ARI Speaks for Rand (by Neil Parille)

The Ayn Rand Institute’s (ARI) Chief Philosophy Officer Onkar Ghate and philosopher Ben Bayer have a new video, Why the Ayn Rand Institute Comments on Current Events.  The discussion is defensive, trying to justify the large amount of time spent on current affairs, including topics that Rand didn’t — or couldn’t have — commented on such as Israel, immigration, Donald Trump, COVID and Ukraine.  These topics get at least as much attention as Rand’s philosophy.  For example, the on-line journal of the ARI (New Ideal), lists 277 articles on Objectivism and Philosophy versus 330 articles on Culture and Politics.

Ghate and Bayer dutifully report that the ARI does not claim to speak for Ayn Rand.  This is incorrect, e.g.  “The Anti-Intellectuality of Donald Trump: Why Ayn Rand Would Have Despised a President Trump.”  Not only that, but the founder of the ARI (Leonard Peikoff) has repeatedly claimed to speak for Rand.

One thing I find interesting is that of four issues the ARI seems most concerned about – abortion, immigration, Israel (and the greater Middle East), and Donald Trump  – Rand wrote  about only one (abortion).  Bayer admits that these positions often get criticism from some ARI supporters. Consider immigration. Although ARI doesn’t seem to have an official position on the question, their denizens tend to support what is called “open immigration.”  A person should be free to enter and reside in the United States (or any other country) so long as he doesn’t have a criminal background.*  (ARI supporter Harry Binswanger opposes screening, saying the border between two countries should be no different than the border between New York and Connecticut.)  

Objectivist Round-up, March 2025

1.      Ayn Rand Institute philosopher Ben Bayer attacks Christianity.  While there are things to disagree with, Bayer actually has read some primary sources and doesn’t repeat any of the usual Objectivist urban legends about religion.

2.     Harry Binswanger just posted some Objectivist trivia questions.  Bonus points if you can name the four U. S. states that Ayn Rand didn’t mention in Atlas Shrugged.

3.     The ARI has released Raymond Newman’s interview with Ayn Rand.  The interview took place during the end of 1980 (Rand died in March 1982).  Rand is a little slow but still sharp.

4.      According to the ARI, there are “thousands” of handwritten pages in Rand’s papers that are now being transcribed (later in the article it looks as if the material is roughly 3,000 pages).  These include some of her early notes on philosophy.  While the Archives have never (best I can tell)  provided a complete list of all Rand’s papers, I wouldn’t have gotten the impression from reading the introductions to the posthumously published works that this much material remains to be published.

Objectivist Round-up, February 2025

1. Shoshana Milgram, who has been working on a biography of Ayn Rand for at least twenty years, gave an interesting talk at OCON 2024 – “Behind the Scenes: Ayn Rand’s West Point Lecture (1974–2024).”  Rand gave her Philosophy: Who Needs It? lecture there.  I listened to almost all of it and no mention of any biography.

2.  Multi-millionaire Objectivist supporter Carl Barney will be creating a “Great University” in March 2025 to “foster reason, objectivity, and the pursuit of truth into the American culture and, indeed, worldwide.”

3.  The Ayn Rand Institute just published The Art of Thinking, transcripts of lectures by Leonard Peikoff given in 1992.

Objectist Round-up, January 2025

1. The Ayn Rand Letter (1971-1976) is now out in a moderately priced paperback edition.

2. The Ayn Rand Fan Club has a review of the Objectivist response to Donald Trump’s election.  Co-host William Swig notes that in 2020, Yaron Brook said the country is done with if Trump got elected.  As Swig notes, there is a tendency in Objectivism to say “the end is near” going back to Rand’s essay, “The Fascist New Frontier.”

