Thanks for this post!
Very important. Not at all unlike the need for all valid concepts to accept humor and be the butt of a joke.
I believe it is a axiom that any dogma can be demonstrated to be fundamentally wrong in a context for which it was not conceived.

Those were not political opinions. In particular she argued that she did not think wanting to be president is consistent with the feminine psychology, but recognized that some women had become strong leaders of nations and that there is no reason why a woman could not do a better job than the current string of men as presidents.

Starwagen: "A stringer/reporter showed up to talk to those attending, working on an article that appeared (IIRC) in Saturday Evening Post. With the title (again IIRC) 'The Angry Cult of Ayn Rand'."

"The Cult of Angry Ayn Rand: Followers of The Fountainhead Philosophy of Selfishness are Out to Lead Us Back to a 19th Century Paradise", by Dora Jane Hamblin, LIFE Magazine, April 7, 1967. Hamblin understood more than what she led you to believe. She knew what she wanted to kill. It was a planned hit piece for which she "found" what she wanted to find.

She advocated intellectual independence as one virtue among many other basic virtues in her ethics: rationality as the primary virtue (including the "rejection of any form of mysticism"), and as derivatives: integrity, independence, honesty, justice, productiveness and pride. Her philosophy has a content, with positions explained and demonstrated on all the major questions in all the major branches of philosophy. She did not equate independence with 'go out and think whatever you want because it's you who is doing it'. She was not a subjectivist.

Ayn Rand did not confuse metaphysics with politics and did not focus on God anywhere, let alone in politics. She focused on reason and individualism throughout her lectures and writing; as a consequence she rejected appeals to the supernatural when it came up -- as it did from Buckleyite conservatives pushing religion as the alleged basis of capitalism and with the attention to religion in the news on papal encyclicals of the time.

She was a philosopher, not a politician or political policy wonk, and deliberately did not restrict herself to political commentary as the a-philosophical libertarians did and still do. She wrote in the first issue of The Objectivist Newsletter in1962:

"Objectivism is a philosophical movement; since politics is a branch of philosophy, Objectivism advocates certain political principles- specifically, those of laissez-faire capitalism - as the consequence and the ultimate practical application of its fundamental philosophical principles. It does not regard politics as a separate or primary goal, that is: as a goal that can be achieved without a wider ideological context."

"Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics - on a theory of man's nature and of man's relationship to existence. It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistency and superficiality which is loosely designated today as 'conservatism.' Objectivists are not 'conservatives.' We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish."

She quoted that again in 1971 and added:

"I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."

Throughout her writing you find explanation based on relevant principles and concepts and the facts that give rise to them. Such a principled, philosophical approach is not a "focus on metaphysics (God)" (and "metaphysics" does not mean "God").

As an advocate of reason she did not focus on religion at all (as some contemporary 'professional atheists' do today), she dismissed it as not worthy of further intellectual efforts as a philosophy -- other than in the context of posing a specific threat (such as some prominent politician promoting it to impose restrictions) and in a few key articles like those revealing the meaning and consequences of the papal encyclicals. Those articles explained the destructive meaning of religion for human life on earth, which she emphatically regarded as the good, with an emphasis in those articles in showing the contrast and the consequences of the religious advocacy for man's life in reality. That, too, was not an inappropriate "focus" on God . Libertarians and conservatives wishing for something else is not relevant.

it's exactly why I wore out a bic pen underlining stuff
in my first paperback copy of AS. . it was my "I could
have written that ... I wish!" -- j
.

Mike, this is a great article;;; Thank You! -- j
.

Well, yes, I understand, and I mean no disrespect to your father (or mine), but It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis was published in 1935. And the so-called "Mercury Dime" with a Fasces on the reverse was issued in 1917 and through World War II. It was just a struggle for territory among fascist powers, Germany, Japan, Russia (briefly), Italy (a little less briefly), versus the USA, the UK, and France (half of it) with allies all up and down the coasts including Argentina, Uruguay (gave harbor to the Bismarck), and Paraguay (where Friedrich Nietzsche's sister built an Aryan gulch, hence the Boys from Brazil).

My point is that the facts were there. I stand by my mother's family. Staunch Republicans, they were opposed to US entry in World War Two. One time, when my mother told me about the concentration camps for Japanese, I asked, "Why didn't they put us in concentration camps?" and she replied: "Because they needed our labor for their steel mills." Republican.... back then...

Minor Comment: We called them "Randoids: sans the R. As in humanoids.

This is all well, fine, and good, but it was coupled with another post that got ignored: Pseudo-Profound Bullshit, here https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post.... The two go together, through a linkage that was not perceived, apparently.

In this essay, the main point was about writing from the subconscious. No one commented on that. No one questioned why the supreme Left Brain Intellectual would advocate writing from your subconscious -- especially when writing non-fiction.

Thanks! I do not know who voted you down to Zero, but I plussed you back to 1. I am happy to know that you got something from it.

