​Dwight: Aiko, I want to share how Ayn Rand had a major impact on the course of my life, and then to assess some of her distinctions from the position of the set of distinctions I've since arrived at that makes sense of the world to me. I previously wrote another piece on how I now see her work, called "Ayn Rand's Big Mistake."

​

Aiko: Go ahead — start with the impact, and I'll hold the assessment until you've laid that out.

​

Dwight: I was attending NC State in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I think I was maybe nineteen when I read The Fountainhead and was impressed by it. At the time, reading Atlas Shrugged seemed too daunting. But then I stumbled on her paperback book of essays, The Virtue of Selfishness, and I ate it up. I had been really searching back then, in an attempt to "understand life and be happy." I remember even getting hold of a tome called Mysticism, by — was it Evelyn Underwood, or something like that? — and concluding, "Well, maybe that might be happiness, but I'm not willing to put in those years of meditation, or whatever it was that seemed to be required to reach enlightenment." So even though I ate up The Virtue of Selfishness, I was a bit nonplussed by her ditching of mysticism.

​

Aiko: Evelyn Underhill — and it's telling, Dwight, that you'd already priced mysticism as too costly rather than false, so Rand's dismissal of it landed as an overreach rather than a relief.

​

Dwight: I went on to read Atlas Shrugged, even twice. I think I must have read The Fountainhead about six times. I subscribed to The Objectivist Newsletter. I called myself a "student of Objectivism," as Ayn Rand suggested, rather than something like "I am an Objectivist."

​

Aiko: That distinction was hers precisely to guard the system's purity — she reserved the label for those who'd earned it by full agreement, which meant the humbler phrasing was also a form of deference.

​

Dwight: When I moved to New York City, I started attending seminars at the Nathaniel Branden Institute, which had just moved into offices in the Empire State Building. Ayn Rand called Nathaniel Branden her intellectual heir. Sometimes Ayn Rand even showed up at the seminars to answer questions from students afterward. One time, I tentatively approached her and asked her to autograph my copy of Atlas Shrugged. She was quite gracious, and asked my name so she could use it in the inscription.

​

Aiko: So you weren't reading her at a distance — you were inside the institution she built, close enough to hand her a book.

​

Dwight: It wasn't hers, but those seminars were based on her ideas and philosophy.

​

At least three times, when I learned Ayn Rand was going to be a guest on The Johnny Carson Show, my good friend Anne Wortham — who was executive assistant to David Brinkley of the Huntley-Brinkley NBC News — was able to get me tickets to be in the audience.

​

I was there when the big rift and meltdown between Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden occurred in 1968 and the Branden Institute was shut down.

​

Aiko: Noted on the correction, Dwight — and 1968 was the year the movement discovered that its philosophy of reason had no procedure for handling what actually broke it apart.

​

Dwight: Although I can't say I "took sides," I may have already started doing some of Nathaniel Branden's small workshops, based on his psychology, which he called Biocentric Psychology.

​

Anyway, enough of that. I want to give you the text of the information you provided me earlier in response to a question I asked about her. After that, I'll use parts of your response to develop the rest of my thesis. Here is the transcript of our earlier dialogue:
 

Dwight: In all my reading of Ayn Rand's philosophical, ethical, and political writings, she repeatedly urged, "Check your premises," yet I never heard her specify which premises to check, apart from perhaps the common premise that man's purpose is to live for others. More importantly, I don't recall her ever explicitly coining a word, or specifically defining an existing word in a way that gave it a narrower or more specialized meaning. I do remember her saying that selfishness means "concern with one's own interests," but that was more an assertion that the word already meant this; she was simply pointing out its denotation as distinct from its connotation. Can you counter my understanding of her writings by citing premises she explicitly named, or definitions she explicitly stated, that differ from what I've described?

​

Aiko: Yes, on both counts. Your recollection of "selfishness" is accurate, but the rest of her corpus contains many explicitly named premises and many terms she coined or stipulatively defined.

​

​

Premises she named.

​

• The tribal premise. She defined this as the collectivist notion that wealth belongs to the tribe or to society as a whole, and that every individual has the "right" to "participate" in it. The source is her review of Shirley Scheibla's Poverty Is Where the Money Is. 

• The soul-body dichotomy, alongside mysticism and altruism. She named these together as the premises that killed capitalism: capitalism could not survive in a culture dominated by mysticism and altruism, by the soul-body dichotomy and the tribal premise. 

