{"id":527,"date":"2013-12-14T01:24:06","date_gmt":"2013-12-14T09:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=527"},"modified":"2013-12-14T01:24:06","modified_gmt":"2013-12-14T09:24:06","slug":"friday-messiah-ayn-rand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2013\/12\/14\/friday-messiah-ayn-rand\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Messiah: Ayn Rand"},"content":{"rendered":"

So what the heck is the true meaning of Christmas, anyway?\u00a0 Here is what Ayn Rand, perhaps the strangest of modern cult messiahs, had to say<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions\u2014the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors\u2014provide the city with a spectacular display, which only \u201ccommercial greed\u201d could afford to give us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Objectivist<\/a>
Objectivist Tree Ornaments<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For a Rand quote, I find that unusually entertaining.\u00a0 But what’s so strange about Rand as a cult leader?\u00a0 We tend to think of cults as being irrational by definition, based on bizarre ideas, unbelievable unless you\u2019re under the spell of a mind-controlling messiah.\u00a0 Rand’s cult is, on the surface, the very antithesis of that: a group based around the idealization of the rational and the objective\u2014hence the name, Objectivism.\u00a0 <\/i>Rand’s gospel involved, not mystical healings or heaven-sent powers, but individual rights, the moral pursuit of self-interest, and laissez-faire capitalism.\u00a0 So where does the cult aspect come in?<\/p>\n

\"Ayn_Rand1\"<\/a>Ayn Rand was a novelist by trade, but a philosopher by inclination.\u00a0 Many people consider her the most important novelist AND philosopher of the twentieth century.\u00a0 Many do not. \u00a0She was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905 to a privileged professional Jewish family, somewhat impoverished in 1917 by the revolution. She studied history and philosophy in Petrograd University, but already she was writing; and when she got a visa to visit American relatives in 1925, she stayed on, went to Hollywood, and after some of the usual vissicitudes became a screenwriter and novelist.\u00a0 She also married a minor actor named Frank O\u2019Connor in 1929, a marriage that lasted until his death in 1979.\u00a0 But her writing had a purpose beyond movies, fame or fortune.\u00a0 Her books were intended to be vehicles for her developing philosophy; her characters were idealized people demonstrating how the world according to Ayn Rand should work.<\/p>\n

And how is that?\u00a0 If you strip off the jargon, her books seem to be saying that humanity divides into heroic individuals, who need to go their own way and do their own thing, viewing their own happiness as the highest moral good; and parasites, who bleat about altruism and collectivism and helping the needy, but are really just trying to leech off the heroic true achievers.\u00a0 The imperative, then, is that one must be rational, must think for oneself, and must be an individual of the fairly rugged persuasion.\u00a0 Which is ironic, given how things turned out.<\/p>\n

\"cover3j\"<\/a>The two novels for which she is most famous are\u00a0The Fountainhead<\/i> (1943) and Atlas Shrugged<\/i> (1957).\u00a0 These were her manifestos; and alas, for some us, they suffer as novels from having to bear the heavy burden of her philosophy.\u00a0 Myself, I find them stodgy, stiff, clich\u00e9d, and peopled with cardboard characters.\u00a0 The heroes are all big, rich and handsome.\u00a0 The villains are weak, snivelling and small.\u00a0 The women like to be taken by force.\u00a0 The dialogue is as far from natural as it is possible to be\u2014one character, John Galt of Atlas Shrugged<\/i>, delivers a radio speech that runs for a full chapter (over fifty solid pages), would take three hours to deliver aloud, and plods through, in deadening detail, the philosophy of objectivism.\u00a0 Myself, I\u2019d have dashed that radio against the wall within the first five minutes.\u00a0 And the critics of the time pretty much expressed similar views.<\/p>\n

BUT\u2014some people found Rand\u2019s novels revelatory, literally life-changing. These people tended to be intelligent, young, well educated and upper-middle-class, reading Rand in their teens or early twenties.\u00a0 An admiring group began to gather around her in her New York apartment, hanging on her every word.\u00a0 The Ayn Rand cult was born.\u00a0 Atlas Shrugged<\/i> became the next thing to a holy text.<\/p>\n

It is interesting to see, through the memoirs of various participants in Rand’s circle, how a literary discussion group can morph into a personality cult.\u00a0 The venerated leader is empowered to lay down the law to her followers\u2014what they must think, which works of art are correct for them to appreciate, whom they may form sexual relationships with, and so forth.\u00a0 Her every word must be considered capital-T Truth, to be internalized without question or debate.\u00a0 A hierarchy develops, with an inner circle laying down the law to the rest in the leader\u2019s name, and exerting psychological and even physical pressure to keep lower members in line.<\/p>\n

