could you please prove that choosing life is the correct value vis-a-vis choosing death?

 

No, no one can appeal to logic for the answer to such a question without collapsing into circularity, because the concept of "value" (and the need of morality, which is "a code of values") only arises vis-a-vis living organisms and only when there is some alternative facing you from which you must choose in order for anything you do to matter.

Demanding a justification for valuing life as opposed to valuing death is a stolen concept fallacy because the choice to live or not arises in a context prior to any standard by which to determine what a person should do. Since the choice to live is what gives rise to values in the first place, all normative propositions depend on that presupposition because the struggle for life is what makes the achievement of certain ends necessary.

Thus it is a misunderstanding to state that life is just “the correct value, as opposed to death” but rather the source of moral values, which means the choice of whether or not to remain in reality apart from any ends is outside the scope of ethics (i.e. is pre-moral) because a rational morality must start with: “If I want to live, then...” Life is the only end in itself, requiring no further justification, because any other value depends upon you being alive, and being alive requires action, which requires you to know the general principles of action that will keep you alive and help you to flourish and achieve your values. Any other answer would assume you being alive and remaining in reality to accomplish that end, so one could keep asking “Why?” until one arrived back at the fact of being alive. Thus holding anything other than man's life qua man as a standard of value is a logical contradiction.

 

Rand touches on this aspect of metaethics in Galt's speech when Galt says: “My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these.” and explains why an organism's life is its standard of value in more detail in The Virtue of Selfishness and “Causality versus Duty” (in Philosophy: Who Needs It.) Mises takes a similar point of view in regards to his justification of utilitarianism, though he disbelieved in rational judgments of value.

Mises recognized that if you want to foster social cooperation, maximize wealth, prosperity, peace, and harmony, then you must have the institution of private property. “Morality consists in the regard for the necessary requirements of social existence that must be demanded of each individual....” “To the state of nature they have preferred the state of civilization, for they sought the closest possible attainment of certain ends—the preservation of life and health—which, as they rightly thought, require social cooperation. […] The ultimate yardstick of justice is conduciveness to the preservation of social cooperation. Conduct suited to preserve social cooperation is just, conduct detrimental to the preservation of society is unjust.”

As Roderick Long points out, if you replace “man's life qua man” with "social existence" and “social cooperation” in the above sentences, you have transformed Mises into Rand. Rand sort of combines virtue ethics and this consequentialist element in the same way to form a consistent rational moral theory: “If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.”

Initiate:

No, no one can appeal to logic for the answer to such a question without collapsing into circularity, because the concept of "value" (and the need of morality, which is "a code of values") only arises vis-a-vis living organisms and only when there is some alternative facing you from which you must choose in order for anything you do to matter.

I'll stop you here.  Can you prove that that concept of "value" is the correct one?

Can you prove that that concept of "value" is the correct one?

  

Yes, anyone can understand this quite easily, if nothing else for the fact that nothing can be valuable to a nonliving thing. The entire phenomenon of valuing presupposes the existence of life because there is nothing for a nonliving object to pursue, no alternatives confronting it, and nothing for it to act to gain or keep, and thus does not generate goal-directed action.

It is only living things that require values, and only to a living thing that something can be of value because every action faces alternatives (like "opportunity costs," so to speak.) One thing can only be of value for X if other things would be bad for X. Distinctions such as “good” or “bad/evil” only have relevance to a living thing that faces the alternative of death as the most fundamental "opportunity cost," so to speak.  So since life is a genetic root concept of the concept “value,” and makes the concept of “value” possible and necessary, asking to prove that choosing life as the “correct” value as opposed to death is like asking for some value beyond all value. It's the remnant of having a mystical frame of mind towards values (that is, that value is intrinsic, viz. the value of life is assumed to be intrinsically good, but as we can see, it's not because there is no such thing as intrinsic value.) If we reduce this down to the level of metaphysics, it would be like asking “can you prove existence exists as opposed to not existing” and demanding that someone prove existence by pointing to some fact beyond all existence. It's the same logical fallacy involved. One cannot go outside of the realm of existence by asking for its cause, nor can one go outside of the realm of values to point to any value "beyond" or "higher" to man's life and happiness. Not with logic anyway.

Actually, that is the point at which Rand starts her study of the field of ethics in The Virtue of Selfishness. Rand does not begin as most philosophers do by taking the existence of morality for granted. Instead of starting off explaining what men should do and why, what good and evil is and why, and so forth (i.e. what particular code of values should men pursue and why), if we are to formulate a rational theory of ethics, we have to start at the very beginning and ask what morality is in the first place. Rand begins her book by questioning why there should be values in the first place. Instead of “what particular code of values should men pursue and why” she asks “what are values and why do we need them?” Are they even necessary? What are the facts of reality and man's nature that give rise to values? I mean, maybe ethics is a bunch of nonsense, morality is irrelevant prattling of philosophers, or maybe there are no such things as “values” in the first place. So since ethics is a code of values, you have to begin with “what are values?” If you are interested in a rational ethics, you might want to read that, because no rational ethics can be discovered until the concept of values vis-a-vis the facts of reality and the nature of man that give rise to them is investigated and explained.

Initiate:

Can you prove that that concept of "value" is the correct one?

Yes, anyone can understand this quite easily, if nothing else for the fact that nothing can be valuable to a nonliving thing. The entire phenomenon of valuing presupposes the existence of life because there is nothing for a nonliving object to pursue, no alternatives confronting it, and nothing for it to act to gain or keep, and thus does not generate goal-directed action.

Whether a concept can be understood "quite easily" has nothing to do with whether that concept is correct.  Furthermore, in your attempt to prove the correctness of that particular concept (or definition) of "value", you presuppose the very concept you set out to prove.  As I'm sure you're aware, this is circular reasoning.

The fact of the matter is, concepts/definitions cannot be proven correct -- they can only be accepted or rejected.  And no one is obligated to accept the same concepts/definitions that you do.

 

Omg. Is it correct that concepts and definitions cannot be proven correct? Is it correct that they can only be accepted or rejected (i.e. are arbitrary)? What method are you going to use to prove that statement correct? What would you have to count on? This empiricist line of attack denying the validity of language and concepts is always a stolen concept fallacy: you are trying to use concepts, definitions, and words to attempt to prove correct that concepts, definitions and words can't be proven correct. You charge that I have assumed that which I wish to prove, but actually you have assumed that which you wish to disprove. At least you could try to be more consistent and say something like: “Adlkhdlkadlkjdasdlk, therefore you're wrong.”

Words stand for concepts, concepts refer to things in reality, and logic is the method of adhering to reality. Asserting that words and concepts are arbitrary is to assert that reality is arbitrary because only reality gives meaning to them, and is a presupposition in the demand to prove or disprove anything. Arbitrary means “without proof” as opposed to “with proof,” which counts on concepts, definitions, words, and logic to separate the arbitrary from the certain. Every concept is reached on the basis of observation and logical induction and deduction, and is reducible to the perceptual level, which is what I just did in the last two posts, recounting facts about the natures and actions of living organisms versus nonliving organisms and applying logic to these observations, showing that values logically presupposes life, and how its denial would contradict facts already known to exist. Falling back on “language is just arbitrary, no concepts can be proven correct” is just an evasion of the responsibility of thinking.

A better analogy would be if McDonald's accepted Big Mac deposits from customers who could "cash in" on them (i.e. get their Big Macs back) at any time.  Then McDonald's turns around and issues Big Mac loans to people using those same deposits.  So the question is, who owns the Big Macs -- the depositors, the borrowers, or McDonald's?

So if the bank's notes are clearly noted as redeemable pending supply, with the reserve rules of the bank printed directly on them, it's not fraud and can't be banned, right?

Kaz:

So if the bank's notes are clearly noted as redeemable pending supply, with the reserve rules of the bank printed directly on them, it's not fraud and can't be banned, right?

It is obvious that in our current statist world, anything can be banned or not banned.  Referral to logical reasoning in this case is futile.  

You should continue this debate here:

http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/6197.aspx?PageIndex=40

Initiate:

Omg. Is it correct that concepts and definitions cannot be proven correct?

It is true that concepts and definitions cannot be proven correct, based on the definitions I'm using (and presuming you're also using) for those words.

Initiate:

Is it correct that they can only be accepted or rejected (i.e. are arbitrary)?

Yes, per above.

Initiate:

What method are you going to use to prove that statement correct?

Proof by contradiction.

Initiate:

What would you have to count on?

I'm sorry but I don't understand this question.

Initiate:

This empiricist line of attack denying the validity of language and concepts is always a stolen concept fallacy: you are trying to use concepts, definitions, and words to attempt to prove correct that concepts, definitions and words can't be proven correct.

Perhaps you misunderstand what I mean by "correct".  Consider the famous Randian dictum otherwise known as the Law of Identity, "A = A".  Why should "A" be used there and not "B"?  Or "C"?  Or "42"?  What makes "A" the "correct" symbol to use there?

Here's another example.  Which is the correct word to use to describe electromagnetic energy with wavelength between 440 and 490 nm -- "blue", "azul", or "sininen"?

My point is that words are mere symbols.  They can mean whatever we want them to mean.  As Shakespeare put it, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

The whole idea of "the stolen-concept fallacy" is contradictory, as it implies that specific words are necessarily tied together with specific concepts.

Initiate:

You charge that I have assumed that which I wish to prove, but actually you have assumed that which you wish to disprove.

In light of what I've written above, what (according to you) have I assumed that I wish to disprove?

Initiate:

At least you could try to be more consistent and say something like: “Adlkhdlkadlkjdasdlk, therefore you're wrong.”

I fail to see how that would be more consistent.

Initiate:

Words stand for concepts, concepts refer to things in reality, and logic is the method of adhering to reality.  [Etc.]

My own definition of "logic" is such that it doesn't necessarily adhere to reality.  It only adheres to consistency of the symbols under consideration and their interactions.  Neither those symbols nor their interactions need to have any connection to reality in order for what I call "logic" to still work.

To clarify my position further, when you talked about "the concept of value", I thought you were implying that the word "value" necessarily points to a particular concept.  In other words, I thought you were saying "the word 'value' must necessarily mean this: ..."  If instead you were simply talking about something that (you believe) has been inferred from observation and given (by you) the label "value", I stand corrected.  However, inductive principles can never be said to be proven, as they rely upon empirical evidence and observation.  As any scientist knows, the set of empirical evidence and observation is never complete.

Initiate:

Falling back on “language is just arbitrary, no concepts can be proven correct” is just an evasion of the responsibility of thinking.

I'm not sure what logical relevance this apparent personal attack has to my argument.

