-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: The Ayn Rand Cult Carrus Puublishing Company©1999 Jeff Walker Open Court Publishing Company PO Box 300 Peru, Illinois 61534-0300 800.815.2280 ISBN 0-8126-9390-6 ----- Introduction: The Most Peculiar Cult on Earth In a furious rage, the 63-year-old woman glared at the handsome young man seated in front of her, and in a choked voice, with a heavy Russian accent, placed a curse on his penis: "If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health, you'll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve any potency, you'll know it's a sign of still worse moral degradation!" Having delivered this imprecation, she violently slapped his face—once, twice, and some witnesses say, even a third time. These slaps rang out like pistol shots. And these shots would soon be heard round the world. For this was the first great schism in the Objectivist movement. The woman was Ayn Rand, believed by her followers to be the greatest thinker since Aristotle, though some said, not to damn her with faint praise, the greatest thinker of all time. That she was the greatest novelist of all time almost went without saying. The young man was Nathaniel Branden, second greatest living intellect, who had brought the followers into the fold and had done more than anyone to convince them of Rand's greatness, and incidentally of his own. In the weeks that followed, the rank and file, the 'students of Objectivism' (they were not permitted to call themselves 'Objectivists') would be asked to take sides. Without knowing the cause of this violent rupture, the students of Objectivism would be asked to shun Branden and anyone who continued to associate with him. Many of them did just that, because Ayn Rand asked them to. Others refused to denounce Branden until they were shown a reason, and these were excommunicated, anathematized, boycotted, and blacklisted forever by official Objectivism. Their close friends abruptly stopped speaking to them. Some of Branden's own sisters and cousins would never speak to him again. One of the loyal Randians who shunned Branden was a young man named Alan Greenspan. The face-slaps would drastically change thousands of lives, and oddly enough, they continue to do so. And it would be years before the full story which led up to them would come out. Prior to this dramatic incident in New York City on 23rd August, 1968, Objectivism had grown by leaps and bounds. You might think that the Break between Rand and Branden would put an end to all that, and so it seemed for a while. In fact, things turned out differently Some of the history of the Objectivist movement can be found in this book, but let me just mention here a few of the highlights of the year 1998. A Showtime cable TV movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand, based on Barbara Branden's biography of the same name, finished shooting, with Helen Mirren as Ayn Rand, Eric Stoltz as Nathaniel Branden, and Peter Fonda as Frank O'Connor. The documentary movie, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, premiered and appeared in theaters across the U.S. and Canada, and was nominated for an Academy Award. The views of neo-Objectivist philosopher David Kelley dominated a popular John Stossel TV special on 'Greed'. Since her death in 1982 several books on Rand have appeared, most notably, Barbara Branden's biography The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), Nathaniel Branden's memoir Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand (1989), and Chris Sciabarra's Ayn Ran& The Russian Radical (1995). Reading these three volumes will leave one with some understanding of what Ayn Rand and her movement were all about-but not much. The Sciabarra book is precisely the kind of academic exercise that Rand would have felt justified her contempt for academic philosophy. Apparently not an Objectivist, Sciabarra is nonetheless so sympathetic a critic as to invite the label of 'neo-Objectivist'. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical goes to great lengths to suggest that Rand's philosophy is to a significant extent an outgrowth of various Russian influences present during her youth and is as systematic and radical as Marx's. Yet what Rand in fact took from her strictly Russian milieu was little more than a perceived need to counter Marxist ideology with an alternative indepth complex of ideas. The Passion of Ayn Rand and Judgment Day are works by the pair who were her greatest champions between 1950 and 1968. Both Brandens strive to preserve the Randian core of what they learned in their 18 years with her. Both strive also to expose Rand's volcanic temper and moralizing judgmentalism. Though both Branden books appear critical at times, and some unattractive wrinkles are sculpted in, care is taken to avoid knocking Rand off her pedestal. It was the Brandens, after all, who placed her there. Ron Merrill's The Ideas of Ayn Rand (1991) points to Rand's Nietzschean influences but argues unpersuasively against what seems obvious to non-Objectivists, namely that Rand clung to certain Nietzschean ideas throughout her life, despite an overlay of Aristotelianism that she displayed in later years. The dismissal by Rand's followers of the importance of her Jewish background indicates another blind spot. Without an appreciation of that background, an understanding of her philosophy and of the whole Rand phenomenon is incomplete, to say the least. I disclose the Nietzschean and Jewish roots of Rand's thinking, especially in Chapter 10. To ignore the insider reports of Rand's personality problems is to neglect the origin of crucial components of her philosophyand of her movement which came to embody some of her own psychological peculiarities and to reinforce their presence in the Objectivist philosophy. Where did Rand acquire her obsession with 'selfishness', ability, brains, and captains of industry as heroic role models? These and much more were part of the business literature of the 1920s Business Civilization that greeted Rand during her first impressionable years in America. Such literature is cavalierly dismissed by Rand herself as well as by her spokesmen, but to read actual excerpts from it come as an eye-opener to many of Rand's admirers. Many of Rand's ideas are taken