Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (2019)

From University of California Press - Yikes!

I've commented on Duggan before here, focusing mainly on an online summary-excerpt of Mean Girl, as well as here, showcasing how Duggan (contemptuously and dishonestly) responds to challenging inquiries about her work: she is a poison tree from which one cannot expect honest fruits.  Having now had the opportunity to see the entirety of Mean Girl, I can point to a number of facts about this book that objectively demolish her intellectual and scholarly credibility.

Duggan quite perfectly epitomizes a subspecies of creature I dub the Rand-basher.  I've never encountered an honorable Rand-basher, and no one ever, ever, ever, ever, ever will, for one simple reason: Rand-bashing is an inherently dishonorable activity given the degree of value in Rand's work.  I'll name a few telltale characteristics of the Rand-basher, but the fundamental underlying one explaining all the rest is: intellectual dishonesty.

Here are discreditable tactics Rand-bashers invariably engage in:

• Intellectual laziness, or forming opinions without having done one's homework
• Evasion of available evidence running contrary to their opinion; lack of any curiosity to discover such contrary evidence or opinion
• Strawman argumentation style; rejection of the principle of interpretive charity
• Refusal to have a meeting of minds with proponents of an opposing viewpoint, not just on matters of what views they actually hold, but why; neglecting to acknowledge or address the aspects of the opponents' worldview that the opponents consider most fundamental
• Exclusive focus on the weaker proponents of opposing viewpoints when stronger proponents are readily discoverable
• Selective and one-sided acknowledgment or recognition of data points, especially when plenty of other data points providing an alternative or opposing perspective are available
• Replacing substantive argument with any number of informal fallacies or slimy tactics including ad hominem, goalpost-shifting, appeal to or abuse of authority, insults, reckless smears, sneering/snideness, overall nasty tone, obvious bad faith

I begin the list above with reference to laziness, because to any actual expert in Rand's thought, laziness is the strikingly obvious if not defining feature of Duggan's so-called scholarship.  There is a now-sizable body of philosophically serious Rand-scholarship, going back decades, which I catalog in rather extensive detail here.  Duggan cites from or references pretty much none of what's listed there.  That's a serious red flag right there.

You might think that a putative scholar of Rand's thought, whose thesis is set out in a title like Mean Girl, would want to take some care to counter the community of scholars who don't share that opinion.  The fact that she makes pretty much no effort whatsoever to engage these scholars is a red flag that this putative scholarship shouldn't be taken seriously.

And it's not like Duggan doesn't consult and cite numerous sources in the endnotes and bibliography.  In fact - given that her main focus is on Rand's literary and cultural influence - she does include in the bibliography the three volumes edited by Mayhew (a member of the Ayn Rand Society's steering committee, and acknowledged among the community of Rand experts as an expert) on Rand's three major novels.  But not only does she not quote, reference, or cite any of these volumes or its several contributions in the main text or the endnotes, while quoting and citing all kinds of negative comments on these novels, there is no evidence whatsoever that she is seriously familiar with what is in these volumes.  (Just for instance, the Gotthelf and Salmieri contributions to the volume of essays on Atlas Shrugged, focused in particular on the Galt speech that is the philosophical centerpiece of the novel, are indispensable contributions for anyone not already familiar with their thematic content.  Indeed, there is really no indication whatsoever in Mean Girl that Duggan has any familiarity with the underlying philosophical structure of Objectivism.  In that regard, she is not an intellectually serious commentator.  Her "summary" of the Galt speech is all of one brief paragraph and conveys none of the philosophical fundamentals in any serious or insightful way beyond anything else she had already said in Mean Girl.)

The only notable additions to the bibliography of secondary sources besides the three edited by Mayhew, are the two volumes Sciabarra is involved in, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical and Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand.  Now, any expert on this stuff knows how thoroughly (well, exhaustively) researched Russian Radical is - its reference sources include all the Peikoff courses up through the Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (I'll get to Peikoff more in a moment, since doing so is downright unavoidable in this context) and lots of other taped material besides - and any expert in this arena is also aware that Sciabarra delves deep into those philosophical fundamentals, particularly Rand's philosophical method (something something "dialectic as the art of context-keeping"; for some details in this blog see here and here) within which all her specific positions/theses, formulations, and applications are inextricably embedded.  But Duggan's only mention of this book is as a source for early biographical Rand information (which would be in the first section of Russian Radical).  Her only mention of Feminist Interpretations is almost merely in passing and with superficial reference to only a couple of the pieces.

Speaking of mere-in-passing mentions, Peikoff comes up in only two places.  The first is one brief paragraph as it relates to all the people Rand supposedly "alienated" thereby leaving "only" Peikoff around to inherit her estate.  (Amazingly enough, Duggan manages not to sink to the usual Rand-bashing low of mentioning that Rand accepted Social Security benefits in old age; usually the Rand-bashers do so in a gleeful "gotcha" manner as supposed proof of hypocrisy without bothering to mention or learn about her 1960s essay on government grants and scholarships.  Given the general pattern of dishonesty on Duggan's part, perhaps this was a lapse on her part so to speak, or perhaps I missed it.)  The other is an inclusion in a "Key Figures" section before the bibliography along with about 10 other people, with about 2 or 3 sentences provided for each.

Now, any serious scholar and expert on Rand knows about the importance of Leonard Peikoff to knowing what's what in Objectivism, including especially that stuff about method (context-keeping, integration, hierarchy, etc.).  To mention it for the umpteenth time, she give her very-high-bar-to-clear authorization and endorsement of the 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course, the most complete and definitive statement of her philosophy in her lifetime.  It's not like this and other courses (e.g, Understanding Objectivism) haven't been available, for free, on the Ayn Rand Institute website for some years now, or that Understanding hasn't been available in book form since 2012.  The book based on this course (which, not insignificantly, Peikoff considers the definitive statement of Objectivism) is Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991) (a.k.a. OPAR).  This isn't among the works listed in the bibliography.

One might think that critics of Rand, interested in getting it right, would be curious to see what a course or book titled Understanding Objectivism by Rand's most qualified student and endorsed teacher/interpreter, is all about.  But I have never once encountered the slightest curiosity from Rand-bashers in this regard when I've told them about it and that pretty much all serious long-time students of Objectivism attest to its importance.  Such a pattern of behavior falls under any number of the bullet points above.

Listed in the bibliography, meanwhile, is Slavoj Zizek's borderline-to-downright silly article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.  It's the only evidence that Duggan is so much aware that this journal exists.  (There are some not-so-silly articles that have appeared over the years in that journal, including this one.)  Now, if Duggan were a serious, honest, not-lazy scholar, she would have done her homework by inquiring into what besides Zizek appears in that journal.  There are, after all, plenty of pieces in there analyzing Rand from a literary and cultural perspective.

