Smoke and MIrrors--Understanding PARC

[Dennis Hardin]

If we disregard all the strained “insights,” rationalizations, misinterpretations and the rest of the nonsense found on every page of Valliant’s ridiculous book, we are still left with one burning question: why? Why, after almost 40 years have passed since their infamous schism, resurrect all the negativity and hostility and rancor that tore the Objectivist movement apart in 1968? We really can’t blame James Valliant for this. He was clearly just a blunt instrument in the hands of Leonard Peikoff. What was Peikoff’s purpose? Nathaniel Branden had already admitted to deception and misconduct. What did Peikoff hope to accomplish by re-opening all those old wounds?

The recently published review of PARC by Roderick Fitts in The Objective Standard gives us a clue. “Rand was happily married,” says Fitts, “but had an open affair with Nathaniel Branden, with the full knowledge of her husband and Barbara Branden.” That sentence appears in parentheses, as if to de-emphasize something so transparently obvious. The next sentence reads: “The purpose of Valliant’s book is to dispel false claims the Brandens made regarding Rand, setting the record straight for those interested in the details of her life.” (The love affair itself and its ramifications, you see, are devoid of significance.)

And what is the first “false claim” made by the Brandens? “Barbara Branden’s claim that insensitivity to the feelings of her husband, Frank O’Connor, regarding her affair led him to years of alcoholism...”

Having charged that this is a false claim, the reader eagerly anticipates a clear statement from Fitts demonstrating how Valliant dispels the allegation. Here is what we get instead: “None of the O’Connor’s closest friends recall seeing him drunk even once.” Fitts totally ignores the well-established fact that heavy drinkers gradually build up a tolerance for alcohol and eventually become functional, so that they don’t seem drunk to others. In her recent biography, Anne Heller points to glaring evidence such as the fact that “morning callers often smelled liquor on his [O'Connor's] breath” (p. 403).

The other false allegations which Fitts explicitly mentions have to do with issues as meaningless as who (Branden or Rand) initiated the love affair and how Rand viewed the age gap between herself and Branden. About matters such as that, one can only say: “Who cares?”

Fitts’ review suggests that the book is a benign effort to demonstrate that all the nasty “controversy” about Rand’s personal life is a nefarious plot by the Brandens. Fitts implies that all Valliant does is to simply correct the Brandens’ accounts. He does not mention that Valliant viciously excoriates the Brandens as manipulative liars and exploiters and, more than once, compares Branden to a rapist. According to this latest review, PARC is just a cheerful, benevolent effort to show that all the “details” of Ayn Rand’s life were entirely consistent with her philosophy.

In fact, Valliant’s book uses scathing, fabricated charges against the Brandens to obscure the obvious: that Ayn Rand’s marriage was far from happy, because people who are truly happily married do not need to engage in affairs; that she put her husband through living hell; and that, following her break-up with Branden, she compounded the madness with her brazenly irrational demand that her followers condemn Branden with no evidence other than her assertions that he was immoral. Christ had suddenly become the devil. Take her word for it.

In the years following her death, Peikoff came to appreciate the fact that Ayn Rand‘s philosophy, for all its brilliance, has suffered from the revelations about her inability to live by it. James Valliant’s job was to create a smokescreen, blaming every single Randian inconsistency on the Brandens.

In my original review of PARC, I argued that the effort to portray Rand as perfect in every way was one key flaw of the book. Now, in retrospect, I fully appreciate the fact that this was Peikoff’s whole purpose in assigning Valliant the role of the hit man. The story of the notorious love affair and its cataclysmic aftermath don’t matter. We just need to shoot those two awful messengers.

[sjw]

Why? The flow of money at ARI depends on authoritarian structures which depend on reverence to authority figures, with Rand at the top of the structure just as God is at the top of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has the advantage concerning its retaining the money flow: God doesn't exist, so they can make him be whatever they want. Unfortunately for ARI, Rand was a human being, and whatever side one comes down on regarding whether perfect consistency and reasonableness is possible to human beings, Rand was not perfectly reasonable and consistent.

Shayne

[Selene]

Why? The flow of money at ARI depends on authoritarian structures which depend on reverence to authority figures, with Rand at the top of the structure just as God is at the top of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has the advantage concerning its retaining the money flow: God doesn't exist, so they can make him be whatever they want. Unfortunately for ARI, Rand was a human being, and whatever side one comes down on regarding whether perfect consistency and reasonableness is possible to human beings, Rand was not perfectly reasonable and consistent.

