Branden’s letter of July 1968. She wrote, “Mr. Branden presented me with a written statement which was so irrational and so offensive that I had to break my personal association with him.” (TWIMC, p. 3.) Left unsaid was that this statement was a several page letter which Nathaniel wrote to Rand explaining that their difference in age prevented him from resuming a sexual relationship with her. (JD, p. 375.) Branden reports that Rand was furious when he hand-delivered the letter to her. (JD, pp. 376-77.) Rand spent numerous pages in her diaries denouncing Branden and the letter. (PARC, pp. 311-69.)

Branden’s response to this claim about the letter was the following:


It is tempting to say, as does Valliant, that this portion of the Branden’s response was, if not gratuitous, at least misleading. In my opinion, the most natural implication of what Branden says is that Rand wanted to start a relationship. I don’t think most readers would conclude that Rand and Branden had a relationship which she wanted to restart. However, one must consider the context. At the beginning of the affair, all parties agreed to keep the affair secret. Rand, by mentioning the letter, in effect broke the agreement. By phrasing his response the way he did, Branden was able to keep his word and respond to the substance of “TWIMC.”

An additional matter is the addendum to “TWIMC” signed by four NBI lecturers (Allan Blumenthal, Alan Greenspan, Leonard Peikoff, and Mary Ann Sures) who announced that they were breaking all ties with the Brandens and “condemn[ing]”
them “irrevocably.” Of these four, only Allan Blumenthal knew of the affair. I find it a bit unfair for Rand to ask (or allow) these three people to sign such a statement without telling them know the complete story.

In hindsight it would probably have been better for Rand to write a short statement that she was ending her association with the Brandens for personal and professional reasons. In light of such a personal attack on the Brandens and indirectly referencing the affair, I find the Brandens’ response measured.

The Play’s Not the Thing

Rand begins her critique of Nathaniel Branden’s supposed change in “intellectual attitude” by referring to his production of Barbara Branden’s stage version of The Fountainhead which, according to Rand, “seemed to become his central concern.” Needless to say, I have no way of verifying whether Branden’s involvement with this project took too much of his time, much less whether it was “authority-flaunting, unserious and, at times, undignified.” Valliant presents no evidence that Rand’s allegations are accurate. I am unaware of such a claim being made in the diaries reproduced in PARC, although the play is mentioned a few of times by Rand. (PARC, pp. 306, 308 and 334.)

Rand then mentions two additional “defaults” with respect to Branden’s responsibilities concerning Objectivism: (1) “the growing and lengthening delays in the writing of his articles” for The Objectivist and (2) his failure to rewrite his “Basic Principles of Objectivism” course. These are, to a certain extent, subject to confirmation.

With respect to articles for The Objectivist, Rand says “[w]e also agreed that we would write an equal number of articles and receive an equal salary.” She adds:


Valliant made no effort to determine whether Rand’s claim on this is true. Fred Seddon did. His findings (which I have not attempted to verify) are as follows:


As far as Branden’s alleged failure to update his “Basic Principles” course, I am not in a position to verify this. Valliant appears to believe that Branden is in error:


Valliant sneers at Branden’s contention that he planned a full update by 1969, but this is possible. It is likewise possible that Branden, after breaking with Rand, was not particularly interested in doing a substantial rewrite. I do find plausible Branden’s claim that of greater concern was his book on psychology, which was finished in late 1968 and published in 1969. Branden’s version of events, all things considered, is at least as likely as Rand’s, if not more likely.

Financial Exploitation

Rand accused the Brandens of financial exploitation. With respect to Nathaniel Branden she asserts that he authorized an improper loan from The Objectivist to NBI, and implies that there were additional improprieties. (TWIMC, pp. 4-5.) With respect to Barbara Branden, she implies that Branden proposed a business plan for a reorganized lecture service that was financially so unreasonable that is was little more than an attempt to cash-in on her name. (TWIMC, pp. 6-7.) We shall see that there is no evidence to support these claims.

Valliant supplements Rand’s allegations in an additional way. He alleges that the Brandens’ deception of Rand concerning Nathaniel’s affair with Patrecia was motivated by financial concerns. Had Rand learned the truth, she would have broken with one or both of them, thus cutting off their “meal ticket.” In addition, he asserts that Nathaniel Branden was gradually drifting away from strict adherence to Objectivism and his failing to disclose this to Rand constituted continued exploitation.

The Brandens’ business relationship with Rand was likely beneficial to all parties, but there is no reason to think that their deception of Rand about Nathaniel’s affair with Patrecia was motivated primarily by financial concerns. It is more likely that they feared Rand’s volcanic temper and the shattering of the Objectivist movement if the relationship was disclosed. As even Valliant concedes, Nathaniel Branden’s finances improved dramatically when he moved to California and went into private practice full-time. (PARC, p. 108.) Branden writes in his memoirs that after the break, NBI was liquidated and the amount after debts was $45,000 – which was split among him, Barbara Branden and Wilfred Schwartz. He adds that “[t]his was all that was left of ten years of work. I had no other personal savings.” (MYWAR, p. 354.) Barbara Branden doesn’t discuss her financial situation at the time of the break, but it doesn’t appear to have been strong. In any event, it was Rand’s intention of naming Barbara Branden her heir that prompted Branden to disclose the truth to Rand (which Valliant, bizarrely, attempts to turn into further evidence of her alleged exploitation of Rand). (PAR, pp. 342-43; PARC, p. 119.) People as talented as Nathaniel and Barbara Branden no doubt could have established themselves in stable careers by 1968 had money been their life’s ambition.

This chapter is an additional example of Valliant’s one-sided writing. In his attempt to convince readers that the Brandens were motivated by a desire to cash-in on Rand’s name there is little, if any, mention of the countless hours of uncompensated time that they spent advancing (if not creating) the Objectivist movement. Instead (in keeping with Rand’s 1968 denunciation), their contributions are slighted:


In an interview with Barbara Branden, Rand said the following (as reported by Mrs. Branden):


Likewise, one certainly wouldn’t know the substantial role that Nathaniel Branden played in turning Rand’s ideas into the mature philosophy of Objectivism. In For the New Intellectual, Rand thanked Nathaniel Branden for his contribution of the “Attila” and “Witch Doctor” archetypes. In the forward to “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” published in The Objectivist in 1966 (which her followers consider her most important writings), she acknowledged the importance of Branden’s article “The Stolen Concept.” One need only consider the seminal essays Branden wrote such as “The Psychology of Pleasure.” In fact, his “Basic Principles of Objectivism” course was the first systematic presentation of Rand’s ideas and was listened to by countless thousands of students throughout the United States. Branden may have been Rand’s “student,” but he was Objectivism’s first teacher.

Barbara Branden devoted more of her time to the business side of the Objectivist movement, but she contributed articles to The Objectivist and presented a lecture series entitled “The Principles of Efficient Thinking” at NBI. Rand’s slight of Branden in “TWIMC” (“I cannot say as much for Barbara Branden” in comparison to Nathaniel’s “waste” of “human endowment”) was entirely unfair given her years of devotion to Objectivism and Rand’s previous praise of her talents and character (which she compared to the heroes of her novels).

Financial Wrongdoing

Perhaps Rand’s most serious charge against Nathaniel Branden is her contention that he financially exploited her. The centerpiece of this claim concerns a loan for $22,500 (or $25,000, depending on whom you believe) that Branden authorized from The Objectivist to NBI.

By way of background, The Objectivist (which was co-owned by Rand and Branden) and NBI (which was owned by Nathaniel Branden) were separate corporations. They shared a common business manager, Wilfred Schwartz. In September 1967, NBI secured a fifteen-year lease at the Empire State Building. The Objectivist was a subtenant, paying $6,000 a year to NBI. NBI’s rent was due yearly (and in advance). From time to time Branden had authorized loans from The Objectivist to NBI. The Objectivist was profitable and the loans had been paid back. This much is agreed upon, or at least not disputed.

In July 1967, Branden authorized a loan from The Objectivist to NBI for $22,500. (Rand claimed that it was $25,000.) In any event, the loan included the $6,000 payment for The Objectivist’s lease, making it in effect a $16,500 (or $19,000) loan. It appears that this loan was greater than previous loans. It was repaid shortly before the break, probably in August 1968. According to Rand, the loan was made without her knowledge, in violation of the articles of incorporation, constituted almost the entire cash reserves of The Objectivist, and was not repaid until she insisted.

Here is Branden’s version of events:


Valliant alleges that this constitutes an admission by Branden that the loan in question constituted “the depletion of most of the cash reserves of The Objectivist . . . .” This is his reasoning:


I’m no accountant, but I am at a loss to see how Valliant reaches this conclusion. While we don’t know the cash in the bank at the time of the loan, approximately four months prior it was $33,881. Valliant doesn’t mention this amount. Approximately eight months after the loan was made (but before it was paid back) it was $17,438. (Valliant mentions only this later amount, and gets it slightly wrong.) What is the evidence that this loan depleted the cash reserves of The Objectivist? I can only assume that Valliant believes that $17,438 contains funds from the repaid loan ($17,438-$16,500= $938), but the loan wasn’t repaid until months later.

Concerning whether the articles of incorporation required consent of both Rand and Branden for such transactions, I can’t comment since I have not seen the document. Valliant doesn’t say whether the Archives has a copy. Valliant alleges that Branden admits in Judgment Day that at the time of incorporation there was an “oral agreement” that there would be “mutual agreement on all decisions.” (PARC, p. 109.) Actually, Branden says only that there was an oral agreement that The Objectivist would not publish something the other opposed and if there was a falling out The Objectivist would cease publication. (JD, p. 291.)

The September 1968 Business Plan

After it was agreed that NBI would close, Barbara Branden presented Rand with a ten-page business plan for the creation of a new lecture service. The lecture service would take over NBI’s lease and The Objectivist would remain a subtenant. Branden presented this plan to Rand, which she rejected. Rand stated:


In both her 1968 response and in PAR, Branden takes issue with Rand’s claims. Her response contains numerous points not addressed by Valliant which, if true, undercut Rand’s version of events. Branden claims that Henry Mark Holzer had in fact approved of the business plan. She alleges that the plan was accompanied by forty seven pages of analysis. If true, Rand’s claim that the plan did not contain “any relevant factual material” is likely false.

In any event, Rand’s claim of financial exploitation of the lecturers appears unfounded. Rand asserts that lecturers were treated unfairly, using as an example the fact that percentages paid to NBI lecturer’s declined as NBI’s grosses increased. Why this should be surprising or unfair is beyond me. A decrease in percentage paid to lecturers doesn’t necessarily correspond to a decrease in payments. Here is Branden’s response:


Valliant repeats Rand’s claim that Branden’s proposal was only a “projection” and adds “without the draw of NBI’s ‘star’ lecturer, Nathaniel Branden, which as she says were based on NBI’s past performance, were of little value.” (PARC, p. 120.) Perhaps the report did mention the possibility of an initial fall-off in revenue. (Valliant’s comment about Nathaniel Branden is interesting given his attempt to downplay his contribution to Objectivism in the book.) Rand said that her name was a “gold mine” and it is certainly possible that a revised lecture service could have been equally profitable.

Valliant, who had complete access to the Ayn Rand Archives, was in a position to shed some light on these questions. He mentions that a copy of Branden’s business plan was likely found in the Archives, yet doesn’t reproduce it or discuss its contents. (PARC, p. 404.)

Conclusion

Having now critiqued chapter four in-depth, our conclusion that PARC’s mistakes and distortions are so systematic as to render it seriously flawed as a critique of the Brandens’ works is further strengthened.

Reflections on Self-Responsibility and Libertarianism
By Nathaniel Branden


The traditional American values of individualism, self-reliance, self-discipline, and hard work had their roots, in part, in the fact that this country began as a frontier nation where nothing was given and everything had to be created. To be sure, most Americans exhibited a strong sense of community, and they certainly practiced mutual aid. But this was not seen as a substitute for self-responsibility. Independent people helped one another when they could, but everyone was expected to carry his or her own weight. People were not encouraged to believe they enjoyed special “entitlements.”

