We knew this would return to bite us

[sbeaulieu]

Rand's puppy-love bias totally distorted in her notes what really happened.

Michael,

Would you agree that this is a case of "first impression" blindness? Could this episode in her life be the catalyst of how thinking/acting on emotion is counter to reason?

~ Shane

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Shane,

Maybe, but I doubt it.

Rand always did have a soft spot for the noble bandit. Her early fiction is full of it. Even in Atlas Shrugged, there's Ragnar the pirate.

In my life I resonated with that aspect of her. So I went out in search of noble bandits. Literally. I went through a phase in the underworld in São Paulo, Brazil.

The result?

I didn't find any noble bandits. But I did find scumbag bandits. Lots of those.

Leave it to me to take something like that literally...

Great metaphor.

Horrible reality.

At least I learned...

Michael

[sbeaulieu]

Rand always did have a soft spot for the noble bandit. Her early fiction is full of it. Even in Atlas Shrugged, there's Ragnar the pirate.

Michael,

Given the timeline of Hickman's crime (1927) and Ayn Rand's first book, We the Living (1936), that's almost a full decade of serious thinking.

Since her arrival to the US in early 1926, I'm wondering if she was desensitized to violence through her experiences in Russia. Someone of Hickman's tendencies or violent disposition might have been commonplace (assumption on my part). Barely two years in the US might not have driven out that cultural aspect she grew up with. Her lack of empathy in the journal entry leads me to believe that.

It's this line of thinking that brought me to my original question. I presume that going down this path, for her, didn't work. As a moral milestone, she might have seen Hickman for his true qualities...reflected on her emotional standpoint at that time, and set new bearings leading towards reason as a result. Hence, the experience becoming the catalyst for a whole new outlook.

Just colliding brain cells here...

~ Shane

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Shane,

Whatever we think about this has to be speculation. I don't know of anything Rand ever wrote about Hickman after that time.

Obviously, if asked later in life, even speculating, I have no doubt Rand would have bashed Hickman as a monster. Whether she would have repudiated the positive sentiments for him in her notes, though, is anybody's guess.

My own speculation is that she would not have, but not because she still cared for him. Rand never did like admitting she was wrong in that manner. I speculate she would have rationalized her earlier attraction in some manner, sort of like how she rationalized taking the Nietzsche-like passages out of We The Living, calling them "stylistic" changes.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

del by BG

Edited March 6, 2010 by Brant Gaede

[Barbara Branden]

Brant: "How can I be a victim of Ayn Rand's journal notes circa 1928? She betrayed me? She was dishonest? She lied? I'm her victim? She was a horrible person way back then? If I can get over Vietnam anyone can get over Ayn Rand, negatively speaking, and get on with their lives."

Of course you weren't her victim. How she saw Hickman had nothing to do with you -- unless you believed that human beings are all-of-a-piece and that grandeur cannot coexist with self-deception. And no, she didn't betray you -- although perhaps she betrayed the best in herself. Was she dishonest in this issue? I don't know. She lied? That question seems irrelevant to this issue. She was a horrible person way back then? No, she was a mix of sensitivity and callousness, of rationality and self-deception, of realism and subjectivism -- with a titanic intellect that was sometimes overwhelmed by passionate emotions.

Barbara

[Barbara Branden]

I just re-read something I wrote in Passion that is highly relevant here:

"There was in her a deep and unnamed need to see Nathaniel and me as she did: as astonishing once-in-a-lifetime creatures. She had made us an integral part of her world; in the inner reaches of her safe haven only giants of the intellect, only giants of ability, could be admitted. Not even Ayn, with her perceptiveness and impressive powers of prediction, could see a ‘great writer’ in the few pages of a short story I wrote; not even Ayn, with her special sensitivity to intellectual creativity, could see ‘genius’ in a brilliant young man who as yet had not demonstrated his powers in action. Just as Ayn formed – as a novelist must – fantasy figures in her mind to whom she gave reality by means of fiction – just as she formed a fantasy replacement of herself and demanded to be seen as the archetype of virtue and rationality – just as she formed a fantasy replacement of Frank in the image of her novelistic heroes – so she seemed to be forming fantasy figures of Nathaniel and of me and attempting to live within that artistic conversion.”

