Brian Doherty of Reason has a fairly reasonable reply to Jon Chait’s review of Ayn Rand biographies:
Chait might be aware that he isn’t really jousting with Rand per se with all this material–he’s explicitly arguing with the likes of Stuart Varney, Greg Mankiw, unnamed stereotypical arrogant “rich people,” and Irving Kristol. But by spending so much of an essay ostensibly about Rand on these points, he’s misleading his readers about what Rand thought and why.
As much I hate to admit it, this is not such a bad point. Whatever one thinks of Rand — and I don’t think much of her work — it probably isn’t fair to condemn her on the basis of today’s glibertarian foolishness. I never like it when people link Nietzsche with Nazism, and that’s not so different.
I never thought I’d read this in a libertarian magazine, though:
All that has little to do with what Rand had to say and why she said it. She believed that it was morally wrong to take from people their just property at the point of a gun. “Gentlemen, leave your guns outside!” was one of her summations of her political philosophy…
I just hope she wasn’t talking about town halls!
Update. On further reflection, I agree that Doherty is not all that accurate in his assessment of Chait’s piece. I also agree that Rand’s actual philosophy is even more terrifying than what today’s glibertarians spout. Nevertheless, I don’t think we should blame Ayn Rand for Glenn Reynolds and Nick Gillespie.
Redleg
Rand didn’t seem to care about those who rob with fountain pens.
Just Some Fuckhead
I accidentally clicked on the Ann Coulter ad to vote for Cutest Dog.
Xenos
I’ll take Bitsy any day.
Zifnab
It’s an understandable philosophy, coming from a Russian ex-pat. The only problem with this philosophy is that you then have people who simply won’t give up their just due outside of leveling a gun at them (and even then…)
Take the UBS tax evaders. They handed over their wealth to a foreign bank, received significantly reduced returns on investment, paid large fees, hampered their liquidity, and generally jumped through a large number of legal and financial hoops to deny the government it’s due. At a certain point, the IRS has to send in the cops because people simply refuse to pay up.
Rand’s adherents have taken her philosophy from “Leave your guns outside” to “You’ll pry it from my cold, dead hands”.
Face
OT:
simply amazing. Talk about shit that ought to the lead on NBC News, but cant, b/c Pat Swayze just died. And Michael Moore is fat.
Zifnab
@Just Some Fuckhead: I can see you getting confused. Bitsy doesn’t have the Adam’s apple, and he’s a short hair.
joe from Lowell
I never like it when people link Nietzsche with Nazism, and that’s not so different.
I disagree. Ayn Rand’s philosophy was actually a great deal worse than that of modern-day glibertarians.
As incredible as that may sound.
Rand with philosophically opposed to altruism, while many glibertarians give to charity.
Ayn Rand was the sort of philosopher who divided humanity into productive and parasite classes, and fantasied about the former having their revenge upon the latter. We’ve seen this before, in Naziism, communism, and elsewhere. The specific details of how those classes are defined and how the parasites are alleged to leech off their betters isn’t nearly as important as the fact that she adhered to that basic framework as she looked upon her fellow human beings going about the business of life, and saw parasite who needed their comeuppance. Not a few bad apples; whole swathes of humanity.
Most modern-day glibertarians just have some screwy ideas about market transactions and public goods.
gex
What a libertarian needs to ask themselves is why they are willing to put that one, and only one, limitation on how people acquire their wealth. They nonchalantly decide that they can impose the social contract on others (government) without acknowledging any debt to those who lose out under that contract. In nature, any animal big and strong enough to take the prey that some other animal has killed will be successful. Libertarians represent that skilled, but weak hunter. They gladly deny others the fruits of their talent only to use the power of the state to advantage themselves.
I’m not arguing that having a government that does the things that libertarians want it to do is wrong. I just think there’s a huge hole in their thinking. One of my pet peeves, for instance, is the fact that a modern economy seems to require a certain level of unemployment to control inflation. I’ve not seen one libertarian or conservative acknowledge that the rest of us owe those who are BY POLICY unable to find work for the poverty we impose.
mellowjohn
j.s.f…..
this just in: ann coulter has LOST the cutest dog contest.
jibeaux
I agree that people should not have their just property taken at the point of a gun, as this is known as “armed robbery”. The problem with libertarians is that they think a democratically elected government enacting any sort of taxes via the legislative process is exactly the same thing. It’s all armed robbery to them.
Ailuridae
Its unsurprising that Doherty would disagree with Chait’s take on Rand and the very real implications of following her belief system. But the thing is, that Chait was very fair – the implications of Rand’s belief system on policy are absolutely disastrous. Its not a bastardization really.
Frankly, this is a reasonably disappointing post by DougJ
jibeaux
@joe from Lowell:
I once tried to have a conversation regarding this view of altruism in which the Randite attempted to explain what this meant. It remains to this day the stupidest conversation I have ever had, and this was pre-internet and I am counting the internet here. It is as if we have the majority of people walking around seeing with their own two eyes, or maybe they have glasses. And then you have the people who have seized on Ayn Rand and they are wearing binoculars to which they have attached those bug-eye-view toys, and then a kaleidoscope after that. It is just a profoundly weird way of seeing the world.
itsbenj
mmm…no. Chait is too charitable. try reading this instead by Tim Wise.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Given that Ayn Rand wrote in praise of William Edward Hickman, the child-murdering kidnapper and possible child rapist who dismembered his victim before returning her corpse at the ransom scene, I’d think that it’s damning her enough just to cite her own works against her.
