Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [232]
I hereby withdraw my endorsement of them and of their future works and activities. I repudiate both of them, totally and permanently, as spokesmen for me or for Objectivism.
There it might have ended, but she went on. Her reasons, she explained, began with Mr. Branden’s three-year drift away from the principles of Objectivism and toward frivolous pursuits. Her personal relationship with him had also deteriorated, turning into “a series of his constant demands on my time, constant pleas for advice, for help with his writing, for long discussions of his personal, philosophical and psychological problems.” After she had warned him that she would not tolerate this treatment forever, he began to reveal certain unacceptable traits. “This year … I was shocked to discover that he was consistently failing to apply to his own personal life and conduct, not only the fundamental philosophical principles of Objectivism, but also the psychological principles he himself had enunciated and had written and lectured about.” The example she gave: He had told her that he sometimes acted “on the basis of unidentified feelings,” a charge that only Randian true believers could find surprising. She added, “He did not practice what he preached.”
The problems had multiplied, she wrote. In the previous two months he had presented her with a paper “so irrational and offensive to me that I had to break my personal association with him.” Next, she had learned from Mrs. Branden that he had long been concealing “ugly actions and irrational behavior in his private life” that had involved the deliberate deception of a number of persons, including herself, and amounted to a conscious breach of morality. She implied, but did not state, that he had committed financial malfeasance in the matter of the $25,000 loan. That he “was exploiting me [not only] intellectually and professionally [but also] financially … was grotesquely sickening,” she wrote. Thus she had ended their professional association, too.
All this time, she continued, Mrs. Branden had pretended to be her ally. Yet almost as soon as she had refused Mrs. Branden’s proposed business plan for NBI, the younger woman was heard to utter “veiled threats” against her. Mr. Branden joined his ex-wife in engaging in “unbelievably hysterical” behavior in the presence of her attorney and the NBI staff. “Since this change in their attitude occurred when they realized that … the gold mine involved in the use of my name was shut down, draw your own conclusions about the cause and motive of their behavior.”
Finally, with an apology to subscribers and others who had trusted the Brandens on her recommendation, she held herself blameless for the rupture and the blow it might represent to thousands of her admirers. “No one stays here by faking reality in any manner whatsoever,” John Galt tells Dagny when she crash-lands in utopia. “I do not fake reality and never have,” she declared in her published statement. Even so, she did not celebrate the tragic downfall of “an unusually intelligent man who had the potential to become a great man.” The lesson was that her philosophy made no allowances for personal contradictions or hypocrisy. It “will stifle the mind” that attempts to adopt it in part or play games with it. “Objectivism, like reality,” she wrote, “is its own avenger.” And so it was.
Within a week or two, the Brandens answered her letter with one of their own. In a tone of barely controlled outrage, Nathaniel pointed out that he had repaid the $25,000 loan within ten days of Miss Rand’s belated objections to it. “So much for my alleged financial exploitation of Miss Rand,” he wrote. In fact, she had exploited him, he continued. She had coerced him into giving up his share of The Objectivist while refusing to keep her promise to return his copyrights, an infringement of their original partnership agreement.