This will be a very personal post.  I have just come
across a very disturbing article: a description of conservative and libertarian
heroine Ayn Rand’s early and passionate admiration of a serial killer because
of his lack of empathy towards other people.  In her words, “Other people do not exist
for him, and he does not see why they should.”  She found it admirable that William Edward 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.'” She explained that “The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the ‘virtuous’ indignation and mass-hatred of the ‘majority.’… It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal…”

Rand’s admiration for a sociopathic murderer is an
eye-opener as to the moral sensibility that appeals to all too many
‘conservative’ and ‘libertarian’ Americans.  She was one very disturbed and deeply wounded person,
as her biographies show.    The widespread admiration for her
work in right wing circles seems to be at a height today even as the
libertarian concern for others’ freedom seems to be at a nadir.  This failure to protect freedom while simultaneously opposing any aid to the less
fortunate (an opposition justified in the name of freedom) has been a paradox that has perplexed me –
until now.

Now the ‘conservative’ and right-wing dislike of protecting children, opposition to punishing the powerful when they commit gang
rape,their own love of torture using methods perfected by totalitarian regimes, their lack of concern about hundreds of thousands killed in Haiti l
and their belief that unemployment insurance simply promotes sloth even when there are 500
people pursuing every available job, makes sense.  We are
not dealing with a rationally held political and moral philosophy.  We are dealing with diseased minds trying to justify their nastiness.  Increasingly what calls itself
“conservatism” is a haven where injured and fragmented souls can come together,
pretend they are normal, and look down on others.  Their “philosophy of freedom” is in fact the
“philosophy of sociopathy” tarted up in a loosely attached veneer of philosophical rigor.

This is all pretty personal for me.

I was a
libertarian myself for many years, and had
read Rand’s novels while in high school and college.  Dealing with my own adolescent batch of insecurities,
guilts, and confusions, I was attracted by the simple clarity of Rand’s moral
universe, even though I was never able to fully embrace her hard core egoism or
her atheism.  But as a bracing
tonic for a young guy with self-esteem problems in a confusing world, her
novels could be inspiring. The Fountainhead and We the Living were my personal favorites.

As I grew older
and a little bit wiser I found I had ever less in common with Rand’s views as
my libertarianism came to be based on a dislike of coercing anyone, rather than
simply my being coerced.  But her
followers remained prominent denizens in the free market individualist circles
in which I hung around.  While we
might disagree on philosophical issues, I felt they were at least reliable
allies for freedom against “the State.” Looking back on my evolution away from
libertarian individualism to whatever it is that I am today, I see that what
moved me away was connected to whatever capacity for empathy for others that I
harbored. 

(For me, the final step was when I encountered the Wiccan Goddess.  When love and wisdom like that exists, who needs power. Her love validated individual worth far more than any philosophy ever could, while teaching that both that love and the value it treasured existed everywhere.)

The Rand-inspired “philosophy of freedom” has revealed itself as anything
but.  A great many admirers of Rand
today are in no way reliable defenders of freedom against “the State.”  For them, “freedom” simply means paying
no taxes and having guns.  In
retrospect certain personal quirks of Rand’s now no longer seem personal, but
signs of something deeply rotten at the core of her philosophy.  Her contempt for Indians and support
for taking away their land always seemed to me a inconsistency in someone who
claimed to believe in rights and follow reason rigorously.  (So much for being against theft and domination, eh?)   

As the American
Right continues its rapid descent into a nihilistic love of empire and domination, either under the tutelage
of  a demonic deity for
its religious members or inspired by a general sociopathic disregard for human
decency among many secular members, it seems fitting that a major intellectual
figure in their midst once praised the amorality of a murderous sociopath who
strangled and dismembered a little girl