The Self Esteem Movement and its Unexpected Underpinnings.

Those who teach Believe It and Be it! neglected to inform their followers that there are millions of people playing air guitar but only one Eddie van Halen.

I wrote a series of essays about Ayn Rand that appeared in a private group some years ago in which I outlined all the reasons why I read and followed Rand for years, and why I subsequently broke with her teachings. Overwhelmingly, my supporters opted in to read these essays. 

Here we go, with some edits and additions.

Much of what we read and see in memes about Rand and her beliefs is misleading or false. The point of that is to subvert without engagement. It's a useful tactic, but it's also intellectually dishonest. If I disagree with something, I want that to come from a place of knowledge.

Ayn Rand was very much a product of time and place, and she had a major impact on the American political and cultural landscape, and I'm not just talking about those Republicans. 

In the Unintended Consequences Department, Ayn Rand is largely responsible for the Self Esteem Movement which got rolling in the 1970's and swept through every school, church, and New Age weekend retreat. All those trophies you got for graduating from the kindergarten to the 1st grade, and every participation certificate, that's a direct result of the Self Esteem Movement.

Some people credit a California politician named John Vasconcellos with creating the movement which informed the leftist landscape for decades, asserting that unconditional positive regard was the key to personal growth. 

But The Psychology of Self Esteem, a book by Nathaniel Branden, was written in 1969, years before Vasconcellos and his compatriots decided to embrace unbridled self love. Branden was a hard core Rand devotee, and the self esteem essays which were the core of his book were originally published in Ayn Rand's The Objectivist newsletter.

Later self esteem movement enthusiasts took the surface meaning of Branden's work - esteem for self precipitates positive life results - and whittled away the hard stuff. 

Hard stuff which boils down to: esteem for self is not enough without self work.

According to Branden, there is self-esteem and then there is psuedo-self esteem - "an irrational pretense at self value". 

Almost everything about the rest of the Self Esteem Movement boils down to feel-good and you will get goodness.

Branden doesn't teach that, and Rand would never teach that. Others, including lots of people who ended up on Oprah, got the cream from Rand because they didn't really grok the meat of the message, because the meat of the message is tough to chew. 

The Psychology of Self Esteem is still in print to this day. In it, Branden emphasizes the necessity of moral underpinnings to create a self esteem foundation, the pursuit of good values, conscious choices, and the objective reality of who you are, as opposed to the dream of what you would like to be but have not earned. 

True self esteem can only come by learning from failure, building skills, the acceptance of reality, and the conscious work to improve the reality you live in.

Ayn Rand is a tough cookie, inflexible and ruthless. Branden could be considered a kinder, gentler version of Ayn Rand, but he's no cuddly bunny, either.  There is nothing of that toughness and critical introspection in the Self Esteem Movement, which is why it's so funny when you think of where it all came from.

You know how I'm always writing "Advice works for the people for whom it can work?" 

I long ago realized that there was a lot in Rand/Branden's teaching that worked for me, but a lot that didn't. The self esteem movement that teaches Believe It and Be it! neglected to inform their followers that there are millions of people playing air guitar but only one Eddie van Halen.

Belief is simply not enough, but without self belief you will never get anywhere. All self belief must come from a solid core. You cannot change for the better unless you think you can. But even if you make those changes, that doesn't guarantee you reward.

When I was a kid, girls were rarely encouraged to do anything except to become wives and mothers. If you have ever had anyone get in your face about how selfish it is to want to be an artist, get into a time machine and turn the clock back 40 years and multiply that attitude by 100.

When I was in my teens a local paper did a profile on me. In the interview I declared that I wanted to be an artist and so would not marry. Most of the women artists I'd read about had bad luck with marriage or were a lot better off without it, so I decided I would be married to art.

People sought my mother out to tell her I was a bad, wicked, depraved girl, and that I was selfish, and blah blah, because any girl who did not get married and produce children was deviant. I still get crap - including this notable diatribe from another woman artist - who lectured me about my "single woman privilege" (this is a term she made up BTW, there is absolutely no such "privilege", and after having this woman rail at me about this on the phone, hours of searching for papers or essays on the matter have turned up absolutely nothing,) and how unfair it is that my career sailed without the burden of her cargo of husband and kids.

