You might have gotten a link to this article on Salon.com titled “How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood.” I suggest taking a minute to read it.
First off, I think how the author’s father acted was abominable. Forcing his child to take classes at ARI and asking her to suddenly become financially independent is just awful. I can understand how she would link those bad experiences to Objectivism and Ayn Rand and denounce it all. But this is by no means an accurate description of how Objectivism should be applied. Not one bit.
My father was an Objectivist and by no means did he try to force it upon me. Nor did he mindlessly quote Rand instead of helping my siblings and I negotiate problems. I plan to give a talk about my experiences growing up with him at ATLOSCon. A webcast will be offered later for those who cannot attend.
I think the author’s father treated Objectivism as religious dogma rather than a philosophy to interpret and apply to your life. I’ve seem similar gaps in theory and application in other “Objectivists”, but you can’t look at the actions of one individual and judge an entire philosophy based on it. There are wackos in every belief system. To balance out the wild stories, here are some real life Objectivists who are not crazy.
To the author of the article, I am so sorry for the horrible things you went through. I wish you could have had better experiences growing up. But I hope you don’t write off Objectivism as a whole because of your father’s misinterpretations.
I’m going to share this with the OGrownups list.
Even if Ms. Bereznak were being 100% accurate with her story and her quotes were exact quotes (which I highly doubt), I don’t see where she says that her father asked her “to suddenly become financially independent”.
You added the word “suddenly”, to a description which obviously is already highly biased against the father.
Hopefully you or someone else will explain what’s so abominable about asking your daughter if she would consider petitioning to become emancipated.
By the way, another word you added to Bereznak’s (already highly skewed) description was “forced”. She says that she “took evening classes from the institute via phone”. She never says she was forced to do so.
Look out, we’ve got a live one here. Why do some people read a book, then forget how to walk?
The links for Jenn and Kelly don’t work.
Anthony:
The Salon writer’s description does indicate that the request came as a surprise: “As I was painting a cardboard owl, my father asked me to come inside the house. He and his new wife sat me down at the dinner table with grave faces. ‘We were wondering if you would petition to be emancipated,’ he said in his lawyer voice.” Given the gravity of the request to an underage young woman, that is certainly sudden, indeed likely shock-inducing. Don’t drop context.
> what’s so abominable
The father was already being neglectful of his duties as a father. He was clearly communicating that his daughter was not of value to him, that she was mainly an economic burden. Unacceptable. Abominable – again, in context.
You’re on somewhat stronger textual ground with the criticism of the term “forced,” though not fully in the clear. The article is an abuse memoir, more or less, and Rand/O’ism is presented as being a malign influence being imposed on the child. The passage reads: “He would return with a tan and a pile of new reading material for my brother and me. While other kids my age were going to Bible study, I took evening classes from the institute via phone.” The two sentences must be taken together: he came back with material to be read by his kids. There’s little sense of optionality or free choice there.
Michael R. Brown
First of all I think you and Miranda are both taking the stories much too literally. Even to the extent Ms. Bereznak believes them to be literally true, I highly doubt she remembers the exact quotes, and have little doubt that she is leaving out many significant details. While it’s probably true that at one point Mr. Bereznak asked her daughter if she would consider emancipating herself, I don’t think it is at all appropriate to call him abominable without even hearing his side of the story.
I also think, given the context which you say that I am dropping, that the request was obviously aimed at allowing Mr. Bereznak to stop making the child care payments *to the mother*. Again, we’re only hearing one highly slanted side of the story. To conclude that the man was “clearly communicating that his daughter was not of value to him” without even giving him a chance to present his side of the story, is abominable.
The comment about lolcats puts the daughter at *at least* 17 or 18. Hardly someone of an age where bringing home books constitutes the use of force. To force someone of that age to take evening classes via phone against their will requires quite a bit of force, and Ms. Bereznak didn’t even allege such force, let alone prove it. Again you are jumping to conclusions about lack of free will without even hearing the father’s side of the story. This is bordering on, if not constituting, libel.
Now, all that said, between the time of posting that last message and posting this one, I had the opportunity to read the California Court of Appeals case about the custody dispute between Mr. Bereznak and his former wife, where Mr. Bereznak was found to have fabricated evidence and supplied “false testimony and half truth”. Given that, I wouldn’t necessarily take Mr. Bereznak at his word even if he was given the opportunity to defend himself. But I still think it is highly inappropriate to accuse him of being abominable without even giving him the courtesy of a response to the allegations. I find it somewhat shocking that objectivists are so keep on doing so. (Though I leave open the possibility that maybe you know more about this story than I do, which is why I invited Miranda to explain her statement.)
Well-said. My parents were both Objectivists. My brother and I turned out fine—in fact, much better off because of it.
Judging from your picture, the smirk on your face is typical to narcissists and psychopaths. It’s wonderful how a professional profiler can spot these things from a glance at facial expressions. Word lie but facial expressions and body language always tell the truth.
“Judging from your picture, the smirk on your face is typical to narcissists and psychopaths.” – No reputable professional profiler would say this – or write so badly.
