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Dec. 4, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

22:16

2855 Dr. Nathaniel Branden: A Farewell

Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio, gives a moving elegy for Dr. Nathaniel Branden on the day of his death. Nathaniel Branden (April 9, 1930 – December 3, 2014) was an American psychotherapist and writer known for his work in the psychology of self-esteem. A former associate and romantic partner of Ayn Rand, Branden also played a prominent role in the 1960s in promoting Rand's philosophy, Objectivism. RIP Dr. Branden.

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	So tonight we have our regular call-in show.
	We'll go a little bit later today because just a half hour ago the news came out that Nathaniel Brandon died at the age of 84 or so.
	He was born in 1930 Nathaniel Blumenthal, who then changed his name later, of course, as many Jews did and still do.
	And he was a huge influence on me.
	From Rand I learned The scope and capacity of a modern philosophical mind and the rigor and ferocity that one could bring to philosophical discourse.
	But from Nathaniel Brandon, I learned the value of self-knowledge.
	Like most people in early enthusiasms for important things, I was probably somewhat...
	I wouldn't say insufferable, but mildly sufferable would probably be the phrase when I first got into objectivism.
	And it was very much, very quickly after I got into objectivism that I started reading The Psychology of Self-Esteem, which, much like Leonard Peikoff's books, was, like Ominous Parallels was a work that Leonard Peikoff had in his association with Ayn Rand that was fantastic.
	As was Nathaniel Brandon's The Psychology of Self-Esteem.
	Self-Esteem became one of these catchphrases that got, as is generally the case, entirely misused and misinterpreted by most people.
	Because he said that self-esteem was our unconscious evaluation of our life and choices.
	It is, and I'm paraphrasing here, so obviously go to the source.
	He's got The Psychology of Self-Esteem, Six Pillars of Self-Esteem and so on.
	His basic argument was you have to do the right thing.
	You have to be good.
	You have to be courageous.
	And then you gain self-esteem as the result of your automatic and unconscious evaluation of your own actions.
	Naturally, this got perverted into stupid, hippy-dippy, feel-good, tell them they're great.
	Even if they're not, everybody gets to win first prize.
	Everybody gets a prize!
	Everybody gets a car!
	Which was not at all his intention to my knowledge.
	But As Ayn Rand was for me a heroine of intellectual capacity and achievement, Nathaniel Brandon to me was heroic in the emphasis and focus that he placed on self-knowledge.
	So I grew up in a extremely disturbed and disturbing and violent and mad and dysfunctional household and I still remember Reading The Psychology of Self-Esteem, and aside from some minorly weak arguments on free will, his emphasis on the value of emotions, which was different from Rand's in a lot of ways.
	Rand had, and Nathaniel Brandon later wrote an article on how dangerous Rand's view of the emotions, or her dramatic portrayal of the emotions, how dangerous that was, which I thought was very good.
	Howard Rourke tends to view his sadness and his anger, you know, coldly from a distance, clinically and so on, which is very unhealthy.
	But Nathaniel Brandon wrote passionately and convincingly, at least for me, on the value of accepting and acknowledging your own emotional processes, which I think was one of the weaknesses that Rand fell prey to was...
	I always sort of felt her intellect sat astride her emotions like the jolly green giant on a Shetland pony, basically just this little horse hair up the ass and that's about it.
	But Nathaniel Brandon, probably because of his training as a psychologist, was very convincing in the case that one should accept even the most negative of emotions as messengers, which have value.
	And I remember, so after high school, I went and worked up in Northern Ontario, Northern Manitoba, gold panning and prospecting and so on.
	And I spent a little bit of time in Thunder Bay, also known as Thunder Bay.
	If you are not from Canada, you get an H. And I remember going to a bar, trying to pick up a woman, and she didn't call.
	And I was in a sauna.
	I went to the gym.
	I was in the sauna.
	And I was lying there, bathed in my own youthful sweat.
	And I felt disappointed that the girl hadn't called me, though I'd given her my number, and Lord knows that generally works for guys.
	But this woman hadn't called me, and I felt disappointed.
	And I just took a deep breath, like, let's just get rid of the bad feeling.
	Get rid of the bad feeling!
	Bad feelings...
	Who needs them?
	Who wants them?
	They're like roadblocks with no pedestrians, or road bumps with no pedestrians.
	And then I remember thinking about the book that I had read the year before, and I thought, you know, let's not do that.
	Let's try not doing that.
	Let's try not pushing away the uncomfortable feelings.
	And I think I was, I don't know, 17 or 18 at the time.
	And that was a huge turning point.
