I deleted this post, because I don’t think it wise to go to the Russian Insider web site.

And this from an Ayn Rand Institute study:

In addition to the question of enhanced cognitive abilities, the
fields of SLA (Second Language Acquisition) and Bilingualism have become increasingly interested
in the similarities between the benefits seen in bilinguals and experts
in other fields, such as chess and physics (de Groot, 1965; Heller &
Reif, 1984). Some researchers have gone as far as labeling bilinguals as
experts in the field of language learning (Nayak et al., 1990, Ramsay,
1980). This line of research opens the door to better understanding
the benefits bilinguals receive from their expertise in languages.
Combining this approach with Cummins’ Threshold Theory may
lead to advances in understanding the benefits seen in bilinguals.

More on the Ayn Rand/chess serendipity. Interestingly enough, a search of the two took me to this site:

The Cassandra Page
"And indeed, the burden of Cassandra’s "gift" is evident in mythology. She predicted the outcome of many disastrous events. In one memorable example, Cassandra announced the dire consequences of the Trojans accepting the infamous Wooden Horse from their Greek opponents. But as Apollo made certain, no one believed Cassandra when she warned her companions about the future. And this, in the end, was to be Cassandra’s tragic fate."

======================

where I read this entry:

Bobby Fischer; Ayn Rand; An Open Letter to Boris Spassky
The world noted the death of Bobby Fischer two days ago. As you may remember, Fischer was the mercurial chess champion that defeated the Russian champion, Boris Spassky, in the match of the century in 1972.

I cannot think of Bobby Fischer without thinking of an article Ayn Rand wrote shortly after the match. She titled her article "An Open Letter to Boris Spassky." The article barely mentioned Fischer, but for me the article and all that implies about collectivism, individualism, freedom and the future of the western world far outweighs anything else related to Spassky, Fischer or the famous chess match.

The article first appeared in Ayn Rand’s newsletter and was later republished in Rand’s book, "Philosophy: Who Needs It." In this article, Rand applied the basic principles of communism/collectivism/socialism to chess. She asked Spassky if he could play the game if he had to play by the collectivist rules. In fact, these simple questions point out the error in much of the assumptions that underlie not only communism, but the entire altruistic, egalitarian unspoken creed that dominates our life in today’s leftist west.

Judge for yourself:

· Would you be able to play if, at a crucial moment – when, after hours of brain-wrenching effort, you had succeeded in cornering your opponent – an unknown, arbitrary power suddenly changed the rules of the game in his favor, allowing, say, his bishops to move like queens? You would not be able to continue? Yet out in the living world, this is the law of your country – and this is the condition in which your countrymen are expected, not to play, but to live.

· Would you be able to play if the rules of chess were updated to conform to a dialectic reality, in which opposites merge – so that, at a crucial moment, your queen turns suddenly from White to Black, becoming the queen of your opponent, and then turned Gray, belonging to both of you? You would not be able to continue? Yet in the living world, this is the view of reality your countrymen are taught to accept, to absorb, and to live by.

· Would you be able to play if you had to play by teamwork – i.e., if you were forbidden to think or act alone and had to play not with a group of advisers, but with a team that determined your every move by vote? Since, as champion, you would be the best mind among them, how much time and effort would you have to spend persuading the team that your strategy is the best? Would you be likely to succeed? And what would you do if some pragmatist, range-of-the-moment mentalities voted to grab an opponent’s knight at the price of a checkmate to you three moves later? You would not be able to continue? Yet in the living world, this is the theoretical idea of your country, and this is the method by which it proposes to deal (someday) with scientific research, industrial production, and every other kind of activity required for man’s survival.

· Would you be able to play if the cumbersome mechanism of teamwork were streamlined, and your moves were dictated simply by a man standing behind you, with a gun pressed to your back – a man who would not explain or argue, his gun being his only argument and sole qualification? You would not be able to start, let alone continue, playing? Yet in the living world, this is the practical policy under which men live – and die – in your country.

· Would you be able to play – or to enjoy the professional understanding, interest and acclaim of an international chess federation – if the rules of the game were splintered, and you played by “proletarian” rules while your opponent played by “bourgeois” rules? Would you say that such “polyrulism” is more preposterous than polylogism? Yet in the living world, your country professes to seek global harmony and understanding, while proclaiming that she follows “proletarian” logic and that others follow “bourgeois” logic or “Aryan” logic, or “third-world” logic, etc.

· Would you be able to play if the rules of the game remained as they are at present, with one exception: that the pawns were declared to be the most valuable and nonexpendable pieces (since they may symbolize the masses) which had to be protected at the price of sacrificing the more efficacious pieces (the individuals)? You might claim a draw on the answer to the this one – since it is not only your country, but the whole living world that accepts this sort of rule in morality.

· Would you care to play, if the rules of the game remained unchanged, but the distribution of rewards were altered in accordance with egalitarian principles: if the prizes, the honors, the fame were given not to the winner, but to the loser – if winning were regarded as a symptom of selfishness, and the winner were penalized for the crime of possessing a superior intelligence, the penalty consisting in suspension for a year, in order to give others a chance? And would you and your opponent try playing not to win, but to lose? What would this do to your mind?

You do not have to answer me, Comrade. You are not free to speak or even to think of such questions – and I know the answers. No, you would not be able to play under any of the conditions listed above. It is to escape this category of phenomena that you fled into the world of chess.
From Chapter 6 of "Philosophy: Who Needs It."

The myopic reader would conclude only that we shouldn’t run chess according to the rules of communism – but would miss the bigger picture. We see the folly of undercutting individual effort, reward, achievement, strategy, etc. when it comes to chess or other games, but we fail to see that the same lesson applies to everything else. At the same time we honor chess champions like Fischer and Spassky, we allow politicians to tell us how they are going to apply Ayn Rand’s invented nightmare scenarios to health care and other major components of the economy. While Rand’s questions might seem ridiculous, we will find ourselves, more and more, answering her questions with regard to our own medical choices, employment decisions, business matters, etc.

Tahoe, I just noticed an old post of your’s at Tom’s site in which you mention that one of the words or phrases on the 13th Hole card looked like it came from a Peanuts book. Indeed, I have thought the same.

Interesting to note that Charles M. Schulz is another comic book artist whom pays homage via Lucy Van Pelt (who happens to be quite the little objectivist, haha) to Ayn Rand in one of his strips.

P.S. I don’t think CS is the Zodiac, either.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I think Ferrin & Mageau and Paul Stine were hits, and that likely Jensen and Faraday and Shepherd Hartnell were crimes of opportunity to obfuscate that the others were hits.

And from this site: http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/23848/ay … vism-cult/

I could sit here and dismantle everything Ayn Rand ever said, but it could be a pretty boring circle jerk for those of us who don’t buy it, and adherents would just put on their ear muffs. So I wound up looking at the phenomenon itself. The not very pressing question of whether Objectivism is an accurate description of/prescription for the world isn’t that interesting. The question of how Objectivism works is interesting. I think it functions like a modified cult. There are some resemblances to a cult that are documented elsewhere. Because of Rand’s juvenile, “I didn’t even want to go to prom anyway,” Leopold and Loeb-esque understanding of guys like Nietzsche, she idolized a serial killer. One of her heroes was William Hickman, who chopped up a little girl and killed some other people. Those in her inner circle believed she was genuinely superior to every other person on earth. She proclaimed that her sexual indiscretions were ordained by God reason, while those of her partners were depraved. When she found out the married guy she openly cheated on her husband with had re-cheated, she set a standard for diaper dirtying that her adherents would forever strive to equal. Lew Rockwell, who is a pretty big wheel down at the libertarian/Anarcho-capitalist factory, hosts an article by Murray N. Rothbard about the cult-like structure of her organization, with its secret knowledge, restrictions on behavior and purges. Plus, she wore a funny hat.