Marriage was your choice, honey.

Reading Ayn Rand helped me through this.

Also, no matter what anyone says on a meme on Facebook, Ayn Rand was devoted to art. Many of her protagonists are artists. She's written numerous essays about art. 

How anyone thinks she doesn't love art I do not know, though it is true that she has rather baffling criterion for what she considered good and bad art, but we'll get into that later.

Be that as it may, when Ayn Rand wrote that "selfish" was just a label society slapped on people who dared to go off that beaten path, it was just what I needed to hear and it came at just the right moment. (In true Howard Roark fashion - Roark was the protagonist of Rand's book The Fountainhead: he was an architect who destroyed a building rather than allow his creation to be bastardized by others - I took original art from entire projects and consigned the work to the flames. How selfish!)

Ayn Rand used the word "selfish" ironically to title her book The Virtue of Selfishness. She wrote, "If this be treason, make the most of it," and believed it was far more selfish for people who did not contribute to want to profit from the work of others than it was for achievers to distribute the fruits of their labors where they wished. She didn't believe you shouldn't share if you wanted: she just didn't believe you should be forced to share. "Rational selfishness" was opposed to self sacrifice, sacrifice defined as the giving up of something of great value (your wants/needs/life) for something of lesser value (their wants/ needs/life).

However, if the other person's wants/needs/life are of value to you, then it is no sacrifice to give to them. You do it because giving to them brings you value. To Randians, everything you ever do that is of value is selfish, therefore no act is truly altruistic. 

We could be here all day arguing altruism, egoism and effective altruism, but whatever.

This whole scene runs rhetorical circles around definitions of value, morality, sacrifice, etc, and sometimes got toxic AF, but the larger point was it gave me a basis from which I could argue for what I truly wanted - the Art Centered Life - over pressure from social norms.

People told me my uterus was a public utility that total strangers could lay claim to because it was more selfish for me to want to draw comic books than it was for them to declare I should be breeding on their terms and on their schedule, preferably before age 25 when women get old.

And yet...I'm the selfish one? 

Hoo boy.

Ayn Rand showed me it was OK to be an artist. That it was OK to feel good about yourself if you worked for it and earned it. And it was OK to say no to people who were happy to drain your time, energy, and resources while returning nothing but lectures about how it was unfair that you weren't married with real life responsibilities, and you owe it to them to babysit their kids at conventions, I swear to God this is true, and once I practically had an entire nursery behind my table at a show and I barely knew these people, and I noticed none of them were asking men to take care of their kids and the minute you say no, they spread rumors that you hate kids.

But I digress.

Back in the day, a girl being told she could live her life her own way was revolutionary. Being told I did not have to do what all the other girls were doing was awesome. 

I was so used to the pressure of being the good girl and saying yes to every single damned thing people asked of me, that my teachers in high school routinely had me doing seminars, and creating posters, and fliers, and participating in groups, and extracurricular whatnots that one day I had a breakdown in class and had to be trotted out to the nurse's office and taken home by my perplexed mom because I had no idea how I was going to find the time to do everything everyone wanted me to do, and I did not have a clue how to say no.

The overachiever life is self imposed hell because there I was, sacrificing my own needs to make other people happy, no matter how much it cost me, like that nervous breakdown in class, but Ayn Rand taught me it was OK to say no, even though I still sometimes have trouble saying it.

Why just the other day on Twitter, some young woman was at me with a dubious claim that some publisher was ripping her off. I have time limits on twitter so didn't have the energy or access to really grok what she was going on about, and after spamming me for a couple of weeks with her tweet complaints, she blew her stack at my lack of response, denounced me as a fake feminist, fake SJW, and fake creator rights advocate (ask me if I care,) all because she seems to think she's entitled to my time because I'm a woman artist on twitter.

If her copyright claim is legit, I would suggest a lawyer would serve her better.

Say, what's more selfish, me saying no to strangers, or people thinking they have an inalienable right to my time and attention, to say nothing of the minefield of involving me in their legal problems in which I don't actually have any expertise?

