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Saturday, July 4, 2009 - 2:04pmSanction this postReply
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How about "giving her philosophy a name"?  I'm not sure if it was a mistake or not, but I do wonder what her legacy would be like without the Objectivism label.

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Saturday, July 4, 2009 - 2:06pmSanction this postReply
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People would call it "Randism" so I can understand why she gave it a name.

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Saturday, July 4, 2009 - 7:41pmSanction this postReply
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I went with "breaking with people all or nothing." From what I've read, she was pretty hard to take in person. Didn't detract from her philosophy if you read her works, but if you're continually tossing your leaders out of the tent for minor differences of opinion, tends to discourage one's ex-disciples from spreading the message of liberty you've created.

A bit off topic -- reading "Inclined to Liberty" by Louis Carabini right now -- a very brief, concise series of rebuttals for most any claptrap one's socialist friends may propose, though the point of the book is that such people are unlikely to incline toward liberty no matter how persuasive you are. And, further, that you don't need to convince anyone else of your POV in order to be free, that freedom is there whenever you choose to seize it and start living a life where you steer clear of coercion / the initiation of force (something a lot of Oist seem to be really bad at when it comes to foreign policy, dunno why.)

Also have Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" on my computers' bookmark bar (at jim.com/econ).

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Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 5:07amSanction this postReply
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there's Harry Browne's old stalwart - How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World...

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Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 7:06amSanction this postReply
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This poll asks, “What was Ayn Rand’s worst mistake?”, and then goes on to give us 6 or 7 of Mrs. Rand’s so-called “mistakes” to choose from.  Unfortunately, the choices of “mistakes” to choose from are less than stellar; given this, I picked “glorifying smoking” as my choice of her worse “mistake”.  I picked that one, not so much out of agreement, but in that this “worse mistake’ was the one I considered the most frivolous choice among the alternatives listed.

Ironically, among the Rand's worst “mistake” options we have to choose from, one is, “Dismantling NBI”. That choice is ironic in that, had this poll included a write-in option, I would have wrote, "Her worse mistake might have been starting/creating and working to build up NBI”.

Of course had I created this poll, no doubt, others would find my choices for, “her worse mistake” quite wanting as well. Polls are like that I suppose; by their very nature they operate under a certain set of assumptions (or is it presumptions? - J) about the set of alternative answers provided, and the validity the poll taker ascribes to those alternatives.

(Edited by Howard Campbell on 7/05, 9:54am)


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Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 8:01amSanction this postReply
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Jim Henshaw,

I just read the first few pages of "Inclined to Liberty" on Amazon...
After all, what one person believes does not obstruct the beliefs of another. If one converts a socialist to a libertarian or an atheist to a Christian, or vise versa, what is gained? Maybe the gain is simply the comfort we experience when someone else reconfirms that our beliefs are "correct" after all.
Yikes! What is gained? A person's position on politics and religion have a large effect on how they treat others and what they vouch for in government, and how they use force against others. Mere beliefs? Humph.

Happy Fourth of July! : )

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Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 11:13amSanction this postReply
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I wasn't excited by this poll and had a hard time finding anything I wanted to pick.

I thought of picking "smoking" but it says "glorifying" and my impulse towards smoking was that she ended up suffering lung cancer and died earlier than she would otherwise.

I ended up picking "Dismantling NBI" because I would like to have seen what another decade or two of a formal education in Objectivism would have spawned. NBI had been growing rapidly. Would it have increased the number of philosophy professors friendly to Objectivism? If so, it might have begun to change the relationship between Objectivism and the academics sooner. Would it have been a place where new ideas on how to do formal education were explored? Would it have ended up with accredidation? By now, after forty years, what would NBI look like?

Sometimes a structure, an institution, can be a powerful focal point, a rallying center around which ideas can be explored and shared and their adherents energized.

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Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 11:40amSanction this postReply
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Strictly speaking she never had a business or financial relation with NBI, so you couldn't say she started it or dismantled it.

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Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 12:08pmSanction this postReply
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I picked "Starting the Branden affair at all" because that led to the end of NBI and so much other nastiness that no one needed.