How much lower do you get than praising William Edward Hickman? That’s like if Michelle Malkin wrote in praise of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Brien Jackson
Don’t go soft on us Doug, that’s not at all an accurate representation of Chait’s piece, which clearly grapples with a lot of Rand’s “thinking,” albeit more focused on the real world application of it (her hostility to altruism, lying about getting ahead without help, etc). Yes he then parlays into what it means in the modern context, but that’s obviously understandable. And besides, as Chait notes, Rand’s is not a transcendant ideology that can only be theoretically grappled with, its tenets are subject to be objectively evaluated, which he does.
Doherty is just being disingenuous.
chopper
@joe from Lowell:
it wasn’t just the productive. it was the creative people, the movers and shakers who were the ubermensch in her philosophy. everyone else was a parasite. what exactly did galt ‘produce’? ideas?
while a strike ala atlas shrugged would surely screw up the country, so would a general strike of the ‘parasite’ workers. you know, the people that actually produce goods and perform services in this country.
as if the ‘worthwhile’ class of artists and inventors and rich dudes in galt’s gulch could build a car or grow and butcher a steer? clean their own houses and fix their own plumbing and take their own garbage to the landfill?
Zifnab
@joe from Lowell:
Donating a ten grand to your church, so it can build a bigger statue of Jesus and buy a bigger megaphone to heckle abortionists is not “charity”.
Sarcastro
Some monkeys like to debate about Rand and Nietzsche, but the monkeys never seem to realize that Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche were just more fucking monkeys.
joe from Lowell
Yeah, most libertarians aren’t choosing the church as their charity of choice.
Zifnab
@chopper:
The idea is that they could. That everyone was perfectly self sufficient. And that society was built up as a cage for the “worthy” people. Going Galt was a pioneer-like dash for freedom. And, to be fair, pioneers have been making lives for themselves since the dawn of time.
But very few people “Go Galt” these days. With the exception of a few survivalists and hermits, no one goes out into the woods to live the good life only True Libertarianism can provide. If people really did embrace Randianism and started floating colonies off the coast of Florida and California, I think people would object to Glibertarians less. Certainly, no one minds Luxemburg and Monaco and Vatican City – that’s about as successful as a libertarian ever gets.
Ash Can
@Ailuridae: I agree with your points on Doherty, Chait and Rand, but I wouldn’t hang this on DougJ. Given the metric shit-ton of illiteracy, dishonesty, denial, stupidity, and outright assholery out of the right over the past few days, whether in the national news or just in these discussion threads here, it’s refreshing to read about a RWer/libertarian taking issue with someone in a literate and reasonable manner, even if he’s trying to make points with which we don’t agree. Reasonable debate is in such short supply these days that I’m inclined to welcome it whenever and wherever it turns up, and I suspect DougJ feels much the same way.
Roger Moore
@Face:
Very interesting. I went to Singapore last year, and I wondered about the huge number of ships moored just offshore. I thought they might be lined up waiting for berthing space, but now I see that wasn’t it.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm
“…In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, “What is good for me is right,” a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. “The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have heard,” she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.)
At the time, she was planning a novel that was to be titled The Little Street, the projected hero of which was named Danny Renahan. According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan – intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man – after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, “is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness — [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people … Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.” (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)
“A wonderful, free, light consciousness” born of the utter absence of any understanding of “the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.” Obviously, Ayn Rand was most favorably impressed with Mr. Hickman. He was, at least at that stage of Rand’s life, her kind of man.
So the question is, who exactly was he?
William Edward Hickman was one of the most famous men in America in 1928. But he came by his fame in a way that perhaps should have given pause to Ayn Rand before she decided that he was a “real man” worthy of enshrinement in her pantheon of fictional heroes.
You see, Hickman was a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer.
Other than that, he was probably a swell guy.
In December of 1927, Hickman, nineteen years old, showed up at a Los Angeles public school and managed to get custody of a twelve-year-old girl, Marian (sometimes Marion) Parker. He was able to convince Marian’s teacher that the girl’s father, a well-known banker, had been seriously injured in a car accident and that the girl had to go to the hospital immediately. The story was a lie. Hickman disappeared with Marian, and over the next few days Mr. and Mrs. Parker received a series of ransom notes. The notes were cruel and taunting and were sometimes signed “Death” or “Fate.” The sum of $1,500 was demanded for the child’s safe release. (Hickman needed this sum, he later claimed, because he wanted to go to Bible college!) The father raised the payment in gold certificates and delivered it to Hickman. As told by the article “Fate, Death and the Fox” in crimelibrary.com,
“At the rendezvous, Mr. Parker handed over the money to a young man who was waiting for him in a parked car. When Mr. Parker paid the ransom, he could see his daughter, Marion, sitting in the passenger seat next to the suspect. As soon as the money was exchanged, the suspect drove off with the victim still in the car. At the end of the street, Marion’s corpse was dumped onto the pavement. She was dead. Her legs had been chopped off and her eyes had been wired open to appear as if she was still alive. Her internal organs had been cut out and pieces of her body were later found strewn all over the Los Angeles area.”
