 This is going to be an enormous change of subject. It will still be about Ayn Rand, however. Ayn Rand's life and work were a feminist manifesto. She wouldn't like me saying that, because she was in the early days of feminism, very opposed to it, for reasons that we can go into later if you want. But nevertheless, I think that statement is correct, that her life and work could be taken as a feminist manifesto. Oh, dear. Excuse me, I'm getting over bronchitis, so if I cough at you, forgive me. I don't have to tell you, I don't believe that her life was a manifestation of feminism at its most exalted. This was a woman, whatever her faults, who never lost for a split second her independence of mind. When she didn't like the philosophical system she found, she created her own, because there was no one else to do it. You know that she fought against enormous odds all her life. She was hated by most of her culture, but she went on and she fought and she fought. And even at the end of her life, when she was ill and sad and weary and disappointed, she decided she would write and she began writing a television script of Atlas Shrugged because she had become convinced that nobody else could do it. Whatever are the most admirable qualities of feminism, and there are many, I and Rand exemplified them. Feminists, of course, don't like her, but the feminizes don't like her, if I may use that expression. The ones who see the state as the solution to all human ills, they would do well to study her. They would find in we the living, Kira, a young girl who fought alone against the brutal weight of communism, who dreamed of building glass skyscrapers and aluminum bridges, and who all her life, her short life, held on to the independence of her mind, despite living in a world that was nothing but the reverse propaganda. She used her mind, she went her way, she made her own decisions, and she loved as passionately as she fought. In Atlas Shrugged they would see Dagny, a woman of giant intellect who ran a railroad, who also loved deeply and passionately, who made her own life by the decisions of her own mind. I believe very strongly, and there was never any question of this, never any contradiction to this, that women properly were purposeful, independent, active, productive, that they were the intellectual and moral equal to man. But what I want to discuss tonight is an issue that has sometimes been seen as a contradiction to this kind of feminism. It has been troubling to many of her readers, and it puzzled me for a long time, and I'm referring to the sex scenes in her books. May I add that though I suspect some of her readers are troubled philosophically, I don't think I've met many who are troubled emotionally. All of the sex scenes, and before I came here, I went through her books and checked just to be sure. All of them, it's not only in the famous rape scene in The Fountainhead, have what is often seen as a disturbing amount of violence in them. All of them, whether it's Kira with Leo, whether it's Dominic and Rourke, Dagny with Francisco or Galt, they could equally be called rape scenes, equally with Dominic and Rourke in The Fountainhead. That is, the woman is taken violently by the man, often seemingly against her will, she's helpless against the power of his sexuality. That's the common theme that runs through all of these scenes. With one proviso, and again, I checked every single sex scene to make sure this was so, and it is. I once was asked about the rape scene in The Fountainhead, and her answer was wonderful. She said, if it was rape, it was raped by engraved invitation. And that's true of all her scenes. The woman has given permission, not necessarily in words, but at least tacitly. The man knows that he's passionately desired. And let me just read you a short passage that occurs between Dagny and Galt. Quote, He held her with a tense purposeful insistence, his hand moving over her breasts, as if he were learning a proprietor's intimacy with her body, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission. She saw his smile, the smile that told her she had given him permission long ago. That's the typical theme of all the scenes. In attempting to explain this, I may very well be accused of psychologizing, but I don't think that's what I'm doing. I did know her for almost 20 years. I was her closest female friend. She talked to me alone about very personal issues, and I spent four and a half years working on her biography. That's a way of coming to know someone that is very difficult to communicate. Imagine how well you know whatever person is closest to you. And you probably know that person extremely well. But imagine taking four and a half years out of your life to do nothing but understand that person fully. That's a kind of knowing that... Let me give an example of the kind of knowing it is. Occasionally, I'm quite unlike I am. Occasionally, I would be trying to figure out what she would do or say in a certain situation, and I would begin introspecting to find the answer. One literally has the feeling, writing a biography, that you carry that person around inside you for that period of time and can learn certain things, not by looking outside at her, but inside at yourself. And that's often where I found answers that didn't pertain to me. They pertain to her. So I hope what I'll be offering you is informed opinion, not psychologizing. I've been convinced for many years that any writer's sex scenes represent their own personal sexual fantasies, that they're not simply invented out of whole cloth for the purposes of a novel. They come from very deep within the writer's own psychology and from the writer's fantasies of the nature of transcendent sex. You have nowhere to go but inside yourself to find, to explain through somebody else what sex is all about. Okay, how do we account for Ion's view of sex, for what is demonstrated in her books? The first issue that I will just mention, because I don't think it was of great significance, of some. I think one of the definitions, though