"Faith and Force..." - Rand, early 1960


Ellen Stuttle

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This is a spin-off from the current last post - #155 - on the thread titled "Hypothesis: Dictators aren't altruists."

In that post I give a link to the whole set of entries for "Altruism" in the Lexicon.

The first entry under "Altruism" in the Lexicon is from Rand's early 1960 speech titled "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World." The speech can be found in the volume Philosophy: Who Needs It.

Reading the assertions quoted, I wondered what had preceded them. It's been many years since I'd last read that speech, so this evening I started re-reading it.

I want to type in the beginning - my next post - and then to ask in a separate post, What is she talking about?

Ellen

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Faith and Force:

The Destroyers of the Modern World

1960

(A lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960; at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960; and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960.)

If you want me to name in one sentence what is wrong with the modern world, I will say that never before has the world been clamoring so desperately for answers to crucial problems - and never before has the world been so frantically committed to the belief that no answers are possible.

Observe the peculiar nature of this contradiction and the peculiar emotional atmosphere of our age. There have been periods in history when men failed to find answers because they evaded the existence of the problems, pretended that nothing threatened them and denounced anyone who spoke of approaching disaster. This is not the predominant attitude of our age. Today, the voices proclaiming disaster are so fashionable a bromide that people are battered into apathy by their monotonous insistence; but the anxiety under their apathy is real. Consciously or subconsciously, intellectually or emotionally, most people today know that the world is in a terrible state and that it cannot continue on its present course much longer.

The existence of the problems is acknowledged, yet we hear nothing but meaningless generalities and shameful evasions from our so-called intellectual leaders. Wherever you look - whether in philosophical publications, or intellectual magazines, or newspaper editorials or political speeches of either party - you find the same mental attitude, made of two characteristics: staleness and superficiality. People seem to insist on talking - and on carefully saying nothing. The evasiveness, the dullness, the gray conformity of today's intellectual expressions sound like the voices of men under censorship - where no censorship exists. Never before has there been an age characterized by such a grotesque combination of qualities as despair and boredom.

You might say that this is the honest exhaustion of men who have done their best in the struggle to find answers, and have failed. But the dignity of an honestly helpless resignation is certainly not the emotional atmosphere of our age. An honest resignation would not be served or expressed by repeating the same worn-out bromides over and over again, while going through the motions of a quest. A man who is honestly convinced that he can find no answers, would not feel the need to pretend that he is looking for them.

You might say that the explanation lies in our modern cynicism and that people fail to find answers because they really don't care. It is true that people are cynical today, but this is merely a symptom, not a cause. Today's cynicism has a special twist: we are dealing with cynics who do care - and the ugly secret of our age lies in that which they do care about, that which they are seeking.

The truth about the intellectual state of the modern world, the characteristic peculiar to the twentieth century, which distinguishes it from other periods of cultural crises, is the fact that what people are seeking is not the answers to problems, but the reassurance that no answers are possible.

A friend of mine once said that today's attitude, paraphrasing the Bible, is: "Forgive me, Father, for I know not what I'm doing - and please don't tell me."

Ellen

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"Today, the voices proclaiming disaster are so fashionable a bromide that people are battered into apathy by their monotonous insistence; but the anxiety under their apathy is real. Consciously or subconsciously, intellectually or emotionally, most people today know that the world is in a terrible state and that it cannot continue on its present course much longer."

-- "Faith and Force...," quoted in the post above.

I can't think of anyone I knew during my growing up years in Peoria, Illinois, whom that describes, or, without some stretching, anyone I knew for years and years thereafter. Today, I can think of people whom it might fit.

Note that Rand delivered the talk on February 17, 1960 (Yale), April 4, 1960 (Brooklyn College), and May 5, 1960 (Columbia).

In early June, 1960, I graduated from high school.

The graduation theme that year was the first line of a poem, "To be alive in such an age."

"To be alive in such an age,

With every day another page

Writ on the world's great wonder book

On which the leaning nations look.

