Chapter 1
Some Seeming Rationalities of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Philosophy
On the surface, Ayn Rand makes excellent points about humans and their potential for rational behavior. Unfortunately, she postulates on individual and social psychology in such an extremist, fanatical, dogmatic, high-flown moralistic and irrational manner as to destroy much of its sense and effectiveness. Let us consider, in this chapter, some of her sanest views, to see how they can be carried to absurd conclusions.
Cognition and emotion. In agreement with the theory of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) and with several other modern psychological views (such as Magda Arnold and George Kelly), Rand holds that emotions do not exist in themselves but are largely created by mental processes. She states that individuals interpret the things they perceive and hear and generate their emotions--including their disturbed emotions from these interpretations. Following Rand’s objectivist psychology, Branden states that mental health is “the capacity for unobstructed cognitive functioning--and the exercise of this capacity.” (1967). This is not only an ideal concept of mental health, but is also an unrealistic goal.
In REBT, the goals of minimum anxiety, depression, and hostility are sought; and clients are taught to work toward these goals by becoming cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally efficient. The therapists have an ideal concept of how they would like to see the client function. Even if a single human never attains this ideal--as it may never be—the ideal itself can help therapists and their clients to work to achieve it. The key is, the achievement of this goal need not be expected or demanded for then clients tend to be disillusioned when it is not reached, and become anxious or depressed by not doing as well as they supposedly must.
Setting up the concept of mental health as an optimum goal is one thing; but believing in this concept as an empirical statement is quite another. Branden talks about the “mentally healthy person as…a man whose cognitive contact with reality is unbreached, whose perceptions, judgments and evaluations are free of blocks and distortions,” (1967). He, like Rand, believes that such individuals can exist today, and that all they need to make them have cognitive contact with unbreached reality is intensive objectivist training.
This belief is unrealistic because (1) it is improbable that anyone with unobstructed cognitive functioning will ever exist and still be what we know as a human; (2) if such persons exist, it is most implausible that they are alive today; and (3) if such people exist, it is likely that they would also have some biological tendencies toward unusual rationality. (4) Rand herself was seriously depressed for the last 25 years of her life. If the suma cum laude of objectivist psychology fails to find happiness using it, how can anyone else?
Branden and Rand say that such people do exist today and that they must have perceptions, judgments, and evaluations “which are free of blocks and distortions.” What luck! This unreasonable expectation will tend to block and distort the thinking of those who hold it because it will make them anxious about not possessing the superb perceptions and judgments that they supposedly must have.
Emotions and values. Objectivist psychology states that “emotion is a value response and is the automatic psychological result of man’s valuing judgments,” (Branden, 1965a). Unhealthy emotions therefore proceed from “inadequate or disturbed thinking” (Branden, 1967a).
This theory of emotion has much to commend it. I first noted that emotions stem from cognitive evaluations or judgments in the 1950’s. In the paper, “An Operational Reformulation of Some of the Basic Principles of Psychoanalysis” (1956), I wrote: “An individual emotes when he evaluates something strongly--when he clearly perceives it as being ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘beneficial’ or ‘harmful,’ and strongly responds to it in a negative or positive manner.” I later discovered that Magda Arnold and several other psychologists and philosophers had independently arrived at this same conclusion.
Rand, after making a good start in its theory of emotion, goes on to state that people’s emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which their mind has to program with the values his mind chooses (Rand, 1961a). The implication here is that all emotion is purely of cerebral origin; and that the emoting individual has full volitional control over his emotional reactions. This is untrue for several reasons:
1.Some emotions, such as sexual ecstasy or disgust over certain foods, seem to be inextricably linked up with, or biased by, various physical sensations and are only moderately instigated by cognitions. They are somatic-psychic as well as psycho-somatic in origin; and sometimes they are more the former than the latter.
2.Cognition itself is inevitably correlated with and is importantly influenced by bodily sensations and motor responses. A heterosexual man desires a woman because he thinks he is attractive; but he also may think her attractive, and even loves her, because he receives great physical pleasure from having sex relations with her. The wish--or desire or satisfaction--as the old saying goes, is father to the thought; and the thought is also father to the wish.
3.Although a person has much more ability to control her emotion through her thinking process than she often thinks she has, her ability in this regard is hardly limitless. Once her emotional process is, for any reason whatever, forcefully under way, all the thinking in the world may not enable her to control it--at least not for the moment. And once her physical sensations are greatly aroused, she will tend to think and emote in certain ways, no matter what is her general philosophy of life.
