Sociopath World: Guest post: Ayn Rand

Sociopath World

Guest post: Ayn Rand

I wrote because I've read you've an interest in Ayn Rand; I found this quote from her early private journals, which I thought might interest you:

"Some day I’ll find out whether I’m an unusual specimen of humanity in that my instincts and reason are so inseparably one, with the reason ruling the instincts. Am I unusual or merely normal and healthy? Am I trying to impose my own peculiarities as a philosophical system? Am I unusually intelligent or merely unusually honest? I think this last. Unless—honesty is also a form of superior intelligence."

This was written in 1934, prior to the publication of her novels, and representative of her less respectable "Nietzschean period" characterized by an overt sense of superiority over the human majority. I'm currently reading Anne C. Heller's biography Ayn Rand and the World She Made with a desire to understand Rand's psychology in light of neurodiversity. Rand is clearly a narcissist, and while too affective and inflexible for a perfect psychopath herself, she shows more than a few sociopathic tendencies as well as a consistent admiration for selective psychopathic qualities.

In relation to the above quote, I'm not at all sure that her mature universalism correctly resolved the question of her relation to the rest of her species. I wonder if her intelligence, low empathy, ambitious drive, social distance, public charisma, manipulative dominance, and purely intellectual conscience place her somewhere towards the extremes of the antisocial spectrum. This is certainly not a new idea for her detractors. I can't help but calculate that if 1% (or 4%) or Americans qualify as sociopaths, then Ayn Rand must surely have been more sociopathic by degree than 99% of any population.