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Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 1:45pmSanction this postReply
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I don't begrudge Rand the affair. She was a lonely, alienated person. Had she been a pretty, outgoing girl, I think it is unlikely she would have channeled the same energies into writing and Objectivism.

Look at how her fiction is so obviously an extension of her fantasy life. Frank O'Connor was obviously not an intellectual match for her. It seems from PAR that Frank's gay brother would otherwise have been a better match. Maybe Rand should have divorced O'Connor, but I am sure she found comfort in him in her later years.

Rand should have realized that rekindling the affair was a mistake. And part of the problem there, the mistake that allowed her to think that as a post menopausal stara baba she could still appear to a virile man 25 year her junior, no matter how much he lied to her, was Rand's intellectualized theory of sex. Her theory of sex hurt many people not the least herself.

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Post 10

Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 7:45pmSanction this postReply
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Ted, in post #7 said, "In the realm of personal character ethics Branden failed himself through his cowardice. Rand failed herself by convincing herself that the issues were primarily philosophical and intellectual and hence potentially amenable to argument, as if had she come up with the right formulation, she could have convinced Branden that her status as a post-menopausal woman would be of no import to a man 25 years younger than she was." and "...did Rand ever examine her own self-delusion?"

I don't think the word "cowardice" is appropriate here. I've known Dr. Branden for a long time and it isn't a word that fits. And we know that "self-delusional" isn't a word one would normally associate with Rand. I recognize that Ted is using the words to refer to isolated incidents and not to enduring character traits, but a context needs to be set, and without it, those words are decidedly inappropriate.

I don't enjoy delving into Rand and Branden's personal affairs - which really aren't the normal business of anyone but those more excited by gossip than ideas, more motivated by anger or jealousy than ideas, but there is a need to give the psychological context in this case - because of the choice of those two words - not just from Ted, but from many people over the last 4 decades.
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Branden was still a young man and even if his romantic love for Rand had faded, he still held her to be of extraodinary value in his life. His best friend, his mentor, his hero - someone he treasured. His entire life was wrapped around the ideas and the person of Ayn Rand. But, until he met Patrecia, his love life had not been fulfilling.

Barbara had not been a soul mate - she had been more of an intellectual mate and friend and the spark really wasn't there. The affairs that she had were most likely borne of her need to feel more emotionally connected, to bring more passion to her life, and must have been very painful for both of them. What little romantic attachment he had had in the past with Barbara was gone long before he became involved With Rand. Only very rarely does it make sense to marry our first girlfriend.

With Rand the spark was there, but too much of the excitement came out of a shared intellectual passions and not enough from the entirety of his sense of self - his deepest identity. All of his life, Branden had been boldly living beyond his years, starting as a precocious child and picking up personal power and responsibility through ability, not senority. There is a sense of aloneness that comes with always being older than your years.

At the time he met Patrecia, he was in his prime. He was the driving force of NBI, acquiring a national reputation in psychology, at the center of Objectivism (save only for Rand herself), and nearing the time when he would be able to publish a seminal work in his field. But, he and Barbara were long past romantic feelings. And, I suspect that he was extremely lonely man when he met Patricia - in one way, he had never in his life really been in love - a real love as opposed to the first girlfriend or the intellectuallized love with Rand.

And at that time the younger self within found, for the first time ever, a real partner. I would guess that Patreicia was his first real love - the first one to involve him fully in all the ways love should. So when he first allowed himself to spend anytime with her - even in the early platonic stages of the relationship - it would have been cowardice not explore those feelings. It would have been a betrayal of his self to not see if this was real. He wasn't sexually involved with Rand who was still depressed, or with Barbara who was more like a roommate by then.

He knew that with Rand's unshakable convictions that love must flow from ones premises - and that she believed that she knew what her premises were in this area, and that to say what he was starting to feel for Patrecia would turn his life upside down and hurt Rand. His lie to himself during those early days was, "Maybe things will change. Maybe my feelings will change. Maybe I'll find a way to convince Ayn that it isn't wrong to love Patrecia." He had been working for with Ayn for years attempting to help her come out of her depression - which put him in an awful place. When she was trying to work with his psychological "problem" of not being fired up for resuming their relationship, his conflict was worse. All the time he keeps trying to find the impossible - a way to not give up either of the women he loves - one romantically and the other in every way but romantically.