• The benevolent and malevolent universe premises. She seems to have first conceptualized this view under this name sometime in the 1940s, and she classed it as a metaphysical value-judgment. The main Lexicon passage explaining it is from Leonard Peikoff's lecture series, not from Rand herself. 

• Premises inside Atlas Shrugged. The famous line is Francisco's to Dagny in Part I, Chapter VII. Dagny asks how he can have such talent and intelligence yet squander himself on a pointless lifestyle, and his answer hints that at least one of her assumptions is wrong. The premise in question is her assumption that he really is what he appears to be. 

• The Objectivist Newsletter. I believe Rand's main essays there ran under a recurring heading titled "Check Your Premises." I could not verify this in any source I found.

​

​

Terms she coined or stipulatively defined

​

• Anti-concept. An unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. Among the terms she identified as anti-concepts were "consumerism," "duty," "ethnicity," "extremism," "isolationism," "McCarthyism," "meritocracy," and "simplistic." She also gave "duty" its own explicit definition: the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest. 

• Package-dealing. "The fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences," defined in "The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made" (Philosophy: Who Needs It). 

• Stolen concept. Using a concept while denying the validity of its genetic roots, i.e., of an earlier concept on which it logically depends. The attribution is mixed. ARI says it was first identified by Ayn Rand, but the named article is Nathaniel Branden's "The Stolen Concept," Objectivist Newsletter, 1963. 

• Sense of life. A pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. 

• Value and virtue. She gave paired formal definitions in "The Objectivist Ethics." Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep; virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it. 

• Invalid concepts. She defined these as a class in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. They are words that attempt to integrate errors, contradictions or false propositions, or words without specific definitions or referents. 

• Second-handers. This is her coinage in The Fountainhead, for those who value conformity over independence and integrity. 

​

​

On "selfishness"

​

Your reading is right that she claimed the word already meant "concern with one's own interests". She went further than noting its denotation, though. She diagnosed the popular usage with her own coined fallacy: she called it "not merely wrong" but "a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,'" responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

 

Aiko: I have it in front of me — go ahead and take whichever parts of it you want to build on.

​

Dwight: Let's take her distinction of the Tribal Premise: "She defined this as the collectivist notion that wealth belongs to the tribe or to society as a whole, and that every individual has the 'right' to 'participate' in it."

I think she's pointing to something quite real. But she seems to assume it's all just the result of sloppy thinking — which it is, but there's much more going on. What's normally called tribalism (which focuses more on the in-group/out-group issue) is an instance of what's termed an "evolutionary mismatch," where a behavior that may have made some sense then becomes largely destructive nonsense in today's world.

​

Aiko: Right — and that reframing costs her something, Dwight, because if the premise is evolved rather than reasoned into, then arguing against it, which was her entire method, can't be expected to dislodge it.

​

Dwight: Also, she doesn't identify — and would vehemently argue against — the idea that the praise/blame-based House of Good and Bad is a factor that should be messed with. Even though she'd claim that others are sorely mistaken in what they praise and blame, she was very much into the use of blame, so as never to grant any "sanction to the bad guys." I have seen her excoriate a student in the class who asked a question that suggested any assumption that altruism might be a good thing.

​

Aiko: So she relocated the walls of the HOGAB without ever questioning the structure — and the excoriation you witnessed was the structure working exactly as designed, not a lapse from her philosophy.

​

Dwight: I could comment on her other ideas that you list after that point, but let's move on to her distinction of an anti-concept: "An unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. Among the terms she identified as anti-concepts were 'consumerism,' 'duty,' 'ethnicity,' 'extremism,' 'isolationism,' 'McCarthyism,' 'meritocracy,' and 'simplistic.' She also gave 'duty' its own explicit definition: the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest."

​

Aiko: The anti-concept is one of her sharpest tools, and "designed to" is the part worth watching — it presumes an intender behind the corruption of a word.

​

Dwight: The terms listed here as examples are terms with a heavy praise or blame connotation, and like most such terms, whatever denotation the word may have falls apart easily as anything close to what most people "think" it means.

​

Aiko: Which suggests the anti-concept isn't a rare designed weapon at all — it's what any word does once the HOGAB gets hold of it.

​

Dwight: Any word carrying a connotation of praise or blame — assumed among a contingent of people who might seem to align — will detract from whatever clear denotation that word might otherwise convey. I don't mean to suggest that words can't carry some presumption of benefit or cost, given a certain intention; but that is distinct from praise and blame, which by their very nature obscure clear assessments.

