Psychological issues common in Objectivists

[epistemologue]

Dustin explained issues he has had in another thread:

On 9/16/2016 at 3:28 AM, Dustin86 said:

sNerd,

My questions were brought on when Repairman suggested that parents replace preaching "eternal hellfire" sermons to their kids with sermons about what happens when people don't obey "objective reality".

What usually brought on hellfire sermons from parents in our Christian past was when the kid didn't do what the parent wanted. Nowadays, kids are more burdened than ever before by rising expectations coming from parents, teachers, everybody. Also, kids today are given the Objectivist version of the hellfire sermon. They have been at least ever since I was a kid. I worked 65-85+ intense hours per week, much longer than my parents or teachers, of school, homework, and other obligations starting at age 11. I was told that I would fail in life and that I would "end up living on the street" if I didn't do it. I became a broken man with major health problems at the "ripe old age" of 28 in no small part because I slaved away my younger years trying to avoid Objectivist "hellfire". I feel like the biggest sucker in the world. I wish I could have just shut my eyes and lived in "fantasy elf fairy world" all those years instead. I would have enjoyed it much more, to say the least.

Issues like these are so common they are almost epidemic among Objectivists.  See for example what Nathaniel Branden wrote, in 1984:

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I know a lot of men and women who, in the name of idealism, in the name of lofty beliefs, crucify their bodies, crucify their feelings, and crucify their emotional life, in order to live up to that which they call their values. Just like the followers of one religion or another who, absorbed in some particular vision of what they think human beings can be or should be, leave the human beings they actually are in a very bad place: a place of neglect and even damnation. However, and this is a theme I shall return to later, no one ever grew or evolved by disowning and damning what he or she is. We can begin to grow only after we have accepted who we are and what we are and where we are right now. And no one was ever motivated to rise to glory by the pronouncement that he or she is rotten.

...

Ayn Rand admirers come to me and say, "All of her characters are so ambitious. I'm thirty years old and I don't know what to do with my life. I don't know what I want to make of myself. I earn a living, I know I could be better than I am, I know I could be more productive or creative, and I'm not. I'm rotten. What can I do?" I've heard some version of this quite often. I've heard it a lot from some very intelligent men and women who are properly concerned they they have many capacities they are not using, and who long for something more — which is healthy and desirable, but the self-blame and self-hatred is not and it's very, very common.

http://web.archive.org/web/20120106060148/http://www.nathanielbranden.com/ayn/ayn03.html

 

An Objectivist popped into the chatroom just the other night discussing their psychological issues with me. They were seeing a therapist because they were overloaded with stress from work, essentially because they were over-valuing material independence, and the therapist was having trouble helping them.

What I had to say to this person is this:

The virtue of independence doesn't pertain to material independence primarily. Virtues are about how you think and act, not about your material circumstances. It doesn't make sense to describe material independence as a "virtue"; that's a consequence, not an action. Virtues describe principles of action.

If you read Rand's description of independence, she's talking entirely about judgment and the mind: "yours is the responsibility of judgment", "no substitute can do your thinking", she rejects "the acceptance of an authority over your brain" - these do not comment on material dependence, or say anything negatively about relying on others, but rather they are focusing in on a particular issue of how you use your own mind.

When she talks about independence, she's talking about that virtue of using your mind, acquiring knowledge the best you can, thinking the best you can, and being able to come to judgments based on that thinking and knowledge. In essence, she's focused on how to think and act to the best of your ability. That does not preclude either material dependence, or relying on others in general. Virtues are not negative principles, they aren't there to instruct you what not to do, they are there primarily to talk about what you should do, based on what's possible to you simply by nature. By nature we are all capable of thinking, acquiring knowledge, and forming judgments - and morally, we should.

Independence as a virtue is a matter of sound mind and sound action, not a matter of a trade-off of material values. And if material independence were held as high in one's mind as a virtue of character, that could lead one to make bad trade-offs in one's life, such as pursuing material independence at the expense of other values like a good social life.

