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My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." —Ayn Rand

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Gulab Jamon
Apparently there is a schism between The Ayn Rand Institute in Marina Del Rey, California, (the group led by Leonard Peikoff) and the Objectivists, who are based in NYC.

One group is very much into preserving Rand's legacy and ideas with no room for reinterpretation, whereas the other group is more into using Rand's philosophy to interpret modern-day events. Unfortunately I can't remember which was which!

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Gulab Jamon
As luck would have it, I met someone last Wednesday who used to be heavily involved with the Objectivists. Apparently there is a schism between The Ayn Rand Institute in Marina Del Rey, California, (the group led by Leonard Peikoff) and the Objectivists, who are based in NYC.

One group is very much into preserving Rand's legacy and ideas with no room for reinterpretation, whereas the other group is more into using Rand's philosophy to interpret modern-day events. Unfortunately I can't remember which was which!

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Cosmophilospher
But if you leave the "religious" component out of the definition, thus broadening the word's usage, it becomes clear that Objectivism was (and is) a cult, as are many other, non-religious groups. In this context, then, a cult may be characterized by:

Veneration of the Leader: Excessive glorification to the point of virtual sainthood or divinity.
Inerrancy of the Leader: Belief that he or she cannot be wrong.
Omniscience of the Leader: Acceptance of beliefs and pronouncements on virtually all subjects, from the philosophical to the trivial.
Persuasive Techniques: Methods used to recruit new followers and reinforce current beliefs.
Hidden Agendas: Potential recruits and the public are not given a full disclosure of the true nature of the group's beliefs and plans.
Deceit: Recruits and followers are not told everything about the leader and the group's inner circle, particularly flaws or potentially embarrassing events or circumstances.
Financial and/or Sexual Exploitation: Recruits and followers are persuaded to invest in the group, and the leader may develop sexual relations with one or more of the followers.
Absolute Truth: Belief that the leader and/or group has a method of discovering final knowledge on any number of subjects.
Absolute Morality: Belief that the leader and/or the group have developed a system of right and wrong thought and action applicable to members and nonmembers alike. Those who strictly follow the moral code may become and remain members, those who do not are dismissed or punished

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Rational Tobacco

The all-encompassing nature of the Randian line may be illustrated by an incident that occurred to a friend of mine who once asked a leading Randian if he disagreed with the movement’s position on any conceivable subject. After several minutes of hard thought, the Randian replied: "Well, I can’t quite understand their position on smoking." Astonished that the Rand cult had any position on smoking, my friend pressed on: "They have a position on smoking? What is it?" The Randian replied that smoking, according to the cult, was a moral obligation. In my own experience, a top Randian once asked me rather sharply, "How is it that you don’t smoke?" When I replied that I had discovered early that I was allergic to smoke, the Randian was mollified: "Oh, that’s OK, then."

The official justification for making smoking a moral obligation was a sentence in Atlas where the heroine refers to a lit cigarette as symbolizing a fire in the mind, the fire of creative ideas. (One would think that simply holding up a lit match could do just as readily for this symbolic function.)

One suspects that the actual reason, as in so many other parts of Randian theory, from Rachmaninoff to Victor Hugo to tap dancing, was that Rand simply liked smoking and had the need to cast about for a philosophical system that would make her personal whims not only moral but also a moral obligation incumbent upon everyone who desires to be rational.

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Son of Rand

Some Randians emulated their leader by changing their names from Russian or Jewish to a presumably harder, tougher, more heroic Anglo-Saxon. Branden himself changed his name from Blumenthal; it is perhaps not a coincidence, as Nora Ephron has pointed out, that if the letters of the new name are rearranged, they spell, B-E-N-R-A-N-D, Hebrew for "son of Rand." A Randian girl, with a Polish name beginning with "G-r," announced one day that she was changing her name the following week. When asked deadpan, by a humorous observer whether she was changing her name to "Grand," she replied, in all seriousness, that no she was changing it to "Grant" – presumably, as the observer later remarked, the "t" was her one gesture of independence.

If looking and talking and even being named like the top Randians was the most "rational" way to act, and seeing them as much as possible was the most rational form of activity, then surely residing as close as possible to the leaders was the rational place to live. Thus, the typical New York Randian, upon his or her conversion, would leave his parents and find an apartment as close to Rand’s as possible. As a result, virtually the entire New York movement lived with a few square blocks of each other in Manhattan’s East 30’s, many of the leaders in the same apartment house as Rand’s.

If continuing an intense psychological pressure was in part responsible for the extremely high turnover among Randian disciples, another reason for this turnover was the very fact that the movement had a rigid line on literally every subject, from aesthetics to history to epistemology. In the first place it meant that deviation from the correct line was all too easy: Preferring Bach, for example, to Rachmaninoff, subjected one to charges of believing in a "malevolent universe." lf not corrected by self-criticism and psychotherapeutic brainwashing, such deviation could well lead to ejection from the movement. Secondly, it is difficult to impose a rigid line on every area of life and thought when, as was the case with Rand and her top disciples, they were largely ignorant of these various disciplines.