Quite a hero, eh? One might question whether Hickman had “a wonderful, free, light consciousness,” but surely he did have “no organ for understanding … the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.”
The mutilations Hickman inflicted on little Marian were worse than reported in the excerpt above. He cut the girl’s body in half, and severed her hands (or arms, depending on the source). He drained her torso of blood and stuffed it with bath towels. There were persistent rumors that he molested the girl before killing her, though this claim was officially denied. Overall, the crime is somewhat reminiscent of the 1947 Black Dahlia case, one of the most gruesome homicides in L.A. history.
But Hickman’s heroism doesn’t end there. He heroically amscrayed to the small town of Echo, Oregon, where he heroically holed up, no doubt believing he had perpetrated the perfect crime. Sadly for him, fingerprints he’d left on one of the ransom notes matched prints on file from his previous conviction for forgery. With his face on Wanted posters everywhere, Hickman was quickly tracked down and arrested. The article continues:
“He was conveyed back to Los Angeles where he promptly confessed to another murder he committed during a drug store hold-up. Eventually, Hickman confessed to a dozen armed robberies. ‘This is going to get interesting before it’s over,’ he told investigators. ‘Marion and I were good friends,’ he said, ‘and we really had a good time when we were together and I really liked her. I’m sorry that she was killed.’ Hickman never said why he had killed the girl and cut off her legs.”
It seems to me that Ayn Rand’s uncritical admiration of a personality this twisted does not speak particularly well for her ability to judge and evaluate the heroic qualities in people. One might go so far as to say that anyone who sees William Edward Hickman as the epitome of a “real man” has some serious issues to work on, and perhaps should be less concerned with trying to convert the world to her point of view than in trying to repair her own damaged psyche. One might also point out that a person who “has no organ for understanding … the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people” is what we today would call a sociopath.
Was Rand’s ideal man a sociopath? The suggestion seems shockingly unfair – until you read her very own words.
No doubt defenders of Ayn Rand, and there are still a few left, would reply that the journal entry in question was written when she was only in her early twenties and still under the spell of Nietzsche, that as her thinking developed she discarded such Nietzschean elements and evolved a more rational outlook, and that the mature Rand should not be judged by the mistakes of her youth. And this might be a perfectly reasonable position to take. Unquestionably Rand’s outlook did change, and her point of view did become at least somewhat less hostile to what the average, normal person would regard as healthy values.
But before we assume that her admiration of Mr. Hickman was merely a quirk of her salad days, let’s consider a few other quotes from Ayn Rand cited in Scott Ryan’s book.
In her early notes for The Fountainhead: “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself. Fine!” (Journals, p. 78.)
Of The Fountainhead’s hero, Howard Roark: He “has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world.” (Journals, p. 93.)
In the original version of her first novel We the Living: “What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?” (This declaration is made by the heroine Kira, Rand’s stand-in; it is quoted in The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ronald Merrill, pp. 38 – 39; the passage was altered when the book was reissued years after its original publication.)
On the value of human life: Man “is man only so long as he functions in accordance with the nature of a rational being. When he chooses to function otherwise, he is no longer man. There is no proper name for the thing which he then becomes … When a man chooses to act in a sub-human manner, it is no longer proper for him to survive nor to be happy.” (Journals, pp. 253-254, 288.)
As proof that her Nietzschean thinking persisted long after her admirers think she abandoned it, this journal entry from 1945, two years subsequent to the publication of The Fountainhead: “Perhaps we really are in the process of evolving from apes to Supermen — and the rational faculty is the dominant characteristic of the better species, the Superman.” (Journals, p. 285.)
So perhaps her thinking did not change quite so much, after all.
And what of William Edward Hickman? What ever became of the man who served as the early prototype of the Randian Superman?
Real life is not fiction, and Hickman’s personal credo, which so impressed Ayn Rand – “what is right for me is good” – does not seem to have worked out very well for him. At first he heroically tried to weasel out of the murder rap by implicating another man, but the intended fall guy turned out to have an airtight alibi (he was in prison at the time). Then he heroically invoked the insanity defense – the first use of this tactic in American history. This effort likewise failed, and in 1928 he was sentenced to death by hanging, to be carried out at San Quentin later that same year.
Hickman reportedly “died yellow” – he was dragged, trembling and fainting, to his execution, his courtroom bravado having given way at last.
Part Two: It just gets worse
After writing the above, I found myself questioning whether it was really possible that Ayn Rand admired William Edward Hickman, the child kidnapper and multiple murderer whose credo Rand quotes with unblinking approval in her journal. Although my opinion of Rand is very low, it has never been quite that low, and I was, after all, relying on secondhand sources. Not having a copy of Journals of Ayn Rand, I thought I was unable to check for myself. Then it occurred to me to use Amazon.com’s “Search inside” feature to read the relevant pages.
What I found was, in some ways, actually worse than anything the brief excerpts from the journals had suggested.
Clearly the editor of Journals of Ayn Rand had some qualms about Rand’s open admiration of Hickman. He tries to put this admiration into perspective, writing:
“For reasons given in the following notes, AR concluded that the intensity of the public’s hatred was primarily ‘because of the man who committed the crime and not because of the crime he committed.’ The mob hated Hickman for his independence; she chose him as a model for the same reason.