Barbara

[Ellen Stuttle]

Point of curiosity: Where are people getting the idea that Hickman raped Marion Parker (see BB's description that "He raped, strangled, and dismembered a child!") and/or that he was a "pedophile" (see posts by MSK)?

I don't find anything indicating either in a few web sources I looked at. On the other hand, I find this in an item linked via the current Wikipedia piece on Hickman:

http://markgribben.com/?p=288

The autopsy revealed that she had been dead about 12 hours and that there were no signs of sexual assault.

Ellen

[Brant Gaede]

Brant: "How can I be a victim of Ayn Rand's journal notes circa 1928? She betrayed me? She was dishonest? She lied? I'm her victim? She was a horrible person way back then? If I can get over Vietnam anyone can get over Ayn Rand, negatively speaking, and get on with their lives."

Of course you weren't her victim. How she saw Hickman had nothing to do with you -- unless you believed that human beings are all-of-a-piece and that grandeur cannot coexist with self-deception. And no, she didn't betray you -- although perhaps she betrayed the best in herself. Was she dishonest in this issue? I don't know. She lied? That question seems irrelevant to this issue. She was a horrible person way back then? No, she was a mix of sensitivity and callousness, of rationality and self-deception, of realism and subjectivism -- with a titanic intellect that was sometimes overwhelmed by passionate emotions.

Barbara is responding to a post I deleted almost immediately after I put it up last night. I didn't know she was there.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Point of curiosity: Where are people getting the idea that Hickman raped Marion Parker (see BB's description that "He raped, strangled, and dismembered a child!") and/or that he was a "pedophile" (see posts by MSK)?

I don't find anything indicating either in a few web sources I looked at.

It's good to correct this. I looked it up to make sure.

William Edward Hickman did not rape Marion Parker nor was he a pedophile.

So where did I get that idea? Barbara too?

If anybody knows me (and Barbara), as attested by what we have written concerning Jim Peron, they will know that neither of us are prone to make an accusation of rape or pedophilia lightly. On the contrary, both of us have stood up to the unwarranted accusations levied against Jim Peron when it seemed like the entire Objectivist subcommunity was screaming for his blood.

So, once again, where did that idea come from?

I just now looked it up with several different Google searches and saw that rape is a presumption by several people, one place even saying Hickman was charged with rape, although it gives his crime as murder and kidnapping (see here--I didn't confirm this anywhere else yet nor examine any trial transcripts). I also acknowledge the impact the kind of descriptions I found during research back then had on me. For instance, here is the description from the link I posted in my article (from which I took Hickman's photo):

As soon as the money was exchanged, the suspect drove off with the victim still in the car. At the end of the street, Marion 's corpse was dumped onto the pavement. She was dead. Her legs had been chopped off and her eyes had been wired open to appear as if she was still alive. Her internal organs had been cut out and pieces of her body were later found strewn all over the Los Angeles area.

That is not sexual assault, but it does strongly convey the impression of sexual assault since that often happens in crimes of this level of brutality. Still, that would not be enough for me to come to a conclusion of rape, even back then.

Finally I came across a passage by Michael Prescott (which I know Barbara also read prompted by my interest--she even communicated with Michael on his blog in a post or two). See here. Incidentally, do not read that blog entry unless you have a strong stomach. Michael goes into much more detail than the quote above and Hickman's sorry story gets truly revolting. Anyway, here is the passage talking about sex:

Hickman demanded ransom, but the amount was small in comparison with other kidnappings of the same period. A certain Dr. Paul Bowers, Loyola College professor of legal medicine, probably got it right when he theorized that the ransom was only a smokescreen for the murderous "gratification of the abnormal sexual impulse." A contemporary psychiatrist, Victor Parkin, described Hickman to a T when he said that the typical sadist possessed an inordinate degree of both "cunning and egotism." And Dr. Joseph Catton, a psychiatrist in San Francisco, speculated that the killer had an "emotional disturbance that probably affects his sex life," adding, "I feel that this case cries out for vengeance."

These psychiatrists were contemporary with Hickman and I presume their remarks come from the book Michael mentioned in his blog post, Stolen Away by Michael Newton. It is certainly no stretch to presume that speculation of Hickman raping Marion Parker was in the air at the time Rand was following all this.

btw - I know I read that passage by Michael Prescott back then. Wanna know how? I was the first to comment, way back in 2005. Here is my post, with the misspelling of Marion Parker's name and all (you can also read it on Michael's blog post):

Hi Michael,

I just read the above post. I came over here to see if there was any more on Ayn Rand and ask if you had taken a look at Solo.