Shayne

Shayne:

An aspect of Catholicism, which you have previously stated that you are not that familiar with, would limit the comparison you attempted to make. In Catholic teachings, Christ is God, does and did exist, and, did corporeally appear on Earth as a man. Therefore, they have the same sticky issues to explain as ARIians appear to have. A human God with human foibles and form. Hence, the Mary Magdalene relationship and other human record that the Christ established during his presence on the planet.

Adam

[sjw]

Why? The flow of money at ARI depends on authoritarian structures which depend on reverence to authority figures, with Rand at the top of the structure just as God is at the top of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has the advantage concerning its retaining the money flow: God doesn't exist, so they can make him be whatever they want. Unfortunately for ARI, Rand was a human being, and whatever side one comes down on regarding whether perfect consistency and reasonableness is possible to human beings, Rand was not perfectly reasonable and consistent.

Shayne

Shayne:

An aspect of Catholicism, which you have previously stated that you are not that familiar with, would limit the comparison you attempted to make. In Catholic teachings, Christ is God, does and did exist, and, did corporeally appear on Earth as a man. Therefore, they have the same sticky issues to explain as ARIians appear to have. A human God with human foibles and form. Hence, the Mary Magdalene relationship and other human record that the Christ established during his presence on the planet.

Adam

True, I'm only generally familiar with churches in general, which seem to tend to want the member's money as their top priority. Replace "Catholic Church" with "organized religion" -- the organizers generally rely on the kind of claims I specified. ARIianism is like the other religousisms. This may not be an intended consequence, but just a natural consequence of having full-time organizers that need to eat, it becomes a natural tendency to do whatever is required to protect and expand the money flow.

Shayne

[Dennis Hardin]

Why? The flow of money at ARI depends on authoritarian structures which depend on reverence to authority figures, with Rand at the top of the structure just as God is at the top of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has the advantage concerning its retaining the money flow: God doesn't exist, so they can make him be whatever they want. Unfortunately for ARI, Rand was a human being, and whatever side one comes down on regarding whether perfect consistency and reasonableness is possible to human beings, Rand was not perfectly reasonable and consistent.

Shayne

Shayne:

An aspect of Catholicism, which you have previously stated that you are not that familiar with, would limit the comparison you attempted to make. In Catholic teachings, Christ is God, does and did exist, and, did corporeally appear on Earth as a man. Therefore, they have the same sticky issues to explain as ARIians appear to have. A human God with human foibles and form. Hence, the Mary Magdalene relationship and other human record that the Christ established during his presence on the planet.

Adam

The comparison between the Vatican and ARI was not lost on the Pope, who obviously admired Peikoff’s hard ball tactics...

Valliant’s new book will be entitled The Passion of the Da Vinci Critics. The Vatican summoned our attorney-author to Rome because the Pope is distressed about all the negative press Jesus has been getting from The Da Vinci Code. The Pope gave him privileged access to the original documents found in the Holy Grail, which the author will use to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Branden really is Satan—and therefore immortal—and that he seduced Mary Magdelene (Jesus’ wife) into a deceitful love affair which begat a love child and the scandalous sacred bloodline. (Oh yeah, and, by the way, Jesus was cool with it.)

It’s already on back-order at The Ayn Rand Bookstore.

[kiaer.ts]

Why does James Valiant, in his defense of Rand, so remind me of Franz Liebkind?

Edited October 24, 2010 by Ted Keer

[Selene]

Why does James Valiant, in his defense of Rand, so remind me of Franz Liebkind?

Ted:

One of the great movies. In 1968, one of my fellow graduate teachers in the Speech Department which was divided into the disciplines of Rhetoric, Theater and Speech Pathology did the fountain scene where Zero finally gets Leo to enroll in "Leo's theoretical accounting scheme."

Kenneth Mars played the author to perfection.

Adam

Edited October 24, 2010 by Selene

[Neil Parille]

Dennis,

While I'm no fan of Leonard Peikoff, I think it's important to point out that Rand set in motion the ball that Peikoff is rolling. She said she was the perfectly integrated human being. So when Peikoff says that Rand's only character flaw was blowing her top (which he goes on to excuse as an "excess of virtue") he is doing Rand's bidding.

Apparently the only person he could find to defend this in print was Valliant.

What I find interesting is that Valliant didn't even read the interviews that the Archives did. Wasn't he curious about what the housekeeper said about Frank's drinking or what Fern Brown said about the typewriter?

-Neil Parille

[kiaer.ts]

She said she was the perfectly integrated human being.

On what are you basing this?

[Neil Parille]

Ted,

I think I read it in one of the new bios. Maybe she didn't use the word "perfectly," but she said something to that effect.

-Neil Parille

[kiaer.ts]

Ted,

I think I read it in one of the new bios. Maybe she didn't use the word "perfectly," but she said something to that effect.