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed the revolutionary idea that a human being had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This meant not that he or she was owed anything by others, but rather that others—including the government—were to respect the individual’s freedom and the inviolability of his or her person. It is only by the use of force or fraud (which is an indirect form of force) that human rights can be infringed, and it was force and fraud that were, in principle, barred from human relationships.

This rejection of the initiation of force in human relationships was the translation into political and social reality of the eighteenth-century precept of natural rights—that is, rights held by individuals not as a gift from the state but rather by virtue of being human. This idea was one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment.

The principle of inalienable rights was never adhered to with perfect consistency. The U.S. government claimed the privilege of certain exceptions from the very beginning. And yet the principle remained the guiding vision of the American system. For a long time, it was what America stood for: Freedom. Individualism. Private property. The right to the pursuit of happiness. Self-ownership. The individual as an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, and not the property of family or church or state or society.

Lord Acton observed, “Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” This premise is what America was perceived to stand for and embody. The United States was the first country in the history of the world to be consciously created out of an idea—and the idea was liberty.

Observe that the inalienable rights on which this system was based were negative rights in that they were not claims on anyone else’s energy or production. In effect, they merely proclaimed, “Hands off!” They made no demands on others except to abstain from coercion. I may not impose my wishes or ideas on you by force, and you may not impose yours on me. Human dealings are to be voluntary. We are to deal with one another by means of persuasion.

In the arena of political economy, the name given to this system in its purest, most consistent form was laissez-faire capitalism. In nineteenth-century America, with the development of a free-market society, people saw the sudden release of productive energy that previously had no outlet. They saw life made possible for countless millions who had little chance for survival in precapitalist economies. They saw mortality rates fall and population growth rates explode. They saw machines—the machines that many of them had cursed, opposed, and tried to destroy—cut their workday in half while multiplying the value and reward of their effort. They saw themselves lifted to a standard of living no feudal baron could have conceived. With the rapid development of science, technology, and industry, they saw for the first time in history the liberated mind taking control of material existence.

In the United States during the nineteenth century, productive activities were predominantly left free of government regulations, controls, and restrictions. True enough, there was always some government intervention into economic activities, and some businesspeople sought government favors to provide them with advantages against competitors that would have been impossible in a totally free market. (Businesspeople as a group have not been enthusiasts for true laissez faire.) And there were other injustices reflecting inconsistency in protecting individual rights: the toleration of slavery and legal discrimination against women. But in the brief period of a century and a half, the United States created a level of freedom, of progress, of achievement, of wealth, and of physical comfort unmatched and unequaled by the total sum of mankind’s development up to that time.

Opening the Doors to Achievement

To the extent that various other countries adopted capitalism, the rule of brute force vanished from people’s lives. By closing the doors to force, capitalism threw them open to achievement. Rewards were tied to production, not to extortion; to ability, not to brutality; to the capacity for furthering life, not to that for inflicting death. For the first time in history, intelligence and enterprise had a broad social outlet—they had a market.

Much has been written about the harsh conditions of life during the early years of capitalism. When one considers the level of material existence from which capitalism raised people and the comparatively meager amount of wealth in the world when the Industrial Revolution began, what is startling is not the slowness with which capitalism liberated men and women from poverty, but the speed with which it did so.[1] Once individuals were free to act, ingenuity and inventiveness proceeded to raise the standard of living to heights that a century earlier would have been judged fantastic.

But there was a price. A free society does not imagine that it can abolish all risk and uncertainty from human existence. It provides a context in which men and women can act, but it does not and cannot guarantee the results of any individual’s efforts. What it asks of people is self-responsibility.

The desire for security is entirely reasonable if it is understood to mean the security achieved through the legal protection of one’s rights and through one’s own savings, long-range planning, and the like. But life is an intrinsically risky business, and uncertainty is inherent in our existence. No security can ever be absolute.

This is accepted more readily if you have a decent level of self-esteem—that is, if you have fundamental confidence in your ability to cope with life’s challenges. But to the extent that self-esteem is lacking, then the self-responsibility that a free society requires can be terrifying. Instead, we may long for a guaranteed Garden-of-Eden existence in which all our needs are met by others. We can observe this attitude in the two main camps that opposed a free-market society in the nineteenth century: the medievalists and the socialists. Longing for some version of a resurrected feudal order, the medievalists dreamed of abolishing the Industrial Revolution. They found spiritually repugnant the disintegration of feudal aristocracy, the sudden appearance of fortune makers from backgrounds of poverty and obscurity, and the emphasis on merit, productive ability, and above all, the pursuit of profit. They longed for a return to a status society. “Commerce and business of any kind,” wrote John Ruskin, “may be the invention of the devil.”

The socialists wished not to abolish the Industrial Revolution but to take it over—to retain the effect—material prosperity—while eliminating the cause—political and economic freedom. They cursed the “cold impersonality” of the marketplace and the “cruelty” of the law of supply and demand, and above all they cursed the pursuit of profit. They proposed to substitute the benevolence of a commissar.

In the writings of both we can distinguish the longing for a society in which everyone’s existence is automatically guaranteed—that is, in which no one bears responsibility for his existence and well-being. Both camps characterized their ideal society by freedom from rapid change or challenge, or from the exacting demands of competition. It was a society in which each must do his prescribed part to contribute to the well-being of the whole, but in which no one faced the necessity of making choices that crucially affected his life and future. It was a society in which rewards were not related to achievement and in which someone’s benevolence assured that you never had to bear responsibility for the consequences of your errors. The sin of capitalism, in the eyes of its critics, was that it did not deliver this protection.

While capitalism offered spectacular improvements in the standard of living and undreamed-of opportunities for the ambitious and adventuresome, it did not offer relief from self-responsibility. It counted on it. It was a system geared to individuals who trusted themselves—trusted their minds and judgment—and who believed that the pursuit of achievement and happiness was their birthright. It was a system geared to self-esteem.

The Evolution of Rights

In the earlier years of our history, when people spoke of rights they meant either the actual rights described above or their derivatives, as spelled out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Or they meant contractually acquired rights, such as the right to take possession of a piece of property you have purchased. In the first two instances, the primary focus was on protecting the individual citizen against the government. Insofar as these rights pertained to relationships in the private sector, the sole obligation of people was to abstain from using force or fraud in their interactions with others. In the case of contractually acquired rights, the sole obligation was to honor your agreements and commitments. No great drain on the public treasury was required to secure such rights—nothing remotely approaching a third or half of one’s income. The cost of government’s performing this function was marginal.

But in the twentieth century, a new notion of rights became fashionable that negated the earlier ones. Ironically, it was the very success of the American system that made this development possible. As our society became wealthier, it began to be argued that people were “entitled” to all sorts of things that would have been unthinkable earlier. One hundred years ago, few would have suggested that everyone had a “right” to “adequate housing” or “the best available health care.” It was understood that housing and health care were economic goods and, like all economic goods, had to be produced by someone. They were not free gifts of nature and did not exist in unlimited supply. Now, however, at the sight of our growing prosperity, intellectuals and politicians credited not freedom but the government for the new wealth. And they began to declare that government could do more than merely guarantee the protection of rights and establish a more or less level playing field, which was the original American idea but which now seemed too modest a goal. Government could become an agency for achieving any social goal thought to be desirable. In the growing enthusiasm for government regulation, planning, and expanded “services,” especially since the 1930s, it was not a long step from “it would be desirable” to “people are entitled.” Desires thus became rights.

For example, if a man wanted to be a farmer, then under the philosophy of Roosevelt’s New Deal the fact that his farm could not support itself need not be an impediment: Agricultural subsidies could make his desire attainable. Of course, to correct the “mistakes” of free-market capitalism, political coercion became necessary. For wealth to be “redistributed,” first it must be created and then it must be expropriated. Citizens’ taxes paid the farm subsidies. These subsidies had the effect of driving up the cost of farm products, for which, again, citizens paid. Their rights were expendable. Whenever artificial “rights” are enforced by a government, genuine rights inevitably are scarified.

Under pure capitalism—that is, a system based on the inviolability of individual rights—a farm that could not maintain itself in a free market could not remain in existence. Under an increasingly “mixed economy,” the impossible became possible by transferring to others the burden of one’s failures, which the government alone had the power to enforce. This particular program was introduced by a Democrat, but for a very long time it was hard to find a Republican politician—notwithstanding all the free-enterprise rhetoric—who would dare challenge the sacred cow of farm subsidies (or some other form of financial aid), since so many of these farmers were (and are) Republicans.

Undermining Self-Responsibility

I shall not attempt to retrace the steps by which the United States moved from something close to laissez faire to the extravagantly regulated system we have today. Here, I want to focus on the role the government has played in undermining respect for self-responsibility in our society—and in creating a nation of dependents who can no longer imagine a life without government support, involvement, and regulation. (German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, generally credited as being the father of the welfare state, clearly articulated the understanding that the way to build a base of political power was to create a nation of dependents on government “benevolence.”)

Under a mixed economy, government intervention can take many forms, but the essential pattern is always the same: the violation of the rights of some (or all) individuals in the name of allegedly serving the interests of a particular group.

I say “allegedly” because the welfare programs were intended to solve problems that have worsened steadily since the legislation was enacted. This is made devastatingly clear in such powerful critiques of our welfare system as Charles Murray’s Losing Ground.

The world of government operates very differently from the world of business. In business, when millions of dollars are poured into a project that does not deliver on any of the promises of its advocates, the project is typically dropped and the judgment of its advocates is reassessed. Not having unlimited resources, business is obliged to pay attention to outcome. Failure is a signal to go back to the drawing board. In the world of welfare, entitlement programs, and “social engineering” overseen by bureaucrats with the business acumen of social workers, outcome is less important than intentions.

Never mind that the underclass expanded, rather than diminished, as the programs expanded. Never mind that the most important economic gains made by African-Americans took place before President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation, that many black leaders say that the situation has worsened since, that government policies and programs have encouraged millions of people to think of themselves as helpless children for whom dependence on the state is a necessity. Never mind that our “humanitarian” tax laws and welfare system (though reformed somewhat in recent years[2]) have played a major role in the breakup of black families by financially penalizing a family that remains intact and rewarding one in which the husband departs. (The absence of a male figure in the household has been tied to young people’s disposition to crime, teenage pregnancy, and drug addiction.) Never mind that the people the programs were designed to help have fallen farther and farther behind. Never mind that our welfare/entitlement programs have created a nation of dependents. If our motive is compassion for the unfortunate, it seems we do not have to be concerned with those whose rights are sacrificed to pay for it—nor what kind of personal and social outcomes we produce.

The message of our welfare system has been that we are not responsible for our lives and well-being. The message of our legal system is that we are not responsible for our actions. (Has getting away with murder ever been easier in a civilized society?) The message of our political leaders throughout most of this century is that if they are elected, ways can always be found to transfer the burden of our needs and our mistakes to someone else.

That last message is the essence of a mixed economy. Such a system means government by pressure groups, a state of affairs in which various gangs (“special interests”) compete for control of the machinery of government to win legislation providing them with the particular favors or protections they seek, always justified, needless to say, by ritualistic references to “the common good.”

Our government has poured into regulatory agencies, welfare programs, and every imaginable kind of statist intervention trillions of dollars that in private hands could have been put to productive use. What we have to show for it is a society characterized by:

• Increasing polarization between every kind of social faction;

• Massive, inarticulate rage against and suspicion of anyone who does not share our opinions;

• Widespread cynicism;

• Escalating conflict between young and old (provoked by the Social Security program, among other things);

• Increasing conflict among ethnic groups;

• An intractable underclass, nurtured by intellectuals who advocate more of the poison that is killing it—the politics of victimology and entitlement.