I wouldn't dare try to define genius, but one sort of approximate, almost definition, is that a genius is the person who will question as much as is humanly possible about the things other people don't think to question. That is, we're all brought up in worlds, small worlds, large worlds, in which we hear certain things said or implied every single day of our lives. We don't make a judgment about them. They're sort of in the air we breathe. And so we go along without doubting or thinking about them. They seem self-evident. The genius is the person who questions the self-evident, which Ion Rand certainly did. However, no one in the world can question everything. Everyone carries some emotional baggage from their past, some issues that they think are true simply because they've never thought about them. What I'm talking about specifically in this sense is guilt, which in many ways was very alien to Ion psychology. But I suspect, I do not know, that there was some... Ion Rand was born in Russia and brought up in Russia. There would be no way that I can think of for a young girl in that very sexually repressive atmosphere especially a young girl who would have become aware of her own intense sexuality very early, not to carry some touch of guilt with her. And the reason I suspect this is that in her sex scenes, since the woman is taken violently, she bears no guilt. She hasn't initiated it. It's not her sexuality that causes the sex act. It's the man's. Now as I say, I think this is a small element. The next one is more important. Ion was in one sense rejected by men all her life. It began with Leo, the man she loved in Russia. She once told me that if Leo had asked her to marry him, she would never have left Russia. And she probably would have been killed there. But she would have stayed. She loved him that much. He rejected her. I saw the reason. The rejections throughout her life were not in the obvious form in which Leo rejected her. But I saw, even when she was in middle age, if we were to party, I would see men and women throng around her to listen to her. But even among her contemporaries, there was nothing personal. And I saw the men around her scared to death of her. She's just too smart, too impressive, too aggressive intellectually. They back up. They're drawn to her. But as men, they back up. I don't know that she was ever consciously aware of it. But she had to have felt it. And I think what that did was make her very not afraid, but uneasy about initiating with a man. And again in her sex scenes, she doesn't have to initiate. The man initiates. Another reason that I think they are is they are. In such a sexual encounter where the man is the very active one and the woman submits, the woman can drop her controls. With iron, it was an issue of dropping iron controls that ruled her life. She could drop the struggle, drop the battles, drop the aloneness, and surrender herself to a force that was stronger than she was. I think this was very important psychologically. She felt so much alone in the world. So much that whatever was going to happen in her life, she had to make happen. Nothing was coming from the outside. In this sexual context, a great deal was coming from the outside from the man. He was entering her world and she didn't have to initiate. The most important thing that I think accounts for these scenes, for the quality of them, is that in childhood and all through her life, she was stronger and wiser and more courageous and braver and smarter than anybody else she met. If she met her equal, I never heard about it. It was hard. It was very lonely for her. She suffered a great deal for it. She wanted desperately to find at least an equal. What she wanted even more than that was to find someone wiser than she, braver than she, more courageous than she. There was a desperate longing to find that, and she never did. Throughout her life, she never did. She never found an end to her loneliness, but she could create him in her novels and especially in her sex scenes. In the world of her novels, she for once didn't have to be the leader. She could surrender to a man and find in herself the softer, warmer woman who existed inside her but whom she could almost never express in ordinary life. She could be without the controls. He decided what they would do. She didn't for once in her life, she didn't. Ion wrote of Dagnees, and this is a quote, her need to find in a man the courage, the will, and the strength that would bring her helplessly to her knees. Ion would have given anything on earth to find such a man. I only regret that she never did. Thank you. It has to be very difficult to ask questions when we talk about such different things, but please. I have a question for John and Barbara, if you wish to comment. To me, Ion was like a genius who illuminated recesses of the human soul I would never have imagined as a young person. After I read Atlas Shrugged, I began to understand what might motivate the people in the world who are running the world. What kind of motivations could they possibly have? This was an act of genius. Why was it so important for her to be considered a philosopher, which, as you well know, is difficult for her to be seen that way, in a sense, in the modern world? She didn't want to be without basic premises. So she forged those for herself, to a large extent from Aristotle, and to some extent from Thomas Aquinas. Also, she invented a great deal. Part of her intellectual independence consisted in wanting a sound basic philosophy, which she had to do for herself. Whether she did it satisfactorily is a matter of disagreement among people. But she didn't want to do the second, third, fourth, and fifth stories without doing the foundation. If I might add something, it was very upsetting to me that only in her obituaries did I see her called novelist, philosopher, or philosopher novelist, which she would have given a great deal to see in her life and never did. She wanted to be recognized as a philosopher, and certainly she would have been tops in