The Playboy interview with Ayn Rand

[Victor Pross]

The Playboy interview with Ayn Rand, The unpublished Passages

Over forty years ago Playboy magazine interviewed Ayn Rand. Playboy offered Rand an opportunity to elucidate her philosophy and address varied topics. In the original published interview, she discussed everything from metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics to sex, religion, politics, and art. Here are some selections omitted from the Playboy interview. This 1964 deleted Q&A focuses on an important issue: the widespread antipathy toward ideology as such.

Unpublished Passages:

PLAYBOY: Philosophers have offered world systems in the past, often with frightful and frightening consequences—slavery, inquisitions, purges, etc. Isn't there something in the very nature of philosophical system-building that leads to intolerance? Don't world views, because they try to be all-inclusive, because they are so neat and seemingly simple, attract and encourage fanaticism?

RAND: Surely you don't mean to say that knowledge and consistency are dangerous, but ignorance and inconsistency are safe? It is irrationality that leads to fanaticism, and inconsistency that leads to destruction. Man cannot escape the fact that he needs a philosophy. The only question is: what kind of philosophy is it? If one man believes consistently in production, and another man believes consistently in robbery, the nature and the consequences of that consistency will not be the same. The atrocities you mentioned were caused by philosophy—by the wrong kind of philosophy. They were caused by the irrational influence of what, in a generalized sense, I can call the Platonist school of thought.

PLAYBOY: In Atlas Shrugged, you wrote that "one neither asks nor grants the unearned." Did you mean this to include unearned love as well as unearned aid and material support?

RAND: Yes.

PLAYBOY: Well, then, why should a mother love her newborn infant who is still too young to have done anything to earn her love?

RAND: You don't really mean this as a serious question. To begin with, if the mother is a responsible, rational human being, she does not have a baby by accident; she has him by choice. At first, a child has a value to her simply because it is a human being created—physically, at least—by her. The child's parents owe him support until the legal age of 21, which means until such time as he can support himself. This is a chosen obligation that rational parents accept when they decide to have a child. They have to accept the consequences of their own decision. But do they have to love the child? No, not necessarily. That will depend on their evaluation of his character, as he grows up. He has to earn their love—as they have to earn his.

(In the discussion of sex and hedonism, the following was cut. Note Rand's insightful and provocative interpretation of the chronic gambler's psychology and motivation.)

PLAYBOY: What about discriminate and selective indulgence in other activities—drinking, for example, or gambling? Are these immoral?

RAND: To begin with, those are not in the same category as sex. Drinking, as such, is not immoral, unless a person is a drunkard. Merely taking a drink is hardly a moral question. It becomes an immorality only when a man drinks to the point where it stifles and stunts his mind. When a man drinks in order to escape the responsibility of being conscious, only then is drinking immoral. As to gambling, I wouldn't say that a person who gambles occasionally is immoral. That's more a game than a serious concern. But when gambling becomes more than a casual game, it is immoral because of the premise that motivates it. The passion for gambling comes from a man's belief that he has no control over his life, that he is controlled by fate, and, therefore, he wants to reassure himself that fate or luck is on his side.

*The photo was taken from Objectivist Living in the auction section and the interview is an extract from The Atlas Society site.

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Edited March 17, 2007 by Victor Pross

[Chris Grieb]

Don Hauptman brought the Playboy Interview material at the auction Playboy. The interview was one of the first wide spread exposures to Miss Rand's ideas outside of her novels. The interview has been reprinted by both ARI and TOC. Don has twice talked about the auction at TOC's summer seminar.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Victor,

I moved this from the news section.

Sources please.

Michael

[Chris Grieb]

Don Hauptman's article is on the TOC web site. Googling Ayn Rand's Playboy interview will also bring up the article. Don has done Objectivism and the historians of Objectivism a great service.

[Greybird]

The picture of Rand with that faux marble inscription, by the way, was from an interview she had in 1960 on NBC's "Today Show." It was unattributed in the auction catalogue.

(I don't have a source to cite, but I distinctly recall this being mentioned alongside that photo in at least one book that reprinted it. Possibly the book based on Paxton's bio-film, which I have in storage at the moment.)

[John Dailey]

Victor:

~ These unpublished PB quotes of Rand you give...interesting.

~ One of them raise a deep question for parents: Can one be a good/worthwhile parent, without 'loving' (whatever that means, in this context) the child?

LLAP

J:D

Edited March 24, 2007 by John Dailey

[Victor Pross]

Victor:

~ These unpublished PB quotes of Rand you give...interesting.

~ One of them raise a deep question for parents: Can one be a good/worthwhile parent, without 'loving' (whatever that means, in this context) the child?

LLAP

J:D

John,

Anything I might venture to say may border on rationalism because I don’t have children. I have never made any observations and never thought about it. But maybe Angie would have some insights. (This is not to say that she doesn’t love her child).

Victor

Edited March 24, 2007 by Victor Pross

[Judith]

I think Rand would say that one "can't" grant love where it's not deserved, so the question is irrelevant. More specifically, love is an emotional response, not something one commands up from one's depths as a duty.

Judith

Edited March 25, 2007 by Judith