[multiple verses]

"To live, to give, in such an age." *

Since I had to deliver a valedictory, I was glad that the theme was something I could enthusiastically get into, a kind of Victorian Era vista of exuberant progress ahead. The attitude of the theme was what I felt in the town where I lived. I suppose that there were some people who were worried about a nuclear shoot-out. I learned later that there were people in other places who were very worried about that prospect, including people my own age who didn't expect to live to adulthood. But I didn't encounter such people myself in my Peoria years.

In Fall of 1957, the same week Atlas Shrugged was published, though I didn't hear of Atlas Shrugged until four years later, Sputnik was launched. Sputnik produced worry, but also started the huge push in the US space program.

In 1952, the helical structure of DNA had been discovered. Biological research was cracking.

The spirit of what I saw in movies and on television was upbeat and heroic - the 50s, the golden era, Westerns galore, excellent daytime live drama on TV, the Mickey Mouse Club and the Mousketeers, hardly a negative-outlooked entertainment.

Maybe in New York City, Ayn Rand was seeing something different from the view in heartland USA. But there were some fine magazines in those days. The Saturday Evening Post, Scientific American, which back then was a real-science classic. There were intellectuals whom I'd hardly call "cynical" - for instance, Sidney Hook, Jacques Barzun, John Gardner, Brand Blanshard, Henry Veatch, Paul Schilpp (the later two were among the professors I had at Northwestern). Sidney Hook gave For the New Intellectual an unfavorable review, but For the New Intellectual hadn't been published in 1960, and Rand wasn't clairvoyant as far as I know.

So what and who in particular was she talking about in her opening passage of "Faith and Force..."?

Ellen

* I'm quoting the poem from memory, haven't searched yet to check the wording. It was pedestrian as poetry, but I liked the feeling of it.

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You are a little older than I am, Ellen, but we have quite a cohort of boomers here. I grew up in Cleveland. Maybe Rand was making mountain out of a molehill. Perhaps her speech was only fashionable in the same sense that the doom and gloom she saw was trendy among some intellectuals. That is only a surmise.

Also, I point to the words to "Cockeyed Optimist" from the musical South Pacific. (Three verses of ..."They say the human race/Is falling on its face/And hasn't very far to go..." and so on.) It was not just the war itself - though there was that - but that the play was sold to audiences 15 years after WW2 and that message spoke to them.

And of course, there was the Cold War, the escalating nuclear weapons tests, and all that.

What stood apart from Orwell's 1984 and Golding's Lord of the Flies? (Rand's target was The Diary of Anne Frank which glorified a victim for being a victim.) What else was there? Catcher in the Rye? On the Road? Hardly inspiring.

I point out also that 1960 was much different from 1970. Rand may well have seen a trend from her vantage point in NYC that we in the heartland did not experience until later. My wife is from a small town in northern Michigan where time has stopped. Their Congressman was Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat. When you get drunk and run off the road coming home, you just tell your insurance agent that you hit a deer and it's no problem. Just sayin' Peoria (or Cleveland) might have been behind the times.

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I think I'll start collecting Rand's assertions about "most people" which I come across.

Another which I noticed recently comes from "The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made," date 1973.

The essay can also be found in Philosophy: Who Needs It.

She starts that essay by quoting the Al-Anon serenity prayer:

"God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

Three paragraphs farther along, she states:

Most men spend their lives in futile rebellion against things they cannot change, in passive resignation to things they can, and - never attempting to learn the difference - in chronic guilt and self-doubt on both counts.

In this case, I think it's obvious where she got the "observation": by taking the opposite of a statement of which she approved. The proclaiming of opposites is a technique I've noticed in a number of her essays.

Ellen

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Another example of Rand's proclaiming of opposites.

I picked up the quote from a post of Jonathan's, #10 on a thread titled "Foggy Lanscape, Foggy Mind." It's from the essay "Philosophy and Sense of Life," reprinted as Chapter 2 of The Romantic Manifesto.

Jonathan gave the page number as page 27 but didn't say in which edition. In the Signet Second Revised Edition, 1975, it's on pages 16-17.

I corrected some transcription errors in J's post.

