Jerome Tuccille has a lot of good nuggets on Objectivism and Ayn Rand in It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand.
On Rand as a Totalitarian:
“Objectivism can be a wonderfully appealing religion substitute for disaffiliated Jews and Catholics from the middle class who turn to it with mania formerly reserved for their ancestoral religion–and also to the sons and daughters of Old American WASPS, brought up in the Protestant ethic of hard work and self-sufficiency. It is a closed system of ideas, even more so than the conservative Catholicism in vogue until the middle sixties. Under the most doctrinaire of Catholic upbringings there is a certain margin for flexibility. The boundaries are clearly defined, but you are permitted an area of deviation from the straight and narrow before stepping onto the wild shores of heresy. To a lesser extent the same holds true for Judaism.
Not so under the tutelage of the Rand.
Objectivism is an inflexible package deal. Ayn Rand, having established herself as a radical individualist, an uncompromising mudracker and free thinker by the 1950’s, then proceeded to ereect a tight system of logic embracing every conceivable area of human endeavor. Economics, politics, psychology, child-rearing, sex, literature, even cigarette-smoking–Rand has written about them all, issuing her pronouncements on each subject in turn. Curiously enough, for a woman who started out as a champion of the independent mind, she began to consider her own ideas as natural corollaries of truth and objectivity.
‘Objective reality’ was what Rand said it was.
‘Morality’ was conformity to the ethic of Ayn Rand.
‘Rationality’ was synonymous with the thinking of Ayn Rand.
To be in disagreement with the ideas of Ayn Rand was to be, by definition, irrational and immoral.”
(from It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccille p.15-16)
On The Place of Humor in Objectivism:
“Smiling, when it happened at all, was indulged in surrepitiously, since humor in the Objectivist handbook was considered immoral and anti-life, a device contrived to destroy man’s capacity of greatness”
(from It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccille p.22)
On The Objectivist Theory of Litearture
“My second crisis of conscience revolved around the Randian theory of literature. For someone whose tastes in literature ran the gamut from Hemingway to Maugham to Fitzgerald to Steinbeck to Duerrenmatt to Cheever to Mailer to Salinger to Evelyn Waugh to Perelman to Vonnegut, naturalists and satirists to the last, it was a bit difficult to accept the theory that naturalism and comedy were immoral and anti-life, or that Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming were the greatest living practitioners of the romanticism of Victor Hugo”
(from It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccille p.23)
The excommunication of Murray Rothbard:
“The falling away of Murray Rothbard began..Shortly afterward it became known that Rothbard’s wife, Joey, was a devout Protestant, a practicing Christian who actually believed that faith an altruism had a positive moral value. When the last tremours caused by this revelation finally faded away, a pall of silence fell over the living room. There was a Christian in the house…a real, live, breathing Protestant who admitted belief in the existence of a Supreme Being! A heretic such as this was occupying the armchair in Ayn Rand’s living room. And was married to one of Rand’s most gifted protoges [Murray Rothbard], no less, who now sat beside her with a look of villainous unconcern on his face.
Well, if Murray Rothbard’s wife was a Christian there could only be one logical explanation for it: she had obviously never read Ayn Rand’s proof that a Supreme Being does not, did not, will not, and could not exist. Ever
…This incident marked the beginning of the end of Murray Rothbard’s eminent position in the Objectivist hierarchy…[h]e…had begun to question the wisdom of many Randian attitudes on political, and particularly, historical affairs. He compounded his crime of being happily married to a practicing altruist at the following meeting when he refused to leave his wife and take a more rational mate.
…Shortly afterward there was a meeting at which he found himself denounced for not smoking cigarettes.
…Since it was unthinkable for anyone to leave the Randian nest of his own accord, and emergency meeting of meeting of the Senior Collective was called to hear the various charges of deviationism that had been compiled against Rothbard over the past six months.”
(from It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccille p.29-33)
