This blog is dedicated to the memory of David Weintraub, who took on insidious astroturfers and won.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Ayn Rand Was A Stupid, Sociopathic Wench



This year's nominations for Supertroll of the Year (Meta Magazine®) offer up some splendid choices, including Ron Brynaert and Neal Rauhauser. While we await that decision, I thought we'd take a quick looksie back at who won the award in 1957.

There are two types of people in this world. We have folks who care deeply for humanity. We have folks who only care about themselves, their immediate family, and those they consider close friends. Ayn Rand was a member of the latter.

Unlike what many on the right believe, Ayn Rand was anything but a scholar. Her academic background is sketchy. It appears she only made it through an undergraduate degree before heading off to Hollywood to become a screenwriter.

One can watch this idiot in action during a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace. Check out how awkward she was. She wasn't exactly a people person. That makes sense considering her writings exposed herself as a sociopath. We'll get to those in a bit.



Now contrast that Wallace interview with one of a real scholar, Erich Fromm. I believe there is a fundamental difference between right and left. Conservatives simply do not much care for anyone but themselves. Ayn Rand actually considered it immoral to be our brother's keeper, that altruism is a sin. Those on the left tend to have big hearts and are basically true sweeties.



Ayn Rand as Sociopath

Yes, it's true. Here's the proof.

Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman by Michael Prescott

A bit of narcissism can be healthy. It's called self-confidence. But the problem with reactionary thinkers is they take it too far. They become in essence Calvinists with hard-ons for Friedrich Nietzsche.

They confuse luck for skill. They believe those who achieve so-called success always merit it, and that those who don't are fundamentally flawed. Such people miss the point of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment; In the recesses of their deranged minds, the point isn't that Raskolnikov was an anti-social creep, but that indeed some people are truly better than others and are supermen. Those on the right are incapable of realising there's a minority of self-serving fatfockfaces destroying the planet.

One of Ayn Rand's "crowning achievements" was Atlas Shrugged written in 1957. But before then in 1943, she found success with The Fountainhead. Hmmm. Her hero Howard Roark was a criminal, but it was society's fault, not his. Now go back to the Prescott article. Soak in how Ayn Rand was an admirer of the sociopath William Edward Hickman. The truth of Ayn Rand starts to add up. One can then have a better grasp of the nature of conservatism as a form of mental illness.

Great Minds Think Alike

I've had a draft of this entry on the back burner for a month or two. Today I stumbled across a pleasant surprise. George Monbiot of The Guardian recently penned, A Manifesto for Psychopaths. Yay! For an unpaid blogger who likes to mail them in, this is manna from heaven.
(fair use excerpt) Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government intervention, in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers. The millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas holding the world aloft, withdraw their labour, with the result that the nation collapses. It is rescued, through unregulated greed and selfishness, by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt.

The poor die like flies as a result of government programmes and their own sloth and fecklessness. Those who try to help them are gassed. In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate(2,3). One, for example, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing”.

Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demi-god at the head of a chiliastic cult(4). Almost one-third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged(5), and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.
Ayn Rand basically created a cult. If she were still alive, Ayn Rand would probably be pimping for Mitt Rmoney. Which makes sense. Mitt is also cult member whose wife purchases $1,000 shirts.

Conservatives have been and always will be the party of the rich. They are able to win office because they effectively prey on weak-minded useful idiots. Of course Obama is a lousy president. Mitt would take us to an even uglier place. Hopefully the vast majority of voters haven't forgotten what the corrupt GW Bush administration did. We can expect more of that, if somehow the sociopathic, greedy Republicans return to the Oval Office.


Mitt Romney’s Mormonism



7 comments:

thegoodsareodd said...

God, I was shopping today and found a fab T-shirt with Ayn Rand on it. It was only $1000, so I bought it.

OmegaPaladin said...

Objectivists are not representative of conservatives or even libertarians. It's akin to saying Marxism is representative of what liberals believe.

For starters, Objectivism is avowedly atheist. Most conservatives tend to be either religious or friendly to religion. Additionally, Objectivism opposes private charity, and the number for charitable giving show either an advantage for conservatives or a dead heat. Going to an Objectivist rally was pretty damn creepy - its basically an ideological commitment to selfishness.

Conservative arguments relating to compassion and charity generally relate to freedom vs. control, with some questions on efficacy. In other words, giving money to pay for medicine for the needy is a noble endeavor and an sign of your compassion, because the gift is your choice. If the state forces you to pay for the medicine, it now becomes only a matter of following the law. Since when have you heard someone praised for paying taxes? A sociopath could still pay taxes to avoid jail, but he wouldn't become moral even if the taxes all went to do good things.

Additionally, there are some programs which do not help the their target audience. Sometimes, even generous gifts will not help a person. It's why I never give homeless folks cash, but buy food or bus passes instead - I don't want to help keep them chained to addictions.

Tokyo Shemp said...

Thanks for the interesting comment. You obviously know what you're talking about.

Stereotypes are ridiculous. My entry was definitely over the top and mailed in. Though that's what blogging is all about.

Like most people I have always heard of the name Ayn Rand. I assumed she was a heavyweight thinker. Was I ever wrong.

Probably lots of conservatives laud her out of ignorance. Probably lots more have become so drunk on nationalism and televised sound bites, they haven't the means to realise not one thought is of their own.

Unfortunately due to Clinton's success at triangulation, there appears little hope for classic, bleeding heart liberalism.

I think the Ayn Rands of the world are straight out fascist. They are Calvinistic supremacists. They cannot distinguish between luck and skill.

I commend you for helping out the homeless. However, I wouldn't assume they are all addicts who would spend any money given on drink or drugs.

I believe everyone should have the right to food, shelter, higher education, and health care.

Unemployment and inequality are too steep. Capitalism has uterly failed to provide fair play. Too much is spent on the military industrial complex. There would be enough for everyone, if there was simply a redistribution of wealth with priorities based on humanity and the common good.

The philosophy of Ayn Rand makes me sick to my stomach. How on earth could anyone believe it is immoral to be altruistic?

Anonymous said...

the secret to giving it is to not be attached to the outcome. to assume that every homeless person is an addict is ridiculous. most homeless people are mentally ill and that is why they are in the state they are in. our society does not take care of the mentally ill and that's why they are thrown out street. give for the sake of giving and then let go and stop trying to control the outcome.

Anonymous said...

Ayn Rand was the most brilliant philosopher of our time.

She could see the United States and the founders created a country that believes in the individual 1st and not the "collective".

She was an aethist, and would definitely hate both Bush and Obama as both big government spenders.

rcpinmd said...

Just read "Fountainhead". AR is a terrible writer whose stories are more like cartoons than life. There is no virtually no character development or explanation of how a person came to be who he/she is. Her philosophy is so half-baked that anyone who has been around a while should be appalled that she actually has followers. The world is far richer and more complex -- and kinder in many ways than AR portrays.

Treg4RonPaul said...

Nothing annoys me more than EITHER --- conservatives who love to give "psychological reasons" to dismiss and NOT ADDRESS political ideas from the Left..... and of course liberals who love to give "psychological reasons" to dismiss and NOT ADDRESS political ideas from the Right. Here is the Left today; "Whatever he said, he's a "hate filled" _________ (racist/fascist/sexist/xenophobe/sociopath) and so lets turn away with our ever loving altruistic and caring good & wonderful selves and forget him." That is, there is no discussion with "someone like that", hence they have been defined as a disgusting "intellectual untouchable" whose value "humanity" is zero. Thus, the Left does not listen or address the Right, and the Right (doing the exact same thing) does not listen or address the Left.