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applications to less wrong left as an exercise for the reader, ayn rand, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post
[content warning: brief reference to sexual abuse]
I recently read The Ayn Rand Cult and it has given me various thoughts.
I think, to a certain degree, “cult” is a bad category: it combines two things that are more productively thought about when separated.
The first is abusive social groups. Abusive social groups are similar to abusive relationships: they are social groups that attempt to maintain complete power and control over their members’ lives. The Ayn Rand Cult is full of descriptions of how Objectivism exercised unreasonable power over its adherents: disagreement with Rand was often met by a screaming fest or an excommunication; Rand would require people who were genuinely incompatible to date each other; there were objectively correct opinions about all matters of aesthetics from television to dance, and incorrect opinions were a sign of poor moral character; Objectivist therapists revealed private information, dated people they were providing therapy to, and sexually abused their patients using Objectivism as a flimsy justification.
The second is a group with a lot of new or unusual ideas.
Reading the Ayn Rand Cult was an interesting experience because I kept finding myself going “yes, so?” in response to ideas the author seemed to believe would horrify me. If you feel unattractive and can’t get a date because you have a large nose, one ought to at least consider that the solution is a nose job. It is reasonable to expect your partner to respond positively when you say you want to fuck the next-door neighbor. Whom you’re attracted to does seem to be related to your fundamental values, although certainly not all the time, and certainly not as directly as Objectivists as presented in this book seemed to believe. Consensually hitting your partner does make sex more enjoyable for many people, and asking people before kissing them seems much less awkward than just going for it in most cases. People should be more thoughtful about whether it’s a good idea for them to have children. And artforms (including non-literature artforms) do seem to reflect a “sense of life” of the author, although it is perhaps a bit much to make moral conclusions about individuals based on what books they enjoy reading.
There is a certain amount of sense in being wary of new and unusual ideas. Most unusual ideas are bad ideas, simply because most ideas are bad ideas. If an idea is old and popular, it has been extensively tested and you know what the flaws of putting it into practice are. If an idea is new and strange, the tester is you.
A lot of Objectivism’s ideas turned out somewhat poorly in practice. (I’m not talking here of the economic ideas– an Objectivist may, quite rightly, object that Objectivism’s economic ideas have never been put into practice– but the ideas of how one lives one’s life.) It turns out that the idea that all your actions should be compatible with your values leaves a lot of people guilt-ridden and constantly gazing at their navels about whether some twinge of altruism has possibly escaped their notice. It turns out that the idea that all emotions should be the product of one’s rational beliefs leads to repression of emotions that don’t go well with Objectivism and legitimation of destructive emotions that can be rationalized into an Objectivist framework.
On the other hand, if no one tries out new ideas, progress is never going to happen. Someone has to be the first person to try out everything from marriage for love to desensitization as a treatment for phobias. Some things can be studied using randomized controlled trials, but tragically we are not in a world where we can assign half the population to the Marriage For Love condition.
This observation does suggest one way of reducing the harm of new and unusual idea sets: if an idea can be tested through a randomized controlled trial, it should be (given a reasonable grace period to publicize the idea and get funding and so on). If an idea has not been tested through an randomized controlled trial, or the results were inconclusive, you should probably stay away from groups about how awesome it is and definitely not spend thousands of dollars on learning it. (I’m thinking here particularly of Dianetics, of course.)
Part of the problem Objectivism encountered, I think, is that it’s a closed system. It’s pretty easy to correct both of those problems through adding a little more nuance: “make all your actions compatible with your values and being guilty all the time is definitely not part of your values”, “it is better to be honest about nonObjectivist emotions than to repress them.” Since Rand’s inner circle was also an abusive social group, there was no such process of self-correction.
Thing of Things 
Alternative suggestions for nuance:
“Make your actions compatible with your values, but if they aren’t, don’t feel guilty, because the only person you’re failing is yourself, and you’re already experiencing the negative consequences in that you’re not achieving as many of your values, so there’s no need to also beat yourself up about it.”
“Your emotions being the product of your rational beliefs is an achievable ideal, but if you haven’t reached it yet, acknowledge it so you can deal with it, instead of suppressing it.”
