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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2824 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 24, 2024

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What have you heard about codependency in popular culture or your circles, what have you heard about Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, and do you know why I’m asking about both together?

I’ll post more on this after church this morning, whether this gets any replies or not.

Codependency is a word with a misleading etymology (like schizophrenia meaning “split mind” and being confused with dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly multiple personality disorder). It comes from the discovery that most people in relationships with substance dependents (the less judgmental term for drug addicts and alcoholics) tend to have some personal issues and patterns of behavior of their own keeping them in the relationship. It was later discovered to be the same thought patterns and patterns of behavior of serial divorcees, serial victims of abuse, people with chronic loneliness, and other people with constant relationship troubles. It tends to run generationally in families with issues of abuse, divorce, and substance use. For every visible relationship addict or drama addict, there’s a dozen functional codependents struggling through their day-to-day life. It is a known failure mode of human socialization.

At its core, much of codependency is boundary issues: the inability to separate one’s thoughts and feelings from one’s perception of what others think, feel, or opine. Actively codependent relationships tend to be characterized by enmeshment, where one partner/friend is trying to run or fix some part of the other’s life, and the other is letting them, each for their own reasons. Not all toxic relationships are codependent, but most codependent relationships are at least somewhat toxic. Most codependents feel hollow or empty, and use other people, or attempts to help someone live their life, to try to fill the void.

Ayn Rand was a Russian Jew born in 1905. Her family lost their small business under Lenin’s rule, and her family lost their lives under Stalin. She hated Communism more than most people will ever hate anything in their lives, and made it her life’s ambition to eradicate socialism through art and philosophy.

She traced the philosophical roots of socialism to two concepts: collectivism and altruism. Collectivism is the belief/worldview/way of setting up societies in which groups are treated more important than individuals and their rights. Altruism proper is the belief that a person’s life is only worthwhile if it is lived for others (not the mere belief or value judgment that helping other people is a good and worthwhile thing to do). She made it clear that these stand in contrast to individualism, the belief that individuals have rights that no group can take away justly, and egoism, the belief that a person’s life is rightly to be lived for their own values, happiness, and worth.

Objectivism, her philosophy, is based on the belief that humans are the most amazing and glorious creatures to walk the Earth, when driven by objective values and living through reason, rational self-interest in the short and long term, and the most suffering or cruel creatures on Earth when they are not. (This is a very brief and extremely reductive description of Objectivism. The real thing is best absorbed through her essay anthology The Virtue of Selfishness.)

Her former disciple Nathaniel Branden (from whom she was estranged over specific relationship issues, ironically) wrote extensively on the psychological roots of what would come to be known as codependency. Some have called him the father of the self-esteem movement. Here’s a list of some of his best insight porn.. His well-known Six Pillars of Self-Esteem are useful reading for anyone with codependency:

  • The Practice of Living Consciously
  • The Practice of Self-Acceptance
  • The Practice of Self-Responsibility
  • The Practice of Self-Assertiveness
  • The Practice of Living Purposefully
  • The Practice of Personal Integrity

From Branden’s introduction:

I was acutely conscious of the pressures to “adapt” and to absorb the values of the “tribe” — family, community, and culture. It seemed to me that what was asked was the surrender of my judgment and also my conviction that my life and what I made of it was of the highest possible value. I saw my contemporaries surrendering and losing their fire — and, sometimes in painful, lonely bewilderment, I wanted to understand why.

(Tagging @comicsansstein @non_radical_centrist @George_E_Hale and @cjet79 instead of individual replies.)

  1. That it's a term that probably has a more narrow formal definition, but has been watered down to being thrown willy-nilly by people in /r/relationshipadvice and similar places, like "gaslighting" or "emotional labor"

  2. I've learned about in back in 2007 from the Bioshock previews, which coincided with Fountainhead and Atlas getting Polish editions in 2008 or 9 (there probably were some in the 90s, but with small print runs and niche). I've read the former, but not the latter. Which leads us to...

  3. I guess whatever the fuck Dominique and Roark had going on can be described as codependency if you squint? And considering that our autistic (cmon, can it be any more obvious with the fixation on trains?) anti-bolshevik queen modeled her characters after her... inclinations, there's probably some real life subtext here which I'm not familiar with.

I know codependency as mostly a gag in sitcoms about crappy couples. Like Jerry and Beth from from Rick and Morty.

I've never read an Ayn Rand book. I don't really know how it differs from other types of libertarianism, but I mostly see lefties mocking Ayn Rand as a dumb libertarian, and libertarians politely disagreeing with Ayn Rand as also a dumb type of libertarian. So I assume Objectivism is somewhere between wrong about literally everything and wrong about most things.

Ayn Rand has always been a strange one. I don't personally like her books because I don't like the style of Russian literature that she uses.

But she really nails some aspects of her criticism of communism and communalism. I'd suggest reading Anthem to most people. I actually enjoyed that book of hers the most. It's short, like a hundred pages. Communism has won in the story. Completely won. It's quaint but also horrific.

There is a depiction of the community concerned politician in Ayn Rand novels that she occasionally nails. The code language to say politically correct things while proposing evil.

It was and maybe still is a gold pill for a lot of young libertarians.

Not sure where I was going with this, but "objectivism is mostly wrong" seems like the wrong take to me.

What does gold pill mean? I've heard of red, blue, black, white, and pink pills, but not gold.

I really don't know what Objectivism is. I've just never really seen anyone defend or explain it in depth, and I've never seen anyone smart recommend it besides Rand herself.

I’ve given a basic outline in a reply to my OP. It’s the philosophy she believed western enlightenment thought was based on, before she discovered Kantianism had infected America like the USSR.

Just made it up, libertarian pilled basically. Gold and green (money) are common colors associated with libertarianism.

My first guess was that it meant skepticism of fiat currency.

I feel as if I heard more about co-dependency in the 90s or early 2000s, and most always in pop psych ways, again most always in the context of a romantic relationship. I.e. she needs to be needed, is happiest when tending to the bruises of a damaged man, even when he's violent, moody, not particularly kind, etc.

I read a few of Rand's books in the early 90s, having been given a few by friends. Apart from its fetishizing of grand-level accomplishment, The Fountainhead had some, to me, weirdly rapey scenes in it, and not in a "reader should see this scene as bad" way, more of a "height of eroticism" way. Ten years later Ian Fleming would, in Casino Royale, have Bond musing on "the sweet tang of rape" so maybe it was just a really different era. The collection of objectivist essays The Virtue of Selfishness, co edited by her lover Nathaniel Branden (whom Rand knew along with Branden's wife) seemed to lay out the tenets of objectivism more explicitly than Rand's novels. Fervently anti-altruism and--arguably at the time just as importantly--anti-christianity.

I don't know exactly why you're lumping putting the two together.

I was around a bunch of libertarians in college, so I've heard lots about Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged seemed to have some co dependency themes.

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