Well, the off-hand remark would be that those conservative sympathizers are easy to dismiss. However, the difficult proposition is culling out the irrational claims from the valid ones. Ayn Rand was not an active supporter of World War Two. She spoke well of labor unions. She was not gung ho for guns. The problems with conservatives and conservatism have been addressed elsewhere here in the Gulch.
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

And, yet, who else speaks up at all for individual initiative, enterprise, and limited government, except the conservatives?

The basic problem, of course, is that with those positives come a package deal to support any war at any time and the abrogation of certain rights if not the fundamental concept of rights. That is the fundamental problem: conservatives only want to hang on to the glorious past - granted that parts of it were glorious - rather than to define first principles and follow them where they lead.... wherever they lead...

Yes, MA, myself, I was caught by Rand's insistence on writing from the subconscious. I would have throught that she advocated for frontal lobe reasoning in writing. But, actually, she believed that your subconscious is programmed by your conscious. So, when you write from the subconscious, you really are drawing on the full history of all of your evaluations.

I agree also that our six or seven decades of experience give us a wisdom that we did not have all those decades before. Is the wisdom of age "better" than the passion of youth? Would you trade the one for the other, if it were either-or?

That aside, I do agree that the wisdom gained from a lifetime of experience provides a standard against which to re-evaluate the choices of our youth. Largely, I find agreement.

Right. See my post to Starwagen above (https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post.... As I recall, she allowed "Ayn Rand Study Group" and "Students of Objectivism" but your point is still valid. You can appreciate that Rand did not want neophytes and acolytes speaking as authorities on Objectivism.

Look at the problems here. Someone watched Atlas Shrugged in a theater and likes it because it expresses what they always believed. But aesthetic reflection is not philosophical agreement. The line of (ahem) logic goes like this:
I liked Atlas Shrugged.
I believe X.
Therefore X is supported by Objectivism.

Then they claim things that Ayn Rand never did. (What she would say now is arguable, perhaps.)
One clue is the focus on politics and the ignoring of of metaphysics and epistemology.

I am not sure about the physical reality of "randroids" today. It had some meaning in the 1970s. I am not sure about today. Even Leonard Peikoff has found his own voice. I recommend highly Understanding Objectivism by Peikoff and Berliner.

Dagny shoots the guard here: "Calmly and impersonally, she, who would have hesitatated to fire at an animal, pulled the trigger straight at the heart of a man who had wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness." -- Signet ppb pg. 1066.

It is true that your value system is based on your emotions. Most people stop there. They absorb the values around them. If they are "thinkers" after a fashion, they find ex post facto reasons to explain and justify their values. (Most people never do.) Very few people throw everything out and start fresh with new ideas, and build their personal value system from a foundation of reality and reason.

The key is that while your values are based on your emotions, your emotions are automatic summation of your ideas. Your continuous and continual self-experience determine your emotions. Thus, Dagny was different from James -- and Dominique was not Roark. Those contrasts are highly cogent. James was evil. Dagny was good, but her expression of it was - as Rand's own - idiosyncratic: ruled by itself. "It" (she) had a self. James Taggart did not.

I believe that individualism is a physical fact. In your body no two hemoglobin molecules are identical. They are large and each atom can have chemically equivalent isotopes. (Not my idea, but that of Roald Hoffman, Nobel laureate chemist, author of The Same and Not the Same.) Be that as it may, it is nonetheless important to be clear on the difference between "I want" and "It is" -- between rational self-interest and counterfeit individualism.

I also like to examine those challenges that you call "certain topics." Ayn Rand could be - no other word for it - idiosyncratic. She was happy being Ayn Rand, but not everyone can (or should) be someone else. I am not able to agree with all of her political opinions - but those are the minor ones, like whether women should wear midi-skirts or be President.

I agree with your main point. It is important to understand that you matured. It is that simple. You began with a healthy, rational-empirical psycho-epistemology, and from there grew into the person you were meant to be. As for borrowing from the Rand corpus in your work, I would see that as no different from a science fiction writer incorporating actual physics discovered by (unnamed) others -- after all, it's a story, not an essay. You do not need to footnote Von Mises (and others) for the economics in your books. So, too, is the technical philosophy simply a matter of fact. What you do with it is your business.

Thanks, Starwagen. There's a couple of things going on here. I also took the taped lectures in 1966. In addition, as a high school senior, I was looking at colleges; and wherever I went, there was an "Ayn Rand Study Group" or - her own suggestion - "Students of Objectivism." You can appreciate the fact that she did not want her philosophy or her name misrepresented by college students on the path to (but not in possession of) knowledge. I must point to both Existentialism and Hegel as examples of philosophies that went out of control. Sartre resisted the Nazis, but Heidegger embraced them. Which was the true Existentialist? (Yeah, I know: both... But just from within the context of that school itself... Heidegger took it places that Sartre did not intend.) So, too, with Hegel: fierce advocate for the Prussian state as the highest expression of the Idea. Then came the "Young Hegelians" among them Karl Marx, who declared all nation states obsolete.

So, you can see why Rand was wary.

And rightfully so, as she insisted in her condemnation of the "Libertarian" Party, which stood for your right to use heroin and work as a prostitute. Indeed, you have those political rights. But Objectivism teaches something far different.