A sense of life is formed by a process of emotional generalization which may be described as a subconscious counterpart of a process of abstraction, since it is a method of classifying and integrating. But it is a process of emotional abstraction: it consists of classifying things according to the emotions they evoke - i.e., of tying together, by association or connotation, all those things which have the power to make an individual experience the same (or a similar) emotion. For instance: a new neighborhood, a discovery, adventure, struggle, triumph - or: the folks next door, a memorized recitation, a family picnic, a known routine, comfort. On a more adult level: a heroic man, the skyline of New York, a sunlit landscape, pure colors, ecstatic music - or: a humble man, an old village, a foggy landscape, muddy colors, folk music.

Which particular emotions will be invoked by the things in these examples, as their respective common denominators, depends on which set of things fits an individual's view of himself. For a man of self-esteem, the emotion uniting the things in the first part of these examples is admiration, exaltation, a sense of challenge; the emotion uniting the things in the second part is disgust or boredom. For a man who lacks self-esteem, the emotion uniting the things in the first part of these examples is fear, guilt, resentment; the emotion uniting the things in the second part is relief from fear, reassurance, the undemanding safety of passivity.

Ellen

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I think I'll start collecting Rand's assertions about "most people" which I come across.

Another which I noticed recently comes from "The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made," date 1973.

The essay can also be found in Philosophy: Who Needs It.

She starts that essay by quoting the Al-Anon serenity prayer:

"God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

Three paragraphs farther along, she states:

Most men spend their lives in futile rebellion against things they cannot change, in passive resignation to things they can, and - never attempting to learn the difference - in chronic guilt and self-doubt on both counts.

In this case, I think it's obvious where she got the "observation": by taking the opposite of a statement of which she approved. The proclaiming of opposites is a technique I've noticed in a number of her essays.

Ellen

Quite interesting. Her take on the serenity prayer--which I haven't read in many moons--is quite jarring.

I am reminded reading this thread of Binswanger's comments about the 99/1% issue. Hyperbolic for the sake of hyperbolic, it seems.

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I was surprised to find that the following example hasn't previously been posted in full on OL, although it's been referred to a bunch of times.

It's from "Art and Sense of Life," pg. 31 of the Signet 1975 Second Revised Edition of The Romentic Manifesto,

Predominantly (though not exclusively), a man whose normal mental state is a state of full focus, will create and respond to a style of radiant clarity and ruthless precision - a style that projects sharp outlines, cleanliness, purpose, an intransigent commitment to full awareness and clear-cut identity - a level of awareness appropriate to a universe where A is A, where everything is open to man's consciousness and demands its constant functioning.

A man who is moved by the fog of his feelings and spends most of his time out of focus will create and respond to a style of blurred, "mysterious" murk, where outlines dissolve and entities flow into one another, where words connote anything and denote nothing, where colors float without objects, and objects float without weight - a level of awareness appropriate to a universe where A can be any non-A one chooses, where nothing can be known with certainty and nothing much is demanded of one's consciousness.

Ellen

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And, a passage I've posted a couple times earlier and will pick up from #25 on the "Brushmarks of Infinity" thread.

The Function of Art according to Rand

[This is from "Art and Sense of Life," pages 38-29 of the Signet 1975 Second Revised Edition of The Romantic Manifesto. I adjusted a chapter reference, since I'd copied from a different edition in the earlier post.]

It is not journalistic information or scientific education or moral guidance that man seeks from a work of art (though these may be involved as secondary consequences), but the fulfillment of a more profound need: a confirmation of his view of existence--a confirmation, not in the sense of resolving cognitive doubts, but in the sense of permitting him to contemplate his abstractions outside his own mind, in the form of existential concretes.

Since man lives by reshaping his physical background to serve his purposes, since he must first define and then create his values--a rational man needs a concretized projection of these values, an image in whose likeness he will re-shape the world and himself. Art gives him that image; it gives him the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals.

Since a rational man's ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process--and the higher the values, the harder the struggle--he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. Art gives him that fuel; the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one's own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one's ideal world.

"The importance of that experience is not in what man learns from it, but in that he experiences it. The fuel is not a theoretical principle, not a didactic 'message,' but the life-giving fact of experiencing a moment of metaphysical joy--a moment of love for existence." (See Chapter 11.)

