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Agorism
04-16-2011, 09:21 PM
The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult
by Murray N. Rothbard (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard23.html)

Selected quotes from it


Son of Rand
Some Randians emulated their leader by changing their names from Russian or Jewish to a presumably harder, tougher, more heroic Anglo-Saxon. Branden himself changed his name from Blumenthal; it is perhaps not a coincidence, as Nora Ephron has pointed out, that if the letters of the new name are rearranged, they spell, B-E-N-R-A-N-D, Hebrew for “son of Rand.” A Randian girl, with a Polish name beginning with “G-r,” announced one day that she was changing her name the following week. When asked deadpan, by a humorous observer whether she was changing her name to “Grand,” she replied, in all seriousness, that no she was changing it to “Grant” – presumably, as the observer later remarked, the “t” was her one gesture of independence.

and this one


And the Randian movement was strictly hierarchical. At the top of the pyramid, of course, was Rand herself, the Ultimate Decider of all questions. Branden, her designated “intellectual heir,” and the St. Paul of the movement, was Number 2. Third in rank was the top circle, the original disciples, those who had been converted before the publication of Atlas. Since they were converted by reading her previous novel, The Fountainhead, which had been published 1943, the top circle was designated in the movement as “the class of ’43.” But there was an unofficial designation that was far more revealing: “the senior collective.” On the surface, this phrase was supposed to “underscore” the high individuality of each of the Randian members; in reality, however, there was an irony within the irony, since the Randian movement was indeed a “collective” in any genuine meaning of the term. Strengthening the ties within the senior collective was the fact that each and every one of them was related to each other, all being part of one Canadian Jewish family, relatives of either Nathan or Barbara Branden. There was, for example, Nathan’s sister Elaine Kalberman; his brother-in-law, Harry Kalberman; his first cousin, Dr. Allan Blumenthal, who assumed the mantle of leading Objectivist Psychotherapist after Branden’s expulsion; Barbara’s first cousin, Leonard Piekoff; and Joan Mitchell, wife of Allan Blumenthal. Alan Greenspan’s familial relation was more tenuous, being the former husband of Joan Mitchell. The only non-relative in the class of ’43 was Mary Ann Rukovina, who made the top rank after being the college roommate of Joan Mitchell.


and this one


There was a generally consuming concern with greatness and rank among the Randians. It was universally agreed that Rand was the greatest person of all time. There was then a friendly dispute about the precise ranking of Branden among the all-time all-stars. Some maintained that Branden was the second greatest of all time; others that Branden tied for second in a dead heat with Aristotle. Such was the range of permitted disagreement within the Randian movement.

heavenlyboy34
04-16-2011, 09:22 PM
Murray also wrote a play making fun of Rand and Randians. Look up "Mozart was a Red" on youtube. Funny shit! :) :D

ETA: Here it is-


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk5C2qsRH8

low preference guy
04-16-2011, 09:24 PM
What a petty little man Rothbard was.

dbill27
04-16-2011, 09:30 PM
^I don't see it as a big deal and i love rand, i think its worth pointing out that rand preached a philosophy of individualism and independence and then so many of her followers simply worshiped her and joined that collective.

Agorism
04-16-2011, 09:36 PM
Ayn Rand also hated Post-Modernism\Deconstructionism, which I personally think is awesome.

And Rothbard is awesome.

heavenlyboy34
04-16-2011, 09:56 PM
What a petty little man Rothbard was.
Not really. From my reading of his stuff and listening to his lectures, I get that he was very bright and had a great sense of humor. I've never heard a Rothbard lecture in which he didn't crack at least a few great jokes that made the audience laugh. :)

WilliamShrugged
04-16-2011, 11:26 PM
What a petty little man Rothbard was.

I disagree... The ideology Rand and her followers viewed as they talked down to Rothbard about his marriage was one of the many reasons he quit the meetings that he himself brought together. He was a early fan of hers and praised her for Atlas Shrugged.

doodle
04-17-2011, 01:00 AM
Ayn Rand also hated Post-Modernism\Deconstructionism, which I personally think is awesome.




Need to learn more about her. But if she supported US attack on Iran like ARI and movie "Atlas Shrugged" funder does, that I would find bit puzzling.

Agorism
04-17-2011, 07:57 AM
She supports having huge military and entangling aliances.

