Ayn Rand as Self-Help: The Good, the Bad, and the Tragicomedy

Analyzing Rand's views on psychology

Note: This is the second in a two-part series on Ayn Rand and her work. For the first part, on the moral defense she provided of capitalism, see here. See also my discussion about Rand with Alex Epstein.

Ayn Rand taught that all aspects of her philosophy were integrated. Her views on everything from epistemology to art were all related. I’ve already discussed her ethical and sociopolitical ideas in a previous article. Yet her views on psychology are also useful and worth exploring in depth.

Below, I start with three important lessons from Rand on how to live a happy and fulfilling life that can be reconciled with positive outcomes for society. Rand teaches you to romanticize day-to-day life, live in dread of being a loser, and accept that you are selfish. I then move on to discuss the two main flaws in her psychological approach, which are positing a strong inherent relationship between rationality and happiness and her views on sex.

Ironically, Rand as a novelist is sometimes insightful on male/female relations, but the understanding of sex put forth in her nonfiction and the speeches of her characters is frankly ridiculous. Rand’s blindspot in this area is so bad that it calls out for an understanding of how it fits into her larger philosophy, and what it reveals about her greatest weaknesses as a thinker. I also discuss how she approaches the issue of family. In the end, while she is never explicitly anti-natalist, there are some fundamental tensions between having children and living in accordance with Rand’s worldview.

Three Psychological Lessons from Ayn Rand

1. Romanticize Day-to-Day Life

Randian heroes love to work. Whether building a railroad, creating a new kind of steel, designing buildings, or performing as an actress, they see their jobs as expressions of their deepest virtues. This is true not only for the titans of industry who are the protagonists of her novels. One of my favorite aspects of Rand’s psychology is that she glamorizes regular, productive work for people at all but the lowest levels of ability, creating at least some realistic role models. In Atlas Shrugged, railroad magnate Dagny Taggart has an assistant and childhood friend named Eddie Willers, who is honest and honorable. He realizes that he could never have founded a major company himself, but uses his mind to the best of his ability, and in effect suffers much less psychological stress and pain than men who are more successful but have the value system of Attila or the Witch Doctor, the two recurring villains in Rand’s reading of history. Similarly, in The Fountainhead, there’s a manual laborer named Mike, who is one of the only people in the world that architect-hero Howard Roark seems to like. As Willers does, Mike seeks the company of those who are great and wants to do all he can to contribute to their missions. The heroes themselves of course find fulfillment through their work too, willing to get their hands dirty when the time calls for it.

Gary Cooper as Roark in the film version of The Fountainhead, which Rand was involved in but ended up hating.

Had Rand’s novels provided guidance only to current and aspiring billionaires, they would not have been nearly as influential. When I was in my teens, I worked some lower class jobs in restaurants and call centers, and noticed a vast difference between the employees who took pride in what they were doing, and those who just wanted to punch a clock and get as much money as they could for the least amount of work. The superior workers were not only better for GDP and thus serving a social good, but happier in their day-to-day lives. Most people need to work in order to achieve an adequate standard of living, and the rest of society needs them to do so. They themselves will be happier if they believe that they are doing something honorable and productive, even if it’s washing dishes.

I sometimes see leftists talking about blue collar work in a way that completely misses this point. For example, there was once a John Oliver segment I vividly remember in which they were making fun of an anti-union video produced by Target warning employees that if they unionized, there may end up being rules against helping customers in a different department (see here, 11 minutes in)..

Oliver found it a source of amusement that you could threaten employees with the idea that they might have to do less work. In his model of employer-employee relations, the guy at Target simply wants to get away with as little movement as necessary. The possibilities that an employee might go through the day wanting to help customers, that he wouldn’t necessarily appreciate a union bureaucracy getting in the way of him doing so when the opportunity comes up, and that he doesn’t see himself as constantly trying to get one over on shoppers and the boss, are completely foreign to him. Corporations do a better job than leftist comedians of understanding that their employees seek not only money, but pride, from their work. To leftists that detest markets, blue collar work is inherently degrading, and you must treat individuals in such jobs as seeking nothing more than as much pay and time off as they can possibly get for the least amount of work. Labor unions in effect create a legally sanctioned bureaucratic manifestation of this worldview.

This Oliver segment is three years old, yet it has stayed with me as a perfect example of what the left fundamentally doesn’t get about capitalism and human nature. If all workers behaved how John Oliver thought they should, they’d all be unionized, service would be terrible everywhere, and everyone’s living standards would suffer. Yet even if that did help blue collar employees, they would end up a lot more miserable at work, which is a huge chunk of their lives, and it still probably wouldn’t be worth it. I’m not saying that every blue collar worker is happy all the time. Rather, if work is a necessary evil, then we should glamorize it as much as possible, and cultures differ in how much they encourage a positive or negative outlook.

