The second hazard Branden states in his essay, is encouraging repression.
Sounds like you believe repression is when one gives priority to conscious data over emotions or subconscious potentials, when in fact the reverse is true. [but that’s a side-quibble]
The use of emotions and the subconscious, in most people, is based on their history, role models, aspirations, and the costs incurred when they followed their values. However, in those trying to behave objectively in the explicit sense Rand taught, first their haywired programming has to be examined consciously, over many years, with a weedwacker and trimming shears, until one’s emotions and subconscious responses are congruent with their consciously held values. The more one retrains and consciously holds objective values, the more their emotional and subconscious responses will mirror these values every day. Given our present culture’s antagonism towards objectivity and individualism, this is very difficult for most people to acheive consistently.
I personally have been on this journey since I was thirty, and I just turned fifty a few days ago. By conscious attention to objective values, I have saved my own life several times, when there was objectively not enough time to process the amount of data consciously and still come up with the right descision. I’m talking about the kind of split second decision that made me turn my bike into a position that would have normally caused me to crash into a busy intersection, but instead allowed me to hit a glancing blow on a car that was dangerously racing through rush hour traffic, where a direct impact most likely would have killed me. Two things I identified later were responsible for this decision. First, I had consciously chosen to take more care in protecting my life, and to be more aware of my surroundings to that end. And second, by having that value formost in my conscious mind, generally, if not at that moment, my subconscious filing system popped up a reference in a book I had read on biking on ice which recommended to turn a bike sideways to distribute the impact. I had much less time to decide than it took to type this, and it was my subconscious that gave me the data about what action to take. I trusted my subconscious because I had learned to trust it because I had been retraining it consciously for many years at that time.
Another example is when one takes up a martial art such as aikido. To learn anything with a both physical and mental component, one must start slow, and go through each step consciously, and repetitively, or there will always be weak points in your technique and those are the cracks in which an opponent can turn your technique against you. The more you train consciously, the more you are training your subconscious mind, which to be more scientific, is your muscle memory.
Most people, when they are falling towards the floor, flail out their arms and break a wrist (common in icerinks). It is quite frightening, initially, to tuck your head away from the ground, making you blind in that direction, and to roll along one side of your arm. With a lot of training, you can do it without thinking about it. So the conscious begets the subconscious.
Now, one can have a subconscious chocked full with irrational, contradictory, bloody dangerous responses. And most people do. But the objective thing to do is to identify where the flaws are, where one responds emotionally and incorrectly to a situation (as in personal relationships), and corrects the conscious errors that lead to the subconscious ones. Likewise, as Branden said, when one rigidly applies a consciously held (and maybe poorly understood) principle which one uses to override previous subconscious integrations, sometimes, the subconscious is the right call. Sometimes. It is the responsibility to every adult to sort through their epistemology, history, and mistakes (past & present), and continually reprogram their subconscious with the aim of being more objective and more life-valuing.
Although I admired Spock in Star Trek, once I understood objectivist epistemology, I could never believe that such an emotion stripped race would ever survive a second season of the Pon Far.
Bottom line is that emotions are a necessary part of being objectively human, and it is beholden upon the torchbearers of objectivism to train their emotions appropriately. Galt had emotions consistent with his epistemology, as did other Rand characters to the extent and scope of their development.
While Rand gave us an objective epistemology, and many fictional examples of objective characterizations, Branden has and is supplying the tools to help us retrain and deprogram bad epistemologies, and to grasp, not just consciously, but subconsciously, the values of objectivism. The developmental aspect of achieving Galt-hood from Mouch-hood is missing in Rand’s fiction. I think that Branden is teaching us how to develop into more objective people who can feel emotions without guilt or obfuscation, because they understand and live their epistemological roots, and that is a service to the objectivist community that should not be disparaged or belittled.
Sincerely,
<Φ>aj