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March 30, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:00:22
Individualism Shrugged
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Hey guys, Greg Hood here.
And this is Chris Roberts.
Left, right, and white.
And we're going to be getting into Metapolitics today, and we'll be talking about somebody who has started a lot of ideological journeys for a lot of people.
Most people move beyond her, some people don't, and that of course is Ayn Rand.
And we both got introduced to this with one of their outreach efforts, right?
Yeah, so I'll share this story.
It would sound too egotistical if you did it.
So, first off I'll say, technically this author's name is pronounced Ayn Rand, but a lot of people say Ann Rand.
I'm probably going to say Ann Rand at least a couple of times.
Same person.
It sort of depends on just how much of a purist you are about this author as to how you pronounce it.
So there's the Ayn Rand Institute, and they actually offer one of the best scholarships for college students in the country.
All you have to do is read Atlas Shrugged, and then write an essay about how great it is.
For first place, you get a full ride to any university that accepts you for four years, and then it's tiered from there.
I think second place gets two years, third place gets one year, one and a half years, something like that.
And that is actually why I read Atlas Shrugged and because I was so interested in winning this scholarship, I then read her three other novels that I was just like really, really, really immersed in, like her literature and her worldview and stuff.
And I submitted my essay and I did not get the scholarship and I also did not really enjoy almost any of what I read, so it was really absolutely all for nothing.
Greg Hood, on the other hand, read all of her works and got a lot out of them and did apply for the scholarship and did get it.
He didn't get number one, he didn't get first place, but you got What did you get?
No, I got nothing.
I got very little, I should say, in terms of the Iron Rain Institute.
All I got was a... I think it was Anthem.
So it was just a cash prize.
Anthem is her first novel.
I think I got like $100 or something like that.
It was that little?
It was that little.
But then, of course, later I was able to draw on that.
I don't even know.
for the Occidental Quarterly.
So he has won two cash prizes writing on Ayn Rand and I have won none and he enjoyed a lot of it and I really really didn't.
We'll get into kind of the specifics of that soon but we wanted to talk about this because one Ayn Rand is you know enormously influential if you look if you do polls of Americans of like You know, novels they read that had, like, a biggest impact on their worldview.
Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged are, like, always at the top of the list.
Ayn Rand also holds an interesting distinction of being a right-wing writer who has influenced a lot of left-wingers.
It's one of the few instances where you can talk to somebody who's, like, totally on the left and they're like, oh, well, I do have this one right-wing guilty pleasure.
If they say that, it's almost invariably Ayn Rand.
It's just...
It has this enormous appeal that I never quite understood.
Stacey Abrams is actually the most famous example of this right now, I think.
She credits Ayn Rand with getting her interested in writing, you know, because she has this side career of writing Harlequin romance novels, or some softcore erotica.
She's credited Ayn Rand with getting the ball rolling on that, and Stacey Abrams is no right-wing libertarian by any means.
Nor does she fit the phenotype of a Randian hero or archetype, as we'll get into.
Indeed.
Indeed.
So, we figured this would actually be a really good topic for a show called Left, Right, and White, because Mr. Hood here, coming from the right, always really enjoyed Rand, and me, coming arguably more from the left.
Arguably.
Arguably, friend.
Arguably.
I never got it.
I've got to pass it to you here.
Explain to me this big, you know, why do so many people get into this?
Why is this a major influence?
Because I'm sure tons of readers of American Renaissance are familiar with Ayn Rand's work, really enjoyed them, at the very least when they were younger, maybe not so much now.
Yeah.
But a lot of people's initial interest in politics even begins with Ayn Rand.
Paul Ryan, famously.
Yeah, Paul Ryan is an example of one of those people who took it and then just didn't go any further.
Or he's just being deliberately disingenuous.
I think he said his two biggest things were, like, Christianity and Ayn Rand.
Yeah, it was the Bible and Atlas Shrugged.
Those two do not go together.
No, not exceptionally well.
But, I mean, Stacey Abrams politics don't jive well with... Although her writing style probably does.
I'm not going to subject myself to reading anything she's ever written, but Rand's... I'm not going there.
I mean, Ran's books are essentially just specifying her characters or just placeholders for certain ideas and certain concepts.
Yeah, they're very ideological novels, I'm sure.
Right.