directly from 1920s business theory, which therefore pops up in several places in this book. The reputation that Rand turned into a cult phenomenon is based on Atlas Shrugged. That thousand-page-plus opus is acclaimed by adherents as wildly original. Yet, as I show in Chapter 11, it is derivative of particular novels and other works. Moreover, Atlas Shrugged was written very much to serve as probusiness propaganda. The Francisco speech on 'money' is even a product of consultation with her favorite real-life businessman. The more sophisticated economic thinking that grew into a revival of economic liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s was done by others, particularly Friedrich Hayek, whom Rand hated but who was its true intellectual epicenter. Just as playwright Maksim Gorki, despite substantial disagreements with the Bolsheviks, conveyed Bolshevism's ideological message via his 'socialist realism, so novelist and essayist Rand, despite substantial disagreements with the business community, conveyed its preferred laissez-faire ideology through her 'romantic realism'. There have been other Ayn Rands, before and after Ayn Rand. Throughout this book, I draw attention to the striking parallels between Rand and such figures as Mary Baker Eddy, Edward Bellamy, Count Alfred Korzybski, L. Ron Hubbard, Werner Erhard, and Bhagwan Rajneesh. The phenomena she represents are common and recurring ones that say a great deal about the nature of individuals and society. Rand's was but one of several waves of cultism that rolled out of America's peculiar religious heritage during the era of that heritage's disintegration and reshaping. Re-integration was the hallmark of all these new religious movements, the very term 'integration' constituting for Rand a kind of rallying cry. In her fiction Rand portrayed a constellation of values—reality, objectivity, reason, egoism, individual rights, heroism, and laissez faire—that underwent severe contortions during their attempted embodiment by a real-life movement. As many government interventions in the economy accomplish precisely the opposite of their intent, so Rand's formative influences made it likely that she would adopt a set of ideas which, if probed deeply enough or if embodied in real people, could be seen as accomplishing precisely the opposite of her intent. That opposite is the ultimate destination of her exclusive concern for the Nietzschean overachiever, who must be protected via absolutized individual rights, which are justified only by Reason. The Objectivist movement began in the living room of Rand's New York City apartment in late 1951 through 1952. Canadians Nathan Blumenthal and wife-to-be Barbara Weidman from Toronto and Winnipeg respectively, both students at New York University, and soon various of their relatives and acquaintances such as later chief of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, sat at Rand's feet, listening spellbound to her read from her work-in-progress Atlas Shrugged and discourse upon ideas. Ten years earlier Ayn Rand herself had sat at the feet of her guru, novelist and conservative firebrand Isabel Paterson, listening to 'Pat' discourse on American history and politics. By the time Rand was writing the scenes about her Galt's Gulch utopia in Atlas Shrugged, she had gathered around her a parallel, if junior, Galt's Gulch, its members too lecturing to each other on their professional specialties from the perspective of Rand's philosophy. it was basically Ayn's 'Blumenthal bunch' but she dignified it as 'the Class of '43', given that their admiration for The Fountainhead (1943) was what had drawn them to her. Privately they referred to themselves facetiously as 'The Collective', as if they made up a communist-like cell of party faithful, disciplined to unquestioningly carry out the dictates of a central authority. But as time passed, permissible jokes became fewer, and this particular insiders' joke became more appropriate to the grim reality. Reinforcing the emerging hierarchy which placed Nathan second as Rand's special protege and intellectual heir, Ayn and Nathan began a sexual affair in 1955, kept secret from all but their spouses, who were persuaded to give their consent to it. By 1957, some of Rand's more youthfully optimistic disciples were convinced that the world would be almost instantly converted to her selfishness-based laissez-faire capitalism, from the collectivist corruption she had dramatized in Atlas Shrugged. Just as the novel ends with society in ruins and the heroes of Galt's Gulch about to descend from their Nietzschean mountain retreat to set all things right, so 'the Collective' saw itself as the personal vanguard of Ayn Rand's philosophic and literary genius, preparing to instruct a society grateful for Rand's solutions. Critical reaction to Atlas Shrugged was only sporadically favorable, mostly mixed, and often downright hostile. Rand, seeing her magnum opus, despite its commercial success, derided by virtually all established intellectual voices, sank into despondency. Nathan, lacking the credentials to continue practising as a psychologist in the state of New York, and thinking instead about making a living by teaching Rand's philosophy explicitly, devised and delivered in early 1958 a lecture series introducing Atlas Shrugged's biggest fans in the New York area to Objectivism. Within a few years hundreds were enrolling at his Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI), not just in the intro course (usually two or three times), but in supplementary courses given by himself or by other members of the Collective, with Rand herself sometimes in attendance to answer students' questions. The success of the venture proved to be just the tonic Rand needed to emerge from her depression, restoring her confidence that in the longer-term her ideas might have a major impact upon America. Unfortunately, by then the darker facets of her personality were prevailing, and any tiny step toward greater acceptance of her ideas would be partially negated by the autocratic manner in which they were conveyed. Objectivism had begun as Ayn Rand's way of dealing with the world; the Objectivist movement evolved into the way her admirers would have to deal with Ayn Rand. Nonetheless, Rand's inner circle swelled