As one of the tiny fraction of individuals in the world who makes their living actually doing something that they love, which I would do for free if I didn’t have to work, I’ve often thought about what I would do if I didn’t have the talent for writing. I probably wouldn’t have to clean toilets. But even relatively exciting jobs that I could possibly do seem much worse than what I’m doing. Most people don’t have that many options. We can either tell them that work is a necessary evil and they should loot whatever they can from customers and the bosses whenever possible, or that they are doing something noble and honorable in their lives, they should take a great deal of pride in it, and do it to the best of their ability. In order to get to the latter view, it is useful to do more to educate people on the glories of capitalism, and remove the stigma that John Oliver types create around work in the private sector.

2. Live in Dread of Being a Loser

It is usually considered a flaw to be judgmental. As with selfishness, Rand embraced this much maligned concept. She calls the precept “judge not, lest ye be judged… an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.” Rather, she prefers her own maxim: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”

One way this tendency to judge manifests itself in her novels is through the message that there truly is a vast gap in inherent value between the best and worst among humanity. In her first ever television appearance on The Mike Wallace Show in 1959, Rand told the interviewer that very few people are worthy of being loved.

There’s more than a hint of misanthropy here. But I’ve always found that believing that it’s really bad to be a loser is a great motivation for self-improvement. Accomplishing things in your limited time on earth is too hard if you think all forms of life are acceptable, that whether you end up an obese alcoholic on welfare or a muscular business executive doesn’t matter that much because we’re all really equal at a deeper level.

During my teenage years and early adulthood, I was seriously depressed. I had atrocious social skills, didn’t really understand other people, and walked around feeling like a loser that no one liked, for justifiable reasons. I remember that my initial reaction to Atlas Shrugged was to be taken in by the idea that, as simple and trite as this sounds, it actually mattered what I did.

In a Randian universe, there’s a heroic and rational way to brush your teeth, put on your pants, or go to the bathroom. Thinking like this would probably drive some people mad. But I find it motivating. Cynicism is poison for the soul, and we all have experience with people who go through life with the attitude “lol, nothing matters.” But you always sense that the “lol” part is a mask and they’re really miserable, because it is difficult to be happy or fulfilled when you have completely given up on the idea of finding meaning or living up to ideals.

Rand teaches that the concepts like heroism and cowardice do not only apply to the battlefield or rare historical moments. They’re the stuff of everyday life, which returns to the point of romanticizing reality. I could be a James Taggert by eating some sour patches right now and indulging my most base instincts, or I could do thirty pushups and follow up on a business opportunity someone presented earlier. I could hide what I believe about an issue and satisfy my audience or be a Howard Roark and see my articles, books, and maybe even Tweets as sacred texts providing unvarnished truth to the world. Would an extra 5,000 followers be worth more than the image of myself living up to a heroic ideal?

Rand’s villains show you the worst in humanity, and when you are sucked into her world, the journey of life starts to feel like walking a tightrope where if you fall you’ll be too disgusting to deserve the gift of existence. They have affairs, but not even because they like sex; it’s just that they’ve been told that this is something men and women do. They go to elegant parties and look at fancy works of art, not because they actually enjoy these things, but because they are going through the motions of what it means to be cultured.

As will be discussed below, Rand was wrong in implying that everyone who rejected her philosophy is unhappy and ridden by anxiety. But as with her defense of capitalism, there are truths here that the world can benefit from hearing, even if she was too absolutist in her thinking. Individuals need self-esteem to be happy. The best way to have a solid sense of self is to feel justified pride in one’s achievements. If you’re not satisfied with the person you are, all the things that we normally think make individuals happy like money, fame, and sex won’t help you. Just observe how many wealthy actors and musicians either commit suicide or end up succumbing to drug addiction.

3. Accept that You Are Selfish

Capitalism is about accepting the insight that man is fundamentally interested in his own well-being and applying it to economics. Adam Smith correctly pointed out that if the most enlightened philosopher in Europe heard that an earthquake had destroyed all of China, he would say it was a pity and then go about his business. Yet,

If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?

