A previously unpublished interview with Nathaniel Branden

My 1999 discussion with Ayn Rand's long-time associate

In the summer of 1999, I had the opportunity to interview Nathaniel Branden at his home in Beverly Hills. I was then 23, fresh out of college, and writing for a short-lived student publication called The Restoration. The headlines at the time were dominated by the horrific murders of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado, which was one of the subjects I asked Branden about. Another was the film The Passion of Ayn Rand, released in January 1999, and based on the biography of the same title written by Branden’s ex-wife Barbara. Although a short portion of this interview appeared in The Restoration, it has never been published in its entirety before.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a publication willing to publish it, so instead of a monthly update, I’m posting it here.

Sandefur: Do you think that there is a crisis of self esteem among youth today? They always like to talk about crises?

Branden: It’s very difficult to speak in generalities, because news reports, of course, naturally, tend to focus on negatives. And one always wonders whether or not there are large, perfectly healthy segments of the population, at least relatively speaking, who are simply not regarded as newsworthy and are therefore not part of contemporary news coverage. So it’s easy enough to point out aspects of troubled youth, but one always wonders what percentage of the population we’re talking about. It’s an easy enough generalization to say that many young people today are confused, disoriented, goalless, and of course are suffering from problems in the area of self-esteem. Of course you could say that. But if you ask what percentage of the population are we talking about, I wouldn’t be able to answer that question.

Sandefur: But would you say that something like the Columbine High School massacre can be interpreted as being caused by a problem of the self-esteem of the people who caused it?

Branden: Oh, without doubt yes, only let’s not be too quick to generalize from that, because over the last five or four years, violence in the schools has been steadily decreasing. The Columbine massacre was very much of an exception to what has been the trend in the last five or so years. Which is not how it’s treated by the media. But if you ask me, with regard to the perpetrators, do they clearly have massive self-esteem problems, I don’t think that anybody would dispute that they do. Did.

Sandefur: What do you think of education in psychology today? In the schools?

Branden: I think it varies very much from university to university and from professor to professor. It’s not easy to say. I’m inclined to think that it’s better than when I went to school, because at that time, psychology was dominated by psychoanalysis and behaviorism. And that today there is a much wider range of perspectives, and I think that psychology is far more sophisticated and advanced. In that respect I would have to say that at least relatively, it’s better than it was during the time when I was getting my education.

Sandefur: Now you say that it was dominated by psychoanalysis.

Branden: And behaviorism.

Sandefur: But you refer to yourself as a psychoanalyst, don’t you?

Branden: Never.

Sandefur: What’s the difference?

Branden: A psychoanalyst means someone who subscribes to the psychological theory and the psychotherapeutic techniques that were developed by Sigmund Freud. Someone who works in that tradition. The public often treats psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and psychologists as synonyms, but they’re not. Psychoanalysis is a school of psychology and a school of psychotherapy, whose founder was Sigmund Freud.

Sandefur: I know your disagreements with Freud.

Branden: Right. I would never call myself a psychoanalyst. Maybe some person in an article who doesn’t understand these distinctions might, but that would be their error of knowledge.

Sandefur: So you wouldn’t say that modern life and technology and things puts a psychological strain on Americans that life before say the Industrial Revolution didn’t have?

Branden: I would say that every significant progress offers advantages and confers costs. And I would say that we live in a time when there are incredible opportunities and incredible options, and at the same time, it’s very easy for people to stagger from information overload, and to feel stressed out by the sheer enormity of what they have to learn about in order to operate in the modern world. So I would say that there are great causes of stress today. Information explosion [or] overload is one. And the other is, of course, the escalating rate of change.

Now the important word in that sentence is “rate.” In other words, it isn’t just that we have to accommodate many new dramatic changes, but the rate of change itself is escalating, and I don’t know, but I suspect, that this is causing some measure of almost global anxiety, even among people who have almost no understanding of what’s happening in the world, or how the world is changing. But at some level there is the awareness that things are changing, they’re changing very, very fast, nobody knows what it all means or where we’re headed, and I think that more unconsciously than consciously, this is a source of anxiety that is almost worldwide.