that league, too. But, you see, in the philosophical community, you have to engage in discussion. You have to write an article and put it into a philosophical journal, and then somebody replies to it, and then you reply to that, and so on. And she never entered the arena, that kind of arena. And if you don't choose to enter that kind of arena, you just don't get known in the profession. And that's why, I think, a good part of the reason why she never was recognized as an intellectual. She just was considered a novelist who happened to have things like Galt's speech stuck in there, which they may or may not have liked, but that was incidental to them. So, as a result, she never got the recognition in the philosophical community, but she did see my point when I said, well, the way things are these days, to get in that community, you have to enter the arena of philosophical disputation. And she didn't want to do that. And I think it would have helped in the 30s and 40s had she not been a woman. That was very much a strike against her. Do you have a woman philosopher? Yes. It depends on what she said, but there would be, yeah, there are... They haven't heard the question. I think if she had written an article on the Stolen Concept or something like that, I mean, that's reputable, intellectual stuff. Somebody might have replied and said, I have the following objections, one, two, three, but it would have been there. I think it would have. We'll never know. Walter. No, I'm sorry. You were commenting, Barbara, on Inran's sexuality and her... You were commenting on Inran's sexuality and her desire for a man who she could admire and look up to. It leaves sort of a big question. What was exactly her relationship with her husband, Frank O'Connor? Did she not admire or look up to him? That's not an easy question to answer. It's a very complex issue. Yes, in certain ways, she did look up to him and admire him. Frank was one of the finest men I've ever met in my life. He was very much loved by the people around him. I have never heard anybody say a bad word about Frank. Many people didn't understand, however, what their relationship was all about, what they were doing together. He was not an intellectual. He was not many of the things that John Galt was, certainly, or any of her heroes. I have always believed that it was Frank, that person, who was not an intellectual, who was not John Galt, that person whom I am truly loved. I also believe that she could never quite admit it to herself or anyone else. And over the years, I saw her constantly refer to him as her hero, as John Galt, as having virtues which he didn't have and didn't need to have. He was just wonderful as he was. Not everyone in the world is required to be an intellectual. To be the sort of man he was is a sufficient achievement, in my opinion, and basically, I believe, in her opinion. One of the things she said to me about him, and this was true, in a childhood and a womanhood in which she felt very alone and often betrayed, Frank stood with her no matter what. She knew that no matter what the world did to her, Frank would be there, and he would understand her context and stand with her. That meant a tremendous amount to her. But she had to aggrandize him, as I have to say she did with many of her friends, myself included. Nathaniel and I were geniuses. We were to carry on her philosophy and to carry it further. We were said to be things, and she said it often publicly, that we weren't. I'll speak for myself. I was just fine. But I wasn't many of the things she said about me, and neither was Nathaniel, and it was the same psychological phenomenon that was at work with Frank. She could not let us be human beings, we had to be something more. And I believe that was born out of a dreadful loneliness. People often get the wrong impression seeing Ein and Frank together. Since his benevolence, his goodness, and so on, and they think, well, Ein is the one that wears the pants in this relationship. Not entirely true, not really true at all. He would rely on his judgment, things like this. I'd like to go see the Leningrad Ballet when it comes to town. But on the other hand, this is, by doing it, Frank would say to her, you are helping to subsidize an evil empire, her words to that effect. And she would rely on his judgment, and much as she might want to go, she would decide, no, we won't go. And she was glad that he had made that decision. Yes, definitely. She always deferred to him. I always wanted to know his opinion or thought, how will Frank react to this? Will it be okay with him? If it wasn't, she wouldn't do it. With some exceptions. Have we answered you? I wanted to probe and discuss two things. One, my own relationship with Einren, in a few minutes, and before that, the relationship of von Mises, Ludwig von Mises and Einren, for many years I was a friend and follower, confidante of Murray Rothbard, and Murray was, his life was certainly affected by Einren's, and he told me many stories about her, and I wanted to check up on one, or at least get a different version of it. Before I say that, I just realized by what you said, John, tonight, how she had some affinity for von Mises, because I was always puzzled as to this, because Einren was an objectivist if she was anything, and Mises was a subjectivist if he was anything, especially in economics, but the key is that Mises was an a priorist, and now I see the way you put it, how much Einren was an a priorist, even taking it to realms where Mises wouldn't. He would only confine it to economics. He would confine it to everything. I guess the story I wanted to ask about before I get into my personal relationship, very minimal that it was, but I guess the older I get, the fewer people had any personal relationship with her, so I guess mine might be of interest. But could you tell me about that dinner that Einren first met Ludwig von Mises? And I can tell you I was at that dinner, and it didn't happen. I have heard that story. Can you tell the story? Well, the story I got from Murray