One of Rand’s contributions is to apply that same lesson to psychology. Nobody really cares all that much about the rest of the world. Just as how Marxism, based on the idea that people will work for the common good, is destined to fail, holding up altruism as the highest ideal is bound to lead to misery. As she writes in the introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness,

Observe what this beneficiary-criterion of morality does to a man’s life. The first thing he learns is that morality is his enemy; he has nothing to gain from it, he can only lose; self-inflicted loss, self-inflicted pain and the gray, debilitating pall of an incomprehensible duty is all that he can expect. He may hope that others might occasionally sacrifice themselves for his benefit, as he grudgingly sacrifices himself for theirs, but he knows that the relationship will bring mutual resentment, not pleasure — and that, morally, their pursuit of values will be like an exchange of unwanted, unchosen Christmas presents, which neither is morally permitted to buy for himself. Apart from such times as he manages to perform some act of self-sacrifice, he possesses no moral significance: morality takes no cognizance of him and has nothing to say to him for guidance in the crucial issues of his life; it is only his own personal, private, “selfish” life and, as such, it is regarded either as evil or, at best, amoral.

Since nature does not provide man with an automatic form of survival, since he has to support his life by his own effort, the doctrine that concern with one’s own interests is evil means that man’s desire to live is evil — that man’s life, as such, is evil. No doctrine could be more evil than that.

Even lives dedicated to service are selfish in the sense that they are usually rooted in someone seeking to live up to their own ideal. Imagine two young American men. One volunteers for the military, the other joins Teach for America and tries to help disadvantaged children in rural Arkansas. Both are in their own minds serving their country, but neither did a cost-benefit analysis to determine the best path to take. The military cadet likes the idea of wearing a uniform, marching in drills, staying in good physical shape, and being brave in the face of danger. The guy teaching kids in Arkansas feels like that stuff is primitive and cringe and thinks government should buy books not bombs. Something innate in the character of each drove them towards the morality of either the red or blue tribe.

Effective altruists are the only group that actually tries to do the calculations and figure out whether they should either join the military or become an investment banker and buy malaria nets. For this, everyone hates them. I’m personally a fan, because I believe that human beings are so inherently selfish and their attempts at charity so laughably ineffective or even counterproductive that there’s little danger of us ODing on too much rationality in thinking about how to make the world a better place.

But while I appreciate EAs, I could never be one. It doesn’t fit my nature. I focus on writing not necessarily because it’s the most effective way to shift culture or society in my preferred direction, but because I am deeply in love with myself. Everyone claims to value seeking and speaking truth as ideals, and I believe that I live up to them better than anyone else. Actually, maybe this is the best way to change the world in a positive direction since I feel like I’m very good at writing and that motivates me to work very hard at my job. I wouldn’t have as strong of a work ethic if I tried to do anything else because there wouldn’t be the feeling that I was practicing a skill I was unusually good at. So in the end, my healthy ego is prosocial, unlike that of someone whose ideal says that they should become the world’s most successful pimp or degrowth activist, even if my motivation is nonetheless selfish in some deeper sense.

Just as how capitalism channels our desire for comfort and material goods into making the world a better place, an understanding that we are selfish should guide us towards norms and giving life advice that encourage people to live up to certain ideals. Military recruitment ads generally tell soldiers what they can do for themselves and focus on how good they’ll look in uniform, rather than making arguments about the centrality of American power to maintaining the global order.

We can debate whether encouraging people to sign up for the military makes sense in the first place, but the larger point is that man needs a compelling narrative about who he is and what he’s doing, and the way that the two relate to one another. The ideals that different individuals hold come in more masculine and feminine flavors. The job of intellectuals is to tell us that, say, masculine energy going into being a US fighter pilot is a good thing, while using the same instincts to become Andrew Tate is not. Women wanting to save animals in factory farms is good, trying to shut down speech because it hurts their feelings is not.

Are Pain and Anxiety Caused by Internal Contradictions?

According to Ayn Rand, when people are depressed or angry, it is because they are struggling with internal contradictions that are the result of them being irrational and trying to evade reality. As she writes in “The Objectivist Ethics,”

The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man’s body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard that determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or of pain. What is that standard? His life.

The pleasure-pain mechanism in the body of man — and in the bodies of all the living organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness — serves as an automatic guardian of the organism’s life. The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal indicating that the organism is pursuing the right course of action. The physical sensation of pain is a warning signal of danger, indicating that the organism is pursuing the wrong course of action, that something is impairing the proper function of its body, which requires action to correct it. The best illustration of this can be seen in the rare, freak cases of children who are born without the capacity to experience physical pain; such children do not survive for long; they have no means of discovering what can injure them, no warning signals, and thus a minor cut can develop into a deadly infection, or a major illness can remain undetected until it is too late to fight it...

