4,191 words

“What’s all this fuss about Dr. Mengele when Nathaniel Branden is alive and well and living in LA?” – A former member of Ayn Rand’s inner circle

In the 1960s, Ayn Rand was putting people on trial in her Manhattan apartment. Their crime? Social metaphysics. Members of “the Collective” — the in-joke term for Rand’s inner circle — would gather in her living room to hear the case against the accused. Nathaniel Branden, Rand’s business partner and erstwhile lover, acted as prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and sometimes executioner, all with the blessing of Miss Rand.

In her biography of Rand, Barbara Branden discusses one particularly painful occasion when a young woman of 20, a dancer, was accused of social metaphysics:

That evening, Ayn exhibited a lack of human empathy that was astonishing. As Nathaniel, who conducted the conversation — it had the aura of a trial except that the accused had no defense attorney — was pointing out the young woman’s psychological deficiencies, he occasionally made some especially compelling point, succinct and well phrased. Each time, Ayn chuckled with appreciation — and clapped her hands in applause.[1]

But just what is “social metaphysics”? In Nathaniel Branden’s 1969 book The Psychology of Self-Esteem, published a year after Rand excommunicated him from the Objectivist movement, he defines it as follows: “social metaphysics is the psychological syndrome that characterizes a person who holds the minds of other men, not objective reality, as his ultimate . . . frame of reference.”[2]

The term “social metaphysics” was coined by Branden, but it is essentially a repackaging of what Rand had referred to in The Fountainhead as “second-handedness.” A second-hander, for Rand, is someone who gets their values and beliefs not from contact with reality and from their own thinking, but from other human beings. They are thus leading “second-hand lives,” which was the working title of the novel for several years. Rand wisely changed it, as she came to realize that it put the emphasis on the novel’s negative or imperfect characters, rather than on her “ideal man,” Howard Roark.

In a scene in The Fountainhead, Howard Roark explains the concept of second-handedness to his friend Gail Wynand (himself a second-hander, though of a higher sort):

It’s what I couldn’t understand about people for a long time. They have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand. Look at Peter Keating. . . . What was his aim in life? Greatness — in other people’s eyes. Fame, admiration, envy — all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn’t want to be great, but to be thought great. . . . [Second-handers] have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: “is this true?” They ask: “is this what others think is true?” Not to judge but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. . . . Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation – anchored to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people.[3]

The first part of this description might cause the reader to conclude that social metaphysics or second-handedness is more or less the same thing as what Freud called “narcissism.” Peter Keating “didn’t want to be great, but to be thought great.” This does sound like the classic narcissist. Indeed, Rand’s treatment of Peter Keating is arguably the most perceptive and detailed portrayal of a narcissist in all literature. In fact, however, narcissism and social metaphysics are not quite the same thing.

Rand defined metaphysics (somewhere or other) as “the study of the fundamental nature of reality.” Thus, the social metaphysician is someone for whom reality is essentially social; reality, for the social metaphysician, is what other people think it is. In the quote above, Roark says that second-handers “have no sense of reality,” meaning that they don’t base their beliefs and values on their own evaluation of facts. Instead, their contact with reality is filtered through their contact with other men. As Roark also states, “They don’t ask: ‘is this true?’ They ask: ‘is this what others think is true?’” Rand writes of a minor character in The Fountainhead, “There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends . . .”

The narcissist definitely fits this description. All narcissists are social metaphysicians — however, not all social metaphysicians are narcissists. To begin with, the narcissist is usually characterized by a degree of grandiosity. He has an exaggerated estimation of his own importance. He nurtures illusions about his talents, abilities, or looks, and wants others to affirm him in these illusions. When they fail to do so, he feels threatened at a fundamental level and responds with “narcissistic rage.”

There are social metaphysicians who show no trace of grandiosity, however, as well as no trace of the callousness that the narcissist classically displays towards others. Indeed, some social metaphysicians are characterized not by grandiosity but by hyper-insecurity: Their question “is this what others think is true?” is motivated by a near total lack of faith in their own judgment. Deep down, many a narcissist may be this insecure. But not all social metaphysicians compensate for this by constructing a grandiose self-image; only the narcissistic type does this.

