Ayn Rand's Nietzchean Pathology

Warning: extremely disturbing imagery in the link below. Reader be warned.

Ayn Rand had some brilliant insights--the necessity of the relentless pursuit of truth, the refusal to compromise with a lie in one's philosophical system, the value of profit as a reward for the productive individual, and so forth. But she also fell flat on her face in some respects. She never understood the family, or the community--indeed, anything which violated her absolute individualism was supposedly evil and in the service of the oppression of genius.

One can easily see the gaps between her theories and reality in her fiction when she has to write something approaching believable human interactions between sympathetic characters. Family is glossed over to a large extent. Issues of real interdependence become reduced to social contract style interactions insofar as she can make it make sense--but she never can quite figure out the family. Anyway--there's some reasons for that. Among them, her infatuation with the Nietzchean ubermensch, over and above all other mere mortals, liberated from all rules, killer of God and so killer of man, wild and free. As can be seen for her fondness for a serial killer:

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...

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...

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...

Read the whole thing--if you have the stomach for it: Hickman did some vile things--and consider the peculiarities of mind which lead someone to think this way. Consider also the significant similarities between the worldview expressed her and that of the Communism from which she'd escaped.

She seeks to use the methods of the Communists against them. She merely believes in the proleteriat of the brilliant oppressed by the bourgeois of the mediocre and incompetent. Apart from that inversion, the whole scheme is the same: the awakening of the consciousness of the oppressed, including class traitors such as Eddie Willers and other sub beings who serve the wonderful higher beings even to the point of self destruction after the glorious revolution comes into being, sweeping away the structures of oppression by the oppressive powers of incompetence and mooching. Ayn Rand is Karl Marx.