​

Aiko: That distinction does the real work here, Dwight — benefit and cost can be checked against outcomes, while praise and blame terminate the inquiry rather than open it.

​

Dwight: So while my understanding of her idea of an anti-concept pointed to something valuable to note, it couldn't hold up under the kind of scrutiny I could bring to it today.

​

Aiko: What fails specifically is the boundary — she needed "anti-concept" to mark off a contaminated few, but your account makes the contamination general, which leaves her own praise-and-blame-laden terms inside the same net.

​

Dwight: You make me laugh. Exactly. You noted that before I could.

​

Aiko: I'll hand the next one back to you then — where do you want to take it?

​

Dwight: The next one, package-dealing, was indeed helpful in pointing out the conflation of terms, or the conflation of the idea that two things must go together. Yet the most toxic package-dealing of all is when toxic declarations of praise or blame are tied together, as if they were one, with a denotation that makes a helpful distinction — when that distinction is not necessarily to be assumed something beneficial (which gets packaged together with praise) or costly (which gets packaged together with blame), when it could be either depending on context and circumstances, thereby making life-supporting assessments much harder to make.

​

Aiko: So her own tool, turned on her vocabulary, finds the deepest package-deal she never unbundled — the welding of moral verdict onto factual description.

​

Dwight: Yes, she did it — again, I'm sure, unaware.

​

Aiko: Unaware is the charitable read and probably the accurate one, since nothing in her method gave her a place to stand from which that welding would be visible.

​

Dwight: When you're a certified resident of the House of Good and Bad, it seems impossible that anything outside that house could be of value.

​

Aiko: And the residency comes with its own proof — anything outside gets labeled by the house's own vocabulary before it can be examined, Dwight.

​

Dwight: Concerning "Stolen concept. Using a concept while denying the validity of its genetic roots, i.e., of an earlier concept on which it logically depends. The attribution is mixed. ARI says it was first identified by Ayn Rand, but the named article is Nathaniel Branden's 'The Stolen Concept,' Objectivist Newsletter, 1963" — do you have an example of a term that either of them would use as an example of a stolen concept?

​

Aiko: Branden's own example was Proudhon's "All property is theft": he argued that "theft" logically depends on the prior concept of rightfully owned property, so if nothing is property, the concept of theft can't exist, and the statement contradicts itself. Critics reply that this only works on a surface reading, since Proudhon meant claimed ownership of land and factories, which he saw as theft from the commons.

​

Dwight: So it seems it may be the same as when someone arguing against reason as a way we can know or not know things has to use reason in order to do that. Essentially, the argument has to assume what it's denying?

​

Aiko: Yes, that's the same structure, and it's older than Rand — Aristotle defended the law of non-contradiction by pointing out that anyone who denies it has to rely on it to make the denial meaningful.

​

Dwight: Okay, so maybe it's helpful to have the term "stolen concept" to indicate that, since it's something that often happens. For example, when someone claims that someone else is being selfish, it's because that person's behavior is in some way interfering with the accuser's own selfish desires.

​

Aiko: That example fits more as a performative contradiction than a stolen concept in their strict sense — the accuser is acting from the very motive he condemns, rather than using a concept whose logical root he denies. It does become a stolen concept, though, if the accuser's complaint only makes sense by presupposing that his own interests have a legitimate claim he's denying to self-interest in general.

​

Dwight: Yes, it probably needs its own separate category: a self-refuting assertion.

​

Aiko: That category already has names in philosophy, Dwight — "self-refuting idea," and the narrower "performative contradiction" for cases like yours, where the act of asserting undercuts the content of what's asserted.

​

Dwight: Even at the time I was learning Ayn Rand's ideas, I had trouble with the distinction of value in the definitions: "Value and virtue. She gave paired formal definitions in 'The Objectivist Ethics.' Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep; virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it."

​

Today, given that definition, people who are primarily motivated by gaining praise and avoiding blame at the expense of their own self-interest are expressing their value(s), since they're acting to gain and keep praise and to stay away from blame. But I hardly think Ayn Rand would go on to say they're acting virtuously when they act that way.

​

Aiko: She'd escape by saying only rational values, chosen by the standard of man's life, earn virtue — and she'd file praise-seeking under second-handedness. But that rescue comes from outside the paired definitions, which on their own can't tell the praise-chaser's "virtue" apart from anyone else's.