The same principle applies to an irrational man, though in different terms, according to his different views and responses. For an irrational man, the concretized projection of his malevolent sense of life serves, not as fuel and inspiration to move forward, but as permission to stand still: it declares that values are unattainable, that the struggle is futile, that fear, guilt, pain and failure are mankind's predestined end--and that he couldn't help it. Or, on a lower level of irrationality, the concretized projection of a malignant sense of life provides a man with an image of triumphant malice, of hatred for existence, of vengeance against life's best exponents, of the defeat and destruction of all human values; his kind of art gives him a moment's illusion that he is right--that evil is metaphysically potent.

Art is man's metaphysical mirror; what a rational man seeks to see in that mirror is a salute; what an irrational man seeks to see is a justification--even if only a justification of his depravity, as a last convulsion of his betrayed self-esteem.

Between these two extremes, there lies the immense continuum of men of mixed premises--whose sense of life holds unresolved, precariously balanced or openly contradictory elements of reason and unreason--and works of art that reflect these mixtures. Since art is the product of philosophy (and mankind's philosophy is tragically mixed), most of the world's art, including some of its greatest examples, falls into this category.


Ellen
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I think I'll start collecting Rand's assertions about "most people" which I come across.

Another which I noticed recently comes from "The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made," date 1973.

The essay can also be found in Philosophy: Who Needs It.

She starts that essay by quoting the Al-Anon serenity prayer:

"God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

Three paragraphs farther along, she states:

Most men spend their lives in futile rebellion against things they cannot change, in passive resignation to things they can, and - never attempting to learn the difference - in chronic guilt and self-doubt on both counts.

In this case, I think it's obvious where she got the "observation": by taking the opposite of a statement of which she approved. The proclaiming of opposites is a technique I've noticed in a number of her essays.

Ellen

Ellen,

This is an interesting problem I, too, have observed in Rand--and in other authors. Here are a few conclusions I have come to over time.

1. In copywriting, they actually teach you to write this phrase "most people." It's an imprecise number that gives you the aura of expert. (btw - I try to avoid it.) Rand learned a lot about writing in Hollywood, the home of hype. This might be a bad habit she picked up and never corrected.

2. I'm not so sure "approval" is at the root when Rand says "most people," although I do see it in the mix. In the way I envision her doing it, she introspected using metacognition (although she did not use that term) to see what was going on in her own mind. (Metacognition here means observing yourself thinking and feeling at the same time you do it.)

After observing, she concluded certain things about how her mind works, including the normative part, then projected this as universal for all people. After doing that, she compared this observation with other people she observed personally, in the culture, and in history. Then she evaluated and concluded "most people" did this or that.

I might be wrong, but that seems to me the process she used, or close to it. I came up with this as I was mulling over a way she often wrote that I call, "argument by proclamation." What this means is that she starts with a declarative statement, then treats it as an already proven fact. Here is a typical example from the first essay of ITOE, "Cognition and Measurement" (actually, a triple whammy):

Consciousness, as a state of awareness, is not a passive state, but an active process that consists of two essentials: differentiation and integration.

Although, chronologically, man's consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual—epistemologically, the base of all of man's knowledge is the perceptual stage.

Sensations, as such, are not retained in man's memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation.

I wondered where Rand got those conclusions from, but she never said. They are true because she said them. That's the implication. But, she continued with an unnamed source: "As far as can be ascertained, an infant's sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos."

As far as can be ascertained? By whom? Her? Other people?

I'm going outside the point here, but I think I know why she did not cite her sources here. In her masterclass on nonfiction writing, she told people to avoid discussing current events or current people. When they do that, they date their writing and, if I remember her phrase correctly, later it becomes "yesterday's news."

3. I'm going to say something blasphemous. I think "most people" should be treated as rhetoric and not as a mathematical comparison. It's emphasis. Sloppy emphasis, maybe, but still emphasis.

I came to this conclusion working on a project about Napoleon Hill (I'm doing a thing on Think and Grow Rich). He gets worse than Rand. He constantly makes statements like "Ninety percent of all men (yada yada yada)." Sometimes he gets more specific and it become 98%. :) There is no way on earth he could know a statistic like that, much less find it from a credible source anywhere.

