Slate article on Ayn Rand by Johann Hari

[ToyoHabu]

You must be doing something right to generate a diatribe of this sort. Slate article on Ayn Rand

[brian0918]

Do you think he read either biography? He got the author's name wrong on Goddess of the Market ("Gordon" Burns instead of Jennifer Burns) More likely, he printed off the Wikipedia page, read a bad summary of Rand from another diatribe, and proceeded to scribble away.

Edited November 2, 2009 by brian0918

[softwareNerd]

True; the quality of the writing is poor. It is as though form is all that matters. As for truth... well, who can really say what is true!!

[~Sophia~]

Did Rand write those comments about this William Hickman?

[softwareNerd]

Did Rand write those comments about this William Hickman?

I haven't checked the article against the original, but I assume the quotes were at least close if not fully accurate. (See this thread.)

[~Sophia~]

I haven't checked the article against the original, but I assume the quotes were at least close if not fully accurate. (See this thread.)

Wow. I am a bit shocked I be honest. This man was not an example of rational egoism.... just the egoism but what makes the second admirable is the presence of the first.

[SapereAude]

Wow. I am a bit shocked I be honest. This man was not an example of rational egoism.... just the egoism but what makes the second admirable is the presence of the first.

It is my understanding from a couple things I read in the past (awhile a go, I'll try to find links later as I don't recall where I saw them) that her quotes were in context of statements he made in his journals and that she later, upon finding the extent of his crimes refused to recant what she said about his journal entries but said his crimes were unforviable.

[softwareNerd]

Wow. I am a bit shocked I be honest. This man was not an example of rational egoism.... just the egoism but what makes the second admirable is the presence of the first.

I doubt Rand would have published those notes as-is, precisely because people could misunderstand them. Harriman's comments indicate that he thinks the tone is indicative of a different point in Rand's intellectual development. I think most of it can actually be explained by the fact that this was an author, writing her own journal, for herself.

Regardless of that apologia, even the straight up text is actually not that shocking. When you read the whole section on Hickman from her journal (and the little section where she mentions him during her notes on her character, Danny) you'll see that her focus is not really Hickman as much as it is the crowd, what the crowd offers Hickman in terms of norms and greatness, and how the crowd reacts to him. She calls him a degenerate and a monster, but she questions whether the reaction was merely to a monstrous crime or something more than that. Got to read the whole thing to get the sense of what she's saying to herself and what she's focussed on.

As Harriman notes, Night of January 16th was also about a criminal. Her psychological model in that case, the "Match King". One could make this more contemporary by thinking of Madoff. Imagine writing a play where the hero is based on Madoff. Change Madoff into a more self-confident figure, and give him a playboy side and one has a person who might be attractive to any author who wants to focus on the self-assertive aspect -- i.e. on the psychology. However, intellectually, all the crimes remain the same. Still, to an author, I think this type of person represents a challenge. An author might ask herself: could I make a character who has the same psychological attitude, but was not a monster at all? In a short story idea, within another short story, Rand's writer hero fantasizes about a woman who watches a man killing someone, but then she suddenly has to decide if she will protect him from capture... does she go with her gut? As a writer can one give the character just enough hints so that she will protect him, and be right in doing so?

Finally, again as Harriman notes, some of these early works do reflect a more malevolent man-vs-society state of mind than Rand's later work.

Edited November 3, 2009 by softwareNerd

[Tyco]

I find this quite distressing (the Hickman thing).

Not so much that she found something to admire in a loathsome killer (I can understand how that might be interesting from an artistic perspective, or how in the 1920s details of news stories didn't travel so fast. Plus her later writings contradict those sentiments), but its the way Rand attacked the public that bugs me. Her criticisms of the 'fat, little' (little seems to be the no.1 Objectivist insult) jurors and the suggestion that the hostile Joe Public had probably done 'worse' seem utterly ridiculous.

Maybe I'm being too harsh, I mean the main characters in her novels, due to their society, often lead spiritually tortured early lives where they don't know what to think of their fellow men, until they have their revelations. Maybe they were more autobiographical than I thought. Hmm.

Unless there is a huge amount of misquoting going on.

[agrippa1]

It's important to understand that the journal entry in question was written in 1928, when Rand was 22 or 23 years old, and just two years after she escaped the collectivist hell of the Soviet Union.

It's also important to note that Hickman's demeanor (both physical and in his writings) is what inspired Rand, and that she apparently shifts freely, in her journal notes, between her descriptions of Hickman and those of Renahan, the character she distilled from parts of Hickman's personality. When she fleshes out the fictional Renahan's character to be "a wonderful, free, light consciousness" Prescott implies that all of Renahan's characteristics are derived from Hickman, and that she therefore see Hickman this way.

Similarly, when Rand describes Hickman's statement, "What is good for me is right," as "the best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard," Prescott draws the conclusion that Hickman is therefore Rand's "epitome of a 'real man.'" No argument against Hickman's statement is given, just an ad hominem using Hickman to attack Rand's favorable opinion of that statement, which is quoted out of any context of Hickman's sociopathic nature.

That all said, it is still more than a little disturbing that Rand would have idolized, even in limited context, a character such as Hickman. His behavior is so clearly and grotesquely at odds with Rand's philosophy that one is left with the inescapable conclusion that her philosophy developed over time as she matured from the state of a slave.

Gasp!

[Thales]

I too was shocked by this, but in the thread linked to by SNerd above, Spaceplayer has the following quote, which I also found in the same publication.

From Journals of Ayn Rand: David Harriman (editor) gives a lengthy explanation/defense of Rand, but I'll let her speak for herself:

"[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." p. 22

So, she really had no use for his degeneracy. Her heroes are very far from him, so what she did was abstract what she considered a positive.

All of Rand's work and writing and the way she lived her life establishes clearly that she promoted life and the respected the rights of others fully.