Paul Ryan and many conservatives take their cues from a sociopath (by anon)

I wish I were being over-dramatic here.  But I’m not.

Paul Ryan, Rush Limbaugh, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Clarence Thomas, Alan Greenspan, and hoards of Tea Partiers (to name just a few) all herald the writings of pop-cult writer Ayn Rand.  She wrote such books as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and she forges her position of OBJECTIVISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF SELFISHNESS (her words, not mine).

Many conservatives LOVE Ayn Rand.  Paul Ryan even makes his staff read Atlas Shrugged (1000+ pages) and Clarence Thomas makes his staff read The Fountainhead.  Rand’s basic line is that there are the “producers” and there is the “collective.”  There is the strong and there is the weak.  She heralds the individual producer, the person who is strong and is willing to do what it takes to fulfill one’s potential regardless of the cost.  In some ways, this can seem sexy.  But if it means neglecting community and social responsibility, this can be dangerous.

But here’s the root problem.  Many of Ayn Rand’s protagonists (you know, the lead person in her novels whom we should all admire) are modeled after WILLIAM HICKMAN.  Who the hell is he?  Well, he was a serial killer in the 1920’s.  That’s right.  A SERIAL KILLER.  She praised him to no end in her diaries because he did things his way regardless of what society thought.  One commentator writes (and I’ll give a link to this article below) – “What did Rand admire so much about Hickman?  His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own.  He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"”

Hickman wanted to do things so much his way that he decided to dismember one of his victims.  He bargained with the father of a girl he kidnapped for a ransom in exchange for the daughter back.  Hickman thought that all that was required for the ransom transaction was the body of the girl.  Here is an excerpt from a newspaper reporting the rest of the incident:

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Then he took a pocket knife and cut a hole in her throat. Then he cut off each arm to the elbow. Then he cut her legs off at the knees. He put the limbs in a cabinet. He cut up the body in his room at the Bellevue Arms Apartments. Then he removed the clothing and cut the body through at the waist. He put it on a shelf in the dressing room. He placed a towel in the body to drain the blood. He wrapped up the exposed ends of the arms and waist with paper. He combed back her hair, powdered her face and then with a needle fixed her eyelids. He did this because he realized that he would lose the reward if he did not have the body to produce to her father.

Hickman packed her body, limbs and entrails into a car, and drove to the drop-off point to pick up his ransom; along his way he tossed out wrapped-up limbs and innards scattering them around Los Angeles. When he arrived at the meeting point, Hickman pulled Miriam's [sic] head and torso out of a suitcase and propped her up, her torso wrapped tightly, to look like she was alive--he sewed wires into her eyelids to keep them open, so that she'd appear to be awake and alive. When Miriam's father arrived, Hickman pointed a sawed-off shotgun at him, showed Miriam's head with the eyes sewn open (it would have been hard to see for certain that she was dead), and then took the ransom money and sped away. As he sped away, he threw Miriam's head and torso out of the car, and that's when the father ran up and saw his daughter--and screamed.

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Sick.  And Ayn Rand loved this man.  She models her protagonists (Howard Roark, John Galt) after this man.  This is nothing short of sociopathic thought.  Ayn Rand is a sociopath.  Many conservatives love Ayn Rand - and that is how they take their cues from a sociopath.  Does this make many conservatives themselves sociopaths?  Of course not, but this is a connection that should give us great pause.  As I was reminded today in a discussion, the reason why Europe does not latch onto Rand’s philosophy is because they see what that kind of thinking does in the absolute extreme: the Holocaust.  If you get enough William Hickman’s, anything like that is possible.

Here’s the link to a very interesting article: Rand a Big Admirer of Serial Killers

And if this wasn't bad enough, we even have a student group on the UWW campus dedicated to the teachings of Ayn Rand.  It is called, REA$ON.  Fitting.