“Hickman served as a model for [her fictional hero] Danny [Renahan] only in strictly limited respects, which AR names in her notes. And he does commit a crime in the story, but it is nothing like Hickman’s. To guard against any misinterpretation, I quote her own statement regarding the relationship between her hero and Hickman:
” ‘[My hero is] very far from him, of course. The outside of Hickman, but not the inside. Much deeper and much more. A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me.’ ”
The editor also provides the briefest and most detail-free synopsis of Hickman’s crime possible: “He was accused of kidnapping and murdering a young girl. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in February of 1928; he was hanged on October 20, 1928.”
As far as I can tell, this is the one and only reference to Hickman’s victim to be found anywhere in the book. Ayn Rand never mentions the victim at all in any of her journal entries. The closest she comes is a sneering reference to another girl, “who wrote a letter to Hickman [in jail], asking him ‘to get religion so that little girls everywhere would stop being afraid of him.'”
Notice that the editor does not bother to tell us that the victim in question was twelve years old, that Hickman tormented her parents with mocking ransom notes, that Hickman killed the girl even though the parents paid the ransom money, or that Hickman cut the girl in half and threw her upper body onto the street in front of her horrified father while scattering her other body parts around the city of Los Angeles.
This is the Hickman whose “outside” so intrigued the young Ayn Rand.
Now here are some of Rand’s notes on the fictional hero she was developing, with Hickman (or what he “suggested”) as a model:
“Other people have no right, no hold, no interest or influence on him. And this is not affected or chosen — it’s inborn, absolute, it can’t be changed, he has ‘no organ’ to be otherwise. In this respect, he has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’ ”
“He shows how impossible it is for a genuinely beautiful soul to succeed at present, for in all [aspects of] modern life, one has to be a hypocrite, to bend and tolerate. This boy wanted to command and smash away things and people he didn’t approve of.”
Apparently what Hickman suggested to Ayn Rand was “a genuinely beautiful soul.” The soul of Marian Parker, the murdered girl, evidently did not suggest any comparably romantic notions to her.
As I mentioned in my previous post, there is a term for a person who has “no organ” by which to understand other human beings — a person who “can never realize and feel ‘other people.'” That word is sociopath. I mean this quite literally and not as a rhetorical flourish. A sociopath, by definition, is someone who lacks empathy and cannot conceive of other people as fully real. It is precisely because the sociopath objectifies and depersonalizes other human beings that he is able to inflict pain and death without remorse.
It is also fair to say of any sociopath that he “wanted to command and smash away things and people he didn’t approve of.” How this relates to having “a beautiful soul” is unclear to me — and I earnestly hope it will continue to be.
In her notes, Rand complains that poor Hickman has become the target of irrational and ugly mob psychology:
“The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the ‘virtuous’ indignation and mass-hatred of the ‘majority.’… It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal…
“This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul.”
Before we get to the meat of this statement, let us pause to consider Rand’s claim that average members of the public are “beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives.” Worse sins and crimes and kidnapping, murdering, and mutilating a helpless little girl? If Rand honestly believed that the average American had worse skeletons than that in his closet, then her opinion of “the average man” is even lower than I had suspected.
We get an idea of the “sins and crimes” of ordinary people when Rand discusses the jury in the case: “Average, everyday, rather stupid looking citizens. Shabbily dressed, dried, worn looking little men. Fat, overdressed, very average, ‘dignified’ housewives. How can they decide the fate of that boy? Or anyone’s fate?”
Their sin, evidently, is that they are “average,” a word that appears twice in three sentences. They are “shabbily dressed” or, conversely, “overdressed” — in matters of fashion, Rand seems hard to please. They are “dried” and “worn,” or they are “fat.” They are, in short, an assault on the delicate sensibilities of the author. Anything “average” appalls her. “Extremist beyond all extreme is what we need!” she exclaims in another entry. Well, in his cruelty and psychopathic insanity, Hickman was an extremist, for sure. Nothing “average” about him!
Returning to the longer quote above, notice how briskly Rand dismisses the possibility that the public’s anger might have been motivated by the crime per se. Apparently the horrendous slaying of a little girl is not enough, in Rand’s mind, to justify public outrage against the murderer. No, what the public really objects to is “a daring challenge to society.” I suppose this is one way of looking at Hickman’s actions. By the same logic, Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy posed “a daring challenge to society.” So did Adolf Hitler, only on a larger scale.
Hickman, she writes, knew that his crime “was against all laws of humanity” — this is a point in his favor, she seems to think. And “he does not want to recognize it as a crime.” Well, neither does any criminal who rationalizes his behavior by saying that his victim “had it coming.” Hickman “feels superior to all.” Yes, so do most sociopaths. Grandiosity and narcissistic self-absorption are another characteristic of this personality type. Hickman has “a consciousness all his own”; he is a “man who really stands alone, in action and in soul.” I cannot think of any comment about this that would be suitable for public consumption.
Although the American people showed no sympathy for Hickman, Ayn Rand certainly did:
“And when we look at the other side of it — there is a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy turned into a purposeless monster. By whom? By what? Is it not by that very society that is now yelling so virtuously in its role of innocent victim? He had a brilliant mind, a romantic, adventurous, impatient soul and a straight, uncompromising, proud character. What had society to offer him? A wretched, insane family as the ideal home, a Y.M.C.A. club as social honor, and a bank-page job as ambition and career…
“If he had any desires and ambitions — what was the way before him? A long, slow, soul-eating, heart-wrecking toil and struggle; the degrading, ignoble road of silent pain and loud compromises….