with new admirers and NBI swelled the lower ranks with hundreds and soon thousands of 'students of Objectivism'. The Objectivist newsletter and then journal that Branden and Rand started up would by 1968 have 21,000 subscribers. Rand herself spoke to overflowing halls on the campuses of more than a dozen universities. Branden delivered radio broadcasts. Both Brandens collaborated on the biographical Who Is Ayn Rand? Essays by Rand and inner circle members were collected and published as books such as The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Soon there was a book service, there were NBI social events, and an entire institutionalized social network, like a church. It appeared that via this burgeoning community, Rand's philosophy might indeed exert a countervailing effect upon the 1960s' increasingly collectivist and non-rational ethos. In fact the predominant ethos of the 1960s would reach deep into the 1970s, while the Objectivist movement would implode in the second half of 1968. Why this happened provides an indication of just how personal an extension of Ayn Rand was her philosophy and the movement attempting to embody and spread it. Between 1964 and 1968, unbeknownst to Rand and everyone else except Barbara from whom he had separated, Nathaniel Branden engaged in an affair with a gorgeous model, 35 years Rand's junior, who in 1969 would become his second wife. Branden was convinced that if Rand found out, that would be the end of the movement and his leadership of it. During that entire period, Rand was with great exasperation trying to re-ignite the sexual affair with Branden and to puzzle out his tortured explanations of why unfathomable personal problems were getting in the way. When at long last the truth did come out, Rand did explode with rage at Branden's betrayal and systematic deception of her. As feared, NBI was dissolved and both Brandens were mercilessly expelled along with anyone who took their side. Students of Objectivism were as stunned by this Break as they were ignorant of its real cause. The most hard-core fanatics rallied to Rand's side, but a large percentage of students, utterly disillusioned, simply drifted away. The Brandens, separately and with new partners, fled the poisonous atmosphere of recrimination in New York, for California. In New York, while Objectivism's formal lecture bureau was gone, some inner circle loyalists such as Barbara Branden's cousin Leonard Peikoff continued to give lectures on her philosophy. But the juice had been squeezed out of the movement. Most former adherents found their way toward libertarian political activism or psychotherapeutic cults. By 1973 Rand was in ill-health and soon ceased all formal communication with her followers, save her yearly public address at Ford Hall in Boston. Newsletters published by acolytes with her conditional approval partly filled the vacuum. But since Rand had no stomach for spearheading a dynamic movement herself and since no one else with Branden's entrepreneurial flair came to the fore, the movement shrank to the point that few even spoke of there being a movement as such during the 1970s and early 1980s. The uncharismatic Leonard Peikoff became Rand's replacement intellectual heir largely by default-she had fallen out with everyone else. Contrary to appearances, the Objectivist movement was merely in hibernation. The Reagan era brought a quasi-Randian free-market economics to the forefront of national politics and Nathaniel Branden's obsession, self-esteem, to the forefront of therapy and educational policy. When Rand died in 1982, the albatross of her oppressive personality was lifted from that remnant of her following which did want a vibrant movement. By 1985 funding was in place for an Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) in Los Angeles, with Peikoff having veto power over its decisions. For a while it seemed if the reawakening of interest in Rand's ideas would be accompanied by an easing of the intolerant moralizing that had become a hallmark of Objectivism. That brief halcyon period soon encountered thunderheads, first Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), and then Nathaniel Branden's Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand (1989), which together subjected Rand's reputation to a critical dousing which was very mild but still completely unacceptable to Peikoff and ARI. With Peikoff evidently looking for an excuse to purge those who had expressed any sympathy for either Branden volume, Objectivist philosopher David Kelley's accepting an invitation to address a gathering of libertarians handed Peikoff that excuse. (Libertarians are hated by Objectivists.) Kelley was summarily excommunicated for expressing tolerance of ideological sympathizers who largely accepted Rand's politics and economics but had the effrontery to designate her metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics as merely optional. Kelley responded in 1990 by forming a New York-based, more tolerant alternative to ARI that he called the Institute for Objectivist Studies (IOS). He took a a significant proportion of Objectivist scholars and rank-and-file with him. This second great rift continues to reverberate throughout the revived Objectivist movement and as the century closed, ARI and IOS would be more at loggerheads than ever. A third rift, the product of internecine squabbling at ARI, occurred in 1994 when Peikoff excommunicated economist George Reisman and his wife, psychologist Edith Packer, the two who for a decade had been operating the ARI-affiliated Thomas Jefferson School (TJS), basically a summer school for Objectivists. In response, a number of former ARI stalwarts joined Reisman in virulently denouncing ARI and Peikoff. Both 1990s rifts have narrowed ARI's base of financial support and rendered the Objectivist movement no less unedifying a spectacle today than at the time of the Rand-Branden Break in 1968. Nonetheless, about 400,000 copies of books by Rand, or by her current or former followers, continue to sell every year, probably more than enough to keep up a constant flow of new recruits to Objectivism. The Ayn Rand cult is alive and well on planet Earth. pps. 1-9 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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