That Robert Tracinski is a hard-working carney!Photo by: Paul Sableman
Tl;dr, of course, but the gist is this:
Ayn Rand, who died nearly-penniless after having had most of her ‘investments’ devoured by currency inflation, was also the world’s greatest expert on business.
That’s just sad, particularly because it’s the only tune Tracinski ever plays:
Ayn Rand was the world’s greatest expert on everything – except for, you know, everything that matters in life.
So I thought I’d balance the scales with a quick look at how the world’s greatest expert on love, sex, marriage and family actually managed the actual motor of human civilization – marriage and family.
These are all matters of fact, so obsessively trying to ‘disprove’ them will give Rand’s harried Ci victims something to do. And while you may think it’s unfair for me to hold The Big O accountable for the wreckage of her marriage, it is beyond dispute that – unlike business or financial management – Ayn Rand was a world-class expert at wrecking marriages, her own and those of everyone who strayed near her for too long. The relative zeal of her inner circle can be quantified in divorces per decade of devotion to her. I wish I were making that up.
So: Herewith are the seven simple tactics Ayn Rand deployed with a methodical precision to assure that her marriage would be bleak, with both she and her husband miserable in it, that they would both die without issue, that she would destroy the marriage without permitting it to break, and that she and all her mincing minions would lie about all of this forever:
Ayn Rand’s 7 helpful tips for wrecking your marriage with a total, lifelong commitment.
1. Latch onto the first guy who can’t escape your clutches, even though you and he are temperamentally unsuited from day one.
2. Don’t let him have any children. When one of his brave warriors surmounts every obstacle set before it, abort his baby. With money you borrowed. From his family.
3. Always put your work first in your life – before him and before your marriage, obviously, but especially before his work. When he finds any joy in his work, relocate him at once.
4. Openly resolve to commit adultery – with a man he had thought was his friend. Browbeat him into going along with the program.
5. Commence each date with your paramour in his presence, making him yield his own home to his cuckolding usurper.
6. Meticulously ignore his descent into suicide-by-alcoholism – in the apartment you got for him for that purpose.
7. Lie – consistently, persistently, for life – about how happy your marriage is. Make your creepy little Ci minions do the same, and excommunicate anyone who dares to tell the truth – about anything.
I grow regardless: DISCing Ayn Rand’s marriage tells us why it was doomed from the start. Frank O’Connor was more than dominant enough for most of the women he might have married, but never enough for the one he wed. Rand was a woman who spent her whole life desperately seeking (inventing over and over again) a man dominant enough to get her to shut up, for once – a man strong enough to turn her over his knee when she needed it. This she rhapsodized but never knew.
No man enduringly submits to a woman without mutiny, and no woman submits to a man she does not respect. The DISC of the pairing – Sdic man marries Cids woman – foretells the tale of their mutual repulsion. Opposites attract? Only where both empathy strategies are reciprocal – high D with high S. These two have opposite priorities at every step of their values hierarchies, and the natural course of human leadership – Dad’s the Big Boss – is blocked.
What kept them together? Her fear of being humiliated for not being who she claimed to be coupled with his ever-growing, ever-more-stuporous passivity non-contradictory joy.
Ayn Rand’s Ideal Man was Dcis – the perfect CEO, the perfunctory husband and the despised father of every seething malcontent since Marx. As we discussed, ideal performance for a man is Dsci, but Rand’s ideal isn’t hurting anyone, anyway. Her followers don’t follow her imaginary examples but her real-life praxis: Cids.
That’s why they don’t reproduce, and why they kill any kids they accidentally breed. It’s why they either don’t commit to marriage or commit to it in the most loosely-committed of ways, with their own variation of the Ci Yuppie’s lifelong-but-childless marriage.
For them, and for every other species of the “lucky” 2% of kids who actually get something more than trivia, treacle and cant out of school, reciprocal empathy strategies only make sense topically, as special exceptions to their normal unilateral strategies.
Rand actually makes a fetish out of saying as much: “Love is exception-making.” Got that but-but-but! motor running? The line of dialog she was proudest of having cut was, “I am not kind.”
She wasn’t lying. If you don’t believe me, ask Frank O’Connor.
Don’t ask Robert Tracinski, though. He’s full of cotton-candy.