Regardless of the fact that cognition itself (and its product, reason) are biased and restricted by our limited powers of perceiving, emoting, and acting. Because we are fallible humans all our behaving abilities--including sensing, perceiving, thinking, emoting, and acting--are imperfect and restricted. The virtually perfect, one-to-one relationship between our thought and emotions that Rand and Branden posit is practically nonexistent. Consequently, if they wish to remain unchallenged, their position had better be modified. An emotion tendsto arise from a value-response. It usually is something of an automatic psychological result of our value judgments. It has, however, other important causative factors connected with human sensing, perceiving, and acting.
Volition or free will. One of the best aspects of Rand’s objectivism is its theory of volition. Like rational emotive behavior therapy, it emphasizes that people have some choice or free will in their acceptance or rejection of parental and other social influences. Ayn Rand states that the choice to think, or not, is volitional. When people are predominantly negative, they choose “a self-made cognitive malnutrition,” (1967b) that leads to an impoverished, anxiety-ridden inner life.
Even children, Branden aptly points out, have some choice in being influenced by or conditioned by their environment and do not have to be completely affected by it, (1967a). Although most children are highly suggestible to their parents’ teachings, quite a few are not. However, having stated this fact, Rand and Branden characteristically louse it up with silly allegations and implications. Their main theory of volition--as we shall see later in more detail--implies that people are perfectly able, especially during adulthood, to make healthy and rational choices in their conduct. Rand then holds that when they refuse to choose sanely or to think clearly for themselves, they are reprehensible persons who deserve to be punished. Note that she does not merely believe that, if people choose to think poorly, they will in all probability bring on unpleasant consequences. Yes, most probably. It is quite questionable that anyone chooses not to think well. More probably, it is an error in thinking that causes their emotions, and sways them to choose not to think. They may not think about important things or use bad judgment. It is a non-sequetor to surmise that they perceive a clear choice and choose to think poorly. Moreover, behaviorism has shown that people can change if they understand what is happening and work at changing. But Rand moralistically condemns the person who does not “volitionally” think well and she attempts to put them into a kind of objectivist hell. She thereby becomes theological rather than empirical.
After stating, however, that people need not make themselves anxious as long as they hold rational values, Rand contradicts herself and contends that they must lose self-esteem and become anxious if they volitionally refuse to think, if they perform poorly, and if they do not continue to ceaselessly grow as a person. (See a detailed discussion of this point in the following chapter.)
Rand also sets up her own theological premises, her own dogmatic shoulds, oughts, and musts, that will probably cause people as much emotional disturbance, if they adhere to them, as any of the other absolutistic and not falsifiable constructs about themselves that they are likely to hold. Although I recognize that a person’s values can make them needlessly disturbed, Rand believes that they must hold certain unqualified values about reason and reality that will inevitably cause them trouble. Rand does little to disabuse individuals of their unrealistic value systems by which they seriously disturb themselves. Instead, she frequently tries to get them to adopt more irrational and dogmatic assumptions. It seems likely that this is why she herself suffered with depression for the last 25 years of her life.
Self-interest. Ostensibly, Rand--like REBT and several other systems of philosophy--espouses enlightened self-interest as an aspect of ethics and mental health. Thus, she states that just as life is an end in itself, humans are ends in themselves, not means to the ends or the welfare of others (1964). Therefore, people must live for their own sake, neither sacrificing themselves to others, nor sacrificing others to themselves. This kind of living for one’s own sake and achieving one’s own happiness, is, Rand dogmatically states, man and woman’s “highest moral purpose.”
Rand, moreover, defines selfishness and sacrifice in tautological, unempirical terms as absolute values and disvalues. A sacrifice, states Rand “is the surrender of a value,” (1957). If you sacrifice money, comfort, or time, you have not made a real sacrifice, as long as you do not simultaneously sacrifice one of your basic values. Thus, if you give your only bottle of milk to your starving child, you are not making a sacrifice, because you very much value your child. But if you give the milk to your neighbor’s child, whom you don’t value too much, and let your own child die, then you are truly sacrificing high value for lower value and making a real sacrifice. Note that besides being an absurd, silly extreme example of something no mother would do, sacrifice and selfishness are defined as Rand prejudicially thinks they should be defined; and are not standard dictionary usage. Several objections can be made about Rand’s definition of sacrifice:
1.The Randian definition infers if you give a bottle of milk to a starving child, you are doing so because your value system says that this is a good thing to do; therefore you do not sacrifice any value in giving it. But your value system could also tell you to sacrifice your own child to God (who will then presumably love you), to cut off your leg so that you will win the approval of the physically impaired, (which you may value highly), and to give money to a “worthless” stranger, because you think that you will then be a “good” person yourself.
