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July 9, 2015 - Davis Aurini
31:26
The Fatal Flaw of Objectivism

Michael Shermer's article, "The Unlikeliest Cult in History": http://www.2think.org/02_2_she.shtml My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/ Credits: I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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Hey folks, this video comes from Billy Taylor, who asked me to explore the failures of objectivism.
Thank you for your support.
Now, as most of you know, objectivism is the philosophy promoted by Ayn Rand, authored by Ayn Rand.
She's the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and it's worth noting that she is an incredible figure.
She escaped communist Russia to move to the United States, learn a brand new language, and become an incredibly accomplished author in a language that's not her native tongue.
And when I say incredibly accomplished, I mean she is arguably one of the, is the best novelist from the 20th century.
Atlas Shrugged, from its construction, its language usage, and even its characters, is a stunning work.
It's a masterpiece.
And upon first reading it when you're 21 or 22, you know, maybe the villains seem a little bit cartoony.
But as you get older, you start to realize that they're not cartoony at all.
These people are all over the place, the moochers and the looters.
Now, objectivism promised to be this new philosophy, a modern philosophy of pure rationality, of capitalism, of atheism.
It proposed to create a civil society without God and without superstition.
It wound up just becoming so incredibly popular at a time when we were fighting socialism and communism head-on in the world, as opposed to indirectly as we are these days.
It still sells incredibly well, and yet, objectivism is a stillbirthed philosophy.
It hasn't inflamed the world the way it promised to do.
Certainly her books are still very influential, but the philosophy itself hasn't really gone anywhere.
Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine described it as the world's most unlikely cult.
And if you meet the members, the hardcore adherents of objectivism, many of them do seem to be a little bit off, much like cult members.
So why is it?
How does this come about?
How does such a reasonable philosophy that seems such a perfect fit for the 20th and 21st century, how does it go nowhere?
Well, let's start off with the simple critique, the critique of overweening greed.
Now, Ayn Rand championed greed.
She championed selfishness, the free market.
She wrote about the tyranny of the selfless and how through selfish motives, everyone is better off.
A form of radical honesty in a way.
And yet, what do we see when we look at this amazing woman, this extremely accomplished woman that did so much with her life, but who is also an imperfect human being?
What do we see when we examine her personal life?
And so the simple critique of it is simply Nathaniel Brandon.
Now, Nathaniel Brandon was a member of Objectivism.
Part of her inner circle, who became her lover, even though he was 25 years her junior.
Both he and she were married at the time, but they rationalized this.
They rationalized the cheating on their spouses by saying that obviously our minds are so perfect, the only reason that you fall in love is because you need a perfect mind.
So, in our case, it's okay to break our wedding vows.
They did inform both of their spouses about the whole thing, but nonetheless, they were taking their needs as more important than the needs of those around them.
Because they were selfish, it was okay for them to break a contract.
But what happened that really drove all of this, that really caused things to explode, is that Brandon wound up getting another lover.
And when Ayn Rand found out about this, she just flipped out.
She kicked him out of the inner circle.
She posted a memorandum excommunicating him from the objectivist movement to all of its members without detailing specifically what he'd done, because the affair was kept secret for most people, but utterly blasting him.
So you see this selfishness again and again.
That if you have this sense of self, if selfishness is your highest value, if honor isn't, if honesty isn't, beauty, truth, etc., if selfishness is your highest value, why would you ever honor a contract?
Because with any contract, there's going to come a point where it becomes inconvenient.
If you get paid in advance, for instance, actually producing the product is now a little bit inconvenient.
If you promise to meet these specs and it proves to be a little bit more difficult than you thought at first, now it's inconvenient.
And if you're thinking with selfishness, with no differentiation between long-term and short-term, then you are very prone to rationalize things, to rationalize the short-term over the long term.
And when you have an entire society embracing this sort of radical selfishness, an implosion is guaranteed over the long run.
Contracts will eventually become meaningless.
And it's ironic that one of the best examples of this is the modern marriage contract, which has just been completely eviscerated.
Modern marriage is nothing but dating plus one.
And so we see an early version with Ayn Rand breaking the marriage contract for short-term selfishness and thus missing out on the long-term potential.
If she could have stayed friends with Brandon, if they could have stayed together, the movement never would have split along these two lines.
But because she went for the short term, because she was selfish, it did split the movement.
So that is the simple critique of objectivism.
That, yes, selfishness in the sense of the free market, in the sense that people are self-interested, and rather than fighting this aspect of human nature, embracing it and using it for the good of society.
But using that alone, this radical selfishness, raising it up above and beyond all else, will inevitably lead to the very chaos that Ayn Rand was trying to fight.
That you need more for a society to function, that there is a role for charity, there is a role for honor.
