The Fatal Flaw in Objectivism and in Ayn Rand
I have sometimes been accused of being an Objectivist. I was once, of course, and there is a certain sense in which I still am one -- and a sense in which I am certainly not.
In terms of the primacy of objective reality over subjective opinion, I'm as much an Objectivist as Ayn Rand was ever. My point is subtler: it's that we can't always count on our minds and sensoria to accurately perceive objective reality, because they are not perfect reasoning instruments but rather merely the best that evolution has happened to give us. They can be and often are fooled (indeed, there are whole lists of standard tricks that work against them), especially in situations that they would have rarely encountered during our history as hunter-gatherers.
Thus we need a certain humility about our own conclusions, because we can make errors. This does not mean that we should turn to some anti-rational or mystical means of perceiving reality. It does mean that we should not assume that, just because we have induced or deduced something, it is automatically and certainly true.
Ayn Rand's fatal flaw was vanity. She was a highly intelligent and well-educated woman, and hence tended to be right more often than were most of her contemporaries. From this she concluded that she was always right, that all her ideas were automatically and certainly true. Both reason and painful experience have taught me that, when you feel like this, you are almost certainly missing something vital.
She got to the point where, not only was she treating any serious disagreement with her as proof of the "evil" of the dissenter, but she began to treat even trivial disagreements with her that way -- for instance, preferring the "wrong" sort of art or music. Ultimately, she decided that she was not bound by the normal human laws and practicalities of sexual morality, and that she could take Nathaniel Branden as her lover while everything would remain perfectly fine with her own husband and Nathaniel Branden's wife.
That was the beginning of the end of her movement. The predictable consequence ensued: Nathaniel Branden ultimately broke up with her, but Branden's own marriage was shattered and Ayn Rand badly hurt her husband. Ayn Rand was forced by her own arrogance to conclude that this was everyone's fault but her own and that Nathaniel Branden was "evil" for not continuing to do what she wanted.
Ayn Rand had of course been fooled by the human tendency to rationalize whatever we emotionally want as logically valid. But of course she couldn't admit to this, even to herself, because she had gone too far in classifying logical errors as "evil." And the unadmitted error cannot be rationally corrected.
Thus fell her movement, which had accomplished many good things, and could have accomplished so much more had Ayn Rand understood the falliblity of all human minds -- including her own.
In terms of the primacy of objective reality over subjective opinion, I'm as much an Objectivist as Ayn Rand was ever. My point is subtler: it's that we can't always count on our minds and sensoria to accurately perceive objective reality, because they are not perfect reasoning instruments but rather merely the best that evolution has happened to give us. They can be and often are fooled (indeed, there are whole lists of standard tricks that work against them), especially in situations that they would have rarely encountered during our history as hunter-gatherers.
Thus we need a certain humility about our own conclusions, because we can make errors. This does not mean that we should turn to some anti-rational or mystical means of perceiving reality. It does mean that we should not assume that, just because we have induced or deduced something, it is automatically and certainly true.
Ayn Rand's fatal flaw was vanity. She was a highly intelligent and well-educated woman, and hence tended to be right more often than were most of her contemporaries. From this she concluded that she was always right, that all her ideas were automatically and certainly true. Both reason and painful experience have taught me that, when you feel like this, you are almost certainly missing something vital.
She got to the point where, not only was she treating any serious disagreement with her as proof of the "evil" of the dissenter, but she began to treat even trivial disagreements with her that way -- for instance, preferring the "wrong" sort of art or music. Ultimately, she decided that she was not bound by the normal human laws and practicalities of sexual morality, and that she could take Nathaniel Branden as her lover while everything would remain perfectly fine with her own husband and Nathaniel Branden's wife.
That was the beginning of the end of her movement. The predictable consequence ensued: Nathaniel Branden ultimately broke up with her, but Branden's own marriage was shattered and Ayn Rand badly hurt her husband. Ayn Rand was forced by her own arrogance to conclude that this was everyone's fault but her own and that Nathaniel Branden was "evil" for not continuing to do what she wanted.
Ayn Rand had of course been fooled by the human tendency to rationalize whatever we emotionally want as logically valid. But of course she couldn't admit to this, even to herself, because she had gone too far in classifying logical errors as "evil." And the unadmitted error cannot be rationally corrected.
Thus fell her movement, which had accomplished many good things, and could have accomplished so much more had Ayn Rand understood the falliblity of all human minds -- including her own.