What you described about Hickman, especially his vivisection of Marian Parker, has blinded me with anger and indignation at this monstrosity. I have no way to continue my post at this minute.

I want to talk about Ayn Rand, but first I have to get this horrible taste out of my mouth.

Shit!

Michael

So that post is probably where the idea of rape came from (with the logical extension to pedophilia, since Marion Parker was a minor). I haven't confirmed this with Barbara, but that's probably where she got the idea, too. She and I discussed Michael Prescott quite a bit offline back then.

I have since learned in NLP that my reaction is called "anchoring." There are other names for it in other schools of psychology going all the way back to Freud and Pavlov, like imprinting, for instance. Basically this means that a person's first contact with--and reaction to--an idea or stimulus is the one that takes precedence in his thinking and development. If it was a wrong impression, it will stay there in his mind until corrected.

I know I was suddenly and totally revolted at the time by the sheer gruesomeness of it all. That was quite an impact. And I think imperfect images of the sexual theorizing stuff Michael wrote about implanted itself in my brain right along with it.

There was another parallel impact, too. I had the flash insight that Ayn Rand had almost all of this information available in the accounts she read in the news when she wrote down her notes on Hickman. That even extends to the sexual abberation part. Even though Hickman was not a rapist or pedophile, it is pretty good speculation to imagine that Ayn Rand suspected him of being this in addition to his other horrors.

I know I didn't want to believe that Rand was capable of feeling what she did about someone like Hickman. But she was.

On looking all this stuff up, another point got to me just now. Hickman was the first person to use the insanity defense in California. So not only did Rand read the public outrage against Hickman, she knew that he was claiming to have bouts of insanity.

She was trying to create a fictional hero around a person who was claiming to be insane!

The more I read about this, the worse it gets.

Thank goodness the only real thing she took with her was the "lone man against the lynch mob" theme that she used so well in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. And maybe some descriptions of contempt for ordinary people and her odd lopsided view of crowd psychology (hating the good for being the good). But what a screwed up way to get it...

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Are we going to make Hickman the Tar Baby of Objectivism?

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Are we going to make Hickman the Tar Baby of Objectivism?

Brant,

That's not the Tar Baby. "Barbara Branden makes up stuff" is the Tar Baby.

It's only a Tar Baby to a select few involved with PARC or a similar mindset (everybody else thinks she rocks), but they just won't let it go.

I'm pretty good at seeing the Tar Baby, too, irrespective of how they dress it up to make it look like something else.

Anyway, good research is good research, regardless of why one does it.

Michael

PS: To those who don't know what a Tar Baby is, here is the definition from the Free Dictionary: "A situation or problem from which it is virtually impossible to disentangle oneself."

[James Heaps-Nelson]

I registered my chagrin with the emphasis on Rand's Hickman entry in her private journals when this topic came up before. It is particularly unfair in light of her body of work.

Jim

[ginny]

James, I agree with you, although I'm one of those who is appalled at the incident. I don't think her entire life needs or should be judged on some thinking stemming from your younger days. (Hell, when I was stupid and in college and taking my first phychology class and was taught how all of a person's behavior stems from bad times during infancy, I went around for a few weeks declaring that Charles Manson's entire problem was poor toilet training. Oh god ...) I do believe some objectivist can overthink a situaion - just how many words and pages have been devoted to the origin of her name, and who is lying about what, when it was probably nothing but a misunderstanding along the way. I also, however, think there's another reason some people are making a big deal: Rand spend her life judging harshly and putting down many people - friends and audience members. She demanded perfect thinking at all times, or else the non-thinker was damned to fiery hell. (The difference between error in judgment and moral wrong seems pretty subject to me. She made those split-second decision during Q&A's when the speaker had only uttered a few words.) She repeatedly talked about how rationally she lived her life since childhood. So now some people are comig down on her. I think it's understandable, and I suspect it has to do with a lot more than the Hickman disaster. People who've listen to her talk about her perfection and the evils of others are pointing fingers. Maybe they can't be blamed. Or maybe they should have gotten better toilet training, I don't know.

Ginny

[Selene]

Ginny:

You mean all big "O"bjectivists are not born completely toilet trained! I am appalled.

