Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was Admirer of Serial Killer

[laststeamtrain]

Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer
By Mark Ames, AlterNet
Posted on February 26, 2010, Printed on February 26, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145819/

There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the US.

One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

<snip>

So what, and who, was Ayn Rand for and against? The best way to get to the bottom of it is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten by Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

<snip>

The fear that some felt at the time was that these philosophers' dangerous, yet nuanced ideas would fall into the hands of lesser minds, who would bastardize Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and poison the rest of us. Which aptly fits the description of Ayn Rand, whose philosophy developed out of her admiration for "Supermen" like Hickman. Rand's philosophy can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books: The Virtue of Selfishness. She argues that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even "moral cannibalism" to use her words. To her, those who aren't like-minded sociopaths are "parasites" and "lice" and "looters."

<more>

http://www.alternet.org/books/145819/ayn_rand%2C_hugely_popular_author_and_inspiration_to_right-wing_leaders%2C_was_a_big_admirer_of_serial_killer_

[BanzaiBonnie]

1. Well, this is pretty creepy

And the stuff about one of our chief justices...

While I still think there is merit to SOME libertarian views, some of it just feels OFF and this may be why. If I understand the premise of the philosophy correctly, and I may not, it is a cold, harsh worldview. The practical reality espoused is that we are all self centered and to play on that as a useful and fine attribute. It currently seems to be playing itself out in the "mean-spirited", snarkiness that know no bounds in the online world of blogs and Facebook and such.

For me, I must choose kindness, however "weak" I look to some, it is MY rule of law.

[laststeamtrain]

12. If you ever wanted to 'go philosophical' (like 'going rogue' without the stupid)

Levinas is interesting:

"...For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics (which Lévinas called "ontology"). Lévinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the love of wisdom (the literal Greek meaning of the word "philosophy"). By his lights, ethics becomes an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; hence an ethics of responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth".

"Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt. "The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness."<3>. At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one's freedom, to affirm or deny.<4> One instantly recognizes the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an attempt to take hold of this otherness.

"In Levinas's later thought following "Totality and Infinity", he argued that our responsibility for the other was already rooted within our subjective constitution. It should be noted that the first line of the preface of this book is "everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."<5> This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence (chapter 4 in "Otherwise Than Being"), where Levinas maintained that subjectivity was formed in and through our subjected-ness to the other. In this way, his effort was not to move away from traditional attempts to locate the other within subjectivity (this he agrees with), so much as his view was that subjectivity was primordially ethical and not theoretical. That is to say, our responsibility for the other was not a derivative feature of our subjectivity; instead, obligation founds our subjective being-in-the-world by giving it a meaningful direction and orientation. Levinas's thesis "ethics as first philosophy", then, means that the traditional philosophical pursuit of knowledge is but a secondary feature of a more basic ethical duty to the other. To meet the Other is to have the idea of Infinity <6>" ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Levinas

It's my understanding that Nietzsche's sister & brother-in-law were the anti-semites in the family. They post-humously edited his work to reflect something that wasn't really there.

[bemildred]

13. Kindness is not weak.

Only fools think so.
:thumbsup:

[laststeamtrain]

14. You got that right.

:thumbsup:

[Mopar151]

17. Kindness, charity, whatever you want to call it

Comes from strength and lack of fear. Greed and avarice are the result of fear of not being provided for, that "it could all be gone tomorrow".
I've been telling folks for a while now that Barack Obama is but 1 example of a relatively new phenomenon - "post-monetary wealth".
Paul "Bono" Hewson, Bruce Springsteen, Kyle Petty are some other examples. Throw any of those guys a million bucks cash, and they are bright and secure in themselves enough that their first thought will be "How do I give this away?"
Haitian releif will give you a pretty good roster of folks who are getting there - that "Give now, pays off later" works better in the world than terminal parsimony.

[bemildred]

20. Yah.

Fear makes you stupid, and it makes you angry, and it makes you mean.

[BanzaiBonnie]

21. I agree wholeheartedly

Kindness is not weak.

It's just that the Rand philosophy of operating in the world is the refuge of those who call kindness as being weak.