Your value system could induce you to make just about any kind of sacrifice, including the sacrifice of your life so that others will think you noble. To say that therefore you are not really making any sacrifice is either to demonstrate (a) that practically all sacrifices are actually justifiable; or (b) that virtually no sacrifices involve the giving up of your values, and therefore there are not really any sacrifices. Ayn Rand’s notion that, if you give milk to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is a sacrifice is invalidated because you must have had some reason--or value--for making this decision; hence, not having sacrificed a value, you made no sacrifice at all.
2.What Rand really seems to mean is that there are some “good” and “sensible” choices and some “bad” and “foolish” ones. She uses sacrifice in a pejorative sense to differentiate between choices she likes and dislikes.
3.By any reasonable definition, the term sacrifice means the giving up of anything--money, time, physical comfort, or anything else--for either (a) something else of lesser value or (b) no return whatever. Moreover, unless the thing you give up has some value to you, your “sacrifice” is unimportant or meaningless. The Webster’s New World dictionary, in fact, defines sacrifice as “a giving up, destroying, permitting injury to, or foregoing of some valued thing for the sake of something of greater value or having a more pressing claim.” Rand differentiates between some things or desires, which she does not call values (even though they are obviously valued by the individual) and some basic philosophic premise about yourself and the world, which she does call a value. This distinction is arbitrary.
What is worse, if your basic philosophic premise happens to differ from hers--if, for example, you consider a stranger “worthwhile” and she considers him or her “worthless,” or if you consider money more important than a friend--she - thinks your values are wrong and that you are making a terrible sacrifice! She is therefore arbitrary in regarding what your values really are and what she thinks they should be. With that kind of highly definitional thinking, she is bound to call any of your actions that she dislikes a “sacrifice” and any action that she happens to approve a function of your “selfishness or enlightened self-interest.”
4.Where definite sacrifice seems to exist, and the sacrificing individual is lauded for being unselfish, Rand and Branden refuse to admit that any sacrifice has actually taken place and pretend that it has not. Thus, Branden states: If, in an issue where no self-sacrifice is involved, you help another human in an emergency, and do so out of good will and regard for the value of a human life, you cannot equate your action with the policy of a man who believes that to serve others is the purpose of her or his existence, that he has no right to live otherwise, that anyone’s suffering takes first claim on him, (1967). Some obvious objections here are:
a.Where is any man who believes that to serve others is the purpose of his existence, that he has no right to live otherwise, and that anyone’s suffering takes first claim on him? Perhaps a few “saints” in human history have held this extremely altruistic view; but has anyone else?
b.If you are on your way to meet your friend and you stop to help a fellow human in an emergency, knowing that you will miss your enjoyable date, you may do so out of good will and regard for the value of a human life. But--let’s face facts!--you are obviously making a sacrifice, out of your regard for the value of a human life; and it seems to me silly to deny it. The fact that you gain some value by making this sacrifice (which you do in making almost any sacrifice) does not guarantee that you are being at least partly self-sacrificing or altruistic. And the fact that you are not as self-sacrificial as someone who thinks that to serve others is the purpose of his existence, does not negate the sacrifice.
It is incredible, in this regard, that Rand and Branden keep insisting that no sacrifice is involved when you gain what they call value for your sacrifice. They seem to be incredibly dense here; or they are so bent on being the outstanding upholders of the philosophy of selfishness that they simply refuse to admit that any degree of altruism is legitimate, even when they indicate (as does Branden in his above statement) that one kind of sacrifice is hardly the same as another.
5.The unusually tautological nature of the objectivist concept of selfishness and self-sacrifice is indicated in the following passage from Branden’s essay, “Benevolence versus Altruism” (1962). He states that if you found an abandoned baby on the street and helped it, you normally would not do so out of altruistic duty but out of loyalty to the value of living and to the potential that the baby represents. If the baby represented an evil person like Hitler, you would not bother to save it. Your motive for saving the baby would be the value you place on it. Therefore you would not be thoroughly altruistic in saving it.Obvious objections to this statement include: