More on recovering Objectivists: I've observed a pattern with a lot of them, so frequent that I gave it a name - post-Objectivist wild oats syndrome. It was endemic in the first few years after the Branden excommunication. Intellectually-inclined people virtually always go through a phase of granting serious attention to fairly silly skeptical and solipsitic notions, as when they ask whether they exist or not. Most get this out of their system at eighteen or nineteen. Some, though, were too dogmatically Randroid at that age, and they go through it, to everyone's embarassment, a decade or two later. It's like stories one hears about people who went steady with the same partner all through high school and got married not long thereafter. Five, ten or twenty years later they find themselves divorced and playing the field for the first time, looking ridiculous as they do. Peter