I mean, the best one was probably With a Living.
Where you actually do have some semblance of complex characters, and you have interesting experiences.
And that's because she's writing something largely autobiographical.
Right.
We the Living is the novel she wrote about the very early years of the Soviet Union.
But it's after the revolution.
has won. I mean it's yeah it takes place in like 1919 1920 1921 right around there just as like
the soviets are just totally like you know remaking russia and just the absolute misery
that everybody goes through uh because of that and yeah i mean that's it's probably one of our
only novels where like you have some level of like sympathy for the for the characters and
they're not they're not just like these these archetypes these sort of like heroes or villains
It's not all just like Darth Vader versus Luke Skywalker.
Right.
And that's also one of the novels that she edited later.
There's this one because there's this kind of Admiring view of the Soviets in some ways, at least their discipline and their militancy and their ruthlessness.
And there are two lines in We the Living that were taken out.
One was where the heroine says something like, what are your masses but raw fuel to be trampled underneath by like the men who need them or something like that.
Pretty Nietzschean, just the masses are worthless type thing, which he edited out later.
And then I think there was another line that said something that I admire your means, but not your ends.
And that's what she's saying about the Soviet Union.
And keep in mind, the Ayn Rand Institute is also... I mean, that was the party line thing.
We can get into what happened to her movement a little later.
But they were coming out in favor of nuclear war and all this kind of stuff.
Yeah, they were big boosters of the Iraq War.
I remember there were college groups back when we were doing that kind of stuff who would bring in that group and they would give speeches about Israel and why we need more wars in the Middle East and whatever else.
And the rationale given was because somehow this advances human potential or human freedom or capitalism or something.
But in answer to you why it starts, Jerome Tuseel, who's this libertarian activist, famously wrote this book.
It usually begins with Ayn Rand.
Right, which was about why people become libertarians.
Right, and also left anarchists and everything else.
He gets into that too.
Just as a quick side note, Jerome Tuseel was also the first person to ever write a biography of Donald Trump.
Interesting.
He got a wave of publicity just before he died because when people were trying to find dirt on Trump, they dug up what he had done.
It's a cliched thing and one thing you can say about objectivism is that it is just cliches.
It's a very rigid ideological system where there is something that is absolutely right and there is something that is absolutely wrong and you can spell it out over literally every aspect of human life.
Everything is objective hence objectivism.
A is A and therefore if you like this piece of music you're a communist.
It gets to that point in Atlas Shrugged.
If you're a teenager and you want somebody to A. tell you that you're great and special and better than everyone around you and B. that everything you've been taught up to this point is completely wrong.
Fine rand is where you're going to turn.
I do get that.
People often comment, when they're trying to explain the libertarian to alt-right pipeline, of libertarianism is the safest place to initially, the safest ideological space to go to, to be like, I don't like either of these two dumb teams.
I have thoughts that go beyond this really basic political binary that we all live in.
I think there's a lot of truth to that.
Sure, Ayn Rand speaks to that with these sort of libertarian fantasies.
It's probably not true now, but I do know that everybody, not everybody, but 90% of the people who ended up becoming white advocates started off as a libertarian for precisely that reason.
It was because, well, I see something wrong.
Because remember, what was Republicans 20 years ago?
It was the Iraq War.
It was neoconservatism.
It was all these stupid ideological crusades about things we didn't believe in.
And the only response to that was basically libertarianism.
That was where you could be.
Right.
That was the only way of dissenting on the right that had any kind of traction.
Right.
And there was also a much stronger authentic paleo-libertarian presence among the libertarian movement back then.
So you get in via Ayn Rand and then that's your gateway drug to Murray Rothbard and where all that leads.
But Rand herself, if you actually look at some of the themes implicit in her work, she never really spelled them out, because to spell them out would destroy her worldview.
I mean, one thing I always took away from her work was she had this term, sense of life.
I mean, probably the closest English expression to the German Weltanschauung.
This all-encompassing thing.
Right, your big TOQ, your Occidental Quarterly Essay about her is called A Sense of Life, I think.
Right.
The biographies that were written about her by her intimates talked about her using that term and how that was how she viewed the world and everything else.
And what's interesting is that her first hero was actually from an adventure story where it's this heroic captain in like the British Army or something who puts down a native rebellion in the Raj and then, you know, Blows up a dam and floods the natives and saves the day, saves like a princess and ruthlessly upholds the course of empire.