At some point it clearly became dishonest to continue to explore his feelings for Patrecia without coming clean with Rand - he didn't, but it was not because the man was a coward, but because he was swamped by the dilemma his life had become and his lies were more to himself, that somehow he could find a way to make it all come out good. Both of the values he was pursuing were objective values.

My heart goes out Ayn Rand. I don't believe it is possible to achieve something as extraordinary as Atlas Shrugged without paying a psychological price. The many years of writing must have involved motivating herself with visions of the rewards to come - a decade of postponed gratification. She must have imagined those who would react when they read her work, like reaching into the future and feeling the gratitude of those whose lives were enlightened. We have been told how disapointed she was that there were no leaders of their fields who came forth to say what Atlas Shrugged meant to them. There is a real unfairness to that depression.

Her desire to reconnect to life - to excitement - to passion, to all of the pleasures and joys that leave when depression arrives, is so normal. And sex and romantic love ARE the most vital of all life forces. How natural that as she was coming out of a deep depression, the best within her reaches out to rekindle the love affair with Branden. A decade long depression and the tremendous need to come back but at a time where she still had no driving purpose, no over-reaching goal - and this is the woman who defines purposefullness, that is where she is at this time and that makes it easy to see her putting thoughts out of her mind when they conflict with this life-line back to life. So, it wasn't so much self-delusional as not willing to give up on the belief that she could somehow get what existed years before to exist once again - when inside of her everything cried out to come back to life. Branden himself defined the phrase "Strategic repression" which is where to preserve one's sanity when thrust into a situation to horrible to handle, one partially suppresses part of the negatives in order to maintain the strength needed to move forward.

Both Branden and Rand were heroic in that they struggled in the conflicts they found themselves - attempting to live more fully. Rand's pattern of unforgiving judgments of others and her incomplete understandings of romantic love created Branden's dilemma. They each lied to themselves in hopes that if they worked harder or thought more deeply or argued more persuavely they could win a value that was dear to them in the extreme. I know of very few people who are as brave, or as clear thinking as these two, which is why I don't see this as an area for engaging in moral condemnation, but as a tragedy for them - they made a mistake in judgment in their personal lives and they paid for it.



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Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 9:01pmSanction this postReply
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An act of cowardice may or may not a coward make. I have no grounds for defaming Nathaniel Branden as a coward, no wish at all to do so, and I haven't.

There seems to have been three types of people around Rand, older people whom she did not insist on persuading to her ways, younger people who either accepted what she said or shut up about the matter, and people who weren't around Rand. Rand needed to be told no more often. Maybe NB wasn't afraid of the results of telling Rand the truth about both his feelings toward her and his feelings toward Patrecia. But then why didn't he? Confusion? I doubt that. I am not at all excoriating Branden and I think Rand's break with him was disastrous, her treatment of him shabby, and his and NBI's loss was terrible. Neither do I prtend that I have not been in similar situations where I have been afraid of speaking up for fear of the consequences.

It was Nathaniel and Barabara who wrote their memoirs. If they wanted privacy they could have remained silent. As it stands, I don't see them as in need of defense or protection. And like Rand's fictional characters, for better or worse, their stories provide a common narrative for discussion of morality, and a real-life one. If we are looking for the proper word to describe Branden's fear of telling Rand the truth, I think cowardice is a reasonable choice.

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Post 12

Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 10:32pmSanction this postReply
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Ted,

It is clear that Nathaniel was in a position where he would loose one of the greatest values of his life no matter which choice he made. He lived with that fear, hoping to find a third choice. It is easy with hind-sight to see that there would never be a third choice, and eventually that became clear. But feeling fear doesn't make one a coward. Ordinarily a very decisive man, he let himself stay stuck - unable to decide - for too long.