In psychological terms, the issue of man’s survival does not confront his consciousness as an issue of “life or death,” but as an issue of “happiness or suffering.” Happiness is the successful state of life, suffering is the warning signal of failure, of death. Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is an automatic indicator of his body’s welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death — so the emotional mechanism of man’s consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering. Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him — lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.

To be happy, then, you have to do productive work. So far, this is similar to a modern perspective rooted in evolutionary psychology. But then things go off the rails.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. If a man values productive work, his happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his life. But if a man values destruction, like a sadist — or self-torture, like a masochist — or life beyond the grave, like a mystic — or mindless “kicks,” like the driver of a hotrod car — his alleged happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his own destruction. It must be added that the emotional state of all those irrationalists cannot be properly designated as happiness or even as pleasure: it is merely a moment’s relief from their chronic state of terror.

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment — so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.

Rand in effect argues here that anyone who lives in a way she doesn’t approve of must be unhappy, including perhaps most of all guys who drive hotrods. In “For the New Intellectual,” she discusses two villains who have reappeared in different forms throughout history: Attila, the man of brute strength, and the Witch Doctor, who uses mysticism to manipulate men, whether as a priest or modern intellectual. These two are contrasted to the man of reason, who lives a life of pride in which he deals with others on the basis of trade, a respect for individual rights, and enlightened self-interest. Because they reject the power of ideas, Rand tells us that Attila and the Witch Doctor both live with a “chronic sense of guilt and terror.”

Was Attila the Hun unhappy? It’s difficult to say for sure. Yet it strikes me as far from obvious that Rand’s real life villains are all miserable on the inside. Even if we accept her views on the function of emotions, once we bring evolutionary reasoning into the picture, we can see that Genghis Khan obviously behaved adaptively, given that he is now a direct ancestor to tens of millions of people alive today. I think his life was probably filled with joy.

The best that can be said about Rand’s approach, and what makes it useful to the type of person I expect to read this essay, is that the idea that internal contradictions lead to unhappiness is likely to be true for an unusually honest and moral person. I feel terrible when I lie, cheat, or steal. That doesn’t mean I reject the possibility even in theory that if I was a complete psychopath I could be happy. But I’m not a psychopath, which is a good thing.

Let’s say that I decided to start lying about my political views for the sake of financial gain. I’d feel terrible about it, and whatever extra income I earned probably wouldn’t be worth it. So Rand’s psychological insight here is correct when applied to Richard Hanania. Yet there are people who go on X and build huge follower accounts while making things up. Some see themselves as earnest but are so captured by whatever audience they have that they at a fundamental level don’t internally distinguish their own views from those of others. Another type knows he is lying and doesn’t care. Are all such people, who behave unethically for fame or financial gain, miserable? Maybe on average they are, but in many cases, lying, cheating, and stealing are evolutionarily adaptive, as is being able to tell yourself stories that justify whatever you happen to be doing in the moment.

That said, I think you should want to be ethical! And if you were born with a highly developed moral sense, you should also seek consistency between your political and social ideals and how you act in your personal life even for the sake of your psychological health. In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark goes through life wanting to put up buildings in his own rational way as “second-handers” keep trying to get him to conform to tradition or the tastes of the public, and he maintains his absolutist principles throughout the whole process. If you’re the kind of person who thinks about ethics at all, it’s probably at the margins worth losing some power and opportunities for financial gain in order to feel pride in one’s life and work.

Most people are somewhere in between, neither Roarks nor complete psychopaths. They want to believe that they are going through life behaving virtuously and having a positive impact on the world, but the quest for money, comfort, and status are more prominent in their day-to-day lives. I don’t have a confident view of whether on the margins, when focusing on their own psychological well-being only, we should encourage such people to be more or less conformist. Given that is the case, pro-social behavior is what we should be encouraging.

Still, I don’t think that there’s much hope of changing cowards, sadists, and liars by convincing them that they’re in some deeper sense acting against their own self-interest. It is because anti-social behavior can lead to a materially secure and psychologically rewarding life that we need norms and values that stigmatize it in the first place.

The Spectacular Failure of Applied Randianism to Sex

In talking to Rand fans, my experience is that the topic of her views on sex tends to make them a bit uncomfortable. The ideas are frankly bizarre, and when she tried to live by them, the situation exploded so spectacularly that her life ended up serving as a refutation of what she preached.