was that Mises dismissed Einren as an ignorant young girl. Does that sound like Mises to you? He was a gentleman. He was very gracious. I heard another story about Mises at the first meeting in the Mont Pelerin Society when Hayek and Friedman and Repke and all these guys were yacking it up, and Mises stood up in a huff and said you were all a bunch of socialists and walked out, so... That's a little different than saying you're an ignorant girl. The point is he didn't say it. Could you give me your version? There's no version to give you. Your recollection, I mean. I admired him very much. Not because he was an a prioris, but because she felt he was so great an economist the way she put it but not to him was that she could forgive him for not having his philosophy straight in effect. But she did admire him a lot. I'm sorry. Go ahead. A number of times I was at her apartment when Mr. and Mrs. von Mises were there and Mr. and Mrs. Henry were also there. And a very nice relation. There was no tensions at all that I could discern. She did say to me once, she said, I admire von Mises as an economist and only that, but she said, I'm not going to try to convert a man in his 80s. I will take him for the good that he has to give. That's almost to your exact words. She wasn't quite as generous with Henry Hazlott because in his book The Foundations of Morality he did not give, she thought, sufficient attention to her ethical views and she thought he should have been more acquainted with him by this time and more. It wasn't enough to break off the relationship as far as I know, but there was a bit of tension there over that, that she wasn't going to forgive him because he was 80 years old, he wasn't. And so it was a slightly different situation with Hazlott. She thought he should have known better. I do remember that they're having a very heated argument but nobody was calling names. And it was about the draft. Von Mises was for the draft and Ayon was passionately against it. So that got rather heated but I can obviously philosophically heated. They weren't throwing things at each other. Okay, does that answer you? Yes, fine. I was going to give my recollections but that was when there were no people behind me. Since they're on now I'll defer to the next and if there's time maybe I can get back. Well, I'm kind of interested, aren't you John? Yes. Okay. Once upon a time, long, long ago, this was in 1962 when I was a senior at Brooklyn College, Inran came to lecture. And it was a gigantic auditorium. There must have been 3,000 kids there and I was a young Pinko, Kami, whatever. It's hard to believe but it's true. And I came to Boo and Hissar and I booed in Hissar for an hour and a half and I didn't get enough booing and hissing. And then the president of the Inran study club or something like that, the group at Brooklyn College under whose auspices she had been invited, said that there would be a luncheon in Heron and anyone could come and I figured, well, anyone includes me so I came. And they were sitting at this long table in sort of a hierarchical status. I guess Inran was at the head of the table and Nathaniel was here and Leonard Peacoff. I don't know if you were there. I don't remember that. I don't think so. And I was sort of relegated to the foot of the table as befits a person who had no previous knowledge and only a deep abiding hatred for free enterprise and free everything. And I was relegated to the foot of the table in my neighbor and I said, what is all this capitalist crap? We'll have babies starving in the streets and people sleeping on the bridges, the whole bit. And he said, well, I hardly know. I've only been at it for a few months. The people that do know are up there. So I stuck my head between Ines and Nathan's and I said there's a socialist here who wants to debate somebody on these issues. And I said, oh, yeah, who? And I said, oh, it's me. And Nathan was, I guess I was a chutzpannick in those days, but Nathan was very gracious and he said, well, I'll tell you what. I'll make a deal with you. I'll talk to you if you make two promises to me. One, that you will not let the conversation lapse until one of us convinces the other or at least until we've done it, until we're fully convinced that no convincing can be done. And secondly, you'll read two books that I recommend. The two books were Atlas Shrugged and Henry Haslund's Economics in one lesson. Those two books I assigned to my freshman classes now. That's great. Certainly turned my life around. And we continued our discussion. And so I had one glimpse of Ayn Rand. I said the statement in her and Nathan's ear. And I went to Nathan's apartment. I guess you're in his apartment at the time. I don't know that I met you there. And Ayn would come in sort of fleetingly and ask a question or become involved in the discussion slightly, and then she would leave. And I had seven or eight discussions with Nathan. And I read Atlas Shrugged one weekend without going to sleep much. I just read the whole thing. I couldn't put it down. It was so magnificent and fantastic. And I probably read it five or six times in the past 30 years, 35 years. The other connection I had with Ayn Rand, and I want to elevate my relationship with that word, was I don't know where the NBI, that is the Nathaniel Brandon Institute, which was sort of like a group dedicated to the promulgation and discussion of her philosophy. I don't know where it was. I guess there were meetings at various hotels. And I went to those. And then it finally got a permanent home in the sub-basement of the Empire State Building. We called it the lower level. Okay, sorry. The lower level, and there was discussion of moving on up to the highest level. And I went to several of those, and I was introduced to her, or I reintroduced myself. I don't really think she knew of me, but I had met her. So it was, I guess, legitimate for me to presume, to say hello, and she was very gracious to me. I don't know. I guess I soon after that slipped away from the objectivism and got into