“A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet. That boy was not strong enough. But is that his crime? Is it his crime that he was too impatient, fiery and proud to go that slow way? That he was not able to serve, when he felt worthy to rule; to obey, when he wanted to command?…
“He was given [nothing with which] to fill his life. What was he offered to fill his soul? The petty, narrow, inconsistent, hypocritical ideology of present-day humanity. All the criminal, ludicrous, tragic nonsense of Christianity and its morals, virtues, and consequences. Is it any wonder that he didn’t accept it?”
How exactly she knew that Hickman was “brilliant, unusual, exceptional,” or that he “had a brilliant mind, a romantic, adventurous, impatient soul and a straight, uncompromising, proud character” is far from clear. A more realistic portrait of Hickman would show him as a calculating sadist.
For all those who assume that Ayn Rand, as a figure on the political right, would be “tough on crime,” please note that she here invokes the hoariest cliches of the “victim of society” mentality. Poor Hickman just couldn’t help kidnapping and murdering a little girl — after all, he had a lousy home life and an unfulfilling job. And it would be asking too much of such a superior soul to put forth the long, sustained effort necessary to rise to a position of power and influence by means of his own hard work.
Rand’s statement here reminds me very much of an attitude often found in career criminals — that honest work is for suckers.
“A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet.” This is about as bald-faced a confession of Rand’s utter dependence on Nietzsche as we are ever likely to see. “That boy was not strong enough. But is that his crime?” No, Ayn Rand, that was not his crime. His crime, in case you have forgotten, is that he kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl and held her for ransom and murdered her and cut her to pieces and threw her body parts in the street and laughed about it. That was his crime. True, he did not quite “trample society under his feet” — but it was not for want of trying.
Oh, but “he was not able to serve, when he felt worthy to rule; to obey, when he wanted to command.” How sad for him. There is a point in most people’s lives — usually around the age of fifteen or sixteen — when they reject authority and want to rule and command. Rand apparently feels that this adolescent hubris represents the best in human nature. A less addled personality would recognize that it represents a passing phase in one’s personal development, a phase that a mature human being has long outgrown.
But of course we know the real villain in the picture. Not Hickman, but Christianity! More specifically, “All the criminal, ludicrous, tragic nonsense of Christianity and its morals, virtues, and consequences. Is it any wonder that he didn’t accept it?” So it is Christianity that is characterized as “criminal,” just as it is average Americans who are excoriated for their “sins and crimes.”
In case there is any doubt as to Rand’s position vis-a-vis Christianity, a few pages later we find her fulminating against the depravity of:
“… the pastors who try to convert convicted murderers to their religion… The fact that right after his sentence Hickman was given a Bible by the jailer. I don’t know of anything more loathsome, hypocritical, low, and diabolical than giving Bibles to men sentenced to death. It is one of those things that’s comical in its stupidity and horrid because of this lugubrious, gruesome comedy.”
I can think of at least one thing that is “more loathsome … low, and diabolical than giving Bibles to men sentenced to death.” And that is: ripping up little girls for fun and profit.
Incidentally, given Hickman’s claim that he ransomed his victim in order to pay for Bible college, the jailer’s decision to hand the condemned man a copy of the Good Book seems like poetic justice to me.
Defending her hero, Rand asks rhetorically:
“What could society answer, if that boy were to say: ‘Yes. I am a monstrous criminal, but what are you?’ ”
Well, society could answer: We are the ones who caught you, tried you, convicted you, and are going to put you to death. Or more seriously: We are the ones charged with upholding all those “laws of humanity” that you chose to violate – and now, dear Willie, you must pay the price.
At times, Rand — who, we must remember, was still quite young when she wrote these notes — appears to be rather infatuated with the famous and charismatic boy killer. She offers a long paragraph listing all the things she likes about Hickman, somewhat in the manner of a lovestruck teenager recording her favorite details about the lead singer in a boy band. Rand’s inventory includes:
“The fact that he looks like ‘a bad boy with a very winning grin,’ that he makes you like him the whole time you’re in his presence…”
You can practically hear the young aspiring author’s heart fluttering. I have always been puzzled by the psychology of women who write love letters to serial killers in prison. Somehow I suspect Ayn Rand would have understood them better than I do.
Still writing of Hickman, she confesses to her “involuntary, irresistible sympathy for him, which I cannot help feeling just because of [his antisocial nature] and in spite of everything else.” Regarding his credo (the full statement of which is, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right”), Rand writes, “Even if he wasn’t big enough to live by that attitude, he deserves credit for saying it so brilliantly.”
Remember all the flak taken by Norman Mailer for championing a jailhouse writer and getting the guy paroled, only to have him commit another crime? Here we have Rand enthusing about the “credit” Hickman “deserves” for expressing his twisted philosophy of life “so brilliantly.” Get that man on a work release program!
At one point, a sliver of near-rationality breaks through the fog of Rand’s delusions: “I am afraid that I idealize Hickman and that he might not be this at all. In fact, he probably isn’t.” Her moment of lucidity is short-lived. “But it does not make any difference. If he isn’t, he could be, and that’s enough.” Yes, facts are stubborn things, so it’s best to ignore them and live in a land of make-believe. Let’s not allow truculent reality to interfere with our dizzying and intoxicating fantasy life.