Government is not the sole cause of these problems, although its contribution has been enormous. A fact avoided by our political world is that all the social evils government intervention was supposed to ameliorate have grown steadily worse in direct proportion to the degree of the intervention.

Am I suggesting that no social group has improved its circumstances over the past half-dozen decades? Of course not. What I am saying is that government efforts were not responsible, despite the self-congratulatory propaganda to the contrary.

During the 1980s, for example, women enjoyed historically unprecedented gains in wages, in entry into such traditional male professions as business, law, and medicine, and in education. According to studies by three women economists reported in the New York Times, in that one decade women made almost as much progress as in the preceding 90 years. This was principally due to economic forces that drew more and more women into the marketplace, and also to shifts in our values regarding women’s role in the world. In other words, these gains were in the voluntary domain, not the coercive (political) domain.

West Indian blacks in the United States, who come from a background of intact families, respect for hard work, and an ethic of self-responsibility, have not typically looked to the government for special forms of political protection and favoritism. They take any work available, often beginning on the lowest levels, just to get started in the economy; they may begin on low levels, but they do not remain there. They rise as fast or faster than many whites. “Second-generation West Indians have higher incomes than whites,” reports economist Thomas Sowell in his illuminating study Ethnic America. Furthermore, he writes, “As of 1969 . . . [w]hile native blacks had an unemployment rate above the national average, West Indian blacks had an unemployment rate beneath the national average.” They are a walking refutation of standard explanations of poverty among blacks primarily in terms of racial discrimination. They sometimes look with quiet scorn on those African-Americans for whom their victimhood, helplessness, and necessary dependency are axioms, and who regard low-paying, menial jobs as beneath their dignity but do not regard welfare is beneath it. (It should also be said that there are many African-Americans who share the West Indian perspective.) Both groups are black, but the difference in how far and how fast they rise is an issue of differences in their culture and values. A mindset of self-responsibility is not a peripheral but a central issue here.

As to those who are genuinely in trouble and not merely cashing in on the philosophy of entitlement, do I believe it a proper human goal to alleviate suffering and offer a helping hand? Of course. There are, however, many things I am in favor of that I do not see as proper functions of a government. Charity is one of them. The question is not whether one believes in benevolence and mutual aid. The question is whether one thinks in terms of voluntary choice or governmental coercion. Kindness is a virtue, to be sure. But it is not grounds for sacrificing individual rights. Nothing is. And it is one of the many intellectual ironies and disgraces of our age that those who protest coercion are called “cruel” and “reactionary,” while those who embrace it are called “compassionate” and “progressive.”

There is nothing compassionate or progressive about imposing one’s values on others at the point of a gun. And that, ultimately, is what we are talking about, however it is rationalized and dressed up to sound “liberal” and “enlightened.”

The ideal of self-responsibility in no way forbids us to help one another, within limits, in times of need. As noted, Americans have a long tradition of doing this. We are the most charitable people in the world. This is not a contradiction but a natural result of the fact that ours is the first and still the only country in history to proclaim the right to selfishness in “the pursuit of happiness.” The happiness the Declaration of Independence refers to is our own. In proclaiming and defending our right to pursue our own self-interest, to live for our own sake, the American system released the innate generosity in everyone (when they are not treated as objects of sacrifice). It is interesting to observe that during the 1980s, the so-called “decade of greed,” Americans gave more than twice the amount to charity they had given in the previous decade, in spite of changes in the tax laws that made giving less advantageous. Our private, not-for-profit organizations—the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the Salvation Army, churches, not-for-profit hospitals, and philanthropic agencies of every conceivable kind—perform benevolent work far more extensive than in any other country.

What needs to be challenged in our country today is not the desirability of helping people in difficulty (intelligently and without self-sacrifice), but rather the belief that it is permissible to abrogate individual rights to achieve our social goals. We must stop looking for some new use of force every time we encounter something that upsets us or arouses our pity.

We hear a great deal about the need for a “greater sense of community.” Government by pressure group is the antagonist of community. This is why I stress that individualism and self-responsibility are the necessary foundation for true community. If we are free of each other, we can approach each other with good will. We do not have to be afraid. We do not have to view each other as potential objects of sacrifice, nor view ourselves as potential meals on someone else’s plate. If we live in a culture that upholds the principle that we are responsible for our actions and the fulfillment of our desires, and if coercion is not an option in the furtherance of our aims, then we have the best possible context for the triumph of community, benevolence, and mutual esteem.

Are there now and will there continue to be severe social problems challenging our resourcefulness, inventiveness, and ingenuity? Yes. Will other people sometimes make choices we can neither agree with nor admire? Inevitably. That is the nature of life. But a culture of self-responsibility is not just the best chance we have to create a decent world. It is the only chance.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes:

1. For example, with respect to the impact of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism in England, a 1983 study by Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson found that the real wages of English blue-collar workers doubled between 1819 and 1851.

2. See Norman Barry, “The Never-Ending Welfare Debate,” Ideas on Liberty, March 2001, pp. 19-23.

Nathaniel Branden (nathaniel@nathanielbranden.com) is the author of 20 books, including The Art of Living Consciously, Taking Responsibility, and most recently, My Years with Ayn Rand. His Web site is www.nathanielbranden.net.

[This essay was originally published in the April 2001 issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty (Vol. 51, No. 4) and was posted to Objectivist Living with the author's consent on Wednesday, May 9, 2007.]

Objectivity Online Archive

Today, in a wonderful act of generosity Stephen Boydstun announced that he has provided his 1990-1998 magazine, Objectivity, online. Here is his announcement.


I looked it over and it is just magnificent.

I am pinning this topic in the Library so that it will be readily available to all who wish to read the important articles he published. For a while, I am putting it on our front page to make sure more people know about it.

If anyone is interested in some preliminary comments from Stephen, see here, and for a touching personal angle, see here.

Thank you, Stephen. Your act of generosity is more appreciated than you could ever know.

Michael

Barbara Branden, Robert Hessen and the 1998 Rand Auction
by Michael Stuart Kelly


I received a gift from Barbara Branden a while back when I was looking for some quotes on how she and Nathaniel Branden exerted a disciple-like influence on Ayn Rand as a writer. She sent me the Butterfield & Butterfield catalogue for the auction she, Robert Hessen and some others held of Rand’s papers and memorabilia on November 18, 1998. She said there were some quotes in it that might interest me. It sure did. This catalogue is a small treasure of historical images and texts. When I received it, I immediately wanted to share some of the interesting things in it with Rand admirers other than myself.

This material is unavailable elsewhere, including the fascinating opening speeches by Barbara Branden and Robert Hessen. I asked them for permission to publish these speeches and they both graciously agreed. As I was preparing them, it became evident that providing some context would be very interesting—so would providing a peek inside the catalogue.

I had occasionally read of trouble with the auction—that it almost did not take place because of a clash with Rand’s heir, Sylvan Leonard Peikoff, and that it threatened to become a lawsuit instead of an auction. I decided to look into this in more detail. The story has been told before and the events are well documented on the Internet and elsewhere, but the details are either scarce or disperse. I saw that the story was well worth retelling.

So in presenting information from these two basic sources (the catalogue and the trouble), plus some lesser sources, here is what you will find below, which is more compilation than article proper: the opening speeches, which give a poignant introduction and background; information on the catalogue and the auction; the pre-auction trouble over ownership, including examination of pertinent documents, a close look at twenty of the catalogue entries, including information on Rand currently unavailable elsewhere; the auction’s results; and a list of the catalogue’s lot entries.

Some of the items stray off on a small tangent, as is their nature. These were items that I encountered that were too charming or dramatic to skip over. I think of them like a stroll on a path through the mountains: there is the main path and you keep your destination in mind, but sometimes you see something so interesting that you can’t help but stop and look.

This makes for more length than normal. My final intention was to provide a document for easy research and there was much to include. Actually and lamentably, much more was left out than I really wanted, but I tried to keep it to a reasonable size. In addition to quotes and images, I have provided a number of links to pertinent material and contact information for some sources.

One of the fascinating aspects of putting all this together, one that became clear to me as I was doing it, is that it provided a small microcosmic window to an event that contained the essentials of Ayn Rand and her impact on the world—her personal life, the greatness of her vision, the commercial worth of what she produced, and bitter conflicts. All of these have become her historical progeny.


Opening speech by Barbara Branden



Opening speech by Robert Hessen

The Lepers of Objectivism
by Barbara Branden

I had not read anything on SoloPassion for quite some time, but I went there tonight and discovered an article by Phil Coates entitled "Targeting Those Who Have Not Initiated Force -- Muslims as Such."
http://www.solopassion.com/node/1599

In this article, Phil criticizes an Objective Standard post by Craig Biddle, as follows:

"Craig Biddle on his Objective Standard blog advocates taking out Iran by aerial bombing. He adds the following to the list of military and leadership targets: 'All Iranian mosques and madrassahs, and the residences of all Iranian...imams [and] clerics. Hit these targets when they are most likely to be occupied (e.g., mosques during the day and residences at night).'"

I did not expect that I ever would recommend that the members of Objectivist Living should read a Solo article, and particularly the comments being made about it. But I think you need to know that there are so-called Objectivists who advocate, as a value in itself, the deliberate, pointless murder of perhaps millions of people in mosques and millions of children in schools.

If Lindsay Perigo does not denounce Craig Biddle and the members of Solo who support his recommendations, and if ARI does not denounce The Objective Standard, (which is published and edited by Craig Biddle, and which numbers among its writers Andrew Bernstein, Yaron Brook, Alex Epstein, and David Harriman) they should be shunned and avoided just as lepers once were shunned and avoided. These people are the lepers of Objectivism.

Barbara

Objectivism and Rage
by Barbara Branden

A lecture presented at the TAS 2006 Summer Seminar, July 4, 2006, Chapman University, Orange, CA

One cannot avoid recognizing that we live in a very angry age. At one time, people spoke to “My worthy opponent” when addressing someone who disagreed with their views. That attitude of respecting differences has long disappeared. Today, in discussions of politics, of religion, of environmentalism, of war and peace, of abortion—of all the issues that concern and often divide us—we hear little but raised voices and enraged insults coming from all sides of every issue. Speak to an opponent of the Iraq war and suggest that it might have been a good idea—and a torrent of abuse washes over you. Say that Israel is morally superior to the Palestinians—and statistics about Israel’s supposed “atrocities” of the last 2,000 years fly furiously at your head. Say a kind word about George W. Bush—and you had better take to the hills at once.

Objectivists are by no means immune to this rage. On the contrary, I find it to be increasingly prevalent among Objectivists. We see everywhere—particularly on the Internet—the spectacle of supposed supporters of reason and free inquiry erupting in fury at the least provocation and hurling abuse at anyone who opposes—even questions—their convictions.

But what I call “Objectivist Rage” has a peculiar twist to it, unlikely to be found anywhere else except, paradoxically, in religion. It is almost always morally tinged. Those who question our ideas and those who oppose them, we are told, are not merely unintelligent, ignorant, uninformed; they are evil, they are moral monsters to be cast out and forever damned.

And that is what I want to discuss today: the immensely presumptuous moralizing, the wildly unjust condemnations, and the towering anger and outrage exhibited by so many Objectivists. I want to explain, as best I can identify it, why this happens—that is, what are the mistaken philosophical ideas that lead to it, and what appears to be the psychology of many of its practitioners. If we are to defend ourselves against it and prevent it from contaminating our own dealings with others, our first requirement is to understand it.