Sandefur: Would you see that as a damning trait of capitalism?

Branden: As a damning trait of capitalism?

Sandefur: Yeah. Capitalism causes these changes, and so it is therefore unfit for humans?

Branden: No, I would say that it is the nature of reality. That, as I said earlier in the interview, whenever we move forward, we gain new powers, and new knowledge, there are advantages, and there are also new problems or challenges. That’s the nature of reality. It’s not an issue of capitalism, unless you want to blame capitalism for the nature of reality, and maintain that if you were God, you would have organized things better. Unless that’s the position you’re taking, this is just one of the costs.

Sandefur: Have you seen the movie Pleasantville?

Branden: Yeah.

Sandefur: That’s the sort of thing you’re talking about then, that you have to take the bad with the good—

Branden: Yes, exactly.

Sandefur: —in order not to live in a sterile society.

Branden: Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Sandefur: What do you think of Dr. Laura Schlessinger?

Branden: Dr. Schlessinger teaches a kind of traditional, I’m tempted to say Judeo-Christian morality, but it’s more Christian than Judeo, even though she herself, I think, is Jewish. Her following is among Midwestern Christians. That’s the enormous area of her following. I don’t like the disrespect, and often the contempt, with which she characterizes people whose beliefs or behaviors are not ones she approves of. I don’t believe in sarcasm or abuse or vilification of people as good teaching tools. So for that reason, even though I might agree with her on some points, I would not like often the way that she elects to communicate her views. I don’t think that she’s a good role model.

Sandefur: What about—I can’t remember the name of the author—of the Mars and Venus books. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus?

Branden: John Gray.

Sandefur: Yeah.

Branden: I think they’re fairly superficial. I think that they contain ideas which many people will relate to. I think it’s all rather gimmicky. That doesn’t mean that he never makes any good observations. Almost anybody who is that successful is probably saying some things that are true and useful. But I never was able to get through one of his books completely because I find them so shallow, and prone to oversimplification of complex psychological realities that I had to stop.

Sandefur: What about—do you think that romance and realism are opposites?

Branden: Not at all, or rather, I believe in romantic realism. I believe that romantic love is a possibility, but it requires far more of us in terms of psychological development and maturity than we were ever taught. It requires to be successful, that we bring a lot of consciousness to our relationships, that we be self-accepting, and accepting of our partner. It requires that we operate at a higher level of self-responsibility. It really asks a lot of us in terms of emotional maturity. And people confuse romantic love with infatuation, with neediness, with sex attraction, and such relationships don’t tend to enjoy long life, and when they fail, romantic love takes the blame, but really, that’s a mistake. I wrote about all this some years ago, of course, in a book of mine entitled The Psychology of Romantic Love.

Sandefur: Which I really enjoyed.

Branden: Thank you, but I also wrote about it, an updated very brief treatment that I really like a lot in a relatively newer book of mine called Taking Responsibility. I wrote a chapter on what the concept of living self-responsibly means in the context of marriage or romantic love, and it ended up being maybe my favorite chapter in the book.

Sandefur: I’m afraid I haven’t read that one.

Branden: That’s okay.

Sandefur: What place does irrationality have in human psychology? Is Nietzsche on the right track [in his 1872 book The Birth of Tragedy] with his Apollo-Dionysus [distinction]? Do you think we have to have an element of irrationality in our—

Branden: I don’t think about it in those terms. Let me think. Well, I would say that I don’t know anybody that didn’t have some irrationality in his or her makeup. Probably it’s inevitable. I don’t think that we are going to be perfectly rational, any of us twenty-four hours a day, but at the same time, I think that we should keep striving to improve our average. And be realistic about the fact that we have limitations, we’re not gods, and rather than collapse into guilt for whatever errors we’ve made, it’s far more useful to say, or ask, how can I learn to do better next time? So I always think in terms of raising my average, and I encourage my clients to think that way, to raise their average.

Sandefur: Do you think hero worship is ultimately dangerous?

