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While her books championed men and women as intellectual equals (for example, Dagny Taggart, the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged was a hands-on railroad executive), she thought that the differences in the physiology of men and women led to fundamental psychological differences that were the source of gender roles. Rand denied endorsing any kind of power difference between men and women, stating that metaphysical dominance in sexual relations refers to the man's role as the prime mover in sex and the necessity of male arousal for sex to occur.[45] According to Rand, "For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship – the desire to look up to man." (1968)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Gender.2C_sex.2C_and_race

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The hit parade of corporate scandal isn't about money. It's about boredom. It's not about wealth. It's about loneliness. It's not about power. It's about insecurity.
And it's not about greed. It's about unrealistic fantasy.

So say top corporate psychologists, management experts and CEOs asked by USA TODAY to answer the simple question: Why? What motivates wealthy CEOs to steal from their companies? When you're already a multimillionaire, why do you need more?

Take Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco, who, along with two others, has been charged with looting $600 million from the company. Or Andrew Fastow, former Enron CFO, who has been charged with masterminding schemes that officials say let him pocket millions of dollars.

Take former Global Crossing chairman Gary Winnick, under fire for selling $734 million in Global Crossing stock before the company's collapse. Or John Rigas, founder of Adelphia Communications, who — along with two sons — was accused of stealing hundreds of millions from the company.

This image — CEO as crook — changes everything. It changes the way millions of investors view Corporate America. It changes the way the nation's best and brightest leaders of the future view the executive seat. It changes the way honest, hardworking CEOs view themselves and their peers. And it changes the way some scandal-weary boards of directors will operate.

"It threatens the very fabric of our system," says William George, former CEO of Medtronic, an outspoken critic of corporate greed.

But it doesn't change one thing: the internal motivations that prodded a plethora of top executives to enrich themselves at the expense of shareholders and workers.

Were he still alive, Dr. Seuss might have his own name for it: Yertle the Turtle syndrome. Sound hokey? Well, the more Yertle got, the more the imperious turtle wildly fantasized about what else he could get — until his kingdom literally toppled into the muck.

Some of the nation's top corporate psychologists say that's precisely what's taking place in Corporate America. This isn't about simple greed. It's about a warped executive mind-set — stoked by the faux tech boom of the 1990s — that's so out of whack it threatens the credibility of big business.

It wasn't long ago that CEOs were equated with rock stars and heralded as corporate messiahs. Now, after various scandals, investors are lumping corporate chiefs into the same ethical junk heap as con artists and two-bit crooks.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2002-10-10-ceo-psychology_x.htm

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Who said Ron wasn't a success? If he put everything he had into it, who would you or I be to say he wasn't successful? Is the bottom line on the bank statement the only measure of success?

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Then your doubts are in grave error, reb. I've never given a thought to having more money than Bill Gates. The Masters? Sure, in a daydream I would like to win one but I have never even considered putting in the time and effort to be good enough to make it a reality. Tiger did. Why would you think I would seriously want either of those things? Because that's what people are supposed to want? Believe me, many don't. I'm perfectly content to have what I have but then I've never professed to be a Rand character.

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On reading his bio the apparent bar Ron set for himself was avoiding starvation.

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On the other hand -- it's also my intent to get people who have 'success' to be disabused of the notion that they are 'self-made' -- or that thier success belongs to them alone -- it doesn't.

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Which man could have succeeded without a market?  Without a Constitution of rights,laws, and courts?  Without teachers?  Without a central banking system?  Public schools?  Post-secondary grants, loans, scholarships, veterans benefits, a culture to give success context?

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But still -- even when lucky (and good) -- it had no context without the need to make the product.  The product had not context without a market.

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I'd bid the jobs with a cartoon concept -- If I won the bid -- then I had to start hammering that concept into the constraints of reality -- time, money, and physics.

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Another aspect of her philosophy that I would like to talk about -- one of the hazards -- is the appalling moralism that Ayn Rand herself practiced and that so many of her followers also practice. I don't know of anyone other than the Church fathers in the Dark Ages who used the word "evil" quite so often as Ayn Rand.

Of all the accusations of her critics, surely the most ludicrous is the accusation that Ayn Rand encourages people to do just what they please. If there's anything in this world Ayn did not do, it was to encourage people to do what they please. If there is anything she was not, it was an advocate of hedonism.

She may have taught that "Man's Life" is the standard of morality and your own life is its purpose, but the path she advocated to the fulfillment of your life was a severely disciplined one. She left many of her readers with the clear impression that life is a tightrope and that it is all too easy to fall off into moral depravity. In other words, on the one hand she preached a morality of joy, personal happiness, and individual fulfillment; on the other hand, she was a master at scaring the hell out of you if you respected and admired her and wanted to apply her philosophy to your own life.