So I’m going to get into how Objectivism draws in followers with cult-like mechanisms. It targets a certain type of person who thinks a certain type of way and tells them that they are awesome. Their weaknesses are strengths. Their emotional immaturity is a virtue. The reason they don’t understand some stuff is because that stuff is unimportant or wrong. Like many such movements, Objectivism gives followers permission to indulge in their worst impulses. It tells them that their only weakness is that they aren’t the same way they are, but to a greater degree. It is never you who is wrong or limited, it is everybody else. Not only should you never graduate from the diaper of your arrested development, you should embrace the diaper and perhaps even use it as a mechanism for power over other people. “Me me me. If you don’t like it, get a whiff of this, baby!”

Rand’s followers are dramatically more fervent than people who like other writers because The Objectivism cult is an affirmation of themselves. Political figures like Paul Ryan and Clarence Thomas have reportedly forced their staffers to read Rand. Objectivists join Objectivist clubs, so they can meet people like themselves. There is an Objectivist dating site so they can date people like themselves. There are even Objectivist weddings. Nobody who likes Kant or Leibniz or Lao Tzu would ever drive their car around the country so that their GPS signal spelled out “Read Lao Tzu.” Nobody forces their employees to read Steinbeck. There’s no such thing as a Chomsky club or dating site for utilitarians or a Wittgensteinian wedding. The reason Objectivists engage in such behavior is because their own identity is described and extolled by the movement. They crave this affirmation and want to see it multiplied. Even the majority of people who are influenced by Rand, who do not go to these extremes, are being pulled by their own desperate need for affirmation.

I try not to talk about poker too much because I know most people don’t care about it. But it is such a wonderful laboratory for human behavior. Even more so than college football! For example, this dumb little story works as a parable about objectivism and it could only happen playing poker. Even if you’ve never played poker, you should be able follow it easily. We’ll call this guy I used to play with in LA, “Herbert.” Herbert must have had a high IQ. He had an advanced degree in Computer Science from one of the world’s top universities. He made a decent chunk of change off his brain and is now semi-retired. In general, Herbert is a reasonably nice guy and pretty cool to talk to. He loves Ender’s Game.

Herbert really tries to be good at poker. It’s his main hobby. He reads books, he writes notes and so on. He is not good, though. He makes some money at it, because he is very disciplined and plays in smaller games. In smaller games, a very conservative, rigid strategy, coupled with discipline and the ability to exert some control your emotions almost guarantees you a profit. Herbert can do this, but it is all he is really capable of. That is because progressing beyond this level usually requires getting into your opponents’ heads, which Herbert can not do at all, as we shall see.

So one day, I am sitting next to Herbert. He’s telling me that it makes no sense for him to pay into a pool that covers women’s reproductive issues and it makes no sense for them to pay for any prostate problems that he might have. This other guy, who is a dealer at another casino, sits in the game. He is as drunk as a skunk. Most dealers are bad players when they are sober. So a drunk dealer sitting at your table is kind of like being a crooked mechanic and having one of the Real Housewives of Orange County bring in her Jag, saying it makes some kind of noise that seems to disappear whenever someone else is in the car with her.

Every time it is the drunk dealer’s turn to act, he makes a big raise and everybody folds. Obviously, he is not getting a big hand every time. He is drunk and having fun throwing his chips around. He’s daring anybody to stand up to him. He’s letting everybody know that he doesn’t care about the money. I am very pleased with this. I think, “I care about you, Money. Come over here and let Plexico take care of you, baby.”

The way the drunk is playing drives Herbert crazy, however. He cannot stand the fact that this guy is playing so irrationally. Herbert complains to his neighbors about how the drunk dealer won’t play real poker and keeps calling him stupid loudly enough for the guy to hear. I want to point out that when someone plays poker in a way that he can’t understand or deal with, Herbert simply declares that it isn’t real. A lot of poker players do this, few of whom are Objectivists. This defense mechanism is a weakness that shows up in all of our thinking. But it is a cornerstone of the Objectivist mindset and Objectivism tells its followers that it is not a weakness, but a strength. They have the wisdom to see that anything they cannot grasp “isn’t real poker.”

As this goes on, the diaper begins to fill. Herbert’s complaints continue and grow in intensity. It sours the drunk dealer and justifiably so. He does not like being called a moron. He knows that 90% of the time, he will dump off his $700 to the table. All he wants in return is to have some fun doing it. The deal he is proposing is more than fair. However, because Herbert is incapable of dealing with any situation that’s even slightly outside of certain parameters, he feels compelled to dirty his diaper and foul the air for everyone. Luckily, the drunk dealer did not get up and leave, though he seemed pretty close to it.

Now, let’s talk a little poker. I’m sorry about this, but we have to do it. So, even if you do not play poker, I want you to try to think about how to adjust to the way the drunk dealer is playing. You have a drunk guy who is just waiting for his turn. Then when it is his turn, he just throws a bunch of money in. He is doing this with, let’s say 70% of his hands. How would you exploit such a player? Here’s a lovely musical interlude so you can think it over.

Did you figure it out? If you said something like, “I would just wait until I had a big hand, then let him throw a bunch of money in with an almost random hand. Then I’d put my money in and hope my big hand beat his random hand,” congratulations! That is the correct answer! I think some of you who have never played poker before might have gotten that one. That is because it is a very simple and obvious adjustment.

Herbert could not figure that out. He could not adjust at all. It was almost a comedy routine. I am not exaggerating when I say that, over a dozen times, Herbert would just call when holding a medium strength hand when the drunk dealer was going to act after Herbert. Then it would get to the dealer and he would make a big raise, just as he did every hand, and 100% of the time he saw Herbert in the pot. Then Herbert would angrily fold his hand and his chips would be pushed to the drunk dealer and he would start talking about what an idiot the other guy was. It was an incredible thing to watch this happen again and again.

Herbert is a guy with a sky high IQ and plenty of well-earned money to spare. But when it comes to poker, Herbert is a fool. Herbert is also an Objectivist. Even if Ayn Rand had never been born and there was no such thing as Objectivism, people like Herbert would exist. There were probably cave Objectivists. They just didn’t know what to call themselves yet, because nobody had written otherwise terrible novels that portrayed their mindset in a way that flattered them.

What we see in Herbert is someone who has great problem solving ability, but an incredibly small perspective and who is retarded in terms of emotional intelligence and empathy. He’s the type of guy who can be a wizard in closed, predictable situations with fixed rules, like computers, but he is almost helpless in wild, unpredictable, chaotic situations. For the record, I happen to know that Herbert has done some very nice things for people. His lack of empathy doesn’t make him a monster, like Paul Ryan. Herbert’s a good guy. But he does the nice things because he wants to be nice and because he would usually prefer to see other people happy, not because he truly understands what it is like to be in the other person’s shoes.