Kaz:

So if the bank's notes are clearly noted as redeemable pending supply, with the reserve rules of the bank printed directly on them, it's not fraud and can't be banned, right?

That doesn't answer my question of who owns the deposited Big Macs or gold.

You should continue this debate here:

http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/6197.aspx?PageIndex=40

Sadly, the admin's overly-controlling theory of management includes objecting to the resumption of old threads, as well as the natural evolution of topics in existing threads. The theory of healthy board discussion is foreign to this realm.

Auto, since some are determined to keep the offtopic discussion going, what do you think I should name the thread I will split all of this offtopic stuff to?

You give it a name, I will do the work, and we can get this discussion about Objectivism and Austrianism back on track.

Well, some of the off-topic stuff involved fractional-reserve banking, which is already being followed up in a thread started by Kaz.  As for the rest... maybe you could call it "Why do Objectivists attack libertarians?"

By the way, I think my discussion with Initiate in this thread is on-topic.  Let me know if it isn't.  As far as I can tell, the fundamental distinction between Objectivism and Austrianism is in their treatment of "value".

I will try to organize your responses by topic.

 

 It is true that concepts and definitions cannot be proven correct, based on the definitions I'm using

Proof by contradiction.

I'm sorry but I don't understand this question. [Re: What would you have to count on?]

In light of what I've written above, what (according to you) have I assumed that I wish to disprove?

 

Your proof by contradiction fails because you are, and openly admit to, using definitions to prove that definitions cannot be proven correct. What you have to count on in order for your argument to work is definitions (and concepts and logic, which I will treat below) in your very attempt to show they cannot be proven correct. This is a classic skeptical argument collapsing into self-contradiction and absurdity. 

What makes "A" the "correct" symbol to use there?

Here's another example. Which is the correct word to use to describe electromagnetic energy with wavelength between 440 and 490 nm -- "blue", "azul", or "sininen"?

My point is that words are mere symbols.

[…]

it implies that specific words are necessarily tied together with specific concepts.

[…]

I thought you were implying that the word "value" necessarily points to a particular concept. In other words, I thought you were saying "the word 'value' must necessarily mean this: ..." If instead you were simply talking about something that (you believe) has been inferred from observation and given (by you) the label "value", I stand corrected

 

I see now where your confusion is coming from with regard to your asking my to prove my conception of “value.” Yes, words qua symbols (i.e. combinations of letters and sounds) are “arbitrary” in a sense that they strictly depend on the discoverer and labeler of a concept and whatever pronunciations and rules of grammar of the language he uses. You learn the correct existing word-unit relationship from others who already know the words (“cow”, “torque” and so on). When you invent a word to go with some concept (e.g. because you’ve invented some nifty new tool and you need a name for it), you have to make a choice. “Cow” is one word in English meaning a specific group of bovine animals, while " 牛" is the Japanese word meaning the same thing. It makes absolutely no difference epistemologically what sounds, letters, or symbol(s) is chosen to name things, provided that symbol refers to a clearly defined aspect of reality. Words and their definitions, however, are not “arbitrary” in a sense that they are used for a specific cognitive reason, and thus if I start using “cow” to refer to a random hash of things “cow, chicken, dog, cat, round, loud, gravity, inflation, property, law” then utter mental chaos results and language is useless and now does the opposite of what it is for (designating and retaining concepts, thus enabling you to think and deal with broad, complex information that otherwise would be impossible.)

From your objection that you thought I was trying to prove that there was something metaphysically in a concept which necessitated that particular combination of letters for a word leads me to believe that you think a definition states the meaning of a word and somehow necessitates a particular word in a given instance. But this is false because a word is merely a visual-auditory symbol used to represent a concept. In order for logic to even function, you have to have words to denote things. A word has no meaning other than that of the concept it symbolizes, and the meaning of a concept consists of its units. So a word is not a concept, a word is merely a perceptual symbol that stands for a concept.

The purpose of a definition is to distinguish a concept from all other concepts and thus to keep its units differentiated from all other existents. A definition helps us retain a long chain of knowledge about a concept's units by means of organizing and condensing its characteristics. Without words and definitions, reason would be practically impossible to use (you would have to start anew the entire process of abstracting every time you needed to think about any one given thing, there would be no way to order thoughts, any higher level concepts would be impossible to reach.) 

However, inductive principles can never be said to be proven, as they rely upon empirical evidence and observation. As any scientist knows, the set of empirical evidence and observation is never complete.

 

It's not true that the set of evidence is never complete. It depends on the context. But what you are saying is true in a sense that all knowledge is contextual. A way to picture this is like a skyscraper. The base is the fundamental axioms and perceptual observations, then first-level concepts are formed by isolating and integrating perceptually observed concretes, then wider concepts can be abstracted by isolating and integrating those, and so on. Higher level concepts consist of long chains of abstractions and classifications (this is impossible without precise definitions), but they are always reducible to their base in perceptual reality (that is actually what I meant by “anyone can understand it” earlier, not that that constituted the proof.) So the skyscraper has its base and gets more and more bricks added on to it as knowledge expands, as we become aware of more things, and as more things confront our awareness, or new knowledge is discovered. This means knowledge is hierarchical in nature because wider concepts derived from earlier narrower concepts (which constitute its “genetic roots,” and the attempt to ignore or invalidate a concept's genetic roots constitutes a stolen concept fallacy.) e.g. If you haven't grasped “parent” then you couldn't grasp “orphan.”

So, the point I'm trying to explain here is that the structure of man's knowledge is contextual and hierarchical, therefore so are definitions. We are not even talking about Ayn Rand now, but Aristotle and his “rule of definitions,” which is that a proper definition must consist of a genus and differentia. Words in a definition used to denote genus and differentia have definitions too, e.g. definition of “man” as “rational animal” depends entirely on the definition of “rational” (differentia) and “animal” (genus.) The precision of the definition depends on this structure and the structure of the definitions of its genus and differentia. So, as knowledge grows, context grows (concepts are open-ended), definitions are simply updated, refined, expanded, etc. with the expansion of one's knowledge. If done correctly, a newer definition won't contradict the older one. A definition can only reflect the context of knowledge available at that time, and a the definition which is objective is the one that does exactly that. (An example Rand gives is a child who in effect defines “man” as “a thing that moves and make noises.” This is obviously correct, and all that is possible given the child's context. It doesn't contradict Aristotle's more essential definition of “rational animal” because “animal” includes “thing that moves and make noises” in its referents.) 

My own definition of "logic" is such that it doesn't necessarily adhere to reality. It only adheres to consistency of the symbols under consideration and their interactions. Neither those symbols nor their interactions need to have any connection to reality in order for what I call "logic" to still work.

 

The doctrine of empiricism is that analytical statements are independent of experience. They are just symbols under consideration, “castles in the air,” with no connection to reality, e.g. all bachelors are married. Thus, a true analytic statement is necessarily true, because it follows from logical necessity due to the symbols used, but they bear no relation to experience. Empirical statements, by contrast, are devoid of logical necessity, and thus “contingent” on experience. e.g. All bachelors are happy. A true empirical statement bears no logical necessity however, because the symbols involved, and it could have been otherwise in reality. (If this is to be taken as an empirical statement itself, then it has no connection to reality on its own terms, or else it is an analytical statement and yet contradicts itself, but I will dispense with that criticism in order to explain the Objectivist view of logic.)

Since we have seen that knowledge is contextual, there can be no such thing as “out of context knowledge” because it would have no bearing on reality, like a floating skyscraper without a base. All knowledge is acquired on the basis of previous knowledge, which means it has to be integrated into a non-contradictory whole. The method used is logic, which means logic is applied to experience to gain true and valid knowledge. If logic doesn't adhere to reality, then you are stating logic is meaningless because there is nothing else for logic to adhere to. There is nothing else for something to be "logically true" of. A statement without connection to reality is arbitrary, i.e. without rational basis, i.e. meaningless. This is a failure to grasp the metaphysical basis of laws of logic.

All truth involves adherence to the law of identity. Logic is never divorced from reality because the law of identity forms the basis of the laws of logic. It is not merely just “A is A,” again the symbol itself is not relevant. The point is what it means: “What is is, what is not is not. A thing is itself.” and then we can deduce its corollaries, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of excluded middle, and so forth. All truths are “tautological” in the sense that all truths reflect the fact that A is A. By the same token, all falsehoods are self-contradictions. Therefore there is no “necessary versus contingent” or “analytic versus synthetic,” only “true versus false.” Experience will always bear out what it logically must and it could not be another way. The laws of nature are inherent in the identities of the entities that exist. The violation of a law of nature would require that an entity act in contradiction with its nature, that is, it would require a contradiction.

Secondly, the implicit assumption in the “logic versus experience” dichotomy is that a concept consists only of its definition. But above we have seen this is false, as a concept consists of its units, and all their characteristics and referents in reality. “X is: one more more of that things which it is.” The predicate in that proposition states some characteristics of the subject, but since it is a characteristic of the subject, the concept designating the subject, X, includes the predicate from the outset. Therefore an "empirical" statement such as X does Y is "tautological" in a sense because Y is within the nature of the entity X, it is one of the ways in which X can act by its nature. X cannot not act according to its nature, or violate its nature.

Thus, there is no such thing as “empirically true versus logically true.” A true proposition is necessarily, empirically, logically, true, all these being redundancies. A “contingent truth” or “logical, but not factual” or “factual by not logical” or “logical but not empirical” truth is a self-contradiction. All truth is a product of the logical identification of the facts of reality (experience), because reason identifies and integrates observations into concepts. Reason itself is the application of logic to experience, the fundamental base of which is the law of identity. Without the use of logic, man has no way of drawing conclusions solely from his perceptual data. e.g. if you see a lamp, your eyes alone won't give you “lamp.” Logic must be employed at every step of concept formation, from induction from observation, to deduction from previously-known facts. The same eliminates the dichotomy between a priori and a posteriori, which is an actual disagreement with some Austrian economists' epistemology. 

the fundamental distinction between Objectivism and Austrianism is in their treatment of "value".

 

According to Rand, “the market value of a product does not reflect its philosophically objective value.” By "philosophically objective value" she means morally right value: those things that people ought act to gain and/or keep based on the biological and psychological requirements and needs of human survival and flourishing. But rather, Rand states, “its socially objective value,” i.e. “the sum of the individual judgments of all the men involved in trade at a given time, the sum of what they valued, each in the context of his own life.” (Cf. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.) This is pretty much parallel with Menger's original explanation. Here, Rand agrees that prices in the aggregate are rhe sum of all individual choices about valuations and exchanges. She apparently just doesn't like the term “subjective value theory” because that has certain implications. Other Objectivists simply use the term “economically subjective” just to differentiate between ethics and economics.