It doesn’t changes the facts. Once you’ve seen hundreds, you can tell them all. People come in types and their expressions and body language give them away. But I don’t expect Objectivists to accept that. Their philosophy doesn’t let them understand the way a mind actually works because they believe they can reason how it works without actually knowing how it works. Pure logic without facts. Programs with incomplete data sets. Garbage in = Garbage out.
Thank you for posting this, Miranda! John and I are very much looking forward to your talk at ATLOSCon.
I don’t care what anybody says…the experiences that the girl in the article wrote about are bad, Objectivism aside. You could substitute any philosophy or belief system and get the same results.
This entire discussion is a ridiculous tempest in a teapot. The wording used by Miss Bereznak reveals enough to cast doubt on her *understanding* of what she experienced. Subsequent information about Mr. Bereznak may or may not have bearing on what she claims to have experienced. Further, if as was suggested above, he was being dishonest concerning other issues, then the entire situation is so irrational that neither side can be trusted. Why is anyone taking sides, or using this as a talking point?
There is little rational response possible.
One is: I was raised by Objectivist parents and believe I am better for it —as per Jason Crawford.
Another: Children are different, respond to different influences, and can draw enormously faulty conclusions, in the same household —which I offer as a parent
As an F.Y.Interest on the latter—
I have two daughters. My ex-wife joined me in attending many Objectivist functions, including four 2nd Renaissance conferences. She eventually proved herself to be a liar, a socially manipulative bureaucrat, and one who parents by favors, blatantly reneging on things we had agreed upon.
The eldest (now 16), learned how to use this to advantage by the time she was three years old. She sides with my Ex, knowing “which side her bread is buttered on”, and is very likely to take the same route as Ms. Bereznak.
The younger one (12) cannot stand the behavior of the other two, and says so, often directly to them.
A year ago, in a mistaken attempt at improving the situation, I succeeded in getting us into counseling. I asked both girls to think about what they were going to say to the counselor. To her enormous credit, the younger hand wrote a twenty point list, with zero prompting from me, identifying and providing examples of the problems. The counselor *liked* my ex, and ignored all aspects of the problem that the younger listed, dismissing them as indicating “different parenting approaches” (I did not know lying was a parenting approach.)
The younger one is far more likely to embrace Objectivism, but I must wait three to five years. The introduction will be gradual, subtle, and contextually appropriate for age and knowledge.
Compare this Bereznak issue with the recent problems over John McCaskey’s resignation from The Ayn Rand Institute. It involved many more very trustworthy people, and lead to massive rationalizations/suppositions among some pretty experienced Objectivists. The amount of discussion and supposition, about at least one untrustworthy writer’s exposition on Objectivist parenting, is considerably less rational.
I’m confused: what’s your problem exactly? I can understand taking issue with spurious judgement about what happened based on this article here, and I agree it should just be thrown out as a vicious piece of unreliable trash. But do you have a problem with people simply pointing that there is a dogmatic way to do things, and a proper way to do things, and that this article typifies the dogmatic approach, which is something we all (I hope) reject as the right way to parent.
Incredible. The fact that you’re gaslighting the girl’s understanding of her experience makes it seem like you’re no different than your manipulative ex-wife. It’s common for narcissists to do this, especially when others’ comments strike at the core of their belief system. That said, I guess your ex is the better narcissist considering that she charmed the therapist better than you.
Your interpretations are paranoid.
LOL! Are they? Bereznak’s father is obvious an abusive narcissist, and the guy above makes it seem like she doesn’t understand what she went through, as if her emotional torment isn’t actual pain, yet my comment is paranoid? How about accusing her of being paranoid, too, because she really didn’t experience what she experienced, and even if she did she really didn’t understand it. You see how gaslighting works? And I’m the paranoid one?
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Miranda, what I got out of your note: it’s the parents!
& then I read the comments, and THEN I glanced at the Salon article.
I stopped here:
About Real Families
Real Families is a personal-essay series that celebrates the surprising and ever-shifting nature of domestic life in the 21st century.
“My parents split up when I was 4. My father, a lawyer, wrote the divorce papers himself and included one specific rule: My mother was forbidden to raise my brother and me religiously.”
Dog bites man, that’s not news. Man bites dog, that’s news. Salon thanks you for your eyeballs.
I actually caught the article at salon before this blog post and I do sympathize with the daughter. Some have mentioned it isn’t right to jump to conclusions without hearing the father’s side but there isn’t any reason to doubt the story about her brother about “hogging all the food”. You can’t have a real family if the underlying rules of the family are “get what you want selfishness is good.”
@Miranda (or any other objectivist really): I wonder if you could submit your own experiences with some details to Salon and see if they would accept it. It would be a nice counterpoint to the above article.
Yes, that woman’s father was not an Objectivist. The reason? He wasn’t respectful of the objective requirements of childhood and the human mind in general. He treated his daughter like an object to be molded rather than a person to be persuaded. He should have realized that even if she was wrong in content about many things, she wasn’t wrong in form (ie: given her context, where she was intellectually was appropriate).
If only so many other otherwise-objective Objectivists would remember this fact when it comes to the issue of dealing with sympathetic, yet different cultural elements. Tolerating them like one does a child – not damning them as “crusading irrationalists.” That would be the objective method of dealing with them.