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My situation involved my ex-wife of 13 years having affairs. After giving her opportunities to stop, she chose not to, so I filed for divorce. She did not want the divorce (wanted her cake and eat it too). In my state we have No Fault laws, so not only did I not have the opportunity to recover any damages, but I had to give her half of my life savings, buy her out of my business, and pay her alimony. We split custody of our children 50/50, however I pay for 100% of their expenses (private school, healthcare/insurance, etc), AND I have to pay her child support.
Bottom line, I am the one who ultimately pushed for the divorce. She fought tooth and nail to not let me divorce her. It ended up setting my retirement age back 10 years.
The good news is that my current wife of 7 years is fantastic!
The problem with our divorce laws is that they are antiquated. When these laws were written, a traditional divorce consisted of a man leaving his "kept woman" who all but wasn't allowed to go to school or work. She would end up with the kids full time with little help from the father. While that still often happens, many scenarios have changed dramatically. Women can easily take advantage of the laws the way they are written, with no worry of recourse.
Funny thing about my ex wife is that she always claimed (and still does claim) to be very much against entitlements. She had no problem taking as much from me as she could get her hands on every month for years. Even though she is remarried to a fairly successful realtor, she still has no problem taking plenty of child support and not paying any of the kids expenses, even though they are only with her half of the time. The laws are pretty messed up.
Can you tell I'm a little bitter about the laws? ;)
Objectivists base all decisions using reason which eliminates most of the causes of the poor selection of partners and divorce. If you choose a partner because you like and respect their mind and their character, you will be disappointed far less than if you select them based on their physical characteristics.
I married my wife because I thought she was a good person, intelligent and I liked being with her. I decided that she would be the best mother to our children and friend to me. We are not religious and are strong advocates of individual rights. We married when she was 20 and I was 21 which was soon to be 55 years ago. We have 4 children and 6 grandchildren. I claim that everything we own is hers and she says, no it is mine. I base my claim on the fact that I want to dispose of it all and bum around the world together and she won't let it go.
wife's name Alice?
My question is, what would happen to the spouse if the couple were to divorce and he or she had no other marketable talents?
Many years ago, I was stationed on the island of Okinawa. At one point, another Marine "discarded" his wife who was 6000 miles from home (this loser ended up in the brig). I'm sure the Marine Corps sent this young lady home (at her ex's expense), but how would this be handled in the Gulch?
Obviously, you couldn't simply send the spouse away...they would know too much about the Gulch. You could send them both away, but the striker may have a critical job within the Gulch.
I was hesitant to ask such a question, but something like a Galt's Gulch would, inevitably run into such a situation. I just thought I would see how a true Objectivist would handle it.
Remember John's boss at 20th Century Motors never told his wife about the gulch because she wouldn't have got it.
Other than what? I'm asking genuinely, not snidely, because people with no marketable talents will struggle in almost any situation.
What happens to anyone who becomes an invalid without adequate financial resources saved up for long term care? Let face it, many people (young and old alike) become invalids requiring 100% care through no fault of their own i.e. accidents, disease or simple old age....
Unless the ex-wife is able to obtain independent employment (or get re-attached)...what happens to her status in the Gulch?
If you don't have any wealth and cannot provide goods or services to trade, how do you provide for yourself and happens to your status anywhere? It is just a fundamental fact of life that if you want people to do stuff for you, you have to do stuff for them, assuming you don't steal.
If the spouse really is a homemaker, doing work making the home run well, helping the other partner get to work, recover from sickness, deal with life's stress's and sorrows, the partners could (and should IMHO) make a deal to share all the wealth they produce 50/50. The partners are free to work out some other deal, perhaps based on the approximate going rate of everything they provide one another, but that strikes me as meretricious.
The fact they were married distracts from the main issue of what happens to people unable to provide goods/service to other but want others to provide them goods/services. That's never a good situation.
The first of the two problems comes about because the philosophic connection is not strong enough, and as a result small problems loom large and large problems become insurmountable. That is why a courting period should last for a long enough time for the couple to truly know one another. When sex is involved, it should take up to less nor more importance than the couple has agreed upon. Yes, I know that sex can promote powerful feelings and that rationality should not be governing it. WRONG! Once again, agreed upon compatibility will make many problems disappear.Sex can be an expression of love where one party offers the other their greatest gift -- themselves. Or, it can merely be a bodily function. Which one is best? I needn't tell you.Infidelity is not negotiable. Unlike Rand's personal life, there is no way to participate in it without psychologically damaging the partner. If a new love overshadows the current partnership, then take it out of the lies and shadows and deal with it honestly. There is still pain, but at least deception is not a part of it.