	For me, I was headed to desperately bad times in the absence of self-knowledge, as I think we all are, particularly those of us who come from a childhood that lets us learn about light the way that an eclipse lets us learn about the sun.
	In other words, the only thing we know about virtue is that we grew up in its opposite.
	And Brandon's case, I remember vividly him talking about the drowning death of his wife and how he rolled and rocked and screamed and cried and let all of the feelings course through him.
	It was incomprehensible because my feelings as a child were so overwhelmingly negative and terrified and angry that the idea of accepting them as helpful standard bearers, as messengers, Trying to create a different future from the past was very hard to follow.
	And I think that was the first...
	I know I'd read a little...
	I'd read some Freud by then.
	And Freud had given me some interest in my dreams.
	But it was Brandon who really gave me a sense of the value of my own emotions.
	And I am...
	I'm so grateful for that.
	I actually wish I'd bought the book.
	I actually borrowed it from a friend of mine, although I did buy his later books.
	And I still remember looking at the kind of pose on the back of his books.
	I guess this was in the 80s, which he was not at the end of his life, but certainly for a time in the middle, he was significantly overweight.
	And he just had a smile, he had a calm, he had a...
	A presence that was soothing.
	You know, one of the things that is true about growing up poor and growing up in the underclass is that you're not short of money.
	You are, but that's not really what matters.
	You're not short of money.
	You're not short of clothes.
	I remember asking a woman out, a girl, I don't know, I was 16 or so, We're going to go and see an airplane.
	This was a girl I asked out.
	And she was very attractive and came from a wealthy family.
	And the only pair of pants I had left had been chewed up by a hamster.
	And I had to sit on the bus and put my fingers just so to cover up the holes in my pants.
	And what you're desperately short of It's not money.
	It's not food.
	It's not even security.
	When you grow up in the underclass, what you're so desperately short of is admiration.
	Admiration.
	Because admiration is the precursor to emulation.
	What you admire, you become.
	And around me, and I don't just mean in my...
	Dirt poor, rent control, single mom cathedral neighborhood.
	I mean, all around.
	In the media, in the school, in the sports that I was engaged and involved with, there was a desperate shortage of heroism.
	There was a desperate shortage of courage.
	There was a desperate shortage of the necessary willingness to rock the boat.
	That gets us out of the dry dock of history.
	And I found my heroes in books.
	And it was one thing to find heroes in fiction.
	It was quite another thing to know that there were real people writing those books who I considered heroic, and still do in many ways consider heroic.
	Something only has to be possible for you not to be mad in the pursuit of it.
	Something only has to be possible for you to not be thought mad in the pursuit of it.
	And I think that there was heroism.
	In what was occurring early on.
	I mean, yeah, I think things went kind of haywire later on in the 60s.
	But I didn't know any of that at the time.
	And that was fairly not well understood at the time.
	Although I remember in one of Rand's books, I think it was The Virtue of Selfishness, she said that Brandon is no longer associated, blah, blah, blah.
	And I said to my friend who gave me these books, ah, they had an affair.
	And this didn't come out, I think, for quite some time.
	But that was fairly...
	Clear at the time.
	So yes, things got haywire later on, but early on, seeing courage, seeing virtue, seeing clarity, meant that not all the water in my desert was a mirage.
	Not all the water in the desert that surrounded me was an illusion.
	That there was something to strike out for, that I could I could achieve and that to me was an amazing gift and I've tried to emulate that as I've become I guess with close to a hundred million downloads kind of a minor public figure.
	I do want people to know that to see heroism It means that you can have it.
	Heroism isn't some motorbike behind gorilla glass in a store that's closed that costs $10,000 when you have no money.
	Heroism is as close, as tangible, as real, and as possible as the next decision you make in your life.
	Heroism isn't something on the other side of a museum wall.
	There are no walls between you, between me and heroism.
	You can walk through these walls.
	And as you walk through and as you climb these stairs, the armor, the shield and sword coalesce around you.
	And I had been exposed to heroism as a child.
	But the heroism, and this is a British culture to some degree, but the heroism that I was exposed to as a child was all murderous.
	It was all martial.
	It was all mud spattered screaming faces with yellow ringed teeth running up a hill in a hail.
	It was all pushing the bayonet in and turning it to make sure you did as much damage as possible.
