Ayn Rand and Nazi Punks

Ayn Rand vs. Schelling

Many people get the idea that since being contrarian is great they have to be contrarian all the way to defending Hitler and serial killers. I think this is the kind of underlying psychology behind Ayn Rand, who famously defended a serial killer, and wrote a lot of long, boring books about how the industrialists should kill all the people who rely on the government and then live on a farm not doing industrial things ever again (nothing wrong with farms but pretty sure you don’t have to give up your industrial CEO job and live like a stereotypical medieval peasant just because you want to start raising chickens.)

How Ayn Rand became a big admirer of sadistic serial killer William Hickman - Raw Story

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that 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.'"

A while back I’ve started trying to write a Kant series attacking Kant, and then an Alfred North Whitehead series attacking Alfred North Whitehead, but these are both terrible ideas. I’m not really a Kantian myself, and I think Kant was wrong about many things, but that’s a far cry from calling him Hitler. The only person who called him Hitler was Ayn Rand, who herself was much more like Hitler than Kant was. I do really like other German idealists who were influenced by Kant, and naming my blog Metamorphology is generally a reference to Goethe and Schelling, who I attribute the first modern theory of evolution to and Schelling also came up with the kind of way of analyzing myths as a basis for psychology long before Jung, Joseph Campbell, or anyone else that has been what I’ve been extrapolating for all my literary analysis posts as well, but even if I have to have sort of a begrudging acceptance of Kant due to them doesn’t allow me to really put down Kant. You can’t make a blog where you tell everyone about Schelling more than any other blog does and put down Kant even if there are some points of disagreement between Schelling and Kant, as well as Goethe and Kant, etc. Those points of disagreement are called “constructive criticism,” not “you are wrong about this so you are literally Hitler.” Likewise, I do have a lot of criticism for some of the people who take philosophical inspiration from Alfred North Whitehead since I’ve noticed many of them really hate mathematics and in my mind I was sort of combining that with some things from the Lyndon LaRouche article even though I don’t like Lyndon LaRouche just like I don’t like Ayn Rand and turning this into some sort of anti-math boogeyman. Yes, it’s not good that a lot of the sort of disciples of Whitehead seem to have a very dismissive attitude toward the use of mathematics, but that should also be a civil disagreement, not calling people worse than Hitler.

We do live in an environment full of all sorts of mudslinging with the current elections and all, but that shouldn’t be allowed to corrupt our real thinking. While Ayn Rand and Lyndon LaRouche are still not wrong about everything and that’s true, if they’re the only ones railing against Kant or Bertrand Russell or whatever their opinions are probably deeply wrong. We don’t like people trying to replace figurative art with vomiting on a canvas, but I don’t think Kant is really to blame for that, and I don’t think Whitehead and Russell, literally mathematicians even if Gödel refuted their logicism, should be held to blame for what I view as a destructive anti-mathematical turn in the social sciences and to a lesser extent in biology and other “soft” sciences. Not everything you don’t like is literally Hitler just because you want to be contrarian, that train of thought ironically just leads eventually to people defending Hitler even if it starts out with complaining about Hitler because it’s a self-contradictory way of thinking.

Yes, Rush did write “To Ayn Rand” on their album and then they decided to disagree with that. Ayn Rand is decidedly not an individualist philosopher like Emerson or Nietzsche, and people should get used to that. Some people initially supported Hitler before realizing Hitler was bad too. If Ayn Rand attacks Kant at length in ways that make it nearly impossible to defend anything in German idealism even if lots of German idealism directly contradicts parts of Kant, then we can’t have Ayn Rand with our idealist philosophies, we have to choose, and obviously, you don’t want to choose Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand wrote boring books about industrialists killing people and German idealists came up with proto-Jung psychologies of stories, evolution, color theories, and lots of things that are really interesting and useful. This is not a difficult choice.

I still think Jack Kirby was a terrible writer and Neil Gaiman was pretty hit and miss, just like, well, Friedrich von Schiller, but again, that doesn’t make any of them Hitler. Not being a very good writer doesn’t make you Hitler even if it’s true Hitler wasn’t a very good painter. Hitler had much bigger problems than not being a very good painter and everyone needs to keep that in mind.

Edit: I just found Elon Musk posting a pro-Ayn Rand comment. This is probably also what he needs to stop. I doubt he’s even read Ayn Rand to know what he’s defending, he just picks it up from other right-wing people. He still needs to stop pretending to know about all the kinds of things he doesn’t, and now this means both Alexander von Humboldt and Ayn Rand.