Duggan goes to great lengths in Mean Girl to portray Rand as having a contempt or disregard for "inferior" people, selectively and one-sidedly marshaling "evidence" to that effect (most if not all of it is slippery and snide insinuation based on assuming-the-worst readings of the original texts - this falls under the Strawman bullet-point above).  Given the mainly literary context in which Duggan is operating, she draws connections here between Rand and Nietzsche.  Now, a couple things Duggan says in connection with Nietzsche: First, he's among the 10 or so included in the "Key Figures" section; the first sentence under his name is, "The work of German philosopher Nietzsche has exerted a profound influence on Western intellectual history," and then mentions that Rand initially admired his critique of religion and Christian morality and his concept of the "Superman," before later rejecting him.  But guess who's not included in the "Key Figures" section: Aristotle.  Now, Duggan does mention at least a couple times in the main text that Rand was really big on Aristotle.  Perhaps the omission of Aristotle from the "Key Figures" section is just another piece of evidence of laziness and/or sloppiness on her part.

But there's also an awfully dubious claim Duggan makes in an endnote (ch.2, note 26) in connection to Nietzsche: "Rand was not a close reader of Nietzsche, but more of a fan, until she eschewed his influence...".  Now, in Wiley-Blackwell's Companion to Ayn Rand (Gotthelf and Salmieri, eds., 2016, included in my extensive cataloging of Rand scholarship linked above), Nietzsche scholar/expert Lester Hunt writes a chapter on Rand's relation to Nietzsche.  It begins by quoting Rand from author-information material she submitted ca. 1935 to the publisher of We the Living that Also Sprach Zarathustra was her "bible" and that she could never commit suicide as long as it exists.  Does that sound like someone who isn't a close reader of Nietzsche?  Or: how did she ever happen upon the "noble soul" aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil that she discusses in the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead (which Duggan obliquely refers to in the same footnote quoted above), without doing some pretty close reading?  Not only was Duggan evidently too effing lazy to know about the Companion and its contents, but how can she keep her story straight that a not-close-reader would know about such an aphorism?  This is Duggan characteristically playing fast and loose with the facts.

Here's another point of evidence of Duggan's lack of thoroughness and care: she does quote numerous times from Rand's Journals (including a context-omitting discussion of Rand's early comments on the serial killer William Hickman, whom Duggan blatantly-dishonestly asserts in the book's Overview section was an initial basis for Rand's "ruthless 'heroes'"), but there is no mention anywhere in the book of Rand's Letters!  There's a shit-ton of material of interest in the Letters.  This has direct bearing on the quality of Mean Girl's "scholarship."  For instance, in the Overview section there are a couple or so sentences describing the main points of each of the chapters, accompanied by bullet-pointed key concepts or names for each chapter.  For chapter 2, covering roughly the 1930s and 1940s of Rand's life/work, one of the bullet points, in addition to ones like 'Marriage to Frank O'Connor,' 'Anthem,' and 'The Fountainhead', is 'Isabel Paterson.'  Now, for one thing, the mentions of Paterson in the chapter are pretty much in passing, conveying merely that she was the main mentor-figure to Rand in the '30s and '40s, and that she wrote a book titled The God of the Machine (1943).  Now, in the Letters, there are two sizable chapters containing Rand's correspondence with two key figures: Paterson and John Hospers.  (Hospers isn't mentioned in Mean Girl.  Suffice it to say that this well-respected professional philosopher, expert in aesthetics, and big fan of Atlas Shrugged didn't regard Rand as "mean," whatever criticisms he did have of her.)  One of Rand's letters in connection with Paterson was one praising The God of the Machine as the best book in political philosophy in 300 years and a decisive antidote to The Communist Manifesto.  Duggan declares somewhere in Mean Girl that Rand's understanding of capitalism and markets is fundamentally deficient, but it's safe to say that Rand's understanding aligns with that of God of the Machine.  It's also safe to say that Duggan is too lazy to have known about this, or what's in that book.  Also in the Letters is Rand's ca. 1980 letter of reference for Leonard Peikoff as eminently qualified to teach her ideas, although I doubt Duggan cares to know this or its relevance.

In her discussion of Atlas Shrugged, Duggan neglects to mention its theme ("the role of the mind in man's existence."  Gallingly, she makes reference to the novel's "civilizational theme" as echoing the one that "shapes Anthem."  About Anthem, Duggan manages to at least make reference to "individual initiative" and "innovation," and then says, "The civilizational framework and character descriptions in Anthem are inscribed in a pervasive hierarchy [this is the prose of a pretentious twit, BTW] of mental and physical ability that intertwines with racial, class, and moral differences in all Rand's fiction."  So even when she kind-of touches upon the role-of-the-mind theme running throughout Rand's work, she poisons it with a discussion of a supposedly "racial" makeup to Rand's heroes (which she does at numerous points throughout Mean Girl, it's pretty disgusting).

When she bothers to discuss Rand's nonfiction writings, she does the following:

It's evident that she didn't bother to go through Rand's 'Objectivist Newsletter/The Objectivist/Ayn Rand Letter' collections, but rather only the anthologized books.

Now, she shows familiarity with at least the first essay in For the New Intellectual (1961), but also in FTNI are the speeches from her novels introduced by explicit discussions of their themes, which as I've said Duggan neglects to show any deep familiarity with.  (Ask Rand-bashers what the theme of Atlas Shrugged is, without cheating, and they'd never properly guess it in a million years.  I know this from experience.)

When she discusses The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) anthology, the one essay she discusses is the "Racism" one.  Duggan used this as an opportunity to bring up in the usual smeary Rand-basher ways Rand's supposed views on "the erasure on indigenous peoples, restriction on immigration from more 'primitive' parts of the world, and the persistence of sharp racial inequality in the 'private' economic and social spheres [as] part and parcel of her system of rational morality, even as she opposed state-imposed racial (and sex) discrimination."  Actually, an honest scholar discussing what is part and parcel of Rand's system of rational morality would at the very least make mention of the general points of the lead essay in The Virtue of Selfishness, "The Objectivist Ethics."

The same vice marks her treatment of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967).  Instead of demonstrating real and serious familiarity with the lead essay, "What is Capitalism?", she focuses instead (for a short paragraph) on the essay "The Wreckage of the Consensus," only to mention  Rand's positive reference to Reagan's speech nominating Goldwater in '64 "as a promising new direction for electoral politics - a new direction her influence helped to shape."  Big whoop.  What's really the meat and bones is what's in the lead essay.  For one thing, Rand gives her definition of capitalism there.  Duggan doesn't mention this definition anywhere, although she provides her own in the Glossary.