All those steps were taken in short order by Rand\u2019s circle, and became more marked as her circle grew into an organization. \u00a0Harsh criticism and agonized self-criticism were common, with distinctly Orwellian overtones. The ultimate penalty, though, was excommunication, after which the excommunicated individual was to be considered dead, in a way reminiscent of, say, Scientology or the Latter Day Saints.\u00a0 A large number of young people came out of the Ayn Rand experience bitter and damaged.<\/p>\n

Ayn\u2019s personality also emerges clearly in memoirs of people who passed through her cult.\u00a0 Autocratic, egoistic, jealous, demanding of attention, prone to terrible rages if crossed; but also highly intelligent, stimulating, charismatic, addictive. <\/i>\u00a0Getting Rand\u2019s nod of approval became an obsession among her followers; losing her favour became their worst fear.\u00a0\u00a0 This is the great irony: to gain her approval, they were required to stop thinking for themselves\u2014in the service of a philosophy that prized heroic individualism, they had to turn themselves into clones.\u00a0 And by all accounts, they had to spend so much time worrying about getting things right<\/i>, and casting out wrong thinking, that there was little opportunity to pursue happiness, productive achievement, or rationality.\u00a0 It sounds like a particularly earnest, anxious and joyless cult.<\/p>\n

\"1953BrandenWeddingj\"<\/a>Now the dirt\u2014the gossipy bit.\u00a0 Though it\u2019s illuminating gossip, so it\u2019s in for a reason.\u00a0 The original inner circle consisted largely of Canadians, oddly enough, some of them related to each other.\u00a0 At the top, the brightest and best, the designated successor, was a lad from Winnipeg, Nathaniel Branden, and his girlfriend Barbara Weidman, who first came under Ayn\u2019s influence when they were 19 years old.\u00a0 As the group evolved into a large, complex organization, Nathaniel was given the running of it, and was even allowed to coauthor papers with Rand.\u00a0 He began to show signs of autocratic messianism himself.\u00a0 When, with Ayn\u2019s blessing, Nathaniel married Barbara, Ayn was the bridesmaid, and her husband Frank the best man.\u00a0 Rand considered Branden the incarnation of her idealized heroes.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s maybe not surprising that we come to another common messianic characteristic, one that crops up repeatedly: a sense of sexual entitlement.\u00a0 Though Rand was twenty-five years older than Branden, she thought it was natural that they, the two preeminent thinkers of the twentieth century, should get together.\u00a0 Branden agreed.\u00a0 Their spouses put up with it, because that\u2019s what you have to do when you\u2019re married to junior and senior messiahs. The sexual arrangement\u00a0 lasted only a couple of years<\/a>, but Rand later wished to resume relations.\u00a0 Branden put her off with various excuses until 1968, when Rand discovered \u00a0he was having a secret affair with the young and beautiful woman who later became his second wife; all hell broke loose.<\/p>\n

Rand was enraged<\/i>.\u00a0 Obviously Branden was not a real objectivist, and obviously he was not worthy of her trust.\u00a0 He was excommunicated, excised from the group, turned into a nonperson.\u00a0 Rand never forgave him.\u00a0 It was not, of course, the end of Branden; he is still around, now in his eighties, the messiah of his own little self-help movement.\u00a0 (Barbara Branden, another major player in the drama, died only yesterday<\/a>.)\u00a0 Nor, of course, was it the end of Rand\u2019s cult.\u00a0 Her books are still bestsellers, and her organization is still with us in the form of the Ayn Rand Institute, her lasting effect on the libertarian movement and, heaven help us, her disciple Alan Greenspan, whose efforts to run the Fed by Randian principles did not have perhaps the happiest of outcomes.\u00a0 Perhaps it is dangerous in general to turn a messianic theory into actual practice.<\/p>\n

One final word on Rand, an interesting link with the messianic pattern.\u00a0 In her own special way, she had a millenarian, apocalyptic agenda.\u00a0 In Atlas Shrugged<\/i>, Rand\u2019s heroes, the productive laissez-faire capitalists, get tired of being exploited by the parasites, and go on strike.\u00a0 That is, they go into hiding in a little enclave in the mountains, where they can all be happy laissez-faire capitalists together\u2014meantime the outside world, deprived of their creative and heroic influence, slides into chaos and Armageddon.\u00a0 That message became stronger and stronger as Rand aged: the urgent message that her philosophy of objectivism was the world\u2019s only hope of salvation, the only way that twentieth-century messianic woes could be followed by a shining objectivist utopia.<\/p>\n

\"galts_gulch\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Note: with help from the Tea Party and affiliates, Atlas Shrugged <\/i>is being turned into a monumentally dreadful trilogy of movies.\u00a0 Alas, it appears that plans to shoot Part 3 as a musical<\/a> were abandoned.\u00a0 The charming Christmas tree ornaments shown at the top of this post are available from the movie’s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So what the heck is the true meaning of Christmas, anyway?\u00a0 Here is what Ayn Rand, perhaps the strangest of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[24,23,22],"class_list":["post-527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-secularism","tag-atheism","tag-cults","tag-mess"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}