This is one area where one has to separate Rand the writer of fiction from Rand the intellectual. In her novels, the better kinds of men simply take the women that they want. Women want to be dominated by the higher type of man. Here is the story of the first time Howard Roark has sex with Dominque Francon in The Fountainhead,

He let her wait. Then he approached. He lifted her without effort. She let her teeth sink into his hand and felt blood on the tip of her tongue. He pulled her head back and he forced her mouth open against his.

She fought like an animal. But she made no sound. She did not call for help. She heard the echoes of her blows in a gasp of his breath, and she knew that it was a gasp of pleasure. She reached for the lamp on the dressing table. He knocked the lamp out of her hand. The crystal burst to pieces in the darkness.

He had thrown her down on the bed and she felt the blood beating in her throat, in her eyes, the hatred, the helpless terror in her blood. She felt the hatred and his hands; his hands moving over her body, the hands that broke granite. She fought in a last convulsion. Then the sudden pain shot up, through her body, to her throat, and she screamed. Then she lay still.

It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him — and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted. Then she felt him shaking with the agony of a pleasure unbearable even to him, she knew that she had given that to him, that it came from her, from her body, and she bit his lips and she knew what he had wanted her to know.

Since you’re reading this in 2025, you may be feeling a bit uneasy and saying to yourself, well, maybe this encounter actually met some standard of what people raised in a post-feminist world would consider consent? Rand is there to tell you that nope, it was rape, and Dominique loved it.

She thought, if they knew ... those people ... that old life and that awed reverence before her person ... I’ve been raped.... I’ve been raped by some redheaded hoodlum from a stone quarry.... I, Dominique Francon.... Through the fierce sense of humiliation, the words gave her the same kind of pleasure she had felt in his arms.

This was published in 1943. By the time of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, the sadomasochism wasn’t as extreme, but the basic outline of a man taking complete possession of a woman is still there in the relationship between Henry Rearden and Dagny Taggert.

So women want to worship great men. What do men want? Accomplished career women, of course. As Francisco d’Anconia tells Rearden,

Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself…He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience — or to fake — a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer—because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut.

So Ayn Rand believed that,

1) Great men want the most heroic women and

2) The most heroic woman in the world is Ayn Rand

You can probably see where this is going. The obvious conclusion is that any man of value wants Ayn Rand. It was based on this logic that she started an affair with Nathaniel Branden, who she considered her intellectual heir at the time, when she was 49 and he was 24. Both were married, so in good Objectivist fashion they sat their spouses down and told them that they were going to sleep together and this was fine because it was consistent with rationality.

As Branden tells the story, Rand was the aggressor throughout the relationship, but it became more and more difficult for him to maintain interest. They began the affair in early 1955. Rand put a stop to them sleeping together in 1958, but they started doing so again five years later, when she was in her late 50s. In Branden’s telling, Rand was his intellectual hero and the center of his life, so it was difficult to resist without being cast out of a social and professional circle that had become something of a cult, especially when Objectivist philosophy basically mandated every man be attracted to Ayn Rand. When he started falling for a beautiful but otherwise unremarkable actress, Rand remained blind to the romance, with Branden describing her as an “Eddie Willers” to assuage her suspicions. As Branden recalled in My Years with Ayn Rand,

Ayn did not want to pursue me; her self-concept demanded that I pursue her. “Tell me what’s wrong. If I ask, you say you love me, and sometimes you act like a man in love, but there’s no consistency to anything you do. If our romance is over, say so.” When I made the most tentative move in that direction, she would immediately respond with an explosion of wrath that would last for hours.

Branden even pretended to be impotent, which Rand tried to cure through psychological sessions. She eventually came to doubt that he was telling the truth, as Branden recalls.

During calmer times she would say, “Is it my age? I could accept that.”

No, she couldn’t. I tried to tell her more than once, and even the hint sent her through the roof.

What I actually told her was, “It’s more exact to say that I would like the chance to build a life with someone who is a contemporary and with whom I could have a complete relationship.”

“Where will you find a contemporary who is my equal?” I said, “You have no equals at any age,” and I wondered, Is love only a contest of philosophical grandeur?

“Well, then, what are you suggesting? Do you want to be like Goethe or any of those so-called geniuses who marry a nothing hausfrau? You know the type I mean; I despise them. Do you wish to be a hero in public life but not in your private life?” Each word was a thunderbolt of moral condemnation.

“Ayn, the world consists of more than you and hausfraus.”

Her voice rose. “The man to whom I dedicated Atlas Shrugged would never want anything less than me! I don’t care if I’m ninety years old and in a wheelchair! This will always be my view! If you are a complete and utter fraud, at least have the decency to say so, and we’ll go our separate ways and you’ll be out of my life for good and I’ll be out of my misery! I won’t have to see or speak to you again — ever!”