[bemildred]

22. Yah, you put it in quotes, I know.

:hi:

[era veteran]

2. Her White Russian ancestry shows through

They were so above the people it inspired revolution. How's that working for you Ayn?

[proteus_lives]

16. The revolution didn't work out so well either....

[proudohioan]

3. Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" comes to mind.

[Lost Jaguar]

4. Wasn't Saint Ayn...

...also an undocumented immigrant, an agressive atheist, and an adulteress? I wonder what the nativist/Christianist right-wingers think of her? Perhaps this is where the fault line lays between the anarcho-capitalists and the crypto-facists.

[TexasObserver]

5. Ayn Rand was nutty as a squirrel turd. She was a sociopath.

Like L. Ron Hubbard, a huckster who found a following among soft headed people.

[bemildred]

6. Well said.

A Pied Piper of the ignorant and immature. And a lousy writer to boot.

[TexasObserver]

8. She was a horrible writer.

Atlas Shrugged is the worst waste of paper in the history of book publishing.

[bemildred]

9. L. Ron Hubbard was a better writer.

An extremely low bar to get under there, but Ms Rand manages it easily.

[whathehell]

7. Rand..

"The fear that some felt at the time was that these philosophers' dangerous, yet nuanced ideas would fall into the hands of lesser minds, who would bastardize Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and poison the rest of them".

Perhaps they were correct in their anticipation..Weren't the nazis, especially Hitler himself, influenced by the above "philosophers"?

Rand sounds like a sociopathic nazi.

[Prof Lester]

10. Commie Drug Addict Bitch

Damn tweaker bitch. Have any experience with speed freaks? Yeah. Damn bitch was one of them.

"Ayn Rand", actually Alice Rosenbaum, was a part of Kojeve's NKVD gang, "the Trust".. Synarchists, ultimately working for the banksters.. Her specific aim was to destroy capitalism in the usual Marxist method.. by increasing it's "contradictions" to allow it to destroy itself. This meant encouraging insane greed and selfishness among the brainless children of the ruling classes.. already prone to sociopathy by virtue of being submerged in a evil predatory ideology. She did her job alright. Take a look at the state of America! Raped and ruined by banksters and predatory scum!

And all the while, these so-called "libertarians" are squawking for yet more "deregulation" and more "freedom". Ha ha ha ha! Fools. The absolute freedom of the predators means slavery for every one else. I suppose these "libertarians" are like those faux Christians who think Jeebus is going to fly down and "rapture" 'em all out of here, leaving the rest of us to get KC-barbecued by Satan and his boys. They think they will magically be spared from predation.. Why? Because they lick the asses of the big predators and peddle their lies and bullshit.

All the wolves and coyotes got together and agreed.. "we" (ha ha) need to deregulate everything and let the invisible claw.. er.. hand of the market rule.

I like Mark Ames. Always did. Kid has some stones on him. Went to Russia and critiqued the Oligarchs until they run him out of here at threat to his life. A good boy. Too bad his website The Exiled is infested with smirking libertarian scum. I just cannot abide a man who smirks. Betrays a big hole where the heart should have been.

[laststeamtrain]

11. Lots of interesting people attended Kojeve's lectures on Hegel in the '30s.

Bataille, Sartre, klossowski, etc.

Later, after his turn to the right, Leo Strauss was an associate.

Kojeve's interesting having had an impact on both left & right.

[demigoddess]

15. I tried to read the Fountainhead in high school, it was just downright stupid

and from what I remember it did not seem to support free market capitalism but more of a tyrant philosophy. Recently heard Pat Buchanan say that a christian based monarchy is better than democracy with separation of church and state. These people are all over the map if you ask me.

[Joanne98]

18. I didn't know Ann the selfish admired child molesters?

Figures.

[slackmaster]

19. Sometimes serials need to be killed

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/01/guiding-light-canceled-af_n_181863.html

[VPStoltz]

23. This woman was real piece of work.

I read a review of book about her recently and, what was it?, she was a closet atheist?
An adulterer? A real a-hole?

[yurbud]

24. k & r