	It was all walking into the hailstorm of machine gun bullets for the sake of buying 10 yards of mud that you would sell later for the same price on the other side.
	In the heroism that I was taught as a child, All the men were heroic only in their disposability.
	And it always struck me that although when these men died in the distant past, they cried out in joy at their virtuous sacrifice for king and country, In the ones that I read about more immediately and more vividly,
	like the First World War, the Wilfred Owens, the Siegfried Sassoons, the people who wrote about war more vividly and more recently, that those men who were shot through dying of stomach acid pouring into their internal organs, those men who spun in useless circles in the mud Their legs kicking, their arms flailing.
	They cried out, not for flags, not for queens, nor gods, nor the angels and devils that flew over like black kites over the battlefield, endlessly drinking up the souls of the dying.
	They cried out, not for gods, not for kings, not for queens.
	They all cried out for their mothers.
	That when we are reduced through indescribable violence to the helplessness of infants we cry for our mothers and that all the abstractions of gods and governments and the artificiality of proximate dirt fetish known as nationalism that all vanishes and we are back to where we started as we are unmade in war We
	return to where we started when we are made by our mothers.
	And so when I came across people like Nathaniel Brandon and Ayn Rand, I got a sense of the kind of heroism that squats and narrows its eyes and raises its javelins against the charging horses Of endless male disposability,
	where men are flushed like sewage down the toilet of the history for the vanity and bloodlust of the kings and the queens and the bankers.
	That I could have a heroism that might reduce violence rather than A heroism based on the addiction to violence, that I could have a heroism in the service of virtue, rather than a heroism in the service of the sword.
	It's people like Nathaniel Brandon and Ayn Rand, and I'm simply focusing on those two because, I mean, there's many more, but he's the one who died today.
	And I would like to thank Everyone who gave me a sense of what willpower and the dedication to truth and virtue could provide me in my life.
	The capacity to bend your will to the quenching of the flame of the sickness of our addiction to violence and That one could be snow.
	Soft snow.
	Gentle snow.
	But irrefucking-zistible snow.
	On the endless lava in which we pitch men and children and women throughout history.
	In the human sacrifice to the ancient fire gods of our hating hearts.
	That I could speak words to the world that fall like snow on the lavas of history and cool it.
	That is something that until I was 16 never even didn't occur to me.
	In other words, it was so far outside the realm of possibility that one could bend one's will and one's heart and one's mind and one's muscles in the direction of calming And soothing and opposing the hatreds of history.
	This was nowhere in my repertoire that didn't teach me any Socrates or Spinoza or the other peaceniks, the other gentler but firm souls of human history.
	I didn't learn those people when I was growing up.
	I learned that they slap a helmet on your head, they slap a gun in your hand, and you goddamn well charge.
	And if you're grounded to hamburger, they'll try and reassemble you enough to pour you into a nameless grave.
	And they'll light a fire on that nameless grave, and your syllables will be screamed into the wind of history, never to be heard again.
	So I just want to thank...
	Nathaniel Brandon, who I believe was a brave man on two levels.
	I mean, he fought for what he wanted.
	He spoke the words that were true to him at the time and when he learned better later on in life than some of what he'd been up to in the objectivist circles.
	He wrote an apology.
	He changed.
	He mellowed.
	And I'll miss him.
	I only spoke with him twice.
	I spoke with him, I think in the...
	Gosh, maybe mid to late 80s.
	He came to Toronto to do a speech.
	I chatted with him briefly.
	And then I interviewed him on this show a few years ago.
	But I miss him.
	And then I miss him.
	And...
	I'll hope in a small way to provide to others what was provided to me, which is an example of what is possible and what can be done with courage.
	And planting your feet so firmly and deeply in reason and empiricism that cars blown by a storm shatter against your heart.
	So thanks.
	Dr.
	Brandon, we are a chain that hoists up the human condition, those of us who wish to will it.
	And we are opposed and we are scorned and we are mocked and we are lied about and all that.
	And we are praised and we are supported and we have love in the world for what we do.
	And we save the world, person by person.
	And we save people from the predators, person by person.
	And we aim to feed the victims and starve the hunters.
	And Nathaniel Brandon was one of those links on the chain that raised me up out of the well of a horrible past.
	And I aim to be a small link on the chain that can help others.

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