Let me say that I have found The Objectivist Center [now The Atlas Society] to be a significant exception to Objectivist rage, certainly an exception as regards its official policy. Although I have also found that by no means are all TOC members immune to it. And I am certain that many, perhaps most of you, have at one time or another had this sort of injustice very painfully directed against you. I am especially concerned with young people, new to Objectivism, who find themselves angrily accused of heresy, of evasion, of being “enemies of Objectivism” and therefore “evil” because they do not understand certain Objectivist ideas and/or because they disagree with them. Terrible damage is done to young people by this means. I have seen so many instances in which newcomers to Objectivism become rigid, fearful true believers in order to escape censure—or else they are driven away to lick their wounds in hurt and bewilderment. And sadly, often the victims in their turn become victimizers—spewing the poison that sickened them onto the next young Objectivist they encounter, having learned to treat even the most polite and reasoned disagreements with contempt and insult and morally-outraged fury.

Let me give you an example, from a letter I recently received, of the damage this venom does; it's one of many such letters written to me over the years.

"I was interested in the books and philosophy of Ayn Rand, but my few brushes with organized Objectivism have left not only a bitter aftertaste but also some emotional and social damage in my life.

"I guess I should introduce myself a little more. I am university student, in my final year studying biomedical sciences. . . I turned 21 last October. I started reading Ayn Rand's works when I was 20. I have read Anthem, Atlas Shrugged and watched The Fountainhead movie. I attended one meeting of my school's Objectivist club (and decided not to go back after that) . . . I also corresponded with the owner of an Objectivist web site. . . .

"Although my involvement with objectivism is relatively mild compared with some of the other horror stories I hear about, I still do believe it had a significant negative impact on me. It had a bad effect on my emotional and social life, made me rigid, humorless and judgmental, slowly lose friends and nearly precipitated a bitter split from my boyfriend of 3 years, whom I loved dearly . . ."

This young woman now refers to herself as "a recovering Objectivist."

This is a problem that has caused many well-meaning people to turn away from Objectivism after painful and humiliating encounters with moralizing Objectivists; it thereby endangers the future acceptance of the ideas that are important to all of us. I wonder if the Savonarolas of Objectivism have any idea how many men and women who were drawn to Objectivism, eager to understand it and to learn its application to their lives, are now saying: “If this obsession with finding and rooting out ‘enemies,’ this fanatical unearthing of villains—if this is Objectivism, I want no part of it.”

I truly believe that Objectivism may stand or fall, as far as public acceptance is concerned, by whether or not this problem can be eliminated. Orthodox Objectivists may be willing to put up with being called "dishonest" and "evil" at the least imagined provocation; I don't think the public at large will stand for it or respect a philosophical system that they are told demands it.

So we must consider very carefully the sources of this dangerous error.

1. Evil Ideas

A major source of unjust moralizing and condemnations is the belief that ideas can be either good or evil—that it is not merely people, their motivations, the degree of their rationality, their characters, and their actions that are open to moral evaluation, but also and primarily their ideas and convictions. We can—and must, this view holds—judge people, judge the very nature of their souls, according to that which they hold to be true. It is what one thinks that determines one’s virtue or vice.

Objectivists are not alone in holding such a view, although it is relatively rare among people who are not Objectivists. Several years ago, I had dinner with some liberal acquaintances when a discussion of the present Administration began. I mentioned that I liked George Bush and approved of many of his policies. No one asked me why. No one said a word. A dead silence fell over the table. Everyone stared at me, aghast, as if Satan, complete with horns, hooves, and a tail, had seated himself among them. They wanted nothing to do with me, they did not want to know me; I had established myself as irredeemably evil. Approve-of-Bush is an evil idea, is it not?

Let me hasten to say that this attitude is not limited to liberals. Had I been at dinner with conservative or libertarian acquaintances and said I approved of many of the policies of Bill Clinton, I have little doubt that I would have met with the same appalled rejection and similarly been viewed as an advocate of the gentle art of well-poisoning.

The view that ideas can be evil is held implicitly or explicitly by a great many Objectivists. If someone tells us, for instance, that he is religious, presumably we know—without knowing his context, the extent of his understanding, or the depth of his commitment—that this is an evil idea that cannot be accepted by a mind devoted to reason. Therefore, at least to the extent of his religiosity, we know that the person is evil. Or again, if a man tells us he is a political liberal, presumably we know—again without knowing his context, the extent of his understanding, or the depth of his commitment—that this, too, is an evil idea that cannot be maintained by a mind devoted to reason. Therefore, at least to the extent of his liberalism, we know that the man is evil.

How do we know it? How do we decide which ideas are proof of evil? What the argument ultimately amounts to is that mistaken ideas of a fundamental sort—fundamental to whichever branch of knowledge is being considered—are evil. The concept of error, of innocence, vanishes, and error is transmuted into evil.

And worse. What do we hold to be the mistaken ideas that constitute proof of evil? Why, those ideas that contradict our own, of course. We are not religious mystics, we do not believe that the use of force is permissible in human society, we despise non-objective art, we know that certainty is possible, we know that emotions are not tools of cognition—and those who do not recognize these truths are our mortal enemies, Satanic beings to be shunned, denigrated, denounced.

It makes moral judgment so very easy, does it not? All we require in order to know that someone is worthless is to know that he holds convictions contrary to our own.

And if we hold such a view, we necessarily will morally denigrate and verbally abuse those who do not agree with us. We will be indignant at our opponents’ presumption in asking that we even consider or attempt to disprove their evil ideas. Instead, to the cheers of those who agree with us, we will ringingly denounce their dishonesty, their irrationality, their evasion, so that the world will recognize them for what they are.

And what superior and virtuous beings we are! And how incredibly smug and self-congratulatory! We cavalierly dispense with most of the human race for not agreeing with our philosophy. Socialists are evil, theists are evil, determinists are evil, so are Democrats and so are Conservatives and so are Libertarians, so is anyone who has read Rand and is not an Objectivist, and so are many who call themselves Objectivists but who don’t think ideas can be evil. As someone once said, “That leaves you and me, my friend . . . and I’m not so sure about you!”

I have seen lifelong friendships end, families bitterly divided, savagely cruel things being said that cannot be forgotten or remedied because of such an easy ascribing of evil. Yes, momentous issues sometimes are at stake, but that does not automatically turn one’s intellectual opponents into moral monsters.

So let’s examine a bit further the belief that ideas can be evil and a proof of evil.

I think we all will agree that Muslim fundamentalism is a dangerous and deadly threat to our values and to our very survival, that it is the most pernicious force facing our world today. Surely we must damn as evil anyone who accepts its doctrines. Must we not?

Imagine an Arab boy of twelve, born in a remote village in Saudi Arabia. He cannot read or write and he has no knowledge of the outside world. From the time he is five years old, he and the other boys are read to from the Koran by the village elders, the only role models he has. He is told that the Koran is the word of Allah. He is told that Allah demands that his servants kill all unbelievers, because their purpose in life is to destroy the Muslim world, to slaughter his parents, his sisters, his friends. The boy sees the men of his village go off to immolate themselves, cheered by the villagers, their victories and their deaths celebrated as heroic, as a valiant martyrdom to be rewarded by their acceptance in heaven. And he longs for the day when he can join these heroes.

If this young boy considers himself a fundamentalist and upholds its doctrines, is he evil?

If the boy were an adult who had seen something of the world, who had had an education, who had heard intelligent opinions in conflict with those he’d been taught, then yes, we could consider him evil—evil because he has so corrupted his thinking that he is willing to ignore the evidence he has heard and seen. But in so concluding, we would be taking his context into consideration, the fact that he is educated, that he has traveled, that he has learned of other ways of living and of thinking.

Or consider Andrei Taganov, the Communist protagonist in We The Living. He is a man of great integrity, dedicated to the communist principles he believes are right; but when he finally understands that communism inevitably leads to inhuman conditions, he abandons his allegiance. But communism is an evil idea, is it not?—an evil idea which proves the evil character of the man who endorses it. Was Andrei evil while he endorsed communism? I suggest that in today’s world, most people who embrace communism are, indeed, intellectually corrupt, not because the idea per se is evil, but because the anti-life consequences of creating a communist state have so clearly and universally been demonstrated. Unless one lives under a rock, I see no way in which one can be unaware of this. Today, Andrei would not have been a Communist.

And just as mistaken ideas are not proof of evil, so correct ideas are not proof of moral virtue. There can be many reasons why one adopts valid ideas—it might be because of peer pressure, because one believes that embracing a certain set of beliefs will raise one’s status in society, because one feels that they are true, because one believes they are the word of God, because endorsing them will lead to the advancement of one’s career, because one has been brainwashed—or because one has conscientiously examined the evidence and understood the rationale of the ideas.

An idea, like an emotional reaction, is not a moral agent. Only men and woman are moral agents; only they can be good or evil. And the overwhelming majority of them are not wholly one or the other. Stalin was evil; your next-door-neighbor, who may believe he ought to be his brother’s keeper, is not. Thomas Jefferson, despite owning slaves, was basically a good and honorable man; the historical revisionists who focus malignantly only on his errors in order to “cut him down to size,” probably are not. Actions can be good or evil. Ideas cannot. To think something cannot make a person evil, just as it cannot make a person virtuous.

Before we presume to pass moral judgment on a person, we need to remember that we, too, are fallible. We need to remember that knowledge often is hard-won, and that if we were immeasurably assisted in our pursuit of knowledge by the work of Ayn Rand and by many others, we ought to be grateful to them, not pompous about what we have come to understand. Nor should we denounce someone who does not understand what we learned only yesterday. Were we evil the day before yesterday? We need to grant to others, and to ourselves, the right to make mistakes, even serious mistakes, without being flayed alive for them.

I do not wish to deprive you, and certainly not myself, of your inalienable right to anger—even to enraged, tempestuous, foaming-at-the-mouth anger. I am not suggesting endless civility, politeness, and the King’s English when one is driven up the wall in a discussion. You have a perfect right not to like some people and not to deal with them. I wish only to deprive you of specifically moral outrage when it is unjustly directed at your opponents. Be fiercely angry because you know the deadly consequences when certain ideas are translated into action. But recognize, recognize clearly, that it is likely that many of your opponents do not grasp those consequences—and that, if they did, they would change their convictions. In a very real way, it may be said that a great many people who hold ideas that many Objectivists judge as evil, do not really hold those ideas; that is, they do not understand the source, the full meaning, or the consequences of those ideas. Perhaps they need educating. They do not need moral damnation. As Nathaniel Branden has pointed out, we do not bring a person to virtue by informing him that he is evil.

As people who hold unconventional ideas, we all know the experience of stating what we think—say, about ethics—and suddenly being treated as if we were plotting the immediate destruction of civilization. “What! You think people should pursue their own self-interest? How can you be so cruel? Why do you want the weak to starve?” We don’t like it when we are treated this way. Let’s not do it to others.

I feel sometimes that I want to say to Objectivists: “Isn’t there enough pain in the world, my friends? Must we really create more? Must we leave so many bruises and scars in our wake as we move through our lives and our human relationships?”

2. Consequences as self-evident

Now I want to consider a source of irrational anger and moralizing that results from quite a different sort of error. It consists of a failure to recognize the long chain of observations and reasoning required by philosophical or moral conclusions. I’ll give an illustration from my own experience.

In my university days, when I first met Ayn Rand and was introduced by her to Objectivist ideas, I was quick to anger in intellectual discussions with my classmates and professors—probably in part because I was not yet totally sure of my ground. I don’t doubt that I quite often shed more heat than light. However, as time went by I learned to be calmer . . . most of the time. With one blatant exception. If the subject was the military draft, I immediately lost my composure in the face of disagreement, and anyone advocating the draft faced a torrent of outraged denunciation. I was emotionally convinced that such a person was a moral monster. Why?

It seemed to me that I could see, as if it were a visual perception, the meaning of “military draft”—and what I saw was a field strewn with the butchered bodies of dead and dying young soldiers, soldiers who were scarcely more than boys, who had been sent to bleed and die for purposes that were not their own. I was certain that my opponent saw precisely what I saw, the same field, the same young bodies—and so it must be the case that either he wanted those consequences or he simply did not care. In either event, he was profoundly immoral, in the exact sense of that term: he was anti-life. But when, at last, I came to understand that not everyone “saw” what I “saw,” that my opposition to the draft was not a simple acknowledgement of a fact of reality easily available to everyone, then I was able to be relatively sane in such discussions.