Punctuating the point, Rand writes, “There is a lot that is purposely, senselessly horrible about him. But that does not interest me…” No indeed. Why should it? It’s only reality.
By the appraisal of any normal mind, there can be little doubt that William Edward Hickman was a vicious psychopath of the worst order. That Ayn Rand saw something heroic, brilliant, and romantic in this despicable creature is perhaps the single worst indictment of her that I have come across. It is enough to make me question not only her judgment, but her sanity.
At this point in my life, I did not think it was possible to significantly lower my estimate of Ayn Rand, or to regard her as even more of a psychological and moral mess than I had already taken her to be.
I stand corrected.”
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Fuck. Ayn. Rand.
ed
I’ll fix that for ya: Megan McArdle.
There. All done. You’re welcome.
Hob
Rand may not have wanted anyone to be threatened with guns… but in the “everyone on this train is going to suffocate, ha ha” chapter of Atlas Shrugged, she makes it pretty clear that she thinks socialists, unionists, and even writers who make fun of businessmen, deserve to die. It’s not subtext; it’s what the narrator says. True, it’s not like she wants anyone to shoot them or anything – they should just die in a convenient accident.
Mojotron
So Ayn Rand was the type to write marriage proposals to sadistic murderers. I always wondered who did that. Brrrrr.
and ‘Yes. I am a monstrous criminal, but what are you?’ isn’t quite the effective burn that she thinks it is.
Brien Jackson
@23:
Very nice.
To sum up Rand: read The Fountainhead (if you can bear it) and honestly try to tell me she wasn’t a sociopath.
J.W. Hamner
@jibeaux:
Oh god yes. There is a certain type of teenage boy who wants a moral justification for being selfish. They find Rand and (often) never grow up. For my own sanity I long ago stopped having the “there’s no such thing as altruism” arguments, but they still exist as black holes in my memory and time that I’ll never get back.
Allan
Ayn Rand destroyed in cartoon form:
Bob the Angry Flower in Atlas Shrugged 2: One Hour Later
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@J.W. Hamner:
“Oh god yes. There is a certain type of teenage boy who wants a moral justification for being selfish. They find Rand and (often) never grow up. For my own sanity I long ago stopped having the “there’s no such thing as altruism” arguments, but they still exist as black holes in my memory and time that I’ll never get back.”
Yeah. Fun waste of time arguments with jackoffs. “Supposed altruism is just done for the selfish motive of feeling better about yourself.” Universally uttered by people who’ve never actually done an altruistic deed in their entire lives. On par with a man lecturing a woman on what childbirth feels like, except that the ignorance could actually be remedied if the selfish little shits actually TRIED altruism for a change.
Ben JB
Doug,
I’m not so sure I would describe Doherty’s response as reasonable, except for the fact that he notes that Chait’s piece isn’t really a review of the two biographies of Rand. That part seems right, but the rest?
Insofar as Doherty describes “the real Rand” as someone “who believed that everyone deserved everything they honestly earned through uncoerced trade,” he has to ignore all the biographical information (which he does)–no mention of Chicago relatives, of De Mille’s largesse, of her sexual control over her acolytes. She becomes, instead, an ideal philosopher whose philosophy just isn’t approached right, for Doherty. Which is not totally off the wall, but here’s the thing:
As much as I hate the “Nietzsche led to the Nazis” line of thinking, I have to admit that certain Nietzschean formulations are very congenial (that not necessarily causative) to a Nazi worldview. The difference between the Nietzsche-Nazi and Rand-asshole connections is that I can think of Nietzsche leading to other avenues of thought, whereas Rand’s philosophy seems to lead only to narcissistic assholes as a consequence.
Lastly, Chait’s line about libertarians being traumatized as greedy kids is perhaps unfair, but Doherty shows a little too much of his hand when he notes that these kids were deprived of things “they thought of as theirs.” I mean, Grover Norquist’s dad ate some of his ice cream, but who do you think bought that ice cream in the first place and gave it to Grover? That to me is the hallmark of libertarian/conservative thought: the ease with which they can assume sole ownership of something that is theirs only by the combined work of a larger social mechanism.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Ben JB:
Good point. Nietzsche leads to Nazism if he’s completely misunderstood, and some of his remarks are taken out of context. Rand leads straight to being a sociopathic asshole if her writings ARE understood. Nietzsche was almost as much a poet as he was a philosopher. Rand is crystal clear, and every bit as ridiculous and insane as she is easy to understand. I read “Anthem” when I was 16, and even that very short text taught me everything I needed to know about that awful, awful woman.
LD50
@Allan: “I only know how to pay people to create new alloys!”
Priceless.
The Raven
What I find striking about Randian ideology is it in theory it claims neutrality but in fact it idealizes brutality. If the ideal man is above interest in other people, then why does he torture? Why does he care enough to do even that? All he needs to do with other people is the bare minimum to get them to leave him alone. But secretly he hates, if hate is not making his emotional state too human. As, I suppose, Rand hated. So if you follow Rand, if you think she might have had some good ideas, remember that her ideas come from a well of poison, and are not to be trusted.