This is what Objectivism says you should be like. It’s an interesting kind of cult, with unusual tactics. Most cults target people who are just generally weak minded or emotionally vulnerable. They have an open door policy and then embrace the new members and sell them on the idea that the act of joining the cult has elevated them. In general society, these people tend to be on the bottom in most respects. By joining the cult they can feel like they have been placed above general society, in spite of their deficiencies. Some similar organizations function by having a few easily met criteria to identify potential members as special. For example, you set up an organization for members of a particular race or ethnicity, take all comers from that ethnicity and tell them they were born superior.
Objectivism works by describing a certain type of person who is probably not weak minded enough to join a traditional cult or even a supremacist movement. But they probably were born with some of the traits that can lead to Objectivism. They are also less likely to be total social failures than the people who join such movements. A potential Objectivist may well be at the top of general society in some respects, like education or income. But such people have strong deficiencies in other areas, like empathy or imagination. These are people who tend to be emotionally immature and possess low emotional intelligence. More likely than not, they feel separated from other people and/or lack social skills. So it’s easy to sell them on the idea that this is all evidence of their superiority.

Rand was such a person and her project was to describe people like herself as being virtuous and above other people. Her philosophy, for example, consists of descriptions of her own thought processes, which were very limited. So people who are like Rand read her and they read a description of themselves. They pick up this book that says, people who fit this description are the best kinds of people. Even the areas where other people say they are deficient are actually areas of strength because it is virtuous to be deficient in those areas. And all of society should be structured in the way that people who fit this description believe will be most beneficial to them. It’s OK if that social structure harms other types of people, because they are inferior.

By joining the cult, these people can feel like they are placed above general society, not only in spite of their deficiencies, but because of them, since they are not actually deficiencies. They think that is right and just for society to be structured for their benefit, or in a way that they incorrectly believe will benefit them. Just like every other cult.

* * *

Sometimes I think of people as either CSI people or Columbo people. CSI people are studious, organized and good at comprehending and applying fixed but complicated systems of rules. They can take a little piece of the chaotic world back to their labs, where everything is static and uniform and they can work wonders there. They can identify elements that should behave consistently across all situations and make brilliant inferences from that knowledge. Columbo people would be terrible in the lab and probably break some expensive equipment. But they see things in a more holistic way and are good at figuring out stuff like how other people think. They are more reflective, and can imagine what it’s like to be in another person’s shoes. They can figure out how another person might behave in a wide range of complicated situations and understand why they would behave that way.

Columbo gives you flexibility but makes more mistakes, while the CSIs give you a higher degree of certainty, but less flexibility. Some remarkable people are bi-detectivual, able to function as both Columbo people and CSI people. Others are a mix and others are one extreme or the other. Herbert the poker player, like most Objectivists, is a CSI person.

Now, the point of all this rambling about a poker player and TV crime shows is that we can see that Herbert is a particular type of person. He thinks and behaves in a particular type of way. Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline. But we can see that he’s a CSI person, who struggles with wide open situations that require him to understand irrational behavior from other human beings, but who is a wiz at closed systems with fixed rules, like computers. We can also see that, when confronted with a situation that calls for a Columbo, he is lost and becomes frustrated. His first impulse is to declare that the situation is somehow illegitimate, because it doesn’t match up with the type of person he is. This is the kind of thinking that makes him susceptible to Objectivism.

Most of us go through life trying to create narratives about how we are special, How we’re better than most other people and deserve better belongings and higher status. This applies to everything from thinking our bad grades are due to some kind of fault with the teacher, to thinking that our culture is better than the next one. As someone who is like 85% Columbo, I think Columbos are better than CSIs, which you could probably tell even though I tried to be objective. So, big surprise, the primary message of every religion and every cult is that, simply by being a member, you are superior to all non-members. More often than not, they will all die and you will all live. Plus you get to go to heaven, and they will all rot in hell.

Ayn Rand’s cult of the dirty diaper doesn’t promise posthumous rewards for joining and punishment for disagreement. But it pushes the envelope on the “being like me is awesome,” story we like to tell ourselves in a much more powerful way than something as broad as, say, Christianity. It zeros in on specific types of people and tells them everything they want to hear. It tells them that being the way they are by default is an enormous virtue. For example, it appeals mainly to CSI people because it provides simple, consistent rules for things that are really chaotic and complex. In other words, it tells CSI people that the stuff they are really bad at, like psychology and genuine philosophy, are really just nonsense that should be ignored anyway. More specifically, it appeals to emotionally and psychologically weak CSI people because it tells them that, when confronted with things you don’t easily understand, instead of grappling with them or just conceding your limitations, you should respond with a stinky diaper, that is, by rejecting the legitimacy of anything beyond your understanding.
If you read what Ayn Rand has to say about philosophy, it is really just an articulation of the limits of her ability to comprehend philosophy. Now, you might say, “I am pretty sure Ayn Rand was a good deal more intelligent than you are.”  And you might be right, generally speaking. But let’s remember Herbert. Herbert is also more intelligent than I am in most ways. I would have about as much chance of getting an advanced degree in computer science from Herbert’s school as I would of stealing Rob Gronkowski’s girlfriend. But then look at how woefully incapable Herbert was of understanding and adjusting to the behavior of another person that was so different from his own. That’s something Herbert’s mind just can’t handle.

So I am just going to go to Wikipedia for some Ayn Rand philosophy instead of pretending I read it all or, worse, actually reading it all. You can do the same if you want. Even if you don’t know much about philosophy, but are a reflective, contemplative person, you’ll see right away that there’s not much response required beyond, “puh-leeze!” About zero percent of philosophy professors consider her anything like a legitimate philosopher. But let’s consider the mindset conveyed in her philosophy. Hold your nose, here we go!

In epistemology, she considered all knowledge to be based on sense perception, the validity of which she considered axiomatic, and reason, which she described as “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.” She rejected all claims of non-perceptual or a priori knowledge, including “‘instinct,’ ‘intuition,’ ‘revelation,’ or any form of ‘just knowing.’” In her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Rand presented a theory of concept formation and rejected the analytic synthetic dichotomy.

So what Rand is saying here, is something like, “CSI people rule and Columbo people drool!” The first thing that leaps out at me is that it is objectively false that instinct and intuition are bad routes to knowledge. Obviously, you can play semantic shell games all you want to disqualify Xs from being Ys and say what does or does not count as knowledge. But psychologists have discovered that intuition is pretty accurate, meaning that beliefs arrived at through intuition can be justified true beliefs. Coincidentally, I’ve played poker with one of the people who made these discoveries, Arthur Reber. It’s super interesting stuff and he was nice enough to discuss much of it with me. Here’s a bit from Arthur’s Wiki:

His M.S. thesis was the first demonstration of implicit learning, a form of learning that takes place without awareness of either the process of acquisition or knowledge of what was actually learned. Those experiments used the artificial grammar learning methods where participants memorize strings of letters that appear chaotic but are actually formed according to complex rules. After the learning period they are able to discern whether new, novel letter-strings are “grammatical” (i.e., conform to the rules) or “non-grammatical” (i.e., violate the rules) without being able to articulate the rules they are using. These processes have much in common with the notion of intuition where people often find themselves able to make effective decisions without being aware of the knowledge they are using, how, or even when, they acquired it.

