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IT USUALLY BEGINS WITH AYN RAND 263
In 1968 Brand noted in his diary, “I’m reading Atlas Shrugged these
days, again, on quite a different level—keeping some watch on myself,
but mostly letting the notions run on.” He returned to Rand during a
period of deep thinking, aided by his near daily consumption of nitrous
oxide. For more than a month his journal made occasional references to
Rand and showed unmistakable traces of her thought. He wrote after a
discussion of Arthur Koestler’s views on abstract and emotional thought,
“Don’t sever ‘em, connect ‘em up better. Then your abstract advances
will be accompanied by emotional joy, and so forth. Which sounds Ayn
Randish.” 47 In the Last Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural classic
that sold more than a million copies and won a National Book Award,
Brand offered a cryptic one-line review of Atlas Shrugged, “This preposterous
novel has some unusual gold in it,” followed by a short excerpt.
Brand’s ability to freely mingle Rand’s ideas with futuristic themes like
moon colonization foreshadowed the emerging culture of cyberspace,
which was strikingly libertarian from the beginning. 48
Looking at another new movement of the 1970s, feminism, Rand
was similarly critical. Like feminists Rand had always emphasized
the importance of paid, professional work for both men and women,
and her proto-feminist heroines rejected traditional female roles. She
was also fi ercely against any legal restrictions on abortion, calling it “a
moral right which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman
involved.” When New York State considered liberalizing its abortion
laws, Rand broke from her typical position of detached analysis and
urged Objectivist readers to write letters in support of the proposed
change. Watching the pro-life movement take shape, Rand was aghast.
“An embryo has no rights,” she insisted. The principle was basic: restrictions
on abortion were immoral because they elevated a potential life
over an actual life. It was essential that women be able to choose when,
and whether, to become mothers. 49
Despite this common political ground, Rand regarded the feminist
movement as utterly without legitimacy. In a 1971 article, “The Age
of Envy,” she declared, “Every other pressure group has some semiplausible
complaint or pretense at a complaint, as an excuse for existing.
Women’s Lib has none.” To Rand, feminism was simply another form of
collectivism, a variation on Marxism that replaced the proletariat with
women, a newly invented oppressed class. 50 The proof was in feminist
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