Further, far from being callous, many social metaphysicians are overly empathetic — constantly trying to read the moods and signals of others. Narcissists care nothing for the internal states of others and are notoriously bad at reading them, because one of their defining traits is a lack of empathy. Mythologically, social metaphysicians are closer to Echo than to Narcissus. Echo was the nymph who loved Narcissus but could not communicate her love for him, since she was cursed only to repeat the words just spoken by others.

Actually, Peter Keating doesn’t quite fit the classical narcissist mold, either. He certainly lives for the praise of others. But he doesn’t seem to start out with a grandiose vision of himself as a great architect, which he then needs to have affirmed by other people. He is quite ambitious, and schemes and ingratiates his way to success. But while getting there he displays a good deal of insecurity — especially when confronted with Roark’s superior talent. Keating really doesn’t begin to think he might be a great architect until Ellsworth Toohey tells him that he is. And when Toohey says this, Keating does not respond as a narcissist would; he does not feel that his long-standing opinion of himself has been vindicated. Instead, he is gratified by the praise but also puzzled by it, suggesting that at some level he knows he is unworthy. He hopes that Toohey’s judgement is correct, and he clings onto it for dear life.

While Branden’s concept of social metaphysics is more or less the same thing as Rand’s “second-handedness,” there is, in fact, an important difference between the two. The Fountainhead features two major sympathetic characters who are second-handers: Dominique Francon, the woman Roark loves, and Gail Wynand, his best friend. Both are depicted as having become second-handers due to drawing the wrong conclusions about life. In other words, in Rand’s terminology they were guilty of “bad premises.” Dominique overcomes her second-handedness by novel’s end, whereas the outcome for Wynand is more ambiguous.

By contrast, Rand portrays some of her other characters essentially as congenital second-handers — meaning that they seem to have undergone no process of development that made them that way, and they seem constitutionally incapable of being anything else. In The Fountainhead, the principal examples of this are Peter Keating and Ellsworth Toohey, though there are others. Whenever Rand depicts members of the public, standing on the periphery of the novel’s events — a fat man reading The Banner, a toothless old woman gossiping with her neighbor, a drunk stumbling out of a saloon — one always gets the distinct impression that she regards them as cattle, devoid of agency. One doesn’t believe for a minute that Rand thought that most social metaphysicians could have been anything else — regardless of what she may have said consciously and explicitly.

In the mind of Nathaniel Branden, a trained psychologist,[4] second-handedness became a curable disease. “Social metaphysics” is the medicalization of second-handedness; it is second-handedness become a “psychological syndrome,” treatable through what Branden called at the time “Objectivist psychotherapy.” I have always thought that “Nathaniel Branden” sounded like a perfect name for a seventeenth-century English witchfinder. Witchfinders had a funny way of finding witches literally everywhere — sort of like how “diversity, equity, and inclusion coordinators” find racism everywhere. True to form, once Branden had identified social metaphysics as a psychiatric disorder, he realized he was completely surrounded by social metaphysicians. Probably only Miss Rand herself was free of the disorder. Though if Branden had hung around a little longer, he might have fingered Rand as well.

With fanatical zeal, Branden set about identifying the social metaphysicians in Rand’s circle and proceeded to try and “cure” them. Barbara Branden describes the results as follows:

The diagnosis of social metaphysics became an Ayn’s hands, and in Nathaniel’s, both a means of accounting for human “irrationality” and a means of exercising control. . . . When applied to one or other of Ayn’s friends or close acquaintances, the diagnosis of social metaphysician – announced with the gravity of a medical doctor pronouncing a verdict of cancer, to which was added a moral opprobrium appropriate to a volitionally chosen cancer of the spirit — became a nightmare to be avoided at all costs. And once that verdict was pronounced, the consequences were clear: hours and weeks, even years, of psychological consultation with Nathaniel in an effort to rid one’s spirit of the demon into whose hands one had given it; hours and weeks, even years, of work and thought and struggle to perform the necessary act of exorcism.[5]

It seems as if, at the very least, Branden had fallen into the classic trap of “over-diagnosis.” My favorite illustration of this phenomenon is a skit from the British comedy series Jam in which a demented doctor discovers a new disease, “symptomless coma,” and then proceeds to find it everywhere. “You won’t have realized this,” he tells a fully conscious patient, “but you’re in a coma.”