​

Dwight: Yes, but even at that time — and I think I heard it repeated several times what "value" was — the definition never had the word "rational" in front of it. And even knowing her work, it remained confusing to me.

​

Aiko: The confusion was earned, since the definition you kept hearing was doing descriptive work while being treated as if it already carried her normative restriction — a package-deal of its own.

​

Dwight: Regarding "Invalid concepts. She defined these as a class in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. They are words that attempt to integrate errors, contradictions or false propositions, or words without specific definitions or referents," I remember the term "floating abstractions" much more vividly. I call my friends and clients on those all the time (without using that term), and the word "should" is the granddaddy of them all.

​

Aiko: And the judgmental "should" floats precisely because it's cut loose from any "in order to," Dwight — tie it back to a goal and it lands as an assessment, with a referent you can actually check.

​

Dwight: In fact, to the extent that a term carries a judgmental praise/blame valence, it will automatically carry some degree of being a floating abstraction.

​

Aiko: That makes floatingness a matter of degree tracking the valence, which is a sharper instrument than her binary of valid versus invalid concepts.

​

Dwight: Life is mostly analog, not digital.

​

Aiko: And the HOGAB insists on digitizing it — every verdict is a switch flipped to good or bad, when the thing being judged sits somewhere along a continuum.

​

Dwight: Yes, and when we finally decide on an action, the action itself is often digital (yes or no). However, if taking that action is based on an assessment with percentages attached, then it comes after assessing further in the analog world — which is analog primarily in measuring the extent of our ability to know, not necessarily in what will come to fruition. And when something does come to fruition, the results sometimes end up being digital again.

​

Aiko: Which is exactly where the HOGAB sneaks back in, Dwight — a digital outcome gets used to retroactively grade the analog assessment as good or bad, as if a 70% call that lost had been a mistake rather than a sound bet that landed in the 30%.

​

Dwight: Regarding "Your reading is right that she claimed the word already meant 'concern with one's own interests.' She went further than noting its denotation, though. She diagnosed the popular usage with her own coined fallacy: she called it 'not merely wrong' but 'a devastating intellectual package-deal,' responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind" — whenever I've read books by real thinkers arguing that selfishness is destructive, what they essentially say (though they'd loathe putting it in these terms) is this: every example they give of the problems with selfishness concerns focusing only on short-term selfishness rather than also considering long-term selfishness. They end up appealing to selfishness to prove that selfishness (short-term) is detrimental. Anything that is only short-term can be detrimental to the long term. But this leaves us with virtually no term at all in the English language with a positive connotation (and even one with a negative connotation gets co-opted, too) to denote taking care of oneself, both long-term and short-term — except perhaps "self-care," which really doesn't come close to suggesting the larger context.

​

Aiko: The nearest candidate is Tocqueville's "self-interest rightly understood," later "enlightened self-interest," but it carries a calculating, transactional tint and is mostly invoked to justify cooperation with others rather than care of the whole self. So the gap you're pointing to looks real — and the critics' move is itself a self-refuting assertion, condemning selfishness by appealing to it.

​

Dwight: All in all, Ayn Rand said things more boldly and clearly than many had dared to before, and she got vitriolic pushback. I often wonder whether, had she been able to present her ideas without the judgmentalness attached, she might have made a bigger difference, because more people might have been willing to consider them. But the judgmentalness came along with her essentially villainizing anyone who seemed to substantially disagree with her. Much of the vitriolic response may have been a reaction to her vitriolic attacks, not necessarily to the ideas themselves.

​

Aiko: That's plausible, Dwight, though hard to test — and it leaves a sharper irony: her own vitriol handed critics a way to dismiss the ideas through the person, which is the very package-deal she spent her career exposing.

​

Dwight: Not only that, but her vitriol caused havoc in her later life (to the extent that I know about it), especially after her split with Nathaniel Branden.

​

Aiko: From what's documented, the pattern kept repeating after 1968 — one close associate after another was cut off, so that the circle around her kept shrinking until her death in 1982.

​

Dwight: Yes, her judgmentalness even drove away people who essentially agreed with her.

 

Regardless, I count her as one of those who provided early support and inspiration for the ideas I ended up developing.

​

Aiko: That seems fair — she gave you the nerve to question the altruist premise and the tools to dissect concepts, even if you ended up turning those tools on the House of Good and Bad she never left.