Randroid Ideal
When I was a young lad saying bombastically foolish things like “I want to be rich or dead by time I’m 30,” I will admit that I mistook Ayn Rand’s intellectual sleight of hand as good philosophical shorthand instead of the snakily oiled license for greed that it was.
I hadn’t yet been faced with much travail in life, and when I had been there were friends around who helped me out (Digby knows two of these folks very well.) So my habit of introspection and of triple questioning every conclusion had not yet formed and it was the natural match for my atheism that helped Ayn Rand’s ‘Objectivist philosophy’ become a guiding star of my ideals. Like I said, I was bombastically foolish back then, but I’m wise enough now to know that Objectivism mostly appeals to the socially and morally defective with it’s easy shorthand. This article from Digby makes it much easier to see why that is.
I can hardly wait for his review of “Ideal.”
This could be very interesting if it’s based on what I think it might be. Rand famously admired a serial killer as the ultimate expression of objectivist manhood and based her male characters on some of his attributes. She was known to have wiritten an unfinished novel about him. I don’t know if this is it, but it might be:
Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation — Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street — on him.
Warning: Highly Graphic content at link.
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