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Can you explain what emotions being a product of rational beliefs means? Emotions are inherently irrational, right?
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No, why would emotions necessarily be irrational? They’re a reflection of values or beliefs you hold at some level, which may or may not be rationally endorsed. For example, if liver is good for my health and I enjoy its taste, then being happy at the prospect of eating it isn’t irrational.
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A definition where ‘rational = logical deliberation’ is a fairly impoverished use of the term. We in the business call it the Straw Vulcan, a fairly unnecessary distinction between emotion and reason.
A rational agent is just an agent that pursues its goals in the optimal way, given its current beliefs about the world. For monkeys like us, that can be a very emotional experience! If fear of failure helps get you there, then it makes sense to embrace that fear. If an all-encompassing sense of love for humanity is a part of you doing a good job at some task, then you should cultivate that love. But if your emotions are not moving you towards your goals, then rationality does imply a certain degree of self-knowledge/self-mastery, so that you can plan ahead for the unhelpful emotions and find a solution before they sink you.
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Re: emotions based on rational beliefs:
Our beliefs can obviously affect our emotions. For instance, I certainly feel different emotions if I believe my friend is angry at me than if I believe he is not.
Beliefs are said to be “rational” if they are based on conditional probability and reasoning about the behavior of other individuals. For instance, the prior on “my friend is angry at me” is probably pretty low (my friends are angry at me a small fraction of the time); but the posterior belief, “my friend is angry at me conditional on observing that he’s shouting at me” is much higher.
You’d need numbers and game trees and stuff to figure out exactly what the “rational” beliefs are, but informally you can use your observations and your reasoning about other people to approximate those beliefs. Your emotions are based on rational beliefs if you try to figure out what the rational beliefs are, and then let your emotions respond to those.
(My definition of rationality is based on game theory–I’m taking a graduate class on it, but I am not an expert yet. The word might mean something else in other contexts.)
Actually–in consumer theory, economists use the word “rational” to describe preferences that meet certain consistency criteria. Your revealed preferences are “irrational” if they imply self-contradictory behavior. With a loose use of this notion, we might say that emoting is rational if it is consistent with your overall preferences, and irrational if it is somehow self-defeating? I don’t think we even need to do that here, though– I’m just responding to Wirehead Wannabe’s comment about emotions based on rational beliefs, which only requires us to define rational beliefs, not necessarily rational emotions.
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Few movements can accomplish this, since status within the group is typically tied to adherence to the group’s values. Objectivism is a bit of an obvious case — it most definitely was a cult in practice, during Rand’s lifetime — but almost all ideologies suffer from the same problem. The temptation to denounce heretics while concealing one’s own heresy simply becomes too strong.
My understanding of the rationalist movement is that it was conceived as a deliberate attempt to address your second point. Even the name “Less Wrong” signals the idea that we’re all still wrong somehow — a concept it has in common with Christianity, now that I think of it.
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no no no no no no nothing in common with christianity
jesus is bad mean yucky
(this is obviously not a considered or endorsed opinion)
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Now, I actually sort of like the comparison; I should state though that I grew up in a secular household and around lots of non-theists, so personally I don’t feel threatened or triggered by Christianity. Thus when I see the Christian imagery of temptation and resistance, I really like it, because it rings true: We are all tempted to do bad things. Or are all flawed in our thinking. Or all DO bad things. But we have to try to do better. But I am not Christian and really don’t know Christian theology very well, so it’s just a surface impression, an aesthetic trope almost, that I like. But I DO like it. The high-horsing moral purity of “But I don’t even have bad thoughts!” really grates; I want us to be judged by our actions. So the emphasis on “We’re all flawed, and all face temptation” (or, in the rationalist case, faulty thinking) is, I think, very important and good.
So while I do not endorse explicitly Christian positions, there’s some Christian imagery and rhetoric I unabashedly love and think is actually great. If Christianity causes people to adopt those values, and doesn’t do other harms that outweigh this, then I guess I approve of that kind of Christianity. (That’s a big if, so I expect in practice that rules out lots of Christianity.) But I wish secular liberals could adopt these tropes, and could talk about them in the same passionate way Christians do. I find it’s missing from discussion on the left, and it’s an odious exclusion. Please, counter the sanctimonious high-horsers with this. We are all flawed; we are all human.