Agorism
04-17-2011, 10:22 AM
bump

Wesker1982
04-17-2011, 10:31 AM
I disagree... The ideology Rand and her followers viewed as they talked down to Rothbard about his marriage was one of the many reasons he quit the meetings that he himself brought together. He was a early fan of hers and praised her for Atlas Shrugged.

Yeah didn't she give him an ultimatum? Get divorced or you can't be my friend anymore or w/e lol. I don't think making fun of her after that is out of line on Rothbard's part.

You know I just thought.... Maybe Rand had a crush on Rothbard and that is the real reason why she wanted him to get divorced! She couldn't handle seeing him with another woman so she didn't want to see him at all lol :D

Agorism
04-17-2011, 10:33 AM
Rand wanted Rothbard to get divorced? Any other good articles\gossip on this?

lester1/2jr
04-17-2011, 10:38 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU

In "enemy of the State" Raimondo has a section on the rothabrd-rand stuff. He really liked her books and the idea that you could make someting interesting and exciting out of libertarianism, but she had a weird cult surrounding her.

Agorism
04-17-2011, 11:00 AM
So did Rand have a thing for Rothbard?

Why did she want Rothbard to get divorced?

Wesker1982
04-17-2011, 11:06 AM
My post wasn't serious but afaik it is just a rumor. And rumor has it that since Rothbard's wife was a Christian, Rand demanded that he divorce her.

Agorism
04-17-2011, 11:09 AM
Why did Murrey demand Rand divorce her husband (if she was married) as well?

TNforPaul45
04-17-2011, 11:12 AM
What a petty little man Rothbard was.

You all must remember that Rothbard and Rand did not see eye to eye for a very long time, but much later on, Rothbard put aside his differences and actually paid her immense compliments

Letter from Murray Rothbard to Ayn Rand, 1957: http://mises.org/journals/jls/21_4/21_4_3.pdf




Dear Ayn:

FIRST, I would like to begin by saying “and I mean it”; there is no exaggeration or hyperbole in this letter. Anything less than complete honesty would be unworthy of Atlas Shrugged. I just finished your novel today. I will start by saying that all of us in the “Circle Bastiat” are convinced, and were convinced very early in the reading, that Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written. This is our generally accepted initial premise, and the discussions over the book have naturally been based upon it. But this is just the beginning. This simple statement by itself means little to me: I have always had a bit of contempt for the novel form, and have thought of the novel, at best, as a useful sugar-coated pill to carry nougat-prop work amongst the masses who can’t take ideas straight.

Month ago, if I had said a book was “the greatest novel ever written, “it wouldn’t have been too high a compliment. It is one of the small measures of what I think of Atlas Shrugged that I no longer pooh-pooh the novel. I have always heard my literary friends talk of the “truths” presented by novels, without understanding the term at all. Now I do understand, but only because you have carried the novel form to a new and higher dimension. For the first time you have welded a great unity of principle and person, depicting persons and their actions in perfect accordance with principles and their consequences. This in itself is a tremendous achievement.

For with the unity of principle and person there emerges the corollary unity of reason and emotion: and the reader, in grasping your philosophic system both in speech and through acting persons, is hit by the great emotion of an immediate and rational perception. As I read your novel, the joy I felt was sometimes tempered by the regret that all those generations of novel-readers, people like my mother who in their youth read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, searching eagerly for they knew not what truths which they never quite found, that these people could not read Atlas Shrugged. Here, I thought, were the truths they were really looking for. Here, in Atlas Shrugged, is the perfection of the novel form. It is now a form that I honor and admire. But the truly staggering thing about your novel is the vast and completely integrated edifice, of thought and of action: the astounding infinity of rational connections that abound, great and small, throughout this novel.