-Neil Parille

It's a rather strong claim for which documentation would be helpful.

[Starbuckle]

What's interesting from a sociological perspective is that it took Peikoff's lunacy over the propriety of disagreeing about the intepretation of details in the history of science to get many of the orthodox remnant to admit that hey, maybe something is not quite right in the land of independence, individualism, and reason as the only absolute. Yet even in this blatant case, the hardest core of the hardest core will still contend that it is a "non sequitur" to infer from Peikoff's irrational behavior vis-a-vis McCaskey that his conduct clashes with the implications of a philosophy of reason for intellectual discourse. Such self-deceivers are self-consciously "rational" friends of reason, however. So they cannot downplay conduct that is irrational on its face without recourse to impressive or at least voluminous bulwarks of rationalization, written in the appropriately orthodox style and with the requisite code words and idiom. Hence, for example, the True Believers' urgent citation of Peikoff's "Fact and Value" to "prove" (without argument) how eminently rational is Peikoff's anti-substantive assault on McCaskey. Now, holes can be and have been poked in "Fact and Value," can be and have been poked in the even more incontinently blatherous Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics. In arriving at his judgments touching on his faith, though, the True Believer can diligently attend to and credit only approved doctrine and approved text--not any inconvenient facts, no matter how evident or accessible, that might disturb that faith. So it does make sense for those who feel it important to produce and control orthodox believers to produce these sacred texts, even if the texts are fatally disconnected from the facts on the ground.

Edited October 25, 2010 by Starbuckle

[kiaer.ts]

Big stack of money.

[Dennis Hardin]

Ted,

I think I read it in one of the new bios. Maybe she didn't use the word "perfectly," but she said something to that effect.

-Neil Parille

It's a rather strong claim for which documentation would be helpful.

Ted,

I think Neil is likely referring to the following sentence from Heller’s biography. It’s from a passage discussing Rand’s preliminary notes for Atlas Shrugged which were written in 1946.

“While contemplating the attributes she had in common with John Galt, she wrote, ‘I think I represent the proper integration of a complete human being.’ “

Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made(p. 197)

[Dennis Hardin]

Dennis,

While I'm no fan of Leonard Peikoff, I think it's important to point out that Rand set in motion the ball that Peikoff is rolling. She said she was the perfectly integrated human being. So when Peikoff says that Rand's only character flaw was blowing her top (which he goes on to excuse as an "excess of virtue") he is doing Rand's bidding.

Apparently the only person he could find to defend this in print was Valliant.

What I find interesting is that Valliant didn't even read the interviews that the Archives did. Wasn't he curious about what the housekeeper said about Frank's drinking or what Fern Brown said about the typewriter?

-Neil Parille

Neil,

I agree that Peikoff is merely doing Rand's bidding. He is little more than a puppet dangling from imaginary strings. Amazing that a human being can be the slave of his own projections for nearly half a century.

Valliant, meanwhile, was dangling from very real strings being pulled by Peikoff. Aware of the poor thing's obvious limitations, I'm guessing the kindly puppeteer let the puppet know in advance what the evidence would and would not show, taking the brainwork out of the deal.

[Kimmler]

Dennis,

While I'm no fan of Leonard Peikoff, I think it's important to point out that Rand set in motion the ball that Peikoff is rolling. She said she was the perfectly integrated human being. So when Peikoff says that Rand's only character flaw was blowing her top (which he goes on to excuse as an "excess of virtue") he is doing Rand's bidding.

Apparently the only person he could find to defend this in print was Valliant.

What I find interesting is that Valliant didn't even read the interviews that the Archives did. Wasn't he curious about what the housekeeper said about Frank's drinking or what Fern Brown said about the typewriter?

-Neil Parille

As for Frank's drinking...I thought that had been cleared up. As he was a painter (of sorts) he used those empty beer bottles that were in their bedroom to mix his paints. I know that is not very believable, but the UKOA (United Kingdom objectivist Assoc.) believe this.

[Neil Parille]

Dennis,

Valliant admitted that, having Peikoff's sponshorship for PARC, he could have seen any documents he wanted. Why he examined very little except the diaries is an interesting question which we can only speculate about.

-Neil Parille

[Dennis Hardin]

Dennis,

Valliant admitted that, having Peikoff's sponsorship for PARC, he could have seen any documents he wanted. Why he examined very little except the diaries is an interesting question which we can only speculate about.

-Neil Parille

Tunnel vision, Neil. See no evil, speak no evil. Biographical subjective idealism in reverse. "To not be is to not be perceived."

Twisting words and facts around to make them fit your preconceived conclusions must be exhausting.