If all the laziness and sloppiness weren't in evidence enough, her discussion of The Romantic Manifesto (1969/1971), a work one might reasonably think is crucial to grasping Rand's literary aesthetic, is all of one sentence.

This is growing tiresome.  It's all too obvious that Duggan doesn't possess the intellectual/philosophical wherewithal to provide an insightful analysis of Rand's philosophy.  She leaves out way too many crucial sources that would shed a positive light on, and foster understanding of, Rand.  The length of the book is all of about 100 pages, and many topics are covered all to briefly to provide much if any useful information for serious inquirers.  A book accomplishing that task would have to be considerably longer than this, and there are already numerous books on Rand out there that provide way more value than this one does.  If there were constraints on publishing length limiting this to 100 or so pages, on that basis alone it is perhaps better that it not be published at all.  Or, if one were to assign Rand to a scholar in some academic 'Brief Introductions' series without butchering the subject, I can think of many - even relatively mediocre ones - who are way more qualified than Duggan.  No serious expert on Rand's thought can possibly think this book meets even minimum quality standards.  The dishonest title, if nothing else, is a dead giveaway that it's nothing more than a hatchet-job rather than a minimally decent attempt at being fair, objective, enlightening, or anything of the sort.  Its only use is as a foil case contra serious Rand scholarship and a lesson in how not to be taken seriously (which is the only point in going through the trouble of making this post).  I'll link again to another post demonstrating what high-quality Rand scholarship looks like.

In this post I haven't done much to show what Duggan actually does say about Rand in Mean Girl, but I've already discussed the gist of that in the post linked at the beginning of this one, and there's plenty there to show just how shoddy her work is - along with that second link revealing the level of intellectual and moral character behind this work.  Along with fundamental dishonesty, her other main character flaw, along with so many other leftists and "progressives," is hubris.

I'm going to close by removing any possible remaining doubts about Duggan's honesty and credibility.  The key context of Duggan's hatchet-job is that, like most Rand-bashers, and most of the very worst and nastiest of them, she is a leftist/anti-capitalist.  The very same dishonest tactics these creatures use to recklessly attack and smear Rand are used likewise to attack and smear capitalism.  If the following isn't the last nail in the coffin as far as Duggan's (and their) credibility goes, I don't know what is.

In the preface, Duggan asserts (as does the typical nasty leftist) that "From the 1980s to 2008, neoliberal [i.e., more or less capitalist] politics and policies succeeded in expanding inequality around the world.  The political climate Ayn Rand celebrated - the reign of brutal capitalism - intensified."  Now, aside from the rather ludicrous claim that Rand's philosophy in its actual neo-Aristotelian essentials has even so much as come close to exerting its proper neo-Aristotelian influence on the culture (as in, what actually would take place if everyone absorbed and practiced the principles espoused in Galt's speech and OPAR), the factual claim about expanding global inequality is false and can only be the product of a reckless and willful ignorance of the data.

The only serious question remaining at this point is how someone like Duggan and her ilk (this includes all the ignorant fools - willing if not eager dupes - who positively blurbed this trash) could have ended up with the positions in the academy that they occupy, filling publications and student's heads with garbage.  It is precisely because of entities like these that the academy has taken the widely-loathed, ever-leftward and therefore ever-inbred and pro-dishonesty path of recent years.  Upon comprehensive exposure of their blatant dishonesty, I recommend sardonic ridicule as the next appropriate course of action.  Is it really too much to ask that these creeps clean up their act?

How shitty are Rand-bashers?

I've fucking had it with Rand-bashers.  (Note: I distinguish bashers from responsible critics who make an effort to know what's what.)  Not one of the Rand-bashers operates in good faith; out of countless instances I've never seen it happen.

What do I mean by operating in good faith?

Well, let's start with Rapoport's Rules, recently popularized by Daniel Dennett.  (An aside about Dennett.  He brought up Rapoport's Rules in his 2013 book Intuition Pumps, which is 6 years ago now.  There may be no more well-known philosopher in the USA than Dennett.  And yet here we are, 6 years later, and no one seems to have picked up on Rapoport's Rules, not by the philosophically-impoverished "discourse" that's going on in the American lamestream.  Exactly how long should we expect to wait before Rapoport's Rules become a mainstream norm of discourse, i.e., before a critical mass of people have learned about the Rules?  50 years?  250?  5000?  Never?  For this no-brainer?)

Here's the first Rapoport Rule as formulated by Dennett:

1: You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, "Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way."

This principle is also expressed in Bryan Caplan's proposed Ideological Turing Test (ITT), modeled on the original Turing Test idea which had to do with whether one could tell a computer apart from a person.  The ITT has to do with whether one can "state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents," so that one wouldn't be able to tell the critic of view X from the holder of view X.

Another way of expressing the principle involved is: dialectic.  To make any progress in dialectic we have to be sure that we've established a common ground as to the ideas being proposed by the multiple parties involved.  If one side says that the other side is caricaturing its views, then dialectic cannot proceed or get off the ground.

By the standards expressed here - Rapoport Rules, ITT, dialectic - Rand-bashers have failed abysmally and will always fail abysmally.  This isn't just because Rand's ideas are a lot more plausible and well-supported than the bashers claim; it is because their approach to attacking contrary ideas is so shitty, so ignorant, so lazy, so discreditable, etc.

(I should note, as I have on many an occasion in many a venue, that I find Rand's polemics against such philosophers as Kant to fail by the standards expressed above.  As a result I have been slammed online by the shittier "Objectivists" who basically take the same approach to Kant that Rand-bashers take toward Rand, with as little genuine fruit to show for it.  Hell would freeze over before Kant scholars would consider Rand's characterizations of Kant true, helpful, insightful, etc. - just as hell would freeze over before Rand scholars take Rand-bashers seriously.  Suffice it to say that I think Rand does a much better job formulating her own ideas than characterizing those she despised [or thought she despised, given what she thought those ideas contained].)

Here we are, it's 2019, and a steady stream of professional philosophical literature on Rand - duly compiled in the bibliography at the SEP entry on Rand -  has been emerging for well over a decade now.  You would never know it by listening to the Rand-bashers.  Not only do they not know about this body of literature but all indications I've seen is that they refuse to know.  (I consider intellectual laziness a form of such refusal to know; I distinguish between intellectual laziness - not making an effort to know - from the more extreme form of evasion or intellectual dishonesty, which is making an effort not to know.)  They would rather stick with their ignorant caricature than to learn from those who'd put in the study/effort.

