- The tragic irony of Objectivism is perfectly captured in Peikoff's life story. A man who dedicated himself to a philosophy of radical independence ended up defining his entire existence through dependency. First on Rand, now apparently on his caregiver-turned-wife.
I met Peikoff at an ARI event in 2009. He was surprisingly warm in person, but you could see the weight of being "the heir" in how defensively he responded to even mild questions about Rand's work. Now reading about the fracture with his daughter over the estate, it's like watching Atlas Shrugged's plot play out in real life: the bitter disputes over Rand's intellectual property mirroring the novel's battles over physical resources.
What's most disturbing isn't the personal drama but what this reveals about how Objectivism operates in practice. For a philosophy obsessed with reason and independence, its institutional guardians seem remarkably focused on excommunication, loyalty tests, and controlling access to primary sources. The gap between preaching individualism while demanding conformity has always been the movement's central contradiction.
- I also get such energy from Atlas Shrugged, I don't understand why. I know that the good guys are very carefully crafted, they don't cheat, they don't do things like lobbying to win. They don't compromise on their world view to the extreme. They don't have children, that makes it all easier, but also less real.
Raised christian but feeling burned out by the contradictions, the emptiness of trying to live for others (it's killing for relationships I can tell you), the mental struggle to rationalize all the rules, I too felt that spark. I realize dogmatism is always bad but that voice inside keeps saying: It's not when the theory is perfect! The truth is knowable and can be discovered through reason. How super comforting (and damn that Incompleteness Theorem I learned about later).
I don't know what it is, my hunger for a system? For rules to make sense of the world? Whatever it is, Rand's philosophy remains so appealing. It's probably the reason I started a company, walk into meetings now boldly, with a goal, why I enjoy things now, just to enjoy myself. As a rational, healthy human, there is nothing wrong with that, in contrast to what my upbringing tried to instill in me.
Perhaps that's it, it liberated my from a confining worldview. Perhaps another worldview could have done the same.
- I read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and wasn't impressed by either. The author never got the "show, not tell" memo. Long, long speeches.
(In the movie version of The Fountainhead, Howard Roarke's architecture is terrible. His buildings resemble 1960s US housing projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. There's good minimalism, but that's not it.)
- I fail to see the irony of "inheriting" an empire from Rand, when the protagonist of atlas shrugged and other main characters were heirs to a fortune. Inheritance is thoroughly explored in her work.
To me- this article is about the social dangers of taking a philosophy to the extreme, and about how easy it is to take advantage of the elderly when estranged.
by ryandrake
6 subcomments
- I have the pleasure of living in a pretty "red" part of the country, and everyone I know who is a self-described libertarian (or otherwise worships at the altar of self-sufficiency) lives utterly dependent on societal systems. They're on Medicare, Disability or Social Security, live in neighborhoods with solid public services, rely on the rule of law for protection from crime, and enjoy clean air and drinking water, safe food and medicine, that they only have access to due to strong environmental and safety regulations. They were the first ones to freak out on Social Media during COVID when they had to actually rely on themselves for a bit.
As someone else put it on Twitter, they are like house cats: absolutely convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand.
- Confusingly, at various point in this article they refer to him in the past tense, "was a good father" etc, while he's still alive.
by reverendsteveii
1 subcomments
- Ayn Rand is the ultimate proof of something I've realized as I've grown: doing the right thing is actually really simple. It's not easy as in "low difficulty of accomplishment", but it's simple as in "low difficulty of understanding". In fact, I've started to think of complex decision making as the moral equivalent of a code smell: if I'm waffling back and forth over what the right thing to do is sometimes it's a genuinely complex situation where principles are in conflict but much (Much, MUCH) more often it's just that I no what the right thing to do is and just don't wanna do it. Objectivism feels like the inverse of this: you can make anything feel like the right thing to do if you just expand, generalize, hypotheticalize and muddy the question until "Should I give a hungry person a sandwich when I've got one I won't miss?" becomes something like "How do you expect society to function if no one works?"
by nonrandomstring
0 subcomment
- Getting famous and having a cult following isn't always the best thing
for an author. Not for their works. Rand wrote one good book
[0]. Actually really got to me. Probably not one you think of. "We
The Living", a pretty bleak account of collectivisation and the exodus
from communism. A shocking, semi-autobiographical account of watching
the world you love and know torn up. I think it might be more apropos
Americans today than any of the "objectivism" stuff. All her later
work I read in my 30s seemed lacking. But that first one really had an
impact, not quite Solzhenitsyn or Kafka, but a hard hit with a similar
interior. That book really defines her I think.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_The_Living
by GlibMonkeyDeath
0 subcomment
- This is a truly tragic story. Toward the end of the article (regarding the 2024 findings in San Diego Superior Court), Peikoff sounds like he has his faculties intact, according to multiple doctors and attorneys. He has freely chosen to marry his caregiver, much to the dismay of his daughter (who believes the caregiver is a grifter, and so his daughter forced the court inquiry.) His response, "if being unreasonable is choosing to be with the woman I love, then I choose to be unreasonable" is peak objectivism. He is going to do what he wants - to do anything else would be a betrayal of objectivist principles.
He is now estranged from his daughter Cordelia -er, Kira - over this.
by 4fterd4rk
2 subcomments
- It's interesting to me how Rand wrote books about socialism leading us to a world where irrationality takes over in a dysfunctional world and we now live in a world where unrestrained capitalism has caused irrationality to take over in a dysfunctional world.
- https://archive.ph/sXHrb
by richardanaya
1 subcomments
- Peikoff is a wonderful man who wrote books that inspire me and intrigue me to this day.
by greener_grass
0 subcomment
- Readers might enjoy Mozart Was a Red, a play by Murray Rothbard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk5C2qsRH8
- "In the throws of narcissism" is best way to describe them.
Living hellish painful lives purely volitionally, from the mental cage they created for themselves.
Must've had extra specially unpleasant childhoods.
- Atlas Shrugged was one of the most important books I ever read.
A society where the rich destroy the entire world fighting stupid battles against each other, even witholding technology that would aid all humanity because someone other than them would benefit, all the while ordinary men like Eddie Willers are left to die in the desert?
Marx couldn't have laid it out so clear to me as Rand has.
- Seems like an unpleasant person.
I read on his Wikipedia page that he called Obama's re-election "the worst political event ever to occur in the history of this continent" and "worse than the Civil War".
An estimated 600,000 to one million people died in the war. And many more suffered life-long injuries, had to deal with the loss of their child, spouse, etc. Also seems to me the slave system in the US – where people were born in to slavery with no realistic hope of freedom – is the ultimate in state control and stripping of individual rights that people like him are supposed to be against.
You can dislike Obama, nothing wrong with that. But is having a president you dislike for 4 years really worse than up to a million dead people? And the institute of slavery?
Also denies property rights to Palestinians and native Americans. The notion that individual rights are paramount again goes out of window at the first sign of inconvenience.
So not just unpleasant on a personal level, also morally decrepit and intellectually vapid.
by fireburning
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- [dead]
by richardanaya
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
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