Thus it should be clear that the Objectivists don't really treat value any different in the field of economics. In ethics, it a different case, but this is not “a main difference with Austrians” because again Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Rothbard, Reisman among other Austrian economists and intellectuals do not disbelieve in objective moral values to different extents (they have different opinions on morality.) So it's not even that Objectivists treat value different, it's just that some of the people in this thread apparently have a strange inability to isolate economics from ethics and apparently think they're the same thing.

Anyone who can't grasp this can simply read the first chapter of Human Action, or Man, Economy, and State, Chapter 1: “The Fundamentals of Human Action,” p. 73-74

“Praxeology, therefore, differs from psychology or from the philosophy of ethics. Since all these disciplines deal with the subjective decisions of individual human minds, many observers have believed that they are fundamentally identical. This is not the case at all. Psychology and ethics deal with the content of human ends; they ask, why does the man choose such and such ends, or what ends should men value? Praxeology and economics deal with any given ends and with the formal implications of the fact that men have ends and employ means to attain them. Praxeology and economics are therefore disciplines separate and distinct from the others.

[...]

To sum up the relationship and the distinctions between praxeology and each of the other disciplines, we may describe them as follows:

􀁺 Why man chooses various ends: psychology.

􀁺 What men’s ends should be: philosophy of ethics. also: philosophy of aesthetics.

􀁺 How to use means to arrive at ends: technology.

􀁺 What man’s ends are and have been, and how man has used means in order to attain them: history.

􀁺 The formal implications of the fact that men use means to attain various chosen ends: praxeology.”

Man, Economy, and State, Chapter 12: “The Economics of Violent Intervention in the Market,” p. 1029 n141, Rothbard explains that economics is Wertfrei and does not make value-judgments. But that doesn't mean that he, qua ethicist, won't make value-judgments, just that they are outside of the scope of economics and praxeology (and thus the current volume.) “Ultimate ethical principles and choices are outside the scope of this book. This, of course, does not mean that the present author deprecates their importance. On the contrary, he believes that ethics is a rational discipline.”

I mean, for all the people insisting oh, those Objectivists just don't think and are just dogmatic robots, (I know because Rothbard said so in an article I read on LRC, yay independent thought!) it strikes me as ironic that some of these “Austrians” have no clue what Austrian economics even says before pronouncing knowledge about it, and even less clue of what Rand says before condemning her.

note: the history of this forum shows that the length of a post is inversely proportional to the likelihood of a reply.

anyway, how is the Objectivist contention that "the objective moral rules stem from the notion that life/thriving is good and death is bad" different from Mises's noting that if you want to live/thrive, you will want to follow certain rules?

rather than the word "objective value" it seems the term you are looking for is "nearly universal value"---because your argument seems to be that it is this nearly universal desire to live and thrive that makes these values "objective". correct me if i'm wrong, preferably succinctly.

Oh crap, objectivists are automatically hostile? Let me take a sec to mark that down in my Dagny Taggart trapper keeper so I can remember. Just for the record I'm reasonably certain the vast majority of objectivists would agree that Rand could be wrong about something, aside from the hardest of the hard core. Of course, no one in the anarchist/libertarian camp has that problem at all. I've only been checking out what is seriously said by libertarians for a few weeks and I can assure you there are quite a few people advocating some pretty wild ideas and insane suggestions in the name of "anarchy" that isn't really backed up by any of the many intelligent philosophers of ethos. So it might be useful for all of us to valet park our high horses and take a serious look at what's out there. Just maybe Rand's advocacy of minarchy could be an honest assessment regarding the human condition and what is possible given current social technology. Something that can change if honest debate regarding that possiblity is attempted rather than half assed minimally informed criticisims. And maybe Rand's critique of libertarianism and anarchism having no grounded philosophic base and letting any jackass with the right t-shirt through the door is a relevant problem to any worthwhile libertarian/anarchist movement. A lot of people use the title objectivist have some wild ideas that they can't really justify with any actual connection to the philosophy. Trust me, you get the same with libertarians and anarchists.

 

As a final note I'd like to point out that one of the works I was steered toward from this board regarding functional anarchy (which was a good read btw) had the author explicitly stating that he would take minarchy if that was the best he could wrangle out of his fellow man and that some parts of the best possible vision of an ancap system just aren't workable at the moment. As someone who identifies fairly strongly with objectivism I can assure you there are things both sides can learn from the other.

Kaiser434:

As a final note I'd like to point out that one of the works I was steered toward from this board regarding functional anarchy (which was a good read btw) had the author explicitly stating that he would take minarchy if that was the best he could wrangle out of his fellow man and that some parts of the best possible vision of an ancap system just aren't workable at the moment. As someone who identifies fairly strongly with objectivism I can assure you there are things both sides can learn from the other.

If a stateless society isn't workable now, when will it be?

I'll be more specific. Some aspects of a stateless society are not technically feasible now without demanding that mountains of corpses and rivers of blood be produced in an effort to go cold turkey. Having seen enough corpses in my time I find it preferable to advocate a transition to a minimal government with the understanding that I'm reasonably certain that the "minimum" can be "none". Some things I can envision in the most desireable system I can think of cannot be instantly adopted now. In much the same way that if I was doing that thinking 500 years ago there wouldn't be the communication technology to make certain aspects happen immediately.

An example would be that I think its a bit more feasible to wean ourselves off programs like social security and medicare at the maximum speed that it is possible to do so without having to hire people to haul away the corpses of the poor bastards unlucky enough to have been forced to participate at the point of a gun. There are things politically or in society that I want that I can't make happen tommorrow, maybe not in this lifetime, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't set more realistic goals and refusing to acknowledge one's situation is counter-productive.

The short answer? As fast as the people who believe in it can manage it.

There's no much point arguing with some kinds of Objectivists.They are plain cultist crazy.

So they're people? How do the all the other ideologies out there manage to keep all the cultist crazy people out?

I prefer to judge philosophy on the basis of it's merit, not the lowest common denominator of crazy a-hole that can parrot it.

But then again I guess "You just can't deal with them crazies" is a form of intellectual discourse as well.

Call Guinness!  Three flags of ignorance in just 15 words! 

1) characterizing people as "crazy" unaccompanied by evidence of such

2) claiming a cultist could qualify as an adherent to a philosophy in which rationality and independence top its list of virtues.

3) considering this sentence to be a cogent contribution to a forum of serious ideas. 

Michael M:

Call Guinness!  Three flags of ignorance in just 15 words! 

"1) characterizing people as "crazy" unaccompanied by evidence of such"

Largely for the reasons mentioned by others above.Also for there extreme hostility to libertarians calling them "libtards" or "socialists"(which may or may not be true)

"2) claiming a cultist could qualify as an adherent to a philosophy in which rationality and independence top its list of virtues."

That's the worst part of Objectivism.It claims one thing and does another.I think Rothbard has explained what I mean and to some extent such an attitude still exists except amongst the most unorthodox or post objectivists.

"3) considering this sentence to be a cogent contribution to a forum of serious ideas. "

It wasn't really trying to get involved in a debate just a passing remark.I've spent to much time and effort arguing with Randians that sometimes I think it's a waste of time.In this case it is for me especially as others are roughly arguing what I would.The criticisms are all largely available all over the net  in anycase.I don't worry though.The isolated randian cult will never get very far.

 

 

Well, if you've managed to reach the pinnacle of your development enough to feel like arguing with an opposing viewpoint prehaps you'll decide to stretch those intellectual wings a bit more and decide not to make half assed comments in a public forum that you aren't interested in backing up or taking seriously. If you were just "making a passing remark" to screw with a semi-group of people (which I suspect you didn't expect to actually have within notice) then identify yourself as such so everyone can wave at the troll.

BTW what kind of lame ass justification is "other people made my point earlier", "it's all over the internet", and "some objectivists are really mean and call names". On an anarchy related website nonetheless. A real champion of individuality, nonconformity and thinking for yourself.

To the extent that I agree with objectivism (I do have disagreements) you seem like someone who doesn't have a clue what they're talking about aside from interpersonal problems with people who self labeled as "objectivists". To the extent I'm a philosopher who likes discussion (100%) you seem to be making an asinine ad hominem to back up what you thought was a little quick epeen stroking on a sympathetic medium but got called on. Sorry to ruin your fun. If you want to type your mind with no interaction you know you can just pull up wordpad and type there, right?

Now let's see if we can rescue some valuable knowledge from your inappropriate comment that will help you (and other lurking minds) from ever debilitating their own positions that way. 

The error at the root of your comment was confusing the subject of this (and any other respectable forum) to be personalities instead of ideas. When you say about Objectivism, "It claims one thing and does another," you have deceitfully switched the context mid-sentence. Objectivism is a philosophy—a body of ideas. While you may say that those ideas constitute claims, you may not say that the philosophy "does" anything with them, in the sense you meant of "acts on them in a certain way."  People act according to ideas, philosophies don't. 

What people do with ideas is never relevant to the validity of the ideas themselves. Those stand alone on their own merit or not. The subject of Ayn Rand, her character, actions, motives, etc. or any other person who correctly or incorrectly understands and advocates the tenets of her philosophy have no bearing on the validity or value of the philosophy itself.

Your judgment of them and their actions is just that, a judgement of them as people. To comment on the philosophy, you must restrict your text to judgments of the ideas that are the philosophy's content and why your judgment is valid. You could have learned from her a valuable lesson: In the context of philosophy, only ideas matter.

So, the next time you are called a "libtard," take the high ground armed with the above explanation.

 

i am just for the first time thanks to lewrockwell.com/mises.org learning about hans-hermann hoppe and his 'argumentation ethics' and there is a big appearance in certain points of this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI-RUPQ9RdA of the term 'objective' in relation to the conflict-generating nature of fiat declarations of ownership. in my reading of mises so far he goes so far as to assert that all action is rational, the base of the logic for private property is not shown but instead the results are demonstrated and therefore asigned a positive value. since the O word came up in hoppe's discussion and logic in, amusingly enough, relation to the concept of fiat declaration, now i am wondering what the objectivist view is in relation to these. for those unfamiliar with hoppe, he argues for two aprioristic, non-contradictory axioms, specifically: that of self ownership, which is fundamentally based in your ability to disagree and express that disagreement, and that of appropriation of property through first use. through demonstrating that the first rule is contradicted in a case of communist shared ownership or slavery (the former you cannot have a discussion about what to do because you need permission from all others in the society, the latter the contradiction lies in the fact that the slave can argue and is not simply a puppet or automaton). the second extends from the first because first of all an unowned good is not taken from anyone else, and that no prior claim exists to contradict the first owner, and this reinforces back into the first rule because implicitly one is the first exerting control over the self. this seems to me like an objective basis for ethics, as a relative newcomer to libertarian and objectivist theory, how does this relate to both?

