Eye on ARI

The best of the Ancient Greeks, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, purged of their errors and contradictions – that’s one way to describe Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Ayn Rand justified human freedom and dignity with a consistency and eloquence as had no one before.

Though nothing can undermine that achievement, the spread of her ideas has been hampered by her extraordinarily unfortunate choice of associates. In her own lifetime eventually all but a few of them betrayed her, afterwards heaping her with abuse.

Ayn Rand died in 1982. She willed her entire estate, including the copyrights to all her books, to Leonard Peikoff, an associate of some 30 years. She told him she trusted him to use it well. In 1985 Mr. Peikoff founded the Ayn Rand Institute – ARI – to promote her ideas, called Objectivism.

The September 11, 2001 attack soon revealed the true colors of many people and organizations. The National Review magazine (which Ayn Rand had loathed when she was alive), the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Accuracy in Media, and many other professed advocates of limited government, turned out to be advocates of a police state – so long as neocons are in charge of the police.

What staggers honest students of Ayn Rand is the likewise unmasking of ARI. It turns out ARI too promotes the essence of the neocon agenda, dressed up in Objectivist verbiage. This betrayal of Ayn Rand, by the last of her former associates, could hardly be more perverse.

The man responsible is Leonard Peikoff. Though not on ARI’s official board of directors, he ultimately controls ARI. He has veto power over anything ARI would publish, through Ayn Rand’s estate he largely finances it, and he appointed its director, one Yaron Brook. Besides Leonard Peikoff, two other of Ayn Rand’s former associates now at ARI are Harry Binswanger and Peter Schwartz.

ARI writers advocate the expedient suspension of the U.S. Constitution, self-sacrifice, and torture. They evade, they ape Ayn Rand’s style of expression, they lie. They call all who disagree with them pragmatists, leftists, and America-haters. Let them hang by their own utterance.

Vice is ugly, but it does one good to see it properly labeled.

Though these knaves and bunglers would destroy the intellectual legacy of Ayn Rand by marrying it to an agenda totally foreign to her ideas, one can take some solace in an aphorism by Friedrich Nietzsche: “The first adherents of a creed prove nothing against it.”

If you were expecting another Ayn Rand hater, you have come to the wrong place. My target is the “Ayn Rand” Institute, because I respect the work of Ayn Rand.