Among the materials with which the highest-caliber professional philosophical literature on Rand would have to demonstrate familiarity is Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses or at the very minimum the themes addressed and highlighted therein.  They're usually methodological themes, having to do with how to conduct one's mind in acts of cognition.  Among the key Peikoff courses is the one titled Understanding Objectivism.  (This one has been in book form for seven years now.)  Whenever I have brought up this course, Rand-bashers have evaded.  They don't think they need to "waste any more time on that crap."  I suppose they would have an excuse for such an attitude if they ever got Rand's ideas right in the first place, or were so much as aware of the importance Rand and Peikoff placed on methodological issues (the core focus of Sciabarra's thoroughly-researched 1995 book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical).  Rand herself has said that she is not primarily an advocate of capitalism or even of egoism but of reason, and that her conception of reason is contained in works on epistemology she wrote or endorsed (including the full presentation in Peikoff's 1976 Rand-endorsed.

Assuredly, Rand-bashers are in essence ignorant of all this material, hence their main focus on what they think Rand's ethical views are.  (They think they know what Rand's views on capitalism are, but if they couldn't tell you about the themes in Rand's "What is Capitalism?" essay - namely its focus on Rand's whole "role of the mind in man's existence" theme - then they haven't really done their homework.)  And when they get around to talking about her ethics, they're usually terrible at it (according to Rapoport/ITT/dialectical standards).

With that background...

Here's a recent reddit thread on /r/philosophy (sic), in which a bunch of ignorant/lazy/vicious Rand-bashers come out in large numbers.  The thread itself is linked to this piece of shit from the managing editor of the American Philosophical Association's blog.  If it had ever even so much as occurred to that author to run her stuff by Rand's defenders for the sake of accuracy and context, there's no indication of that in the essay.  It is nothing more than the standard hit-piece that Rand fans have seen over and over for decades on end.  (What the fuck is the excuse for this decades-long pattern of shitty behavior?)  The Ayn Rand Society's (ARS) Greg Salmieri wrote a response to that piece at the ARS blog.  If there is a shred of evidence that this made the author rethink her view of Rand, I don't know of it.  No retraction, no contrition, no accountability that I can see.  I think Salmieri is, as a matter of professional necessity and maybe some kind of Aristotelian sensibility as he understands it, is far more cordial than his targets deserve; Rand herself would not be nearly so mild-tempered toward those who basically act like slime when bashing her.

Now, as to that reddit thread.  It's a fucking trainwreck, a testament to "the intellectual bankruptcy of our age," as Rand would have put it.  Next to none of the negative things said about Rand in the thread are true.  I reiterate: this is not even so much about whether Rand's ideas are correct or well-supported, but rather about the method of approach toward ideas/viewpoints displayed in that thread.

We get the usual smears about Rand accepting Social Security benefits ("she hypocritically took welfare, probably ending up in government housing and eating pet food to boot"); only one person in the thread pointed to a well-done Snopes piece debunking the smear.  The others in the subthread just proceed unaccountably as though they know what they're talking about.  Their falsehoods get dozens of upvotes.  (How can reddit be taken seriously as an intellectual format?)

We get the usual smears about Rand's egoism being: cold-hearted, indifferent to others, sociopathic, mean, money-grubbing, narcisstic, simple to refute, and on and fucking on it goes.  Almost zero direct quotes are provided to support any of this.  If any quotes are provided, chances are good they're out of context.

[Note: Numerous comments I made in the thread trying to correct or challenge the smears and strawmen do not show up in the thread, meaning the mods have employed the patently dishonest/malicious shadow-ban technique for which social media mods/admins have earned considerable notoriety.  By doing so they have wasted my motherfucking time and for that they have landed squarely on my shit-list.  Further, one /r/philosophy (sic) mod in particular who for a while went under the user name /u/drunkentune is an especially bad-faith piece of shit on the topic of Rand - for instance, citing Nozick's critique of Rand as evidence she is easily refuted, but not citing the Dougs' rebuttal even thought the latter had been pointed out to him numerous times before.  Another slimy mod, /u/ReallyNicole, was among those wanting to ban Rand threads from /r/philosophy (sic) on the grounds that Rand isn't a philosopher.  These two creatures are/were in philosophy (sic) grad school, well on their way to joining the other dishonest anti-Rand academic faculty-creatures.  By the way, the systematic Rand-related dishonesty is also in full force at /r/askphilosophy.  Indeed, the intellectual culture on any of the "default" subreddits where politics figures heavily is systematically dishonest due to its leftist bias and popularity-contest format.]

The top-voted comment in the entire thread?  I'll quote from it:

Every two months, some blowhard makes an article about how Ayn Rand is being "ignored".
She is not being ignored. Every college ethics textbook mentions her by name in the opening chapters. They describe her ethical system with something called Ethical Egoism.They then usually just say the system is unworkable as an ethical system. Then the book moves on to greener pastures. She is sometimes compared to Machiavelli and maybe Clausewitz.
That's it. There is no problem here.
Look -
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egoism/#EthiEgoi

So instead of being pointed to random internet smears, we are pointed to "ethics textbooks" where Rand is covered in the "egoism" section.

Well guess fucking what: Rand scholars don't accept those textbook treatments as even close to adequate in representing what Rand actually thought.  (Link is to Irfan Khawaja's article "Randian Ethics: Time to Get High.")  Now, people can differ in their interpretations of texts - it happens all the time in philosophy - and it's pretty safe to say that Rand's critics and Rand's defenders aren't on the same page as to what they're talking about.  But the important question then is: how do Rand's critics react to this fact?  Are they basically willing to engage, or do they dishonestly evade?

I've studied Rand's egoistic theory enough to have published on it in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.  That, along with being able to almost cite chapter and verse from Peikoff's Objectivism courses (I've listened to the biggest ones at least twice each: Understanding Objectivism; Advanced OPAR Seminars; The Art of Thinking; Objectivism Through Induction), is good evidence that I have an expert-level understanding of Rand.  The "egoism" being attributed to Rand by the haters in that thread and elsewhere is not the one I recognize in Rand, not even close.

I haven't read the thread far enough yet to see if the usual Hickman smear comes up, but outside of that thread the Rand-bashers have comported themselves like fucking scumbags on this point.  Follow the links and discover for yourself how they operate when they think they have Rand nailed on something.  It's basically the same story as with the "Rand took welfare" smear - reckless disregard for things like context, or not making an effort to get a different take on the story (from those who probably know a lot more about it than they do; me, I was aware of Rand's journal entries on Hickman over twenty years ago and knew well enough how to assess its relevance to Rand's mature thought, and so you might imagine my disgust when clueless scumbags come along years later, like a child wandering into the middle of a movie, and use them to smear her).

Without exception, from my experience, when Rand-bashers are presented a different take on Rand from theirs, they either slink away without any acknowledgment that they were mistaken, or they double down and get nasty and evasive.  Every fucking time.  It's what Rand-bashers do, given their natures.

