Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (23 page)

How could such a highly individualistic philosophy become the basis of a cult, an organization that thrives on group thinking, intolerance of dissent, and the power of the leader? The last thing a cult leader wants is for followers to think for themselves and exist as individuals apart from the group.

The 1960s were years of anti-establishment, anti-government, find-yourself individualism. Rand's philosophy exploded across the nation, particularly on college campuses.
Atlas Shrugged
became
the
book to read. Though it is 1,168 pages long, readers devoured the characters, plot, and philosophy. The book stirred emotions and provoked action. Ayn Rand clubs were founded at hundreds of colleges. Professors taught courses on the philosophy of Objectivism and the Literary works of Rand. Rand's inner circle of friends grew, and one of this circle, Nathaniel Branden, founded the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI) in 1958, which sponsored lectures and courses on Objectivism, first in New York and then nationally.

As Rand's popularity shot skyward, so too did confidence in her philosophy, both Rand's and her followers'. Thousands of people attended classes, thousands of letters poured into the offices of the NBI, and millions of books were sold. By 1948,
The Fountainhead
had been made into a successful film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and the movie rights for
Atlas Shrugged
were being negotiated. Rand's ascent to power and influence was nothing short of miraculous. Readers of her novels, especially
Atlas Shrugged,
told Rand they had changed their lives and their way of thinking. Their comments include (Branden 1986, pp. 407-415 passim):

• A twenty-four-year-old "traditional housewife" (her own label) read
Atlas Shrugged
and said, "Dagny Taggart [the book's principle heroine] was an inspiration to me; she is a great feminist role model. Ayn Rand's works gave me the courage to be and to do what I had dreamed of."

• A law school graduate said of Objectivism, "Dealing with Ayn Rand was like taking a post-doctoral course in mental functioning. The universe she created in her work holds out hope, and appeals to the best in man. Her lucidity and brilliance was a light so strong I don't think anything will ever be able to put it out."

• A philosophy professor concluded, "Ayn Rand was one of the most original thinkers I have ever met. There is no escape from facing the issues she raised. At a time in my life when I thought I had learned at least the essentials of most philosophical views, being confronted with her . . . suddenly changed the entire direction of my intellectual life, and placed every other thinker in a new perspective."

The November 20, 1991 issue of
Library of Congress News
reported the results of a survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club of readers' "lifetime reading habits," indicating that
Atlas Shrugged
was ranked second only to the
Bible
in its significance to their lives. But to those in the inner circle surrounding and protecting Rand (in a fit of irony, they named themselves "the Collective"), their leader soon was more than just extremely influential—she was venerated. Her seemingly omniscient ideas were inerrant. The power of her personality made her so persuasive that no one dared to challenge her. And Objectivism, since it was derived through pure reason, revealed final Truth and dictated absolute morality.

The cultic flaw in Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is not its use of reason, emphasis on individuality, view that humans ought to be motivated by rational self-interest, or conviction that capitalism is the ideal system. The fallacy in Objectivism is its belief that absolute knowledge and final Truth are attainable through reason, and therefore that there are absolutes of right and wrong knowledge and of moral and immoral thought and action. For Objectivists, once a principle has been discovered by (the Objectivists' version of) reason to be True, the discussion is at an end. If you disagree with the principle, then your reasoning is flawed. If your reasoning is flawed, it can be corrected, but if you don't correct your reasoning (i.e., learn to accept the principle), you are flawed and do not belong in the group. Excommunication is the final solution for such unreformed heretics.

One of those closest to Rand was Nathaniel Branden, a young philosophy student who joined the Collective in the early days, before
Atlas Shrugged
was published. In his autobiographical memoirs, entitled
Judgment Day,
he recalled, "There were implicit premises in our world to which everyone in our circle subscribed, and which we transmitted to our students at NBI." Incredibly, and here is where a philosophical movement mutated into a cult of personality, their creed became, in Nathaniel Branden's words:

• Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived.

•
 Atlas Shrugged
is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world.

• Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man's life on earth.

• Once one is acquainted with Ayn Rand and /or her work, the measure of one's virtue is intrinsically tied to the position one takes regarding her and/or it.

• No one can be a good Objectivist who does not admire what Ayn Rand admires and condemn what Ayn Rand condemns.

• No one can be a fully consistent individualist who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue.

• Since Ayn Rand has designated Nathaniel Branden as her "intellectual heir," and has repeatedly proclaimed him to be an ideal exponent of her philosophy, he is to be accorded only marginally less reverence than Ayn Rand herself.

• But it is best not to say most of these things explicitly (excepting, perhaps, the first two items). One must always maintain that one arrives at one's beliefs solely by reason. (1989, pp. 255-256)

Rand and her followers were, in their own time, accused of being a cult, a charge that, of course, they denied. "My following is not a cult. I am not a cult figure," Rand once told an interviewer. Barbara Branden, in her biography,
The Passion of Ayn Rand,
stated, "Although the Objectivist movement clearly had many of the trappings of a cult—the aggrandizement of the person of Ayn Rand, the too ready acceptance of her personal opinions on a host of subjects, the incessant moralizing—it is nevertheless significant that the fundamental attraction of Objectivism .. . was the precise opposite of religious worship" (1986, p. 371). And Nathaniel Branden addressed the issue this way: "We were not a cult in the literal, dictionary sense of the word, but certainly there was a cultish aspect to our world. We were a group organized around a powerful and charismatic leader, whose members judged one another's character chiefly by loyalty to that leader and to her ideas" (1989, p. 256).