This is from Judgment Day, page 326. It is when Nathaniel and Patrecia first discuss having an affair. He realizes that he must first tell her about his past relationship with Ayn. They meet in Central Park and he says, "When I went on to speak of Ayn's suffering and her lifelong struggles Patrecia listened with tears in her eyes. 'I can't deliver a new blow to her,' I stated... 'I can't and I can't accept loosing her either - she's too important to me. Since I was fourteen years old, this woman has been at the center of my thoughts and my values and everything I admire. You said once I lacked courage, maybe you're right."

Cowardice isn't the appropriate description for that position. Conflicting loyalties at the deepest level is paralyzing. A man willing to sacrifice his feelings for Patrecia to remain true to Ayn or just to keep his life as "Mr. Objectivism" wouldn't be as courageous. A man who was 'cheating' on Ayn to gain some unearned, cheap thrill or wasn't deeply torn by his situation, would qualify as a coward. But those descriptions don't fit. He did not know which way he could turn that wouldn't cost him one of the two greatest values in his life. Make one choice and he would be giving up the woman he loves, making the other choice and he is destroying the woman he has loved since he was a teen.

I understand why he chose to live a lie - and the price he paid in self-esteem while that went on. But I don't fault him for it. I understand how fragile Ayn Rand was in this situation how impossible it must have felt to endure the loss she did in any way other than to embrace an irrational anger. I don't fault her for that. To see this in any other way just wouldn't make any sense to me.

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Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 11:54pmSanction this postReply
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Steve, I have basically agreed with everything you have said on this thread. The issue is that you and I are using the term cowardice with different connotations. I say that the fact that he would not due to fear reveal the truth to Rand was [an act of] X. And I think you agree with me, that there is some X that describes exactly that. Now, If I refused to go to the top of the Empire State Building due to fear when I had some good reason to do so, I would call that cowardice. I would call a person who repeatedly acted out of cowardice as his main personality trait a coward. Now I think in my usage the first applies to Branden for that refusal to act but the second does not apply. I, by using the word cowardice, do not think he was a girly man or evil (remember this is etiquette, not politics here) or anything bad. And Rand, who reasons I totally understand and sympathize with, was bloody irrational in her refusal herself to realize the dynamic and step away before it was too late. And he did have something great which he was correct to fear losing. He had two outs - either don't start the affair at all, or don't let Rand ever think it could be restarted. He didn't take those outs, so the results were the price he ended up paying. The bottom line here ethically is that you have to learn things like this on your own. No one every believes things like how short life is or how complicated love is just from hearing his elders speak it. An issue of moral reprimand would come in if even after the Rand break Branden kept making the same mistakes with women. Were that the case, then there would be grounds for contempt. But so far as I see there are not grounds at all for contempt. This story is a leaning opportunity, not an excuse to pass judgment. I am completely sympathetic.

If this were art, both Rand and Branden would be heroes, but the heroes of a tragedy.

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Monday, July 6, 2009 - 1:07amSanction this postReply
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Ted,

You said, "If I refused to go to the top of the Empire State Building due to fear when I had some good reason to do so, I would call that cowardice."

But there is no conflict between two major values in your example. You only imply a value when you say that you had a good reason to go up - but is it one of the greatest values of your life at risk? And your scenario has no great price to pay if you do go up. If there had been, it would also have to be one of the greatest values in your life. Your scenario isn't the same. cowardice is the wrong word and totally inappropirate. Bad judgement is all that is there - on both sides. Two good people that ended up hurting one another - out of love.

Rand's irrationality over the break isn't unlike the irrationality that sweeps over a person in a sudden and traumatic state of grief - the inability to absorb a great loss in a short time.

You said, "If this were art, both Rand and Branden would be heroes, but the heroes of a tragedy." A few people do live the lives that are grand enough to be as art. Rand and Branden are both heroes and neither of their lives should be seen as a tragedy (although I'd wish Rand much more happiness in the last part of her life) - but the the end of their friendship was a tragic episode.




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Monday, July 6, 2009 - 8:06amSanction this postReply
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No, I don't see their lives as tragedy. I see that story as tragedy. The conflict in values "made sense" but we could see from hindsight and the outside that the price they would have to pay would be ruinous.

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Monday, July 6, 2009 - 9:30amSanction this postReply
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I agree with Luke (post #8), for the same reasons.

But I think Ted and Steve have provided some excellent and informative discussion on this thread.

jt

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Monday, July 6, 2009 - 12:27pmSanction this postReply
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I just read the first few pages of "Inclined to Liberty" on Amazon...

After all, what one person believes does not obstruct the beliefs of another. If one converts a socialist to a libertarian or an atheist to a Christian, or vise versa, what is gained? Maybe the gain is simply the comfort we experience when someone else reconfirms that our beliefs are "correct" after all.

Yikes! What is gained? A person's position on politics and religion have a large effect on how they treat others and what they vouch for in government, and how they use force against others. Mere beliefs? Humph.

Happy Fourth of July! : )


Dean, that was my initial reaction to that statement, too. But if you read further, the point the author was trying to make here was that you don't need the permission of others to be free, it's something that's yours to seize at any time. And that, further, at the margins, converting one more person to the concept of liberty isn't going to cross some tipping point where you finally get to be free. He's saying we're way beyond any such tipping point, that a free life is readily available in our current society.

This claim isn't true, of course, if you're a Jew in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, and so this sentence overstates the case, but he's using hyperbole to try to get people on the verge of choosing liberty to quit waiting for someone else to give them permission to be free, when that choice is already attainable. In Objectivist terms, he's saying don't sacrifice your own liberty in order to preach liberty to others.

But, yes, if you can convince someone to give up their statist beliefs, that's a worthwhile accomplishment. And, yes, that sentence could have been worded more precisely.


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Saturday, July 4, 2009 - 6:17amSanction this postReply
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A challenging poll, as one has to be aware of ones own inventory, before passing judgement on another. A mistake being the fault of the reasoning not the reasoner. www.iep.utm.edu The candor of a philosophical endeavour bares ones soul at the risk of bruising ones ego.
 A constant struggle in my mind is the usage of the word selfish, If she had chose selfhood perhaps she would have been easier for me to understand. Which would make me selfish then. Ha ha ha. A gender thing perhaps who knows,either way as with learning from any teacher it is a challenge to retain ones identity while gaining knowledge from another. Any intake of information will constantly change ones out look on life. If their was no resilience their would be no improvement.
 Nothing is powerless over you in lieu of its counter part, You are powerless over nothing.


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Monday, July 6, 2009 - 3:01pmSanction this postReply
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I think Luke and Jay are making a timeline error. The affair began during the writing of Atlas Shrugged, before the publication of For The New Intellectual and the publication of Who is Ayn Rand and before the creation of NBI. Without the affair, would NBI have existed? The split came because the affair had cooled off. Rand was depressed for some time, and I wonder if she was going thru menopause. It was later, in 1964 that Rand tried to rekindle the affair. It was then that Branden was apparently ambivalent. If I didn't make it clear, I think this was the fatal step, one which was brought about when the conflict arose between the intellectualized theory of sexual attraction and Branden's natural response toward Patrecia versus Rand.

I think the flaw could have been addressed properly by a theory of adequate rather than necessary attraction. It is a mistake to say that since one responds to one's highest values as embodied in another person, if one values intellect that a person's brilliant intellect makes a romantic response necessary. It is much better to say that a person must be sufficiently attractive, sufficiently positive, and share sufficient common values, and then romantic love can blossom and thrive. One need not necessarily fall in love with the one person that best embodies the one highest value. Indeed, should every man and woman on earth who finds intelligence attractive lust for Steven Hawking? So long as the person to whom we are attracted is at least adequate in all those important areas, and obviously more than adequate in other areas, then romantic attraction is proper and praiseworthy. It is not the case, in this example, that Rand's intellect necessitated love, while Patrecia was inadequate. But Rand's theory and the evidence of her journals regarding Branden shows that those are the explicit and tragic premises that were being reasoned from.

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