To understand the logical consequences in action of our ideas is not done by an act of perception. It results from a complex chain of reasoning. We don’t “see” those consequences; we understand them, and only if we have undertaken that chain of reasoning. With regard to the draft, that chain requires the understanding and acceptance of a moral code that rejects altruism and the sacrifice of some individuals to others. It requires the recognition of each human being’s right to arrive at and act on his own convictions. It requires the knowledge that we do not have the right to sacrifice others to our purposes and that we are not the owners of any lives but our own. By holding that to understand the immorality of the draft was a childishly simple matter of observing reality, I wasn’t seeing the meaning of the draft; instead, I was blurring my own understanding of why it was wrong. By vastly oversimplifying the errors involved, I was failing to understand and deal with the opposition of those who supported the draft

As an aside, it was recognizing this mistake that helped me to understand, at least in one respect, Ayn Rand’s quickness to pass negative moral judgments. I believe that because of her remarkable intelligence, she often grasped the consequences of ideas, for good or for bad, with the clarity that was typical of her—as if those consequences were visual perceptions. And so she failed to recognize that the consequences so blazingly evident to her were by no means evident or understood by others. Instead, she decided they were evading what was so clear to be “seen.”

Many years ago, when Nathaniel Branden was becoming acquainted with Rand and the sweep of her ideas, and was reading Atlas Shrugged in manuscript as it was being written, he wrote her a letter in which he said that although he was trying not to get angry in philosophical discussions, he had exploded at a man who was denouncing big business. In her reply to him, reproduced in The Letters of Ayn Rand, she wrote: “I was amused to hear that it is the words ‘selfish exploitation’ that blew you up. Can you tell me why? I suspect that this is the influence of my new novel. Is it because you see Hank Rearden when you hear those words? (italics mine) I know that’s the reason for my own anger at this sort of attitude.”

Leonard Peikoff makes the identical error, and has attempted to justify it philosophically. He wrote: “A valuer is a man who evaluates extensively and intensively; his value-judgments are integrated into a consistent whole, which to him have the feel, the power, and the absolutism of a direct perception of reality.”(italics mine)

In this connection, I cannot recommend too highly David Kelley’s The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand, in which he points out the many errors in this statement.

It is true that many of our convictions may begin to seem almost self-evident to us. But we must recognize that this is not so, that we have learned the truth of them as a result of many complex and extended processes of observation and thought—which means that they are not self-evident to our opponents. Our opponents rarely disagree with us out of sheer perversity, willfully denying the evidence of their senses. We ought to treat them accordingly, to remember that we did not always know what is so clear to us today, and, very importantly, to remember the steps by which we came to know it.

3. Evasion

Another major source of irrational moralizing is a belief that also vastly oversimplifies a complex issue. And that is the view that evasion—which Rand defined as “the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know”—can easily be recognized and identified.

The science of psychology, despite its impressive progress in recent decades, is still a youthful one. It has existed for only a short period of time compared to the physical sciences, and is hampered because it often is impossible to apply the methodology of the physical sciences to the human mind: we cannot conduct potentially dangerous experiments on human beings. Further, there is no agreed-upon philosophical base to the science of psychology, no accepted starting point from which psychologists and psychiatrists conduct their investigations and do their theorizing.

And we are immensely complex creatures psychologically, who often fail even in our best efforts to understand ourselves and our own motivation, much less to understand other people. Do we fully know, for instance, why we fall in love with a particular person? Oh, we probably can specify some reasons—perhaps we say that our lover is an honorable person, kind and strong and wise; but we forget that we have known others who were honorable, kind, strong, and wise with whom we did not fall in love. We forget that we may also have known others who, if judged solely in relation to our philosophical values, would rank higher on the ladder of values, yet we did not fall in love with them. We are less than satisfied if the psychiatrists we turn to for explanations tell is that we chose our lover because of an unresolved Oedipus complex, or because of our irrational value system—or even our rational value system—or because we were bottle-fed as babies.

I believe the idea that self-esteem or its lack crucially affects our approach to life and its challenges, including the challenge of love and sex, points toward the day when we will not only better understand ourselves and others, but will be able scientifically to validate our understanding. But that day is still in the future.

Thus, we must recognize that we cannot look into another human mind. We can know what we ourselves understand; we cannot know what others understand. And we certainly don’t have the right to accuse others of evasion, of the deliberate refusal to understand, until and unless we have incontrovertible evidence. We may feel bewilderment that a particular person fails to see the logic of an idea when we have explained it so clearly and carefully, and when the evidence appears to us everywhere to be seen—but our failure to understand this does not constitute knowledge that the person is evading.

Often, it is difficult even for us, who have unique entry into the workings of our own minds, to say with certainty if we have or have not evaded in considering a particular issue. We might ask ourselves, about a decision we made which we later came to realize was a serious mistake: Did I think about it as carefully as I should have done? Or: If I did not, did I know that I ought to have examined it more closely? Did I allow any out-of-focus moments to blur my understanding of the alternatives? Did I have any small glimmer of awareness that there were more issues to be considered than I was thinking about and that my decision was questionable? Was there at times a fuzzy quality to my thinking that might have alerted me? Did I select only those facts to think about that supported what I wanted to do? Did I really do my best to understand?

I submit that these are often difficult and sometimes impossible questions fully to answer. No one says to himself, as seems implicit in Rand’s description of evasion: “I’m not going to think about X because if I did so I would have to recognize truths that I am unwilling to recognize.” We do not knowingly evade. When evasion occurs—and of course it does occur—it is on a level that involves only minimal conscious awareness, perhaps only the discomfort of a nagging uneasiness.

How much more difficult it is to see into other people’s minds. We cannot know precisely what information they possess or how their minds dealt with that information. We cannot know the degree of their intelligence or their context or their life experiences. We cannot know how or why they have arrived at ideas that we may find abhorrent and irrational. Yes, we may feel, when an opponent seems invincibly ignorant: “The world is racing toward disaster and we all face extinction because you refuse to think!”—but our emotions are not tools of cognition. Justice demands that we withhold moral censure where we do not have certainty. Life would be much simpler if the line between honesty and dishonesty, between intellectual integrity and evasion, were self-evident. But that line is not self-evident.

Of course there are thoroughly dishonest people in this world. Of course there are people who deserve the strongest possible moral condemnation. Of course there are people who push away guilt feelings and continue to act destructively and irrationally. Of course there are people who act without thinking, who mouth ideas they do not take the trouble to understand, who refuse to examine their own motives and purposes. Of course there are people who would rather die than think—and often do. But the fact that someone holds ideas contrary to your own is not a reason to rush to judgment, to hurl accusations of evasion as if it were a scarlet letter rather than an ad hominem attack. Accusing someone of evasion should never be done casually, or on the assumption that disagreement is a sign of intellectual dishonesty. To do so is both unjust and presumptuous. We must recognize that most of the time, disagreement means . . . disagreement.

4. Some psychological causes of Objectivist rage

Now, let’s consider some of the psychological reasons why so many Objectivists are quick to morally condemn and denounce. There is no single psychological syndrome that explains every judgmental person’s attitude or why such a person might be drawn to Objectivism, but there are some sources of moralizing that I’d like to point out, with others left for another day.

It is generally recognized by psychologists that human beings often repress pain and fear and guilt and profound self-doubt, not wanting to recognize them as real, and instead of acknowledging and dealing with them, they turn them outward onto others, transmuting them into anger and condemnation. They blame everyone but themselves for their suffering, for their failures in life, for their damaged self-esteem.

Most of us, if we have emotional problems, are our own worst enemies. That is, we, not others, are our primary victims, in the form of unfulfilling lives, and we are aware that it is not other people who have caused our suffering. But the sort of person I have described, who damns others for his own sense of inadequacy, leaves victims strewn in his path. He is incapable of experiencing empathy, like a psychopath for whom other people are unreal and for whom any context but his own is non-existent; he has no capacity and no desire to put himself in someone else’s place and attempt to understand the reasons for views other than his own, and he lashes out blindly with no concern for the damage he creates.

Philosophy is not psychotherapy, and not even the most powerful philosophy is a cure for severe emotional problems. Objectivism doesn‘t magically elevate one to sainthood. Dependent people, cruel people, dishonest people, need more than philosophy to change them; in most cases, they need psychological treatment. And until and unless they get it, or have life experiences that awaken them to their mistakes, they will be dependent, cruel, dishonest adherents of Objectivism. If you were a nasty bully when you discovered Objectivism, the odds are that you still are a nasty bully. And you will have discovered an entire vocabulary that gives you an arsenal of weapons to use in your bullying that you did not have before—such as the concept that ideas can be evil and that the consequences of certain ideas are self-evident.

Let me give you an example of what might happen if such a person considers himself an Objectivist—and even supposing that he has authentically embraced many of its principles but has not incorporated them into his psychology. A friend says something to him that he fears means that the friend secretly despises him. He does not want to acknowledge his guilty sense that he may have given his friend cause for such a reaction, and so instead he works himself into a rage and tell himself and others that it is he who rejects and despises his friend. The false friend has shown himself to be irrational, evasive, an immoral subjectivist or an equally immoral intrinsicist, intellectually bankrupt, a rationalist, a social-metaphysician, an enemy of the good for being the good, a whim-worshipper, a deliberate distorter of Objectivist principles, anti-conceptual . . . well, you all know the drill. “You don’t like me!”—becomes “You fail to meet the minimum standards of objectivity!” He insists—using concepts he has plucked from Objectivism as a set of buzzwords to feed his malice and to be brandished as a club—that he is the true defender of Objectivism and reason, and it is his friend who is the destructive and evil heretic.

But how is it that such people—who, after all, are of little or no importance in themselves—acquire the power to create victims? Why are they not simply ignored—just as, once we are no longer children, we ignore the street-corner bully who once had the power to make us uneasy, because we have learned that all bullies are cowards?

This leads us to another psychological phenomenon.

We human beings find great value in the company of others who see the world as we see it, who share our sense of life and our intellectual commitments, and with whom we can experience the joys of comradeship and mutual affection. This is why young—and not so young—Objectivists seek out Objectivist groups, hoping not only to learn from them but also to be accepted by them, to be treasured as fellow-fighters in the same noble cause.

But there are potential dangers involved in group membership, any group membership, dangers immensely magnified if one is not aware of them.

I want to tell you about a fascinating—and blood-chilling—documentary I saw on television about the psychology of suicide bombers. But before I do, I hasten to assure you that it is not with the intent to compare Objectivists—even of the most misguided sort—to suicide bombers. Except in one significant respect. (I can see the headlines now: Barbara Branden likens Objectivists to suicide bombers!)

In the documentary, psychologists and psychiatrists--who had interviewed unsuccessful suicide bombers in many different countries and over a period of years, and had also interviewed friends and families of those who had succeeded, in order to learn if such people had characteristics in common--presented their findings. What they found, despite what one might expect to the contrary, is that suicide bombers are not united by race, religion, class, intelligence, economics, or education. Nor do they tend to be wild-eyed, screaming fanatics; they are not psychotic, they are not paranoid; for the most part they tend to be average, commonplace, normal.

However, there is one important characteristic that they share: membership in a group. They are not created in isolation and they do not function alone. They become part of a group—and then they become like that group, they take on its characteristics. It is group dynamics, the researchers contend, that creates suicide bombers.

What is it that occurs within groups that can make this happen? Often its members find in the group a new family, superseding their real families in importance, and with whom they develop a powerful bond. They spend most of their time together; they become progressively cut off from the larger society, progressively more alienated from it. As a result of this deep alienation from a world they believe does not understand them, they cease to regard the rest of society as being fully human; people outside the group become things, they are de-humanized, they are evil, and thus it is not possible to feel empathy or compassion for them.