Rand admitted that reading was not her strong suit, and the disciples, of course, were not allowed to read the real world of heresies even if they had been inclined to do so. And so the young convert – and they were almost all young – began to buckle when he learned more about his own chosen subject. Thus, the historian, upon learning more his subject, could scarcely rest content with long outdated Burkhardtian clichés about the Renaissance, or the pap about the Founding Fathers. And if the disciple began to realize that Rand was wrong and oversimplified in his own field, it was easy for him to entertain fundamental doubts about her infallibility elsewhere.

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And how can Uber win back customers when it can’t seem to shake its reputation that it cultivated from the very beginning? No matter how many times Kalanick apologizes and cries

[www.bloomberg.com]

and promises to change his ways, it’s going to be hard to make people forget about all the other times he’s acted like an utter buffoon. (See: “Boob-er.”)

[pando.com]

He’s the face of the company, and while he’s certainly not the only Silicon Valley prodigy to build a multi-billion company on the ideals popularized by Atlas Shrugged author Ayn Rand — that greed, selfishness, and winning at all costs are okay as long as they’re put toward the goal of changing society — he has since become the most public face of it.

[www.vanityfair.com]

Rumors are already beginning to sw

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Clarence Thomas is his own man
After 20 years on the high court, the justice is known for standing alone in dissent.
July 03, 2011|David G. Savage

WASHINGTON — Each summer, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas invites his four new law clerks to his home to watch a movie.

Not just any movie, but the 1949 film version of the classic of libertarian conservatism, Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead."

The movie's hero, played by Gary Cooper, is an idealistic but stubborn architect, who, as Rand wrote, "stood alone against the men of his time." A character, it might be said, a lot like Thomas himself. "If you think you are right, there is nothing wrong with being the only one," he said last year in explaining his fondness for the movie. "I have no problem being the only one."

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Kalanick appears to be a true believer in smashing the state.

Years ago, he used the cover image of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as his Twitter avatar and told the Washington Post’s Mike DeBonis that his company’s regulatory issues bore an “uncanny resemblance” to the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

Still, in a practical sense, Uber operates overwhelmingly in big, dense liberal cities and needs political cooperation from Democratic Party elected officials. To that end, Uber has always sought political connections with blue-state politicians (Tusk was a former communications director to Chuck Schumer and top aide to Michael Bloomberg) who can help them in concrete ways that Republicans generally can’t.

But Kalanick and his inner circle, according to people familiar with the situation, are largely pretty hardcore right-wingers who understand a pragmatic need to go along and get along with progressive values without really believing in them.

Indeed, as Vox’s Tim Lee has written, Uber has consistently applied the “it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission” to a huge range of conduct that has nothing to do with rent-seeking taxi regulation:

[W]hen Uber accepted a massive $3.5 billion cash infusion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, I noted the irony of Uber accepting cash from a government that doesn’t allow women to drive cars and that once punished a rape victim for being alone with a male nonrelative. And Uber didn’t just take Saudi Arabia’s cash; it also gave the theocratic regime a seat on its board.

Over the years, Uber has allegedly spied on its own customers, threatened to dig up dirt on journalists, and downplayed sexual assault concerns.

In many of these cases, Uber has backpedaled in the wake of a public backlash. Kalanick, for example, tweeted out an apology in the wake of his executive’s comments about journalists. But often, Uber only seems to take this kind of step after becoming the target of a social media firestorm.

While this attitude was helpful in breaking through initial taxi cartel rules, applying the principle to every situation has enmeshed the company in an endless series of controversies that’s unusual for a consumer-facing company.

..... Pairing an avowed indifference to a large share of the workforce with a corporate culture that valorizes rule breaking likely encourages misogynistic behavior at the home office, and almost certainly impedes efforts to create a more rule-bound, publicly appealing corporate culture.

Hence the recruitment of Jones from the outside to try to improve things, and his rapid departure as it becomes clear that problems are too deeply rooted from him to change them.


Self-driving car technology, by contrast, poses obvious public safety hazards. Like any car, if self-driving cars malfunction, people will die. And there is a reason there’s no such thing as an automaker that has deliberately courted a public image as defiant of the law or the basic legitimacy of the regulatory state — nobody would buy a car they were worried didn’t meet basic safety standards. Recalls at General Motors a few years back cost the company a small fortune, and led to high-profile congressional investigations. It’s a much higher-stakes game than taxi regulation.

Reasonable people can and do disagree about what rules are genuinely necessary for safety’s sake (the public doesn’t realize it, but cars considered safe in Europe generally wouldn’t be allowed on the road in North America, and vice versa), and there is a lot of low-key lobbying around the margins, but all the players in this industry accept that there will be rules and the rules should be followed.

Nothing about Uber’s approach to taxi regulation, labor law, sexual harassment, public relations, or much of anything else, though, suggests the kind of cautious attitude that would tend to give a person — or a city council member, or a state Department of Transportation official — confidence in the safety of Uber’s robot cars.

Jones’s words, which characterized a culture that’s so badly broken it took the person brought in to fix it just six months to decide that he couldn’t, do not in any way suggest a company you’d want to trust on life-or-death matters.