I read her biographical link…she’s a sociopath…I feel truly physically sick right now.

Those “conservatives” who have a fetishism for Rand tend to be the free-market capitalist ideologues or fushionists. The Old Right would have repudiated her.

It has taken many years for me to recover from the effect that Rand’s works had on my Mother and her own lack of empathy for her own children or consideration of her responsibilities as a check on her right to meet her own ego-needs. It surprises me VERY little that she admired a sociopath, as she seemed determined to create as many of them as possible thorough the influence of her work. to paraphrase Frank Herbert, “every person who commits atrocity, is responsible not just for their own act, but all the further atrocities thus inspired as a reaction to the initial act”. Thus, Rand is responsible for untold horrors perpetrated by those inspired by her works. Whether Karma, Hel, or the Threefold Law, I like to imagine that her soul will bear the torments due her for such ferocious wit.

Anyone who’s just read this article but has not himself read Ms. Rand, do NOT take this guy’s word for it. Read Ms. Rand’s books for yourself: the Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Don’t rely on someone else’s obviously biased summary of Rand’s philosophy.
95 percent of what’s written here about Ms. Rand and her philosophy is simply untrue. Even though she’s now the most influential female intellectual of all time, the left hates Ms. Rand to no end – because over the last few decades she has brought millions of Americans to the GOP.

Actually, Rand >didn’t

Gus,
RandalV does bring up a good point about Rand’s evolution in thought. The early Rand is much less harmonious and Nietzscheian. This journal entry was written during her early years…I’ve yet to investigate it myself, so I am not sure if R is correct about her attacking the crime. A person I trust has told me as much, but I’d like to look at it myself.
A disturbing revelation to be sure, but my problem with Rand’s critics on the left is they never quote her views on charity or address her own peculiar take on what selfishness and altruism are. She was wrong to say that the dictionary definition of selfishness is concern with one’s own interests as opposed to concern with only one’s own interests. The latter wasn’t her mature view of selfishness. They select the most anti-social quotation out of context and then proceed as if it represents her entire body of work. Rand attacks psychopathology herself and more or less says that mutual aid has survival value. I don’t have the essay collection with me right now, so I can’t quote it specifically. I am not really convinced the right right in America has egoistic premises in any really substantive sense of the term. The Old Order certainly doesn’t strike me as very individualistic. When I imagine real deal American conservatives as opposed to Libertarians; my measure is always the extent to which a peculiar brand of theocratic nationalistic selfless duty bound ethics pervades them. In Randian terms; the social conservatives are quite altruistic or “altruistic” for non-Randians. They are constantly demanding self-abgenation before their hateful God. Alan Keye’s attack on lesbians as “selfish hedonists” is just the logical culmination of this theocratic ethic.
What’s interesting is that Roderick Long uncovered this quote of Rand’s below:
“That idea of hardships being good for character and of talent always being able to break through is an old fallacy. Talent alone is helpless today. Any success requires both talent and luck. And the “luck” has to be helped along and provided by someone. … Talent does not survive all obstacles. In fact, in the face of hardships, talent is the first one to perish; the rarest plants are usually the most fragile. Our present-day struggle for existence is the coarsest and ugliest phenomenon that has ever appeared on earth. It takes a tough skin to face it, a very tough one. Are talented people born with tough skins? Hardly. In fact, the more talent one possesses the more sensitive one is, as a rule. And if there is a more tragic figure than a sensitive, worthwhile person facing life without money – I don’t know where it can be found. … [H]elp for young talent …. not only provides human, decent living conditions which a poor beginner could not afford anywhere else, but it provides that other great necessity of life: understanding. It makes a beginner feel that he is not, after all, an intruder with all the world laughing at him and rejecting him at very step, but that there are people who consider it worthwhile to dedicate their work to helping and encouraging him. Isn’t such an organization worthy of everyone’s support? … So many gamble on roulette, and slot machines, and horses. Why not gamble for a change on human beings and human futures?” ~ Ayn Rand
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/80352.html

Another Limbaughesc rant. Just when I thought things were improving around here. The Left is just as bad as the right. Any form of extremism is highly undesirable.

Maybe that’s where the Tea Party phenomenon is heading: to unabashedly elect a serial killer to office. Buffalo Bill in 2012. They figure if waterboarding didn’t break Al Queda, maybe they’d quit at the prospect of being personally interrogated by a chief executive who’s not afraid to cover a leather recliner with their hide in the West Wing. “It puts the lotion on it skin….!”