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The problem (one of the many problems) with Christianity is that we’re tempted by genuinely good things and we’re supposed to give them up for God, and not be “worldly”. Christianity doesn’t want us to be prudent and avoid bias, it teaches thay we are sinful and fallen and deserve death, and can only avoid the punishment we deserve by succumbing to abusive Dark Arts techniques.
I agree that most of us could do better, but describing it as “we’re all flawed” is psychologically unhealthy and condemns us in a contextually inappropriate way. Both a bad golfer and Tiger Woods could play golf better, but you wouldn’t go to them and tell them to repent for that, both because it suggests that their flaws are on the same level and because it’s not something either of them should feel bad about.
Something similar applies to rationality. We all sometimes experience faulty thinking, but to very different degrees – compared to the average person, the best of us is functionally (though not actually) perfect. And more importantly, the reason we want to be rational is so we can accomplish our goals, and if we fall short, we’d already be experiencing the negative consequence of not having been as successful, so there’s no need to additionally whip ourselves.
“We’re all flawed, we all face temptation” = “None of us are in a position to feel consistently virtuous, and the right thing to do is to give up worldly pleasures that distract us from the Externally Important”. And that’s just false, whether it’s wrapped as Christianity or utilitarianism or social justice.
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Yes, “we’re tempted to do bad things” only works if you get the variables right, which Christianity tends not to.
That said, I think I’m not getting across well. I see “we all face temptation” as comforting actually; I read it as “we should be judged not on whether we are tempted to do bad things, but on how we act despite that.” And similarly, we all have flaws in our thinking, and we should be judged on how well we overcome them, not on how many we had to start with.
That said, I think you may be right in how Christians use these ideas; as I said, I haven’t grown up around Actual Christians, so my surface impression of “Judge people for what they do, not what they are tempted to” may be a big reinterpretation. When I think about these ideas, I don’t include the “and therefore repent of your sins” part; I’m really trying to extract a mere piece of Christian imagery.
I should also clarify that I only mean high-horsing moral purity in terms of temptation to do evil; I am not saying that people act that way in terms of rationality. But very specifically, the “you have X-ist thoughts, or are tempted to do X-ist things” rhetoric is extremely obnoxious if you ask me; we really should be judging people’s actions instead. There’s too much “Well I don’t even have bad THOUGHTS; my sexuality/media preferences/etc. are all super-progressive!” on the left.
(Man, this is really sidetracking.)
I think I see what you’re saying, though; “everyone is flawed” to some extent maps to “you’re never good enough”, which I think can be really counterproductive, yeah. But I do think it’s good to admit that we’re all imperfect, even if we shouldn’t always say “and therefore I must improve”. But it IS virtuous to try to improve; what you’re saying though, I think, is that at a certain point it’s supererogatory. I agree. We shouldn’t be made to feel constant guilt for being flawed. (That said, again, I’d bring up the distinction between actions and thoughts. “We all face temptation” is a distinct claim from “We’re all flawed”; the former is about things I don’t hold against people, whereas the latter is about things I might.)
I guess what I’m trying to say is, the very specific claim “We all face temptation to do Bad Things, and we shouldn’t ever hold that temptation against people” is a very important idea and especially so when people are being excessively righteous about how pure their thoughts and motivations are. If we fulfill our moral obligations in terms of our actions, people can’t hold our thoughts against us.
Separate from that, nobody’s actions are perfect and so “try to do better” is in general a good philosophy, so long as it doesn’t inflict permanent guilt and doesn’t stop us from sorting “good enough” from “not good enough”.
Does that make more sense?
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I’d like to see the randomized trial that supports how “dear wife, I’d liek to fuck the neighbour” is “reasonable” to be expected to go over well. If we could transform the whole society to be this particular brand of poly (and also make all STIs extinct or at least make everybody rich enough to keep them treated)… we could as well make large noses considered sexy. Yet you retreat into realism in one case and happily pretend that the kind of things 90% of people have in their minds is inexistent. Was this a typo? wut?