If one holds material independence - the outcome - to the standards of a virtue of one's character - which pertains to one's actions - that could lead to some serious distress and guilt, because one's esteem becomes tied to the material outcomes rather than to one's actual virtue and character. Imagine if Roark took working in the quarry as fault of his integrity; he wouldn't have made it out of there.

Virtue needs to be completely separate from outcome.

Consider this quote from Peikoff's lecture on "Certainty and Happiness":

"Let’s consider here a moral man who has not yet reached professional or romantic fulfillment, an Ayn Rand hero, say Roark or Galt, at a point where he is alone against the world, barred from his work, destitute. Now such a person has certainly not “achieved his values”.

On the contrary he is beset by problems and difficulties. Nevertheless, if he is an Ayn Rand hero, he’s confident, at peace with himself, serene. He is a happy person even when living through an unhappy period. He does experience deprivation, frustration, pain. But in a phrase that I think is truly memorable, from the Fountainhead, it’s pain that “goes down only to a certain point”.

He has achieved, not success, but the ability to succeed. In other words, the right relationship to reality. So the emotional leitmotif of such a person is a unique and enduring form of pleasure: the pleasure that derives from the sheer fact of a man’s being alive, if he is a man who feels able to live. I’ve described this particular emotion as "metaphysical pleasure".
   
Now metaphysical pleasure depends on one’s own choices and actions. And in that sense virtue does ensure happiness- not the full happiness of having achieved one’s values in reality, but the radiance of knowing that such achievement is possible."

I think this quote from Peikoff is helpful because it illustrates what it means to have self-esteem based on your character, independent of where you actually are in life - that is, independent of the outcomes.

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Dustin is by no means alone in the issues he's having. Objectivists have had these issues for decades, and they still do even today.

In Understanding Objectivism, Peikoff identifies another cause of this psychological problem in Objectivists: a concrete-bound mentality. As an Objectivist, one might hold themselves to the concrete elements of Rand's heroes instead of to the abstract moral principles the heroes exemplify. Since, objectively, one might not (and need not) value any of the particular concretes that her heroes value, the fact that one's emotions are not in line with such concretes can mistakenly lead one to the idea that one's emotions are out of control and must be repressed, which can lead to a great deal of distress and suffering.

Here's an excerpt from lecture ten of Understanding Objectivism describing the issue:

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The problem is that the novel—any novel, particularly Ayn Rand’s novels—presents forcefully and brilliantly a vivid, compelling image of an ideal, a thoroughly admirable man. But it cannot be a philosophical treatise; it does not have footnotes saying after each line of dialogue, “This is Roark’s general principle,” or saying, “This is just unique to him, don’t take…,” and so on. She cannot analyze it as she goes. She presents the whole, with her genius for making a compelling, integrated whole out of it. She gives you the principles and the concretes that make him unique, and she leaves it to you as a kind of beacon. But some people are so overcome by the portrait as a whole that they do not know how to dissect the principles from the optional, personal elements. They take it as one undifferentiated portrait of the ideal. They take it as “This is perfection, in every detail. Any departure is guilt, low, evil.” So, Roark or Galt become the role model, down to every concrete aspect, including hair color (I once met someone who died his hair orange).

The motive here is not necessarily bad. It can be hero worship, idealism; it can be the real desire to live up to the good, as opposed to just saying, “It’s a nice book, but you’ve got to be practical.” But the method is very wrong. It’s natural, but mistaken. It’s natural to want to be like a character you admire. But if you have an imperfect understanding of the abstractions that make him, then all you have is the concretes of his life, and you are reduced to, “The only way to be like him is to copy him, to imitate him.” This is typically a problem of young people. Young people don’t yet know how to act, or even fully how to think in principles—that’s not a flaw on their part—and therefore they copy out of helplessness, out of a desire for something they admire; they copy mannerisms of their parents or their older brothers or the Beatles or whatever it is that they happen to admire—all adolescents tend to imitate their favorite role models, because they haven’t yet learned to abstract or think in principle. So I think this is, to a very significant extent, a problem of a young person seeking a moral ideal but not yet grasping principles, and therefore, becoming concrete-bound. What it amounts to is that he doesn’t grasp the range of concretes that are possible under that abstraction. Thus, his abstractions float. To him, independence or integrity has no connection to reality except that one concrete, which is Roark. So the real problem here is floating abstractions, which makes you concrete-bound in actual practice—there’s no way to know what to do except model yourself on the literal concrete. Again the root of the trouble is a wrong way of holding philosophic ideas. And if you do take this approach, it leads to a lot of trouble, because no human being can literally become another, or copy him successfully. If you try to do that, you’re headed for disaster, because every assertion of your individuality thereby becomes a threat; everything that makes you you, as opposed to Roark, becomes weakness, imperfection, something low, nonideal.