I cannot imagine how this Hickman issue could get any sillier, or less relevant to anything other than avoiding real analysis of Rand’s ideas.
Like every other article I’ve read that focused on this story, I’m afraid this one doesn’t shed any light on what impact her passing private thoughts — as a 22-year old writer — actually had. Answer: none, judging from the fact that she perfected the only non-sacrificial political and moral systems ever created.
And enough with the empathy thing already, because that’s a total misreading of Rand. She was not un-empathetic; she advocated basing decisions on thought, not on feelings; on facts, not on fears or wishes, or what others browbeat you into saying. It was a stance for courage and intellectual honesty in the face of other factors that may incorrectly sway a decision.
I recommend that readers instead look to her original texts, such as Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and The Virtue of Selfishness, to find out what she said and meant.

The Hickman smear is based on one journal entry from 70 years ago when she hardly even spoke English yet and ignores hundreds of thousand of her mature published works, their content, the work done since, and the entire field of Objectivist ethics. Nice try, but an intellectually dishonest ad hominem attack is not going to do anything but make you look more foolish than you already do, old pagan wicca worshipper with bad haircut and silly moustache…

Dear Gus:
This is getting a lot of play on the web these days, along with Rand’s long lasting drug habit (evidently she started taking uppers while working on the Fountainhead and basically never stopped). Defenders of Rand have various ways of handling this, a few of which have been posted here. The core idea in her defense is that such a diary entry is just a passing thought, a stray item, not something that really illuminates her considered views.
I differ from that analysis. Rand’s philosophy is a form of rugged individualism, rooted in the idea of the autonomous individual. From this perspective she never really left Nietzsche behind. (Does anyone know if she read Stirner’s “The Ego and His Own”?) The idea is that individuals are in some sense self-sufficient and independent of other individuals and acting agents.
I would like to suggest that this is not true. If one attempts to uncover the actually existing autonomous agent that Rand so admired, one cannot find it. This is not difficult to understand. For example, we are dependent upon our parents for our existence; if they had not existed we would not exist. We are dependent upon countless people for our food, clothing, shelter, books, means of transportation, in fact everything. We are dependent upon others for the ideas we hold which we have received and learned from others. As a Shinto prayer puts it, “All our knowledge is bequeathed knowledge.” And we are dependent upon plants for the air we breathe, the sun for the energy that fuels the life processes of the earth.
There is no such thing as an autonomous, separately existing, individual. Rand was wrong. But if you believe in the autonomy of the individual, then the type of person who most clearly manifests that autonomy is someone who actually acts on that view, and such a person is the kind of killer that Rand comments on in her diary. If one sees other people as sources of one’s own life, as foundational for one’s own wellbeing, gratitude for those others naturally arises. If, in contrast, one thinks of oneself as self-sufficient and autonomous, then there is no reason to view others as anything but tools for one’s own self-aggrandizement; after all, what could be more important than the rugged individual’s own life? Far from being an aberrant comment, Rand’s diary entry is an inevitable consequence of the egotism she espoused.
Jim

Jim-
Great minds and similar channels and all that. While you were writing this I was writing a longer response of my own, which I will post as a new entry because it is so long. But in many ways it dovetails with your comment.

The serial killer who most influenced my own thinking emerged in my own hometown, killed several times in places where I grew up, took family friends and acquaintances, knew some of the same “only-locals” stuff that I knew, and cast a panic pall across the SF Bay Area and the country for years. This serial killer remains a puzzle, and people still try to figure out who he was or could have been to do what he did.
The Zodiac.
What gnawed at me for years was the notion that I might know The Zodiac. I might have gone to school with him or lived nearby him or crossed paths with him regularly.
So every so often, I took a look at what was available about The Zodiac. Turns out, I did know one of the long running chief suspects when I was a little kid.
Then I had the misfortune to reside next door to a different sociopathic killer for a while. Until, in fact, he went out in a blaze of ignominious murder-sucide.
Nothing about The Zodiac or this other killer made me want to be “free” to do anything like they had done. Let alone codify it.
All they did for me was to nurture the heartfelt conviction that liberty–spiritual, political, daily living–resides in coummunity and all that fosters community. Not in anything that fails to. Spruce up or spook up serial killing however you like, there’s nothing there that’s human–let alone magical.

XCowboy2, knock of the personal appearance insults to Gus. Disagree with what he SAYS all you want – that’s fair. Your juvenile comments are not.
I think he’s a very handsome guy and a lot of us ladies love him. YOU should be so lucky.

