@Renickulous There are plenty of accounts about this. It's not "propaganda". Watching a murder documentary is incredibly different than her admiration of that man and his type.

@Renickulous Have you just overlooked the characters in her books and their sociopathic/psychopathic personalities? Are you being disingenuous?

@Renickulous No no no, you don't get to do that. Don't have a conversation using logical fallacies. Either that or you have misconstrued what a sociopath/psychopath is.

@Renickulous Acts weird?

Well I don't think her characters are "heroes". They are "heroes" from the extreme right wing view point. Do you know the plot to "Atlas Shrugged" and the characters? That is exactly her philosophy, and one of the characters is based off of that serial killer Hickman. Do you not see the similarity in Roark from "The Fountainhead" and a sociopath/psychopath?

[mises.org]

He also rapes a woman in the book, but Rand and her followers call it "welcomed" or "invited" rape which is an oxymoron.

[nymag.com]

[washingtoncitypaper.com]

In Atlas Shrugged there are "hero" characters who despise the poor, the "ugly", and destroy society.

[salon.com]

I think her and her followers' understanding of what a "hero" is, is misguided. It's basically the opposite of what the majority of people view as a hero. They are basically creating their own world with their own definitions to break away from the rest of society, a la "alternative facts". Sure, everything is subjective in the purist sense of the word, and I'm sure if the world was mostly in the corner of Ayn Rand and her philosophies that it would be the "norm", but I don't think that would be a "good" world for most people to live in.

Her stories remind me of the movie Avengers: Infinity War and the character Thanos. He believes to be doing the right thing in killing half the universe's population for what he sees to be the means that justify the ends of "alleviating" suffering. He's not a hero for killing trillions of beings. Ayn Rand would have loved him. She is basically supporting the 1% in society and demonizing everyone else as being uncreative, useless, leeches, undesirables, etc.

I can only assume that her followers think the same.

How can you not see the sociopathic/psychopathic behavior in her writing, characters, and philosophy?

[dailykos.com]

[sott.net]

@Renickulous Like I said in another post on this thread, I'm sure some positive tenets can be taken from her philosophy individually just as you can with any philosophy, but if you can't see the overall message then I don't know what to tell you.

Did you watch the video? She is brilliant and courageous.

@sfvpool Courage assumes costs. What cost do you think she may have paid in this almost sycophantic interview by Donahue ("You can't prove there is no god" ugh, eye rolll). The reasons she gives are not brilliant, not stupid, but not brillian or original (I can't prove a negative, I don't want to destroy reason or agency, etc). She is at best a mid-level thinker. And a superficial one.

I am always left with the impression that for Rand, atheism was almost a parlor trick, something to shock the "average" audience, and give crediance to her belief in self-interest (read in this case, the value of selfishness), and realignment of the traditional morality based loosely on Nietzsche's amoral philosophy. Hers isn't amoral. She props up the morality of selfishness.

@KenChang Yes, her philosophy advocates rational selfishness, based upon reason and logic. I don't think her atheism was a parlor trick to shock anyone. On the contrary, she came to the decision to be an atheist as a child and never wavered.

@sfvpool. Yes. Perhaps I am not giving her sufficient credit. But just because one learns (self taught or otherwise) a parlor trick at young age, it doesn't necessarily give that trick any more depth than it deserves. Her philosophy of "rational selfishness" and her purported use of "reason and logic" are those that belong to an emotionless narcissistic psychopath. Compare her almost smug atheism with the passionate atheism of Hutchins or the humanistic atheism of Sagan.

I am sorry, but her "reason" sounds as hollow as someone describing the music of Bach by reciting the notes....

@KenChang you said it way better than I could ever have done.

@KenChang "Her philosophy of "rational selfishness" and her purported use of "reason and logic" are those that belong to an emotionless narcissistic psychopath"

It's funny you say that. You probably know about the psychopath that she admired and used as her ideal man and inspiration for her writings. Disgusting story about the man she admired. His name was William Edward Hickman.

[alternet.org]

@KenChang Perhaps you should learn more about her philosophy, if you think she was an emotionless, narcissistic, psychopath -- or learn what those terms mean?

@sfvpool perhaps I should learn more about her philosophy , if I can manage my gag reflex and eye rolling. But I am quite familiar with narcissistic personality disorders and psychopathy.

@Piece2YourPuzzle Do you know the source for the article you quoted (alternet.org)? Like most smear campaigns, someone takes something someone said, did, or they think they did, out of context, disregarding everything else the person said or did, and they make a big deal of it.

It reminds me of what I read in a college history textbook about John D. Rockefeller. All it stated about Rockefeller was that he was responsible for the Ludlow Massacre, which was when the Colorado National Guard was called in to end a labor strike, ending in the death of many people. I looked up the history book's reference for the citing, and found that I owned the original source book. The original source book was Allan Nevins' two volume biography of Rockefeller. John D. Rockefeller was a great man that did many amazing things over the long span of his career. The Ludlow Massacre, which happened in, I think, 1914, happened after John D.'s retirement, had nothing to do with him, and, it is debatable whether it was a "bad" thing. So, with all that could be said about Rockefeller, the history book chose something the author thought would make him look bad.

Similarly, in the case of Ayn Rand's admiration for Edward Hickman, I have the original source for the smear. It is in the book, "Journals of Ayn Rand." First off, she was 23 years old when she wrote about Hickman -- long before she developed her philosophy. She was fascinated with the Hickman trial, and I think she even attended some of the court hearings. She was developing her writing style and was fascinated with the psychology of Hickman, as many people today are fascinated with serial killers. She also called him a monster and thought his crime was horrific. She thought he was intelligent and imagined what he could have been like, had he not chosen his eventual path. If anyone is interested in making their own judgement about this, they can read the source for themselves.

@sfvpool So I and countless others are taking her plainly stated published words out of context when she says things like, "“the amazing picture of a man [Hicks] with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.” She called him “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy,” shimmering with “immense, explicit egotism.”"?

[slate.com]

Her admiration for Hicks was an integral part in her developing her own philosophy, but it was well on it's way before even Hicks. Her "fiction" had much of her own personality in it too.

I think @KenChang is right with his evaluation. She was a sociopath. Could we be wrong? Sure. Her words and philosophy don't exactly make for a great case on that behalf though, and she sure seemed to be wearing the uniform of a sociopath. Her own lover Nathaniel Branden (psychologist), who initially promoted her Objectivism philosophy, later on offered criticisms on it and splintered his belief in it. "......he eventually offered criticisms of aspects of her work, naming as problems a tendency to encourage emotional repression and moralizing, a failure to understand psychology beyond its cognitive aspects, and a failure to appreciate adequately the importance of kindness in human relationships." [en.wikipedia.org] [web.archive.org]

I'm sure you and others have taken elements of her philosophy and have used it to your benefit, but I believe people can do that without actually having her same rigid belief in it. Her philosophy has been proven to not work in the Sears example. It also has a lack of compassion among other characteristics that would run in the same direction of sociopathy/psychopathy.

[psychologytoday.com]