Ayn Rand’s Certainty

ARI: Mary Ann, getting back to your positive response to her certainty. Did anyone ever accuse you of being attracted to her because you wanted an authority figure in your life?
MARY ANN: Yes, I used to hear that frequently—but I haven’t heard it for many years. It didn’t take me long to learn that although it was said as a criticism of me, the real target was her philosophy and her certainty that her philosophy was right.
ARI: Could you elaborate on this point?
MARY ANN: Some critics have tried to turn her certainty into a desire on her part to be an authority in the bad sense, and they accuse her of being dogmatic, of demanding unquestioning agreement and blind loyalty. They have tried, but none successfully, to make her into the leader of a cult, and followers of her philosophy into cultists who accept without thinking everything she says. This is a most unjust accusation; it’s really perverse. Unquestioning agreement is precisely what Ayn Rand did not want. She wanted you to think and act independently, not to accept conclusions because she said so, but because you reached them by using your mind in an independent and firsthand manner. She was adamant about it: your conclusions should result from your observations of reality and your thinking, not hers. Now, she could help you along in that process, and, as we all know, she did. But she never wanted you to substitute her mind for yours.
ARI: Charles, you must have some thoughts on this issue. Why do you think some critics claim the opposite to be the case?
CHARLES: What it comes down to is that they resent her for her ideas. They resent certainty and what it comes from—from holding reason as an absolute, from basing one’s knowledge and conclusions exclusively on observation and thinking conceptually, from holding a consistent, integrated philosophy. She often stressed that last point—that Objectivism is an integrated philosophy, that it cannot be accepted piecemeal, that one cannot take an option on principles of Objectivism and apply them only when and if it is convenient—that is, when they don’t clash with irrational desires and deceptive behavior. Some people attempted to do that. And whenever she saw evidence of it, she did not let it go by. She always named the issue, always called a spade a spade. She made it clear that you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. You cannot say you hold reason as an absolute and then indulge in petty evasions, or go back on your word, or breach contracts, or tell lies to get a value you don’t deserve, or say that everything is a matter of opinion, that everything is relative. When she saw someone doing this, she didn’t let them get away with it. She named what they were doing. She always brought reason and reality back into the picture.