Because this Rand issue has played
such an important part in my own intellectual and moral history, and because my
discovery of the Hickman stuff helped solve a puzzle for me about the
contemporary political right, I will answer the critics at some length.  I assume you have read the first post
and perhaps the replies her admirers have sent.   Because this answer delves
more into some interesting philosophical issues with strong spiritual implications,
especially what it is to be an individual, I will make it a new post.  Who knows, maybe this will become part
of a more finished essay some day.

Despite what some of her defenders
have written, the “empathy thing” is central to my argument and to the lasting
quality of Rand’s work.  It forms a
pattern, both in her work, most all of which I have read.  It is even more central among many today
on the political right who use her as an inspiration or hide behind her
reputation as an excuse.

There is a central tension in Ayn
Rand’s work as I remember it.  On
the one hand – and this is the positive part – there is a celebration of
individuality and creativity, of people who persevere in their vision despite
the uncomprehending and often disapproving attitudes of the broader
society.  I think this is where her
work can and does inspire people, especially young people, who are seeking to
find their way in a society where hypocrisy and confusion seem to reign, and
who seek the strength to stand their own ground.

On the other hand, there is also a
view that society itself is composed mostly of the weak, the uncreative, the
dependent, who are the undeserving beneficiaries of the creative few.  The best of them honor their betters, but
the worst, such as the Ellsworth Tooheys, are consumed by envy, and use the
concept of self-sacrifice to bring the creative few and others as well into
subordination. This is why “Atlas” had to “shrug” letting the world descend
into barbarism while the creative few set up camp in “Galt’s Gulch.”

When the first side of the tension
predominates the Randian crowd tends to be defenders of freedom of the
individual.  But when the second
prevails freedom is not what emerges. 
What emerges is such contempt for the inferiors that they can be
sacrificed when necessary.  This is
because if the gap between the capable and the weak is big enough, not
subordinating the inferior becomes a kind of ‘self-sacrifice’ that is
‘irrational.’

The amount of empathy a person
possesses seems to be the critical factor in determining which prevails among
those inspired by Rand.  And in
general she did not put much emphasis on the concept, and so for that or some
other reason, the bulk of her work tends, when they come into tension, to tilt
towards the second of these tensions.

I know Randians will object – but
before you go off on it, please explain what she herself said about Indians
using some other rationale.  I
think you cannot. She is quite explicit. 
If I remember correctly, another example would be the murder of a man in
Atlas Shrugged by one of her main characters, a murder justified by the
victim’s personal failings when measured against Rand’s preferences.  He stood in the way of their plans, not
as an aggressor, but as a weakling. 

In other words, people’s exalted
sense of their own superiority gets in the way of their capacity to empathize
with others.  And when this sense
of a gulf is strong enough, it leads to a brutal disregard for others.

Which of these two central
tensions predominates when they come into potential conflict depends entirely
on the empathetic capacity of the person holding them.

Back to Hickman…

The Hickman case apparently caught
Rand’s imagination not because she approved of his crime – she did not and the
quotes I gave made that explicit. 
If her biographers can be trusted, Hickman appealed because he stood
outside society’s hypocrisy.  The
money quote is “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…” 

She
is right when the mass get on their self-righteous high horse about someone who
simply differed from them.  I am
thinking of the Dixie Chicks’ treatment a few years back.  Hypocritical, disgusting, and depraved
are a few of the words that come to mind.

On
the other hand, as in Hickman’s case, to argue that many of those who condemned
Hickman had committed “worse sins and crimes in their own lives” takes this
point to another level.  Rand is
wrong, deeply wrong, and we are led to wonder why she wrote it.  Why she thought it.

Given this tension, her philosophy
of freedom easily becomes a philosophy of domination by the strong.  That she has become more popular than
ever before at a point where the American right wing has become less interested
in freedom than ever before, beyond not paying taxes and having guns, suggests
that I am right, and that her reaction to Hickman gives a crucial clue: she
really did have a hard time appreciating the situations in which other people
found themselves.

To bring this back to
spirituality, to me Rand’s work owes much to Christianity, in a weird way.  The individual as something totally
separate from society and owing nothing to it is very compatible with the
notion of the soul descending into the fallen world but not a part of it.  The individual is utterly alone, with
his or her needs, allies, and impediments, and great individuals succeed in
turning the world to their purposes and visions.  The world is not a home; it is a stage for acting out the
drama of a life.

In my experience this view is so
partial as to be wrong.  Yes, each
of us is a creator of worlds, as Yevgeny Yevtushenko put it so well: [Thanks, Vesta for, correcting my using the wrong first name.]

In any man who dies
there dies with him

His first snow and
kiss and fight.

It goes with him.

. . .

Not
people die but worlds die in them.

The
crucial parts that Yevtushenko saw and that Rand did not really seem to
appreciate, were first, that this was true for every person, and second, that
these worlds were created in relationship with others. The notion of the
solitary genius when followed myopically leads to sacrificing other lives and
other worlds on the altar of one’s own inflated ego. 

I
want to expand a very little on this second point.  Beginning with our genome we are composite beings, as
qualities we receive come together to form an individual.  This process never stops.  Every individual is from one
perspective a unit, unique in all the world, and from another a gestalt manifestation
of myriad qualities and experiences all shared by others, but forming a unique
pattern.  Thus who we are is both
our own creation and the sum total of the gifts and injuries we have received
from others.  In my view these two
dimensions are irreducible to one or the other.  If the first emphasizes our uniqueness, the second opens us
up to embrace the world.

So
Rand’s model of the individual is lacking in depth because it does not address
how each of us as individuals came to be who we are.  She simply takes them for granted as elemental forces of
nature.  As the African proverb
puts it: “I am because we are.”

Perhaps
this is why the true geniuses of our age and hers did and do not seem all that
impressed by Rand’s analysis.  It
does not fit their own experience. 
In addition, the ones who are threatening today to “Go Galt” would
probably leave the world a better place if they did so.  They are in no sense the “Atlases” who
sustain the world on their shoulders.

I
think my analysis explains the strange dereliction of duty in the defense of
individual freedom on the part of so many who take Ayn Rand as an inspiration,
combined with a lack of even the most basic concerns for decency towards
others, as my initial post described. 
These are not Rand’s failings. 
She is dead.  They are the
failings of those who hide behind her name, but that her name affords such
comfortable hiding room for the right wing sociopaths among us is a sad
commentary on her own work.  For in
their words and lives they are the negation of her celebration of creative and
persevering genius.