It was clear to me, from what these researchers learned, that the group was now ready for the bully—the man who did not have to learn from others the art of de-humanizing one’s opponents, the man seething with hatred and resentment and the need to reduce the self-esteem of others to the level of his own. Such a man may, nevertheless, be highly intelligent, charming, able to dominate and intimidate. If the group he joins, or perhaps forms, consists of people who have embraced Objectivism, he will show himself to be well-versed in its principles, and especially well-versed in using those principles as his means of intimidation and control. The members of the group, eager, even desperate to maintain their membership in their new family, never to be thrown out into what has become an alien and threatening world, will follow his lead. They might have learned to be tolerant and kind if they were led in that direction; but they have submerged their identity into the larger social or ideological system, and will exhibit a degree of cruelty and hostility they would not be capable of if they were acting on their own. They glory in the self-importance of being a member of their group, and whatever its direction, that is what they will follow. Oscar Wilde wrote: “Most men are other people. Their thoughts are someone’s else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Whether or not this is true of most men, it certainly is true of a great many—and particularly of those most tightly bonded to a group.

Someone recently said, “I see the acts of suicide bombers at the far end of a continuum that starts with the deceptively simple ‘suicide’ of one’s individuality in the face of group identity.” And, I would add, in the face of group pressure.

Let’s return for a moment to the television program. One of the researchers demonstrated a fascinating and relevant experiment. Six or seven people were asked to participate in a simple test: to look at several straight lines drawn on paper, and to say which one of them most closely matched a particular line in length. In fact, only one young male participant was, in effect, the guinea pig; unknown to him, the others had been told that each of them was to choose a specific wrong line—that is, a line that did not match the given line in length. The guinea pig at first looked startled at the selection of the others, and, shaking his head in bewilderment and uncertainty, he nevertheless gave the correct answer. But by the time he reached the second set of lines, he still gave puzzled looks at the others—but he gave the same wrong answer they had given. It was chilling to watch; the young man clearly knew that his answer was highly dubious, but he was intimidated and overwhelmed by what he experienced as the power of the group.

Knowledge is power. If we do not know the potential dangers of group membership, despite its advantages, if we do not keep sacrosanct our own independent view of reality, we may not become suicide bombers, but we surely will become the Peter Keatings or worse of Objectivism.

Of course, there are Objectivists who come to this philosophy in search of a new religion, a dogma they can blindly follow, a set of rules that will bring them the certainty they require, eager to lose their blemished selves, their sense of personal failure, in something larger than themselves. These are the true believers of Objectivism and they are epidemic in every intellectual movement, whether the movement be philosophical or religious, social or political—whether it upholds reason or mysticism, freedom or force, the individual or the collective. Any vital new philosophical system will attract true believers. The psychological needs that normally draw a man to faith and force may instead lead him to stumble into a philosophy of reason and seek his fulfillment there. But what he is seeking is not reason, it is not knowledge; he seeks a holy cause to which he can submit himself, he renounces intellectual independence and its attendant doubts, uncertainties, and errors—he renounces spiritual struggle and the sense of wonder—for the certitude of dogma and faith.

My own understanding of maturity is that it requires the ability to live with uncertainty. Because no matter how much we know, how much we learn, we always are faced with many uncertainties—uncertainties about ourselves, about other people, about the world. No one can once and for all tie reality into one pretty parcel for us and tell us we need never doubt or wonder again. If we cannot accept this fact, and live comfortably with it, we are in very deep trouble indeed. How wonderful it is to find answers in an area where before we had only doubts and questions and uncertainties. And it can be equally wonderful to find new questions where before we thought we had certainty—and then to leap into the unknown in the search for knowledge. Surely this is a substantial part of what the richly lived life is all about.

It is the people who cannot bear to live with uncertainty who are the greatest threat to Objectivism. They are the ones we must beware of. We must never let them tell us that we are culpable for what we do not know, for our doubts, for our questions, for our disagreements with aspects of Objectivism. We must wear our uncertainties as a badge of honor, for it is only through uncertainty that we will find the path to knowledge.

And we must never give them the sanction of the victim by allowing their ugliness and hatreds to cause us to doubt ourselves.

None of us is likely ever to forget the excitement of our first discovery of the works of Ayn Rand and of the exalted vision of the human potential that she offered us. Let us never allow anyone to turn that discovery into dogma, heresy trials, and excommunications. The real meaning of Objectivism in our lives is surely contained in The Fountainhead, in the scene with the boy on the bicycle, who found in Howard Roark “the courage to face of lifetime.”

------------------

Barbara Branden is a writer, lecturer, and author of the best-selling biography The Passion of Ayn Rand (Doubleday, 1986). An M.A. in philosophy (New York University), she was for eighteen years a close associate of Ayn Rand, the managing editor of The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist, and executive vice-president of the Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York, where she wrote and lectured on the philosophy of Objectivism.

Objectivism and Rage
Copyright, The Atlas Society and The Objectivist Center. All rights reserved.
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Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-Ayn-Rand (202-296-7263)
Fax: 202-296-0771
www.objectivistcenter.org
toc@objectivistcenter.org

Index to Articles by Author posted on Objectivist Living

Here is an index by author to the articles that are on Objectivist Living. They are organized by member groups alphabetically. (work in progress)


Owners

Michael Stuart Kelly
Thoughts on the 12 Steps and Self-Forgiveness
Why the Tolerance and Support?
Atlantis in the Wilderness
A Hunting Story
Moral Perfection
Like a Lamb to the Slaughter
Letter to Madalena ... An Homage to the Value of Valuing
Going Home... A Few Thoughts on Family Values
Where Principles and Rights Break Down
The Stigma of Addiction
Book Review on an Addiction Fraud - A Million Little Pieces
Charmed on a Raw Night
The Nature of Private Written Correspondence – The Sciabarra Smear
Online Objectivist Mediocrity
The Ayn Rand Love/Hate Myth
The Ayn Rand Love/Hate Myth - Part 2 - Moral Ambivalence
The Ayn Rand Love/Hate Myth - Part 3 - Brotherhood of Hate
The Ayn Rand Love/Hate Myth - Part 4 - Rand's True Value


Kat
The Virtue of Silliness (w/MSK)

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VIP Members

Barbara Branden

The Lepers of Objectivism
Thoughts On Aging
Enough is Enough!
Objectivism's Plague
Objectivism and Rage
The Passion of Barbara Branden
The Psychology of Suicide Bombers
Who is Michael Stuart Kelly?
The Moral Antagonism of Capitalism and Socialism (1959)
Capitalism and Religion (1962)

Barbara Branden Reviews
(Reviews of books and movies that were published in The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, Academic Associates’ Book News, and Libertarian Review, between 1962 and 1975)
Planned Chaos by Ludwig von Mises (January 1962, [i]Objectivist Newsletter)
The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn (December 1962, Objectivist Newsletter
The True Believer by Eric Hoffer (Summer 1969, Academic Associates Book News #1)
The Art of Making Sense by Lionel Ruby (Fall 1969, AABN #2)
The Greek Experience by C. M. Bowra (Holiday 1969, AABN #3)
Thinking as a Science[/b] by Henry Hazlitt (Holiday 1969, AABN #3)
Chinatown & Deathwish[/b] in “Cinema in Review” (October 1974, Libertarian Review)
Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram (October 1975, Libertarian Review)


Ed Hudgins
The Pope vs. Islam: Who Stands for Reason?
Happy Labor Day - We're All Workers!
Gustav Mahler’s Second and Eighth Symphonies
Starbucks' Fat Cup of Trouble
"Atlas" Movie One Step Closer! THE INSIDE SCOOP
Why We Give Gifts
Policing Phone Calls and Perverting Principles
Birthday Blips: Are Americans Really Free & Equal?
A Cool Capitalist
Atlas Forced into Early Retirement
The Public Side of Private Love
Every Day a New Year
Saddam Hussain's Execution

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Objectivist Living History Project
(Compiled by Roger Bissell and posted on Objectivist Living with Authors' permission)

Nathaniel Branden
Nathaniel Branden's Reviews from The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, Academic Associates' Book News, Books for Libertarians, Libertarian Review, Reason, etc.

John Hospers
Ayn Rand's Philosophical Significance – Reason Papers no. 23 (1998)
John Hospers Reviews
John Hospers on Chamber Music
John Hospers on Orchestral Music
John Hospers on Choral Music
John Hospers on Song, Opera, and Oratorio
Hospers on Copland, Lang, Machlis, etc. – Reviews of Music Appreciation Books

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Moderator/VIP

Roger Bissell
Up from Despair--Becky and Me
An Epiphany
Libertarianism, Objectivism, and Rage (Rpt on BB's talk)
Dialectics: Guardian of Logic
Mistaken Identity: Long’s Conflation of Dialectics and Organicism
Comments on ch. 13 of Ayn Rand: the Russian Radical (1996)
Ayn Rand: Dialectical Objectivist
WHAT IS "DIALECTICS"?
Dialectical Objectivism? A review of Chris M. Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: the Russian Radical
The Virtue of For the New Intellectual
Brother- and Sisterhood
Objective Self-Awareness as the Root of Wisdom
Who Qualifies as being an Objectivist
How to Improve Objectivism
Comments on Rand's "The Age of Envy" in re the Frozen Abstraction fallacy
Why Union Scale is Killing Our Work
AESTHETICS "...to give us Ayn Rand faithfully..." a critical note on the Boeckmann transcript
Art as Microcosm: The Real Meaning of the Objectivist Concept of Art
Objectivism and gender-neutral language
Writing About The News For Students
Religious Addiction
A Higher Power for Atheists and Agnostics (1989)
Conditional Morality and Rational (?) Enablement
The Intelligent Design Controversy in the Libertarian-Objectivist Media

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Members

Charles Anderson
The Virtues of Benevolence and Tolerance
Benevolence:People as Tolerance:Ideas
Freedom of Conscience
Respect for the Value of Other Thinking Men
The Individuality of a Thinking Human Being
Rational Men Must Be Tolerant of Others
The Complexity of Reality


Phil Coates
The Hostage Principle


Dragonfly
The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy


Rich Engle
Mortality and the Rituals of Infinity
The New Year: How I Saw Ritual Trump Resolution
The Challenge of Understanding Mysticism


Eudamonist (Mark)
The Cosmos Is Not Enough
Prometheus Unbound


Dennis Hardin
An Objectivist Retrospective


Paul Kay
An Atheist's Journey to Self-Esteem


James Kilbourne
The Prevailing Wisdom versus the Truth
The Meaning of Heroes
Immigration - Will the Republican Party Self Destruct?
Facing the Final Music
The Glory of Being Human


Paul Mawdsley
Synthesizing Two Epistemological Orientations
Objectivist Ethics, the Empathic Perspective and Manners
Authentic and Civil Objectivist Living in a Social World
God, Euclidian Geometry, and the Church of Ayn Rand

Victor Pross
Follow the Leader!, Caricature of Lindsay Perigo
The Hungry Artist
The Hungry Artist - Chapter 1
Lenny Bruce: A First Amendment Hero!
Caricature: Exploring the Light Side
Caricature: Exploring the Dark Side
A Simple, Simple Philosophy of Love and Appreciation
The Dire Search for Meaning and Purpose in a Finite Life
Objectivist Romantics, Individualism and Selfish Relationships
Humor, Satire and Caricature in Visual Art: It’s a Serious Matter
Art and a Sense of Life
The Hatred of Objectivism is the Hatred of Objectivity
Objectivism amidst the Modern Anti-reason Climate
The Age of SO WHAT?


