Ayn Rand’s Superman: A Serial Killer and Rapist

Whenever I doubt my own powers of naivete and rationalization, I remind myself that I once considered Ayn Rand to be an admirable and important philosopher. Somehow I was able to justify her atheistic nihilism with my views of Christianity by telling myself that she really didn’t mean what she said.

For instance, since no moral person could truly be against altruism, her frequent rants against the behavior must be referring to something else, something much more nefarious than caring for the welfare of other people.

Similarly, when the hero of her novel The Fountainhead raped a woman I used Whoopi Goldberg’s moral reasoning: It can’t be “rape-rape”, can it, if the victim consents after the fact?

Eventually, I could not longer dismiss the evidence that Rand was an apologist for wickedness. But I was shocked to learn today just how far she would go to condone evil in following her views to their logical conclusion :

[Rand] announced that the world was divided between a small minority of Supermen who are productive and “the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent” who, like the Leninists, try to feed off them. He is “mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned.” It is evil to show kindness to these “lice”: The “only virtue” is “selfishness.”

She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented “the amazing picture of a man 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.” Rand had only one regret: “A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough.”

Her most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged , opens with the question, “Who is John Galt?” Rand then spends the next 1,199 pages answering the question by revealing her ubermensch . She wasted a lot of time and effort. She could have saved her readers a lot of trouble by just telling us that her ideal man is a Ted Bundy clone who is able to eloquently rhapsodize about radical individualism while raping and killing children.