To judge from the summarized biographies, Rand probably had antisocial personality disorder probably as a result of childhood abuse combined with her innate personality. Her ideology, therefore, forms a rationale for the antisocial and destructive.
jibeaux
@J.W. Hamner:
This is probably going on 18 years ago, with a fellow college student friend of a friend. She had a very odd idealism about striving for your dreams, like that at age 19 she could suddenly decide to become a professional ballet dancer despite not having previously studied ballet. I’m sure that would make a great Disney movie and all, but even at 19 I was jaded enough to know that wasn’t going to pan out too well. I was never in touch with her, but heard about her from time to time through the friend, she’s in California trying to be an actress, she’s in Prague trying to be a writer, etc. I heard recently from the friend, who basically reported back that she has given up on her wild-eyed idealism and has learned that she actually can’t seem to be whatever her dreams of the moment are, and she should probably have learned a practical skill by now, and that she regrets that.
I don’t mean this as a sort of depressing “tamp down your dreams, kids!” moral, but there is some sort of moral there about not pulling a dream out of your butt just because you’ve read some stupid book that says anyone who is not a genius visionary hero type doesn’t deserve to go on living.
chopper
@Zifnab:
that’s because in rand’s mind if the workaday shlubs can do it then it can’t be that difficult.
pioneers, on the other hand, have been making lives for themselves since the dawn of time by working themselves to an early grave putting 16-hour days in. if john galt had to live completely off the land he’d be dead of exhaustion by the end of the month, or at the very least not have any free time to sit around being better than everyone else.
chopper
@The Raven:
oh, of course it isn’t neutral. rand’s philosophy isn’t really based on ‘productivity’ either. i mean, the artists that ‘went galt’ in the novel didn’t produce anything that kept america’s economy going, did they? no, they belonged there because they had the right philosophy. that’s really how rand divided the world up into – the ubermench who agreed with her, and the subhuman parasites who didn’t. of course, agreeing with her philosophy meant you were full of superhuman awesomeness and could do anything that anybody else could do.
the thing about atlas shrugged is, you can write the exact same book from a socialist perspective and it’s just the same. some dystopic uber-free market america full of rich jerks and poor workers and then some cesar chavez-type convinces the workers (who actually produce the goods and services the world relies on) go on a general strike and the whole country grinds to a halt.
meanwhile john galt and his rich buddies all starve to death because they’ve never learned how to grow their own food and the workers, the guys who know how to actually build and fix crap and have been getting by on their own forever, live on while the rich all die away.
who are the noble producers and the parasites now?
chopper
ah, moderation hell. stupid boner pills.
RSA
Her beliefs went a bit farther than that. Rand on charity:
This is pretty consistent with selfishness being a virtue. Also, conveniently enough, if you have high enough standards for being deserving, you never have to be charitable to anyone at all.
bellatrys
She believed that it was morally wrong to take from people their just property at the point of a gun.
I call bullshit.
This statement is only true with the additional qualification of white .
Which makes her quite as bad as any current Teabagger, and in keeping with their general current prejudices.
bellatrys
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
On par with a man lecturing a woman on what childbirth feels like, except that the ignorance could actually be remedied if the selfish little shits actually TRIED altruism for a change.
Alas, I think they have, & this is the result. Something’s broke inside.
(And this made me laugh, as I have had a man lecture me that he knew as well as I did, what a pelvic exam felt like, based on having escorted his wives to their OB-GYN appointments! Yes, he’s a wingnut, too…)
flounder
What I was struck by was that Rand’s mom had taken all her toys and given them away and it scarred her for life. Then he mentions that Grover Norquist’s dad used to take his ice cream cone and say “sales tax” and “income tax” as he ate his kids ice cream.
Does low-grade child abuse lead to creepy conservative ideology?
Slugger
I have a certain sympathy for libertarian thinking, but I don’t understand the fascination with Rand. Isn’t Heinlein a much better writer creating more plausible worlds with a less puerile view of humanity and sexuality than Rand?
Of course, my views might be discounted since I currently base my worldview on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@bellatrys:
True. A sociopath, forced to do community service as part of some juvenile court sentence, probably wouldn’t get much out of it.
@Slugger:
“Of course, my views might be discounted since I currently base my worldview on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.”
“Death would be a great boon if only it could blot out the memories.” Yep, that sums up the nihilistic core of the GOP quite nicely.
Mnemosyne
@Ben JB:
Exactly. It took me years to realize it because of all of the high-falutin’ language they wrap themselves in, but Randians and Libertarians are basically leeches on society. They want to enjoy the benefits of civilization that we all pay for without having to pay in themselves. They’re freeloaders. They want the fire department to come to their house when it’s on fire and the city to repair the potholes in their street, but they want everyone else to pay for it.
Allan
@jibeaux: Or as Lily Tomlin’s similar character Chrissy in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe says:
RSA
@Zifnab:
Exactly. Libertarians don’t seem to realize that productive people generally don’t want to live in a fucking Gulch. Me, if I ever go Galt (and I definitely qualify as a productive citizen), I’m going to move to a socialist hellhole like Germany or France.
cyd
You could point out that scientists worked out that altruism really exists, and why, more than four decades ago.
Persia
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: “Supposed altruism is just done for the selfish motive of feeling better about yourself.”
