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with one another. The correct moral stance, she wrote at about this time, wasn’t “Judge not, lest ye be judged” but “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.” Said a longtime NBI staff member, “Moral judgments were required if you were a moral person. It was terrible.” The new emphasis on “sense of life” placed devotees’ longings, fears, tastes, sexual impulses—anything—on the table for approval or condemnation. “Most people were walking on eggshells,” recalled Henry Holzer, who joined the inner circle as Rand’s “intellectual bodyguard,” or copyright attorney, in 1962 or 1963. “If you said something that was unknowingly immoral you’d be devastated. She’d look at you with those laser eyes and tell you that you had a lousy ‘sense of life.’” Recalled Branden, “Her idea of encouraging a person to be independent is to tell him, in effect, ‘Go and think it over—until you see things my way.’” Everything was a matter of philosophical importance, and everyone was morbidly afraid of her disapproval.

True to Rothbard’s 1954 prediction, a pallid kind of Stalinization set in. Whenever the leader took a position—against naturalism in novels, abstract art, or, a little later, the student rebellions at Berkeley and elsewhere—her young friends followed suit. A slip of the tongue by an Objectivist who liked Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or secretly didn’t like the paintings of one of her favorite (and also, she told people, one of her husband’s favorite) contemporary artists, Spanish superrealist José Manuel Capuletti, could bring accusations of mysticism, whim worship, malevolence, or an attitude of “anti-life.” If a transgression suggested disloyalty or simply that someone was “not my kind of person,” often no amount of prior goodwill made any difference. “She was the Evel Knievel of leaping to conclusions,” said Hessen, who himself went through a number of painful episodes. Although she typically forgave isolated lapses, tantrums and purges became more common in the late 1960s.

It was typically Branden who took charge of the denunciation of followers who had strayed, and sometimes he revealed information from his therapy sessions with them. “There was very little psychological privacy in those days,” he offered as an explanation to an interviewer in 1999. “Everything that was wrong with anybody or was thought to be wrong was publicly discussed. It was like public knowledge in our whole group.” By the early 1960s, he “was constantly denouncing,” Barbara recalled, and because he was “everybody’s therapist, his denunciation was much more damaging than Ayn’s.” Those who survived learned to juggle the explicit messages of the Objectivist subculture with the unstated rules: They were expected to practice obedience in the name of reason and embrace loyalty as a road to independence.

The story of Rand’s brief friendship with a forty-year-old Brooklyn College professor of philosophy named John Hospers is a poignant case in point. She and he, a rising academic thinker, met during the spring of 1960, when she gave the lecture titled “Faith and Force” at Brooklyn College. Unfamiliar with her work, he was thunderstruck by her speech and invited her to lunch on campus. She enjoyed the lunch and reciprocated by inviting him to a lecture at NBI. In the meantime, he read Atlas Shrugged and was “bowled over” and “wiped out” by the book. She asked him to visit her at her apartment, and he began to do so every two or three weeks, usually arriving at eight in the evening and staying until four or five in the morning. The two talked endlessly about Atlas Shrugged, which Hospers praised in depth and in detail, and about politics, literature, and art, her opposition to the draft, her withering disapproval of government intervention in a market economy, and her strong views on determinism and free will. They analyzed traditional ethical conundrums, such as, “If you had a choice between driving over a stranger or your own dog, what would you do?” (He didn’t remember her answer, except that it wasn’t to hit the stranger.) On the night before he was to turn in the manuscript