Ayn Rand: EIE with a slight LIE accent

"It is both angry and exaltedly idealistic, a tortured hymn to integrity." — Barbara Branden, on Rand's work

"I reached for the doorbell, knowing without words and with irresistible certainty that nothing was ever going to be the same again." — Nathaniel Branden, on going to meet her

"I've always seen [the Collective] as a kind of comet, with Nathan as the star and the rest as his tail." 

Ayn Rand spent her life (1905-1982) insisting she was the apostle of cold reason — the enemy of emotion, the philosopher of pure logic, the woman who deduced an entire moral universe from the axiom that A is A. But what was most memorable about Rand to virtually anyone who knew her personally was the passion: the zealotry, the anger, the holy fire, the manner in which an idea held by her was elevated to a crusade and an affirmation of one’s own integrity. She did not persuade people into agreeing with her, but rather she made converts, she rallied people, and she excommunicated her apostates. She was more an EIE crusading ideologue of tremendous passion and will who happened to wave the banner of reason — with a slight LIE accent supplying the worship of the capitalist industrialist and parts of the deductive scaffolding (other parts are supplied by valued, although fairly averagely strong Ti).

It is easy to see how she can, in fact, be typed as LIE, as WSS did — there are "ambilogoethical" traits in her, and her whole visible ideology is capitalism, productivity, the heroic businessman, achievement, the self-made man; her circle included Alan Greenspan; her novels are hymns to the industrialist. But here we have a certain contradiction between the content and the ultimate form, and while both are socionically important, the form takes precedence. The pragmatic, results-driven type adjusts the theory to what works, and Rand did the reverse with a vengeance. Where every other free-market writer argued from outcomes and prosperity, she argued from ideological first principles and treated efficiency as secondary. She did not care what worked, she cared what followed from her ideological passion, and she subordinated the whole world of consequences to a deductive moral structure she would not let anyone amend. "Rand did not regard facts as relevant ways of testing her propositions," scoffed Milton Friedman once. Really, the IDRlabs collection of quotes by and about her is quite telling. A genuinely pragmatic intellect does not build a closed catechism and expel its members for heresy. Rand was an ultra-"ascending" character, far more Fe-valuing than even Jack London (LIE with not-that-unvalued Fe). Her protagonists suffer extreme hardship and ostracization rather than compromise their principles, not caring about the relations they break — one of "ascending" qualities (principles are more important than either profit or good relations). 

Her intellect was also not the conformist structural LSI intellect that administers and enforces an existing order, finding its home inside a hierarchy. Rand originated a total worldview from nothing, in absolute defiance of every established authority on earth — academic philosophy, organized religion, etc. — and stood combatively against all of it. Her rigidity is the rigidity of someone defending a revelation she believes she alone has seen, not of a functionary slotting the world into received categories. The whole posture of her life — the lone genius against the mob (see also Talanov-Qe and general "questimity") — is the crusading prophet, which is an EIE stance, not an LSI one.

Consider how people came to her. The nineteen-year-old Nathan Blumenthal read The Fountainhead and experienced an epiphany, and walking to her door for the first time he felt, by his own account, "irresistible certainty that nothing was ever going to be the same again." Rand constantly inspired that kind of conversion language, the vocabulary of religious awakening. Around her formed the Collective, a circle that observers described as a "cult": an unquestioned leader, total loyalty demanded, deviation punished by excommunication, members reduced (in John Hospers' words) to "shivering, scared children who dared not say the wrong thing lest they incur her wrath." She presided over all-night sessions of disciples drinking in the doctrine. She reached, herself, for the celestial image — the group as "a kind of comet" with her favorite at its head. None of this is how a logician (especially a "descending" one like LIE) relates to colleagues.

Sympathetic academics, trying to describe her philosophical prose, reached for words like "hyperbolic and emotional." Barbara Branden, a sympathizer, called the work "angry and exaltedly idealistic, a tortured hymn to integrity". Her worship of reason was itself a passion. She crusaded for it, at a fever pitch, with the ardor of a zealot, treating Kant as "the most evil man in mankind's history" and the defense of the rational mind as a holy war against treason. The woman who, in Branden's phrase, felt herself "a brain encased in flesh" made even her rationalism into an object of exalted devotion. That is the EIE's relationship to ideas: they are never merely true or false (types like Alpha NT do care about that), they are sacred or evil, banners to die under or enemies to destroy. The denigration of emotion was conducted with overwhelming emotion. The break with Nathaniel Branden — the one disciple she had loved, on whom she had literally modeled John Galt, the ideal man of her philosophy — ended in a multi-paragraph public denunciation and a campaign of vengeance. It's no accident that the Beta rational dual pair (plus SLE) takes the lead for being the most vindictive, with LIE being fairly average in that quality.

The "A is A" business and the worked-out epistemology is the logical accent that gave her enough systematizing drive to give the passion the architecture of a philosophy rather than merely a creed. Still, ultimately, she left a wider mark in the history of inspiring ideologies, than in the history of thoughtful philosophical concepts.