libertarianism. But those are my recollections. That's very interesting. Thank you. The reason I was very comfortable with Walter to carry on was that when I got up there was no one here, and I thought, well, I'm not going to miss such an opportunity. And then various things came into mind. One of which is that I was just going to ask you to carry on talking. While I am here, my own recollections of Randa are somewhat strange. That is, I never met her. I lived on the opposite side of the earth, and I got to libertarianism through her works, and particularly through what was my closest friend who introduced me to the ideas. But my only contact with her was that she excommunicated me from the movement, because I quoted her somewhere, and I was written a lawyer's letter saying that I had done this without consent, and I was therefore excommunicated, or words to that effect. And then Leonard Pickoff, not knowing that I had already been excommunicated, re-excommunicated me. So I like have the, you know, whatever it is, the curse, or the blessing of two excommunications. And he did it because I had a debate with his representative in South Africa about some very trivial aspect of her works. With his representative? Yes, his representative, yeah. And she, well, there was a little amusing angle to that. She wrote off to him saying Leon Lowe has sinned and must therefore be excommunicated, and he wrote back giving his blessing to that. But unfortunately, his secretary put the letter to her in the wrong envelope, and it came to me. So I opened this letter to her, approving of my excommunication. And I thought it was an interesting sort of angle to justice, you know, and asked, you know, for another side of the story or whatever. And it was a very trivial issue. So that's what little contact I've had was two excommunications, which I suppose is quite an achievement when you've never had contact with any of the people who excommunicated you. Check with T. Bohr McCann. He had the same experience of being excommunicated twice, once by Ion and once by Leonard. He drove all the way from Los Angeles to Colorado, being told that he and Leonard could have some conversations about philosophy, and after traveling those 1,500 or 2,000 miles, when he got to Leonard's door, the word had got out. No, can't talk with you, go back home. Anyway, what I did want to ask, by the way, that didn't have any negative effects, I don't think on my views towards her or Leonard or the ideas. But what I did want to ask is that I have the odd experience that my whole introduction to von Mises and libertarianism was directly through Rand. It was like a very rapid conduit. And yet, objectivists, most of them I believe to this day and Rand herself were so intensively hostile to libertarians, right wing hippies and so on and so forth. And I've never really had an opportunity, I've spent lots of time with John, not with you, to kind of get to the bottom of this and my question is, I suppose, there are two naive questions and I apologize for that. One is, it seems to me that all libertarianism says is there shall be a mutually-evolutional interaction between consenting adults, which as I understand it, she says. And it seems to me to have this Roth and Venom for libertarians like somebody who says I'm an atheist and then because the atheist doesn't buy all the rest or doesn't even know about all the rest, then to denounce atheists because they aren't fully-fledged objectivists or any other single tenet that objectivists would go with. So really just to get an opportunity to ask two luminaries like you to respond to what seems to me to be something but an objective response to libertarianism. Increasingly with age, I think, she would have the following characteristic. There could be a dozen things in favor of somebody or some position, but if there was one against it, that would do it for her. For instance, she didn't want anything to do with Ronald Reagan because of his stand on abortion. Nothing to do with economic- however much he might have approved some of the things he said and stood for because she defended Goldwater. It was simply on the basis of this. And there were many instances of that kind. I think it was not libertarianism she objected to, but libertarians. There were a lot of them. Wild-eyed, cocky, confident, long-haired, all the hippie sort of stuff that she never liked to begin with. And there was a lot of that, especially in the early movement and it really, really turned her off. But certainly the philosophy, I became a libertarian because of her. I saw no fundamental disagreement. In fact, some things she said, like in all exchanges and all interactions and enterprises involving two or more persons, the voluntary consent of all parties is required. Well, this would seem to undercut all government. I mean, this is a different subject I don't want to go into now, but certainly she was libertarian through and through, but there was something, something I think it was the people involved more than anything else. Maybe she thought they were trying to compete, although God knows they gave her enough credit. They referred to her all the time as the fountainhead of their ideas. As is being done here. As is being done here. May I add something, John? The hippie part was certainly part of her objection. But let me say she never would have written the article that came from Leonard's people. Never. That article I think was preposterous and I believe she would have thought so too. What she objected to was the libertarian party. There was no movement. There was simply the party. And her powers of prediction were quite remarkable. Astonishing, as a matter of fact. She said it was the anarchist wing, the Murray Rothbard wing of the party, which she objected to. She also felt that the party because of that had no philosophical base and that it wasn't enough. I said this in another context, I think, but she said that if economics could have won the battle for capitalism, economics alone, it would have been one long ago