"In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, 'What is good for me is right,' a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard," she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.)
At the time, she was planning a novel that was to be titled
The Little Street, the projected hero of which was named Danny Renahan. According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)
"A wonderful, free, light consciousness" born of the utter absence of any understanding of "the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people." Obviously, Ayn Rand was most favorably impressed with Mr. Hickman. He was, at least at that stage of Rand's life, her kind of man.
So the question is, who exactly was he?
William Edward Hickman was one of the most famous men in America in 1928. But he came by his fame in a way that perhaps should have given pause to Ayn Rand before she decided that he was a "real man" worthy of enshrinement in her pantheon of fictional heroes.
You see, Hickman was a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer.
In December of 1927, Hickman, nineteen years old, showed up at a Los Angeles public school and managed to get custody of a twelve-year-old girl, Marian (sometimes Marion) Parker. He was able to convince Marian's teacher that the girl's father, a well-known banker, had been seriously injured in a car accident and that the girl had to go to the hospital immediately. The story was a lie. Hickman disappeared with Marian, and over the next few days Mr. and Mrs. Parker received a series of ransom notes. The notes were cruel and taunting and were sometimes signed "Death" or "Fate." The sum of $1,500 was demanded for the child's safe release. (Hickman needed this sum, he later claimed, because he wanted to go to Bible college!) The father raised the payment in gold certificates and delivered it to Hickman. As told by the article "Fate, Death and the Fox" in crimelibrary.com,
"At the rendezvous, Mr. Parker handed over the money to a young man who was waiting for him in a parked car. When Mr. Parker paid the ransom, he could see his daughter, Marion, sitting in the passenger seat next to the suspect. As soon as the money was exchanged, the suspect drove off with the victim still in the car. At the end of the street, Marion's 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."
Quite a hero, eh? One might question whether Hickman had "a wonderful, free, light consciousness," but surely he did have "no organ for understanding ... the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people."
In her notes, Rand complains that poor Hickman has become the target of irrational and ugly mob psychology:
"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...
"This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul."
Rand's statement here reminds me very much of an attitude often found in career criminals -- that honest work is for suckers."
Michael Prescott, Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman, April 19, 2011
"To be a follower of both Rand and Christ is not possible. The original Objectivist was a type of self-professed anti-Christ who hated Christianity and the self-sacrificial love of its founder. She recognized that those Christians who claimed to share her views didn’t seem to understand what she was saying.
Few conservatives will fall completely under Rand’s diabolic sway. But we are sustaining a climate in which not a few gullible souls believe she is worth taking seriously. Are we willing to be held responsible for pushing them to adopt an anti-Christian worldview? If so, perhaps instead of recommending Atlas Shrugged, we should simply hand out copies of The Satanic Bible."
Alan Bean, Ayn Rand: the Mother of American Satanism, August 27, 2012
"At this point in my life, I did not think it was possible to significantly lower my estimate of Ayn Rand, or to regard her as even more of a psychological and moral mess than I had already taken her to be. I stand corrected.
Young men and women sometimes read stories about pirates, gangsters, and cowboys, who are 'rugged individualists' with an uncompromising, amoral response to anyone or anything that gets in the way of their fulfilling their needs.
And typically they start to graduate to less one dimensional heroes and role models, people who temper their strengths with restraint and compassion, who build as well as take. The archetype of this is Robin Hood. And finally one hopes, they mature into whole people who have a moral dimension that informs their baser instincts, and they obtain the ability to create, whether it be a home, or a business, or a family.
But some people never really grow up. Something in their psyche is broken, has gone astray, beyond the range of reason. They have a fatal attraction to lawlessness and callousness in the most classic imitation of the immature desire to shock, in their restless search for relief from their hollowness, to finally feel something. And on occasion even these can become powerful figures, despite their otherwise banal and stunted personalities, and beyond a small circle of cultish adherents, become fashionable.
And then the madness is unleashed, and in extreme instances an entire generation can go astray, exulting in their willful disregard for restraint, despising the ordinary and the conventional, dressing in costumes, and imagining themselves to be gods on earth, even as they plunge into the abyss."
Jesse, Ayn Rand: A Fitting Muse for the Tyranny of the Self, 20 September 2011
Granted, she was largely the ideological cats paw of con men. But I always thought it was ironic that Ayn Rand had become the intellectual
icon of the conservative/libertarian movement, and had taken in so many
gullible followers with her baby talk.
And here we are, years later, being blithely led into the abyss by some of the most self-obsessed, lawless babies of all time.
Believe what you want. Serve whom you will. Those are the rules by which we play.
I just think its important to realize what team you are playing for.
You know, for when they hand out the awards at the end of the game.
I am sure there will be plenty of 'precious moments' to be enjoyed, by some.
"So let me get this straight. You encouraged murder and unimaginable cruelty because you thought it would compel my only Son to return to earth and take you straight to heaven, while leaving all the rest of his flock, whom he has called by name and who do my Will, to a hell on earth?"
At this point Asmodeus and Baal are laughing so hard that tears of lava are flowing from their eyes.
Stocks did a pop and flop.
I wouldn't get in front of this, but if I have ever seen a construction of madness and vanity the equity market at these valuations is it.
But you cannot help exceptional people who have foolishly decided they are very clever. A good man named Bonhoeffer came to that conclusion about his German acquaintances.
Gold and silver rocketed higher.
Let's see, there was an stock option expiration on Friday. And here we are now.
What an amazing coincidence. Some old geezer might even be making money on this.
The Dollar took a dive.
Even King Kong fell from his tower.
It's going to be raining the exceptional.
And so we beat on, boats against the tide.
Have a pleasant evening.