As I looked into this problem, I found that lots of people wrote like that in self-help material back then (they still do at times). And here's a trap in criticizing it. If you get hung up on precision when they do that, you miss the great stuff they serve up.

As a way to get around this, I came up with a term of my own. I call it "rhetorical statistics." I put Rand's "most people" in that category, too. The moment I read a declaration of rhetorical statistics, I automatically add a preface in my mind: "According to my experience," or "From what I have observed," or "From the way it seems to me," something like that. (Obviously, I'm talking in the author's voice, i.e., according to the author's experience, etc.) Then the rhetorical statistics become properly qualified and I can move on to the author's message without getting irritated.

Would the author like me to do that? Damned if I know. But I prefer that to calling these authors liars or incredibly sloppy thinkers.

I recommend the practice for people who like them and get value from their writing, too. That way when someone criticizes them, you can admit the imprecision (and even wish it were different) without letting the critic discredit them--i.e., their more important ideas--over a trivial point.

Michael

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MSK, good insights, thanks.

"1. In copywriting, they actually teach you to write this phrase "most people." " That is not how I learned it. The newspaper that I worked for actually kept reader poll data going back over a decade. You could not get away with a rhetorical statistic like that writing for them. However, I take the point and I agree fully that rhetorical statistics are at once weak and perhaps not worth arguing.

I agree also that Rand fell into something like introspection - you call it metacognition - but was far from a zen master or guru. Especially when offering conjectures about the minds of children, she really does not go deeper than "I must have been thinking ..."

Toward the end of my bachelor's in 2008, one of my seminar professors went on a bit about academic writing. He clarified and validated something I had seen - and went a bit further. The "further" was that Ernest Hemingway affected our writing. Academics gave up long, flourishing "germanic" sentences, for the short and declarative. The other that I noticed looking at old papers is that back before 1950 footnotes and citations were not expected. The author was accepted as the expert. You could challenge the author, of course, but you had to do you own homework and then cite your sources. Citations were intended only for novel or controversial claims. "We are raised to honor our parents as a Commandment from God, but according to Chagnon, the infants of the Yanoamo of Brazil are praised for striking their fathers." But you could just say "The jungles of South America are home to some of the fiercest and fearsome peoples on Earth, not the least of whom are the Jivaro headhunters and the Yanoamo." Anyone who wanted to claim them as gentlefolk was free to do so, but would then have to supply citations of authority.

So, Ayn Rand seldom cited her sources.

On the other hand... Hardly a paper today gets published without an impressive bibliography. Tales are told of credible papers with 20 or 25 citations being held up because the editor asks for more sources to pad the bibliography: Mine's bigger!

Also, just a note: In the physical sciences, sources older than five years are rare. In sociology, it is common to start a paper with citations to Max Weber or someone else from 100 years ago.

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The two Michaels have good points, I believe, especially those insights of MSK. Ellen has a choice (imo, quite valid) phrase with "proclaiming of opposites". To add, it is very likely that Rand was not simply passing on her methods and findings to enable one's communication skills - predominantly - but for one's own private, individual cognition.

At times/often one needs a starting point to thinking - one that eventually averages out any exclusivism and proves itself in the long run.

If - we follow up with the effort ourselves.

The concepts she seemed to pull out of thin air, naturally have to be checked and double-checked for authenticity in one's own experience and conceptualization.

As for her often criticized "sweeping assertions", it would take a most foolhardy intellectual to presume she didn't herself have all her premises severely checked. Not an easy thinker to refute, and her integrity is unquestionable.

I sometimes think that her so-called "sweeping assertions" are in fact advanced abstractions that have yet to be fully grasped.

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Michael (MSK),

Regarding your #11, I'll talk about the use of "most people" first.

I agree that a lot of writers use that. I use "a lot of __." A lot. What I mean by it is some fairly large but not exactly specifiable percentage. For instance, "A lot of the NYC area Objectivists I knew ___." I try to indicate by the wording that it's just my own impression which I can't document with statistical analyses.

I generally don't like it when writers make statements about "most people," but I agree that a lot (:smile:) of the times when writers do this, it's what you called "rhetorical statistics" and it can be charitably disregarded.