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I explicitly stated that not everything can be done through RCTs. Clearly, monogamy/nonmonogamy is not one of those things. Also, telling your wife that you want to fuck the neighbor does not mean you will actually fuck the neighbor. Monogamous people can also communicate openly with their partners about their sexual attractions. Also, it is possible to be mindbogglingly promiscuous without spreading STIs– straight porn stars have a lower rate of HIV than the general population, and they don’t even use condoms at work. That concern is tremendously disingenuous.
And, yes, I think for a lot of people romantic insecurity is easier to change than what they’re sexually attracted to.
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“And, yes, I think for a lot of people romantic insecurity is easier to change than what they’re sexually attracted to.”
I feel there is some “typical mind” thinking going on here, but I’m not sure i can justify it. If you hang out with someone who is someone you are capable of being attracted to long enough, intimately enough, it seems like attraction comes along. Plus, there is the whole socially-constructed, social signalling part of it. If some of the noble families all had large noses, you might find large noses to be in vogue.
But even if it is easier to change romantic insecurity, that doesn’t make it easy, which sort of seems to be qwertyne’s point. People exist who can change it, sure. But that doesn’t mean that the average person can change it easily.
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Also, telling your wife that you want to fuck the neighbor does not mean you will actually fuck the neighbor.
I think a disagreement about semantics is being papered over here, as often happens when verbs like “want” get involved.
To me “I find the neighbor sexually attractive” and “I want to fuck the neighbor” are very different statements, and I would expect a spouse to react differently to them (and justifiably badly to the latter), because it does imply something to me that it doesn’t to you.
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Disintegruous? Scarleteen, the most sex-positive sex ed site itself says that one method of diminishing risk is to sleep with fewer people. The porn statistics are about as relevant as the low mortality rates of cirque du soreil performers shows us that jumping in the air at ten meter high is healthy. Typical users do not get tested at every five minutes, for example. You can redefine sex to sensuously playing a mandolin while your partner jacks off with a tenga egg, but again, this is not statistically relevant.
You have no idea how a monogamous relationship works (no, most people do not even mention the fuckability of others), and instead of accepting that you are in a minority, you pretend that 1. What you accidentally ended up as makes you a better person 2. Everybody else should become like you. And you disregard basic informations about how diseases spread, while pretending to be oh-so-rational…. To be clear, anyone is allowed to take the pros and cons into account and make free decisions, and diseases are used as scare tactics, but falling in the opposite extreme is stupid.
I guess we are in for the next round of “I write false things because my brain is weird, everybody must love me now, otherwise opression!”. It’s nice to have a closed system of arguments that all lead to you winning, isn’t it?
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Yes, it is true that I have poor intuitions about monogamous relationships.
I don’t think that I’m better than monogamous people and I am sorry that I implied that. I phrased that sentence poorly, perhaps because I’d read the book and knew the passage I was responding to and had the illusion of transparency. 🙂 What I meant was something like “it is not absurd and unthinkable that your partner respond well to you expressing sexual attraction to someone else, even in the context of a monogamous relationship.” I do have a tendency for typical mind fallacy about polyamory, and for that I am very sorry.
I think you are perhaps mistaken about the STI transmission risk with promiscuity. The per-act transmission rate of HIV is 0.08% for receptive PIV and 0.04% for insertive PIV when unprotected; if you are using condoms, the risk drops by eighty percent. The per-partner transmission rate is much much higher, of course, because people usually have sex more than once with their partners. (Statistics from Sarah Constantin’s excellent lit review.) Taking anti-retroviral drugs reduces one’s risk of transmitting HIV by up to eighty percent. And HIV is the worst-case scenario here– other STIs, with the exception of the relatively rare Hep C, are treatable, preventable with vaccines, or usually asymptomatic.
Does reducing your number of sexual partners reduce your risk of contracting an STI? Yes. But the risk can be compensated for by being responsible about one’s sexual health, and I don’t think it quite justifies saying making all STIs extinct is necessary for a more polyamorous society.