It must be noted that the Ayn Rand Institute warns against taking Branden as a source since he had a falling out with his mentor. I reached out to some people there to check whether there was another side to the story, and they told me to read The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics by James Valliant. The book is an attack on Nathaniel Branden and his onetime wife Barbara on an endless number of points, but it is the age thing that I’m concerned about here, because it is directly related to Rand’s views on sex.

Valliant quotes from Rand’s diary, which says that she gave Branden an “out” on more than one occasion by recognizing that he could stop sleeping with her on account of her age, and that this was a rational concern she would accept. According to Rand, Branden would lie and say he was still interested in her.

But, as we’ve seen, Rand saying that she told Branden that she could accept age as an issue is completely consistent with what he himself has written. The only question is whether Branden is correct that she would explode if he even hinted at the possibility, or if Rand really was willing to end the relationship on that basis and move on.

Even if Rand’s side of the story as presented by Valliant is correct, it would indicate she wasn’t demanding that Branden live up to Objectivist standards. Atlas Shrugged told us that men should be attracted to women for their personalities and minds; no age limit is placed on this principle.

Rand said that her own life was a “postscript” to her work, in the form of telling the world “[a]nd I mean it.” What makes Branden’s account believable is that it does present Rand as trying to live in accordance with her stated philosophy and demanding others in her life do the same. She told us that men should only want heroic women, and that she was a heroic woman. She also told us that people should act according to their stated ideals in their personal lives, and that we should judge them harshly if they don’t. Branden’s framing of the story makes complete sense in that context.

The only problem with Rand living up to her beliefs about sex is that her ideas were absurd. Men who meet the standards of Rand’s ideals in other areas of their lives don’t become sexually interested in elderly women, no matter how great their minds might be. In her diary and conversations with Branden, Rand conceded that age could be a barrier, but she never explained why, given that her work doesn’t make any allowance for a rational man to be able to love on the basis of physical attraction.

Just to be as fair as possible to Rand, I also read the section on sex in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff, who she chose as her designated heir after the break with Branden. Under the subheading “Sex as Metaphysical,” Peikoff repeats the same ideas expressed in Atlas Shrugged.

No man desires everyone on earth. Each has some requirements in this regard, however contradictory or unidentified—and the rational man’s requirements, here as elsewhere, are the opposite of contradictory. He desires only a woman he can admire, a woman who (to his knowledge) shares his moral standards, his self-esteem, and his view of life. Only with such a partner can he experience the reality of the values he is seeking to celebrate, including his own value. The same kind of sexual selectivity is exercised by a rational woman. This is why Roark is attracted only to a heroine like Dominique, and why Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged is desperate to sleep with John Galt, not with Wesley Mouch. Romantic love is the strongest positive emotion possible between two individuals. Its experience, therefore, so far from being an animal reaction, is a self-revelation: the values giving rise to this kind of response must be one’s most intensely held and personal.

When a man and woman do fall in love — assuming that each is romantically free and the context otherwise appropriate — sex is a necessary and proper expression of their feeling for each other. “Platonic love” under such circumstances would be a vice, a breach of integrity. Sex is to love what action is to thought, possession to evaluation, body to soul. “We live in our minds,” Roark observes, “and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form.” Sex is the preeminent form of bringing love into physical reality. The subject of sex is complex and belongs largely to the science of psychology.

I asked Ayn Rand once what philosophy specifically has to say on the subject. She answered: “It says that sex is good.”

Although Peikoff tells us that sex is the “integration” of mind and body, there is nothing here, or anywhere else in the Objectivist canon, that can explain why a man might find a 20-year-old more attractive than a 60-year-old. Like his hero, Peikoff is forced to acknowledge sex is physical, but he then focuses exclusively on the spiritual characteristics men are required to find attractive if they are rational. A man who sees Rand as the fount of all wisdom will think he is being taught sex-positive values, but his actual desires will seem completely inexplicable.

At the margins, I do believe that the world of ideas could use more integration, as Randians understand the concept. Capitalism being unquestionably the best way of organizing society definitely provides lessons about moral philosophy and psychology. The fact that we are selfish likewise needs more consideration in determining what kind of economic system we can support.

But Rand again took things too far. There are good evolutionary reasons why men desire the types of women that she constantly denigrates as “sluts” in her novels. Interestingly, her views on female sexuality are consistent with some of the hottest takes from evolutionary psychology. Yet her understanding of the nature of male desire couldn’t have been more wrong, as she would find out in her personal life.