because the economic proofs are there. Her point was that only by moral persuasion can you win the case for free enterprise. And she felt the libertarians per se are not presenting a moral case and will not. They also have tremendous dissension within their own ranks because of this. She predicted that the day would come when the anarchist wing would split the party in two, which it did. Just two small points before I walk away and defer to my immediate superior. One is that in South Africa, just as an anecdotal piece of information, John knows because he's visited there a few times, her books are more visible and prevalent in book shops than anywhere else I've seen in the world. It's something that's always intrigued me because they all seem to be invisible and we don't know who buys them, but there's an enormous demand for her literature. And in the average bookstore, you will find three or four of her titles and they sell in large volumes to people who, as far as we can tell, sort of go off and do their own thing somewhere. The second one, John, I just wanted to make the observation that my question was somewhat different from the Reagan analogy because there she was concerned about an issue on which she disagreed with Reagan. As far as I can tell, there's nothing about libertarianism with which she disagrees except perhaps, as you say, the anarchist wing. It's very relevant that I met Ion in the 50s. I never knew of her during the 50s to excommunicate anybody. By the way, she and we never called it excommunication. It was, but we didn't call it that. But it was as she grew older, as many disappointing things happened to her, she became more bitter and then I saw the excommunications begin, but not until then. Leonard doesn't have that justification. And I mean, he has, about a year ago, excommunicated the last person from the old days who was in his life. There's nobody left. When my book came out, there was wholesale excommunication, which I must say please be, because if you read my book, you were in bad trouble. If you liked it, you were out, gone. I don't know if you know that his review of my book said that he had never read it and didn't intend to, but he knew from friends who had read it for him that it was evil, that the world knew I was immoral, that it was full of lies, and no objectivist should read it. Sounds very objective. Yeah, but very. If I can just start with a brief comment on the libertarian thing, it would seem to me that there was one very radical difference, which was that, as we've heard debated at this conference, libertarians will say that apart from the consent axiom, there's nothing else to libertarianism, and that it has no morality. And Ein was deeply moral. I mean, I think most libertarians have a strong sense of morality, and that in fact within that consent axiom there's a deep morality. But many libertarians deny that. They say, no, this isn't about morality. This is simply about that all relationships will be consenting and everything else will be irrelevant. That in itself I would have thought would be sufficient to drive her craze. Yes, it would. That's what she meant by no philosophical base. As a matter of fact, Walter Block and I were arguing about that. It's all very well to take as your axiom non-aggression, but it isn't in fact an axiom. And what do you say if someone says, well, that's not my axiom. You can't say anything. It has to be justified, and it can only be justified morally. Depends how one defines libertarianism, doesn't it? Does libertarianism include, as an essential part of itself, a doctrine of human rights? I'm inclined to say yes, because it is a moral tenet. Of course, in the opinion of many it doesn't, but Mises was a utilitarian and far as I know, didn't say anything about the concept of human rights. But I imagine it was that those libertarians who emphasized that kind of contextlessness of it that would have been particularly repulsive to her. You're exactly right. The other thing I just wanted to ask you about Barbara is you talked about her a grandisement of her friends and the people she was close to, and I was going to say, didn't she also do that with herself? In other words, invest in herself qualities of perfection and require that of herself to be a heroine. Instead of allowing herself to be a human being and to have weaknesses and faults which is really so much easier to live with yourself if you can accept that. Yes, she did. And I just wondered in doing that, whether the cause of that of her refusal to see normal fallible characteristics in herself and the people she was close to doesn't lie rather in her early life, in her childhood, in other things that happened there that gave her a loss of self-esteem because in... It's very hard. What you're saying is quite true about her attitude toward herself. It's very difficult for me to see an eye a lack of self-esteem. I know that one could think well it follows from that, but in her case and I'd have to say generally I'm not at all sure that's true. She was trapped in a way by her own ideas because if she sort of wavered if one could be and should be a John Galt then for sure that included her and there would be no possible justification intellectually for her not being a John Galt and so she had to be in the same way that her husband had to be something that he wasn't and her friends too. But it was in the context of her own philosophy that she was stuck in that trap. She would very often say she made a mistake about something but she used an odd phrase sometimes which for the life of me I never understood. She would talk about something being the fault of a virtue meaning, I think meaning if she would get very angry at someone who asked a question after a lecture which she often did extremely angry crushing to the person who asked the question afterwards Nathan and I would discuss it with her and we made it clear that we didn't think she should do that and she would say yes she knows she didn't but then she would say well it comes from moral indignation