Since women have the unique biological role of bearing children, and since they are not permitted to divest themselves of their "reproductive rights" by marriage or otherwise, they have total, unilateral authority over all family formation decisions, irrespective of their partners' wishes, whether married or not. A woman can marry you, abort all your kids against your wishes, fuck other guys, have the other guy's kid, tell you it's yours, threaten to abort it to manipulate you into whatever she wants that day, put the kid into state custody over your objection, admit that she did all of that, and that she did it because she thought it would be funny, and it will not affect her parental rights or her rights to equitable division or support and maintenance.
The result of this is that now, about a fifth of all human fetuses in this country are aborted, and about two fifths of those who are born are born to unmarried women (of course, some of the married women's children are not the offspring of the men they are married to, but it's hard to get numbers on something that would produce no legal consequences anyway). Even when children are born to a married couple, the parents divorce before the children are grown a large fraction of the time. The nuclear family was destroyed long ago, to the point that when gay marriage became an issue, you didn't even have a fucking clue that marriage had anything to do with children. Gay marriage wasn't the beginning, it signaled the end, for all time.
To be quite frank and honest, any society which treats marriage and family creation as just another "contract" will collapse in upon itself. If marriage is nothing more than two people wanting to have sex, that becomes the foundation of what the children learn and that becomes the society we have today - no respect or care for how others are affected by our choices. Rome fell as much because of its moral leanings as its flawed tribute-state model. So have many others. And those who suffer the most from divorce are children.
My wife's parents got divorced only a few years after we got married and that was a hard couple of years for us as well as them. My father-in-law openly admitted that he had contemplated suicide afterward - and that was about as amicable a divorce as one is going to find. My brother-in-law divorced his wife when she went off the deep end and abandoned him and their three children. Their children have been a wreck ever since because of the conflicting values between biological mom and biological dad. Then there's some of my kids friends just down the street where their father and mother divorced because the father wanted to go shack up with other women. Guy was a moocher extraordinaire and I could tell stories about him worthy of anything out of an AR novel. But those poor kids - good kids just trying to get past it - are conflicted as a result. Then there are my next door neighbors: a grandmother who runs a daycare in her home because she's stuck taking care of her twin granddaughters born to a drug-addicted mother and dead-beat father. These two can barely read despite being nine years old.
I've seen way too much divorce and its products to treat it with any kind of cavalier attitude. To me, it goes to the very heart of civilization and philosophy. Any society which views with dispassion the method of its very perpetuation will wonder why it collapsed even in the midst of the rubble.
Commitment required by both partners. Responsibility for your actions. Flexible and openness to change. Build a strong foundation for when the winds of changes shift. Divorce is a traumatic event for all children involved, and sometimes it is just the best solution. I think the grass is always greener folks maybe weren't committed from the start.
In the bigger picture, the question is the general values society adopts as a whole toward marriage and children, as that is where the whole debate around marriage licenses originated in the first place.
(Just FYI, but government control and intervention in marriage didn't happen until after the Civil War. Whites were still bitter towards blacks and wanted to prevent inter-racial marriages, so they dreamed up the notion of having to apply for a marriage certificate in order to prove one was married. The government of course liked the control and extra revenue so they were happy to oblige.)
that I should try to get married whether I was in love
or not.--But I never did any of that stuff.
The plot and characterization showed Rearden as conflicted with unearned guilt as he pursued what was in fact right, not as a cheater by nature, denying reality. They were also the last two major characters to understand the logic of the strike. That development of the characters in the plot, discovering proper principles and overthrowing false premises leading to unearned guilt, is what was significantly "featured", not "cheating". Don't switch the featuring of Rearden and Dagny's relationship in the plot to the ugly accusation of "featuring cheating".
Ayn Rand did not cheat in her personal life. Her affair with Branden was done openly with their spouses' full knowledge. It was badly rationalized, not "brazen" (and Ayn Rand later denounced the practice as unworkabley improper), but it was not intentionally dishonest and not cheating. Branden's dishonesty came later after the affair was long over, and his betrayals led to his being expelled and permanently repudiated. See James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics.
These kind of fictional devices and personal choices are frequently exploited by cynically snarling haters of Ayn Rand to smear her, including inflammatory one-liners liners like the context-dropping "cheater" accusation (and similar misrepresentations of "rape" in The Fountainhead). Don't fall for it.
I am not overly familiar with the details of Rand's own affair, however the timing of her husband's knowledge of the affair would be critical in my not being distracted by her actions.
Let me be clear, I adore Ayn Rand, what she accomplished, and what she stood for. Just because there is one action of her personal life that I may not agree with, does not make her less of an influence on my life and countless others' lives. I also very much love Atlas Shrugged, even with the "distraction" (in my opinion) of adultery between the two main characters.
Rand was a human being, much more rational than a typical human, but still fallible. There does not need to be an excuse made for any irrational behavior she may or may not have exhibited at times.