My general response to that is “So what?” Usually that confuses them for at least a good ten minutes.
HyperIon
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.
Isn’t this the definition of a psychopath?
HyperIon
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.
@HyperIon:Isn’t this the definition of a psychopath?
I see you got there later on in the post.
Very interesting. In fact, amazing.
gex
@Persia: The answer to your “so what?” question is that an altruistic transaction is good for both sides in the transaction. To libertarians the only good transactions are those in which there is a winner and a loser. The damn shame of the matter is not many of them seem to realize that the way things are going in the US currently, they are going to be the losers in the long run.
liberal
@gex:
liberal
@jibeaux:
The problem is the word “just”. “Just” property would mean the fruit of one’s labor, and also the fruit of capital (which is akin to “stored up” labor).
Problem is that land is not the fruit of anyone’s labor, and investing in rent-producing assets like land is the most common way to wealth.
HyperIon
@Ben JB: The difference between the Nietzsche-Nazi and Rand-asshole connections is that I can think of Nietzsche leading to other avenues of thought, whereas Rand’s philosophy seems to lead only to narcissistic assholes as a consequence.
Excellent point.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@HyperIon:
Wish I could claim credit for writing that. It’s a quote from the link.
Sorry, I’m really bad at blockquoting on the new Balloon Juice.
NBarnes
“Behind every stable and peaceful social order stands the shadow of the executioner.” – Joseph de Maistre
Rand is rarely described as naive, but it really is one of her bigger failings as a theorist.
Free At Last
@joe from Lowell:
” Rand was philosophically opposed to altruism, while many glibertarians give to charity.”
I actually went to a talk she gave to campus libertarians a very long time ago. At the end, she took questions and someone asked her what we should do about the disabled, etc. Her response was something like “I didn’t cause their problem, so why should I have to fix it.” Nice lady.
Free At Last
@joe from Lowell:
” Rand was philosophically opposed to altruism, while many glibertarians give to charity.”
I actually went to a talk she gave to campus libertarians a very long time ago. At the end, she took questions and someone asked her what we should do about the disabled, etc. Her response was something like “I didn’t cause their problem, so why should I have to fix it.” Nice lady.
HyperIon
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: Wish I could claim credit for writing that. It’s a quote from the link.
yeah, i know.
but mostly when folks paste in a long quote, it’s crap.
this was actually good.
microtherion
Actually, Rand had no problem with her heroes getting what they wanted at gunpoint:
Doug
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html
Sentient Puddle
Dear lord…and I merely thought Rand simply created a misguided philosophy and got a lot of crap thrown at her unfairly. After reading that piece, my sympathy for her dropped to zero.
In any case, if we can’t blame Rand for leading to today’s class of libertarians, can we at least blame them for letting her con them into thinking that she was the second coming of Jesus? I mean, it’s hard to imagine that someone preaching selfishness could actually attract a following. Surely these people have to take some credit for being such incredible morons.
PTirebiter
@Joe from Lowell,
I think your right. In addition to their stunning narcissism, Rand’s followers do seem to share some twisted need to punish. Their philosophy doesn’t require the suffering of others, so it must be some sort of personal validation they’re after. Ironically, the only way I can find any empathy for Rand’s acolytes, is by imputing some sort of catastrophic emotional need.
Anonymous37
Unless, of course, the people in question were American Indians. In that case:
Fuck Ayn Rand and fuck Brian Doherty, too.
Anne Laurie
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
The Malkin-tents would probably tell you that Dahmer only cannibalized Teh Gheys, and mostly non-white Gheys at that — much more socially acceptable than dismembering an adorable little blond rich kid, like that weirdo Hickman!
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Anne Laurie:
Good point. Dahmer was purging our society of some of its more worthless members- gays and non-whites. Well, Jerry Falwell would be proud of him, anyway.
grumpy realist
Gah. Having tripped merrily over to Reason’s blog and having read the comments in that thread, it is even more obvious than ever that Libertarians:
a) don’t understand a bit about property and how it is handled in Anglo-Saxon law
b) don’t understand (or know) a whit about history, and
c) don’t understand how humans interact in society.
(They also don’t seem to be clued in that their beloved perfect Utopia of a Libertarian society would last for 40 years, max, before it died off because fewer and fewer people would be having kids.)
I find Libertarians hilariously clueless.
The Raven
This discussion makes me wonder: did Rand commit crimes of violence that went unpunished? She seems to have been capable of it.
The Raven
Oh, and extra bonus Rand blogging: “The Top Ten Reasons You Don’t Want Ayn Rand as Your Mom” by John Scalzi.
Batocchio
Doherty has a point, but it’s a small one. Chait shows that Rand’s “philosophy” is crap, unrealistic, destructive and self-serving, and shows that her real-life acolytes and those that cite her also have a “philosophy” that is crap, unrealistic, destructive and self-serving. I don’t think it’s very hard to follow. Chait also notes that many right-wing Rand fans invoke her selectively – but they, and Rand, still are full of crap. Doherty’s just pretending that there’s some value or substance to Rand – and thus ignores the substance of Chait’s evisceration of her.
Nancy Irving
At Rand’s funeral there was a six-foot-tall “floral tribute” in the shape of a dollar sign.
Rand was evil and crazy. It would be very hard for any of her followers to go her one better.