Symptomless Coma

In fact, however, Branden was not wrong. Most of those people probably were social metaphysicians. But that’s not because they were suffering from a psychological disorder; it’s because social metaphysics is the natural state of 99% of humanity. Human beings are pack animals — “herd animals,” Nietzsche would have said. We have evolved to take note not just of what is true, but also of what others think is true. We have evolved to fit in, even when this sometimes means cutting our consciences to fit this year’s fashions. For our ancestors, ostracism from the community could mean literal death — one’s own death, and the death of one’s family. Anyone who cares nothing for what others think and does not fear ostracism has therefore always been regarded as quite the oddball.

The earliest Greek philosophers were already complaining that most people are social metaphysicians, way back in the sixth century BC. Heraclitus said that most men go through life as if they are “asleep”: “They put their trust in popular bards and take the mob for their teacher, unaware that most people are bad and few are good.” And all the way at the other end of the tradition, it’s social metaphysics that Heidegger is really complaining about when he notes that most people fail to lead “authentic” lives, immersing themselves in “idle talk” about “the They” (das Man).

My mother was all about “the They.” She began an awful lot of sentences with “They say . . .” I was warned away from things with sentences that began “People don’t like . . .” When I told her I was interested in Rand, my mother said “People thought she was crazy.” This constituted an endorsement, so far as I was concerned. Now, please don’t misunderstand me: My mother was an intelligent woman with good taste. But she was not an intellectual. Rather, her intelligence was the crafty, worldly sort that women often exhibit. There were also limits to what she would accept from “the They.” In the last 20 years or so of her life, she despaired at the vulgarity of our culture.

Still, I found my mother’s social metaphysics hard to accept. I argued with her about it, which just caused her to dig in her heels. She actually seemed proud of the fact that she so attuned to what They say. I didn’t get this at all. It was like we were members of two completely different tribes — and we were, as I shall argue shortly. I should have accepted her limitations — and been more cognizant of my own. And it should have dawned on me that this was, to a great extent, one of those Mars-Venus things: Women are markedly more social metaphysical than men. This is why so many wives and girlfriends head for the hills when their men get outed as thought criminals. This is why Cheryl Hines, wife of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., felt compelled to issue a public statement saying that she does not share all of her husband’s views. For the social metaphysical female, being ostracized by the They is like death.

My father was more independent-minded, but there were limits to this. And I made some serious errors with him as well. (In general, I now advise my younger friends not to argue with their parents or to try to “convert” them.) My father was appalled by my racial views — but evinced no interest at all in knowing what the truth was about race. I had strayed into the They’s Forbidden Zone, and that was enough for him. When the topic of the Second World War came up, I shocked him by announcing that there was no evidence that Germany’s aim had been to “take over the world.” He acted as if I had uttered an impiety. It was like telling a fanatical Catholic that the virgin birth had never happened.

When I showed my father a video by some YouTuber, presenting an argument for a political point, he responded by saying, “But I don’t know who this person is!” I said that that didn’t matter, since he didn’t have to take the YouTuber’s word for anything; all my father had to do was to evaluate the argument the man had made and judge whether it held up. But my father didn’t want to do that. He was a highly intelligent man, but intellectually lazy. He didn’t want to evaluate arguments. He wanted the truth presented to him in pre-digested form by somebody like Walter Cronkite — somebody whose word he could take on faith; somebody endorsed by the They.

I’ll wager what I’ve said about my parents has struck a chord with some readers. Chances are, someone you love is a social metaphysician. Hell, chances are everybody you know is a social metaphysician. But if that’s true, then we must ask whether “social metaphysics” is a useful concept after all. I think that it is.