However, you are correct as to your statement. When you come from "on high" and demand that you judge and be prepared to be judged...

well, you make your own bed. Those who wish too, will never forgive her for being a human being. I am not one of that pack, but I also saw her unnecessary savaging of the "psychological children" who asked her questions while visibly trembling in both voice and body.

She was cruel the way she dealt with them. Thankfully, I was able to see that, but many did not. OK.

On this one, to various degrees, the chickens come home to roost for her.

Good points Ginny.

Adam

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Jim,

"Emphasis" by whom?

Michael

[jeffrey smith]

Shane,

Whatever we think about this has to be speculation. I don't know of anything Rand ever wrote about Hickman after that time.

Obviously, if asked later in life, even speculating, I have no doubt Rand would have bashed Hickman as a monster. Whether she would have repudiated the positive sentiments for him in her notes, though, is anybody's guess.

My own speculation is that she would not have, but not because she still cared for him. Rand never did like admitting she was wrong in that manner. I speculate she would have rationalized her earlier attraction in some manner, sort of like how she rationalized taking the Nietzsche-like passages out of We The Living, calling them "stylistic" changes.

Michael

Given that what she wrote about Hickman was in her own notebooks, for her own private consumption, I don't see any reason to think she would have felt called upon to say anything to anybody on the matter. If someone had read those passages and asked her later in life, she might have rationalized them away, if she was in a good mood.

Or lit into her questioner royally for having the temerity to read her private notebooks, if she was in a bad mood.

Jeffrey S.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Jeff,

Rand kept the notes. She knew they would be made public or go into some kind of archive for consultation by scholars. That's why she bequeathed them to Peikoff.

From the accounts I have read, she had a habit of tearing up stuff she thought was garbage or did not want keep for posterity.

Michael

[James Heaps-Nelson]

James, I agree with you, although I'm one of those who is appalled at the incident. I don't think her entire life needs or should be judged on some thinking stemming from your younger days. (Hell, when I was stupid and in college and taking my first phychology class and was taught how all of a person's behavior stems from bad times during infancy, I went around for a few weeks declaring that Charles Manson's entire problem was poor toilet training. Oh god ...) I do believe some objectivist can overthink a situaion - just how many words and pages have been devoted to the origin of her name, and who is lying about what, when it was probably nothing but a misunderstanding along the way. I also, however, think there's another reason some people are making a big deal: Rand spend her life judging harshly and putting down many people - friends and audience members. She demanded perfect thinking at all times, or else the non-thinker was damned to fiery hell. (The difference between error in judgment and moral wrong seems pretty subject to me. She made those split-second decision during Q&A's when the speaker had only uttered a few words.) She repeatedly talked about how rationally she lived her life since childhood. So now some people are comig down on her. I think it's understandable, and I suspect it has to do with a lot more than the Hickman disaster. People who've listen to her talk about her perfection and the evils of others are pointing fingers. Maybe they can't be blamed. Or maybe they should have gotten better toilet training, I don't know.

Ginny

Ginny,

All these people had to do was simply reject Ayn Rand's judgment if it was faulty and move on. Many great artists and other famous people have a little diva behavior so why take her disapproval personally and for so long? Regardless, painting Rand as a serial killer sympathizer is way over the top. Also, this business of people building their whole social lives around Objectivism when they saw that people were ridden out of the movement was just asking for trouble. I saw what happened in the movement during Kelley/Peikoff and ARI/Reismans. Why not simply enjoy Ayn Rand from afar and leave the diva stuff for others? Why the groupie behavior?

Jim

[Barbara Branden]

Michael: "It's good to correct this. I looked it up to make sure."

Agreed.

Barbara

[Barbara Branden]

Jim:: "Regardless, painting Rand as a serial killer sympathizer is way over the top."

Of course it is. There are two issues we need to keep separate: what we think of Rand's attitude toward Hickman, and what the people who have long been looking for any reason to attack and destroy her and her ideas think-- or say they think.

Barbara

[James Heaps-Nelson]

Jim:: "Regardless, painting Rand as a serial killer sympathizer is way over the top."

Of course it is. There are two issues we need to keep separate: what we think of Rand's attitude toward Hickman, and what the people who have long been looking for any reason to attack and destroy her and her ideas think-- or say they think.