Fred Seddon
Summer Vacation with Leonard Peikoff
Book Review: Essays on Ayn Rand's We the Living, edited by Robert Mayhew
Review of Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature


JennaW
Finding myself and atheism
Choosing Happiness

The Virtue of Silliness
by Kat & Michael Stuart Kelly

Note: Michael and I co-authored this by e-mail. We exercised a little poetic license with some events. We wrote this prior to our first meeting. Now we are engaged. – katdaddy


There SHE sat, in Chicago, trying her best to be serious. Her Sense of Life seemed like a thing of the past. SHE had shrugged off a no-good mooching tomcat and felt like a homeless alley kat—between jobs, barely scratching out a freelance kittance, having trouble getting milk for her two kittens… almost foraging for katfood stamps.

How did SHE ever get so low? What was missing?

People told her that God would always provide for her and the kittens. Well, where was God now? SHE knew they meant well, but it still made the fur on her back stiffen up. Her kittens would mew, people would smile and say silly altruistic bromides, or tell her to pray harder and all would be well. SHE would hiss back, "Talk to the paw!"

Nobody ever seemed to understand her. SHE was unconventional and did not fit in well with any of their political or social sentiments. Maybe SHE was an alley kat after all. Once, after a particularly wretched katfight, SHE thought of putting herself down. SHE had almost let herself become a sacrificial animal. But then SHE remembered her kittens, remembered the way life could and should have been…

"Stop it!" SHE had said to herself. "Don’t be silly."

A few years earlier a friend told her, "You’ve got to read Ayn Rand. Seriously, it’s you."

So SHE started by reading Atlas Shrugged. Meowing with excitement, SHE went on to the other books—first the novels, then the non-fiction. Her older kitten even started pawing through Rand and became a rational teenager, that is, to the extent that such an animal could exist.

Here was Objectivism, a philosophy for living here and now. SHE didn’t need to live with contradictions. SHE didn’t need a leash. SHE didn’t need an owner. SHE certainly didn’t need some mystical god to be a moral fearless pussykat or raise her kittens. It was her life and her responsibility.

SHE especially liked The Virtue of Selfishness. Serious stuff, not fluff. When SHE got confused, SHE would meow to herself, "A is A—and I’m no fraidy-kat. I’ll simply have to check my premises."

When SHE thought about having answers like that, SHE would lick her paw contentedly. So what was wrong? Why was SHE so unsatisfied?

* * *

HE had just arrived from Brazil. HE had been roaming the world trying to get away from the silliness of it all. HE was seeking—HE didn’t quite know what it was yet… something serious maybe… definitely a woman who loved like HE did… HE was a randy young man looking for nookie qua nookie when HE had left the USA… and Brazil was so full of gorgeous women…

HE remembered when HE first arrived there. It was like reaching a wild frontier. There were adventures to live, new things to learn, and all that color and singing and dancing and beaches and jungles and cities and tropical food. Everything was so exciting!

The whole country was like one big silly party—VW Beetle police cruisers, electric shower heads that sometimes blew up, nationwide worship of all things soccer, oceans of beer and caipirinhas, and all those stunning women everywhere. HE loved it. HE could turn on the TV and see John Wayne get off his horse, swagger over to a gunslinger and ask, "Como vai? Tudo bem?" John Wayne speaking Portuguese! Cool! HE could laugh to his heart’s content. Whatever it was HE was looking for, there was no doubt HE could find it here.

But sometimes things didn’t feel so right. There were some not-so-heroic bribes you had to pay and a very unmetaphysical inflation that sent your money to a kind of financial noumenal realm where it disappeared forever. Stuff didn’t work when you needed it to. Everyone was late all the time. Why were there all these unnecessary problems? Why this huge blank-out party?

Oh well. What did HE think a frontier was supposed to be anyway? HE had his ready-to-wear perma-press life back in the States if that was what HE wanted. Here HE could make a difference. No more chains to the past. No more sanction of this here victim. HE was alone in the wilderness and loving it. But HE was alone and longing, and it was such wistful longing…

His Brazilian friend once said to him, "You work too hard. You want good sex? Good food? Good weather? You came to the right place. You want more? If you fancy getting serious, go back, go back."

But HE was razzled and dazzled by all the new adventure. "Stop it," HE told his friend. "Don’t be silly."

HE especially wanted to do something about Objectivism in Brazil. HE could even make his own Objectivist friends from scratch, from pure raw Brazilian people stock… In the States Objectivists were always snapping and bickering and fighting with each other. Some were really ornery and most were no fun at all to be around anyway. Argument-from-intimidation freaks.

HE was extremely lonely for people who thought like HE did without all the sour-pussing. Well now HE could do something about that. In Brazil HE could even handcraft his very own happy-go-lucky Objectivist woman to love—feminine, beautiful, sexy, laughing and smart. What a glorious task!

And it was too, except that the results were glorious failures. “You just can’t do it second-hand that way,” HE finally concluded. “Got to find something else … something different… a little more feline maybe… someone who is already rational and playful and sexy… someone I don’t have to change…”

So after many magnificent failures at severely dichotomized love, and many daring adventures, and many analytic-synthetic years, HE decided to go back to the USA.

* * *

SHE hunted all over the internet for spiritual chow. SHE needed more than just books. SHE was a social animal and wanted to meet others who shared her worldview. Who knows? Maybe there was even a rational, playful, sexy HE for her out there somewhere. A HEro-kat SHE could look up to. One who was ruthlessly honest and unafraid to drag stuff into the middle of the floor and let this particular kat smell it. Someone who loved the best within her.

One day SHE came across an Internet forum, SOLOHQ. Hmmm… Looked pretty darn good. SHE silently stalked in the background for long time, patiently watching and waiting… and then impatiently. SHE finally couldn’t bear it anymore and pounced. SHE was lonely.

Then one day SHE froze. A doubt had crept in. Would this be in vain too? Maybe SHE had found some pretty cool kats, but most were gay, married, randroids or pomo-wankers. Some were good for pussyfooting around with. Some SHE had to use a kat-o’-nine-tails on. But SHE couldn’t find much for a lonely hard-thinking kat in heat. “Where is HE?” SHE meowed over and over. “There has to be at least one for me out there.”

Wait. Maybe there were many. Maybe they were hiding. Maybe they just didn’t care too much for her. Maybe SHE wasn’t good enough…

“Stop that,” SHE told herself. "Don’t be silly."

* * *

HE was lonely and confused. Over thirty years in Brazil and what did HE have to show for it? HE had conquered some of the wilderness. HE had won some hard-fought battles. HE had even grown to love this new culture. But where was his SHE? Did SHE even exist? HE had to keep looking…

Then HE discovered SOLOHQ. Water in the desert. Manna from heaven. Real people talking Ayn Rand, talking reason and productiveness and pride and all the rest—and they were able to laugh while they did it. Not like those HE had met years before in college…those who so badly needed a dichotomectomy. HE had to think. Were there really Objectivists around now who were not castrated or constipated? What had happened while HE had been gone? Was a place like SOLOHQ an oasis? Were there others? Or was this a psycho-epistemological mirage?

HE started posting. Others posted back. Cyber-friendships were born. HE even managed to post to Barbara Branden, his real-life heroine. HE had carried her in his heart all over Brazil for over thirty years. Now here SHE was posting to him! Wow! Miracles do happen! This was for real! This was fun! HE couldn’t get enough.

Then one day HE stopped in his tracks. His heart started beating faster and HE whistled in admiration. There was a pretty Kitten posting, picture and all. Dayaamm…

Maybe? Could it be? But wait a minute. Not so fast. This place was full of good, value-oriented, self-esteemed-up individualists and all, but… what was all that gay stuff about? Huh? Nothing wrong with gays, but that certainly was not for him. “Got to be careful,” HE thought. “You don’t want to embarrass or hurt anybody.”

Besides, SHE called herself a fag-hag. Well what on earth did that mean? Was Kitten a frog in disguise? Was Kitten in reality a human man in katdrag? Was katdaddy a stage name for a drag queen?

“Go slow,” HE told himself. "And don’t be silly.”


* * *

SHE got into a few katfights on SOLOHQ—discussions about katerwauling, legalization of katnip, integration of metaphysical katness and why superheroes wear their underpants on the outside. SHE proudly strutted her stuff.

HE was broadsided a few times because HE disagreed with a few silly issues. Once HE even said that Ayn hiccuped about Kant and the katcalls were merciless.

With all that ruckus going on, they noticed each other at times. Interesting. Very, very interesting…

One day SHE was rereading The Fountainhead and wondering about why SHE had the heebie-jeebies all the time. What was wrong anyway? Could SHE do anything about it? Was there any sense to all this? Then SHE came across a passage that seemed to sum up how silly it all was. This was it! Eureka! SHE had found the words to express her restlessness perfectly! So SHE blurted the quote out on SOLOHQ:

“Toothbrush in the jaw toothbrush brush brush tooth jaw foam dome in the foam Roman dome come home home in the jaw Rome dome tooth toothbrush toothpick pickpocket socket rocket”

What? Did HE hear a mating call? Was Kitten meowing? Dayamm! That was one sexy pickup line! Was that hot little Kitten in heat? What could HE ever do to answer such an erotically charming come-on?

This was serious.

HE did not want to blow it. How could HE tell HER that HE was interested, but still keep the backdoor open for an honorable exit just in case HE got the signals wrong?

Hmmm… Got it:

“Branden in the rand branden done done brand rand meek seek in the meek peikoff seek so weak weak in the rand peek seek brand branden brand pig gigolo polo solo”

SHE could not believe her eyes. HE understood. HE had heard. And HE was silly too! They were on the same frequency… like two cartoon characters on the same show! Could this possibly be real… or just dumb cyber-banter that withered away into boring unreality later?

“Well, pay attention,” SHE told herself.

SHE started noticing his posts even more. Sometimes serious, sometimes silly. SHE was confounded. Could it be him? Was this guy for real? SHE wondered "Oh, My Galt! What if HE is gay too?”

Where on earth was his picture? Was HE ugly? What if HE looked like Jabba the Hutt? What if HE was bony and dorky? What if HE had two noses and seven eyes? Was HE afraid to be seen? Nonetheless, HE made her purr like SHE had never purred in her entire nine lives.

Sometimes SHE pounced too boisterously and got too frisky. Then HE would pop up and tell her, “Git to the kitchen.” Kitchen? Wait a minute. Who did HE think HE was anyway? Nobody had ever dared to tell her anything like that before. SHE would show him a thing or two! SHE would swat him so hard that SHE would put him in a katatonic coma, and without a living will.

But SHE always waited… eagerly breathless for the next time.

One day SHE got tired of kat-and-mouse. SHE sent him a private e-mail threatening to scratch his eyes out after HE posted a particularly unkatty remark. HE answered with a laugh. Laugh? Hey, SHE was being serious! Hmmm. HE was for real! And HE seemed interested! Really interested!

His picture finally came online. Not Jabba! Two eyes and one nose! HE was downright adorable. What a relief!

They sent e-mails and started calling and instant messaging each other every day—and posted on SOLOHQ, of course. Some laughed there. Some called them silly. One even scowled in disgust. But they were way beyond caring.

Sometimes HE talked in a sweet Southern drawl. Sometimes HE seemed like HE was thinking HER thoughts. HE was like nothing that had ever crossed her path before. SHE lapped up his tales of adventure in Brazil, his heart jerking sagas and outrageous silliness. HE was like all her heroes in Atlas Shrugged and favorite cartoon characters all rolled up in one very real and exciting man. SHE had found her hero.

Kitten was smitten.

HE couldn’t believe his luck either. Here was a woman serious about life and silly about living. Feline, beautiful, rational, playful and sexy. HE had roamed for decades over two continents in a desperate quest for this. HE had lived a legion of wild hair-raising adventures. HE knew agony and HE knew ecstasy. Now HE was taming a lioness disguised as a kitten. Was this a dream? Or was HE embarking on his greatest escapade? Did HE dare?