Adhering to the irrational "contract" with Lillian was in fact a moral issue, but a consequence of adhering to the false duty-morality underlying it, which was part of the story. Lillian Rearden's behavior for years before that was inexcusable and was not the basis of the original marriage. Of course he should have told Lillian, far before Dagny, and dumped her. The plot was about why he didn't because of the destructive nature of his false traditional premises, not "justifying secret affairs". That he didn't was a deliberate point of tension in the plot until it was resolved with an understanding of the proper morality near the end -- just like the rest of the plot about the 'strike' and the intellectual development of the heroes who had rejected it. The description of the divorce at the end of the Lillian saga was included for a dramatic, climactic illustration of Rearden's new understanding and his sudden change in putting it into unequivocal action.
If you don't understand what you call a "distraction" of the relation between Rearden and Dagny and how the conflict evolved and was ultimately resolved in the plot, you are missing a big piece of the plot and theme of the whole novel -- and Ayn Rand's philosophy that made it all possible. It was not about sanctioning religious conservativism or a-philosophical libertarian "contracts".
No one is making "excuses" for the Ayn Rand/Branden affair. She did not "cheat" in her personal life as was falsely accused.
Rand's personal cheating is the only thing I know of her that causes me to lessen my respect for her. I am one of the few people I know that thinks that Readon's cheating in Shrugged was not only unnecessary, but it distracted me from having the respect for Hank that the book intended us to have for him. I have no problem with Hank leaving his wife, but he should have done it before he hooked up with Dagny. I don't see marriage as a permanent trap, but while you are under that contract, you had better damned respect that contract. Control your damned urges until you end the contract. Objectivists are supposed to be abide by contracts, that is a major part of our philosophy. If people choose not to abide by contracts, then Objectivism can never work.
with you on that. If I married, I would be faithful. I
would also absolutely demand that the husband be
faithful, and if he were not, I would divorce him.--
In extenuation of Rearden, I think maybe he would not have been able to get a divorce in Pennsyl-
vania at the time the book was written (though I
don't know, I don't know all that much about
Pennsylvania); there are a few things in the mar-
riage vows besides fidelity, such as "love, honor,
and cherish", which Lillian was not doing when
she traded away his bracelet. But he still could
have given her a sort of notice, for instance,"Since
tha's what you think of me and my efforts, I div-
orce you, I divorce you, I divorce you, and from
now on, I'm going to do what I d--- please!"--And
does it affect your orpinion of Dagny for allowing
him to mess with her when she knew he was
still under that contract?
When he did finally bolt after Lillian made the necessity so snarlingly obvious, he did what it took to get the divorce despite the improper legal obstructionism:
"He had handed to his attorney a signed blank check and said, 'Get me a divorce. On any grounds and at any cost. I don't care what means you use, how many of their judges you purchase or whether you find it necessary to stage a frame-up of my wife. Do whatever you wish. But there is to be no alimony and no property settlement.' The attorney had looked at him with the hint of a wise, sad smile, as if this were an event he had expected to happen long ago. He had answered, 'Okay, Hank. It can be done. But it will take some time.' 'Make it as fast as you can.'"
pressed, and held in chains, as Ayn Rand said.
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
As far as Dagny, it isn't as significant to me, because she did not enter any contract of marriage. It wasn't her contract to break. I have never personally been a fan of someone who interferes with another's marriage, but it is ultimately the married parties who are responsible. So, I guess it only made me feel sorry for Dagny that she had to go and fall for someone already "committed." I feel like she loved Francisco more than Hank, but he was a prick, so she ended up with the married guy instead... ha!
if that's what you mean, he was only pretending to
be, because of his mission--a sort of camouflage.
"'But what have you done to your own reputation?'
"Francisco shrugged. 'Those whom I respect, will know the truth about me, sooner or later. The others'—his face hardened—'the others consider that which I really am as evil. Let them have what they prefer—what I appear to be on the front pages.'
"'But what for? Why did you do it? Just to teach them a lesson?'
"'Hell, no! I wanted to be known as a playboy.'
"'Why?'
"'A playboy is a man who just can't help letting money run through his fingers.'
"'Why did you want to assume such an ugly sort of role?'
"'Camouflage.'
"'For what?"
"For a purpose of my own.'
"'What purpose?'
"Francisco shook his head. 'Don't ask me to tell you that. I've told you more than I should. You'll come to know the rest of it soon, anyway.'"
-- Atlas Shrugged Part Two / Chapter IV "The Sanction Of The Victim"
"He took her hands and pressed them to his lips and held them, not moving, not as a kiss, but as a long moment of rest, as if the effort of speech were a distraction from the fact of her presence, and as if he were torn by too many things to say, by the pressure of all the words stored in the silence of years.