Rand in effect projected her own female sexuality – in which attraction is based on an overall judgment of the entirety of the mind and personality of a potential partner — onto men, and demanded they feel drawn to women based on similar criteria. In the bedroom, she thought men should take control, though there was never any explanation in her nonfiction as to why. While acknowledging natural differences between the sexes, without an evolutionary framework she had no basis to think clearly about their full contours and implications.

John Galt told the world, “[w]hen I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter.” With regards to Rand’s views on sex, reality most certainly played its proper role, and its judgment was as harsh as any faced by her fictional characters.

Anti-Natalism by Default

Rand has remarkably little to say about having children. She never comes out against the idea, but it is difficult to see how it fits into her general worldview. Consider that across her four novels, all of her heroes and semi-heroes are childless: Howard Roark, Dominique Francon, and Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead; John Galt, Henry Rearden, Dagny Taggart, and Francisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged; Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000 in Anthem; and Kira Argounova, Leo Kovalensky, and Andrei Taganov in We the Living.

Except for the protagonists in Anthem, none of these characters even hints at any desire to reproduce at some future date. Rand herself was of course childless. The most substantive discussion of child rearing occurs in Atlas Shrugged, when Dagny Taggert is meeting the residents of Galt’s Gulch.

The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley — two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world — a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.

“They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart,” said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. “They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can’t practice successfully in the outer world. I believe you’ve met my husband, he’s the teacher of economics who works as linesman for Dick McNamara. You know, of course, that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker’s oath by his own independent conviction. I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband’s profession, but for the sake of my own. I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child’s brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he’s unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt’s Gulch, there’s no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational.”

It’s an excellent passage, but all you get on having children out of a novel that is over a thousand pages long. Parenting is put on equal status as being a baker, or an oilman. Again, her appreciation of honest work is one of Rand’s best traits. But there is something inadequate about treating parenting as just another job, as worthy of dignity as anything else.

Similarly, Peikoff’s Objectivism has sections on topics ranging from consciousness to epistemology to art and sex, but nothing on marriage and producing the next generation. If Rand was willing to preach to her followers at length on practically every topic under the sun except this one, the message was bound to be received.

I would say modern societies are anti-natalist, but this does not mean that we are directly propagandized against having children. It only means that we are not told to prioritize family formation. There is only so much an individual can do with his life. Explicitly and through implicit signals, we stress the need to get an education, make money, have a fulfilling career, obey the law, etc. But if society is neutral towards having kids, it is going to end up a low priority for most people. Think of it like our attitude towards rock climbing. Society doesn’t really encourage or discourage it. But because it’s hard and not actively encouraged, people are not that likely to do it since there are tradeoffs involved. It of course doesn’t matter if most people don’t go rock climbing, but it becomes an existential crisis if fertility sits at well below replacement for generations.

Rand is pretty down on family as a general matter, at least when your relatives are losers. One of the themes of Atlas Shrugged is that Taggart and Rearden have moochers and parasites for family members, whom they have to learn to stop trying to save. Here is what happens when Rearden finally threatens to kick his brother Philip out of his house, to the shock of their mother.

“You . . . you wouldn’t throw your own brother out on the street, would you?” his mother said at last; it was not a demand, but a plea.

“I would.”

“But he’s your brother . . . Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Maybe he goes a bit too far at times, but it’s just loose talk, it’s just that modern jabber, he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

“Then let him learn.”…

“You can’t be hard on a man who needs you, it will prey on your conscience for the rest of your life.”

“It won’t.”

“You’ve got to be kind, Henry.”

“I’m not.”

“You’ve got to have some pity.”

“I haven’t.”

“A good man knows how to forgive.”

“I don’t.”

“You wouldn’t want me to think that you’re selfish.”

“I am.”

There’s a similar scene where Dagny Taggert tells her worthless brother James that he should simply step aside as the head of their railroad company, while being completely unmoved by his appeal to them being blood relations.

“Dagny” — his voice was the soft, nasal, monotonous whine of a beggar — “I want to be president of a railroad. I want it. Why can’t I have my wish as you always have yours? Why shouldn’t I be given the fulfillment of my desires as you always fulfill any desire of your own? Why should you be happy while I suffer? Oh yes, the world is yours, you’re the one who has the brains to run it. Then why do you permit suffering in your world? You proclaim the pursuit of happiness, but you doom me to frustration. Don’t I have the right to demand any form of happiness I choose? Isn’t that a debt which you owe me? Am I not your brother?”