She used to say to me, "I don't know anything about psychology, Nathaniel." I wish I had taken her more seriously. She was right; she knew next to nothing about psychology. What neither of us understood, however, was how disastrous an omission that is in a philosopher in general and a moralist in particular. The most devastating single omission in her system and the one that causes most of the trouble for her followers is the absence of any real appreciation of human psychology and, more specifically, of developmental psychology, of how human beings evolve and become what they are and of how they can change.

So, you are left with this sort of picture of your life. You either choose to be rational or you don't. You're honest or you're not. You choose the right values or you don't. You like the kind of art Rand admires or your soul is in big trouble. For evidence of this last point, read her essays on esthetics (Rand, 1970). Her followers are left in a dreadful position: If their responses aren't "the right ones," what are they to do? How are they to change? No answer from Ayn Rand. Here is the tragedy: Her followers' own love and admiration for her and her work become turned into the means of their self-repudiation and self-torture. I have seen a good deal of that, and it saddens me more than I can say.

Let's suppose a person has done something that he or she knows to be wrong, immoral, unjust, or unreasonable: instead of acknowledging the wrong, instead of simply regretting the action and then seeking, compassionately, to understand why the action was taken and asking where was I coming from? and what need was I trying in my own twisted way to satisfy? -- instead of asking such questions, the person is encouraged to brand the behavior as evil and is given no useful advice on where to go from there. You don't teach people to be moral by teaching them self-contempt as a virtue.

Enormous importance is attached in Rand's writings to the virtue of justice. I think one of the most important things she has to say about justice is that we shouldn't think of justice only in terms of punishing the guilty but also in terms of rewarding and appreciating the good. I think her emphasis on this point is enormously important.

To look on the dark side, however, part of her vision of justice is urging you to instant contempt for anyone who deviates from reason or morality or what is defined as reason or morality. Errors of knowledge may be forgiven, she says, but not errors of morality. Even if what people are doing is wrong, even if errors of morality are involved, even if what people are doing is irrational, you do not lead people to virtue by contempt. You do not make people better by telling them they are despicable. It just doesn't work. It doesn't work when religion tries it and it doesn't work when objectivism tries it.

If someone has done something so horrendous that you want to tell him or her that the action is despicable, go ahead. If you want to tell someone he is a rotten son-of-a-(pip-edit), go ahead. If you want to call someone a scoundrel, go ahead. I don't deny that there are times when that is a thoroughly appropriate response. What I do deny is that it is an effective strategy for inspiring moral change or improvement.

The great, glaring gap in just about all ethical systems of which I have knowledge, even when many of the particular values and virtues they advocate may be laudable, is the absence of a technology to assist people in getting there, an effective means for acquiring these values and virtues, a realistic path people can follow. That is the great missing step in most religions and philosophies. And this is where psychology comes in: One of the tasks of psychology is to provide a technology for facilitating the process of becoming a rational, moral human being.

You can tell people that it's a virtue to be rational, productive, or just, but, if they have not already arrived at that stage of awareness and development on their own, objectivism does not tell them how to get there. It does tell you you're rotten if you fail to get there.

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.

The question for me is: How come you don't have the motivation to do more? How come so little seems worth doing? In what way, in what twisted way, perhaps, might you be trying to take care of yourself by your procrastination, by your inertia, by your lack of ambition? Let's try to understand what needs you're struggling to satisfy. Let's try to understand where you're coming from.

That is an approach I learned only after my break with Ayn Rand. It is very foreign to the approach I learned in my early years with her. And it's very foreign to just about every objectivist I've ever met. However, if we are to assist people to become more self-actualized, that approach is absolutely essential. We are all of us organisms trying to survive. We are all of us organisms trying in our own way to use our abilities and capacities to satisfy our needs. Sometimes the paths we choose are pretty terrible, and sometimes the consequences are pretty awful for ourselves and others. Until and unless we are willing to try to understand where people are coming from, what they are trying to accomplish, and what model of reality they're operating from -- such that they don't see themselves as having better alternatives, we cannot assist anyone to reach the moral vision that objectivism holds as a possibility for human beings.

.........

So here in Ayn Rand's work is an ethical philosophy with a great vision of human possibilities, but no technology to help people get there, and a lot of messages encouraging self-condemnation when they fail to get there.

Her readers come to me and they say; "Boy, it was so great. I read her books and I got rid of the guilt that the Church laid on me. I got rid of the guilt over sex. Or wanting to make money." "Why have you come to see me?", I ask. "Well, now I'm guilty about something else. I'm not as good as John Galt. Sometimes I'm not even sure I'm as good as Eddie Willers," they respond.


NathanielBranden

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Analyzing a business on a product-by-product or project-by-project basis is misleading to the overall gestalt of the organization.

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What you land on is up to the dice you roll ...

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Moreover -- Rand's fantasy that an elite class holds up the world is a blatant appeal to vanity.  Do you deny the interstitchal nature of the economy.  Doesn't the rising tide lift all boats?

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