True Individualism v.s. Objectivism
(an incomplete review of Ayn Rand and the World She Made)

I just got through reading the new thought provoking and highly readable biography about Ayn Rand by Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. An excellent book and a fair one I think. It has cured me from wanting to read or reread Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. (I vaguely remember reading Atlas Shrugged in my misspent youth). In her own idiosyncratic way Ayn Rand was deeply influenced by Nietchze and believed in the power of will and the doctrine of the Superman (or Supergirl in her case). Her saving grace, in my opinion, which prevented her from descending into crankdom, was an appreciation of Aristotle and his logic. She despised Plato and viewed him as being infested with mystical cooties and as being a proto-Communist. She was a narcissist who related to others only as objects to be manipulated and who had meaning only as they reflected her ideas and desires back to herself. (Thus she also despised Kant with his pesky Categorical Imperative and who said “Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.”) She was the supreme individualist and nonconformist who created a cult of sycophants whose inner circle had to give up their own individualism and conform to her views in every way or be threatened with excommunication and banishment to the outer darkness with anathemas rained down upon their heads.

She described herself as a man worshipper, but she, apparently, was the only man worthy of such an apotheosis. A few exceptional runners-up were her own mythic creations, Howard Roark, the hero in The Fountainhead, Hank Reardon and John Galt in Atlas Shrugged who threatened to stop the motor of the world and, perhaps, Equality 7-2521, the re-discoverer of light, in the dystopic novella, Anthem, which is a retelling of the durable myth of Prometheus. The flesh and blood men she let into her life were submissively effeminate and easily dominated by her, at least. Her husband, Frank O’Connor, appears to have genuinely loved her and always put her perceived needs ahead of his own. He had undoubted talents of his own as a painter, actor and entrepreneur, but was dominated by his strong-willed wife who forced him into cuckold-hood and broke his will and robbed him of whatever remnants of self-worth he might have had and did not notice his slow vanishing act as he disappeared into a bottle. In her eyes he was the perfect wife and her rubber-stamp of a younger lover, Nathaniel Branden, was the perfect mistress. In facebook terms her personal profile status would be described as marriage: open; interested in male/female sycophants and relationship: its complicated. It was complicated indeed. Nathaniel was married and Ayn insisted that they tell O’Connor and Nathaniel’s wife of their planned affair and got their spouse’s stamps of approval for what started out as twice a week trysts. Frank would absent himself for a few hours so the younger man could service the Apostle of Individualism’s body. I am sure it was great and anything but Platonic, but Nathaniel often expressed the wish that his aging paramour would bathe more frequently. He even asked his wife to suggest to the Great Mind that personal hygiene was not a sign of weakness or a concession to conformity; a dangerous thing to do if you wanted to inhabit the world of Ayn Rand. If you agreed with and accepted her views, you were a genius and a moral person, but if you didn’t, you were an idiot and an evil part of the Collective to boot.

The roots of her atheism reached back to her experiences as a Jewish child in pre-revolutionary Russia when it was dangerous to be a Jew. Her mother was observant and her father was a secularist, but went along for the sake of harmony in the family. The Russian Orthodox Church was vehemently and famously anti-Semitic as was the corrupt Russian government at the time. There was a history of frequent pogroms and Jews were second-class citizens who had to live under special laws even in cosmopolitan St. Petersburg (Leningrad after the Bolshevik revolution). In 1905 alone, when Alissa Zinoviena Rosenbaum (Rand's birth name) was almost one year old, 3,000 Jews were murdered in various pogroms fueled by vodka and the religious bigotry of illiterate Russian Orthodox mobs, egged on by the weak czarist government. Her family and friends sacrificed to allow Alyssa to escape the Soviet Union and emigrate to the U.S. She managed to leave during a slender window of opportunity before the Soviets lowered the Iron Curtain with a resounding clang which made her former home a virtual prison. She was the only one of her immediate family able to escape the totalitarian nightmare.

Another reason, I think, for her atheism is that there was room for only one Supreme Being; one I Am, and that was her own Ego (read the end of Anthem to see what I mean). “‘In the pride of your heart you say, “I am a god; I sit on the throne of God in the heart of the seas.” But you are a mere mortal and not a god, though you think you are as wise as God.” Ezekiel 28:2. The God of the Bible is the ultimate rival and iconoclast to our pet idolatries. He has such bourgeois and narrow mind.