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I agree that it’s possible to have a reasonably safe promiscuous sex life, but I disagree that anything but HIV can be disregarded in a safety analysis. HPV and herpes both are quite unpleasant, not curable, not as amenable to condoms as HIV, fairly common and can occasionally result in nasty complications.
Yay for vaccines and antiviral drugs, of course, but not everyone will be vaccinated in time, and taking drugs still costs money (and spoons).
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@ozy, “Does reducing your number of sexual partners reduce your risk of contracting an STI? Yes. But the risk can be compensated for by being responsible about one’s sexual health,” – why do you think that people are not already doing all that they can? If one was not using condoms and taken up condoms+poly, it would be a step forward, but given that most people do not want to die, I don’t think this room for improvement you talk about exists.
anyway, people may be into poly because of believing that they are not good enough to be loved too itnensely, that jealousy is the same of wanting love which is abusive and undeserved for something so shitty as they think they are… so I am for multiple, equally respected realtionship systems, and pushing too forcefully for universal poly will necessarily fuck up most people with anything but secure attachment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory ).
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also, I have told you this earlier: I don’t care how good retrovirals are against HIV when “an estimated one-third [PDF] of Americans diagnosed with HIV aren’t receiving any kind of treatment, according to government data. One big reason: They can’t afford it.” pdf: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/NHAS.pdf Please try to put some effort into actually imagining that not everyone was born into the class you did.
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Most monogamous people don’t get tested for STIs regularly and do fluid-bond fairly quickly.
I am anxiously attached, polyamorous, and doing fine. 🙂 Being in relationships is harder if you’re insecurely attached, but I’m not sure polyamory is any more difficult than monogamy.
I’m sorry, I can’t find that in the link? It says that thirty percent of people diagnosed with HIV are not receiving care, but I can’t find where it breaks down how many are doing so because they can’t afford it (instead of “because the side effects were awful”, “because they’re intravenous drug users and not terribly good at showing up to appointments”, etc.).
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Those monogamous people should get educated asap (and I was imagining them, in the heat of the moment, more similar to me than the way they turned out to be. sorry.) . But given the number of assholes happy to have one-night-stands unprotected, I do not trust that making poly popular could be easily counteracted. Again, on the general level, particular people are allowed to make decisions and I guess stable x-ades can be just as safe as a stable diade (except that one person cheating can fuck up more people.)
I took the quote from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/why-some-with-hiv-still-cant-get-treatment/, and do not have the time for further research. But if the USA healthcare is generally shitty, why would these expensive drugs make an exception? Also, whatever their reason, it still means that they do not benefit from those viral load-reducing and life-prolonging advances of medication, so they raise the average level of risk. You said that “I think you are perhaps mistaken about the STI transmission risk with promiscuity.” And one of your arguments was that treated AIDS is not as good at being transmitted. I just reminded you that a big chunk of it is untreated.
anyway, I just want different relationship styles recognized as equal instead of polivangelism. I mean… you can promote poly, but please do not debate cautious people by pretending inconvenient chunks of reality do not exist. Or put there a disclaimer about “this is just about people who can afford drugs, do not suffer from side effects and are not addicts”.
I do know that people can have all kinds of brains and be into all kinds of relationship styles, but you, specifically, are doing well because you are massively popular, and you support network is very robust. You have access to good therapy. You happen to be sincerely attracted to older/impressive men, which is useful for networking (I take this from a post of yours, and I know it isn’t the single category you’re into, but I distinctly remember a longpost about this), and happen to be physically similar enough to a woman for straight men (who form the overwhelming majority of your subculture/group/movement? and are generally better paid etc) to be attracted to you. You are also young and conventionally attractive (not talking about clothing styles here). You are naturally sexually adaptive/high-libido enough so you can sincerely be attracted to and satisfy all kinds of people. You report to naturally feel little to no jealousy. So forgive me for not taking seriously your experience as anecdata for ~anyone with anxiety can 🙂 be 🙂 happy 🙂 as poly:)~. Imagine having a much smaller dating pool and no long waiting line for the chance to comfort you, plus a paid professional helping you figure shit out, for example.
