Nathaniel Branden and Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand’s most famous dictum was “Check your premises”, but the self-professed individualists in her entourage never dared question hers for fear of being exiled from the fold. They adopted Ayn Rand’s tastes in everything, forming a cultish circle that came to be governed by loyalty tests. Branden became the group’s disciplinarian, staging “kangaroo courts” at which deviants were castigated, and if necessary expelled, for “psychological errors”.
.. Declaring that their relationship was “sexual or it’s nothing”, Ayn Rand demanded he resume their affair. A Randian superhero, she maintained, would not abandon a Randian heroine because of such trivialities as advancing age. Branden must therefore be suffering from a serious character defect. When he fabricated a story that he was having a “sexual freeze”, she went into meltdown, shrieking: “You contemptible swine!” and worse.
In what became known as the “Objecti-schism”, in 1968 Branden was effectively kicked out of his own institute, while, in vengeful fury, Rand wrote an open letter in The Objectivist accusing him of “moral failures” and unspecified crimes against Objectivity. A week or so later, Barbara Branden, too, was excommunicated. Ayn Rand spent most of the rest of her days as a recluse, alienated from old friends, most of whom she had discarded for disobedience. She died of lung cancer in 1982. Her husband had predeceased her in 1979 after years of alcohol abuse.