Given that my main focus here is on how Rand-bashers operate, the question arises: wherever would these creatures have gotten the idea that operating that way is normal or acceptable in intellectual discourse?  Well, we might have a clue as to that from another reddit thread within the past year (which I found as I was searching for the Khawaja article above) on the /r/AcademicPhilosophy subreddit.  Now, the participants in the thread are presumably academic philosophers or closely interested in the subject.  (The sub doesn't get much traffic.)  Ask yourself whether the Rand-bashers in that thread are proceeding in good faith.  Did any of them address the Khawaja article that headlined the thread?  Nope.  Look at all the downvotes for user Sword_of_Apollo's comments that contain reasonable, documented defenses of Rand.  (I don't support Sword's dismissive attitude about Kant; might I recommend any number of these books?)  Unaccountable, anonymous downvoting.  How is reddit supposed to be taken seriously as an intellectual format, where higher-voted (i.e., more popular) comments get more exposure/attention?  How are philosophy subreddits that look this supposed to be taken seriously?  (55 upvotes for a comment consisting only in "At least Machiavelli's systems actually make sense and work"?  How much more anti-intellectual does it get?)  More on social media toxicity here.

Now, this being the year 2019, one might have thought that were some Rand-basher to come out with a book right now, it would contain some intellectually-respectable reference to the growing body of academic literature on Rand.  One would especially come to expect that from a book on Rand published by a university press.  So, what is the best book that Rand-bashers seem to be able to come up with, 62 years after Atlas, etc.?

We have an answer: Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, by Lisa Duggan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU.  It is published by University of California Press.  So naturally there is some expectation of quality given who wrote and published it.  On her twitter page, Duggan identifies herself as "pinko commie" - in other words, a leftist embedded within an academic sub-culture of leftists.  Is the intellectual culture of leftism today a healthy one?  Certainly not, if Duggan is representative of it.

The title of the book, just by itself, is a red flag.  Ayn Rand, mean?  Either that is a basically correct assessment or a basically clueless one.  And no expert in Rand studies would take the "mean girl" thesis seriously.  Now, my question is: Did Duggan so much as make an effort to run her book by Rand experts, for the sake of accuracy, context, intellectual integrity, etc.  Based on the "exchange" I had with her via email, the safe answer is: Fuck no!  I don't think I need to reproduce my goodreads review here, so I'll just link to it; it contains the "exchange" I had with Duggan so you can see for yourself the dishonest/scummy/lowlife way she operates.

And I wouldn't expect much of anything better from the rest of the Rand-bashers.  The two main problems for them: (1) The theme they're pushing - that Rand is a mean bitch, not a real philosopher, etc. - is not defensible in the final analysis, not even close; (2) Their intellectual MO is all fucked-up, lacking the Rapoport/ITT/dialectical sensibility.

Here's the really big problem.  The shitty behavior by those on /r/AcademicPhilosophy speaks for itself, but what about all the shittiness on the main /r/philosophy thread?  Many of the participants there have gone to a college or university where they were supposed to learn the Rapoport/ITT/dialectical sensibility, but that didn't happen.  Why?

Next up: My timeline of key players in the history of Randian thought, which I've had sitting in the queue for months now; it should serve as nice background material to reference on the subject of 'Rand and philosophy.'  The Rand-bashers, and capitalism-bashers - clueless little shits - are only falling further behind the curve.  I'll start talking more nice about them when they start being intellectually honest.

[Edit: Fortunately, there is some serious/honest/respectable academic dialogue on Rand that's happening recently, in the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series, where non-Objectivists give fair critiques of Rand and Rand defenders have the fair opportunity to respond.  Elsewhere, especially where Rand-bashers (who are willfully oblivious to the existence of such dialogue) run amok, it's pretty much a shitshow.]

The "Ayn Rand idolized a child killer" smear

[Note: This outrageous smear has been addressed in numerous other blog entries elsewhere on the interwebs.  This smear may eventually go down as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the so-called intellectual Left.  It's such a slam-dunk case that it's a wonder that anyone would accord Leftist polemics any degree of intellectual credibility whatsoever anymore.  And it's far from an isolated incident, no less!  What's even more disgusting and downright chilling is how this shameful behavior goes all the way to the top in the hallowed halls of higher "learning."]

I've discussed the subject of Rand's comments about William Edward Hickman in this blog a couple times before.  I have some things to add here.

First off, I want to point out the fact that the anti-Rand smear artists don't get to lift Rand's comments on Hickman from her journals while ignoring the rest of the contents in the book from which those comments came - not if they still expect to maintain a shred of intellectual moral credibility.  One doesn't get to do that while ignoring her later (as in decades later), mature journal entries chewing the principle of "the role of the mind in man's existence" (her stated theme of Atlas Shrugged, as any actual scholar with a clue would know).  The principle is the same when it came to Rand's decision to accept old-age government benefits (which is consistent with her published comments about accepting government benefits); the smear-artists cannot claim credibility when calling attention to this while ignoring everything else in the book from which this information came.

But that's the nature of these smear-artists, see.  Usually they're leftist scum who put political sabotage-activism above moral and intellectual scruples, and who mistake Ayn Rand for their usual easy targets on the political "right."  As I've noted elsewhere (see the link immediately below), I don't think that the Left knows how to handle an opponent like Ayn Rand.  (It makes a massive difference that she is an Aristotelian and they decidedly are not - and it's a certainty that Aristotle himself would not resort to the moral level of the sewer that these smear-artists inhabit.)

In that context, I'd like to reproduce my comments from a reddit thread from a few weeks back in which the subject of Rand's "idolization of Hickman" came up - namely, I'd like to present a much fuller context, which the scummy smear-artists typically choose to ignore.  Here are a number of key passages from Rand's journals concerning Hickman, followed by the first part of my commentary that appeared in the original thread comment:

p. 22: "[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."

p. 37: "[the reaction to] this case is not a moral indignation at a terrible crime. It is the mob's murderous desire to revenge its hurt vanity against a man who dared to be alone. It is a case of 'we' against 'him.'"

p. 38: "Yes, he is a monster - now. But the worse he is, the worst must be the cause that drove him to this. Isn't it significant that a society was not able to fill the life of an exceptional, intelligent boy, to give him anything to out-balance crime in his eyes? If society is horrified at his crime, it should be horrified at the crime's ultimate cause: itself. The worse the crime - the greater its guilt. What could society answer, if that boy were to say: 'Yes, I'm a monstrous criminal, but what are you?'

"This is what I think of the case. I am afraid that I idealize Hickman and that he might not be this at all. In fact, he probably isn't. But it does not make any difference. If he isn't, he could be, and that's enough. The reaction of society would be the same, if not worse, toward the Hickman I have in mind. The case showed me how society can wreck an exceptional being, and then murder him for being the wreck that it itself has created. This will be the story of the boy in my book."