There are other values in addition to selfishness that need to be taken into account.
So as I said, that's the simple critique of objectivism.
And it's a little bit unfair.
So to expand upon this, what I'd like to do, I'd like to step back from objectivism for a moment and look at utilitarianism.
Because utilitarianism is another one of these atheistic philosophies that proposes to save the world, to be this modern technological rational philosophy.
And it has the exact same problems as objectivism, except far, far worse.
And so if we see what I like to call the utilitarian death spiral, we can then look at objectivism again and kind of apply those conclusions to it.
Now utilitarianism, utilitarianism is the approach that we should manage society rationally.
We should say if we value happiness, for instance, then we should try and maximize happiness.
You know, it's a very economics sort of way of looking at human civilization.
But it comes up with the fatal flaw, and the fatal flaw points to exactly why it's such a failed philosophy.
So let's say we're trying to maximize human happiness.
And you can replace happiness with anything else.
You could replace it with economic productivity.
You could replace it with anything.
But it winds up being a snake eating its own tail.
So if we go with happiness, well, there's a strange thing about happiness.
As a society, and in fact, this has appeared in many societies in most periods, what you find is that people like having a scapegoat.
People like blaming somebody for all of their problems and assigning responsibility and torturing that person, burning them alive, eating them to make up for their own self-hatred.
It's the sacrificial king that needs to be put to death every year so that his blood can fertilize the fields.
In modern society, we see this with celebrity culture, where they take these poor young starlets and raise them up to be semi-divine deities almost, and then 10 years later, just rip them apart, just destroy them.
The exact same people that were these sycophantic fans are now just insulting everything about them.
Now we're doing pretty well in this society.
That's just psychological here.
In earlier eras, we were literally torturing people for the sake of our collective sins, our collective problems.
We were killing people in the gladiatorial arena, whereas now it's make-believe.
There's still a lot of human suffering involved, but at least no one's being tortured to death.
So we have got better at that.
And yet, if you're talking from a utilitarian standpoint, people like that.
If a million people get enough pleasure, enough hedons, you know, hedons is the hypothetical measurement of happiness.
If a million people get enough hedons torturing somebody to death that it cancels out the hedons from the negative hedons that were experienced by the person being tortured, by pure utilitarian philosophy, that's justified.
Now, utilitarians are very well aware of this.
This is an abhorrent outcome.
That even though it makes sense on paper, deep down, it's like, no, this is not right.
You know, like the utilitarian philosophy justifies slavery.
The utilitarian philosophy justifies all sorts of monstrous behavior.
It justifies having a peasant underclass.
You know, because if the Brahmins get enough pleasure out of what the untouchables do for them, then that can be justified.
And on a humanistic level, we all know that's wrong.
And so what they try and do with utilitarianism is they apply, they patch it.
They add another layer and another layer to say, well, you can only cause so many negative hedons.
Or you can, et cetera, et cetera.
If we look at this from a, instead of hedons, if we look at it from a financial perspective, if you were arguing, if your definition of good is wealth, is GDP, and that's all you're looking at, nothing but GDP.
Well, all of a sudden you have a lot of very ugly behaviors that are being justified.
You know, it could very well be that the company store is one of the most efficient ways to increase GDP, even though that creates an underclass that's being absolutely abused and manipulated.
Again, it can potentially justify slavery.
It can justify enormous gaps in wealth and just complete mistreatment of the poor.
And so then they add a patch.
It's like, okay, well, we're going to have a minimum wage.
We're going to have a minimum standard of living for everybody in this country.
Except that's still not addressing the dishonest business practices that led to this in the first place.
And so they apply patch after patch after patch, but it never quite fixes things.
There's actually an excellent critique of this, very brief, in the.
It's a philosophy video game called Socrates Jones, which you can find on Newcrans.
I highly recommend it.
Now here's the irony of all of this.
People subscribe to utilitarianism because they say there is no universal moral law.
There is no higher truth.
There is just objective reality.
There is just atheism.
That's all there is.
And so we need to come up with this mathematical concept to create ethics out of nowhere.
And yet all these patches that they apply to utilitarianism imply that there's a higher morality.
Why is it that torturing one person to death a year, you know, throwing them into the volcano, feeding them to the dragon?
Why is that wrong?
By their math, it isn't wrong.
By their math, it's fine.
By their math, if you take the walking dead of India, the enormous underclass in India, and ask the question, do those people find value in their life?
And presumably the answer is yes.
Each of those people finds value, even though they are incredibly poor, sick, starving, they don't have the chance to become educated, they don't have opportunities like that, they don't have a lot of freedom, and yet they still find value in their life.
In that case, utilitarianism would argue that you should have as many children as you possibly can.