and moral indignation is what one should feel when faced with that. There always seemed to be an explanation that in the end made it okay. But isn't that then the source of her loneliness the fact that if you require of yourself to be perfect in all things and of those around you and there's a deep denial of reality then you're going to be supremely lonely because being a genius alone isn't sufficient reason. I think geniuses can learn to live with other people and have some loneliness in genius but nonetheless have healthy comfortable relationships. They don't for the most part if you look at historically this pattern of self-aggrandizement and excommunicating people around them who differ with them is a very common one among geniuses. Freud was exactly the same way. Many of them have been. I can't say I know quite why but I think that was one of the sources of her loneliness but only one. It was it is very hard to present a new philosophical system which goes totally against the culture to know that she's hated for it. Do you know the real loneliness started after Atlas shrugged after it was published. What she wanted most was one thing which was to find a peer someone who in his or her field as preferably had achieved something of great importance in the world and who would stand up publicly and announce what kind of achievement Atlas shrugged was. She thought there would be a few she never expected many. There wasn't one. And she began to feel who am I writing for. She had I mean fans everywhere letters of appreciation up to the ceiling but no one known figure who had achieved something important who stood up publicly to say what she did. No one she felt was her equal. Because she felt her fans were not in any way her equal which they weren't of course. They certainly weren't in knowledge and understanding and in prominence and she got she felt in that sense she got nothing back from the world and she began a lot of bitterness which just escalated over the years. Thanks. Forgive me for making this kind of small point because it's a very enjoyable discussion but I wonder whether it doesn't trivialize her accomplishments by wishing her this Holocaust romance wish that she had met this wonderful man this intellectual giant who fulfilled her to whom she could have looked up to as if her life was unfulfilling and not complete without this. I don't ever remember anyone saying that about Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or any other writing. If he only had met this wonderful intellectual woman who somehow their lives would have been more complete. I really think you minimize it by calling it Harlequin romances who had the concept of a John Galt never to meet such a person in her life is very sad and I'm not assuming that she felt that way she said so very often that that was what she was looking for that wasn't by any means the only thing she was looking for but the absence of that was bitterly disappointing to her. Well I understand that it was more I guess your comment on it because I think we're all culture bound to some extent and we're at a different time and perhaps looking at things differently. Did you ever discuss with her or hear her comment as to why she did not include Eddie Willers in Atlantis? Do you want to? No. Yes. I wanted him included and when I came to that section I felt terrible and we did discuss why he wasn't included it's the same reason that Kira had to die in We The Living because the point of the book was that communism destroys the best among human beings that it's the best that go first. If Kira had lived happily ever after she would have destroyed the point she was making. Similarly with Eddie Willers she wanted to show that that sort of man with all his virtues and all his intelligence even he could not survive in a world without the great achievers the geniuses without her finding anything wrong with Eddie Willers which she didn't it was that on his level of achievement he too not just what she called the looters but he too needed the men of greatness to survive. Thank you. I wanted to start but maybe I won't I wanted to start by saying how grateful I personally am that you both could be here for this conference and for tonight I never met either of you. I never got a personal impression of you and it's wonderful to see people only whom I read about or whose books I've read up close I don't have anything against seeing my heroes up close. Thank you. And oddly enough that's the theme of I actually wanted to ask you Barbara about something that you wrote rather than particularly Ayn Rand although I strongly imagine that she agreed with this I guess it was in the early 70's when it came out you wrote a review of the musical and movie 1776 which you titled Prospecting for Clay do you remember that? I don't think I wrote that one. Maybe it was Ayn Rand? I didn't write it. Oh darn that ruins my whole question. Well I'll ask my other question and I have just recently from the a state of a very libertarian friend who recently passed away acquired the complete set of the records of the basic principles of objectivism lectures and your principles of efficient thinking lectures and I just wondered reflecting back over the time since it's been said you did them what would you how do you feel about them now about the whole all the courses? Well yours in particular but Nathaniel's too because I'm sure you were involved in it weren't you? Oh yes indeed I think there was a lot of very good and very important material there I think there was also much too much reliance on the word of Ayn Rand much I'm not saying it exactly as I mean to there was an insistence built into those lectures that one be an objectivist and that the rest of the world wasn't very admirable which I painfully regret I would love one day to review those to redo my own lectures and to do them properly with the respect do an intelligent audience which I don't think I gave properly in that time One quick comment while you are going over those lectures do not forget the ten lectures