P. 42: "[The] claim that Hickman's greatest crime is his anti-socialness confirmed my idea of the public's attitude in this case - and explains my involuntary, irresistible sympathy for him, which I cannot help feeling just because of this and in spite of everything else."

p. 43: "There is a lot that is purposely, senselessly horrible about him. But that does not interest me. I want to remember his actions and characteristics that will be useful for the boy in my story. His limitless daring and his frightful sense of humor...."

p. 44: "All the dirty stories about Hickman. In this case they are probably true, but how easily they could have been manufactured to throw dirt at the object of the public's hatred (which will be the case in my book)."

UP comments: To begin with, this last one carries such irony: the scummy leftist smear-machine manufactures all kinds of dirt to throw at the object of their hatred.

Adam Lanza = Randian Hero?

[In the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel department...]

Adam Lanza, heroic Randian-egoist?

It might appear so, according to result No. 2 here.[*]

Checkmate, asshole.

(Some of my commentary regarding the unbelievably malicious, way-beyond-the-pale "William Edward Hickman" smear can be found here.)

So, what's the over/under on when this Leiter fuck gets his comeuppance?  Not if, but when.  I suppose it depends on the degree of psychological evasion and malice of which even so-called philosophers are capable.  All that scholarly excellence and reputation means only so much when the scholar in question takes a big fat dump all over intellectual integrity.  I'll be ramping up, by a few hundred percent, my campaign to checkmate various and sundry progress-obstructing scumbags in the coming days/weeks/months.  This unjustice will not stand, man.  I'm the motherfucking Django of the philosophical world and these slimy bastards are going DOWN.

[*] Copied and pasted should it ever happen to disappear from publication at 'Leiter Reports':

Ayn Rand's Early Inspiration: A Child Killer

This certainly belongs in the "you can't make this stuff up" category.  As J. Brendan Ritchie, who flagged it for me, wrote:  "Apparently Ayn Rand was heavily inspired by (and admired) a psychopath. Incidently, objectivism now makes a lot more sense to me."

Posted by Brian Leiter on April 15, 2011 at 09:29 AM in "The less they know, the less they know it",Of Cultural Interest | Permalink

Also, the "J. Brendan Ritchie" character who flagged the item for Prof. Leiter can be found in the Department of Philosophy at University of Maryland, College Park (tied at #31 in the latest Philosophical Gourmet Report rankings of graduate philosophy programs).  Prof. Leiter's credentials can, of course, be found here.  Some pretty pathological shit going on here in "higher ed," huh?

(Here is an example of what Randian heroes actually believe.  A true scholar of Rand, Allan Gotthelf - also a leading scholar of Aristotle - can be found in the Rutgers University Philosophy Department, which is ranked at #2 in the latest Philosophical Gourmet Report; he also serves as chairman of the American Philosophical Society-affiliated Ayn Rand Society.  Let the evasion commence/continue/snowball?)

The problem with Andrew Sullivan (and American public culture), Exhibit A

Re: Catholicism and the Romney/Ryan ticket, Sullivan writes:

A small word of thanks to Cardinal Dolan, Robert George and K-Lo for helping shift the Catholic vote massively toward Obama with their summer campaign for religious liberty. And special thanks to Paul Ryan. No actual Catholic could ever find anything but puerile cruelty in the works of Ayn Rand, or rally to the idea that home-care for the elderly should be sacrificed to reduce tax rates for the super-rich. Paul Ryan believes that the basic principles of Rand can be compatible with Catholicism. American Catholics are just not that dumb or confused about their faith.

Hoo boy. Where does one even begin?

It's like he takes pride in being ignorant.

He's not alone.

The outright distortion of Ayn Rand's ideas in our popular culture has become a persistent, pathological pattern.  Are people really this bad at understanding even an accessible philosopher?  Do differences in philosophical viewpoint (namely in regard to her advocacy of capitalism and her concept of egoism) license the non-stop barrage of outrageous and intellectually incompetent smears that have been leveled against Rand and her ideas?  I don't know if I've ever seen anyone else so thoroughly and recklessly smeared as Rand, or ideas so thoroughly smeared as Objectivist ones, and in a manner so insensitive to context in either case.  Even Rand's horrible polemics against Kant hit closer to home than these ridiculous commentaries do.  This is some fucked up shit, there's just no mincing words here.  It is a sadder commentary on the state of our culture, than anything.  A culture of people who thought like Rand did would be way too Aristotelian to come anywhere close to being this fucked-up.

We have a leading public-affairs blogger in Andrew Sullivan, who can't so much as be bothered to get a clue about an intellectual who has become a prominent figure in the American public discourse.  I can't imagine this kind and degree of widespread piss-poor treatment of her ideas happening, were she around to defend herself and speak for herself as she was in the 1960s.  There simply would be no way that these people could get away with it.  In the present day, what accountability will Sullivan face for his blatantly idiotic comment?

How do we expect to have an intelligent discussion of public affairs and move the dialogue forward if standards have fallen this low?

In addition to this here blog, there's intellectually responsible, high-quality Rand-interpretive literature out there, for those who have such considerable shortcomings in reading comprehension skills as not to understand Rand's ideas first-hand.  (I mean, these bloggers, commentators, op-ed writers, et al, don't seem to even minimally grasp what Rand said much less meant, it's that fucking bad.)  Such literature includes:

Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, eds., The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (University of Illinois Press, 1984)

Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Dutton, 1991)

Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Penn State Press, 1995)

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies - various articles by such authors as Roger Bissell, Stephen Hicks, Lester Hunt, Roderick Long, Douglas Rasmussen, and others (1999-present)

Tara Smith, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge, 2006)

* Robert Mayhew, ed., Essays on Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (Lexington Books, 2006)

Robert Mayhew, ed., Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (Lexington Books, 2009)

Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox, eds., Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand's Normative Theory (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011)

Leonard Peikoff, Understanding Objectivism (1983 lecture course edited by Michael Berliner) (New American Library, 2012)

Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry (Neera Badhwar and Roderick Long, 2012)

Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri, eds., Ayn Rand: A Companion to Her Works and Thought (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming)

* - One essay in this collection the smear-artists may be especially interested in evading is Andrew Bernstein's "Understanding the 'Rape' Scene in The Fountainhead."

Any respectable, comprehensive, scholarly work on Ayn Rand's ideas in the future will have to engage this secondary literature.  The recent books by Jennifer Burns, Anne Heller, and Gary Weiss hardly (if at all) touch upon this literature in any meaningful way.