I'm not quite as familiar with Hoppe as I would like to be yet, but self ownership as a base of property rights along with the extension of property rights to things that one mixes one's labor with are fundamental in objectivist ethics. I don't recall self ownership being presented in the format of being able to disagree or agree (it's implicit), but presented as a simple necessity of the human survival mechanism. Man's method of survival being the mind means that it's use and the products of it's use must be unfettered to function properly.

"@ liberty student,

"Objectivist dogma" is an oxymoron. Since intellectual independence is a primary virtue of the philosophy's ethics, treating any of it as dogma by its author or any student, fan, or adherent would disqualify them from being or claiming to be an Objectivist. Consequently, such accusations tell one more about the accuser than the accused.

Also, I am wondering why you asserted that I was making unsupported assertions, and then failed to support that assertion. While you are at it, you might also support your assertions of strawman arguments and contradictions ..."

 

Accusations might tell us something about the accuser, but it might tell us different things, so it's speculation in my opinion. It might tell us that the accuser doesn't like Objectivism, or for example it might tell us that the accuser has met lots of Objectivists that did absolutely nothing to question anything Rand ever said and did nothing to logically prove their arguments other than going "it's self-evident and if you disagree then you're anti-life" as I'm sure has happened to many people (myself included) who have spoken with Objectivists. If you wanna say "they're not "real" Objectivists" even though they clearly follow leaders in the movement, that to me seems like a No True Scotsman fallacy.

 

 

Anyways, rights don't need a state to defend them. The assertion that they do is demonstrably false: if a burglar tries to rob me and I shoot him, stopping the robbery, then I have defended my rights. Maybe you weren't asserting that rights need a state to defend them though and were just saying that Objectivists think that rights need a state to defend them.

"Objectivist dogma" is an oxymoron. Since intellectual independence is a primary virtue of the philosophy's ethics, treating any of it as dogma by its author or any student, fan, or adherent would disqualify them from being or claiming to be an Objectivist. Consequently, such accusations tell one more about the accuser than the accused.

What a beautiful piece of unintentional irony: That is a dogmatic argument.

That Objectivism has been dogmatic from the start illustrates the hypocrisy and circular reasoning of the entire philosophy.

Claiming Objectivist just CANNOT be dogmatic, because of dogmatic adherence to its own claims of objectivity, is just the most precious bit of intellectual naïvetë I've encountered in a long time.

...and considering the "FRB is fraud" debate, that's saying a lot.

@ Kaz

"That is a dogmatic argument."

You have characterized it as such, but you have not demonstrated that it actually applies.

If the ethics of a philosophy holds intellectual independence as a primary virtue, then it implicitly condemns dogma of every kind. You need to put some meat on your unsubstantiated assertions if you want any of the lurking honest minds to take you seriously. To wit:

1) What specific idea or ideas that are tenets of Objectivism contradict the conclusion that rationality and independence are primary human virtues? 

2) What specific part of the Objectivist epistemology and/or ethics concludes that the philosophy should be adopted unchallenged on faith in an authority?

Note that since Ayn Rand specifically advised her fans to never adopt any of her ideas without validating them on their own and to never claim to hold philosophical ideas they do not live by, you will have to find some specific idea in the philosophy itself that would contradict her. It will not be sufficient to recount your personal experiences with people who say they agree with the philosophy, because whether the argument above is dogmatic or not is not relevant to personalities or their relationship with Rand or the philosophy. Only the ideas matter. 

What is the objectivist view of suicide? Is it objectively wrong? Immoral?

One might expect that an egoist ethics whose purpose is eudaimonia might prohibit suicide, but if we examine the issue we can see that this is not so. It depends on the context involved. Suicide can be proper under certain circumstances and improper under others, all relative to an individual's personal values and the context of his life. An example of the former would be when value-pursuit becomes impossible to a person due to certain situations, death may then be preferable to living, e.g. a person with terminal illness, an alternative to living as a slave, a prisoner of a dictatorship, John Galt's promise to Dagny in Atlas Shrugged, etc. A life-based code of morality cannot be maintained “at any cost” because the concept eudaimonia is about more than mere morgue-avoidance. There is no rational moral obligation to continue living “no matter what.” A person can only experience the value of life through those particular values chosen. Egoism is about loving life, but the source of one's love of life is those particular values that fill your life. (You can't be in love with “life” or “value” as an abstraction.) Also, risking one's life may be necessary, if and when crucial values are at stake, (for an example see We the Living.)

 

An example of the latter would be probably the vast majority of suicidal cases, viz., when someone's self-destructive ideas results in misery which they could escape by being rational, working on themselves, and eventually improving their mental health so they can enjoy life, e.g. most depressed or suffering people in the world dealing with unnecessary guilt, loneliness, frustration, repression, despair, and so forth. (for an example see Peter Keating in The Fountainhead.) We can observe that most suicidal people are not simply making a pre-rational decision to choose death as opposed to life, but actually are choosing life and simply acting contrary to reality's requirements for successful living.. Most people experience suffering because they have wracked themselves with contradictions and allow themselves to be victimized by irrational premises, values, and pursuits which all have negative consequences for a person. Since they are waging a war against reality and losing, they could therefore fix it by correcting their mistakes and renew successful value-achievement, thus successful living. But only the use of reason can discover and apply the cures to relieve human suffering. Since (after one has chosen to live) a decision to then commit suicide depends on the particular values one chooses and the context of their life, a decision to commit suicide can be irrational then, insofar as a person chooses faulty values and/or has false beliefs about the attainability of their values. (e.g. A person might be wrong about the severity of one's illness and the prospects for treating it.)

 

If you're asking about the political implications, the answer is that as a consequence of individual rights, you own your life and your body and have a right to commit suicide or ask another to assist.

One might expect that an egoist ethics whose purpose is eudaimonia might prohibit suicide, but if we examine the issue we can see that this is not so. It depends on the context involved. Suicide can be proper under certain circumstances and improper under others, 

The choice between life and death is identical in every respect to the choice between apples and bananas. Both are chosen subjectively, the value of each choice is not inherent in the object but in the subject. It is of course true that life is necessary for valuation to take place, but that does not mean that it has some kind of special priority when it comes to actual valuation.

Your argument is oddly reminiscent of he Marxist argument for the labour theory of value. They maintain that because labour is necessary for any kind of good to be produced, that it is labour itself that imbues it with value, or rather that value can be measured via labour. You are simply making the same mistake but swapping labour for life. It is perfectly rational to choose leisure over labour (despite the fact that labour is necessary for value to exist) and it is also perfectly rational to choose death over life (despite the fact that life is necessary for value to exist).

.

Clearly the choice between life or death is not “identical in every aspect” as between apples and bananas, because choosing an apple or a banana does not remove you from existence and prevent you from valuing it or anything else. It appears you are otherwise in agreement, but have confused objective with intrinsic. Objectivity is not the theory which holds value is inherent in any object. All value is subjective in the narrow sense that it is dependent on a subject (“of value to whom”), but rational moral values are not subjective in the sense that the good or evil is created by the subject and bears no relations to the facts of reality. In other words, yes, there is no good or evil outside of a person for something to be good or evil to, but its objective goodness or evilness depends upon the relationship of some aspect of reality to that person (“of value for what”). You cannot divorce value from valuer, or from purpose without collapsing into circularity. (See previous posts on the issue.)

The alternative you offer is the intrinsic theory as exemplified in the labor theory of value, which was conceived by the classical economists, not the Marxists. The labor theory holds value is intrinsic by the very nature of a specific action regardless of any benefit or consequences it has on the subject. It is “imbued” as you say, apart from any connections with the valuer. But a rational theory does not hold such a premise. The objectivity of values stems from the relationship of a given aspect of reality to the subject and its life-affirming or life-destroying effects on the subject, so your comparison to the labor theory of value is a straw man. Items requiring the same amount of labor to produce could be valued differently to different people all with differing, but necessary objective consequences for the life and well-being of those valuing individuals. I presume you would not object to the fact that entities in reality do have objective effects and consequences on the survival and success of human beings and that these facts of reality are not to be altered by your subjective preferences, emotions, or whims. And you already have recognized that life is necessary for value to even exist and for valuations to take place. So let's proceed to take the consequences of these facts. There is no arbitrary priority given to life-pursuers over death-pursuers, there is only the fact that there is no "value" apart from life. The fact that some people do not act to affirm life does not compromise the objectivity of values, because it does not alter the fact that, at the end of the day, for those who wish to live, only certain principles of action will suffice. If an individual chooses not to remain living, then nothing will be valuable any longer, except briefly those principles of action necessary to remove him from reality.

It is perfectly rational to choose death over life in certain situations, as I have said. An example of a rational decision to prefer death to life is in Atlas Shrugged. It can also be an irrational decision premised on and derived from falsehoods, as I have shown. It can also be a totally arbitrary and random decision with no connection to morality except insofar as it removes the need of it. It seems like you wanted me to say “yes, all suicide is intrinsically evil,” but that is not the case, so it appears you just ignored the actual answer and proceeded anyway.

relieving discomfort is not neccessarily life affirming. what about a dose of heroin strong enough to cause breathing to stop? do you think a heroin addict really cares? anyone who's got the bad luck of having the job of giving them narcaine certainly wouldn't support the notion that people choose things because they are life affirming.

to suggest that there is any objective means to measure the effects of choices and actions on an individual is patently absurd. this is the exact same type of mistake as the mathematical economists thinking they can reduce a complex system of individuals to simple differential mathematics. oh, you *can* model human behaviour with computational systems, but not on paper, unless you got a few hundred years to do the calculations...

"It is perfectly rational to choose death over life in certain situations"

This is the crux of it. You are wrong here, it is ALWAYS rational to choose death over life IF that is what is actually chosen. From what I can gather you appear
to be designating an act irrational on the basis of an arbitrary distinction between the circumstances of the valuer. If the valuer is a slave/terminally ill/prisoner then rational, if the valuer is depressed/miserable then irrational. Well I suppose it is not entirely arbitary, what you have actually done is said "physical illness/restraint = bad" therefore suicide is fine. Whereas "mental issues = no big deal" therefore suicide is not ok. I could quite reasonably cook up a philosophy called 'Neo-objectivism' or whatever, and argue the exact inverse, and I would be equally wrong!

Other than the above you run into a further problem and that is the fact that these
things are continuums. Illness/depression/slavery and so forth have every kind of severity and gradation, and each circumstance of each person experiencing
these things is of course unique. At what point does someone become physically ill enough for you to call them rational to commit suicide? To attempt to differentiate these things and fit them into an arbitrary rational/irrational straitjacket, as determined by an agency external to the actual valuer, is outside the bounds of reason.