3. The Ayn Rand Fan Club has an interesting discussion of “the tribalism charge in Objectivism.”  ARI Objectivists, for whatever reason, seems to use this charge to attack people and ideas that don’t like in a similar way the left attacks its opponents as “fascists.”  ARI philosopher Greg Salmieri was asked if Objectivism is tribalistic and he said, in effect, that all groups are.  I’d mention that maybe half of the early Objectivist leadership was related to each other either biologically or by marriage.  The ARI strikes me as somewhat “tribalistic.”  While their breaks with other people or groups seem reasonable from their perspective, the implication of these breaks – that they alone are competent to opine on Objectivism and even whom Rand would vote for – strikes me as tribal.

4. Up-and-coming Objectivist psychologist Gena Gorlin has an interesting overview of psychology.  Gorlin says she agrees with Rand’s 1971 statement that psychology, as a science, is “barely making its first steps.”  Rand probably said this as a jibe against Nathaniel Branden.  In any event, I find Gorlin’s view surprising for someone with a doctorate in psychology.  Psychology has been studied on a scientific basis for well over a century.  (Many authors associate it with Wilhelm Wundt’s 1879 laboratory.)  Certainly, the study of intelligence is anything but its infancy phase.  The validity of IQ tests, the correlation between IQ and life outcomes, and the high heritability of intelligence (50% to 80%) are well-established.

Objectivist Round-up, December 2024

1.     The Ayn Rand Fan Club interviews anarcho-capitalist Walter Block.  Block discusses his involvement with the Objectivist movement in the 1960’s, among other things.  Speaking of Block, he debated Objectivist Michael Leibowitz on anarcho-capitalism.

2.    Carl Barney posted about the Leonard Peikoff conservatorship case.  Barney takes Kira Peikoff’s side.  Barney concludes his post by saying, “This ordeal is private between Leonard, Kira, and now Grace. Let’s leave it alone,” while spending the previous ten or so paragraphs “trashing” people including Tal Tsfany (ARI president), Yaron Brook, James Valliant, and Peikoff’s new wife.  Brook said Barney is lying about him.  Looks like the Objectivist world is using this sad situation to settle old scores.

3.    The big news, of course, was that Donald Trump was elected president.  From what I can tell, most Ayn Rand Institute officials either supported Vice President Harris or didn’t vote.  On the other hand, most non-ARI Objectivists, even those who don’t support “Open Objectivism”, voted for Trump. It’s interesting that of the three issues that most concern the ARI – abortion, immigration and Israel – Rand wrote about only one

Objectivist Round-up, November 2024

1. Alexandra Popoff, author of the new biography of Ayn Rand, is interviewed here.

2. The Ayn Rand Fan Club interviewed David Kelley on his theory of propositions.

3. The Ayn Rand Institute’s Aaron Smith interviewed Elan Journo concerning his recent reviews of the 2009 biographies of Ayn Rand by Jennifer Burns and Anne Heller.  Journo continues to misrepresent these books.  At the end of the interview, Journo says there is a biography in the works (presumably the authorized one by Shoshan Knapp, which has been promised for at least 20 years).

4. Leonard Peikoff will be voting for Trump

5. Kira Peikoff, Léonard’s daughter, is dropping her conservatorship action.  Her statement reads in part:

In March of 2024, I filed for a Conservatorship over my 91-year-old father, Dr. Leonard Peikoff. I took this action after I lost all communication with him and he deeded title to his house to his nurse and then married her. I was subsequently cut out of his life. I felt I owed it to my father, with whom I had a lifelong loving and close relationship, to protect him. The conservatorship was my only option to reach him and to try to help him after communication closed.

After much thought, I have decided to drop the conservatorship case. Although I still believe I have a strong legal case that is supported by multiple disinterested witnesses (see first comment below), a neutral Court-appointed medical expert, and the presumptions of undue influence under California probate code, my dad has shown himself to be beyond reach as a victim used by his abuser.

Even though many people in our lives can attest that we previously had a close and loving relationship for 38 years, my father has been convinced, under what I believe is the undue influence of his nurse-turned-wife, that I am an evil, greedy person who doesn’t care about him and only wants his money. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even if I were to prevail at trial, so much damage has been done already that it would amount to a Pyrrhic victory.