Doesn't matter, like, even if you can't afford them.
Because each of your children will still find value in life, even though you can't put shoes on their feet or hot food in their bellies.
So, rather than having a responsible number of children, you should have as many children as possible, because the net hedons have increased.
This strikes us all as incredibly evil and irresponsible.
And the fact that the fact that we can debate the particulars, okay, we can, you know, how many is too many, you know, is it better to have like one spoiled little brat that gets a car for her 16th birthday, or three kids that they get used cars for their 18th birthday?
We can debate that.
But we can all agree on the principle that the conclusions of this strike us as ugly and wrong, and that we can do better than that.
So, by the fact that they have to patch their movement, this is what demonstrates, ironically, that the very premise it's founded upon is false.
The premise that there is no higher morality, no higher truth for any of us.
So, now let's return to objectivism.
Now, Ayn Rand, she once laid out the principles of objectivism in very short form.
She had four bullet points of what is objectivism: metaphysics is objective reality.
Epistemology is reason.
Ethics is self-interest.
Politics is capitalism.
So, what are the issues with this?
Well, let's take the first: objective reality.
Now, it's been noted elsewhere, No Man wrote extensively about this, and I think his writings are absolutely brilliant.
He laid out that there are three levels of reality: the subjective, the objective, and the absolute.
Now, the subjective is the world of emotion.
And the subjective needs to be subordinate to the objective.
One of the interesting things you see nowadays, one of the terrible things you see nowadays, is the primacy of feels.
You know, you have to be concerned about how other people feel.
You know, how what you say to them makes them feel.
And there's this idea that emotions are not rational.
Emotions are just emotions, which is an absolute load of nonsense.
Emotions can be either rational or irrational.
A man who loves his wife because of her character, because of her beauty, because of the children she's borne him, because of her faithfulness, you know, a man who loves her romantically, who loves her as a being, as a soul, that is a rational emotion.
It is based upon objective, true things.
Whereas a man that loves a lump of rubber that's shaped to look like a woman, when a man feels romantic attraction to that, that is an irrational emotion.
It is being tricked, is being fooled by something that looks a lot like a human being, but it's just a piece of rubber.
That it's not rational to love a piece of rubber.
Similarly, if you are angry because somebody stole your car, that is a rational emotion.
You should be angry that they stole your car.
But if you're angry because your neighbor has a better car than you, That is irrational.
He did nothing to take your car.
He did nothing to harm you.
So the subjective level, now we can't ignore the subjective level.
It's what motivates us.
It's what gives life meaning.
But it needs to be disciplined by the objective.
It needs to be held accountable to the objective level of reality.
Because if it isn't, you get social justice warriors.
And so, and this is what Ayn Rand was fighting, was the social justice warriors for time, the communists, the socialists, the people that said, whatever I feel is reality is reality, as opposed to whatever I feel is because of reality.
It's not enough to stop at the objective, however.
You see, the scientific method has limits to it.
You know, people don't want to admit this, but there are limits to the scientific method.
The scientific method can only test hypotheses that are testable.
Many social disciplines cannot be disciplined into science.
You know, a particularly bad one is psychology, which pretends to be science by creating so many of these experiments that are supposed to show aggression.
But what they're actually testing is, rather, will these stimuli cause somebody to act like a jerk?
It's not asking what is aggression, because it's talking about aggression.
Well, now you're talking about ethics.
If a man points a gun at you and says, give me your wallet, and you pull out your gun and you shoot him, that is a just and noble action.
It's so saying, is that aggression?
You know, did this person shoot back because something happened earlier?
That's missing the problem.
The problem is not aggression.
The problem is evil.
And to have a definition of evil, to have a definition that fits into the objective realm, you need to apply to the absolute.
You need to apply to that higher realm where beauty, truth, the ineffable lie.
We see this with Gerdel's incompleteness theorem.
What Gödel discovered, he was trying to solve the problem of Principia Mathematica, that all of the math that we use in our day-to-day lives, that builds computers, that builds office buildings, that launches spaceships to the moon, all of this mathematics, we don't know that it's true.
Principia Mathematica laid it all out centuries ago, but it didn't prove it.
Frederick Gerdel sat down to prove it, but what he accidentally proved was that we cannot prove it.
It is, by definition, unprovable.
Math itself only works if you take it as an article of faith.
If you make the moral choice that, yes, I'm going to believe in math because math is beautiful, because I have faith in God.
You know, the creator of the universe, the prime mover, the thing that came before time began.
Without that, it all collapses down into chaos.
Without the absolute truth pinning up objective truth, objective truth very quickly collapses into subjective truth.
Objective truth, the universe, science, it's a container which cannot contain itself.
So either you start with the principle that there is an absolute truth out there, we are never going to know it.