So you can know even without knowing how you know. Pretty cool. But, because Objectivists are usually people who are badly lacking in this kind of cognitive ability, they just decide that it must not exist, even when it is proven to exist. That’s not real poker. Whenever something challenges you and your thinking on a fundamental level, you just dirty your diaper.

So, hold on to your hats. Like her cohort, L. Ron Hubbard, Rand was largely dismissive of psychology. Shocking, I know. Rand thought that philosophy preceded psychology. In other words, the narratives you create about the world must never be examined in terms of the fundamental structure of your thought and behavior. Rather, any examination of your thought and behavior, and the roots of it, must take place through the lens of the narratives you have created.

It works kind of like this. We might discuss the topic of paranoid schizophrenia, but only if we do so with the fundamental and unassailable understanding that the CIA is trying to get me and has put transmitters in my teeth. Perhaps paranoid schizophrenia has some role in the narrative about the CIA trying to get me and putting transmitters in my teeth, but there’s no way that psychological phenomena played any role in creating that narrative.

Bad novelists who start cults hate psychology because they are peddling one of their stories as a comprehensive account of our existence and psychology asks where these stories really come from and what drives us to believe in them. Pulp cultists do not want to answer those questions. They do not even want to acknowledge them. So they either claim that the questions do not exist at all, or that they are somehow fundamentally illegitimate.

You can run through Objectivist philosophy on matters ranging from aesthetics to metaphysics to and it’s the same story again and again. It is an intelligent person asserting that her personal limitations must be the limitations of all people and all possibilities. Whenever you stumble into a chess game (or a poker game) and you only know how to play checkers, you leap to the conclusion that there is no such thing as chess and flip the table before anyone can prove you’re wrong by pointing out all the chess pieces. The overall thrust of Objectivism on philosophical questions is, “everything really is pretty much how it seems to be to me.”

One of the dumbest things Rand ever said was that her philosophy originated “out of my own mind, with the sole acknowledgement of a debt to Aristotle, the only philosopher who ever influenced me. I devised the rest of my philosophy myself.” I keep thinking this has to be a joke, but evidently it’s not.

Obviously, Objectivist philosophy is much more like an eighteen-year-old’s reading of Nietzsche than Aristotle, and for Rand to pretend otherwise is like Michael Bolton saying he has never listened to Otis Redding much and is only influenced by Bach. The true cousin of Objectivism is the puerile egoism of Anton LaVey and The Church of Satan. However, I can see how someone who doesn’t understand things like empathy and complex human relationships could read Aristotle’s ethics and misconstrue them as being some kind of childish egoism because he talks a lot about personal virtue. Anyway, the quote really gets to the heart of the diaper.

The great delusion Rand and her cultists sell themselves is an egoism that runs even deeper than their ethical egoism (the belief that selfishness is good). The reason that, like all cults, they have gatherings and foundations is so that they can repeat the delusion endlessly to each other to convince themselves. “We are all smart people and we believe this stuff.” “It must be true right?” “Right! It’s definitely true!” “Well we all agree so it MUST be true! Praise be to me!” Rand’s dumb egoism isn’t just a gospel of selfishness in material terms. It is an embrace of the entire outlook of a spoiled child. It’s free pass to ignore self examination and reflection and an endorsement of a life that, while not wholly unexamined, is examined only in from the perspective of that bratty child.

It’s easy for most of us to understand this facet of Objectivism because most of us used to think that way when we were children and adolescents. If you learned about Freud when you were a teenager, you probably said, “Psshshht! What a load of crap, man. I decide what I want to do and I, like, just do it. I’m not acting how I act because of, like, how my mom and dad treated me or because of some subconscious bullcrap. Gag me with a spoon!”

Only when we get older, and have more of an ability to empathize with other positions and are able to view our own lives from more of an outside perspective, do we realize how much our environment shaped us and created the context in which we see almost everything. We meet a greater diversity of people with backgrounds and histories we never really imagined. Then we start to realize that our life doesn’t necessarily consist of an independent agent authoring his autobiography as he lives it. The phenomenon or entity we call “ourself” is a drop of water moving through a river. We can see that another drop, in another part of the river might be entirely different, and one of the main things that differentiates us from all the other drops is chance.

This is another thing Objectivists don’t seem to fully understand. I promise I won’t use the word “poker” on this site ever again after this. But in online poker, because of hand tracking software, we learned that it was possible for someone to play well, to make the right decisions, and to lose anyway because of bad luck. Not for a little while, but over tens of thousands of hands. I often wonder what 30,000 hands of bad luck in poker would equate to in life events. Setting aside even the big issues, like the circumstances into which you are born, what is 30,000 hands worth of good or bad luck in job interviews, relationship choices, career paths taken, or decisions on where to live or who to trust? I think the answer is probably several lifetimes worth, keeping in mind that, as in poker, all of the decisions we make in these areas are just educated guesses. Never mind the fact that life is much harder than poker and we all make constant mistakes and how much those mistakes come back to bite us is also mainly up to luck. But Objectivists cannot see any of this. They insist they are deliberately writing the book of their own lives at a nice, steady desk, or, at worst, are prevented from doing so by “collectivists.” Every movement like Objectivism has someone else to pin the blame on, even as it tells you that you have the power to self actualize or whatever. If only the visions of Rand were made real, then all her readers would surely thrive in all areas of life and gloriously trample their way to the top.

Maybe the best way to describe the Objectivist outlook is Daniel Dennett’s Cartesian theater. Dennett has spent a lot of time trying to figure out what consciousness consists of. According to him, the way we tend to describe, or think about our own consciousness is as a homunculus sitting in a Cartesian theater. The real us is like a little person who sits inside the theater that is our head, absorbs all of the incoming information and decides what to do. Of course, this account doesn’t stand up to scrutiny or scientific testing. It’s just a silly little story that wound up stuck in our brains. But this is how Objectivists and some similar types think of themselves. This is how Rand can believe that she reached all of her pseudo-philosophical conclusions completely independently, rather than as a trivial part of a tapestry that provided her with the context and language to even have such thoughts in the first place. So the Objectivist doesn’t think they are a drop in a river, they think they are the river. Though, rivers are really sort of passive entities. It’s not like they can say, “fuck it, I’m flowing up this mountain today.” Nothing in nature really behaves in the way that Objectivists believe they behave. So Objectivists think they are like… well, I don’t know. The big bang maybe?

Etc.

And from this: https://registeroffollies.wordpress.com … -the-bill/

Galt’s Gulch is a community of perhaps a few hundred people, all very important, talented, skilled, rich, and used to mastery and control. They seem to have, in a few short years, replicated hundreds of years of industrial development all on their own. This is based on Rand’s conception of the exceptional individual’s ability to heroically master any art he applies himself to. No skilled trade, from the preparation of cuisine, to animal husbandry, is outside their purview: a philosopher makes the best short-order cook anyone could ask for, an aeronautical engineer and airplane line magnate effortlessly masters livestock ranching, indicating that these men, far from having varied strengths and weaknesses, talents they follow and apply themselves to rather than areas in which they are not gifted – in other words, unlike real people in the real world – are omni-capable and wholly self-sufficient.