My father’s love for me has been destroyed, and I no longer believe that any amount of evidence brought to his attention will open his eyes. Also, a conservator’s actions to protect him from financial fraud would take at least another year or two of contentious litigation to reverse the harm that has likely already occurred. If he is not able to understand what should be obvious, that I am trying to protect him, I do not wish to put him through a prolonged legal battle at this stage of his life.

Kira also released a couple of affidavits from people who know Leonard and have first-hand information concerning his relationship with his new wife.  While Leonard may be competent, it’s hard not to conclude that he is being taken advantage of.  For example, his wife’s son appears to be living in the nearly four-million-dollar mansion.  Harry Binswanger sided with Kira saying Peikoff’s wife is a “gold digger.”

Retouching Rand (by Neil Parille)

Back in 2009, I wrote an essay Retouching Rand, which discussed the Ayn Rand Institute’s efforts to create a better Ayn Rand.  These efforts involved fibbing about Rand (for example, Leonard Peikoff’s claim that Rand quit smoking because she concluded it was dangerous, when in fact she quit because she got lung cancer, and James Valliant’s dishonest hit piece, The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics).  A lot has happened in the past fifteen years, so it’s time for an update.

Retouching Ayn Rand’s Posthumously Published Material

At the time my essay was published, Jennifer Burns had not published her 2009 autobiography of Rand, Goddess of the Market.  Burns revealed for the first time what was suspected: much of Rand’s posthumously published material was so heavily edited as to be essentially worthless.  As described by Laissez Faire Books at the time:

One other area that I found of significant interest is Burns discussion of the various problems surrounding Rand documents made public by the Ayn Rand Institute, Leonard Peikoff’s organization. There has been a great deal of controversy over indications that ARI doctored documents. Some of this doctoring was admitted by ARI, which asserted that they merely made clarifications consistent with what Rand had intended to say. Burns, who has seen the originals, says this is not the case.

She does say that the letters of Rand, that have been released, “have not been altered; they are merely incomplete.” But the same is not true for other works of Rand, including her Journals Burns writes, “On nearly every page of the published journals an unacknowledged change has been made from Rand’s original writing. In the book’s foreword the editor, David Harriman, defends his practice of eliminating Rand’s words and inserting his own as necessary for greater clarity. In many case, however, his editing serves to significantly alter Rand’s meaning.” She says that sentences are “rewritten to sound stronger and more definite” and that the editing “obscures important shifts and changes in Rand’s thought.” She finds “more alarming” the case that “sentences and proper names present in Rand’s original …have vanished entirely, without any ellipses or brackets to indicate a change.”

The result of this unacknowledged editing is that “they add up to a different Rand. In her original notebooks she is more tentative, historically bounded, and contradictory. The edited diaries have transformed her private space, the hidden realm in which she did her thinking, reaching, and groping, replacing it with a slick manufactured world in which all of her ideas are definite, well formulated, and clear.” She concludes that Rand’s Journals, as released by ARI, “are thus best understood as an interpretation of Rand rather than her own writing. Scholars must use these materials with extreme caution.”

The bad news is that “similar problems plague Ayn Rand Answers (2005), The Art of Fiction (2000), The Art of Non-Fiction (2001), and Objectively Speaking (2009).” Burns says all these works were “derived from archival material but have been significantly rewritten.” Rand scholars have long suspected such manipulation of documents; Burns confirms it with evidence she herself saw.*

As noted above, Journals was edited by David Harriman.  Ayn Rand Answers and The Art of Non -Fiction were edited by Robert Mayhew, Objectively Speaking was edited by Peter Schwart, and The Art of Fiction was edited by Tore Boeckmann.  Harriman is no longer associated with the ARI.  However, Schwartz and Mayhew are.  I’m not sure about Boeckmann.