We're not capable of knowing it.
We are, by definition, we're not capable of knowing it.
But without that higher truth, without that perfection of beauty and love, all of this other stuff wouldn't work.
Because if math is nothing but an opinion, then the people that say 2 plus 2 equals 5, they're equally right.
You know, the people that say that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is nothing but Western imperialism, they're just as right.
It collapses down into the inverse.
And this is what you see from the social justice movement.
This is what you see from the monsters out there, is that they start with subjective truth as their highest value.
Whatever I feel right now is the truth.
And so because I feel like I'm a furry otherkin, you all need to pretend that I'm a furry otherkin.
And perfection, life perfection utopia, that's their absolute truth down at the bottom.
Utopia is a product when everybody follows the mass delusions of the crowd.
So that's the problem.
Right off the bat is Ayn Rand is choosing objective reality, but completely renouncing the higher reality that is needed to support it.
And this continues on.
Reason, again, is just part of objective reality.
It's the scientific method.
And science works great inside the universe.
It doesn't work outside the universe.
You know, at the light speed limit, that's where the universe ends for us.
You know, there is more universe beyond it, but it doesn't exist as far as we're concerned.
Science doesn't work beyond that.
There are limits to how far we can go with it.
And if we don't presuppose the existence of the universe, there is no science.
Science itself cannot prove the existence of the universe.
cannot prove causality and finally we've got we've got those are the foundational problems the the foundational philosophical difficulties Then we've got the products of these, which are self-interest and capitalism.
As noted, self-interest, without anything higher guiding it, just turns into a death spiral once again.
Because if everything is self-interest, you wind up with Hobbes Leviathan.
And Hobbes Leviathan starts out as this powerful monarch that forces everybody to cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma.
But bit by bit, pieces get eroded from that.
Exceptions are made.
People bend the rules until the rules start to break.
And soon there is no cooperation.
There is nothing but defection.
And capitalism qua capitalism.
If you take capitalism as your highest value, then you're throwing away the rest of the things that allow a country to have a good GDP.
If capitalism is all that matters, you open up your borders.
And you flood the country with low-skilled, low-paid immigrants that don't speak the language and have their own nationalist values.
If capitalism is all that matters, young men don't join the military because, quite frankly, the pay is not that good.
If capitalism is all that matters, then you destroy the family so that you can suck women into the workforce and tax them to death.
And now all of a sudden you have no birth rate.
Now things like Hobbes' Leviathan, they attempt to solve this with the powerful monarch.
But it's the exact same problem again.
You're trying to build a mechanical God.
You know, these atheists realize that there is no God, and it's like, oh my God, I need to build one now.
And so if you have a monarch that isn't serving God, that monarch is going to become a petty, useless tyrant that does nothing to help the to allow the country to move into the future.
A monarch who serves God is going to be a responsible husband and he's going to maintain the country for the sake of his children.
As well, he's going to promote moral values in the country.
And whereas the one that doesn't is just going to, you're the king.
Why would you get married?
Why would you have children?
Why not have children with 50 different women?
Because that way you'll guarantee more genetic lineage that way, anyway.
Why not do that?
Why would you attempt to maintain the country when you could just get another ivory backscratcher?
You know, the past few centuries have seen time and time again that, as Nietzsche said, God is dead and we killed him.
And we keep trying to reinvent God by building these horrible death machines that wind up eating people alive between the gears.
We keep trying to build utopia.
The great irony is that we already had the solution.
The funny thing about morality, like morality, it's a personal thing.
Everybody can glimpse it, everybody can see it, everybody can feel it.
And when people try and be faithful to God, when they try and work on themselves and become better people, not in the slavish hair-shirt manner that you get nowadays, but when they actually think deeply,
when they pursue wisdom, when they pursue knowledge, philosophy, what you get is a moral and industrious people who recognize it as their duty to cooperate with others, as well as their duty to punish those that defect.
And so you wind up with this society that is very capitalistic, that is very moral, that takes care of its own and functions.
You get all of these things that we're trying to reinvent.
It is literally a case of reinventing the wheel.
So Ayn Rand's work was absolutely amazing.
Again, her arguments against socialism are sound.
Her descriptions of the looters and moochers and the monsters that you get from the socialists, the communists, the social justice movement, her description of these people is also bang on.
But the problem is what she does, she takes this argument that was meant to be addressed, you know, An argument that was meant to criticize and disprove nonsense.
And she took it and she raised it up and tried to make it her God.
She tried to make herself her God.
And the thing is that any of us who try and do this, who try and raise our own ego up, wind up making complete fools out of ourselves.
Because we are very, very good at self-delusion.
Folks, thanks for watching and keep fighting the good fight.
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