They need no one but themselves, no labor force at all was required to build their infrastructure of houses, roads, industries, and farms, or to produce their food and clothing and furnishings. A few hundred scientists, bankers, managers, engineers, stifled artists and academics, all very competitive individuals accustomed to command and mostly unaccustomed to manual labor, are capable of building this from scratch within their tiny individualist market economy. These capitalists, unlike any businessmen I have ever met in reality, do not fear competition or even losing their market and their business to rivals. They are happy to work in the enterprises of the victors, who edged them out, and these victors eagerly look forward to the arrival of industrialists even more competent than they, who will wipe out their business and put them to work as more-productive subordinates. Despite the dense collection of dominant, competitive personalities, their designated arbitrator of disputes has never been called upon to preside over any mediation: they all just get along. The creepy implications of Rand’s Manichean elitism combine here with an utterly unrealistic conception of typical human behavior and capabilities. The radical change needed to bring such a society into real existence is disturbing to contemplate, but Rand seems to fully realize that this vision of a new world requires a total sweeping away of the old. In fact, the destruction of the old world is one of her major preoccupations.

Willian Hickman, the child murderer with whom a young Ayn Rand was infatuated, was Rand’s dream of the overman, the superior human who disdains all the laws of the corrupt world. His is the godlike power of destruction and renewal: he tramples to dust the old world and makes it anew, with new principles and laws which are the product of his own genius. Consider some remarks by Rand about her killer hero. Hickman’s credo that “What is good for me is right,” she proclaims “The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have heard.” From his example, she believes that the ideal man…

…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.

From here, she writes in her notes the driving ethos of her first, prototypical paean to individuality, The Fountainhead, that “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.” This essay provides a more thorough analysis of the psychology of this kind of adoration, but suffice to say that Rand is quite smitten by the idea of violent, destructive power to change the world, to spurn the morals of common man and blaze a new self-obsessed path. It is a theme she would never let go of, which would be made manifest in her hero John Galt.

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…Facscinating.

And here…shades of The Black Dahlia: http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/ … -cold.html

Part One: Ayn Rand’s "real man"

Recently I was rereading Scott Ryan’s fascinating, albeit highly technical, critique of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism and the Corruption of Rationality, and getting a lot more out of it the second time, when I came across a fact culled from a posthumous collection of Rand’s journal entries.

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.

Other than that, he was probably a swell guy.

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."

The mutilations Hickman inflicted on little Marian were worse than reported in the excerpt above. He cut the girl’s body in half, and severed her hands (or arms, depending on the source). He drained her torso of blood and stuffed it with bath towels. There were persistent rumors that he molested the girl before killing her, though this claim was officially denied. Overall, the crime is somewhat reminiscent of the 1947 Black Dahlia case, one of the most gruesome homicides in L.A. history.

But Hickman’s heroism doesn’t end there. He heroically amscrayed to the small town of Echo, Oregon, where he heroically holed up, no doubt believing he had perpetrated the perfect crime. Sadly for him, fingerprints he’d left on one of the ransom notes matched prints on file from his previous conviction for forgery. With his face on Wanted posters everywhere, Hickman was quickly tracked down and arrested. The article continues:

"He was conveyed back to Los Angeles where he promptly confessed to another murder he committed during a drug store hold-up. Eventually, Hickman confessed to a dozen armed robberies. ‘This is going to get interesting before it’s over,’ he told investigators. ‘Marion and I were good friends,’ he said, ‘and we really had a good time when we were together and I really liked her. I’m sorry that she was killed.’ Hickman never said why he had killed the girl and cut off her legs."

It seems to me that Ayn Rand’s uncritical admiration of a personality this twisted does not speak particularly well for her ability to judge and evaluate the heroic qualities in people. One might go so far as to say that anyone who sees William Edward Hickman as the epitome of a "real man" has some serious issues to work on, and perhaps should be less concerned with trying to convert the world to her point of view than in trying to repair her own damaged psyche. One might also point out that a person who "has no organ for understanding … the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people" is what we today would call a sociopath.

Was Rand’s ideal man a sociopath? The suggestion seems shockingly unfair – until you read her very own words.

No doubt defenders of Ayn Rand, and there are still a few left, would reply that the journal entry in question was written when she was only in her early twenties and still under the spell of Nietzsche, that as her thinking developed she discarded such Nietzschean elements and evolved a more rational outlook, and that the mature Rand should not be judged by the mistakes of her youth. And this might be a perfectly reasonable position to take. Unquestionably Rand’s outlook did change, and her point of view did become at least somewhat less hostile to what the average, normal person would regard as healthy values.

But before we assume that her admiration of Mr. Hickman was merely a quirk of her salad days, let’s consider a few other quotes from Ayn Rand cited in Scott Ryan’s book.

In her early notes for The Fountainhead: "One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself. Fine!" (Journals, p. 78.)

Of The Fountainhead’s hero, Howard Roark: He "has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world." (Journals, p. 93.)

In the original version of her first novel We the Living: "What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?" (This declaration is made by the heroine Kira, Rand’s stand-in; it is quoted in The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ronald Merrill, pp. 38 – 39; the passage was altered when the book was reissued years after its original publication.)

On the value of human life: Man "is man only so long as he functions in accordance with the nature of a rational being. When he chooses to function otherwise, he is no longer man. There is no proper name for the thing which he then becomes … When a man chooses to act in a sub-human manner, it is no longer proper for him to survive nor to be happy." (Journals, pp. 253-254, 288.)

As proof that her Nietzschean thinking persisted long after her admirers think she abandoned it, this journal entry from 1945, two years subsequent to the publication of The Fountainhead: "Perhaps we really are in the process of evolving from apes to Supermen — and the rational faculty is the dominant characteristic of the better species, the Superman." (Journals, p. 285.)

So perhaps her thinking did not change quite so much, after all.

And what of William Edward Hickman? What ever became of the man who served as the early prototype of the Randian Superman?

Real life is not fiction, and Hickman’s personal credo, which so impressed Ayn Rand – "what is right for me is good" – does not seem to have worked out very well for him. At first he heroically tried to weasel out of the murder rap by implicating another man, but the intended fall guy turned out to have an airtight alibi (he was in prison at the time). Then he heroically invoked the insanity defense. This effort likewise failed, and in 1928 he was sentenced to death by hanging, to be carried out at San Quentin later that same year.

Hickman reportedly "died yellow" – he was dragged, trembling and fainting, to his execution, his courtroom bravado having given way at last.

Part Two: It just gets worse

After writing the above, I found myself questioning whether it was really possible that Ayn Rand admired William Edward Hickman, the child kidnapper and multiple murderer whose credo Rand quotes with unblinking approval in her journal. Although my opinion of Rand is very low, it has never been quite that low, and I was, after all, relying on secondhand sources. Not having a copy of Journals of Ayn Rand, I thought I was unable to check for myself. Then it occurred to me to use Amazon.com’s "Search inside" feature to read the relevant pages.

What I found was, in some ways, actually worse than anything the brief excerpts from the journals had suggested.