In all the years I spent teaching, I never once encountered a case of a student who began as a social metaphysician — who began by being preoccupied with what others think is true, rather than the truth itself — and then morphed into an independent thinker. And this was despite the fact that I taught the class as if I thought this possible — as if I thought that everyone in the room had that potential (in reality, I knew otherwise). All the students who were independent thinkers arrived that way, and none morphed into social metaphysicians.

I used to tell my independent-minded students that there are two kinds of people, “whatters” and “whyers.”[6] “Whatters” tell you what they did today, or what somebody said: “We had lunch today at Blimpies, and Tinky said the nastiest thing about Balph . . .” The whyers ask why? “Why did you do that?” “Why did you say that?” “Why do you think that’s true?” Faced with a whyer, a whatter feels like they are being over-scrutinized, and soon seeks solace in the company of other whatters. Faced with a whatter, a whyer feels like they’ve just tried to have a conversation with a head of lettuce.

“Social metaphysics” is a useful concept for articulating what’s wrong with 99% of humanity, from the perspective of the whyer. We just have to keep in mind that, contra Branden, it is not some sort of perversion; it is human nature. Freud thought that everyone was narcissistic to some degree or other. The person we refer to as “the narcissist” is merely an extreme; a person in whom the narcissistic aspect has taken over. We can see social metaphysics in exactly the same terms. Everyone is social metaphysical to some extent. I have encountered many examples of highly intelligent men who placed nothing above the judgment of their own minds in one or more areas of life — but in other areas, they were often wringing their hands over what “they say.” The person who deserves to be called “the social metaphysician” is the one who goes all the way; who really seems to be, as Rand would put it, only a shell containing the opinions of others. The social metaphysician is the NPC.

Speaking of memes, social metaphysics is also an extremely useful concept for understanding the age of social media. People call social media a playground for narcissists. This is true. Narcissus runs the show. He posts a carefully curated gallery of images, telling the tale of an enviable life that he does not actually lead. With each “like” he feels affirmed, and the vacuum that is his soul feels temporarily filled. Of all his forms of display, there is one that Narcissus finds most exquisitely pleasurable: posturing as a moral authority. He cares nothing about being good, but he desperately desires that others think that he is good.

Through his constant signaling on social media, Narcissus and his ilk have become those who determine, for an entire society, what “they say.” They are the They whose words and values Echo slavishly repeats, a small cadre of pathological narcissists leading around a vast army of social metaphysicians by the nose. Those social metaphysicians occupy all levels of society, from the sidewalk peanut vendor terrified he might misgender a customer to corporate executives hellbent on going woke, even if it means going broke. All live in terror of the They.

As my readers will have realized, liberals are extremely social metaphysical. This is a much more informative diagnosis than Ted Kaczynski’s observation that they are “over-socialized.” Socialized, indeed — to the point where the social almost completely eclipses the real. Liberals need to deny objective reality because their ideology keeps getting disconfirmed by it. This means that they wind up making the subjective absolute — what Rand called “the primacy of consciousness.” For liberals, what has primacy is not facts, but subjective states: feelings, sentiments, wishes, fears, hopes — and, above all, good intentions. Hence the Left’s emphasis on manipulating the “messages” people receive or the words they use, as if changing language will change reality. Hence also their desire to censor what is said by those who still maintain some contact with facts.

And, oh boy, are they ever in thrall to the They. Social metaphysics is why you cannot make any headway arguing with liberals. Facts are irrelevant when the primary concern is not truth, but the imprimatur of the They. Liberals are led by a They that is always several degrees further to the Left than most of them. This results in a guilty conscience, and they feel obliged to play catch-up — such as Hillary Clinton saying of transgender, “I’m not there yet.” This is why moderate liberal academics allow themselves to be controlled by far-Left campus crazies, and can only speak about their reservations in whispers. Open criticism might create the suspicion that they are crypto-conservatives, and nothing is more awful to academics than losing the approval of their colleagues. Anybody who thinks that Ayn Rand’s villains are implausible just hasn’t spent enough time around academia.