If the ethics of a philosophy holds intellectual independence as a primary virtue, then it implicitly condemns dogma of every kind.

Because Objectivism attempts to "prove" what is "objectively moral" using circular reasoning and other leaps of faith, its means of arriving at, and what it DEFINES AS, "intellectual independence" already depend upon dogma.

"Anyone who isn't intellectually independent (by our definition) isn't really an Objectivist at all" is a self-affirmingly dogmatic argument.

The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult

by Murray N. Rothbard

Written in 1972, this was the first piece of Rand revisionism from the libertarian standpoint.

In the America of the 1970s we are all too familiar with the religious cult, which has been proliferating in the last decade. Characteristic of the cult (from Hare Krishna to the "Moonies" to EST to Scientology to the Manson Family) is the dominance of the guru, or Maximum Leader, who is also the creator and ultimate interpreter of a given creed to which the acolyte must be unswervingly loyal. The major if not the only qualification for membership and advancement in the cult is absolute loyalty to and adoration of the guru, and absolute and unquestioning obedience to his commands. The lives of the members are dominated by the guru’s influence and presence. If the cult grows beyond a few members, it naturally becomes hierarchically structured, if only because the guru cannot spend his time indoctrinating and watching over every disciple. Top positions in the hierarchy are generally filled by the original handful of disciples, who come to assume these positions by virtue of their longer stint of loyal and devoted service. Sometimes the top leadership may be related to each other, a useful occurrence which can strengthen intra-cult loyalty through the familial bond.

The goals of the cult leadership are money and power. Power is achieved over the minds of the disciples through inducing them to accept without question the guru and his creed. This devotion is enforced through psychological sanctions. For once the acolyte is imbued with the view that approval of, and communication with, the guru are essential to his life, then the implicit and explicit threat of excommunication – of removal from the direct or indirect presence of the guru – creates a powerful psychological sanction for the "enforcement" of loyalty and obedience. Money flows upward from the members through the hierarchy, either in the form of volunteer labor service contributed by the members, or through cash payments.

It should be clear at this point in history that an ideological cult can adopt the same features as the more overtly religious cult, even when the ideology is explicitly atheistic and anti-religious. That the cults of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao are religious in nature, despite the explicit atheism of the latter, is by now common knowledge. The adoration of the cult founder and leader, the hierarchical structure, the unswerving loyalty, the psychological (and when in command of State power, the physical) sanctions are all too evident.

The Exoteric and the Esoteric

Every religious cult has two sets of differing and distinctive creeds: the exoteric and the esoteric. The exoteric creed is the official, public doctrine, the creed which attracts the acolyte in the first place and brings him into the movement as a rank-and-file member. The quite different creed is the unknown, hidden agenda, a creed which is only known to its full extent by the top leadership, the "high priests" of the cult. The latter are the keepers of the Mysteries of the cult.

But cults become particularly fascinating when the esoteric and exoteric creeds are not only different, but totally and glaringly in mutual contradiction. The havoc that this fundamental contradiction plays in the minds and lives of the disciples may readily be imagined. Thus, the various Marxist-Leninists cults officially and publicly extol Reason and Science, and denounce all religion, and yet the members are mystically attracted to the cult and its alleged infallibility.

Thus, Alfred G. Meyer writes of Leninist views on party infallibility:

 

Lenin seems to have believed that the party, as organized consciousness, consciousness as a decision-making machinery, had superior reasoning power. Indeed, in time this collective body took on an aura of infallibility, which was later elevated to a dogma, and a member’s loyalty was tested, in part, by his acceptance of it. It became part of the communist confession of faith to proclaim that the party was never wrong.... The party itself never makes mistakes.¹

If the glaring inner contradictions of the Leninist cults make them intriguing objects of study, still more so is the Ayn Rand cult, which, while in some sense is still faintly alive, flourished for just ten years in the 1960s; more specifically, from the founding of the Nathaniel Branden lecture series in early 1958 to the Rand-Branden split ten years later. For not only was the Rand cult explicitly atheist, anti-religious, and an extoller of Reason; it also promoted slavish dependence on the guru in the name of independence; adoration and obedience to the leader in the name of every person’s individuality; and blind emotion and faith in the guru in the name of Reason.

Virtually every one of its members entered the cult through reading Rand’s lengthy novel Atlas Shrugged, which appeared in late 1957, a few months before the organized cult came into being. Entering the movement through a novel meant that despite repeated obeisances to Reason, febrile emotion was the driving force behind the acolyte’s conversion. Soon, he found that the Randian ideology sketched out in Atlas was supplemented by a few non-fiction essays, and, in particular, by a regular monthly magazine, The Objectivist Newsletter (later, The Objectivist).

The Index of Permitted Books

Since every cult is grounded on a faith in the infallibility of the guru, it becomes necessary to keep its disciples in ignorance of contradictory infidel writings which may wean cult members away from the fold. The Catholic Church maintained an Index of Prohibited Books; more sweeping was the ancient Muslim cry: "Burn all books, for all truth is in the Koran!" But cults, which attempt to mold every member into a rigidly integrated world view, must go further. Just as Communists are often instructed not to read anti-Communist literature, the Rand cult went further to disseminate what was virtually an Index of Permitted Books. Since most neophyte Randians were both young and relatively ignorant, a careful channeling of their reading insured that they would remain ignorant of non- or anti-Randian ideas or arguments permanently (except as they were taken up briefly, brusquely, and in a highly distorted and hectoring fashion in Randian publications).

The philosophical rationale for keeping Rand cultists in blissful ignorance was the Randian theory of "not giving your sanction to the Enemy." Reading the Enemy (which, with a few carefully selected exceptions, meant all non- or anti-Randians) meant "giving him your moral sanction," which was strictly forbidden as irrational. In a few selected cases, limited exceptions were made for leading cult members who could prove that they had to read certain Enemy works in order to refute them. This book-banning reached its apogee after the titanic Rand-Branden split in late 1968, a split which was the moral equivalent in miniature of, say, a split between Marx and Lenin, or between Jesus and St. Paul. In a development eerily reminiscent of the organized hatred directed against the arch-heretic Emanuel Goldstein in Orwell’s 1984, Rand cultists were required to sign a loyalty oath to Rand; essential to the loyalty oath was a declaration that the signer would henceforth never read any future works of the apostate and arch-heretic Branden. After the split, any Rand cultist seen carrying a book or writing by Branden was promptly excommunicated. Close relatives of Branden were expected to – and did – break with him completely.

Interestingly enough for a movement which proclaimed its devotion to the individual exertion of reason, to curiosity, and to the question "Why?" cultists were required to swear their unquestioning belief that Rand was right and Branden wrong, even though they were not permitted to learn the facts behind the split. In fact, the mere failure to take a stand, the mere attempt to find the facts, or the statement that one could not take a stand on such a grave matter without knowledge of the facts was sufficient for instant expulsion. For such an attitude was conclusive proof of the defective "loyalty" of the disciple to his guru, Ayn Rand.

Steel-Hardened Cadre Man

Frank Meyer writes, in his The Moulding of Communists,² of the series of crises that Communists repeatedly go through in their career in the Party. From his account, it is clear that the rank-and-file member joins the party from being attracted to the official or exoteric creed; but, as he continues in the Party and rises through its hierarchical structures, he is confronted with a series of crises that test his mettle, that either drive him out of the party or convert him increasingly into a steel-hardened cadre man. The crises might be ideological, say, justifying slave labor camps or the Stalin-Hitler pact, or it might be personal, to demonstrate that one’s loyalty to the party is higher than to friends, family, or loved ones. The continuing pressure of such crises leads, unsurprisingly, to a very high turnover in Communist ranks, creating a sea of ex-Communists far larger than the party itself at any given time.

A similar but far more intensive process remained at work throughout the years of the Randian movement The Randian neophyte typically joined the movement emotionally caught by Atlas and impressed by the concepts of reason, liberty, individuality, and independence. A series of crises and growing inner contradictions was then necessary to gain power over the minds and lives of the membership, and to inculcate absolute loyalty to Rand, both in ideological matters and in personal lives. But what mechanisms did the cult leaders use to develop such blind loyalty?

One method, as we have seen, was to keep the members in ignorance. Another was to insure that every spoken and written word of the Randian member was not only correct in content but also in form, for any slight nuance or difference in wording could and would be attacked for deviating from the Randian position. Thus, just as the Marxist movements developed jargon and slogans which were clung to for fear of uttering incorrect deviations, the same was true in the Randian movement. In the name of "precision of language," in short, nuance and even synonyms were in effect prohibited.

Another method was to keep the members, as far as possible, in a state of fevered emotion through continual re-readings of Atlas. Shortly after Atlas was published, one high-ranking cult leader chided me for only having read Atlas once. "It’s about time for you to start reading it again," he admonished. "I have already read Atlas thirty-five times."

The rereading of Atlas was also important to the cult because the wooden, posturing, and one-dimensional heroes and heroines were explicitly supposed to serve as role models for every Randian. Just as every Christian is supposed to aim at the imitation of Christ in his own daily life, so every Randian was supposed to aim at the imitation of John Galt (Rand’s hero of heroes in Atlas). He was always supposed to ask himself in every situation "What would John Galt have done?" When we remind ourselves that Jesus, after all, was an actual historical figure whereas Galt was not, the bizarrerie of this injunction can be readily grasped. (Although from the awed way Randians spoke of John Galt, one often got the impression that, for them, the line between fiction and reality was very thin indeed.)

Her Bible

The Biblical nature of Atlas for many Randians is illustrated by the wedding of a Randian couple that took place in New York. At the ceremony, the couple pledged their joint devotion and fealty to Ayn Rand, and then supplemented it by opening Atlas – perhaps at random – to read aloud a passage from the sacred text.

Wit and humor, as might be gathered from this incident, were verboten in the Randian movement. The philosophical rationale was that humor demonstrates that one "is not serious about one’s values." The actual reason, of course, is that no cult can withstand the piercing and sobering effect, the sane perspective, provided by humor. One was permitted to sneer at one’s enemies, but that was the only humor allowed, if humor that be.

Personal enjoyment, indeed, was also frowned upon in the movement and denounced as hedonistic "whim-worship." In particular, nothing could be enjoyed for its own sake – every activity had to serve some indirect, "rational" function. Thus, food was not to be savored, but only eaten joylessly as a necessary means of one’s survival; sex was not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but only to be engaged in grimly as a reflection and reaffirmation of one’s "highest values"; painting or movies only to be enjoyed if one could find "rational values" in doing so. All of these values were not simply to be discovered quietly by each person – the heresy of "subjectivism" – but had to be proven to the rest of the cult. In practice, as will be seen further below, the only safe aesthetic or romantic "values" or objects for the member were those explicitly sanctioned by Ayn Rand or other top disciples.