Branden: It depends what you mean by hero-worship. It can mean a passionate admiration for someone in whom you see qualities that you greatly admire, and you see clearly and you see realistically, and you have a reality-based grounds for your response to this person. I don’t see that as dangerous. But I also am aware of the fact that what people call hero worship can be a kind of blind adulation, an uncritical adulation, which is dangerous. I think that one of the challenges of being an adult is the ability to love and admire somebody but at the same time not deceive oneself about their imperfections and shortcomings, realizing that we all have shortcomings, so what? But if we try to tell ourselves that we don’t, or that the other person that we are hero worshiping doesn’t, we step outside of reality, which is never a good idea.

Sandefur: Yeah, and that of course would be what it was like in the “collective” with Ayn Rand.

Branden: Most emphatically yes. We were all committed to the idea of Ayn Rand’s perfection as a human being. And therefore any time she did anything that didn’t make sense, we took that as evidence of a limitation of ours.

Sandefur: I notice in some of your books you talk about having certain disagreements with Objectivism as Rand puts forward, now, that you, at least, didn’t think of then. But when I read the books, it sounds more like a difference of emphasis rather than a real fundamental disagreement. Do you think that’s accurate, or do you think there are fundamental disagreements?

Branden: Well, I think yes, there are real disagreements. I disagree with almost, almost everything Ayn Rand said that pertained to human psychology. I think that her psychological explanations of why people do things are almost never correct. I think her whole analysis of mysticism in Galt’s speech is ludicrous to anyone who has taken the trouble to acquaint himself, begun even to a modest degree, to acquaint himself with the literature of mysticism. I don’t mean—I emphatically do not mean by that that one would end up agreeing with mysticism. I certainly have not. But I do realize that to simplify it to “whim-worshiping,” and dependence on the minds of others, is so far from what mysticism in its serious sense is all about that it just shows a profound ignorance on the part of Rand.

I also would mention the fact that there is a great deal missing in Ayn Rand’s work, and one would never understand from her work that 98 percent of the goals that any of us have require the cooperation of other people, and therefore the ability to relate to other human beings in cooperative endeavors is supremely important to get our tasks and goals accomplished. And therefore any code of ethics needs far more guidance on human relationships and human dealings than she provides. Another really big omission to anyone who attempts to write a comprehensive ethics, there is no treatment in her literature, in a serious way, of a person who makes moral mistakes, corrects, them, and achieves a comeback—moral redemption. She only shows errors of knowledge being corrected, like [the character] Hank Rearden [in Atlas Shrugged] being the most conspicuous. The only example at all of a moral comeback in the book is [the character known as] the Wet Nurse.

Sandefur: Wouldn’t you say Dominique [in The Fountainhead] is one?

Branden: No, because she’s never presented in The Fountainhead as an immoral person, who’s done anything morally wrong. She’s treated as a misguided idealist. And the closest thing to the person who does things that are immoral is Wynand, but observe that Wynand doesn’t really have a comeback, Wynand is destroyed at the end. He never really makes up for it.

And yet the truth of the matter is, that all human beings have done some things that they shouldn’t have done, and not simply through ignorance. Therefore how they should relate to their faulty behavior, how they should be assessed, what they should do about it are questions that a proper code of ethics has to address. That’s one of the reasons that I wrote about it in several of my books. I wrote about it in Honoring the Self, I wrote about it in How to Raise Your Self Esteem, and I wrote about it in The Six Pillars of Self Esteem. Because all of my books, or most of them, not all of them, are disguised works of ethics. They’re all books about values. Took me a long time to really realize that. I didn’t start out knowing that much. I started out thinking, well, I’m just writing about my psychological observations and experiences and the things I’ve learned working with people. And wasn’t until I was in my fifties I really began to understand the extent to which, at the most fundamental level, I’m a teacher of moral values. Only the vehicle through which I work is psychology.

Sandefur: In that regard, since psychology is obviously so connected to philosophy, would you say that it’s—you know there are those who would regard it as not really a science. Would you say that that’s accurate, that it’s not really a science?