To be fair, social metaphysics is not confined to liberals. Conservatism Inc. is mostly populated by social metaphysicians. These people frequently rival the Left in the zeal with which they go about seeking to win the approval of the They — often by throwing anyone to the right of them under the bus.

I turn now to one final topic: What exactly is the alternative to the social metaphysician? I’ve suggested that it is the “independent thinker,” but for Rand it seems to have been a bit more complicated than this. The unqualifiedly positive characters in Rand’s novels are presented as the alternative to the social metaphysician. The Fountainhead really only contains one, Howard Roark, but Atlas Shrugged contains several: John Galt, Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, Francisco d’Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjöld, and a host of others who figure only as relatively minor characters. These people are all independent thinkers, but they also possess another important trait: They all seem peculiarly unable to understand the psychology of other human beings.

In The Fountainhead, after one of Roark’s early triumphs, he glimpses a group of happy-go-lucky young people whooping it up and having some mindless “fun.” Roark is mystified by them. Rand writes:

He thought that there was a difference, some important difference, between the consciousness of this day in him and in them. He thought that he should try to grasp it. But he forgot.

There are many such passages in the novel, and Hank Rearden has similar thoughts in Atlas Shrugged. Randian heroes simply cannot understand the motivations of the vast majority of humanity.

Atlas is replete with conversations, some going on for many pages, between heroes and social metaphysicians in which the former simply cannot understand what the latter are saying at all. A typical example is a scene in which Rearden meets with a bureaucrat. “You understand what I mean,” says the bureaucrat, with a kind of wink-wink nudge-nudge intonation. “No . . . I don’t,” responds Rearden, blankly. Rand’s heroes don’t seem to understand subtle hints or indirectness, and they have no time at all for human emotions. Other characters frequently call them “cold” and “inhuman.” By contrast, the negative characters interact with each almost entirely through indirection — through hints and unstated implications. They are also finely attuned to each other’s emotions.

One begins to wonder if the opposite of the social metaphysician might be the sperg, the autiste. If the “extreme male brain” theory of autism is correct, this would certainly explain why women are more social metaphysical than men. And liberals have always seemed to me to be a tad female-brained. The curse of the sperg, his cross to bear, is his difficulty in empathizing with others, understanding their emotional states, and understanding social signals. But this curse is equally a blessing: It means that he is usually concerned with facts rather than feelings. His perception of the facts is not occluded by concern with the opinions of others. And he tends to give voice to fact, without worrying about how They are going to feel about it. He does not fear disapproval, and if he receives it, especially for speaking the truth, he is dumbfounded. He often gets into hot water. But the sperg is free in a way that the vast majority of human beings are not.

Rand’s heroes are all supposed to be great innovators. That they all seem to be somewhere on the spectrum is probably partly a reflection of Rand’s own psychology (she was a rather spergie female), and partly a result of her perceptiveness. When one reads the biographies of real-life innovators who stood alone against the crowd, single-mindedly championing their ideas, tone deaf to the feelings of others while damning public opinion, one gets a strong whiff of autism.

Quite possibly, it is the spergs who move the world. Quite possibly, if autism didn’t exist as a counterweight to social metaphysics, we’d all still be living in grass huts.

* * *

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Notes

[1] Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Doubleday, 1986), 271.

[2] Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 179-180. The ellipsis omits the term “psycho-epistemological.” This is a term coined by Rand, which I would rather not have to explain. Its meaning is rather vague, and it can be omitted without Branden’s definition losing anything. The term “social metaphysics” is now used in academic philosophy, where it has an entirely different meaning.

[3] Excerpted in Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: New American Library, 1961), 68-69.

[4] Branden earned a BA from UCLA, an MA from New York University, and a Ph.D. from the then-unaccredited California Graduate Institute — all in psychology.

[5] Barbara Branden, 269-270.

[6] I stole this from Florence King. See her book Lump It or Leave It.