But when you leave the "religious" component out of the definition of
cult,
thus broadening the word's usage, it becomes clear that Objectivism was (and is) a type of cult—a cult of personality—as are many other, non-religious groups. A cult is characterized by

Veneration of the leader:
Glorification of the leader to the point of virtual sainthood or divinity.

Inerrancy of the leader:
Belief that the leader cannot be wrong.
Omniscience of the leader:
Acceptance of the leader's beliefs and pronouncements on all subjects, from the philosophical to the trivial.

Persuasive techniques:
Methods, from benign to coercive, used to recruit new followers and reinforce current beliefs.

Hidden agendas:
The true nature of the group's beliefs and plans is obscured from or not fully disclosed to potential recruits and the general public.

Deceit:
Recruits and followers are not told everything they should know about the leader and the group's inner circle, and particularly disconcerting flaws or potentially embarrassing events or circumstances are covered up.

Financial and/or sexual exploitation:
Recruits and followers are persuaded to invest money and other assets in the group, and the leader may develop sexual relations with one or more of the followers.

Absolute truth:
Belief that the leader and/or the group has discovered final knowledge on any number of subjects.

Absolute morality:
Belief that the leader and/or the group has developed a system of right and wrong thought and action applicable to members and nonmembers alike. Those who strictly follow the moral code become and remain members; those who do not are dismissed or punished.

The ultimate statement of Rand's moral absolutism heads the title page of Nathaniel Branden's book. Says Rand,

The precept: "Judge not, that ye be not judged" ... is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself. There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims. The moral principle to adopt... is: "Judge, and be prepared to be judged."

The absurd lengths to which such thinking can go are demonstrated by Rand's judgments on her followers for even the most trivial things. Rand had argued, for example, that musical taste could not be objectively defined, yet, as Barbara Branden observed, "if one of her young friends responded as she did to Rachmaninoff. . . she attached deep significance to their affinity." By contrast, Barbara tells of a friend of Rand's who remarked that he enjoyed the music of Richard Strauss: "When he left at the end of the evening, Ayn said, in a reaction becoming increasingly typical, 'Now I understand why he and I can never be real soul mates. The distance in our sense of life is too great.' Often, she did not wait until a friend had left to make such remarks" (1986, p. 268).

In both Barbara and Nathaniel Branden's assessments, we see all the characteristics of a cult. Deceit and sexual exploitation? In this case, exploitation may be too strong, but the act was present nonetheless, and deceit was rampant. In what has become the most scandalous (and now oft-told) story in the brief history of the Objectivist movement, starting in 1953 and lasting until 1958 (and on and off for another decade after), Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, twenty-five years her junior, carried on a love affair and kept it secret from everyone
except
their respective spouses.

By their reckoning, the affair was ultimately "reasonable" since the two of them were, de facto, the two greatest intellects on the planet. "By the total logic of who we are—by the total logic of what love and sex mean— we
had
to love each other," Rand rationalized to Barbara Branden and her own husband, Frank O'Connor. "Whatever the two of you may be feeling I know your intelligence, I know you recognize the rationality of what we feel for each other, and that you hold no value higher than reason" (Branden 1986, p. 258). Amazingly, both spouses bought this line and agreed to allow Rand and Nathaniel an afternoon and evening of sex and love once a week. "And so," Barbara said later, "we all careened toward disaster."

The disaster came in 1968, when Rand found out that Nathaniel had not only fallen in love with yet another woman but begun an affair with her. Even though the affair between Rand and Nathaniel had long since dwindled, the master of the absolute moral double standard would not tolerate such a breach of conduct by anyone else. "Get that bastard down here," Rand screamed upon hearing the news, "or I'll drag him here myself!" Nathaniel, according to Barbara, slunk into Rand's apartment to face judgment day. "It's finished, your whole act!" she told him. "I'll tear down your facade as I built it up! I'll denounce you publicly, I'll destroy you as I created you! I don't even care what it does to me. You won't have the career I gave you, or the name, or the wealth, or the prestige. You'll have nothing." The barrage continued for several minutes until she pronounced her final curse: "If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you'll be impotent for the next twenty years!" (1986, pp. 345-347).

Rand followed up with a six-page open letter to her followers in which she explained that she had completely broken with the Brandens and extended the pattern of deceit through lies of omission: "About two months ago . . . Mr. Branden presented me with a written statement which was so irrational and so offensive to me that I had to break my personal association with him." Without so much as a hint of the nature of the offense, Rand continued, "About two months later Mrs. Branden suddenly confessed that Mr. Branden had been concealing from me certain ugly actions and irrational behavior in his private life, which was grossly contradictory to Objectivist morality." Nathaniel's second affair was judged immoral, his first was not. This excommunication was followed by a barrage from NBFs associate lecturers, fired in complete ignorance of what really happened, that sounds all too ecclesiastical: "Because Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, in a series of actions, have betrayed fundamental principles of Objectivism, we condemn and repudiate these two persons irrevocably, and have terminated all association with them" (Branden 1986, pp. 353-354).

Confusion reigned in the Collective and among the rank-and-file. What were they to think about such a formidable condemnation for unnamed sins? The logical extreme of cultish thinking was articulated several months later. In the words of Barbara Branden, "A half-demented former student of NBI. . . raised the question of whether or not it would be morally appropriate to assassinate Nathaniel because of the suffering he had caused Ayn; the man concluded that it should not be done on practical grounds, but would be morally legitimate. Fortunately, he was shouted down at once by a group of appalled students" (1986, p. 356n).