His glance was like a prowler’s flashlight searching her face for a shred of pity. It found nothing but a look of revulsion.

“It’s your sin if I suffer! It’s your moral failure! I’m your brother, therefore I’m your responsibility, but you’ve failed to supply my wants, therefore you’re guilty! All of mankind’s moral leaders have said so for centuries — who are you to say otherwise? You’re so proud of yourself, you think that you’re pure and good — but you can’t be good, so long as I’m wretched. My misery is the measure of your sin. My contentment is the measure of your virtue. I want this kind of world, today’s world, it gives me my share of authority, it allows me to feel important — make it work for me! — do something! — how do I know what? — it’s your problem and your duty! You have the privilege of strength, but I — I have the right of weakness! That’s a moral absolute! Don’t you know it! Don’t you? Don’t you?”

His glance was now like the hands of a man hanging over an abyss, groping frantically for the slightest fissure of doubt, but slipping on the clean, polished rock of her face.

“You bastard,” she said evenly, without emotion, since the words were not addressed to anything human.

This is one of those Rand scenes that are so unashamedly over the top that they become enjoyable. This attitude expressed here isn’t necessarily a bad thing. People are often too indulgent of wayward family members, and Rand is correct that unconditional love is a pernicious concept. She doesn’t necessarily say cut your family off; Rearden is much more indulgent of the flaws of his mother and brother than he would be of a stranger. He just reaches a limit, and the lesson is that people should feel no obligation to let useless family members become financial and emotional drains.

This is fine, but kids are the one kind of familial relation that a useful philosophy must make room for. Society can survive if we tell people to ignore their parents; it can’t if they decide not to have children. Infants are not very smart and don’t have moral principles. They have nothing to provide in an exchange with their parents. Rand wouldn’t tell you to abandon those you have, but before they’re born she provides almost nothing in her novels or nonfiction work to tell you why you should become a parent in the first place.

Integration, to a Point

Rand is correct to seek greater integration of morality, politics, psychology, and ethics. Our intellectual world is a mess, one in which Karl Marx can be completely discredited in the field of economics but continue to have an influence in other academic departments. There is too much tolerance of bad ideas, and too little thought given to the need to purge them for the sake of individuals developing and government officials acting on the basis of more logically consistent worldviews.

There is much you can take from Rand in terms of self-help. Rand acolytes might be a bit crazy sometimes, but in my experience they are never depressed or lacking in motivation. She tells you that life matters, and it’s good to always walk around with her voice somewhere in the back of your head telling you that if you behave like a looter you will be unworthy of love.

But you definitely should not take advice about your dating life from Rand, and if you internalize her implicit views on having kids, you will not leave any genetic legacy behind.

Rand could not accept that there could be an irrational man who was happy, nor that there could be a rational man who did not find her sexually attractive. She in effect demanded that through her force of will reality would conform to her Manichaean worldview. Within the minds of her followers, she succeeded, creating a movement that to this day considers her the most insightful human being ever to live on every conceivable topic. She continues to exercise an even wider influence on the millions of us who have not bought into every aspect of her thought, but who can agree fully on the moral soundness of capitalism without feeling guilty for enjoying looking at stupid women with big breasts.

One cannot help but be in awe of her accomplishments. And I feel uneasy going into so much detail about the embarrassing details of her sexual life given that she was in fact a great figure of history. But Rand herself taught us to judge harshly, and we would not be her true disciples if we passed over her most obvious flaws in silence.

She gave the world the twentieth century’s most thorough and popular moral defense of capitalism, the system that is responsible for our modern standard of living. She also encouraged us to love our work and do whatever we must to reach our full potential.

If she got sex wrong, and her views on family and children were at best lacking, this is no reason to not still read and celebrate Ayn Rand. Her flaws only serve as a reminder that no individual has all the answers. Economics might have something to tell us about the business cycle outside of the Objectivist framework, and knowledge of evolutionary psychology in particular is needed as an antidote to many of Rand’s worst ideas.

That said, I don’t think that a more temperate Ayn Rand would have been the same force of nature. It was her certainty and moral absolutism that made her so compelling and motivated her manic work ethic. She was too bold in terms of many of her pronouncements and the ambitions she set for her philosophy, but the classical liberal movement has been starved of moral defenders, mostly for the opposite reason. It cannot afford to discard an ally this powerful. And if one is looking to develop a justified sense of pride in his own existence, Rand’s moral certitude, like the images of her heroes, remains a compelling source of inspiration.