Branden: No, I would not agree with that, because, to begin with, I don’t think it’s difficult to show empirically, that the values that I recommend in my writings work better for people than their opposites. I don’t think that you need laboratory tests to establish all forms of knowledge. I think there are forms of knowledge that are checkable against common experience, and I think that Rand was right in her concept of life as the standard of value, in other words, of looking at good and bad and right and wrong from the standpoint of that which, in the nature of things serves and supports the life of a rational being, or that which undermines and destroys it. I think that’s a very good starting place. And if you accept the idea that the purpose of ethics is to facilitate your leading and fulfilling of a successful life, if you accept that as what the ethical enterprise is ultimately about, then I think it’s possible for intelligent and reasonable people to think through what are the principles of action that tend to support life and well-being, and which are the ones that tend to undermine it. So from that point of view, I think we can talk about ethics as potentially a scientific discipline, if by scientific you really mean something rationally demonstrable, not necessarily something involving test tubes.

Sandefur: Right. What about art? How do you view Rand’s philosophy of art? I noticed you have so much art in this collection, do you think about art in the same way that you did when you were with her?

Branden: I have so much art in the collection?

Sandefur: In the hallway.

Branden: You mean in the house here?

Sandefur: Right.

Branden: Now what’s the question again?

Sandefur: When you purchase a work of art, do you think along the same lines that are set forth in The Romantic Manifesto? How much of that do you agree with?

Branden: Well, first of all, at least half of the art my wife brought with her. I don’t know by what criteria it was selected. I look at it—whether or not—from the perspective, do I like it or not; is it something I want to look at every day or not? I don’t think consciously in terms of those issues, because there are lots of reasons to like a work of art. I’m not certain that the reasons given by Rand are exhaustive, although I am very sympathetic in a very general way.

I’m inclined to say that I tend to enjoy the most art which conforms to her criteria. If you put it to me that way, then I would say emphatically yes. But I probably would be more tolerant than she, although I am not certain of this, I’m inclined to think that I would be in terms of what I can enjoy from limited aspects.

Sandefur: Well the example that came to mind when I was thinking about it was, I know that she really disliked The Man of La Mancha, whereas I know that you are friends with the person who wrote that, and I assume that you like that play, and so I was wondering why you would like it and she would not.

Branden: Well, I liked the sheer theatricality of it. I liked the cleverness of the whole idea of the way that Dale Wasserman chose to tell the story, because the actor is playing both the historical Cervantes, he’s playing the old man who hallucinates being Don Quixote, and then he plays Don Quixote. And I thought that as sheer theater, the way this was done was brilliant. I thought the writing was very fine. I liked the music very much. Now, what wrecked all of the foregoing for Rand was the fact that idealism was presented as related to madness. So you could say, if one took a sympathetic perspective of Man of La Mancha, you could say that it’s a play about the redemptive power of idealism, because of how he redeems, for example, Dulcinea, or makes better persons of those who fall in love with him. Now Rand would object, she would say yes, but this person who does all that is presented as insane. And that for her would invalidate everything else, and I would say, more, that would be a severe limitation on how fully I would enjoy the work of art, but I would be more willing to go along for the ride; accept that as a shortcoming that I regret, but he was choosing to tell the story of Cervantes which required therefore that—and I say “I’m going to give him that for the next two hours and come along for the ride.”

Sandefur: Me too. In your essay on “The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand,” you talk just briefly about what you call a “scientific conservatism” about Rand, that she was hesitant

towards science ever done after Newton.

Branden: Oh yes, oh yes. Right.

Sandefur: Why do you think that is, and how do you think that manifests itself?

Branden: Well, I’ll never forget my shock when she told me that she wasn’t at all convinced that the theory of evolution was true. It was only a hypothesis, she informed me. I never recovered from that conversation, and my astonishment. She somehow—she often looked at things from the perspective, does it make man look good or bad? An example of that would be how she became and atheist when she was twelve or thirteen, because, again, she said, well, if there were a God, that would imply that there was something higher in the universe than man, a state that man couldn’t achieve, and therefore it’s degrading to man, therefore I’m against it. Well, that’s actually a lousy argument.

Sandefur: Not very logical.