I hope you all get a chance to see this bit of Rand-based humor: Ayn Rand’s Head Cheese at http://revolvingfloor.com/issues/5/ayn-rands-head-cheese/

Thanks Cheryl- it’s XCowboy2′s attempt at rationality. The right wing prefers ad hominem to reason because if they give reasons they will b expected to justify them. With rants they just get to feel good. (I don’t much like the picture myself, but what the heck.)

LOL– people can’t take sarcasm– I used an ad hominem myself as satire of the method of the article. No wonder you guys buy into this article– you have absolutely no concept of context.

She actually called Hicks a degenerate. What she liked was the idea of society vs the individual for inspiration for other characters in different circumstances.
It is clear that she is conceptualizing and abstracting certain factors from the individual’s character and social issues from other people’s responses to his character. Many criminals have been idealized and admired in abstract form from Bonnie and Clyde, to Al Capone, John Dillinger, the Mafia families in NY (The Godfather), etc., etc. Many times have criminals been presented as individuals against society. This whole subject is amazing to me that anyone could think that she is admiring a criminal for his criminal actions. Those who attack Rand for this analysis of Hickman are actually attacking reason.

I too was entranced by Rand as a young’un. My memories of her writing, show me that interpreted as I read. (I mean, don’t we all?)
What I took from her novels was an encouragement towards being a responsible individual. In fact, the importance of such. That those who don’t……end up living off of the group.
This shaped me. And looking back, that’s fine. I feel much the same way.
Now being WASP at the time, there were priviledges I didn’t recognize. That were part of the web of my life so I didn’t see that not all had them.
And I never was a “therefore abandon the others” in my looking to the responsible individual. But thought (dreamed? visioned?) of a web/community made up of such. In some ways, I still do.
This has nothing to do w/community not supporting it’s members. And the fact that how we (community) treat our sick, our elderly etc is a way to judge us.
I can’t help but think how Rand was shaped by growing in a society where the group was purported to be “all” and the individual nothing. Early Communist Russia.
What amazes me……is how I read Rand and was inspired in my youth. But where I am (and what I believe) is NOTHING like those whom Gus lambastes. Luck? Innocence? Or ??????

Bruce misread me – not an unknown event. I never said Rand endorsed cutting up little girls and the quotes I gave in this post made it clear she did not approve. I made an altogether more subtle point, one that I made with greater explicitness in my second post above. So, Bruce, you are mot addressing what I said. Not at all.

Thanks again for this post. You are a beacon sometimes, man. Today at work a self professed libertarian cornered me and wigged out about different religious, racial and gendered groups and of course his attachment to Glen Beck. Then he told me how much he loved porn, and that everyone should be honest about what they do. I calmly explained to him that I didn’t want to know about that. It was definitely a hallmark of the egoism you explained, and this guy was definitely demented and rotten, but had somehow found an equally demented political philosophy to run with.

A common failing of the discipline of reason is the over-generalization. This piece is full of such ideas, where a large group of people is characterized by something which essentially is negative.
For example, he writes: “Now the ‘conservative’ and right-wing dislike of protecting children, opposition to punishing the powerful when they commit gang rape,their own love of torture using methods perfected by totalitarian regimes, their lack of concern about hundreds of thousands killed in Haiti l and their belief that unemployment insurance simply promotes sloth even when there are 500 people pursuing every available job, makes sense. We are not dealing with a rationally held political and moral philosophy. We are dealing with diseased minds trying to justify their nastiness. Increasingly what calls itself “conservatism” is a haven where injured and fragmented souls can come together, pretend they are normal, and look down on others.”
Real people can’t be made to fit into such boxes. These over-generalizations then are not “reason”, but rather just over-emotional characterization of a lot of people – generalizations that can’t be any kind of rational evidence from which to draw conclusions.

Maybe you did not check the links?
Each comments had links, and the links were to actual incidents by important or large numbers of right wing figures with political power.
If you don’t like it, clean out your own house rather than throwing stones at mine. I’ll stand on my statement, which I could expand on with important examples to a much greater degree. And, of course, you took the statement out of context, which is common enough among right wingers.

When I was in high school, working out my ethical philosophy, I realized that I was very much in favor of individual liberties. It seemed reasonable to me that a person who valued liberty would be a Libertarian. But when I looked up the Libertarian Party I discovered that they were against: taxes, public schools, public roads, fire departments, and police. I have never been tempted to explore any deeper. I did read “Anthem” and “The Virtue of Selfishness” just to know what people were talking about. But I was not converted.
The needs of the individual must be balanced with the needs of the community. Neither can dominated totally or both will suffer.