Objectivism was never a cult for me. I took from it a quiet confidence that comes from accepting reality and dealing with it There’s always emotional baggage from early childhood experiences, but I was pretty independent with a good sense of self and the idea fostered by MIT that things in the world were understandable by me if I put my mind to it. Went on to become successful inventor and entrepreneur

I remember his name now that you mention it. My roommate, bob poole, and I went on to take over reason magazine from ll friedlander . There was considerable interest in ayn rand’s books. I remember u kind of withdrew from the world for three days to finish reading atlas shrugged. Talk about binge reading- couldn’t put it down

Actually I was. Thinking more of what happened. After ww2 with the acquisition of the other surrounding countries. And wealth contained tgerein

Rocket man certainly deserved to be called that and more. Trump's openness in that respect is one of his best features, in contrast to stock sanctimonious, posturing politicians, but I wonder what he said to him the next time they met to get him to talk (without animus?) and smile on TV. We will see what, if anything, significant comes of it. Meanwhile, Trump went on to praise the murderous dictatorship, as if that didn't matter especially to the victims, leaving us to wonder what if anything he really does believe from minute to minute that he appears so open about.

Ayn Rand tried for four years to help him with his self-acknowledged problems. When she found out how much worse he had become with all the dishonesty and irresponsibility in his work for her philosophy, contrary to her prior hopes and expectations, she wrote him off as destructive to her values and that was it. She wrote her article publicly stating the status, the explanation, and her error in judgment, and then dropped it. She didn't spend the rest of her life hating him like the Brandens carried on. She had the future to think of, too, and Branden couldn't be part of it.

Many copies of the Valliant book for under $10 at https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?au... but I don't know of any ebooks or pdfs.

The leaders, like Jefferson and many others, were well steeped in the Enlightenment. I'm not sure how many others were or to what degree, but they certainly had the right individualist sense of life for it. They got as far as they did because of all that.

And you were able to make use of it in living your own successful life without turning it into a substitute for that. Real living is what it's for.

They were well attended to the very end, with long lines of people waiting hours to get in, and then long lines waiting to see her in the reception after the lecture, and enthusiastic discussions in and out of the lines. It had become an annual event drawing people from all over the country (and sometimes beyond). You were lucky to have those experiences in the early years of enthusiasm. Was there much interest at MIT then? Harry Binswanger graduated from MIT around the time you were starting.

Russians weren't enjoying spoils of war; they were miserable. The statist "sticking with a strong leader" is much deeper than that; the statism is the cause of the wars.

We have all had more than enough of these speculative, personal attacks, including the ones against Ayn Rand. I do not "take joy in being a contrarian". Claiming that is a way to evade the content of what is written here, but it isn't true and the personal deflection through psychologizing is not honest discussion of the content that is posted here, which is written for a reason, not to be "contrarian". Using the word "you" is not the only way to do it when the attacks are deliberately personal.

She described at length what he had done over a period of at least four years. It included irresponsibility in his work with her, dishonesty, and financial misappropriations.

Thanks for the tip. I never hide, but I do ignore, which is what I choose to do with ewv. This is a person who takes joy in being a contrarian. However, an intelligent one, which is what suckered me in. I am a a profound believer in no censorship, subsequently, I will neither delete nor hide any posts. I even went to Federal court in order to defend myself and my son's ability to publish biographical graphic novels of notable entertainers and public figures without the need for authorization by them.

I think of it this way. It is what it is, whether we know the real facts were. But we have our futures to more productively think about

Bantering back and forth in rational discussions can only help to find out what is really true, and to learn from what happened. The book you recommended isn’t on kindle unfortunately to make it easy for me to read. In the absence of reading that, I can say that there obviously were two sides to their split up which unfortunately for both if them wasn’t something they could resolve. What I do have to accept is that they did stop working together and that was that. One would have thought that two people could get to the bottom of disagreement and either settle them or just calmly agree to split up without hating each other. But apparently that didn’t happen, as it happens a lot in real life.