Branden: Because after all if God exists, He exists, whatever the consequences would be. The question is, what grounds are there to assert God’s existence—not, what are the implications for man if God exists? So I regard that as kind of surprising reasoning coming from Ayn Rand. But it illustrates the fact that I think that her reticence about evolution was that part of her, she practically said this to me once, she likes the idea of man appearing full grown on the earth, rather than coming out of a more primitive life form, but you know, I don’t think that she understood that even after that which we call man did appear on the earth, man as he first appeared was radically unlike man as we know him today, because the psychological stages of cognitive development, like for example [child psychologist Jean] Piaget has outlined more systematically than others, also were stages in the cognitive development of the human race, meaning that for thousands of years the first people never got beyond the first level. And it took a long time for us to evolve into what we call the rational beings of the twentieth century. I don’t think that was understood by Rand either.

Sandefur: Do you think perhaps she feared the implication which was that what we consider rationality in man today, may someday in the future turn out to be primitive and meaningless?

Branden: Well, it wouldn’t be meaningless any more than we would look back and say the earlier forms were meaningless.

Sandefur: Right.

Branden: I would say that she would not have liked that implication.

(Interruption)

Branden: I have a hunch, I’m going to test a hypothesis next fall. About Rand, the answer to your question is yes, but next fall, David Kelley invited me to, you know, he has in the fall this Objectivism Today conference in New York City, and he gave me a very challenging assignment, one that will require some serious new thinking on my part. He says, “I’d like you to talk about our spiritual needs in the context of an Objectivist framework. What are spiritual needs?” Now, one of the ideas I would want to address is the fact that we have no reason to assume that evolution stopped with us.

Sandefur: Right. Which is something Nietzsche addresses thoroughly, which is why I’m so surprised that Rand would not go in that same direction.

Branden: Right, quite so. My point is this, I once attempted to explain this to some Objectivists, and they had difficulty with the idea that we are it. Now the interesting thing is, that I’m not at all certain—you know at every age of human development, there are some minds that are already operating at a level different from most of the people at that period of history. So during the period when the human race in general was doing basically kind of a magical thinking, you had some people who were already able to think in a more rational and logical manner.

The paradox is that I think that Rand herself in her cognitive development was in certain respects ahead of most of the human race, but not just in terms of intelligence, which would be the conventional explanation, because she was a genius. I can’t prove this but I actually think that the way her mind worked was in ways that I don’t profess to understand, different from the way that most highly intelligent minds work, including her best followers. I think that in some respects she herself was already, I wonder about this, at another stage in certain aspects of cognitive development, because of what she regarded as obvious, and took a long time for many of us even to grasp. I will say without arrogance that I was faster than anyone else in the group, but even so, I was often stunned by her particular way of seeing things. For example, you give her any of those—there are standard psychology tests, you know, two lines, one the arrows going in the others going out, and you ask which lines are longer?

Sandefur: Right.

Branden: And almost everybody who doesn’t know about it interprets one as longer. She always saw them correctly. She never—any of those psychological tests—they never fooled her. She always looked—she said “It’s obvious, the lines are the same length.” And I tried a few other things of that kind, and she never had conventional responses. She reports she never in her life had a déjà vu experience. So, what that has to do with our spiritual needs, to fill in the gap there very briefly, is, I think we often sense that there are places to go in terms of the development of our consciousness that we can’t articulate, and where we certainly haven’t gone yet. But I think there is some yearning, or some higher level of development. Some sense that there’s another level on which to apprehend reality, that we are often groping toward, and have great difficulty articulating what we’re even talking about.

Sandefur: Yeah. I can see how she would have been very hesitant toward that notion as being borderline mysticism, she would say.

Branden: Yes. And I’m curious to know whether I’ll run into that problem next fall, with that audience.

Sandefur: Yeah, I bet you will. Do you think that her inability to understand the process of evolution is behind, for example, her rejection of [Friedrich] Hayek?

Branden: She only read, as far as I know, The Road to Serfdom. And she was antagonized almost from page one on which he announces that he has no selfish interest in advancing the views in this book. And then again, you know, if you remember the book, it is by no means a fully consistent advocacy of total and absolute laissez-faire.

Sandefur: Yeah, and also his refusal to make moral pronouncements.

Branden: Exactly. So all of that would have antagonized her. I don’t think she even was even aware of his epistemological and other theories in his later books.