"'The women I chased—you didn't believe that, did you? I've never touched one of them—but I think you knew it, I think you've known it all along. The playboy—it was a part that I had to play in order not to let the looters suspect me while I was destroying d'Anconia Copper in plain sight of the whole world. That's the joker in their system, they're out to fight any man of honor and ambition, but let them see a worthless rotter and they think he's a friend, they think he's safe—safe!—that's their view of life, but are they learning!—are they learning whether evil is safe and incompetence practical!… Dagny, it was the night when I knew, for the first time, that I loved you—it was then that I knew I had to go. It was when you entered my hotel room, that night, when I saw what you looked like, what you were, what you meant to me—and what awaited you in the future. Had you been less, you might have stopped me for a while. But it was you, you who were the final argument that made me leave you. I asked for your help, that night—against John Galt. But I knew that you were his best weapon against me, though neither you nor he could know it. You were everything that he was seeking, everything he told us to live for or die, if necessary.… I was ready for him, when he called me suddenly to come to New York, that spring...'"
-- Atlas Shrugged Part Three / Chapter II "The Utopia Of Greed"
were to be married; I believe that self-respecting people stick to one at a time. But I would make
that clear before getting married. Also, I would not act as Lillian did, constantly putting her husband's career down, and refusing to give him
any satisfaction even in the sex act itself. (I
understand that this was deliberate on her part).
In fact, she was glad when she found he was
having an adulterous affair, not objecting until she found it was with Dagny, somebody who was not a slut. She enjoyed the idea that he had done something that caused him to feel guilty. I really have not much sympathy for her at all.
I certainly don't have any sympathy for Lillian. I was only disappointed with Hank's decision to break his contract without giving notice of his intent to do so. Secretly breaking a contract behind someone's back is not rational in my mind.
Part of Rearden's exceptionalism was his devotion in his career in metallurgy and manufacturing, but that single minded focus left him vulnerable to philosophical ideas he didn't know to watch out for. Like so many other good people in science, engineering, medicine and other fields of intelligence not focusing on fundamental philosophical ideas that are crucial to their lives, he didn't know to 'check his philosophical premises'; he let the ends of his productive achievement be turned over to his enemies. It wasn't just his relation to Lillian -- you saw it throughout the novel in his sacrificial alms through his brother and how he was one of the last to join the strike.
Rearden wasn't alone; we see it everywhere. Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged to correct it by showing the necessity for a revolutionary new ethics and its content. Her primary purpose in writing the novel was to show in fictional form her vision of the "ideal man", with the plot-theme of the role of the mind in human life. It took someone with exceptional ability, like John Galt in the novel (and Ayn Rand in reality), to sort out the bad philosophy and replace it with proper ideas, then fight for them throughout the conflicts portrayed in the plot. That took a lot more than just not being a slow learner.
In a lecture presenting her "The Objectivist Ethics" at MIT in 1962 Ayn Rand included a special introduction for "the students who are to be America's scientists", reprinted as "To Young Scientists" in her anthology The Voice of Reason. In that introduction she focused on the "alleged dichotomy between science and ethics" in which the results of rational thought are turned over in principle to the irrational in the name of ethics. In Atlas Shrugged Hank Rearden illustrated the unwitting acceptance of that scam. He learned and corrected it. Robert Stadler did not, and choosing to not face it destroyed himself -- the fast learner who chose not to think.
I understand your viewpoint on this and intend to reread Atlas with this in mind, however I still believe the same point could have been portrayed by his character simply telling off Lillian and storming off to fall into the arms of Dagny, in that order. To me, that would have proven his integrity even more. Like I have said before, I lose respect for those who cheat in a relationship that is perceived to be committed by the other party, no matter the circumstances.
Besides, "storming" and "telling off" are not the behavior of rational people. When you see someone contemptible you recognize it for what it is and go back to your own values, not dwelling on it with the self-punishment of wallowing in it. If it's an injustice perpetrated by force or fraud, then you deal with that rationally. But what good is throwing a fit over it? Why waste energy and time on the contemptible through emotional self-explosions? There is so much more to life.
run" or "The business of government is to let busi-
ness alone"? I don't recall ever hearing of a "Cool-
idge effect" before.
I am not aware of any articles though...
have I inadvertently misspelled "Coolige"?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolidg...
Divorce likely did not happen in the Gulch because membership in it was by invitation only. So everyone was on the same page.
I have to assume that marriage "contracts" would exist, in the Gulch, and, possibly, divorce.
To me that sounds much more aligned with objectivism than a voluntary enslavement enforced by law for 5, 10, 20+ years.
Have to De-mingle, the co-mingled property. Don't use the term "marriage", use civil union, now the discussion is just a legal dissolution of a contract.
Reduced to that, love has no part of it.
As far as stuff, no amount of stuff would keep me where I didn't want to be.