My only points of disagreement with Ayn Rand, libertarianism and scholarship in general: Everyone has been wrong about everything, going back forever.

I have met a lot of big-O and biggish-O Objectivists over the years – people who were present in the salons at the Hotel Martinique, others who were actual invited guests to the show trials at Ayn Rand’s apartment, still others who were close to Nathaniel Branden during or after the split, many others who were attached to spin-off groups – on- or off-campus Objectivist Study Groups. It’s all a Ci china-shop at the top, so bulls like me are not tolerated. But the atmosphere can be more Cs further down – which is how I got to know any of these folks.

Fool that I am, I only just lately thought of a question I should have been asking of all of them – the Willie question, the words no one wants said: “How many abortions do you account for personally?”

Purposefully vague: My own count is two, neither the fruit of my own loins, once by poor advice, once by underwriting the cost of the assassination. (I have redemption-children, too, FWIW, kids I campaigned for on the bubble.) The more pointed question would be, “How many of your own offspring have been murdered in the womb?”

Unconscionably rude, obviously, but it matters to me now because Ayn Rand’s legacy has become nothing but an abortion cult. My ultimate question would be: Was this her movement’s social glue all along? Stupidly dysgenic, obviously, but stupid by every possible conception. And yet this is all that is worth fighting for in her work – per the Ayn Rand Institute – the “sacred” “right” to spawn and then exterminate a philosophical movement by the most efficient possible means – covert de facto virtual-celibacy.

All that’s by way of highlighting how far removed I am, by now, from Rand’s thought – but ultimately from all of libertarian thought. This is me on Facebook today:

“‘Nine Empathies’ is eight years old today. Since then, I went looking for the birth of the thinking brain, and lately I’ve been probing what is true in Cleo, who inarguably lacks a thinking brain.”

And we are vastly different, there, at the most fundamental basis of human character, and so the differences accumulate madly from there – again, not just with Rand but with a whole lot of everything.

For example:

* From Cleo I conclude that there is a truth to the tabula rasa idea: She may have some in-born instincts or race-memory, but neither she nor we have any knowledge of or experience of the world outside the womb, prior to birth (allowing for the quibbles attendant upon occupying Plato’s Perfect Cave). Obviously, this applies to all organisms, each species according to its senses and options. Why do so few newly-hatched lizards make it to Day Two? Duh…

* Also from Cleo, I can see that inference absent the thinking brain is possible – but slow, shallow and unreliable. We raise our children poorly because we refuse to admit that they are mammals much more than they are free moral agents for the first four or five years. You cannot reason with a dog or with a toddler, but you can use incentives and consistent guidance with toddlers as you would with dogs to teach good habits before any more-abstract ideas can make a dent.

* For all of me, I think the best work I have done in the past ten years is to be found in one essay, The Origin of Character. I can remember writing it, all in one morning, and it poured out of me like milk from a pitcher. No links, no footnotes, no external defenses at all. You have to be pretty deeply read in DISC-my-way even to get it, I suppose, but it packs a wallop: “I get away with saying outrageous things all the time, so I want to emphasize this, for pure effrontery: ‘Greg Swann says children can be programmed!’ No. I say children have always been programmed – almost always inattentively and therefore ineptly. I know how we can all do a better job – going forward – of setting our children up for happiness and success in life, instead of graduated obsessive miseries.” I think that puts a distance between me and everyone – including the people who license and resell old-school-DISC.

* There’s much more, but it’s so fundamental that it is hard for me to make connections: Despite her railing against Ivory-Tower intellectualism, Rand’s epistemic world was very far removed from the real world and its consequences. Just by looking at the relative probability of successful outcomes from various social strategies, it is easy to see that Rand (and most of libertarianism, along with most of scholarship) is wrong about the ideal attributes of human character – and, accordingly, is wrong about everything else.

* And: Hence: The anarchism I almost never talk about: When the predominant social strategy among self-responsible fathers is Ds, no police are necessary – Andy Taylor’s world. When Ds fathers are absent, no amount of policing will contain the chaos – as we are seeing. Rand – and everyone – is wrong about politics because she and everyone else are wrong about the building block of civil order – self-responsible fatherhood. This is what causes humanity’s golden ages, and the destruction of that very simple lever destroys everything in due course.