Sandefur: Well, I noticed you have two copies of the Virginia Postrel book [The Future and Its Enemies] on the shelf.

Branden: I do?

Sandefur: Yeah, there’s one here at the bottom left and one there at the top right. Have you read the book?

Branden: Yes.

Sandefur: Do you think Rand would have enjoyed [Postrel’s] notion of dynamism versus stasis?

Branden: Yeah.

Sandefur: You do?

Branden: Yeah, because some of that you’ll find in Isabel Paterson’s God of the Machine. Yeah, sure.

Sandefur: I haven’t read Paterson yet. I tried to; I got through two chapters, but it was just too difficult to read.

Branden: When I met Ayn Rand, or before I met her, and I was to learn about capitalism from her, she said she wouldn’t undertake to teach me from scratch, so I had to read two books before she would meet me. One was Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson, and the other was Isabel Paterson’s God of the Machine.

Sandefur: Okay. Well, I do intend to read it someday, but I have read the Hazlitt book, so I’m half educated on capitalism. Do you think that monogamy can be defended on logical grounds, or do you think that it’s just a purely traditional thing that we can’t seem to overcome?

Branden: I don’t know if you’ve read my book The Psychology of Romantic Love?

Sandefur: Well, I’m just asking the questions for the interview.

Branden: I don’t think you really mean monogamy, I think you mean sexual exclusivity.

Sandefur: Okay, actually, that is part of it, but I meant being married for life to one person, as being the way marriage “should” be.

Branden: I’ll tell you why that is, I think, unrealistic. We have to realize that when that vision of monogamy originated, a man’s life expectancy was 26, and a woman’s was a good deal less, and by the time that a man died at 26, he might have had three wives, the first two had died in childbirth. So that the concept of being married for life had a very different meaning than it has when people are living to be 80 or 90. Now, to see this in perspective, let’s suppose that modern science advanced to the stage where the average life expectancy was 1,000, and you meet and marry a woman, let’s say, when you’re 25. Would anybody be likely to expect that you’d still be married to that person a thousand years later? I don’t think so. Okay, so therefore, let’s suppose that the average life expectancy was 500 years. So you see the argument. So I don’t see how one can take a position, and say, given how long we live, and given the extent of the changes to the very nature of life, that this is the way it should be, if we were all reasonable. I also think, and I think there’s evidence to support this, that some of us have greater novelty needs than others. And that for people who have higher novelty needs, lifelong monogamy is probably unrealistic psychologically.

Sandefur: So would you then go all the way and say that Objectivism is inherently free love?

Branden: Define free love.

Sandefur: In the sense that it abolishes entirely the institution of marriage.

Branden: Say again?

Sandefur: Abolish the institution of marriage, and just have open relationships, as the term is.

Branden: No, I wouldn’t say, first of all, Objectivism. I’m not speaking for Objectivism, I’m speaking for myself.

Sandefur: Okay, a rational psychological approach.

Branden: No, I can see reasons for getting married, obviously, since I got married, and more than once. So I like being married. At the same time I’m keenly aware that my age is relevant. I don’t have a great answer to some of the problems that surround this issue. Let me explain what I mean by that. As I said in The Psychology of Romantic Love, for most people, monogamy doesn’t work. And for most people, open relationships don’t work either. And for most people, nothing works. You get what I’m saying?

Sandefur: Yes.

Branden: And that to achieve a successful relationship, and make it work over a serious length of time, with or without absolute sexual exclusivity, is, for most of the human race, quite a challenging enterprise. Would you agree with that?

Sandefur: Yeah. Personally.

Branden: Right, so you have to know yourself, and I think I’m tempted to tell people, you have to make a custom-made solution that works for you and your partner, and not try to buy your lifestyle off the rack. It’s not realistic.

Sandefur: Right. Well, I would think that sexuality and marriage are such intensely powerful and personal things that you can’t come up with one answer for more than one person at a time.

Branden: Yes, exactly.

Sandefur: Three more questions. The first is, do you want to respond to the Showtime movie [The Passion of Ayn Rand]? Because I thought it was really awful, and I didn’t know if you’d want to even discuss it.

Branden: Sure. What do you want me to respond to?

Sandefur: I mean, what did you think of it?