Clearly the editor of Journals of Ayn Rand had some qualms about Rand’s open admiration of Hickman. He tries to put this admiration into perspective, writing:

"For reasons given in the following notes, AR concluded that the intensity of the public’s hatred was primarily ‘because of the man who committed the crime and not because of the crime he committed.’ The mob hated Hickman for his independence; she chose him as a model for the same reason.

"Hickman served as a model for [her fictional hero] Danny [Renahan] only in strictly limited respects, which AR names in her notes. And he does commit a crime in the story, but it is nothing like Hickman’s. To guard against any misinterpretation, I quote her own statement regarding the relationship between her hero and Hickman:

" ‘[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.’ "

The editor also provides the briefest and most detail-free synopsis of Hickman’s crime possible: "He was accused of kidnapping and murdering a young girl. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in February of 1928; he was hanged on October 20, 1928."

As far as I can tell, this is the one and only reference to Hickman’s victim to be found anywhere in the book. Ayn Rand never mentions the victim at all in any of her journal entries. The closest she comes is a sneering reference to another girl, "who wrote a letter to Hickman [in jail], asking him ‘to get religion so that little girls everywhere would stop being afraid of him.’"

Notice that the editor does not bother to tell us that the victim in question was twelve years old, that Hickman tormented her parents with mocking ransom notes, that Hickman killed the girl even though the parents paid the ransom money, or that Hickman cut the girl in half and threw her upper body onto the street in front of her horrified father while scattering her other body parts around the city of Los Angeles.

This is the Hickman whose "outside" so intrigued the young Ayn Rand.

Now here are some of Rand’s notes on the fictional hero she was developing, with Hickman (or what he "suggested") as a model:

"Other people have no right, no hold, no interest or influence on him. And this is not affected or chosen — it’s inborn, absolute, it can’t be changed, he has ‘no organ’ to be otherwise. In this respect, he has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel’other people.’ "

"He shows how impossible it is for a genuinely beautiful soul to succeed at present, for in all [aspects of] modern life, one has to be a hypocrite, to bend and tolerate. This boy wanted to command and smash away things and people he didn’t approve of."

Apparently what Hickman suggested to Ayn Rand was "a genuinely beautiful soul." The soul of Marian Parker, the murdered girl, evidently did not suggest any comparably romantic notions to her.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there is a term for a person who has "no organ" by which to understand other human beings — a person who "can never realize and feel ‘other people.’" That word is sociopath. I mean this quite literally and not as a rhetorical flourish. A sociopath, by definition, is someone who lacks empathy and cannot conceive of other people as fully real. It is precisely because the sociopath objectifies and depersonalizes other human beings that he is able to inflict pain and death without remorse.

It is also fair to say of any sociopath that he "wanted to command and smash away things and people he didn’t approve of." How this relates to having "a beautiful soul" is unclear to me — and I earnestly hope it will continue to be.

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."

Before we get to the meat of this statement, let us pause to consider Rand’s claim that average members of the public are "beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives." Worse sins and crimes and kidnapping, murdering, and mutilating a helpless little girl? If Rand honestly believed that the average American had worse skeletons than that in his closet, then her opinion of "the average man" is even lower than I had suspected.

We get an idea of the "sins and crimes" of ordinary people when Rand discusses the jury in the case: "Average, everyday, rather stupid looking citizens. Shabbily dressed, dried, worn looking little men. Fat, overdressed, very average, ‘dignified’ housewives. How can they decide the fate of that boy? Or anyone’s fate?"

Their sin, evidently, is that they are "average," a word that appears twice in three sentences. They are "shabbily dressed" or, conversely, "overdressed" — in matters of fashion, Rand seems hard to please. They are "dried" and "worn," or they are "fat." They are, in short, an assault on the delicate sensibilities of the author. Anything "average" appalls her. "Extremist beyond all extreme is what we need!" she exclaims in another entry. Well, in his cruelty and psychopathic insanity, Hickman was an extremist, for sure. Nothing "average" about him!

Returning to the longer quote above, notice how briskly Rand dismisses the possibility that the public’s anger might have been motivated by the crime per se. Apparently the horrendous slaying of a little girl is not enough, in Rand’s mind, to justify public outrage against the murderer. No, what the public really objects to is "a daring challenge to society." I suppose this is one way of looking at Hickman’s actions. By the same logic, Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy posed "a daring challenge to society." So did Adolf Hitler, only on a larger scale.

Hickman, she writes, knew that his crime "was against all laws of humanity" — this is a point in his favor, she seems to think. And "he does not want to recognize it as a crime." Well, neither does any criminal who rationalizes his behavior by saying that his victim "had it coming." Hickman "feels superior to all." Yes, so do most sociopaths. Grandiosity and narcissistic self-absorption are another characteristic of this personality type. Hickman has "a consciousness all his own"; he is a "man who really stands alone, in action and in soul." I cannot think of any comment about this that would be suitable for public consumption.

Although the American people showed no sympathy for Hickman, Ayn Rand certainly did:

"And when we look at the other side of it — there is a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy turned into a purposeless monster. By whom? By what? Is it not by that very society that is now yelling so virtuously in its role of innocent victim? He had a brilliant mind, a romantic, adventurous, impatient soul and a straight, uncompromising, proud character. What had society to offer him? A wretched, insane family as the ideal home, a Y.M.C.A. club as social honor, and a bank-page job as ambition and career…

"If he had any desires and ambitions — what was the way before him? A long, slow, soul-eating, heart-wrecking toil and struggle; the degrading, ignoble road of silent pain and loud compromises….

"A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet. That boy was not strong enough. But is that his crime? Is it his crime that he was too impatient, fiery and proud to go that slow way? That he was not able to serve, when he felt worthy to rule; to obey, when he wanted to command?…

"He was given [nothing with which] to fill his life. What was he offered to fill his soul? The petty, narrow, inconsistent, hypocritical ideology of present-day humanity. All the criminal, ludicrous, tragic nonsense of Christianity and its morals, virtues, and consequences. Is it any wonder that he didn’t accept it?"

How exactly she knew that Hickman was "brilliant, unusual, exceptional," or that he "had a brilliant mind, a romantic, adventurous, impatient soul and a straight, uncompromising, proud character" is far from clear. A more realistic portrait of Hickman would show him as a calculating sadist.

For all those who assume that Ayn Rand, as a figure on the political right, would be "tough on crime," please note that she here invokes the hoariest cliches of the "victim of society" mentality. Poor Hickman just couldn’t help kidnapping and murdering a little girl — after all, he had a lousy home life and an unfulfilling job. And it would be asking too much of such a superior soul to put forth the long, sustained effort necessary to rise to a position of power and influence by means of his own hard work.

Rand’s statement here reminds me very much of an attitude often found in career criminals — that honest work is for suckers.

"A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet." This is about as bald-faced a confession of Rand’s utter dependence on Nietzsche as we are ever likely to see. "That boy was not strong enough. But is that his crime?" No, Ayn Rand, that was not his crime. His crime, in case you have forgotten, is that he kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl and held her for ransom and murdered her and cut her to pieces and threw her body parts in the street and laughed about it. That was his crime. True, he did not quite "trample society under his feet" — but it was not for want of trying.

