Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [137]
Gradually, she and O’Connor took to referring to Nathaniel and Barbara as “the children.” They didn’t mean anything parental by it, Rand insisted. She often repeated her dictum that birth families are unimportant. An acquaintance of the period heard her say that she was “absolutely, violently against” them. She believed in “relatives through choice, not blood.” When another acquaintance asked whether she thought of herself as the young people’s mother, she answered sharply, “Certainly not. They are not my children. They are the children of The Fountainhead.”
Branden shared her view of families. Nonetheless, he was aware that his mentor’s geographic and ethnic origins were very similar to those of his biological parents. He sometimes thought that his literary idol looked very much like one of his mother’s cousins. And though he and Barbara weren’t her actual children, they began to come to her for motherly advice. How should they deal with the left-wing professors and students at UCLA who treated them as pariahs when they argued for her point of view in class? How should they respond when a popular philosophy professor, a logical positivist, insisted that perception is unreliable, logic is arbitrary, and nothing is universally true? Rand responded more protectively than she later would to similar dilemmas, warning “the children” against risking their academic careers by deliberately espousing her ideas. She also trained them to be alert to the implications of all that they were hearing and being taught. “Check your premises!” she would call out in conversation, meaning make sure that the assumptions you argue from are true. She astonished them by skimming a few pages of their college texts and accurately construing the authors’ starting points, arguments, and conclusions. “One could not encounter a human being in whom the psychological attribute of rationality was more pronounced,” Barbara wrote in 1986. Added Nathaniel, in 2008, “She had a Sherlock Holmes ability to ferret out implications that other people might miss,” as well as a prophet’s pleasure in guiding her young fans in mastering her ideas.
Meanwhile, she also learned from them, especially from their encounters with professors. In Atlas Shrugged, Lillian Rearden’s pseudo-intellectual friends the satirical Balph Eubank, a pretentious literary scholar (whose name translates as “barf), and Dr. Simon Pritchett, a pompous purveyor of a “nothing-is-anything” philosophy, are partly based on Rand’s young friends’ university experiences. The novel’s good professor is a philosopher named Hugh Akston, who taught both John Galt and Francisco at Patrick Henry University. As Francisco tells Dr. Pritchett at a party, Akston holds that “everything is something.” This phrase neatly captures Rand’s emerging view of metaphysics, the study of what’s real. Following Aristotle, she argued that reality is absolute: that A is A and facts are facts, independent of feelings, wishes, hopes, or fears. Furthermore, every entity’s existence is also its identity (“everything is something”). To be is to be something in particular. Finally, reason—defined as “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses”—allows the formation of concepts. Therein lies the rational foundation of all knowledge, she contended in Atlas Shrugged.
She especially enjoyed talking to Nathaniel about psychology. Universities then favored Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Rand furiously disagreed with both. Freudianism seemed mystical to her; behaviorism was mechanical; and both