As in the case of all cults and sects, a particularly vital method for moulding the members and keeping them in line was maintaining their constant and unrelenting activity within the movement. Frank Meyer relates that Communists preserve their members from the dangerous practice of thinking on their own by keeping them in constant activity together with other Communists. He notes that, of the major Communist defectors in the United States, almost all defected only after a period of enforced isolation. In short, they had room to think for themselves (e.g., being in the army, going underground, etc.). In the case of Randians – particularly in New York City, where the movement was largest and Rand and the top hierarchy all lived – activity was continuous. Every night one of the top Randians lectured to different members expounding various aspects of the "party line": on basics, on psychology, fiction, sex, thinking, art, economics, or philosophy. (This structure reflected the vision of Utopia outlined in Atlas Shrugged itself, where every evening was spent with the heroes and heroines lecturing to each other.)

Failure to attend these lectures was a matter of serious concern in the movement. The philosophical rationale for the pressure to attend these meetings went as follows:

The logic seemed impeccable, but what if, as so often happens, one didn’t like, even couldn’t stand, these people? Under Randian theory, emotions are always the consequence of ideas, and incorrect emotions the consequence of wrong ideas, so that therefore, personal dislike of other (and especially of leading) Randians must be due to a grave canker of irrationality which either had to be kept concealed or else confessed to the leaders. Any such confession meant a harrowing process of ideological and psychological purification, supposedly ending in one’s success at achieving rationality, independence, and self-esteem and therefore an unquestioning and blind devotion to Ayn Rand.

One incident of suppressed doubt of Randian tenets is revealing of the psychology of even the leading cult members. One top young Randian, a veteran of the movement in New York City, admitted privately one day that he had grave doubts on a key Randian philosophic tenet: I believe it was the fact of his own existence. He was deathly afraid to ask the question, it being so basic that he knew he would be excommunicated on the spot for simply raising the point; but he had complete faith that if Rand should be asked the question, she would answer it satisfactorily and resolve his doubts. And so he waited, year after year, hoping against hope that someone would ask the question, be expelled, but that his own doubts would then be resolved in the process.

In the manner of many cults, loyalty to the guru had to supersede loyalty to family and friends – typically the first personal crises for the fledgling Randian. If non-Randian family and friends persisted in their heresies even after being hectored at some length by the young neophyte, they were then considered to be irrational and part of the Enemy and had to be abandoned. The same was true of spouses; many marriages were broken up by the cult leadership who sternly informed either the wife or the husband that their spouses were not sufficiently Randworthy. Indeed, since emotions resulted only from premises, and since the leaders’ premises were by definition supremely rational, that top leadership presumed to try to match and unmatch couples. As one of them asserted one day: "I know all the rational young men and women in New York and I can match them up." But suppose that Mr. A was matched with Miss B and one of them didn’t like the other? Well, once again, "reason" prevailed: the dislike was irrational, requiring intensive psychotherapeutic investigation to purge oneself of the erroneous ideas.

Psychological Hold

The psychological hold that the cult held on the members may be illustrated by the case of one girl, a certified top Randian, who experienced the misfortune of falling in love with an unworthy non-Randian. The leadership told the girl that if she persisted in her desire to marry the man, she would be instantly excommunicated. She did so nevertheless, and was promptly expelled. And yet, a year or so later, she told a friend that the Randians had been right, that she had indeed sinned and that they should have expelled her as unworthy of being a rational Randian.

But the most important sanction for the enforcement of loyalty and obedience, the most important instrument for psychological control of the members, was the development and practice of Objectivist Psychotherapy. In effect, this psychological theory held that since emotion always stems from incorrect ideas, that therefore all neurosis did so as well; and hence, the cure for that neurosis is to discover and purge oneself of those incorrect ideas and values. And since Randian ideas were all correct and all deviation therefore incorrect, Objectivist Psychotherapy consisted of (a) inculcating everyone with Randian theory – except now in a supposedly psycho-therapeutic setting; and (b) searching for the hidden deviation from Randian theory responsible for the neurosis and purging it by correcting the deviation.

It is clear that, considering the emotional and psychological power of the psychotherapeutic experience, the Rand cult had in its hands a powerful weapon for reinforcing and sanctioning the moulding of the New Randian Man. Philosophy and psychology, explicit doctrine, social pressure, and therapeutic pressure, all reinforced each other to generate obedient and loyal acolytes of Ayn Rand.

It is no wonder that the enormous psychological pressure of cult membership led to an extremely high turnover in the Randian movement, relatively far more so than among the Communists. But so long as he was in the movement, a new Randian Man emerged, a grim and joyless figure indeed. For a while the Randians would discourse at length on "happiness," and on the alleged fact of their perpetual state of being happy, it became clear on closer examination that they were happy only by definition. That in short, in Randian theory, happiness refers not at all to the ordinary language meaning of subjective states of contentment or joy, but to the alleged fact of using one’s mind to the fullest (i.e., in agreement with Randian precepts).

In practice, however, the dominant subjective emotions of the Randian cultist were fear and even terror: fear of displeasing Rand or her leading disciples; fear of using an incorrect word or nuance that would get the member into trouble; fear of being found out in the "irrationality" of some ideological or personal deviation; fear, even, of smiling at an unworthy (i.e., non-Randian) person. Such fear was greater than that of a Communist member, because the Randian had far less leeway for ideological or personal deviation. Furthermore, since Rand had an absolute and total line on every conceivable question of ideology and daily life, all aspects of such life had to be searched – by oneself and by others – for suspicious heresies and deviations. Everything was the object of fear and suspicion. There was the fear of making an independent judgment, for suppose that the member was to make a statement on some subject on which he did not know Rand’s position, and then were to find out that Rand disagreed. The Randian would then be in grave trouble, even if the only problem were that his language was a bit differently nuanced. So it was far more prudent to keep silent and then check with headquarters for the precisely correct line.

Check With Headquarters

Thus, one time a leading Randian attorney was giving a speech on Randian political theory. During the question period, he was caught short by being asked how he could reconcile Rand’s support for the compulsory subpoena power with the Randian political axiom of non-initiation of force. He hemmed and hawed, and then said that he had to think about this – a code phrase for hurriedly checking with Rand and the other leaders on the proper answer.

Part of the continuing need to check with headquarters came from the fact that Rand, though considered infallible by her disciples, changed her mind a great deal, particularly on concrete personalities or institutions. The fundamental line change on Branden is a glaring example, as well as the line change on other formerly high-ranking Randians who were expelled from the movement. But far more frequent if less important were changes of position on show business folk whom Rand might have met. Thus, the "line" on such people as Johnny Carson or Mike Wallace (prominent TV personalities) changed rapidly – largely because of Rand’s discovering various heresies and alleged betrayals on their part. If the Randian member was not attuned to these changes, and happened to aver that Carson was "rational" or had a benevolent "sense of life" when he had already been designated as irrational or malevolent, he was in for serious trouble and inquiry into the rationality of his own premises.

Driven by their conception of rational duty, every Randian lived in – and indeed was himself – a community of spies and informers, ready to ferret out and denounce any deviations from Randian doctrine. Thus, one time a Randian, walking with a girl friend, told her that he had attended a party at which several Randians had made an impromptu tape imitating the voices of the top Randian leaders. Stricken by this dire information and after spending a sleepless night, the girl rushed to inform the top leadership of this terrible transgression. Promptly, the leading participants were called on the carpet by their Objectivist Psychotherapist and bitterly denounced in their "therapy" sessions: "After all," said the therapist, "you wouldn’t mock God." When the owner of the tape refused the therapist’s demand to relinquish it so that it could be inspected in detail, his doom as a member of the movement was effectively sealed.

No Randian, even the top leadership, was exempt from the all-pervasive fear and repression. Every one of the original cadre, for example, was placed on probation at least once, and was forced to demonstrate his loyalty to Rand at length and in numerous ways. How such an atmosphere of fear and censorship crippled the productivity of Randian members may be seen by the fact that not one of the top Randians published any books while in the movement (all of Branden’s books, for example, were published after his expulsion). The only exception that proves the rule was the authorized exercise in uncritical adulation, Who Is Ayn Rand? by Barbara Branden.

But if the Randian lived in a state of fear and awe of Rand and her leading disciples, there were psychological compensations; for he could also live in the exciting and comforting knowledge that he was one of a small number of the elect, that only the members of this small band were in tune with reason and reality. The rest of the world, even those who were seemingly intelligent, happy, and successful, were really living in limbo, cut off from reason and from understanding the nature of reality. They could not be happy because cult theory decreed that happiness can only be achieved by being a committed Randian; they couldn’t even be intelligent, since how could seemingly intelligent people not be Randians, especially if they commit the gravest sin – failing to become Randians once they were exposed to this new gospel.

Excommunications and Purges

We have already mentioned the excommunications and "purges" in the Randian movement. Often, the excommunications – especially of important Randians – proceeded in a ritual manner. The errant member was peremptorily ordered to appear at a "trial" to hear charges against him. If he refused to appear – as he would if he had any shred of self-respect left – then the trial would continue in absentia, with all the members present taking turns in denouncing the expelled member, reading charges against him (again in a manner eerily reminiscent of 1984). When his inevitable conviction was sealed, someone – generally his closest friend – wrote the excommunicate, a bitter, febrile, and portentous letter, damning the apostate forevermore and excluding him forever from the Elysian fields of reason and reality. Having his closest friend take the leading part in the heresy proceeding was of course important as a way of forcing the friend to demonstrate his own loyalty to Rand, thereby clearing himself of any lingering taint by association. It is reported that when Branden was expelled, one of his closest former friends in New York sent him a letter proclaiming that the only moral thing he could do at that point was to commit suicide – a strange position for an allegedly pro-life, pro-individual-purpose philosophy to take.

The break with the apostate – even if once closest friends – had to be uncompromising, permanent, and total. Thus, a woman, very high in the Randian hierarchy, once hired a Randian girl to be her assistant in editing a magazine. When the woman was summarily expelled from the movement, her assistant refused to talk to her at all, except strictly in the line of business – a position steadfastly maintained despite the obvious tensions at the office that had to result.

As is true of all witch-hunting groups, the greatest sin was not so much the specific transgressions of the member, but any refusal to sanction the heresy-hunting procedure itself. Thus, Barbara Branden reported that her greatest sin was held to be her refusal to attend, and therefore to sanction the legitimacy of, her own trial, and other purgees have had similar tales to tell.