In Rand's case, however, I think that often when she spoke of "most people," she did so in the context of one of her "proclaiming of opposites" and that she was getting the opposite not from imprecise observation but instead from sheer invention of the opposite to something of which she approved.

I think that the Al-Anon example is of this type:

"God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

Most men spend their lives in futile rebellion against things they cannot change, in passive resignation to things they can, and - never attempting to learn the difference - in chronic guilt and self-doubt on both counts.

Likewise for the example I gave in post #10, an example for which she couldn't have even vague observational evidence. I'll just re-quote one statement where the opposites are displayed in brief, but the whole passage follows the same pattern:

Art is man's metaphysical mirror; what a rational man seeks to see in that mirror is a salute; what an irrational man seeks to see is a justification--even if only a justification of his depravity, as a last convulsion of his betrayed self-esteem.

Between these two extremes, there lies the immense continuum of men of mixed premises [...]

I'll come back in a different post to the issue of Rand's practice of not citing sources.

Ellen

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Blast. I just noticed in copying from the Rand quote in post #10 that the friggin' posting software took out some paragraph breaks in the quote. Too late for me to fix it. The correct paragraphing can be found in the earlier post (#25) on the "Brushmarks of Infinity" thread.

Ellen

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Ellen,

I like your idea of proclaiming opposites and it probably needs to be in the mix when thinking about how Rand argued new ideas.

A small comment on AA, though. I've often wondered what on earth Rand was doing sniffing around down there. Or maybe reading literature about it.

(You said Al-Anon--do you have any reason to believe Rand attended an Al-Anon meeting? Or even knew what Al-Anon was? I find Rand and Al-Anon incompatible in my mind. :smile: )

I think it is highly plausible that Rand's interest in Alcoholics Anonymous was Frank-related. She wrote about it in "The Metaphysical Versus The Man-Made" (Ayn Rand Letter, II, 12) dated March 12, 1973. Frank died in 1979, so this is around the time when reports of the damage of heavy drinking on Frank would start being noticeable.

I also think it plausible that the Serenity Prayer was a lucky find for her in a terribly painful context, one where she saw an unexpected parallel between her approach to life and Niebuhr's, one that fell way outside her preconceived notion of the world of alcoholism. And within this context, she latched onto it and wrote about it. I personally don't think she would have otherwise. Not in the way she did.
Rand had very little sympathy for addicts of all kinds and considered, at best, addiction to be a problem of hopelessness and giving up (see her treatment of Henry Cameron in The Fountainhead for a good example), and at worst, sheer evil (lots of examples, her descriptions of hippies and so on).
As an aside, I'll fix your formatting problem. (LATER EDIT: Done.)
MIchael
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Michael,

I'm glad you like the proclaiming opposites idea. There are multiple other examples in Rand's work, also a number of them in NB's articles from when he was associated with Rand.

A small comment on AA, though. I've often wondered what on earth Rand was doing sniffing around down there. Or maybe reading literature about it.

(You said Al-Anon--do you have any reason to believe Rand attended an Al-Anon meeting? Or even knew what Al-Anon was? I find Rand and Al-Anon incompatible in my mind. :smile: )

I've wondered, too, about the AA issue, if it was Frank-related.

I used Al-Anon as an abbreviation for Alcoholics Anonymous.

I have no idea if she ever attended a meeting.

Here's what she says in the essay:

I was startled to learn that that statement has been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, which is not exactly a philosophical organization. In view of the fact that today's social-psychological theories stress emotional, not intellectual, needs and frustrations as the cause of human suffering (e.g., the lack of "love"), that organization deserves credit for discovering that such a prayer is relevant to the problems of alcoholics - that the misery of confusion on those issues has devastating consequences and is one of the factors driving men to drink - i.e., to escape from reality. This is just one more example of the way in which philosophy rules the lives of men who have never heard or cared to hear of it.

Ellen

PS: Thanks much for fixing the formatting problem in #10.

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In Rand's case, however, I think that often when she spoke of "most people," she did so in the context of one of her "proclaiming of opposites" and that she was getting the opposite not from imprecise observation but instead from sheer invention of the opposite to something of which she approved.

