| | [I created a new thread to focus more on the above topic, and less on Barbara's speech or other speeches at TAS on the 5oth Anniversary or Atlas.]
Barbara Branden: "...That book had motivated so many people to reach for the best within them...It didn’t motivate them to defend the person who had taught them this. Nobody defended her in print. This for her was worse, much worse than the negative reviews – the silence. It did something permanent to Ayn....She had to have a sense there were minds out there she could reach, and she didn’t have that for sure any more...In the years that followed, I saw her sink deeper and deeper into depression and rage, finally striking out vainly at a world that had disappointed her so bitterly. She had spent her life depending the men of ability, of achievement. Where were they, when she needed them?"
....
Ayn Rand made a major mistake.
It was a tragic error of psychological judgement for her - and for so many Objectivists since who have copied her on this point - to have reacted in the way she did to the *extent* she did, to the extent it killed her sense of hope, to the extent it killed her ability to ever write fiction again. There are other, more common sense, explanations besides (a) cowardice or (b) a wasteland with no top minds in existence to explain the public silence when Atlas came out.
Here are a few:
1. BARRIERS. It's entirely possible there were positive, thoughtful, detailed defenses of the book, but they were simply not published. Most publications, prior to the internet and the huge increase in available 'space', have room for one critic to write one review one time. Not for endless discussions or "counter-reviews" by others.
2. TIMING. Reviews by literary critics and magazine writers of a new book are "early". They comment on books before almost anyone has read them, and this book was very slow to find its audience. Plus it takes a while to read and digest a thousand-page book. Moreover, if I read a great book months or years after the critics have had their say, I am unlikely to remember what some critic said. And also, if I'm the kind of person whose life is changed by Atlas, I am likely to be the kind of person who is not even aware that somebody prominent said something distorting. Keeping up with the intellectual magazines, often with their offensive or shallow content, or what the "literati" think, whether of the right or the left, is less likely to be an interest of the kinds of people who respond to Atlas.
3. DIGESTION. The book challenges everything and causes massive, time-consuming examination. Especially for the older, more prominent person. Even if (or especially if) he is a 'top mind', this is not a non-trivial task. He has developed his views over a lifetime and, if he sees more, he realizes he has a lot to integrate, untangle, wrestle with. He may honestly not be ready to publish his reactions to the book till he can sort out what is visceral and what is rational.
4. AWARENESS. Many people don't take seriously what the critics say or feel the need to publish a rebuttal.
5. AGE AND WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY. The younger person who has less to unlearn, hasn't spent a lifetime acquiring bad premises or bad 'brainwashing' from professors and the intellectuals that has to be untangled after reading Atlas, has less ability to get published than the older, more sophisticated person who is far less likely, even though a 'top mind', to be able to experience an instant conversion and thus write a powerful defense of the book. I'll use myself as an example. After reading Atlas in college, it would have occurred to me to start an Ayn Rand club on campus (and lots of students did - there is your response by the 'top minds'). It would never have occurred to me to wonder at that time what other people, what the culture was saying...or even that there was such a thing as 'the culture'...or to worry about it.
The most powerful reason that there was silence is the most obvious of all: people, virtually all intelligent readers, were still digesting it. The 'top mind' is often very legitimately a slow-moving, cautious one, that takes its time to digest and integrate things, especially something life-changing. Hundreds and hundreds of questions arise.
That is why, decades later, we see prominent people -- many whom still have not resolved issues like conservatism or how laissez-faire would work or early religious hangups -- emerging to offer tributes.
It simply took them a long stretch of years to look back and realize what an influence and impact the ideas had had. At the time they were busy with their careers, busy with single-minded Rearden-like dedication to their work so that they didn't take time to think through difficult, complex philosophical issues. Or whether their love for a novel's characters was objective or merely youthful emotionalism.
It would be the subject of another post, but many - or most - Objectivists have, very tragically, allowed themselves to be "defeated" by the culture -- or to jump to oversimplified, ungenerous, context-dropping conclusions -- in a similar, if perhaps lesser, way than the way Barbara described.
The profound disillusionment is often a form of malevolence caused by a failure to understand people and how their minds operate.
Or to “cut them some slack”. A teacher (of which I am one) would be less likely to make this mistake.
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