| | I thought this part was particularly telling:
Ultimately, someone has to decide who is qualified to hold such positions and where the line is to be drawn. An organization devoted to spreading an ideology is not compatible with “freedom” for its leadership to contradict or undermine that ideology. In theory. the best judge of such contradiction would be the person(s) , if he exists, who best understands and upholds the ideology, as evidenced objectively by his lifelong intellectual consistency, philosophic attainments, and practical results. In practice, the best judge would be the person, if he is still alive, who founded the organization and defined its purpose, in this case as a step in carrying out a mandate given him by Ayn Rand.
Maybe "ideology" is imprecise enough that the above might make sense, but if you replace "ideology" with "religion", then the above makes a lot more sense. If you are talking about "philosophy", then I would say that's exactly the opposite of how you would want to run an organization.
Maybe slightly unrelated, but this reminds me of a passage by Victor Davis Hanson where he writes about how the US had such an advantage over the Japanese in World War 2 in terms of decision-making because important military decisions in the American military were discussed at length and many proposals would be put forward, debated, and a consensus would be reached, whereas in the Japanese military, it was usually one person making the decisions, and the people around him wouldn't dare question or ask.
If you have an organization dedicated to the spread of a philosophy, I would distinctly think that you would want discussion about what that philosophy is and what the organization should promote, not dictates from one person. That is, if you are assuming that your philosophy is the truth and not just one of many arbitrary systems put forth where purity is more important than correctness. And that's what's so horrible, that in all this, purity is clearly more important to these guys than correctness.
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