The Amazing Ayn Rand

The Crone Speaks has a post about the fascination Glenn Beck and others have with Ayn Rand. After describing the attitude as "hate everyone but yourself," the article makes the following conclusion.

It’s not just the former CEO of BB&T that have strings attached to their grants in order to keep the Randian philosophy of selfishness and hate alive. Other CEO’s are doing the same thing, and it has taken hold. We are talking about the ultimate indoctrination of our children, even if some more reasoned folks see the caveat of teaching Rand as a bribe. As these young people enter the business world, they will become the CEO’s and CFO’s that will be fucking with our economy. They don’t need the Glenn Beck’s spouting selfishness or the Dr. Helen’s declaring you should be “Going John Galt!” and who calls liberals and progressives (paraphrasing from a recent post of hers) “parasites that are destroying this country” (a Randian reference to those that refuse to follow her ideas). The Glenn Becks and the Dr Helen’s are the cheerleaders for the next generation of Randian economic leaders.

Which is really quite sad, given Ayn Rand’s “hero” tortured, cut up and threw the body parts of a child he kidnapped at her father for a mere $1500. The me-only-and-only-me philosophy wouldn’t allow a Rand devotee to recognize someone else’s sociopathic traits, simply because someone else, anyone else, doesn’t matter. In other words, Rand devotees are all sociopaths.

That final link goes to an article which describes the length to which Ms. Rand went in her admiration of the Type A real man.

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.'"

This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: "He was born without the ability to consider others."

What's your opinion? Is there a bit of the sociopath in Ayn Rand and her followers?

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