I think that the Al-Anon example is of this type:

"God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

Most men spend their lives in futile rebellion against things they cannot change, in passive resignation to things they can, and - never attempting to learn the difference - in chronic guilt and self-doubt on both counts.

Likewise for the example I gave in post #10, an example for which she couldn't have even vague observational evidence. I'll just re-quote one statement where the opposites are displayed in brief, but the whole passage follows the same pattern:

Art is man's metaphysical mirror; what a rational man seeks to see in that mirror is a salute; what an irrational man seeks to see is a justification--even if only a justification of his depravity, as a last convulsion of his betrayed self-esteem.

Between these two extremes, there lies the immense continuum of men of mixed premises [...]

Ellen

I've thought of her "proclaiming of opposites" -roughly- as a device by contrast. I think it's a secondary method of identification, i.e.: "What is it not?"

(The primary, naturally, being "What is it?")

As such, it's an invaluable conceptual tool. Can one totally comprehend 'hard', without knowing 'soft'?

'Liberty', without 'oppression'? 'Egoism', without 'altruism-collectivism'?

Or vice-versa.

"The immense continuum" in between, Rand acknowledged, as you note.

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I used Al-Anon as an abbreviation for Alcoholics Anonymous.

Ellen,

Good Lord!

:smile:

It's clear you have no experience with chronic drunks.

Al-Anon is a separate organization from Alcoholics Anonymous (see the Wikipedia article here), although it is set up as a 12 step organization, too.

Al-Anoia :smile: is where the family members of chronic drunks go to bitch about all the crap they have to put up with from the drunks.

Any alcoholic worth his salt (me included) is grateful that there is a place those who love him can go to get help, but that doesn't mean he likes them bad-mouthing him to strangers during the meetings, which is exactly what goes on there. :smile:

There's a love-hate codependency thing between AA and Al-Anon. And it gets quite colorful. :smile:

Michael

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Ellen,

I don't either.

What I really suspect is that Frank might have mentioned that he was interested in going to an AA meeting, or maybe even went to one, and she decided to look into it to make sure he would be safe. I think that is entirely plausible.

I have no way to prove it, but I know what being out of control on booze is like and how you seesaw, waking up and promising yourself you are going to quit or at least cut back, then later in the day succumbing to temptation. I also know people who feel that way seek help, but it's always a mess because it's mixed with shame, denial, irritation and a whole lot of contradictory feelings--and generally intense feelings at that.

And I know Rand loved Frank deeply, so I believe she would have acted in his defense almost on instinct--according to how she perceived the threats.

Michael

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Michael,

Frank seems to me like all he wanted was to be left alone to brood and drink in peace in his study - although I suppose he might, as you suggest, have had a moment or moments when he thought of seeking help. What I wondered regarding Rand's reference to AA is if someone else, maybe Allan Blumenthal, brought up AA - to be met by Rand's anger at the idea that her husband was drinking too much.

Possibly the reference is just coincidence, of course. She happened to hear or read about AA's use of Niebuhr's serenity prayer, and maybe well before she wrote the article. I don't suppose we'll ever know the truth of it.

Another little mystery I've sometimes wondered about is who the "wise old Negro woman" was whom Rand quotes in "Causality Versus Duty" as saying, "Mister, there's nothing I've got to do except die."

That's a statement I like very, very much. I think it's super excellent. I've wondered if the source was Eloise Huggins, who did housekeeping and prepared some of the meals for Ayn and Frank from 1965 until Ayn's death, but I don't know if Eloise was a black woman. She did come from the Caribbean Islands, where her father was a minister/teacher, and there are other details in her 100 Voices interview which sound as if she might have been a black woman but none of them definitive.

Ellen

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Frank seems to me like all he wanted was to be left alone to brood and drink in peace in his study - although I suppose he might, as you suggest, have had a moment or moments when he thought of seeking help.

Ellen,

That sounds very plausible. In fact, that sounds like the way I used to drink much of the time.

What I wondered regarding Rand's reference to AA is if someone else, maybe Allan Blumenthal, brought up AA - to be met by Rand's anger at the idea that her husband was drinking too much.

I find this very plausible, too.

Michael

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