It is not a bad thing at all to have these good things in your life, it’s just that suggesting that you can talk from the position of an average person is annoying.
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I mean, I don’t think it’s wrong to fluid-bond quickly and get tested rarely if ever, if you’re already reducing your risk to a level you find comfortable through monogamy. People need to manage their STI risks in a way that is comfortable for them. 🙂
Your article mentioned several HIV-specific programs; while they are sadly underfunded, and many people with HIV cannot get treatment, it is also true that many people with HIV are at low to no risk of transmitting the disease.
I do not think that polyamory or monogamy is right for everyone; I think people should find the relationship style that is right for them. I do not think polyamory is as dangerous as drug use (…well, maybe marijuana) or that people need to be really super-stable to be polyamorous. I’m not sane enough for monogamy myself. 🙂
Yes, I have several advantages (although actually I haven’t had much luck finding a good individual therapist). I’m also borderline, and have a typical borderline hella fear of abandonment. (True facts: I have a panic attack every time my primary goes out on Friday night.) I’m not jealous because “my partner is dating someone else” is only a tiny addition to my normal fear from “my partner left the room”, “my partner is talking to a person who is not me”, and “my partner failed to instantaneously reply to my text messages”. I’m financially dependent on my primary and currently not capable of having a job, which adds a new layer to what-if-he-finds-someone-better fears. Et cetera, et cetera, this is turning into the high-functioning vs. low-functioning game people sometimes play on Tumblr.
And I do not think that anyone with anxiety can be happy as poly. I do think that polyamory is the right choice for some people with mental health issues, and we do them a disservice when we claim polyamory is only for the mentally healthy.
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Hi, I discovered your blog searching for blog posts tagged “transhumanism” (I’m a transhumanist, and my blog supports tranhumanism as well as other healthy values for human life, so I like finding related blogs). I came across your recent blog post about brain chemistry, which left me more than a little confused (the only reason anyone would seek psychosis is obviously if that person rejects reality – which seemed like an unexplainable desire for anyone who is a supporter of transhumanism!). I clicked your ‘about’ page to try to determine what nature of blogger I was visiting, and then I noticed there was a recent comment on “The Ayn Rand Cult”, and of course as a fan of her work and her philosophy I felt I should read your thoughts.
Well, I’m still utterly confused as to what kind of blogger you are, but I wanted to share a few responses. I’ve read hundreds of letters written to and from Ayn Rand, and I’ve never encountered anything related to the claims you mention from the book you read. Many of Rand’s closest friends and followers were already married? I wonder if you have had an opportunity to avail yourself of any of the celebrated biographies of her life which do the more traditionally accepted task of describing her life objectively (the late Barbara Branden wrote a nice one) rather than a book asserting that Objectivism is somehow a cult, which it isn’t and wasn’t and couldn’t have been.
Anyway, I’m not an Objectivist, mainly because Objectivism presents an incomplete (that’s a polite way of saying deeply flawed and not willing to be corrected) understanding of sexuality and gender, as well as a few other issues. But for all those concerned about her followers’ sense of guilt, Ayn Rand’s view of human values certainly has helped me avoid the emotion of guilt. Rand was actually very critical of guilt constraining the human spirit, and she repeatedly attacked the institutions and patterns of human behavior that reinforce unearned guilt. I hope that you will consider a reading of her work as a more appropriate way of understanding the relationship between Objectivism and guilt as a human emotion.
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“Whom you’re attracted to does seem to be related to your fundamental values, although certainly not all the time”
As an ex-Objectivist, I can easily see how you would reasonably interpret the phrase “fundamental values” in such a way as to make this claim reasonable, as if it meant something akin to a fully open sense of one’s sexual orientation, basic emotional personality, etc. Yet you’re very wrong, because what it actually meant and means is essentially code for “degree of adherence to received Objectivist creeds”. It mostly amounted in practice to emotionally abused women fighting against their lack of attraction to those (also emotionally abused) men who were able to become Rand’s best mouthpieces and recruiters.
Of course, there are exceptions, but for those of us who were close to it, “fundamental values” and “sense of life” are among the most cringeworthy words.
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