If you feel in general “Emotions prove something about me, and they’re out of my control; they’re a potential threat to my status as a moral person,” you’re still a thousand times worse off, because your emotions will naturally reflect something about you as an individual. They will be a constant source of fear, self-doubt, self-condemnation. And then you will begin to automatize the idea, “To be moral, I must repress myself,” and that becomes an issue of self-preservation. At a certain point, what happens is that you can’t take it anymore, and finally you “assert yourself,” and jump all the way to the emotionalist axis and say, “The only way to be myself is to say to hell with philosophy and principles,” and run wild. And I’ve seen that pattern many, many times.

The error here is demanding conformity to concretes, as opposed to principles. It’s judging yourself by relation to an archetype, rather than with reference to a chewed principle. To sum up so far: As I see it philosophically, there’s a certain attraction to repression among Objectivists, partly out of fear that emotions will jeopardize their moral status—it will be some kind of revelation of their subconscious—and partly because they misinterpret what it means to be moral.

...

To be against emotions, in any way, is no more sensible philosophically than to be against the body. It’s the same philosophic issue. If you went around worrying, “My body might do X, it’s some kind of demon out of my control, it will sully my moral character,” that would be ridiculous. Your body has a nature. I’m speaking now of your body apart from your will, as a physical entity—you have to allow it to function according to its nature—that is, its internal processes, its objective needs, and so on. And if you do, there will be no clash between the mind and the body. The body as a total instrument will then follow your mind, and work to achieve your mind’s ends. As against if you decide to fight your body, to starve it, to torture it, to whip it into submission, then of course it will become “rebellious” and make it impossible to function.

The exact same thing is true of emotions: They have a nature, they have needs, they have processes that they must follow, and if they are allowed to function according to their nature, there will be no clash. You have to be just as pro-emotion as you are pro-body, because it’s the same issue. Being pro-body, of course, does not mean being a materialist who scorns thought. But it does mean you have to love the body, the physical, and everything inherently connected with it, including sex and money and physical pleasures. And the same is true with emotions: being pro-emotion doesn’t mean being a subjectivist; it doesn’t mean trying to get from emotions what they can’t do. They’re not substitutes for the mind. But it does mean loving them philosophically and everything properly inherently connected with them, giving them full play, enjoying them. Repression is to emotions what asceticism is to the body. You know those medieval ascetics who tried to undermine the body—they drank laundry water when they were thirsty, they ate a mixture of sheep skull and ashes, they slept on pillows that were rocks, they had themselves flagellated, and so on—it was a war against the body. If you think that is absurd, irrational, anti-life, you’re right. But my point is that repression is exactly that same thing, only applied now to the war against emotions.

 

There is a similar issue known by the term "Howard Roark Syndrome", essentially the issue of taking Rand's heroes too literally, and thereby holding oneself to an impossible (or even an improper) standard. This was discussed previously on this forum:

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A few anecdotes about "I am Howard Roark" syndrome...

******

When "I was Howard Roark" (senior year of highschool), I refused to eat some food a friend's mom offered to me unless she let me pay her.

One time someone said, in regard to a comment of mine, "Hey, give him a break." I said, "I don't give breaks."

I dropped out of a musical duet show I loved, and on which I'd been working on very hard with my friend, because there was a religious reference in one of the songs he'd written. We were only a couple weeks from the concert--I said something about not owing him my life.