on free enterprise economics by Alan Greenspan also done for NBI wonderful stuff as clear lucid simply presented as anything in von Mises anywhere else and done beautifully I cannot believe that he disbelieves that now thank you both very much just a couple of quick comments and then I wish to make a statement I once asked Nathaniel about Eddie Willers and his reply was but don't you see Bruce he is the victim of the system that's exactly how he answered it very good I didn't think I would be able to one up Leon Low at any time but I have been excommunicated three times how but I won't go into that right now because there's something else that's more positive that I'd like to talk about I was the head of English for some time in a large high school of about 2,000 students and I exercised as the head of the department to choose one novel I let my other teachers choose whatever they wanted I said I'm teaching grade 12 which would be the senior year in high school for Americans this was grade 13 in Ontario and I suggested at La Shrugged no they wouldn't buy that so I said ok then we'll have the fountain head they didn't want that either they knew about these books so they had the fountain head and they rebelled and I said surely I've given you carte blanche on everything from grades 9 to 12 including the poetry, the plays and everything so I am going to exercise my authority as the head of the department and put on the fountain head and then I discovered there was a conspiracy among all the English teachers of Toronto to have the book banned and I made my fatal they claimed that they were it was a very poorly and badly written novel but the real reason was they didn't like the philosophy of course I wasn't blind to that however I made a fatal error because I could have had every high school student in Ontario reading the book I suddenly shut up and they said Evoy talks a lot and now he's shutting up there's something going on I suddenly let the thing drop and I didn't get to give it to the papers that the book had been banned by the English teachers and I didn't get the chance to have every student in Ontario reading fountain head this is one of the great regrets of my life that only once I shut up and didn't talk thank you I wanted to explore the relationship of libertarianism, anarchism iron Rand iron Rand's attitude toward libertarians and other such issues one interesting thing is that John Hospice ran for president on the Libertarian party ticket and I think it was 72 and iron Rand did not see fit to endorse you even though you were a lot closer to her than Reagan or Goldwater or anyone else I had been excommunicated before that it was going around a lot I guess that was one of the reasons I left after I got to the basement or the ground floor it occurred I discussed all this I had a two part article in liberty in 1990 which I suppose some of you have read entitled conversations with iron Rand so I almost purposely didn't include this evening the things that were included in that long article but at any rate to make a long story very short I was on the committee of the American Society for aesthetics to get some speakers and so I suggested her and she said ok you would know my work better than anyone else will you be the critic I mean everyone had to have a critic so I said ok but a critic of course can't just stand up and say the talk was wonderful and then sit down again so I thought of some critical remarks I didn't think I overdid it but at any rate she really took it amiss and took it as personal insult and that was it that was the end of it no more I guess one of the things that was perturbing to me in my experience at NBI is the vicious response to people questioning you know it wasn't usually hostile questions but many just not understanding and she would be very very you're putting it really too strongly that was the exception but it was that sort of response that was the exception it wasn't only that way but pretty much every session or every other session there'd be one I don't mean to whitewash her because I think it was a serious mistake and one of the things it did was stop students from asking questions yes they were afraid to they don't blame them the only questions they would ask would be very softball questions yes there would never be anything that would challenge her because they were afraid it was a chilling kind of an effect I'd like to tell you what is a part of my explanation not the whole I think I discussed this with you the other night but let me say it again I am aware of certain issues in my own psychology for instance I should not have a conversation about the draft with anybody because I can't stay calm I can't talk in a civilized way I start to yell instantly and the reason I can't stay calm is that when somebody says the draft I see butchered young bodies on a field but I feel like I'm literally seeing it and my sense of the other person is look that's what you're talking about that's what you're advocating they don't see it that way and some part of me knows it but it's so clear to me it's so self-evident that I just lose my patience my everything instantly I think that happened to Ayan especially as she got older in a great many ways in the early days that I knew her she would understand that since her philosophical ideas were in many ways new to her readers they wouldn't she couldn't both say she was presenting a moral system which was brand new and expect people to already know it and not to ask questions that would imply they didn't already know it but in some areas she would see the consequences of some error like I see the butchered bodies it would be so self-evident to her so obvious that she simply couldn't put up with other people not seeing it she forgot that it wasn't self-evident it did require explanation and that's why sometimes she would regret later that she'd become angry and would know that the person really didn't understand and in effect had a right not to understand but I think this was part of why she did grow angry