In a fit of passion, HE had written her a haiku (but changed the animal, just in case):

Duck floats on rough pond.
Two swan siblings trail behind.
The sun shines and smiles.

And lovingly SHE wrote him a Seussed-up ode…

I do so like my Southern ham.
I’ve liked him since our poetry slam.
I‘d like to do it here or there.
I'd like to do it anywhere.
In a house, or down south.
With a goatee. On a boatee.
In the rain. On a train.
In a box. With my fox.
Maybe in a tree. We shall soon see!

They had seriously fallen in love on SOLOHQ… in silly cyberland.

* * *

They finally met. Two lonely misunderstood egoists seeing a perfect real-life reflection of themselves for the first time. It packed an overwhelmingly erotic punch. They rushed into each others arms, smothered one another with passionate kisses and tore at each other’s clothes…

Ahem… at this point there is a rather discreet fadeout to signify the passage of time… a fairly long time in fact…

* * *

Later…

They are laying beside each other. Silent. Pensive. Happy. Serene. So what happens next?

They look deeply into each other’s eyes. There is a fierce love shining through them that had been bottled up for so long. Far too long. Then a flicker of doubt appears.

Each thinks gently, timidly… “Is this real? Will it end soon? Will the other become a frog, or worse—a dichotomy? Will such uncontrollable happiness be denied? Is this rapturous joy a mere illusion?”

They both sigh… No, not an illusion. It is very real. It is right there in front of them. They exist. They love.

"Don’t be silly," they murmur in unison.

And they live happily, forever after...

purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

The Three Elements of Life on Earth is a metaphysical abstraction I have made to distinguish the three key components of human life on Earth. These are what living rationally and morally require. The components need to be universal in which they can be applied to all, and yet individual in that they encroach upon no single person’s rational goals and happiness. Rather than an extensive ethical theory, or epistemological method of what rationality requires these are the elements that need to exist in society for people to have the ability to achieve the full potential of their rational self.

I will start with a simple premise on the meaning of life and existence. The meaning of life is romance. Not in the simple sense of romance towards others – however in the abstract sense that we should live for our goals and dreams. “Romanticism is the conceptual school of art. It deals, not with the random trivia of the day, but with the timeless, fundamental, universal problems and values of human existence. It does not record or photograph; it creates and projects. It is concerned—in the words of Aristotle—not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.” (Ayn Rand, Introduction to The Fountainhead) As the meaning of life I take the essence of Ayn Rand’s art. That the meaning of life essentially is to change the state of the world, be it one’s life through the attainment of love, to the lives of thousands through the attainment of a new technological feat – to achieve a romantic ideal on earth.

Essentially romantic goals have requirements and are not mere whims and fantasies, although imagination is the first step of a romantic goal the second step is conceptualization. Conceptualizing a goal is about rationally realizing its possibility and the actions required to make it possible. The fact that action is required to make ones goals possible brings forth the case of liberty. The ability to act on a person’s own selfish interest, independent of others and their interference, is liberty. The ability to act on a person’s own selfish interest in disregard to the rights and interests of others and their own selfish interests is tyranny – which makes romance difficult, if not impossible.

Thus liberty requires first and foremost the recognition of individuals as independent entities. This requires the erasure of the political notions of nationalism and other forms of collectivism. The implication that sayings like: “Ask not what your country can do for you – but what you can do for your country,” (John F Kennedy) are detrimental ideals towards the freedoms of the individual, and imply that the freedoms of the individual are unimportant. Most politicians in the modern world promote themselves by promoting service towards the nation which they claim to be able to direct in the best way possible. This is antithetical to liberty and generally detrimental to the requirement of liberty: justice.

Justice is the only appropriate realm of Government, on the premise that justice preserves liberty from chaos, mob rule, anarchy, and ultimately tyranny. Justice is not only appropriate to the Government, but to everyone. For a Government to function without encroaching on the rights of its people, the people must realize the requirements of justice. Justice being the concern for the treatment of oneself, those close to oneself, even those strangers whose cause you value in a romantic sense. Justice for oneself depends on self-defense from violations of your liberty, and justice for all depends on supporting or actively participating in the defense of others from violations of liberty. Concern for the liberty of oneself or the liberty of others should be objective not subjective. The persons ill-feeling and personal whims are not of importance – “I felt violated,” or “I felt like violating,” prove nothing and are invalid. What matters are the facts, the evidence of liberties being violated. Justice is rational, not emotional.

What knowledge requires is the subject of epistemology. For a comprehensive view of the subject of objective rationality I’d suggest Objectivism: the philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff.

Justice, Liberty, and Romance,
John Tate.

Fight the Ravenous Beast of Socialism
A message to Libertarians, Independent Conservatives, and Objectivists
(by Eddie Patin)

21 October, 2008, two weeks before election day.

Coming very soon is one of the most important elections our country has ever seen. Important, not for what good could come out of the election if it goes one way or another, but because of the terrible things that could result if Obama is chosen. Unless we, we freedom fighters and independent minds, rally together--our beloved America will be cast into the pit of Socialism. We will lose our freedoms and wallow in the despised collectivism that has consumed and destroyed all countries it has touched.

For most of you, I probably don't have to discuss the extreme-liberal and say-anything Obama, or his thinly veiled Marxist intent. I'm sure most of you like to stand on your own feet, keep what's yours, and want the government to be as minimal as possible. Even though Obama has bought off most of the media and celebrities out there, he's made enough blunders on his campaign trail to reveal to anyone moderately intelligent that he's dishonest, saying whatever he has to to get the votes, has a past of corruption and anti-capitalist ideals, and wants the government to have unlimited control. This weekend, he actually let slip that he wants to "redistribute the wealth". And, assuming the win, his vice-president is already trying to butter us up for Obama making some "unpopular decisions" in the first six months of his term. His base is the extreme left fanatics (the enemy to free America and capitalism), and the ignorant masses that are swayed by his smooth talking, the chic of political correctness, and never bother checking the facts or thinking for themselves.

If there are any independents out there who still think Obama is a good choice, then I won't bother trying to change your mind any more than this: If you're looking for "change", just think about what exactly that "change" is. What about all of his promises for the middle class? Who is going to pay for these tax cuts and checks in the mail for the poor? Businesses. The rich. The movers and shakers and producers of the country. Do you, yourself, really want to take someone else's money? He says this system (i.e. capitalism) doesn't work, and it's time for change. A change to socialism. Marxism. Statism. The flawed system of the second-handers, the looters; a system that crushes achievers and snuffs the spirit of man. The system with no brain, but hundreds upon thousands upon millions of mouths that cry for more.

If anyone has second thoughts about Obama, there are scores of sources out there that will point out his hypocrisy, his greed for power, his desire to strip the common man of his defenses (his voice, his guns, his rights), his drive (his worth, his achievements, his American dream), and his freedom (lack of rights; government dependence). The media is no longer unbiased, so don't believe everything you hear. You CAN find truthful information on the websites and shows of conservative talk-radio hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. [Note for you objectivists: these folks ARE your allies and see eye to eye with Randians on pretty much all issues except that of religion. They believe in independence and freedom.]

So, I know most of you weren't voting for Obama anyway, and could see through his lies and 'messiah' complex to the truth beneath. However, if you vote for Bob Barr, or Alan Keyes, or Tom Stevens, or any of the other ideal independents, you are throwing your vote away and bringing Obama and Socialism closer to victory.

Many of you are tired of the two party system and the corruption, B.S., and government interest of both of them, Democrats and Republicans alike. I've seen said somewhere that "A Republican administration is slowly creeping toward fascism, while a Democratic administration is galloping." They're both bad, in different ways (the Democrats much worse, of course). It would sure be great to have an actual Libertarian president. Or an objectivist. But it's not going to happen. Ideals do not equate to reality. Not yet, anyway. The way things ought to be are rarely the way things are, and will never become the way things are--simply because they ought to. The time is not right. Not yet. Just like with Ron Paul in the primaries. It would have been great, and he had a hell of a grass-roots movement, but he didn't stand a chance.

Despite you intellectuals and you freedom lovers understanding the way things need to be for America to be great again, we are still reliant upon the votes of the masses, the mindless, the mouths and hands of the lower class that have become reliant upon the system. There will be a time when the people feel the oppression more acutely and freedom is something you can almost hold in your hand, but the time has not yet come. The time will come when our liberty is more important than our sense of security, and at that time, America as a whole will be ready for a change. (A good change.)

While there are likely things you do not like about McCain, you've got to appreciate that he believes in capitalism. He'll support a capitalist market, free speech, and he'll fight for us to keep our guns. If you vote for your own independent party, and support your ideals, you'll be giving up the war against collectivism. It might make you feel good to vote Libertarian, but that will be one less vote for McCain that could stop Obama. Maybe you don't think America should be policing the Middle East, or you're just anti-war, but if McCain's in office, you'll at least be able to speak up about it. Look at how the Obama campaign tried to shut down poor "Joe the Plumber" just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and asking Obama a question that helped reveal his evil motives. Under a McCain administration, you can voice your objections. You can work through your community, the internet, etc., to promote your cause and try to make a difference. Under an Obama administration, you'll lose your voice.

And Obama isn't all that special. Not as far as liberal, Democratic candidates go. They all push for more government, more control, more spending, and less freedom (little by little). They're all socialists to some degree or another. However, Obama is a champion of actual Marxism. Openly, even. He is one of the most extreme, far-left, liberal Democratic candidates ever. And, with a Democratic-controlled congress and senate, as well as a supreme court that's split conservative/liberal down the middle, he is here at a very dangerous time. Dangerous for freedom. We almost lost our second amendment not too long ago, protected by only a single vote. And whoever becomes president will be nominating two new justices. With Obama as president, as well as a few more Democratics in the houses, the liberals will control everything. We won't be able to stop them from running amuck with crazy, oppressive laws, stealing what we earn, taking away our protection, our freedoms, and throwing us into Socialist USA.

You can vote for your cause, be it Libertarian, Objectivist, or whatever else, by voting AGAINST Obama. By voting against the spread of the socialist disease. And the only way to vote against Obama is to vote for McCain. Then continue trying to make a difference on the ground-level until the time is right (not now) for a Libertarian president. Otherwise, if you spread out your good, pro-capitalist, pro-freedom intentions among our various parties that support them, you'll weaken the only candidate that realistically has a chance to stand for freedom and beat the Marxist bastard.

Remember 1992, when the votes were split up between Bush, Perot, and Clinton. Bush would have won if the Libertarians voted Republican. And we wouldn't be in the bailout and sub-prime mortgage mess we are in today (which was Clinton's doing).

So please consider. If you vote for McCain because you like McCain and what he stands for--fine. But if you were intending to vote for a Libertarian, Independent Conservative, Objectivist, or other independent candidate, please stand up for your ideals and vote for McCain instead. Not because you like him, but because you're voting AGAINST Obama and the evil he brings with him. The race will come down to Obama and McCain, period. No others will come close. So voting for anyone else will weaken your intentions and weaken our defense against Marxism.

This is a fork in the road for America, that shining city on a hill. We the people. We who love our freedom, our liberty, our land of opportunity where we can become as great as we set out to be. Where we can become the best of our ability and the pinnacle of our hopes and dreams.

The stage is set for us to follow the world into the pit of socialism, the horrors of collectivism and bleak wastelands of bleeding our lives for beggars and thugs; or, to be free to advance America and Capitalism (at least for another 4-8 years), to try to reduce government and regulations, to push our economy to thrive, and hopefully see McCain help out along the way. We can stave off this collectivist decay of our culture and society, and fight to help America stay the last bastion of freedom on the planet. We can do this by voting for McCain. If Obama wins this election, there will be nothing to stop the government from becoming a socialist state, and if that happens, we will NOT be able to retrieve our beautiful America without the use of force.

So vote against Obama. Fight the ravenous beast of Socialism. By voting for McCain.