I apparently called one of my friends a vampire. I don't remember the incident, but I certainly don't doubt it.

In college, I spurned most people because I went to a religious college. I basically became anti-social, constantly suspecting people of being "evil" and trying to subvert me. Whether I was "sanctioning their immorality" was of paramount importance in my mind.

I know a girl who, having read The Fountainhead while in Europe, came back and told her boyfriend, "I didn't miss you, and I don't think you should've missed me either.

Another post:

On 9/16/2006 at 7:45 AM, Ifat Glassman said:

Might be the "Howard Roark" syndrome. Let me explain:

The Howard Roark syndrome is a psychological problem in which the person is trying to imitate Howard Roark by trying to appear indifferent and "cool" by dropping all manners, or every type of behavior that might indicate any consideration for other people's emotions.

This syndrome may include hanging up on people, walking away when they speak, not letting them know important information about their schedule that have influence on your time and efforts.

There are two types of Roark syndromes: One is the second hander, who's main interest is to create the impression of being a Roark in the eyes of the people that matter to him, and the second type is a first hander that misinterprets ethics in a social context: in other words he believes that by being polite he would be unethical, a "non-Roark".

The consequences of this kind of problem can be an inability to act appropriately when dealing with other people (in the case of the second quote), or even broken relationships (in the case of the first quote), or in general, an under-valuation of other people, which can be a major factor in these psychological problems common to Objectivists.

Edited October 20, 2016 by epistemologue

[StrictlyLogical]

I am reminded of a general division observable in many populations and I suppose such a division exists in the population of people who think of themselves as Objectivisists.  Although there is a spectrum, I tend to find people are either oriented toward thinking or away from thinking.  Thinkers are generally independent and not blind followers or superficial whereas non thinkers tend to rely on the thinking of others.  We can give them credit for following what they recognize as correct or good but until they think for themselves they can't really be considered Objectivists.  

I think this sort of thing happens in every population or demographic and thus a subset of nonthinkers is not peculiar to Objectivism.  That said, the particular mix you get when you have a superficial, follower, nonthinker, identify himself with Objectivism is certainly very unique and often irksome.

Edited October 20, 2016 by StrictlyLogical

[Reidy]

I am reminded of a guy I knew in school, who had attended NBI in New York. He coined the phrase "post-nasal drip syndrome" in describing the air of tragic, nose-in-the-air hauteur cultivated by young women who identified with Dominique Francon.

[softwareNerd]

@epistemologue: Great post, 

Of course there is a sense where the following is true, and yet the only point and purpose of virtue is to achieve certain outcomes. So, I think this needs a reformulation that does not say "completely" separate. There's a separation, but also a tight relationship. 

10 hours ago, epistemologue said:

... ...

Virtue needs to be completely separate from outcome.

... ...

You're also right that it's important to set the right goals. This is something humans have struggled with: you see it in the quarrel between the Epicureans and the Stoics. Should you set goals that are lofty, where you have to struggle to reach them, or should to take life easy setting easy goals that let you coast through life? And, what when you fail at some lofty goal? How do you keep perspective that you made the right choice compared to the guy who is coasting? Particularly, what if such failures are routine: does that mean that you should keep aiming just as high and keep failing, or does it mean you need to aim for more realistic goals?

Original Buddhism also struggles with this and concludes -- correctly -- that the source of sadness in life is that we value things, but then lose them or do not get them. So, their original solution is: value less. A counter-argument is that happiness is the other side of sadness. The reason we are happy is that we value things and then gain them. So, cutting off values may reduce sadness, but it also reduces happiness. The link between outcome and happiness is not to be sneered at.

It is true that people can be fundamentally happy and yet go through bad patches. However, feelings of depression come from thinking your life is one huge bad patch. And, a further issue is that some people will deflect the source away from themselves and their own choices, and blame the world. e.g.  "... because of all those other people out there, my life is going to be one big bad patch".

It's not an easy balance: between ambition and acceptance.