One thing I respect about trump is he can call you rocket man at one time but change his tone and negotiate without animus later. At least trump wears his thoughts and feelings in his sleeve for all to see. No hidden agendas

The woman scorned had a ring of truth that fit her very stern approach to anyone who didn’t see and perfectly practice objectivism But she taught me to think for myself, and u ignored the way she protected objectivism (which I understood and was ok with). I figured branden did something and she didn’t like it, but it wasn’t my business

I agree. Also the colonists were a more homogenous group of individualists- enough to stick together and split from the king. I am not sure many of them philosophically understood what they were doing, but they just felt the spark of freedom and acted on it. I think they were children kind of stumbling in the dark looking for the light. It’s amazing they got as far as they did

I think I took away a good dose of the value of learning and then applying it to my life apart from what others were doing. So the split was there, but didn’t really mean much to me. I went through a lot of changes during and after college, shedding off Catholicism and struggling with the effects of an emotionally manipulative mother

I learned a lot from rand and then learned a lot from branden about dealing with emotions He used to have weekly group therapy workshops in LA where I lived. He never talked about breakup with rand at all, just concentrated on integrating objectivist thinking with pre existing emotional problems. I have to say it helped me a lot to be more comfortable and integrated. I took away what I was ready to learn I guess and then moved on to exploit my creativity in business in the 70’s and beyond. I am happy and grateful I was exposed to the work both of them did

Yeah. I went to them in the mid to late 60s while I was at MIT in Cambridge. They were well attended actually

True. I would also say that Russian culture is based on sticking with a strong leader who will take over other countries and enjoy the spoils of war

It appears that the "fight" he means is the one he wants between you and I.

Branden pushed the "woman scorned" line because he knew he could make it sound plausible to those who missed the rest. He never addressed the reasons Ayn Rand herself gave.

The main reason for America's revolution against the British empire was the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and individualism. It was possible to implement because of the geographical distance and ability to be self-sufficient -- and because the American colonies did not have their own entrenched statist centralized government. England had much more freedom than it had previously, making the industrial revolution possible, but it couldn't shake its entrenched statism to become an America.

Most people didn't know what to think. They were surprised and perplexed, made worse by directions from Ayn Rand's associates insisting that people repudiate Branden because "Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged" and anyone recommending, to those interested in psychology, that they read his Psychology of Self Esteem -- which had been published in The Objectivst and still endorsed by Ayn Rand -- was "sanctioning Branden". It was less than convincing as explanation.

Ayn Rand's explanation that had been on the record since 1968 was more than enough to not grant a general moral approval of Branden, but it took years to see the subsequent course of the Branden's careers and nature of their writing. His first book, The Psychology of Self Esteem was essentially the same as how it had appeared serialized in The Objectivist so I continued to follow him, still wondering what had happened to him, then in his subsequent books noticing a big decline in the quality of his writing so I lost interest.

But the later growing, constant attacks from the Brandens, especially after Ayn Rand died, including misrepresentations and obvious hatred and personal vindictiveness toward her, along with the change of direction and progressive decline in their work (including his New Age mysticism!) told me a lot more: I saw that I didn't need more details of the break to know who was worth following and who was not -- as a waste of time and repugnantly obnoxious at best. By the time Valliant's book was published I had long known what I needed to, but the book explained a lot.

At the time, the recordings were not being sold, but she was using her Ford Hall lectures as articles in her own publication. That is how many of them turned up in her anthologies, both during her lifetime and after -- so you did get them.

I don't remember an instance of her roughly directing the ushers, but I only attended her later appearances in the 1970s when I was just starting out. I can imagine her Russian accent coupled with being angry at a transgression sounding "rough"!

In Europe, including Russia, their misery didn't help them to learn what was right. In Russia, in particular, the people lived in terror and despised the government, but knew nothing about freedom and were afraid of it. They couldn't conceive of living through their own choices, without some government authority telling them what to do. Even in the satellites late in the Soviet Union, engineers and and industrial managers were perplexed over how their counterparts in the US whom they were in contact with could know what to build and try to sell, from machinery to software.

Once the understanding of living in freedom with the American sense of life with its self-confidence and self-reliance is lost it's very difficult to get it back.

There was no sign that Branden's problems were from outside influences. He seemed to have let himself go down, perhaps gradually, a path he no longer believed in and it blew up.