| | The enemies of Ayn Rand and Objectivism must find all this bickering over the rival accounts of what was primarily a lovers' quarrel, thirty-eight years ago, to be highly amusing. No doubt they are cheering it on, and would love to add even more fuel to the fire. Collectivists of all stripes, left, right, and center, know that the longer that Objectivists devote themselves to arguing among themselves about what "really" happened and who was "really" at fault, the less time they will have to apply and spread Objectivism. Which is certainly very heartening to all those that hate and (rightly) fear the philosophical arguments of Objectivism.
Students of the history of ideological (and religious) movements would find all of this in-fighting, (preceded and followed by, the requisite schisms and purges) very familiar. Intellectual history is littered with the wrecked, dead, and dying corpses of ideological movements that diverted their attention from their original goals of developing and applying their own philosophies and opposing their common enemies, to instead turn on each other in endless accusations of ideological purity.
If any O'ist thinks that that might have been true of Marxists and certain religionists, but that surely does not apply to us, had better review any of the myriad accounts of what these movements did to themselves - and see how closely their endless accusations and counter-accusations parallel what is now going on in Objectivist forums (over PAR/MYWAR/PARC and related fruitless denunciations). We may be individualists and they collectivists, but the methods and types of argumentation are practically identical. If were so "different," why do we sound the same?
For example, see The Prophets of Paris, by Frank Manuel, on the rise and fall of the movements founded by Auguste Comte and Henri Saint-Simon. Predescessors and rivals to Marx, the Marxists never had to worry about them because the Comteans and Saint-Simonians were too busy arguing with each other and thus rendered their own movements impotent and irrelevant. The same thing happened to the Trotskyists - so much infighting (about rival personalities and ideological purity) that they never became a force to reckon with, and none of their innumerable parties ever gained any substantial influence, anywhere, in the world.
"Good!," you might say, but what about us? Look what we are doing to ourselves!
This pseudo-controversy (and the other related squabbles, eg, "Who is the ONE and TRUE keeper of the faith?" and "Let's denounce and purge those heretics!") reminds me of the quote that Milton Friedman put on the frontispiece to his satirical little book, Is There a Sociology of the Absurd? Attributed to Napoleon, it reads,
"Never interrupt your enemies when they are in the process of destroying themselves."
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