Joey says she used to wonder how a novel could take you over ten years to write; she now wonders how you possibly could have written all that in a mere ten years. Every page, almost every word, has its meaning and function. I am sure that I have only scratched the surface of tracing all the interconnections, and a good part of my conversation consists of saying; and what of page so-and-so: do you see how that fits in? I recall now just a line, I believe it was in an early speech of Francisco, where the following nouns appear: reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement.
To some this [might] seem to be a random string of nouns, but I saw immediately that one follows from the other in strict logical progression, that each leads to the succeeding. This is just one example of the almost infinite treasure house that is Atlas Shrugged. To find one person that has carved out a completely integrated rational ethic, rational epistemology, rational psychology, and rational politics, all integrated one with the other, and then to find each with the other portrayed through characters in action, is a doubly staggering event. And I am surprised that it astonishes even I who was familiar with the general outlines of your system. What it will do the person stumbling upon it anew I cannot imagine. For you have achieved not only the unity of principle and person, and of reason and passion, but also the unity of mind and body, matter and spirit, sex and politics . . . in short, to use the old Marxist phrase, “the unity of theory and practice.”

This is the sort of book where one is apt to find a phrase or concept and exclaim: oh, no leftist could say such nonsense, and then gout and find the same nonsense being spouted all around you. It is almost impossible, after reading Atlas Shrugged, to take the usual leftist arguments seriously. At first I admit I missed the presence of great, super-Toohey villain, a Dr. Fu Manchu of evil, but then I cameo realize that this is one of the key points in the book. And then, when I tried to tell a couple of leftist acquaintances something about your system, all they could do was curl their ugly lips and sneer about a “paranoid closed system.” These are the “intellectuals” of our day! I now come to the painful part of this letter. For standing as I doing awe and wonder at the glory and magnitude of your achievement, knowing from early in the novel that I would have to write you and express in full how much I and the world owe to you, I also know that I owe you an explanation: an explanation of why I have avoided seeing you in person for the many years of our acquaintance. I want you to know that the fault is mine, that the reason is a defect in mown psyche and not a defect that I attribute to you. The fact is that most times when I saw you in person, particularly when we engaged in lengthy discussion or argument, that I found afterwards that I was greatly depressed for days thereafter. Why I should be so depressed do not know. All my adult life I have been plagued with a “phobic state” (of which my travel phobia is only the most overt manifestation), i.e. with frightening emotions which I could neither control nor rationally explain. I have found that unfortunately the only way I could successfully combat this painful emotion is by sidestepping the situations which seemed to evoke it—knowing that this is an evasion, but also knowing no better way.

So in this situation, I have never felt depressed in such a way after seeing anyone else, so I concluded that the best I could do is avoid the reaction by not going to see you. I had naturally been too ashamed to say anything about this to you. Strangely, I don’t feel ashamed now; it is as if when writing to the author of Atlas Shrugged, that book which conveys with such immediate impact the pride and joy in being a man, that it is impossible to feel shame for telling the truth. In trying my best to figure out why I should have been so depressed, I can only think of one or both of the following explanations: (1) that my brain became completely exhausted under the intense strain of keeping up with a mind that I unhesitatingly say is the most brilliant of the twentieth century; or (2) that I felt that if I continued to see you, my personality and independence would become overwhelmed by the tremendous power of your own. If the latter, then the defect is, of course, again mine and not yours.

At any rate, I have come to regard you as like the sun, a being of enormous power giving off great light, but that someone coming too close would be likely to get burned. At any rate, I want you to know that, even without seeing you, you have had an enormous influence upon me—even before the novel came out. When I first became interested in ideas, my first principle that I had from the start was a burning love of human freedom, and a hatred for aggressive violence of man upon man. I always liked economics, and was inclined to theory, but found in my graduate economics courses that I felt all the theories offered were dead wrong, but I could not say why. Miss’s Human Action was the next great influence upon me, because I found in it a great rational system of economics, each interconnected logically, each following, as in Aristotelian philosophy, from a basic and certain axiom: the existence of human beings. When I first met you, many years ago, was a follower of Misses, but unhappy about his antipathy to natural rights, which I “felt” was true but could not demonstrate. You introduced me to the whole field of natural rights and natural law philosophy, which I did not know existed, and month by month, working on my own as I preferred, I learned and studied the glorious natural rights tradition. I also learned from you about the existence of Aristotelian epistemology, and then I studied that, and came to adopt it wholeheartedly. So that I owe you a great intellectual debtor many years, the least of which is introducing me to a tradition of which four years of college and three years of graduate school, to say nothing of other reading, had kept me in ignorance. And now I find, and marvel at in wonder and awe and joy, that have become a better person just in reading Atlas Shrugged. It is still incredible to me that a person’s character can improve from reading work of art, but there it is. I have checked and found many friends who have read it have felt the same way. I think that reading it will bring to the attentive reader, as it has brought me, at least a Littlemore of the conviction of pride in being a man, of joy in unlimited roads of achievement open before him, of the feeling that pain does not matter, of the happiness of being alive on earth, and even of the feeling that reason and justice will ultimately prevail. He will walk little straighter, hold his head a little higher, and be far more honest (one of the greatest accomplishments of the book is its rational and emotional demonstration that honesty is a profoundly selfish and necessary virtue—and not just a luxury for suckers. Magnificent!).