Selfishness is a moving target, and it's one people pin on your back when they don't get what they want out of you.

So you know, thanks Ayn.

But here's the thing. You don't have to read Ayn Rand to know you have the right to say no to people and to set boundaries. You don't need to read The Virtue of Selfishness to be able to tell a rando on Twitter to get stuffed. 

I don't believe in Randian egoism at all, but there's nothing effective about running all my resources into the ground by getting involved in the drama of everyone who approaches me on social media, and if any stranger who doesn't get what they want from you gets to declare you selfish for it, well, so be it. 

I'll wear that scarlet letter.

Anyway, Rand and her disciple Branden go on at great length about the moral and ethical underpinnings of the Objectivist mindset, and having a rather rigid code myself at the time, I didn't grok just how different our moral and ethical underpinnings were. 

Largely absent from Rand and her philosophies is any appreciation of empathy, and there is almost a total absence in understanding of the coercive effects of power imbalance, unless she's writing about socialist mobs trying to take your property.

Which brings us to this:

In 1999, Helen Mirren starred in an HBO production of the film The Passion of Ayn Rand. It was based on a book by Barbara Branden, Nathaniel Branden's first wife.

It recounts the affair between Nathaniel and Rand.

Sexual harassment didn't used to be against the law. It wasn't even a term until 1975, long after the events in The Passion of Ayn Rand took place. But IMHO what happened between Branden and Rand was classic sexual harassment.

Branden was a teenager when he first wrote Rand and became her disciple, and later as a college student, he befriended her and her husband Frank O'Connor. In an epic orgy of convoluted reasoning re: Why This Particular Affair Was Good for Objectivism, Rand and Branden (now married to Barbara Branden,) entered into a sexual relationship with the (grudging? coerced? buyer's remorse?) consent of their spouses.

The part about how Rand first encountered Branden as a teen and then hooked up with the young man when he was her protegee and half her age - let's just let that hang in the air for a minute there.

Barbara Branden found out Nathaniel (who wearied of his relationship with Rand, but was so tied into her professionally he couldn't escape,) was also having an affair with yet another woman - beautiful, young, and look, it's 15 years later and Nathaniel Branden is his new girlfriend's teacher/therapist (so not ethical,) - and when Ayn found out also (a whopping 4 years later,) she became enraged and took revenge by falsely accusing Nathaniel of fiscal wrongdoing re: her Objectivist organization, which Branden had been leading for years.

So let's unpack this: he's been stuck in this relationship for awhile, she rages at him for seeing another woman, then falsely accuses him of a crime to smear him.

Once more for the people in the back.

You have an affair with a professional superior, are under a considerable amount of pressure to continue it because hey, she's your boss, and the professional superior attempts to destroy your career when she finds out you're boinking someone else. 

Classic.

After, I read Barbara Branden's book, I began to see that Ayn Rand's tower of logic life was a construct to protect her from the world she feared, having been scarred by her early years as a girl in Russia during the revolution. She could logic her way into and out of anything because she could argue around anybody. She was ridiculously intelligent, she was dogged, and she was hyped up on the amphetamines she took to keep her weight down.

No one won an argument with Ayn Rand. But that didn't make her right, it just made her persistent.

Having had two male bosses take professional revenge for my saying no to their advances which released the Kraken on my career, I am rather touchy about this sort of thing. While I eventually got over (some of) the damage they did, realizing Ayn Rand had done the same to someone else made me question all those ethics and morals Rand wrote about.

I couldn't find any articles examining Rand's abusive behavior toward Branden that call it by its name: sexual harassment. They refer to "sexual relations with her pupil". But had the teacher been a 50-year old man and the pupil a 25-year-old woman, would everyone be so dismissive? 

When Rand found out Branden cheated on her, she even smacked the crap out of him.

Hey, isn't that domestic violence?

When I read the words "ethics" and "morals" in Rand's work, I assumed the words meant the same thing to me as they did to her. 

When I realized they did not, that was the beginning of the break.

The Objectivist movement is almost completely silent on the subject of sexual harassment, except for this article which basically states that if you just have enough self esteem and work really hard, it will all go away.

I thought that was hilarious.