Rothbard’s penetrating analysis of the cult of St. Ayn:
“The adoption of the central axiom of Rand’s greatness was made possible by Rand’s undoubted personal charisma, a charisma buttressed by her air of unshakeable arrogance and self-assurance. It was a charisma and an arrogance that was partially emulated by her leading disciples. Since the rank-and-file disciple knew in his heart that he was not all-wise or totally self-assured, it became all too easy to subordinate his own will and intellect to that of Rand. Rand became the living embodiment of Reason and Reality and by some quality of personality Rand was able to bring about the mind-set in her disciples that their highest value was to earn her approval while the gravest sin was to incur her displeasure. The ardent belief in Rand’s supreme originality was of course reinforced by the disciples’ not having read (or been able to read) anyone whom they might have discovered had said the same things long before.
Ejection From Paradise
The Rand cult grew and flourished until the irrevocable split between the Greatest and the Second Greatest, until Satan was ejected from Paradise in the fall of 1968. The Rand-Branden split destroyed NBI, and with it the organized Randian movement. Rand has not displayed the ability or the desire to pick up the pieces and reconstitute an equivalent organization. The Objectivist fell back to The Ayn Rand Letter, and now that too has gone.
With the death of NBI, the Randian cultists were cast adrift, for the first time in a decade, to think for themselves. Generally, their personalities rebounded to their non-robotic, pre-Randian selves. But there were some unfortunate legacies of the cult. In the first place, there is the problem of what the Thomists call invincible ignorance. For many ex-cultists remain imbued with the Randian belief that every individual is armed with the means of spinning out all truths a priori from his own head – hence there is felt to be no need to learn the concrete facts about the real world, either about contemporary history or the laws of the social sciences. Armed with axiomatic first principles, many ex-Randians see no need of learning very much else. Furthermore, lingering Randian hubris imbues many ex-members with the idea that each one is able and qualified to spin out an entire philosophy of life and of the world a priori. Such aberrations as the “Students of Objectivism for Rational Bestiality” are not far from the bizarreries of many neo-Randian philosophies, preaching to a handful of zealous partisans. On the other hand, there is another understandable but unfortunate reaction. After many years of subjection to Randian dictates in the name of “reason,” there is a tendency among some ex-cultists to bend the stick the other way, to reject reason or thinking altogether in the name of hedonistic sensation and caprice.
We conclude our analysis of the Rand cult with the observation that here was an extreme example of contradiction between the exoteric and the esoteric creed. That in the name of individuality, reason, and liberty, the Rand cult in effect preached something totally different. The Rand cult was concerned not with every man’s individuality, but only with Rand’s individuality, not with everyone’s right reason but only with Rand’s reason. The only individuality that flowered to the extent of blotting out all others, was Ayn Rand’s herself; everyone else was to become a cipher subject to Rand’s mind and will.
Nikolai Bukharin’s famous denunciation of the Stalin cult, masked during the Russia of the 1930’s as a critique of the Jesuit order, does not seem very overdrawn as a portrayal of the Randian reality:
It has been correctly said that there isn’t a meanness in the world which would not find for itself and ideological justification. The king of the Jesuits, Loyola, developed a theory of subordination, of “cadaver discipline,” every member of the order was supposed to obey his superior “like a corpse which could be turned in all directions, like a stick which follows every movement, like a ball of wax which could be changed and extended in all directions”… This corpse is characterized by three degrees of perfection: subordination by action, subordination of the will, subordination of the intellect. When the last degree is reached, when the man substitutes naked subordination for intellect, renouncing all his convictions, then you have a hundred percent Jesuit.3
It has been remarked that a curious contradiction existed with the strategic perspective of the Randian movement. For, on the one hand, disciples were not allowed to read or talk to other persons who might be quite close to them as libertarians or Objectivists. Within the broad rationalist or libertarian movement, the Randians took a 100% pure, ultra-sectarian stance. And yet, in the larger political world, the Randian strategy shifted drastically, and Rand and her disciples were willing to endorse and work with politicians who might only be one millimeter more conservative than their opponents. In the larger world, concern with purity or principles seemed to be totally abandoned. Hence, Rand’s whole-hearted endorsement of Goldwater, Nixon, and Ford, and even of Senators Henry Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan.
Neither Liberty Nor Reason
There seems to be only one way to resolve the contradiction in the Randian strategic outlook of extreme sectarianism within the libertarian movement, coupled with extreme opportunism, and willingness to coalesce with slightly more conservative heads of State, in the outside world. That resolution, confirmed by the remainder of our analysis of the cult, holds that the guiding spirit of the Randian movement was not individual liberty – as it seemed to many young members – but rather personal power for Ayn Rand and her leading disciples. For power within the movement could be secured by totalitarian isolation and control of the minds and lives of every member; but such tactics could scarcely work outside the movement, where power could only hopefully be achieved by cozying up the President and his inner circles of dominion.