Barbara

Barbara,

That's true. And it's an error I've been making although to a lesser extent than the ARI rewriters. Ayn Rand didn't have to be perfect or even morally blameless. She was impressive enough as she was. We do not have to hold her to the standard she set for herself and others. That the critics use this stuff against her is a reflection on them, painful though it may be.

Jim

Edited March 7, 2010 by James Heaps-Nelson

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Jim,

It is so good to see you get it. And I don't want to sound condescending by saying that. I speak as a person who used to have an ultra-thin skin about Ayn Rand--one that would do any Randroid proud. I know the pain you speak of. I have felt it.

But one day I got it.

Here's an example. One of the trickiest arguments I have had to mull over is the "feet of clay" argument. This is usually levied at a person who mentions one of Rand's shortcomings--that he is trying to paint an image of Rand with feet of clay. He is a Rand diminisher. He hates the good for being the good. Yada yada yada. God knows I, myself, levied that accusation at many people who did not deserve it. (But also some who did. )

Then one day it occurred to me. Saying that a human being has feet of clay doesn't make any sense. Only a statue of a goddess with feet of clay made sense.

So, after a rather long and tortured journey, some of which you already know, I rejected that argument at the premise. Ayn Rand did not have feet of clay because she was not a statue or a goddess. She was, instead, a human being. She had her own hang-ups, some really serious ones, and she had an exceptionally beautiful mind.

I love that image a lot more than I could ever love a goddess or a statue. Even one without feet of clay.

A goddess is not real. But that image is real. It's what Ayn Rand was.

Because some of Rand's critics are so vicious and spiteful, I believe it is an error--and a bad one--to gloss over her shortcomings. It makes one look non-objective and puts the critics on the moral high ground when unpleasant facts about Rand emerge. As you can see, they play it for all it's worth in their writing and pronouncements.

I now adopt the attitude of, "If such-and-such part of Rand is ugly, let's see it fully in the light of day. And to her critics, let me say I know Rand did that or was that. Here's the full story, warts and all, with nothing left out. But I love her and her works all the same. She earned my love and respect, she convinced me of some great ideas, and it would do you some good to think about why."

That way you reclaim the moral high ground by being 100% objective, stating your high regard for Rand, and, in many cases if the person wishes to pursue the discussion, being persuasive.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

I think the "serial killer" description is inaccurate too. Not all (probably only a small percentage of?) multiple killers are "serial killers." As one of the commenters on Michael Prescott's blog post, here, previously linked by MSK, explains:

about hickmans' qualifications as "serial killer:.

I would not classify him as such because serial killers tend to follow a formula in their 'work".

The majority of Hickmans murders were due to robberies. The murder of little Marian was sick and depraved, but a one time thing [please god] in which he apparently experimented [reminiscent of Dahmers attempts at zombism of sex slaves] but, while Dahmer seems to have pursued that line of technique many times, the gutting of marian seems a one time thing.

Posted by: M SKAAR | March 06, 2006 at 06:51 PM

We don't know if Hickman would have become hooked on the method and repeated it, had he not been caught.

Apparently, however, although he was suspected of several killings -- most, as "M Skaar" said, in connection with robberies -- the only killing besides that of Marion Parker of which he was definitely convicted occurred during an "armed robbery of a drugstore that ended in a shootout with a police officer and Hickman's fatal shooting of the proprietor" (quoting Prescott).

Of the possible murders Prescott lists, only one was similar to the Marion Parker killing in being a strangulation "of a girl in Milwaukee." This crime, Prescott says, was "unproved, but circumstantial evidence suggests Hickman's guilt."

The whole list of proved and unproved charges against Hickman can be found in the blog post -- repeat link.

The concluding part of the post, which describes the details of the killing of Marion Parker, is prefaced by a warning about the gruesomeness. I found the warning merited.

Ellen

[Robert Campbell]

Rand kept the notes. She knew they would be made public or go into some kind of archive for consultation by scholars. That's why she bequeathed them to Peikoff.

From the accounts I have read, she had a habit of tearing up stuff she thought was garbage or did not want keep for posterity.

Absolutely.

If anything, Rand was inclined to discard material that many others would have considered worth keeping. For instance, she ended up giving draft manuscript pages to people who saw her getting ready to throw them in the wastebasket. She even gave Frank's portrait of her to an acquaintance who noticed her putting it out with the trash.

Robert Campbell