Branden: I thought that the Showtime movie was very disappointing, as a portrayal of Ayn Rand, of her philosophy, or of the Objectivist culture. Apart from the fact that I thought that the performance of Helen Mirren was magnificent, and I thought the performance of Fonda was excellent, all the performances were really good. I liked least Eric Stoltz’s performance, but quite aside from the acting, the biggest criticism I had was with the script. Because none of us, of the four people involved, Ayn, Frank, Barbara, or myself, would ever have said a single sentence that was given to us in that movie. It’s very, very difficult for most American writers to write dialogue for intellectuals. In other words, to write dialogue that is entertaining, and that reflects a high level of intellectuality. And therefore almost all the efforts in the movie were very stilted and artificial.

On a most personal level, I was offended by the fact that they gave me a romance, first of all with a patient, and secondly with someone whose psychological problems—anyone who knows me knows would be anathema to me. They picked somebody, an invented relationship rather than the real relationship I had with Patrecia, and they picked somebody who was Patrecia’s diametrical opposite, in every respect one can think of. I can’t shake off the feeling there was something quite malicious about that choice.

Sandefur: I couldn’t either. I got that feeling too.

Branden: Barbara Branden’s biography, which of course was the source for this film, was, I think, a good book. I don’t agree with all the interpretations and perspectives in it, but I think it is certainly a good book, a good biography, and the screenplay failed the book, and I was surprised that Barbara’s publicly expressed reservations about the film were as modest as they were. It was hard for me to believe that she was as pleased with the film as she says she was, but I have no explanation for that. I would have to say that if you read Bill Bradford’s critique of the film in Liberty magazine, I agree with it very much.

Sandefur: I don’t know if I read that or not. I was reading a critique of it on a website that was by a guy named Jose Peña, I guess it was, and we were trying to figure out why she liked it.

Branden: You don’t mean to say Piñera, do you?

Sandefur: No, I don’t think it was Piñera, because I’ve heard his name before. It might have been, he’s in South Africa right now, so—

Branden: I don’t remember.

Sandefur: I have a good friend, she’s new to the Objectivist thing, she’s just read Atlas Shrugged, and she is of course filled with the usual first stage which is, I give up on the world, I’ll move off to the hinterlands and if I do have any interaction with the world it will be through letter-bombs kind of reaction. How do you react to people who do that? What advice do you give to people who say the world is so screwed up now, and there’s no dealing with it, so I should really just “shrug”?

Branden: Well, and do what?

Sandefur: Try and live off the land, I guess.

Branden: Well, that’s fine if you want to do that, but that’s not carrying out the lesson of Atlas Shrugged, because those people withdraw, strategically to produce a specific result. They didn’t withdraw simply because they were disgusted. That’s going on strike psychologically, at best, I would say, because a person doesn’t know what to do. But that’s not exactly a model to emulate. For some reason this reminds me of an exchange that Henrik Ibsen had with some woman who left her husband for some lover, and she presented herself to Ibsen kind of as a free spirit and a liberated woman, and claimed to get her inspiration from Nora in Ibsen’s Doll House. And Ibsen said to her, in effect, I’m quoting from memory of decades ago, “But madam, Nora went alone, when she left her husband.” So your story isn’t very different from this.

Now what that’s got to do with these people is, when the strikers quit, they didn’t just quit. They quit with an intention to bring down that society. They were very active, they kept trying to convert other people to quit. Otherwise, you are just surrendering the world to the bad guys. And what a person who’s a little more intelligently selfish about his or her life does is say, Okay, within the context of life in society as it is today, what’s the best kind of life I can create for myself? Or you could say, What’s the best deal I can get? Because nothing is easier than just resigning yourself to suffering. That doesn’t take any brains. It certainly doesn’t take any strength of character.

Sandefur: If you could give one message to the college or high school students in America today, what would it be?

Branden: If your disenchantment with the hypocrisy of grownups results in emotional shallowness on your part, and irrational self-destructive behavior, then you have surrendered your life to the very people who have disappointed you. The only solution to an unhappy childhood that’s worth anything is a happy adulthood. Fight for that.

Sandefur: Thank you very much.