It should come as no surprise to learn that, in contrast to most other psychotherapies, the Objectivist Psychotherapists served as stern moral guardians for the troops. "Immoral" patients were expelled from therapy, a practice that reached its apogee when patients of Objectivist Psychotherapists were expelled for simply asking their therapists the reasons for the Rand-Branden split.

Thus, kept in ignorance of the world, of facts, ideas, or people who might deviate from the full Randian line, held in check by adoration and terror of Rand and her anointed hierarchy, the grim, robotic, joyless Randian Man emerged.

For the moulding processes of the cult did succeed in creating a New Randian Man – for so long as the man or woman remained in the movement. People were invariably transformed by the moulding process from diverse, often likeable men and women to grim, tense, hostile poseurs – whose personalities could best be summed up by the word "robotic." Robotically, the Randians intoned their slogans, generally imitating the poses and manner of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, and further, imitating their common cult vision of heroes and heroines of the Randian fictional canon. If any criticism of Rand or her disciples were made, or any arguments were pressed that they could not answer, the Randians would adopt a tone of high offense: "How dare you say such a thing about her?," turn on their heels and stomp off. No smile, nor many other human qualities, managed to shine through their ritualized façade. Many of the young men managed to look like carbon copies of Branden, while the young women tried to look like Barbara Branden, replete with the cigarette-holder held aloft, derived from Ayn Rand herself, that was supposed to symbolize the high moral standards and the mocking contempt wielded by Randian heroines.

Son of Rand

Some Randians emulated their leader by changing their names from Russian or Jewish to a presumably harder, tougher, more heroic Anglo-Saxon. Branden himself changed his name from Blumenthal; it is perhaps not a coincidence, as Nora Ephron has pointed out, that if the letters of the new name are rearranged, they spell, B-E-N-R-A-N-D, Hebrew for "son of Rand." A Randian girl, with a Polish name beginning with "G-r," announced one day that she was changing her name the following week. When asked deadpan, by a humorous observer whether she was changing her name to "Grand," she replied, in all seriousness, that no she was changing it to "Grant" – presumably, as the observer later remarked, the "t" was her one gesture of independence.

If looking and talking and even being named like the top Randians was the most "rational" way to act, and seeing them as much as possible was the most rational form of activity, then surely residing as close as possible to the leaders was the rational place to live. Thus, the typical New York Randian, upon his or her conversion, would leave his parents and find an apartment as close to Rand’s as possible. As a result, virtually the entire New York movement lived with a few square blocks of each other in Manhattan’s East 30’s, many of the leaders in the same apartment house as Rand’s.

If continuing an intense psychological pressure was in part responsible for the extremely high turnover among Randian disciples, another reason for this turnover was the very fact that the movement had a rigid line on literally every subject, from aesthetics to history to epistemology. In the first place it meant that deviation from the correct line was all too easy: Preferring Bach, for example, to Rachmaninoff, subjected one to charges of believing in a "malevolent universe." lf not corrected by self-criticism and psychotherapeutic brainwashing, such deviation could well lead to ejection from the movement. Secondly, it is difficult to impose a rigid line on every area of life and thought when, as was the case with Rand and her top disciples, they were largely ignorant of these various disciplines. Rand admitted that reading was not her strong suit, and the disciples, of course, were not allowed to read the real world of heresies even if they had been inclined to do so. And so the young convert – and they were almost all young – began to buckle when he learned more about his own chosen subject. Thus, the historian, upon learning more his subject, could scarcely rest content with long outdated Burkhardtian clichés about the Renaissance, or the pap about the Founding Fathers. And if the disciple began to realize that Rand was wrong and oversimplified in his own field, it was easy for him to entertain fundamental doubts about her infallibility elsewhere.

Rational Tobacco

The all-encompassing nature of the Randian line may be illustrated by an incident that occurred to a friend of mine who once asked a leading Randian if he disagreed with the movement’s position on any conceivable subject. After several minutes of hard thought, the Randian replied: "Well, I can’t quite understand their position on smoking." Astonished that the Rand cult had any position on smoking, my friend pressed on: "They have a position on smoking? What is it?" The Randian replied that smoking, according to the cult, was a moral obligation. In my own experience, a top Randian once asked me rather sharply, "How is it that you don’t smoke?" When I replied that I had discovered early that I was allergic to smoke, the Randian was mollified: "Oh, that’s OK, then." The official justification for making smoking a moral obligation was a sentence in Atlas where the heroine refers to a lit cigarette as symbolizing a fire in the mind, the fire of creative ideas. (One would think that simply holding up a lit match could do just as readily for this symbolic function.) One suspects that the actual reason, as in so many other parts of Randian theory, from Rachmaninoff to Victor Hugo to tap dancing, was that Rand simply liked smoking and had the need to cast about for a philosophical system that would make her personal whims not only moral but also a moral obligation incumbent upon everyone who desires to be rational.

If the Rand line was totalitarian, encompassing all of one’s life, then, even when all the general premises were agreed upon and Randians checked with headquarters to see who was In or Out, there was still need to have some "judicial" mechanism to resolve concrete issues and to make sure that every member toed the line on that question. No one was ever allowed to be neutral on any issue. The judicial mechanism to resolve such concrete disputes was, as usual in cults, the rank one enjoyed in the Randian hierarchy. By definition, so to speak, the higher-ranking Randian was right, the lower one wrong, and everyone accepted this Argument from Authority that might have seemed not exactly consonant with the explicit Randian devotion to Reason.

One amusing incident illustrates this decision-by-hierarchy. One day a dispute over concretes occurred between two certified and high-ranking Randians, both of whom had been dubbed as rational by their Objectivist Psychotherapist. Specifically, one was a secretary to the other. The secretary went to her boss and demanded a raise, which she rationally intuited was her just dessert. The boss, however, checking his own reason, decided that she was incompetent and fired her. Now here was a dispute, a conflict of interest, between two certified Randians. How were all the other members to decide who was right, and therefore rational, and who was wrong, irrational, and therefore subject to expulsion? In any truly rational group of people, of course, it would not be incumbent upon anyone but these – the only ones familiar with the facts of the case – to take any position at all. But that sort of benign neutrality is not permitted in any cult, including the Randian one. Given the need to impose a uniform line on everyone, the dispute was resolved in the only way possible: through rank in the hierarchy. The boss happened to be in the top rank of disciples; and since the secretary was on a lower rank, she not only suffered discharge from her job, but expulsion from the Randian movement as well.

The Pyramid

And the Randian movement was strictly hierarchical. At the top of the pyramid, of course, was Rand herself, the Ultimate Decider of all questions. Branden, her designated "intellectual heir," and the St. Paul of the movement, was Number 2. Third in rank was the top circle, the original disciples, those who had been converted before the publication of Atlas. Since they were converted by reading her previous novel, The Fountainhead, which had been published 1943, the top circle was designated in the movement as "the class of '43." But there was an unofficial designation that was far more revealing: "the senior collective." On the surface, this phrase was supposed to "underscore" the high individuality of each of the Randian members; in reality, however, there was an irony within the irony, since the Randian movement was indeed a "collective" in any genuine meaning of the term. Strengthening the ties within the senior collective was the fact that each and every one of them was related to each other, all being part of one Canadian Jewish family, relatives of either Nathan or Barbara Branden. There was, for example, Nathan’s sister Elaine Kalberman; his brother-in-law, Harry Kalberman; his first cousin, Dr. Allan Blumenthal, who assumed the mantle of leading Objectivist Psychotherapist after Branden’s expulsion; Barbara’s first cousin, Leonard Piekoff; and Joan Mitchell, wife of Allan Blumenthal. Alan Greenspan’s familial relation was more tenuous, being the former husband of Joan Mitchell. The only non-relative in the class of '43 was Mary Ann Rukovina, who made the top rank after being the college roommate of Joan Mitchell.

These were the disciples before the publication of Atlas. After that, Branden began his basic lecture series, which soon evolved into the Nathaniel Branden Institute, the organizational arm of the movement. Eventually, NBI was established in Rand’s symbolically heroic Empire State Building, although it resided unheroically in the basement. In New York City, the various lectures and lecture series were put on in person; outside New York, each city or region had a designated NBI representative, who was in charge of putting on performances of the lectures on tape. The NBI rep was generally the most robotic and faithful Randian in his particular area, and so attempts were made, largely though not always totally successfully, to duplicate the atmosphere of awe and obedience pervading the mother section in New York. Determined efforts were made to translate Rand’s mass readership of her best-selling works into faithful disciples who would first subscribe to The Objectivist, and then keep attending NBI taped lectures in their area, thus being inducted into the movement. If a flow of magazines, tapes, and recommended books went out from NBI to the rank-and-file members of the movement, a flow of money and volunteer labor inevitably traveled the reverse path, not excluding payments for psychotherapeutic services.

It has been evident throughout this paper that the structure and implicit creed, the actual functioning, of the Randian movement, was in striking and diametric opposition to the official, exoteric creed of individuality, independence, and everyone’s acknowledging no authority but his own mind and reason. But we have not yet precisely focused upon the central axiom of the esoteric creed of the Randian movement, the implicit premise, the hidden agenda that insured and enforced the unquestioning loyalty of the disciples. That central axiom was the assertion the "Ayn Rand is the greatest person that has ever lived or ever shall live." If Ayn Rand is the greatest person of all time, it follows that she is right on every question, or at the very least, will far more likely be correct at any time than the mere disciple, who grants himself no such all-encompassing greatness.

Typical of this attitude was a meeting of leading young Randians attended by a friend of mine. The meeting turned into a series of testimonials, in which each person in turn testified to the overriding influence that Ayn Rand had been in his own life. As one of them explained: "Ayn Rand has brought to the world the knowledge that A is A, and that 2 and 2 equal 4." When a top Randian, on hearing that a notoriously refractory member who was in the process of leaving the movement had written a parody in the Randian philosophical manner, a "proof" that Ayn Rand was God, the Randian, in genuine puzzlement, asked: "He’s kidding, isn’t he?"

There was a generally consuming concern with greatness and rank among the Randians. It was universally agreed that Rand was the greatest person of all time. There was then a friendly dispute about the precise ranking of Branden among the all-time all-stars. Some maintained that Branden was the second greatest of all time; others that Branden tied for second in a dead heat with Aristotle. Such was the range of permitted disagreement within the Randian movement.