Oh, but "he was not able to serve, when he felt worthy to rule; to obey, when he wanted to command." How sad for him. There is a point in most people’s lives — usually around the age of fifteen or sixteen — when they reject authority and want to rule and command. Rand apparently feels that this adolescent hubris represents the best in human nature. A less addled personality would recognize that it represents a passing phase in one’s personal development, a phase that a mature human being has long outgrown.

But of course we know the real villain in the picture. Not Hickman, but Christianity! More specifically, "All the criminal, ludicrous, tragic nonsense of Christianity and its morals, virtues, and consequences. Is it any wonder that he didn’t accept it?" So it is Christianity that is characterized as "criminal," just as it is average Americans who are excoriated for their "sins and crimes."

In case there is any doubt as to Rand’s position vis-a-vis Christianity, a few pages later we find her fulminating against the depravity of:

"… the pastors who try to convert convicted murderers to their religion… The fact that right after his sentence Hickman was given a Bible by the jailer. I don’t know of anything more loathsome, hypocritical, low, and diabolical than giving Bibles to men sentenced to death. It is one of those things that’s comical in its stupidity and horrid because of this lugubrious, gruesome comedy."

I can think of at least one thing that is "more loathsome … low, and diabolical than giving Bibles to men sentenced to death." And that is: ripping up little girls for fun and profit.

Incidentally, given Hickman’s claim that he ransomed his victim in order to pay for Bible college, the jailer’s decision to hand the condemned man a copy of the Good Book seems like poetic justice to me.

Defending her hero, Rand asks rhetorically:

"What could society answer, if that boy were to say: ‘Yes. I am a monstrous criminal, but what are you?’ "

Well, society could answer: We are the ones who caught you, tried you, convicted you, and are going to put you to death. Or more seriously: We are the ones charged with upholding all those "laws of humanity" that you chose to violate – and now, dear Willie, you must pay the price.

At times, Rand — who, we must remember, was still quite young when she wrote these notes — appears to be rather infatuated with the famous and charismatic boy killer. She offers a long paragraph listing all the things she likes about Hickman, somewhat in the manner of a lovestruck teenager recording her favorite details about the lead singer in a boy band. Rand’s inventory includes:

"The fact that he looks like ‘a bad boy with a very winning grin,’ that he makes you like him the whole time you’re in his presence…"

You can practically hear the young aspiring author’s heart fluttering. I have always been puzzled by the psychology of women who write love letters to serial killers in prison. Somehow I suspect Ayn Rand would have understood them better than I do.

Still writing of Hickman, she confesses to her "involuntary, irresistible sympathy for him, which I cannot help feeling just because of [his antisocial nature] and in spite of everything else." Regarding his credo (the full statement of which is, "I am like the state: what is good for me is right"), Rand writes, "Even if he wasn’t big enough to live by that attitude, he deserves credit for saying it so brilliantly."

Remember all the flak taken by Norman Mailer for championing a jailhouse writer and getting the guy paroled, only to have him commit another crime? Here we have Rand enthusing about the "credit" Hickman "deserves" for expressing his twisted philosophy of life "so brilliantly." Get that man on a work release program!

At one point, a sliver of near-rationality breaks through the fog of Rand’s delusions: "I am afraid that I idealize Hickman and that he might not be this at all. In fact, he probably isn’t." Her moment of lucidity is short-lived. "But it does not make any difference. If he isn’t, he could be, and that’s enough." Yes, facts are stubborn things, so it’s best to ignore them and live in a land of make-believe. Let’s not allow truculent reality to interfere with our dizzying and intoxicating fantasy life.

Punctuating the point, Rand writes, "There is a lot that is purposely, senselessly horrible about him. But that does not interest me…" No indeed. Why should it? It’s only reality.

By the appraisal of any normal mind, there can be little doubt that William Edward Hickman was a vicious psychopath of the worst order. That Ayn Rand saw something heroic, brilliant, and romantic in this despicable creature is perhaps the single worst indictment of her that I have come across. It is enough to make me question not only her judgment, but her sanity.

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.

Much on the internet regarding the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand vs. the Platonic philosophy. I found this article by the students of Objectivism at Lawrence University to be clear and concise on the subject. If, indeed, Goldcatcher was telling the truth about Paul Stine and the Plato and Parmenides book, this could represent a motive.

https://www2.lawrence.edu/sorg/OBJECTIVISM/PLATO.HTML

At this site is an excellent article on Kant, who I’ve seen referred to as Ayn Rand’s Moriarity–sort of the Ayn-ti Rand–, and from which site follow this excerpt: http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/You … nemy.shtml

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For Kant, analytical truths are logical and can be validated independent of experience. These propositions are a priori and non-empirical. On the other hand, he said that synthetic propositions or truths are empirical, a posteriori, and dependent upon experience in order to be validated. Kant contended that analytic propositions provide no information about reality and that synthetic ones are factual but are uncertain, unprovable, and contingent.

According to Rand, there is no basis upon which to differentiate analytic propositions from synthetic ones. Her theory of concepts undermines Kant’s idea of an analytic-synthetic dichotomy. For Rand, concepts express classifications of observed existents according to their relationship to other observed entities. Rand explains that a concept refers to the actual existents which it integrates including all their characteristics currently known and those not yet known. She argued that concepts subsume all of the attributes of the existents to which they refer and not simply the ones included in the definition. Her objective theory of concepts is the tool she used to abrogate Kant’s analytic-synthetic dichotomy.

Kant’s analytic truths are in reality contingent upon what is included in the espoused “meaning” of a concept. The way Kant formulates his theory allows a person to validate a concept merely by including an attribute in the meaning of a concept. Choices are made regarding what characteristics are included in a definition and which are not. Depending upon whether or not a specific characteristic is included in the definition determines whether or not the characteristic is a necessary one or merely a contingent one!
The Nature of A Priori Knowledge

In his attempt to refute Hume, Kant declared that there were synthetic a priori categories or concepts built into the human mind. Kant argued that concepts are certain inherent features of human consciousness. Man’s basic concepts (e.g., time, space, entity, causality, etc.) are not derived from reality or experience, but instead stem from an automatic system of filters in his consciousness. These filters, which he called categories and forms of perception, dictate their own structure on his perception and conception of the external world thus making it impossible for him to perceive and conceive it in any other way than the one in which in fact he does perceive and conceive it. Empirical reality, according to Kant, conforms to the mind of man which lays down a “grid,” consisting of the categories and the intuitions of time and space, over “things in themselves.” Because men have no choice in whether or not they apply this grid to experience, it follows that people cannot know the real world and can only have appearances as our minds have created them.

According to Kant, the a priori includes what is in the mind before one has any sense experiences plus whatever judgments the mind is capable of making which are not based on sense experience. The forms of space and time and the transcendental categories are innate in the mind and comprise its structure prior to a person’s sense experience. He says that the common experience that everyone shares has the appearance and character it does because it has been given the makeup it has by the inherent structure of the human mind.

Phenomenal and Noumenal Reality

Kant attempted to demonstrate that the world that we experience is not the real world. The real world does not include our species concepts of space, time, entity, causality, and so on. He contended that the phenomenal world of appearances that we experience is metaphysically inferior to the noumenal world of true reality. The noumenal world is the world of things in themselves, higher truth, and real reality.