The chief defect in this book—and I am quite serious—is that it lacks an index. My chief emotion in reading this book was beautifully summed up in an emotion that Dr. Staler felt when he first came across Galt’s manuscript: torn between eagerness to proceed onward, and the eagerness to look back and think about and digest the many ramifications of what I had read. With a novel, this is even more troublesome, since the pull of reading onward is more irresistible. This book cries for a fully annotated index, so that when one wants to refer quickly to passages on certain subjects, or to a particularly moving speech or phrase, one could find it without delay. I know that no novel has had an index before, but none has ever required it before, and this does. Perhaps you could be persuaded to come out with a “textbook” edition, complete with index. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to promote the sale of the novel. I will do anything I can: from writing letters to the editor to pasting stickers up on street corners. I am enclosing a copy of the letter I am now sending to the New Leader, in comment on the disgraceful and disgusting column of Granville Hicks, an “ex”-Communist about your book. (When I said your book will improve the reader, I don’t mean the convinced leftists: I shudder what the book will dote their psyche, if they really read it.) I understand, glory be!, that John Chamberlain will review it for the Sunday Herald-Tribune—and, confidentially, there is a growing possibility that John may also review it for National Review, if Whittaker Chambers does not send review in on time. Only twice in my life have I felt honored and happy that I was young and alive at the specific date of the publication of a book: first, of Human Action in 1949, and now with Atlas Shrugged.

When, in the past, I heard your disciples refer to you in grandiloquent terms—alone of the greatest geniuses who ever lived, as giving them a “round universe”—I confess I was repelled: surely this was the outpouring of a mystic cult. But now, upon reading Atlas Shrugged, I find I was wrong. This was not wild exaggeration but the perception of truth. You are one of the great geniuses of the ages, and I am proud that wearer friends. And Atlas Shrugged is not merely the greatest novel ever written, it is one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction. Indeed, it is one of the greatest achievements the humankind has ever produced. And I mean it. If Zarathustra should ever return to earth, and ask me—as representative of the human race—that unforgettable question: “what have ye done to surpass man?”, I shall point to Atlas Shrugged.

Gratefully yours,

Murray


Rothbard, M. (2007) Mises and Rothbard Letters to Ayn Rand. Journal of Libertarian Studies, 21(4), 11-16.
www.mises.org

Wesker1982
04-17-2011, 11:14 AM
Why did Murrey demand Rand divorce her husband (if she was married) as well?

lol I don't think I ever heard about that. Maybe because he WASN'T Christian?!

I read that letter before, interesting read imo.

Agorism
04-17-2011, 11:16 AM
Ayn Rand is really obnoxious.

matt0611
04-17-2011, 11:21 AM
lol I don't think I ever heard about that. Maybe because he WASN'T Christian?!

I read that letter before, interesting read imo.

She wanted him to get divorced because his wife was not an atheist.

Heres a nice speech from Murray's wife, i think she talks about it.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAY8XNL1FqE

Wesker1982
04-17-2011, 11:45 AM
Heres a nice speech from Murray's wife, i think she talks about it.


That was interesting. Her personality seems like it was a perfect match for Rothbard.

timosman
04-23-2019, 10:51 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGgh8ASh0c4

Danke
04-23-2019, 11:08 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGgh8ASh0c4

Where did you find that YouTuber?

"Everyone is a Man!" lol

timosman
04-23-2019, 11:46 AM
Where did you find that YouTuber?

"Everyone is a Man!" lol

Think what you will but he is quite entertaining. :D

Krugminator2
04-23-2019, 07:14 PM
Think what you will but he is quite entertaining. :D

I watched the entire thing. Have to say, pretty good. I laughed. Still laughing actually.