The adoption of the central axiom of Rand’s greatness was made possible by Rand’s undoubted personal charisma, a charisma buttressed by her air of unshakeable arrogance and self-assurance. It was a charisma and an arrogance that was partially emulated by her leading disciples. Since the rank-and-file disciple knew in his heart that he was not all-wise or totally self-assured, it became all too easy to subordinate his own will and intellect to that of Rand. Rand became the living embodiment of Reason and Reality and by some quality of personality Rand was able to bring about the mind-set in her disciples that their highest value was to earn her approval while the gravest sin was to incur her displeasure. The ardent belief in Rand’s supreme originality was of course reinforced by the disciples’ not having read (or been able to read) anyone whom they might have discovered had said the same things long before.

Ejection From Paradise

The Rand cult grew and flourished until the irrevocable split between the Greatest and the Second Greatest, until Satan was ejected from Paradise in the fall of 1968. The Rand-Branden split destroyed NBI, and with it the organized Randian movement. Rand has not displayed the ability or the desire to pick up the pieces and reconstitute an equivalent organization. The Objectivist fell back to The Ayn Rand Letter, and now that too has gone.

With the death of NBI, the Randian cultists were cast adrift, for the first time in a decade, to think for themselves. Generally, their personalities rebounded to their non-robotic, pre-Randian selves. But there were some unfortunate legacies of the cult. In the first place, there is the problem of what the Thomists call invincible ignorance. For many ex-cultists remain imbued with the Randian belief that every individual is armed with the means of spinning out all truths a priori from his own head – hence there is felt to be no need to learn the concrete facts about the real world, either about contemporary history or the laws of the social sciences. Armed with axiomatic first principles, many ex-Randians see no need of learning very much else. Furthermore, lingering Randian hubris imbues many ex-members with the idea that each one is able and qualified to spin out an entire philosophy of life and of the world a priori. Such aberrations as the "Students of Objectivism for Rational Bestiality" are not far from the bizarreries of many neo-Randian philosophies, preaching to a handful of zealous partisans. On the other hand, there is another understandable but unfortunate reaction. After many years of subjection to Randian dictates in the name of "reason," there is a tendency among some ex-cultists to bend the stick the other way, to reject reason or thinking altogether in the name of hedonistic sensation and caprice.

We conclude our analysis of the Rand cult with the observation that here was an extreme example of contradiction between the exoteric and the esoteric creed. That in the name of individuality, reason, and liberty, the Rand cult in effect preached something totally different. The Rand cult was concerned not with every man’s individuality, but only with Rand’s individuality, not with everyone’s right reason but only with Rand’s reason. The only individuality that flowered to the extent of blotting out all others, was Ayn Rand’s herself; everyone else was to become a cipher subject to Rand’s mind and will.

Nikolai Bukharin’s famous denunciation of the Stalin cult, masked during the Russia of the 1930’s as a critique of the Jesuit order, does not seem very overdrawn as a portrayal of the Randian reality:

It has been correctly said that there isn’t a meanness in the world which would not find for itself and ideological justification. The king of the Jesuits, Loyola, developed a theory of subordination, of "cadaver discipline," every member of the order was supposed to obey his superior "like a corpse which could be turned in all directions, like a stick which follows every movement, like a ball of wax which could be changed and extended in all directions"... This corpse is characterized by three degrees of perfection: subordination by action, subordination of the will, subordination of the intellect. When the last degree is reached, when the man substitutes naked subordination for intellect, renouncing all his convictions, then you have a hundred percent Jesuit.³

It has been remarked that a curious contradiction existed with the strategic perspective of the Randian movement. For, on the one hand, disciples were not allowed to read or talk to other persons who might be quite close to them as libertarians or Objectivists. Within the broad rationalist or libertarian movement, the Randians took a 100% pure, ultra-sectarian stance. And yet, in the larger political world, the Randian strategy shifted drastically, and Rand and her disciples were willing to endorse and work with politicians who might only be one millimeter more conservative than their opponents. In the larger world, concern with purity or principles seemed to be totally abandoned. Hence, Rand’s whole-hearted endorsement of Goldwater, Nixon, and Ford, and even of Senators Henry Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan.

Neither Liberty Nor Reason

There seems to be only one way to resolve the contradiction in the Randian strategic outlook of extreme sectarianism within the libertarian movement, coupled with extreme opportunism, and willingness to coalesce with slightly more conservative heads of State, in the outside world. That resolution, confirmed by the remainder of our analysis of the cult, holds that the guiding spirit of the Randian movement was not individual liberty – as it seemed to many young members – but rather personal power for Ayn Rand and her leading disciples. For power within the movement could be secured by totalitarian isolation and control of the minds and lives of every member; but such tactics could scarcely work outside the movement, where power could only hopefully be achieved by cozying up the President and his inner circles of dominion.

Thus, power not liberty or reason, was the central thrust of the Randian movement. The major lesson of the history of the movement to libertarians is that It Can Happen Here, that libertarians, despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements. Hopefully, libertarians, once bitten by the virus, may now prove immune.

Bibliographical Note

Of the several works on Randianism, only one has concentrated on the cult itself: Leslie Hanscom, "Born Eccentric," Newsweek (March 27, 1961), pp. 104–05. Hanscom brilliantly and wittily captured the spirit of the Rand cult from attending and reporting on one of the Branden lectures. Thus, Hanscom wrote:

After three hours of heroically rapt attention to Branden’s droning delivery, the fans were rewarded by the personal apparition of Miss Rand herself – a lady with drilling black eyes and Russian accent who often wears a brooch in the shape of a dollar sign as her private icon….

"Her books," said one member of the congregation, "are so good that most people should not be allowed to read them. I used to want to lock up nine-tenths of the world in a cage, and after reading her books, I want to lock them all up." Later on, this same chap – a self-employed "investment counselor" of 22 – got a lash of his idol’s logic full in the face. Submitting a question from the floor – a privilege open to paying students only – the budding Baruch revealed himself as a mere visitor. Miss Rand – a lady whose glare would wilt a cactus – bawled him out from the platform as a "cheap fraud." Other seekers of wisdom came off better. One worried disciple was told that it was permissible to celebrate Christmas and Easter so long as one rejected the religious significance (the topic of the night’s lecture was the folly of faith). A housewife was assured that she needn’t feel guilty about being a housewife so long as she chose the job for non-emotional reasons….

Although mysticism is one of the nastiest words in her political arsenal, there hasn’t been a she-messiah since Aimee McPherson who can so hypnotize a live audience."⁴

At least as revelatory as Hanscom’s article were the predictable howls of overkill outrage by the cult members. Thus, two weeks later, under the caption "Thugs and Hoodlums?", Newsweek printed excerpts from Randian letters sent in reaction to the article. One letter stated: "Your vicious, vile, and obscene tirade against Ayn Rand is a new low, even for you. To have sanctioned such a stream of abusive invective…is an act of unprecedented moral depravity. A magazine staffed with irresponsible hoodlums has no place in my home." Another man wrote that "one who has read the works of Miss Rand and proceeds to write an article of this caliber can only be motivated by villainy. It is the work of a literary thug." Another warned, "Since you propose to behave like cockroaches, be prepared to be treated as such." And finally, one Bonnie Benov revealed the inner axiom: "Ayn Rand is...the greatest individual that has ever lived." Having fun with the cult, Newsweek printed a particularly unprepossessing picture of Rand underneath the Benov letter, and captioned it: "Greatest Ever?"⁵

Notes

1. Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), pp. 97–98. A particularly vivid expression of this communist faith was put forward by Trotsky, in a speech at the 1924 Congress of the Soviet Communist Party:

Comrades, none of us wishes to be or can be right against the party. In the last instance the party is always right, because it is the only historic instrument which the working class possesses, for the solution of its fundamental tasks.... One can be right only with the party and through the party because history has not created any other way for realization of one’s rightness.

In Isaac Duetscher, The Prophet Unarmed. (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 139.

On all this, see in particular Williamson M. Evers, "Lenin and His Critics on the Organizational Question," (unpublished MS.) pp. 15ff.

2. Frank S. Meyer, The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1961).

3. Nikolai Bukharin, Finance Capital in Papal Robes: A Challenge (New York: Friends of the Soviet Union, n.d.), pp. 10–11. Also see Evers, "Lenin and his Critics," p. 15.

4. Newsweek (March 27, 1961), p. 105.

5. Newsweek (April 10, 1961), pp. 9, 14.

not particularly on topic but thankyou for posting this and pointing out the cult-structure. i hate cultish behaviour and everywhere i see it, my instinctive reaction is to turn around because thinking is the last thing you are allowed to do inside a cult, and demonstrating your ability to think critically and logically always pushes you out of the margins.

I find it incredibly disappointing, as a member of this board, that people feel the need to post garbage articles like the above. We all know that Rothbard had some kind of personal grudge against Rand, and as a result we get this kind of pseudo-academic rant. Is it in any way helpful to throw around meaningless pejoratives like 'cult'? Go to a leftist board such as Revleft and you hear them say "The Mises cult" and "The Rothbard cult". In fact there probably is not a single minority group that has not been called a cult at some point!

The objectivists on this board have been very polite and stuck to the rules of argument, whereas more than one of us have resorted to ad hominem and nonsense such as the above. If janything we make ourselves (as Austrians/ancaps) look like the cult here, not the objectivists.

in response to kaz' other point about wanting the federal government to impose metallic currency... say what? i am pretty sure the anarchocapitalist position wants the federal government gone and free banking just like mises and hayek. let the market decide, all that. and it will choose gold and silver, most likely, but in smaller scale situations other materials may be chosen because of whatever reason, and then there's warehousing with certificates and clearinghouses, free banking in other words.

Yes; but there's a problem in getting there from here. One solution is just to disassemble the entire economic system and let a new money arise from barter, but it would cause a lot of suffering in the meantime.  The only sane solution is to undo the creation of fiat money out of gold by returning to gold (which is not at all "wanting the Federal government to impose a gold dollar"; but Kaz clearly doesn't care what Rothbard actually thought).

A gold certificate means they'll give you the gold when you redeem it. This does not mean they think you're such an idiot that you don't understand what would happen if EVERYONE tried to redeem them at the same moment.

And if they did, then a fractional reserve bank could simply SAY "this is redeemable in gold, based on supply, and we keep a ten percent supply on stock at all times".

Ever heard of a bank run?  The issue isn't just the immediate non-availability of gold. They can't get the gold next week, or next year, or 1000 years from now: unless you use governnment coercion to allow the bank to keep trading after it's clearly bankrupt and force people to accept its notes at face value, shortly after the bank runs out of gold it'll be out of business; the outstanding notes will never be redeemed.

Rothbard wanted the dollar to be defined in terms of gold...that is, he wanted government coercion to be used to impose a monopoly gold dollar.

The first part is true; the second is utterly false.  It's hard to believe you really think the first implies the second...