Thanks for sharing. I hadn’t seen this.
Since Facebook isn’t part of the open internet (can’t view the page without logging in), and to archive it, here’s Peikoff’s letter. I’ll comment in a second post after this one.
Dear Objectivist Students and Friends,
I am Leonard Peikoff and I share with you today another fight against a grave social injustice.
I am outraged, let alone astounded and even heartbroken, at a new assault against me - an assault instigated by my daughter, Kira Peikoff, whom I once loved but no longer can. Kira has done the unthinkable. Based on outright lies and sleight-of-hand innuendo which she has offered about me to a court of law, she has petitioned the government to place me under a conservatorship. If you recall the Britney Spears case, you will know what this means: If not, look it up. Kira’s petition, if she wins, obliterates all my rights as an American citizen.
How can she get away with this? She is asking the court to declare officially that I no longer have mental capacity, and therefore I cannot take safe care of myself in any or all realms. Therefore, she holds, I need a government-appointed conservator to oversee and manage my entire life i.e., an individual to approve or veto in advance any of my decisions, and I, as a matter of law, would have no choice but to obey. A conservator’s power is all-encompassing; e.g., I have been told by attorneys that I would have to get the conservator’s approval even to buy a pack of gum. If so, it is goodbye for us elderly to grab a flight to Connecticut to see the family or even to grab a cab to reach some coffee shop in the neighborhood. Unless either of those have been officially approved in advance. The principle of the worst dictators in history, to my knowledge, has always been: Whatever is not permitted is forbidden.
How does the government justify seizing such power? A California law claims to “protect” elderly people (like me) from “elder abuse” by others and also elder abuse by your own action. Only God - no, only Sacramento and soon Washington - can save us poor helpless old folks.The government will save us from irresponsibility by forbidding us to act as an autonomous, responsible being.
Now “why”? Why is my daughter taking such an evil and destructive action against me? From the evidence I have accumulated in the past months and in certain cases years, the answer is twofold. 1) Kira is upset that after I die, she will no longer get all my lifetime savings. When I remarried, I decided to bequeath my Estate (50/50) to my beloved wife, Grace, and to Kira. 2) So, Grace, in Kira’s opinion, has stolen from her both my love and “her” money. Yes, it is true. Kira regards a bequest in my will - of my money while I am still alive - as already her money.
The case is even more irrational. Due to Kira’s relentless demands, I have already given her a sizable fraction of my Estate, which leaves me with not enough to pay for my present legal expenses which were undreamed of when I gave her the money. For Kira, though, these gifts were not enough, they did not satisfy her. Kira tends to regard her love for me as a bargaining chip, withholding the love if she doesn’t receive the money. I now think that giving her these gifts was a weak and stupid action on my part. Especially since she is now using these gifts to pay her high-priced lawyers – whose fees she can meet only through the very money that I gave her. The Fifth Amendment states that you (the government) cannot ask a man to testify against himself. But our Founding Fathers didn’t even imagine the need for an amendment stating that you cannot ask a man to finance his own destruction.
What does it add up to about Kira? In my understanding, it means that in her dealings with me, Kira is motivated by three desires: Greed, Jealousy, and Revenge. (She launched the petition for a conservatorship shortly after I told her about the change in my will).
What California’s “protection” of me qua elder has meant thus far is that I have spent exorbitant amounts of time and money to defend myself. I and my loved ones are in a fight for my life!
In carrying out her evil project, Kira’s first attack was to petition for an Emergency Conservatorship. This means that the court should grant her desire to enslave me immediately. There was a court hearing - Kira demanded that a conservator be placed over me at once because, I guess, of all the evils waiting in the wings to explode, if and when I am set free.
The normal procedure is to have the wife appointed by the court, but Kira demanded that the court use her nominated conservator - as if that individual would be neutral. Kira in her delusion did not expect me to have the competency or desire to respond. Instead, I was fully present (my wife, Grace, beside me). I think the Court heard my voice loud and clear. I objected to this senseless conservatorship and exposed her lies. Outcome of Kira’s first attack: The judge denied that any emergency existed. I established my competence, at least unofficially, AND won his agreement on the emergency issue! At that point, Kira was stopped, albeit temporarily, in her rush to shackle me.
Once accused of mental incompetency, in order to keep his legal “protector” at bay, the victim faces an uphill battle - a painful trudge through the legal system’s endless procedures not only riddled by costs, but also by the anxiety triggered by all the legal machinations that it creates continuously, month after month, day after day. And I have been advised that the case may continue to 2025. I wake every day to this “ground zero” and to the question when, if it does, will the axe fall?
Objectivists, do you see the contradiction? In the name of “the accuser and the government protecting me”, they have submitted me to very high amounts of stress in multiple arenas. I have been put through hours of legal procedure, and hours-long mental capacity tests which I am required to pay for at $900 plus an hour, stripping from me my dignity and making my life miserable and even fearful of the final verdict to come – who knows when?
As Objectivists, we must fight this ever-increasing poison fed to us by our ever-increasing government. The purpose of this statement is to highlight this evil by concretizing this abstraction for you by showing you the specific terms and the horrors they visit on their victims who are allegedly their beneficiaries. My hope is that this brief indication will help to motivate you even more to join me in the fight against all this injustice.
What is the answer to all these welfare statists? As Ayn Rand has shown, government properly is a policeman to protect citizens from the initiation of force by others. Government is not a hospital or a home for the homeless, mentally ill, the unemployable, or any other group conventionally described as helpless, even if they really are helpless. Helpless individuals or groups must depend on the voluntary assistance of friends, relatives, or private charities. It is important to recall here that in the 19th century, the U.S. was much freer than it is today so that people could keep most of the wealth they had earned and did not see chunks regularly torn from them to feed “the sick” etc. In other words, people were much more generous when they were not visited regularly by the IRS. A farmer in that early period was often richer when his farm burned down than he was before, thanks to the charity that he received from those around him; because they viewed him as an independent equal, not as a leech sucking the blood out of them.
What enables the government to announce its demands for the time and wealth of the producers, and why do those who are the victims accept such demands as moral? Why should the independent producer sacrifice his own achievements, his own productive wealth to those who, whether through their own fault or not, do not produce enough to sustain themselves? Here there is only one answer, which Objectivists know: The morality of self-sacrifice, of altruism – the commandment that you must love and support your neighbor no matter how penniless your sacrifice will leave you. It is, as altruists have often implied and some have stated explicitly, a world in which the helpless survive by eating alive those who are not helpless.
My purpose in this letter is to help fight against the philosophic and ethical ideas now prevalent in our society that lead to so much misery among ordinary citizens such as me. This is not the world we elderly were brought up to expect. If years ago I had been told that this kind of lawsuit would occur in my last years, I would’ve scoffed at the absurdity. I am now in my “golden years” - but it feels like I’m in the “Twilight Zone,” which is now opening up and dragging me into who knows what.
Leonard Peikoff
Thank you for reading this. I have told you the gist of my situation and its philosophic roots as simply and briefly as I can. And special thanks to my good friends Carrie and Bradley, who, through their enthusiasm, editorial assistance, and computer-wise action made it possible for me to write the letter and place it before the public.
Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank my wonderful wife, Grace, for her unremitting support through every one of the legal events and also for the huge amounts of time she has spent as our paralegal, searching out emails, voicemails, and the rest. Sweetheart, you are not only keeping me hopeful, you are actually keeping the hope possible and real.
