The Psychopathology of Ayn Rand

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Democracy is incompatible with Ayn Rand's dystopia. For one thing, she was profoundly anti-democratic as her followers were and are.

She preferred a Repubic to a Democracy. So do I.

ruveyn

It seems Ayn Rand took elements from the existing political culture and turned them into something more socially damaging.

One might say Marxism is similar in that it turns reasonable demands for workers' rights towards destructive class hatred.

I guess a question of academic interest is 'did Ayn Rand believe what she was saying or not?'
I'm interested to see what xenon posted above. Perhaps the supposedly extreme non-collectivist Ayn Rand did in fact have an allegiance to something larger than herself. Who knows?

I know Alan Greenspan was one of her disciples, but was her influence really that great?
I was under the impression the subsersive influence of 'left-wing' Frankfurt School intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno had been greater. In fact, xenon's sentence could kind of describe them too.

Who knows? I don't think she is the largest or only intellectual influence out there, and so I don't know what the damage really is, as there are other libertarian thinkers. The only thing clearly attributable to Rand are cultural voices saying "Greed is good", and many of those are attacks on the idea to some extent, as Gordon Gekko was the bad guy in the movie Wall Street, and Andrew Ryan in Bioshock is the developer of a failed Randian utopia.


I don't see how this is really a question. She very likely did, and most people who knew her attributed these beliefs to her.


By what evidence could we say that? Ayn Rand isn't the only strong libertarian who lived in her time period. Why would we say that she is a spy and not the others? Why would we say the others are spies either though? This idea strains credulity and I don't think it is reasonable to even consider given the background information.


Alan Greenspan also didn't uphold the principles he upheld while in Rand's company. In 1966, he wrote an essay supporting the gold standard for Ayn Rand's book, "Capitalism the Unknown Ideal". http://www.321gold.com/fed/greenspan/1966.html He later became head of the central bank and during this time didn't do anything like what a gold standard would seem to require. I don't think her influence is even then as great as people want to think. She's a cultural icon, but not as intellectually influential as so many others.


You'd have a better case for Marxists, but even then they were likely somewhat separate from the USSR in their actions, despite any apologetics they may have ever written. (I haven't bothered reading much by the Frankfurt school, so I don't know how apologetic they were.)

Rand was a cult dictator. She glorified a child killer as a superior man. Her followers want to destroy any democracy. They are a menace. Alan Greenspan, one of her disciples, wrecked the economy. She was an evil, miserable woman who worshipped money.

Yes.


I haven't read much of her fiction, so I don't know exactly what you are talking about.


To some extent, yes. They want to limit the teeth of all democracies, and possibly replace them. Then again, the Founding Fathers of America wanted to prevent democracy, so I don't think that Rand and the Founding Fathers were so different in this regard. Randians would just make a much stricter constitution.


Most of them don't have a lot of power.


It is difficult to say how much Greenspan was influenced by Rand while acting as the central banker though. The fact that he was a central banker suggests that he recanted some of his Randian beliefs, and given that Rand was all about principles, Greenspan's actions(even so much as they were free market) by being more pragmatically oriented means that he had to have been working with ideas that Rand could not have inculcated, as Ayn Rand wasn't an economist.


One could call her evil. Her followers would call her a saint. Who can prove or disprove the other?

As for worshiping money? She did to some extent, more so she worshiped capitalistic ideas given the emphasis of her thoughts on those ideas.

Getting back to reality, Ayn Rand was an author with some strongly held and influential ideas that she promoted as a philosophy during her lifetime, I don't see how that's either saintly or the embodiment of evil, and I don't think anyone here is qualified to make the distinction either.

In the late '20s there was this child killer, William Edward Hickman, and she fawned over him and went on about how he was better than everyone else. He tricked the girl's father into paying a ransom, after which he discovered that her "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."

As for her worship of money, she used the dollar sign as her personal talisman, even had her coffin decorated with them.

Greenspan certainly believed in this false notion that a bunch of psychopathic, cruel and ruthless actors acting on the basest notions would cause a synergy bringing happiness and wealth to all. He believed in this "rational market" nonsense, said that fraud should not exist as a concept because if someone were to sell you a quack cure and you happened to die, then the quack cure salesman would lose business and the market will correct itself. That of course presupposes that everyone knows that this is a quack cure salesman and by the time he is discovered many, many people would be dead.

Better still, have the quack take out life insurance schemes on his victims and rake in the dough as they drop dead. This is business as usual these days, and those who do this are hailed as "savvy businessmen" by the "socialist president".

You mean she wanted to write a book based partially on Hickman? I don't think that what you are saying seems to be a charitable interpretation. From the wikipedia we see this:
"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..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Edward_Hickman

I don't think this is really "fawning over him" or making him into a saint. I think this is just Rand's expression of disgust at mainstream societal values. I have many times in the past said that suicide bombers are more human than politicians. I don't see how this is different than what Ayn Rand did, and I certainly don't see how this makes either person abominable. I wouldn't even see it as terribly abominable if she was seriously fawning over him, for a period of time and then snapped out of it before she made it big. After all, her first novel was in 1936 and called "We the Living", that's 8 years after the notion of Hickman.

That being said, this is esoteric knowledge to a point where the fact that you know this and are blaming this person for this is enough to question your rationality. The only kinds of people who would know this are scholars and ideologues, and you don't strike me as driven by scholarly zeal.


I didn't deny that. I said "She did to some extent, more so she worshiped....". Ayn Rand was an idealist, not a profiteer, and this can be seen with her absolutism, a trait that many people have attributed to her.