Kant explains that the phenomenal world is the world of earthly physical reality including man’s senses, perceptions, reason, and science. This phenomenal world, as perceived by a man’s mind, is a distortion or misrepresentation of the real world. Kant contends that the distorting mechanism is man’s conceptual faculty itself. He argued that that what the human mind perceives and conceives the world to be is not the world as it really is but rather as it appears to a specifically structured human reasoning faculty.

Kant’s Attack on Consciousness

Kant laments the fact that a person can only perceive and comprehend things through his own consciousness. He also explains that men are limited to a consciousness of a particular nature which perceives and conceives through particular means. For Kant, man’s knowledge lacks validity because his consciousness possesses identity. According to Kant, knowledge, to be valid, must not be processed in any way of consciousness. Kant’s criterion for truth is to perceive “things in themselves” unprocessed by any consciousness. For Kant only knowledge independent of perception is valid. Unfortunately, such knowledge is impossible!

He argues that human knowledge is subjective because it is not relevant to “things in themselves.” Real truth is unknowable because to know it a person would have to relate to reality directly without depending upon his conceptual mechanism. For Kant, the real is the object “in itself” out of all relation to a subject. This means that the consciousness or awareness of things cannot be mediated by any process or faculty whose nature affects the appearance of the object because any process or faculty would distort one’s perceptual awareness. According to Kant, everything is merely phenomenal that is relative and everything is relative that is an object with respect to a conscious subject. Kant is looking for knowledge that could be called absolute, unqualified, pure, or diaphanous.

Kant maintains that identity, which itself is the essence of existence, invalidates consciousness. Any knowledge attained by a process of consciousness is inescapably subjective and therefore cannot match the facts of reality, because it is processed or altered knowledge. Whereas all consciousness is a relationship between a subject and an object, it follows that for a person to acquire a knowledge of what is real, he would have to go outside of his consciousness. To know what is true a man would have to abandon his own nature, which is an absurd impossibility. In order to know true reality requires a consciousness not limited by any specific means of cognition. This is the criterion or goal of Kant’s argument.

Ayn Rand sees the Kantian argument as an attack on all forms of consciousness. Because consciousness exists, it possesses particular means and forms of cognition and thus is invalidated by Kant as a faculty of cognition. It follows that because men depend upon the type of mental constitution they have, that man’s mind is impotent, reality is unknowable, and knowledge is merely an illusion. According to Kant, if consciousness possesses its own identity, then it cannot grasp the identity of anything external to it. The Kantian argument thus divorces reason from reality. Reason, according to Kant, is limited, only deals with appearances, and is unable to perceive reality or “things as they are in themselves.” Reason is powerless to deal with the fundamental metaphysical concerns of existence which properly reside in the noumenal world which is unknowable.

I’m pretty sure my posts are locked for reply and are in limited viewing. If this is not the case, I would like to hear from someone to that effect. Because this stuff I’m posting is pretty "Eureka!", and I’m getting no feedback.

From this site: http://www.bigapplesecrets.com/2013_06_01_archive.html

Atlas – a bronze statue on 5th Avenue and “Atlas shrugged” by Ayn Rand
There were two famous brothers in Greek mythology – Prometheus and Atlas and both were punished – first Atlas and later Prometheus. There are two sculptures of the two brothers near Rockefeller Center in New York. You can find more details in my old post about Prometheus.

Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan is a very crowded street and only in the early morning you can make the picture of the statue of Atlas as if you are alone on one of the famous streets in the world. The monument sits in in front of Rockefeller building across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
It is the largest sculpture at Rockefeller Center.
This huge bronze figure was created by sculptor Lee Lawrie with the help of Rene Paul Chambellan in 1937. Chambellan also created small Nereids and Dolphins on the fountain near Rockefeller center.

In Greek mythology Atlas is the titan of astronomy and navigation. He was a leader in the war between the Olympian Gods and the Titans. After the war was lost, Atlas received the harshest punishment by King Zeus: he had to hold up the heavens with bare hands and bear their weight on his shoulders forever. Atlas instructed the mankind in the art of astronomy. A lost traveler can use the statue as a compass -the North-South axis of the sphere on Atlas’ shoulders points towards the North Star as seen from New York City.

You can see this statue on the cover page of one of the most published books in the world, “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. The theme of the novel, as Rand described it, is "the role of man’s mind in existence". "If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders–what would you tell him to do?" Rand wrote, answering, "To shrug."

The book, describing a dystopian United States, was first published in 1957. John Galt is one of the main characters of the book. He is the leader of the of society’s most productive citizens believing that world, where individual is not free to create and have a profit, where every person is a slave to society and government, will end in the chaos and disaster. John Galt believes that the destruction of the profit motive leads to the collapse of society. Galt was an engineer and invented a new type of motor for the company he had been working for.

Forced by his employer, for the "social good," to share his part of profit with his fellow workers, who contributed nothing to the motor’s development, Galt walks out of his job, determined to "stop the motor of the world."

Ayn Rand (Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. At the age of nine, she decided to make fiction writing her career.

She supported Kerensky Revolution ( February 1917) and criticized the Bolshevik Revolution ( October 1917). She graduated from University of Petrograd in 1924 and in 1925, after obtaining permission for visiting relatives in the United States, Ayn came to USA. Her first novel "We are living" was semi-autobiographical and was set in Soviet Russia.

Ayn was so impressed with the skyline of Manhattan upon her arrival in New York Harbor that she cried what she later called "tears of splendor”. Later she wrote about New York: "I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline”. Rand wrote much of the book in New York and based many of the novel’s fictional sites on real places in the city.

The story of Atlas Shrugged expresses Rand’s philosophy rational self-interest. She wrote:
“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors(…)And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it." “"Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that ‘human rights’ are superior to ‘property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others”

“Atlas Shrugged” debuted on The New York Times Bestseller List at #13 three days after its publication – and was on the list for 22 consecutive weeks. Objectivism movement originally started out as an informal gathering of friends, who met with Rand on weekends at her apartment on East 36th Street in New York City to discuss philosophy. Later Rand promoted her Objectivist philosophy, lecturing students in Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and MIT.

Rand died of heart failure in 1982, at her home in New York City. Rand’s funeral was attended by some of her followers, including Alan Greenspan (the Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006). A six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket. Ayn Rand always wore a gold dollar sign as a brooch on her lapel.

The “Ayn Rand Institute” began operations on February 1, 1985, three years after Rand’s death. More than 50 years after publication, sales are booming. According to a press release from this Institute, over 7 million copies had been sold by the US publishers as of January 2010, with sales in 2009 along being over 500,000 copies. The numbers do not include sales from other countries. Very few novels have had an impact as continuing as "Atlas Shrugged".

The Wall Street Journal published statistics about "Atlas Shrugged" sales:
1980s — 74,300 copies per year
1990s — 95,300 copies per year
2000s — 167,028 copies per year
2010s — 303,523 copies per year

2012- — 359,105 copies per year

On the 22nd of April, 1999, the United States Postal Service has issued a stamp dedicated to Ayn Rand.

Part I of the American film adaptation of the novel Atlas Shrugged was released in 2011, part 2- in 2012, and Part will hit theaters on Summer 2014.

Cosmic. Mind blown. That’s a hell of a chess game.

Feedback -TLDR.
Any solution will be simple and appear to be obvious once verified.
We’ll all wonder how we didn’t see it…