(Nearly a dozen works just right there - that's a lot of literature for so many Rand-commentators to be ignoring!  Is it mere coincidence?  Is it sufficient for them to read only the two big novels while skimming the speeches?  Is this how scholarship or journalism is done these days?  Is Rand only of interest because of her influence, not because of what the best interpretative commentaries have to say, and regardless of how well her professed admirers understand and apply her ideas?  Does the fact of her large influence still excuse the shoddiness of their own descriptions of her ideas?  Is Marx's influence on the Soviets the basis on which we should talk about Marx's ideas, while having next to zero grasp of what Marx actually said or meant?  Let's also not forget to ask: How would an Aristotelianized culture approach Rand's ideas?  Better yet, what would our hypothetical present-day Aristotle say about Rand's ideas?  No one seems to want to touch that one with a ten-foot pole.  Why?  Have they just not been imaginative enough to even raise or ponder such a question?  Has it never occurred to them to ask themselves, "What would the great philosophers say on issue X?"  If so, why?  We've got a decadent culture that would make Franklin and Jefferson puke; wouldn't they be interested in the reasons and causes?  I mean, everyone who's given it a moment's thought knows that Jefferson and Franklin would puke if they saw what's become of the Republic.  Would Jefferson and Franklin and Aristotle dare to ignore the secondary Rand literature, or to go out of their way to misinterpret the primary literature?  Would they ever take pride in being ignorant?  What, am I the crazy one here?)

___

There is also the matter of smears of Ayn Rand the person, some of which are so disgusting, so reprehensible, so vicious, so intellectually and morally negligent, that they shouldn't even have to be addressed, but there are a couple smears that keep circulating around the internets which have the potential to mislead some well-meaning people.  (The original propagators of these smears are not committing honest errors in the midst of a spirit of objectivity, accuracy, fairness, context, or anything like these noble things.  They are malicious and shameful characters.)  These smears are:

1. "Ayn Rand, despite espousing a limited government philosophy, accepted Social Security and Medicare benefits in her old age."  This is alleged proof of hypocrisy on her part.  However, there is a publicly-available statement by Miss Rand on the subject of accepting government monies or benefits.  (Her argument is problematic for other reasons - namely as to whether one has a right to accept government benefits depending on the contents of the recipients' beliefs - but not on the grounds she gave for its being morally permissible to accept government benefits.)

Evidence that this smear arises from malicious intent: (A) The smear-propagators didn't do any thorough fact-checking to determine whether Rand was in fact acting against her principles.  They could have at the least contacted the Ayn Rand Institute for comment, as a responsible fact-gatherer would.  (B) The revelation that Rand accepted these benefits was contained in a book, 100 Voices: The Oral History of Ayn Rand.  (This book was released in part to counter some of the negative things said about Rand published in the Burns and Heller books; there are legitimate concerns about the editorial decisions for 100 Voices to "suppress" more negative testimonials given that the testimonials included are almost overwhelmingly positive.  The book is, however, a needed counter-balance to the negative commentaries.  The ARI could hardly anticipate how the content of 100 Voices would be used by unscrupulous assholes to add further to the anti-Rand commentary out there.)  The use of this revelation was highly selective, taken out of the context of the entire book.  The honorable thing to do at the very least would have been to mention the essential content of the rest of the book along with this factoid.  One thing these dishonorable sonsofbitches decided to ignore was testimonial from Allan Gotthelf, a leading Aristotle scholar and student of Rand, who said that attending Rand's epistemology "workshops" was "the equivalent of having Aristotle in the room."  (I suppose one can excuse the sonsofbitches given their ignorance of Gotthelf and his work so as not to realize what an eyebrow-raiser his comment was.  That then makes them ignorant sonsofbitches in addition to being dishonorable ones for the reasons stated above.)

2. Ayn Rand "worshipped a child-murderer, using him as a model for her heroes."  I submit that this smear is malicious on the face of it.  First off, Rand's commentary on Hickman was contained in her journals, published as Journals of Ayn Rand in 1997.  These juicy journal entries were just sitting there for a decade for any intellectual thug to come along and seize upon, and yet no one bothered to notice them.  Well, actually, no.  Serious Rand scholars knew about them.  After all, Sciabarra noticed and made mention of it; this is even footnoted for easy access right there on the Hickman wikipedia page.  Strangely enough, Sciabarra didn't draw the conclusion that Rand modeled her heroes on Hickman.  I wonder why?  Oh, that's right.  It's because Sciabarra is literally obsessed (as is any cognitively healthy thinker or scholar) with the whole notion of context, motherfuckers.  As in, what is the context (historical, literary, whatever factors come to bear on it) of Rand's intellectual development?  Were Rand's later thoughts and writings a reaction to or repudiation of her earlier thoughts?  Hell, did Rand even do anything like "worship" the child-murderer?  I have to admit, the Journals are something I didn't really get into; I think the Letters are much better and more interesting (actually, downright engaging - a rare truly-must-read, literary river of gold, etc.) as a look into Rand's development as a thinker (and her awesomeness as a human being).  All truth be told, I found the Journals boring enough that once I put it down I could hardly pick it up.  But I had to go back and look because this whole Hickman thing didn't really draw me in the first time around ca. '97.  And now I know why: because Hickman's role in her intellectual development was so inconsequential.  And her comments on Hickman couldn't even remotely - not honestly - be considered "worship."  Her journal entries in this regard were ramblings that mainly focused on something she found awry about the society's reaction not simply to his murderous ways but to his defiant ways, namely, that he didn't care what society thought, and that's what made people so much more angry at him.  The "don't care what others think" does show up in the character of Howard Roark but in the best way possible, not in the socio/psychopathic sense that the idiots keep smearing Rand with.

Anyway, these journal entries go unnoticed for over a decade because the lazy idiots never bothered to read any Sciabarra.  But the subject comes up in the Burns book, and all of a sudden they're a big deal. But what's this now?  They focus their attention on the Burns book, but it's a selective and out-of-context focus.  There are other Rand books that have come out in temporal proximity to Burns's.  There's Prof. Smith's 2006 book, there's 100 Voices, there's Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism just recently published, there's all those books listed above.  Are we seriously expected to believe that the smear-mongers just accidentally failed to notice this other literature?

These people would make Socrates and Aristotle just fucking puke their guts out.

Which necessarily calls forth the following question, in the context of this blog entry's original focus: What would Aristotle think of Andrew Sullivan and The Dish?  Would he be all that impressed?  Is "Bias and Balanced" an Aristotelian sort of masthead, whatever the humorous intent?  Would Aristotle appreciate Sullivan's excruciatingly concrete-bound way of filling up his blog with short-range-focused trivia pertaining to the political news cycle, or would he consider that to be a massive waste of time given the long-range focus of philosophy?  At some point a philosopher sees enough concretes to be able to identify the principle involved, and move further up the cognitive ladder integrating those principles, as (abstract) units themselves, with other principles.  It's called unit-economy, motherfuckers, and it's supposed to characterize, as a norm, the specifically human mode of mental functioning.  (How else do you think Rand achieved a river-of-gold writing style as evidenced by these Lexicon entries?  By filling up pages with a large number of intellectually redundant units?  You do realize how the "Perfectivism" book presently in the works aims to condense a lot of useful information into a short amount of space, right?  Why settle for anything less than a page-turner, amiright?)  There was a time when I would learn things from reading The Dish, but that time has passed; I've integrated and essentialized the gist of it and moved on to making broader integrations and essentializations.