Thus, power not liberty or reason, was the central thrust of the Randian movement. despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements. Hopefully, libertarians, once bitten by the virus, may now prove immune.” The major lesson of the history of the movement to libertarians is that It Can Happen Here, that libertarians,
Of the several works on Randianism, only one has concentrated on the cult itself: Leslie Hanscom, “Born Eccentric,” Newsweek (March 27, 1961), pp. 104–05. Hanscom brilliantly and wittily captured the spirit of the Rand cult from attending and reporting on one of the Branden lectures. Thus, Hanscom wrote: After three hours of heroically rapt attention to Branden’s droning delivery, the fans were rewarded by the personal apparition of Miss Rand herself – a lady with drilling black eyes and Russian accent who often wears a brooch in the shape of a dollar sign as her private icon….
“Her books,” said one member of the congregation, “are so good that most people should not be allowed to read them. I used to want to lock up nine-tenths of the world in a cage, and after reading her books, I want to lock them all up.” Later on, this same chap – a self-employed “investment counselor” of 22 – got a lash of his idol’s logic full in the face. Submitting a question from the floor – a privilege open to paying students only – the budding Baruch revealed himself as a mere visitor. Miss Rand – a lady whose glare would wilt a cactus – bawled him out from the platform as a “cheap fraud.” Other seekers of wisdom came off better. One worried disciple was told that it was permissible to celebrate Christmas and Easter so long as one rejected the religious significance (the topic of the night’s lecture was the folly of faith). A housewife was assured that she needn’t feel guilty about being a housewife so long as she chose the job for non-emotional
Although mysticism is one of the nastiest words in her political arsenal, there hasn’t been a she-messiah since Aimee McPherson who can so hypnotize a live audience.”
At least as revelatory as Hanscom’s article were the predictable howls of overkill outrage by the cult members. Thus, two weeks later, under the caption “Thugs and Hoodlums?”, Newsweek printed excerpts from Randian letters sent in reaction to the article. One letter stated: “Your vicious, vile, and obscene tirade against Ayn Rand is a new low, even for you. To have sanctioned such a stream of abusive invective…is an act of unprecedented moral depravity. A magazine staffed with irresponsible hoodlums has no place in my home.” Another man wrote that “one who has read the works of Miss Rand and proceeds to write an article of this caliber can only be motivated by villainy. It is the work of a literary thug.” Another warned, “Since you propose to behave like cockroaches, be prepared to be treated as such.” And finally, one Bonnie Benov revealed the inner axiom: “Ayn Rand is…the greatest individual that has ever lived.” Having fun with the cult, Newsweek printed a particularly unprepossessing picture of Rand underneath the Benov letter, and captioned it: “Greatest Ever?”5
My Comment:
I was repelled when I first read “The Fountainhead” when I was about twenty. To tell the truth, I didn’t really read it. I read about 20 pages and then got someone else to tell me about it.
That was natural, I think. I was reading a lot of Catholic philosophy and was surrounded by socialists. In India, that book and the kind of people who read it were people who lived in a different world from mine.
My friends and I tended to laugh at them, as well as at the crowd we called “JNU Marxists” (upper class and upper middle-class Indian students who affected Marxism and usually attended the Marxist dominated university, Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi). These Randian contemporaries of mine, like the JNU Marxists, were usually affluent and enamored of the West, which they saw through the eyes of Western counter-culture.
It was only 15 years later, when I reread Ayn Rand, that I came to appreciate what had first seemed repellent to me.
I thought about this when I was reading Shikha Dalmia’s recent commentary about Rand at Forbes. She writes that a love of Rand is a sign of adolescence and is something you leave behind when you become an adult with adult responsibilities. Dalmia’s criticism is a common one, but for me it’s unconvincing, because in my case, I came to admire Ayn Rand relatively late in life.
As for Rothbard, as always, he presents many useful insights, but he was perhaps temperamentally unsuited to understand a woman of Rand’s nature. There’s a whiff of male chauvinism here. Despite all her pretentiousness (and the pretentiousness of her acolytes), despite the flaws in her thinking and in her character, to reduce her to a power-hungry, narcissistic “wicked witch of Capitalism” is just mistaken.
Whatever warping of her personality took place, we have to remember when and where she grew up. She had to struggle mightily simply to maintain her vision of individualism intact, floating in a sea of collectivism and political ideology in the middle of the twentieth century. That, more than pathology, probably accounts for those ideological and personal alignments she made that seem opportunistic to us today….
“I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
Call this what you will but it’s not narcissism…and it is very very far from selfishness.
As for what is is that sends people screaming to the exits when they hear her name:
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”