Excellent article. 

“Perhaps, as suggested by Ayn Rand herself, people accept incorrect premises because they are taught to do so by philosophers. They fail to think for themselves, and instead accept the intellectual authority of Plato or Kant or their followers. The whole culture becomes permeated with irrationality, and individuals absorb its premises passively. But this leaves too much unexplained. How did the ideas of Plato and Kant gain so much influence, and how did they win out over the clearly more sensible ideas of Aristotle? And why are these ideas so universal across cultures? The aristocrats of Heian Japan, or the headhunters of the Amazon rain forest, never heard of Plato or Kant; where did they pick up these ideas? Cultures that developed in complete isolation from Western philosophy have repeatedly duplicated the same basic rules of behavior. Why?”

In line with your answer to the question, I think it is the same thing, except psychologically, as the genetic variation in behavior of animals.  Some are aggressive, some are passive.  In times of abundance, the aggressive win out.  But in times of scarcity, the passive creatures win out because the aggressive spend all of their energy fighting each other.  Similarly, in all cultures, at some point in time, someone was for some reason more apt to demand others do something for him.  While some other, for some reason (either randomly, genetically, sociologically, or by willing abducation of his responsibility for existence), obeyed.  Thus the moral virtue became sacrifice, and the successful ‘aggressors’ became the ones preaching sacrifice as a virtue and collecting the results of the sacrifice. 

“What is it in the nature of human beings that causes them so frequently--indeed, almost universally--to develop emotional repression, and to express it in the same ways in their ideas about reality and morality?”

I agree that the explanation is routed in evolutionary psychology, It makes a lot of sense.  Back when men existed only in groups of hunter gatherer tribes, they needed collectivism to survive.  At the genetic level collectivism worked better for ensuring the continuation of the selfish gene than rugged individualism, so their was always social group pressure and pressure for survival to remain part of a collective.  The aggressive of the collective became the Attila and the witch doctors, the passives became their subservient, and back then, in absence of the abundant resources and division of labor we now have, it was required to act in a group to survive as an individual. 

Conversely though, any creature that has a genetic penchant for abandoning reality in favor of a platonic dreamworld will quickly come to its demise when it waddles of the edge of a cliff.  So clearly most creatures, including humans, have an innate drive to consider the world knowable and predictable, one can see this in the behavior of any young child, who is forming concepts about the way the world works when he picks something up and sticks it in his mouth and bites or bangs a stick on the edge of a table over and over again.  Clearly this tendency to consider the world knowable and predictable is overwritten in most people by the time they are young teens and have become convinced of the pointlessness of life, an ever fluctuating ‘reality’ and hopelessness in the face of the universe. 

“This is, of course, a conclusion highly repugnant to the classical Objectivist model. Ayn Rand regarded human intelligence as starting from a blank slate--tabula rasa--with no instinct, inborn behavior patterns, or "original sin." The conclusions I have reached would have been abhorrent to her. However, Ayn Rand was also the one who said, "nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking."

I am surprised that Rand said that, and did not know it until now.  It seems obvious, we can even look back further, to Aristotle, who made the obvious point:

“All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire”

We clearly start off with ingrained behavior, primarily that of figuring out the way the world works as quickly as possible.  Beyond that it becomes social habits and appeals to authority, but all of these have the ability to be overcome by a rational and well informed choice. 

“Some thinkers, such as Robert Wright [The Moral Animal] and Jared Diamond [The Third Chimpanzee], take the position that our innate drives are mostly evil. Even when we are "altruistic,"

I would suggest Matt Ridley as a good, more rational read on the subject than Diamond or Wright.

The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation
by Matt Ridley

And

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley (Paperback)

Again, Excellent article, thanks!

Michael F Dickey

Why is Objectivism so repellant to women? It was founded by a woman. It is promoted by fabulous Romantic novels with attractive female protagonists. It advocated liberation of females from traditional strictures back when modern feminism was scarcely an embryo.

... had I read The Fountainhead before Atlas Shrugged, I probably would not be an Objectivist today.

I probably would not have read this ultra-long article if it were not because of kat’s post. The topics of family and woman caught my attention. Also Ron Merill’s assessment that “there is only a limited pool of "potential Objectivists" in the population, and that we have pretty much saturated this market” is also an interesting one.

I recently finished reading Barbara’s biography of Rand. It actually gives a lot of insights into Rand’s own attitude toward family matters, even though her formal writings rarely deal with the issue. Rand left her home and family at age 20, an usually rebellious age for many people. However, as soon as she settled down in the US and became financially capable, the first thing she set to do was to arrange to bring her whole family over, which, tragically was not realized. When she later found her sister, the joy she felt and all the things she’d done to bring her sister over demonstrate to me that she was just so normally human, or is that humanly normal?

Ayn Rand didn’t have any children, and I came to believe that it was not entirely by choice. For many years, Ayn was the main bread earner for her family and she was very responsible and independent. She worked full time at her day jobs and could only write her own novels in the evenings and off-days. When she finally achieved financial security after the publication of The Fountainhead, Ayn was already over 40. I can’t help but imagine what would happen if Frank had been more manly and had been able to take care of Ayn, would Ayn then chose to have children? She might or might not. We would never find out now. Though my gut feeling is that she probably would.

Ayn’s family tragedy must have taken a toll on her psychologically. But she obviously did not dwell on it, instead she went ahead and forged her philosophy that dealt with every other issues. Although I don’t think family life is in conflict with Objectivist’s basic tenets, an examination of family ethics in the context of Objectivism is clearly long over due.