Umm... a lot of people hold to the idea of laissez-faire markets though. Greenspan held to these ideas more likely because of his own beliefs as an economist than due to Ayn Rand though, as the idea of laissez-faire has popped up a lot of times in the discipline, including in the Austrian school and Chicago school of economics. That being said, the fact that he wasn't upholding a gold standard is valid.

To play devil's advocate here, I can see how how William Edward Hickman may symbolize certain right-wing talking points:

• Little Parker was only a child; she was mooching off the productive forces in society like her father and the rest of us through taxes that supported the junior high school she was attending.
• He assessed his market. As the murderer, he was the only one with proper knowledge (the supplier) of the girl's whereabouts (the product). The father (the consumer) paid the ransom (the cost), and his demand for the product was high.
• His deception of the father and the police showed high business acumen. Giving the father the corpse instead of the living girl is like adding soy to meat product or melamine to toothpaste, pet food, etc.
• Only liberal nanny-staters are concerned about things like feelings anyway. It just gives them an excuse to regulate away our freedom with such things as laws against abduction and murder.

I've been trying to think of a polite way to bring this up for a while myself, if I'm not mistaken X13 mentions Ayn Rand far more often than any other member of this forum regardless of their political affiliation, and in contexts where her relevance is a stretch at best. I'm not sure what to make of this fixation, and in the interests of civility I'll refrain from speculating here beyond bringing it to light.

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Last edited by timeisdead on 05 Mar 2010, 6:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

By "devil's advocate" you really mean satirist, yes? If you are serious then maybe a head examination is important for this.


Well, we had an Objectivist awhile back. I don't think most people here are very Objectivist though, regardless of their political affiliations.

That being said, Xenon13's ideology seems very important for him. I think a lot of people have ideologies though, the issue is how strongly they are expressed.

I tend to think similarly - the USSR was her biggest influence in a rather split way, ie. she loved atheism and neodarwinian outlooks but hated communism, thus she pointed out a dynamic that takes atheism and neodarwinism to its most logical conclusion - that what we have in the world is a product of the gifted and that the gifted should be given all the resources they need for 'moving us farther out of the jungles that we came from'.

When I look at her and her benefit though its this; she illucidated a dynamic, in its fullest, and dug up the whole vein, ie. I'd see her lasting work as cartography, mapping reality and its dynamics. Qualitatively, most people including myself don't like her attacks on altruism, to say that the gifted shouldn't be harness tackled by 'no child left behind' and smashed and splintered into mediocrity for the sake of equal outcome is absolutely true. To say on the other hand that the handicapped or physically/mentally infirmed deserve next to nothing - that breeds a whole new problem, ie. a great corrosion on our humanity that, if we culturally accepted selfishness as the lead or even only roll in town, we'd likely become vile enough to run our culture right off the rails in an even much worse direction than say being too altruistic and clipping some of the accomplishments of the 'alpha'.

Ayn Rand was right about some things but too obsessed to have the full picture. Karl Marx was right on the desire to just be human and enjoy life as well as spend our time with each other but, also incomplete. Liberalism and libertarianism both have their place IMO. To do a really good job of mapping out a subset of reality though - as Ayn Rand did - you almost need to be a bit eccentric and perhaps too extreme for your own good, at which point people like her point out the great truth of an idea as well as the terrible truth of it all in one sitting.

I really can't agree with your conclusions. I don't think that Rand's perspective was centrally atheist(I think that for her this was either already accepted or just a conclusion of her bigger idea), nor do I think it was Darwinian at all.

Rand was an individualist and a rationalist. Her individualism perhaps pushes her into atheism, and her individualism pushes her into capitalism, but her rationalism disagrees with Darwinism given that an evolved man should be expected to have evolved reasoning rather than perfect reasoning.

To go further though, the entire line of reasoning is nonsense, and the exact line of non-thinking I'd expect of a thoughtless fundamentalist Christian. I mean, the same analysis could be given to almost ANY atheist who had disliked conclusions. Marquis de Sade? Well, his atheism and neodarwinism drove him to take this to it's logical conclusion, which was the valuation of brutality for its own sake given the cruelty of nature and the meaninglessness of life.(without regard to the fact that Darwin published after Sade's death) Stalin? Well, his atheism and neodarwinism pushed him into a cruel protection of himself. Without transcendent values, man just devolves into violence to ward away the war against all. Marx? Well, his atheism and neodarwinism caused him to point out a dynamic of social struggle similar to that found in nature and his prediction of the victory of the proletariat is his wishful thinking for his "tribe" and thus genetic descendants. John Maynard Keynes? His atheism and neodarwinism caused him to see a world of chaos and disarray as darwinian processes do not necessarily lead to good outcomes, and his rejection of the value of future generations with the comment "in the long run, we're all dead" is really an expression of the meaninglessness of life under his beliefs.

I dunno, perhaps I am being too uncharitable, but your analysis seems quite seriously bad.

Really don't feel like debating it - from what you said you had a lot of examples to back up why you think what you do, and if that's your conclusion I'm not going to pretend that you just slopped that one together.

I get the sense that she saw capitalistic 'progress' in the same detached nut or bolt way that Marx saw the dynamic he did - it doesn't fit at all to call it the most salient dynamic out there, I doubt there really are many that fit that bill. I'd just consider it tantamount to taking a microscope to something, claiming its the world, it likely paints a very vivid picture of that nut or bolt, but it disqualifies itself as any kind of big picture answer for that very reason.