Note again that The Dish is a "leading" public-affairs blog - in a broken, proto-dystopian culture in which mainstream debates on "the issues" can be only so intelligent.  But the issue - The Issue - is the broken culture itself.  It is a culture that could really shape up with a generous injection of Aristotelianism in particular and habituated (automatized), unit-economizing, essentialized critical thinking in general.   Ayn Rand wrote that the highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge (ITOE).  Now that sounds right up Aristotle's alley, dunnit?  By contrast, all that Sullivan can seem to muster, at least in regard to Ayn Rand, is puerility.

P.S. Toward the end of my previous blog entry I asked the following: "Ever hear one mention - one fucking mention - of Tara Smith's, or Peikoff's, or Sciabarra's work in the lamestream media?  On the usual "liberal" news sites like the Huffington Post?  Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish?"  We now have our answer: No, of course he wouldn't mention these works; he's proudly ignorant of them.  But he will throw in some gratuitious, arbitrary and vicious remarks about an Ayn Rand that doesn't remotely resemble the Ayn Rand discussed in these works, much less the Ayn Rand as understood by probably a great many of his readers.  I guess he just doesn't give a shit.  What else might he be spouting off ignorantly about?  Hmmm?

The "Rand Took Welfare" Meme

These smear-memes (this one was floating around in the intellectual cesspool known as reddit.com a few days before being picked up by a leading Rand-hating professional philosopher/Comprachico) are just so fucking dishonest and viciously-motivated, I don't even know how one responds to them without dignifying them in some way. This latest one, right on the heels of the screamingly dishonest "William Edward Hickman" meme, comes from excruciatingly selective excerpting from interviews in 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand.

Here's one reason I don't think these memes ought to be even dignified with a response: the people who spread them are not interested in an honest discussion of the facts. They have it in for Ayn Rand, justice and truth be damned. That's all there is to this. You correct them on this, they'll just come back with more of the same shit later like the first incident never happened.

On the other hand, if there is such a thing as an honorable and informed opponent of Ayn Rand, such a person would treat this fact - that Rand received Social Security benefits - in the full context of all the available information. But to do so would, in the end, lead to an embrace of Rand, her thinking methods, her achievements, etc. That's just a fact of the matter, whether these scummy haters realize it or not. But the haters don't want to consider being proven wrong about or embracing Rand. It's just an automatized thing for them: Ayn Rand is a hack, vicious, inhumane, fascistic, a bitch, etc.

Now, an honest, intellectually curious individual reading 100 Voices would also have noticed the hundreds of pages of other things in addition to this tidbit about Rand accepting Social Security benefits - including the very interesting things said by the likes of Columbia-trained philosophers Harry Binswanger and Allan Gotthelf. Gotthelf remarks, about the ca. 1970 epistemology workshops - see the 2nd ed. of ITOE - that it was "like having Aristotle in the room." (Gotthelf, it turns out, is also a highly-respected Aristotle scholar.) Harry Binswanger uses such intriguing phrases as "priming her subconscious," in reference to her years-long preparation for writing ITOE. Hey, that has something to do with psycho-epistemology, and Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism gets a lot into psycho-epistemology! Hey, what is psycho-epistemology all about, anyway? But I rather doubt the haters are interested in any of that stuff. Better to hone in on some one paragraph in the whole book, purporting to show some hypocrisy on Rand's part....

No. I'm not going to dignify this shit. You either have a genuine and honest interest in learning about Ayn Rand, or you don't. Comprachico Leiter (what a scumbag!), et al, obviously do not. Those who do, can readily figure out what's what without my spending the time explaining it all every fucking time something like this comes up. What these smear-memes do accomplish, though, is an insight into the motives and methods of Rand's haters - people who are ready, willing and suspiciously eager to drop whatever context they feel they have to, to continue their grotesque pretense to intellectuality vis-a-vis Rand. Zons of Beetches!

[ADDENDUM: Notice one thing about the methods of these zons of beetches: they transform this issue not into one of the principle Rand espoused - regarding the propriety of a coercive welfare state - but into whether Rand was a hypocrite or not. The propriety of the coercive welfare state automatically vanishes from their cognitive field of view (what is it that psycho-epistemology has to say about automatization, I wonder?), such that "the issue" and the focus is now on the person who espouses principles opposing it. This is not a respectable cognitive process. These are not worthy fucking adversaries. These men are cowards; nothing to be afraid of. Amazingly cynical cowards at that.]

[ADDENDUM #2: Rand's views on receiving government money or benefits were spelled out in print back in the 1960s. Her article was reprinted in an anthology, The Voice of Reason, in 1989. It's not like Rand and her Estate didn't do an adequate job covering their bases on this. How, then, can it be their fucking problem that they didn't anticipate the level of evasion so many people, including professional "philosophers," are capable of? Goddamit, this stuff was in print for over 40 years, and these "philosophers" are smear-artists are just now becoming aware of this stuff? What ass were their heads jammed way up in all this time? It's not Ayn Rand's fucking problem that they've got their heads up their asses. The problem has always essentially been with her haters, whatever her errors or flaws. That's just a fact. Here's another thing: you either get Ayn Rand, or you don't. Either you have the Roarkian soul for it, or you're just a tragically-fucked-up product of the Comprachicos, or one of the Comprachicos themselves. That's just a fact right there; the haters can suck it.]

[ADDENDUM #3: An example highlighting the difference between a philosopher and an intellectual thug: a philosopher is interested in such questions as how Rand's essay "The Comprachicos" fits with the plot of Atlas; an intellectual thug, meanwhile, has nothing better to do than gleefully pounce on the (actually most uninteresting) fact that Rand accepted government benefits. A philosopher is also armed with the ability to connect "The Comprachicos" to the phenomenon of all these little thugs running around, gleefully and cynically attacking greatness.]

The "William Edward Hickman" Meme

An unbelievably dishonest anti-Rand meme making the rounds as of late has to do with her comments on William Edward Hickman in her early journals. The unscrupulousness of these smear-mongers knows no bounds. Simply too disgusting to dignify. What it does reveal is the soul and character of such individuals who spread these smear-memes with impunity, as well as the jaw-dropping cognitive-epistemological breakdown of those who buy into them. In absolute intellectual cesspools such as reddit.com, this lunacy is treated as axiomatic gospel.

Those Zons of Beetches!