The Limits of Objectivism

...Frank, now hostile yet chained to her economically, became a bickering alcoholic...

...In any case, Barbara Branden has written a biography devoid of personal prejudice...

...Rand's sister, who did not value freedom, chose to return to the Soviet Union...

...Man is the creator of his own soul, it proclaimed, responsible for his actions and deserving of both the credit and the blame for them...

...She goes beyond Rand's sum-mum bonum of objectivity, being compassionate and admiring as well...

...Butshe maintained that life's goal was happiness, and by that standard she was a dismal failure...

...Always searching for a hero, she married Frank O'Connor in Hollywood...

...This is a tribute to the fanatical devotion of the late author's followers...

...Born Alice Rosenbaum in 1905 in Tsarist Russia, a witness to the Bolshevik Revolution and a graduate of a Communist university, she was uniquely equipped to recognize the evils of oppression through collectivism...

...After a brief sojourn with relatives in Chicago that allowed her to master the English language, she continued on to Hollywood where she tried her hand at writing film scripts...

...In her 50s Rand fell in love with a young disciple, Nathan Branden, imagining him to be the hero she still sought...

...If the purpose of human life were merely achievement, Ayn Rand's career would have vindicated the philosophy she invented and lived by...

...Rand could not recognize that in the real world emotions are not governed by reason...

...He turned out to be sweet but ineffectual , and she had to support him throughout most of their 50 years of marriage...

...above all, she was what is today vulgarly called a humanist: "Myphilosophyin essence is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral point of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute...

...In 1926, at the age of 21, she came to the United States with a passionate belief not only in freedom but in the human mind— and her own mind's ability to solve all problems...

...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "The Road to Panama," "Haiti: The Black Republic" When I asked at my local library recently for Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, I was told it had been stolen so many times there was no longer any attempt to stock a copy...

...Moreover, Branden (having by then divorced Barbara) had fallen in love with an intellectually inferior woman, and that proved his values were shoddy...

...Architect Howard Ruark, the hero of TheFoun-tainhead, became an inspiration to creative young people everywhere...

...Nathan was dispatched by Ayn for proving himself a nonhero, incapable of presenting her ideas to the world...

...When Branden later rejected her physically, Rand rationalized her brutal dismissal of him as administrator of her lecture series: He had lied to her to save her feelings, and lies were not admissible in her world...

...Rand maintained that both liberals and conservatives were fundamentally opposed to freedom: Liberals, who advocate social liberty, pounce on economic freedom and strangle business with regulations...

...but it is also an indication that her philosophy of selfishness has been misread as license...

...Cherryl is also upset to discover that James married her out of charity, which could actually have motivated Frank O'Connor too: Ayn's visa had expired, and if he had not married her, she might have had to return to the Soviet Union...

...Ayn Rand was less fortunate in her personal life than in her literary career...

...she was unable to appreciate the anger, depression and pain her new-found love caused her husband and her lover's wife...

...She died in 1982...

...It seemed eminently reasonable to her that they should have an affair, and she fully expected her husband and Bran-den's wife Barbara to agree...

...Yet in the late 1930s when her first novel, We the Living, was turned into an Italian film, the Germans were quick to suppress it, knowing full well that a story championing freedom is as great a threat to the far Right as to the far Left...

...Rand's thought was a return to a simplistic interpretation of the Old Testament's eye-for-an-eye morality, adenial of the virtue of Christian sacrifice...

...Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his evaluation of himself...

...Perhaps the triumph of achievement itself has a price in this currency...

...In contradistinction to each, Rand was a libertarian and an atheist...

...But the power of her accomplishments continued to make itself felt...

...Atlas Shrugged, over which she had labored for 14 years, filled a void in mid-20th century thought by providing a moral alternative to the pervading altruistic philosophy of liberalism...

...Theman who is convinced of his own worthless-ness will be drawn to a woman he despises—because she will reflect his own secret self...

...Soon she moved to New York where she became the successful author of three novels, several plays, books of essays, and a monthly newsletter expounding her "objectivist" philosophy...

...everything must be paid for...

...Like Nietzsche, whose superman was distorted by the Nazis, Rand has been labeled everything from a pariah to a fascist by her enemies...

...Although she never admitted disillusionment with him—that would have conceded a chink in her intellectual armor—her subconscious discontent was perhaps voiced by Cherryl, the wife of James Taggert in A tlas Shrugged, who bemoans the fact that her husband is not the great man she supposed...

...thus he must seek justice, not mercy...

...conservatives, w hile favoring laissez-faire economics, cramp personal liberty in the name of religion...

...There is no conflict between the standards of the mind and the body," Rand had written...

...The idea that self-esteem and self-interest were moral and right had a liberating effect on those who wanted to be and to do, and will no doubt carry Rand's influence well into the future...

...Barbara, earlier one of her best friends, had also been dismissed from her presence...

...Thus in the end Ayn was alone, her once consuming vitality dissolved in lethargy...

...In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggert—possibly the first fully liberated woman in fiction—has three lovers, all of whom are understanding because they are superior types...

...Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life...

...if the guilty do not pay, then the price will be exacted from the innocent...