And all of her future heroes were basically...
That archetype, that idea.
Yeah, when you read it, you can tell that she was really influenced by these sort of dime paperback adventure stories.
I mean, even just the fact that her biggest book, Atlas Shrugged, one of the major characters is a pirate, which was a very unusual thing for novels being written in the 1950s and 60s.
Everybody was kind of over pirates at that point.
Yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways, what she talked about was the worldview of late European imperialism And the racial themes that were implicit in those kinds of books.
She never really moved beyond that.
You're talking about, I mean, what you're sort of describing at the risk of putting words into your mouth is like this kind of, like, you can make an argument that there is this sort of convergence between Ayn Rand's more sort of, like, entrepreneurial, like, you know, businessmen who don't care about, like, the regulations and who just want to invent and, like, do cool things and, like, you're saying that there's a similarity between that and The Viking archetype, the pirate archetype, the conquistador even archetype.
and adventurers who are like, oh no, we're just going to set sail into the uncharted
waters, we're going to discover new lands, we're going to conquer them, and we're going
to be great.
The Viking archetype, the pirate archetype, the conquistador even archetype.
And I mean, you actually basically have a conquistador in the book, which is that Francisco
Danconian guy in Out Shrugged.
Interestingly enough, like the one Hispanic character, but yet who has blue eyes.
Right, because he's like an elite Argentine.
And then you've got the pirate, and of course he's portrayed, this is her phrase, faces almost shocking beauty, I think is the one that she says.
He's like a Scandinavian Adonis, basically.
There's Danish?
Yeah, something like that, and it's Danish, yeah.
And there's all these weird racial fantasies that you can see there in terms of the the types of people that she portrays as ideal and of course the leftists who she puts into her books are all physically repulsive and weak and disgusting and you know it's the thing now where you like look at a guy's face and you're like oh I already know it's
How old were you the first time you read Atlas Shrugged, which is definitely her magnum opus?
Atlas Shrugged was college.
Twitter hobbies. Right, yeah, yeah. No, and that's definitely true. Okay, how old were
you the first time you read Atlas Shrugged, which is definitely her magnum opus? Atlas
Shrugged was college. Atlas Shrugged was college. The earlier stuff was the contest, so I guess
that was high school. Okay. And then I went through the whole thing, and I plowed through
every single one of the books, including the non-fiction.
What did you want to do after finishing Atlas Shrugged? What did it inspire in you? I
mean, there's something very positive, and there's something very negative, and the negative is
that it...
It really is a prison, and this is arguably what happened to the entire prison.
Wait, prison?
What's a prison?
The whole worldview is, because it lays out these are the things you were supposed to believe.
This is good.
This is evil.
And if you go beyond that, you're a collectivist or you're, you know, one of these disgusting villains that I've portrayed in my stories and whatever else.
It's liberating in the sense that what I think she really has to say that is interesting is not spelled out.
And for her, everything was about reason.
Everything was about abstractions.
History was just philosophy applied on life.
And she tried to explain everything in certain terms.
And of course, in her personal life, this led to a complete catastrophe.
Because she wanted to have an affair, basically, with the successor of her... Right, with one of her proteges.
Right.
She lost interest in her husband.
Right.
And of course, this is a pretty base desire, but for her it had to be this heroic stand.
And so she had to explain why actually having this affair was good and get everybody to agree to it.
It followed logically.
Right.
And of course it ended in a complete catastrophe and the whole thing basically fell apart.
But I do think the good things that were in the book was, again, it kind of harkens back to those archetypes you don't see anymore, which is this idea of, I don't know, Faustian man going forth and conquering things and creating a new world and looking, everything is always looking above.
It's never, Looking to the ground, trying to bring everything down to equality.
It's always looking above and trying to achieve the heroic.
And she can only take that so far.
Because at the end of the day, you're not allowed to use the state.
You're not allowed to be a collectivist.
You're not allowed to have an identity other than this atomized individual.
Well, her heroes are not, but her heroes, and she wrote about this later, she would write all these things about, oh, big business versus capitalism, and this is the cope you get from libertarians today, where it's like, oh, we've never had true capitalism, we've never had a true free market.
All right.
Well, you know, we've never had true communism either, and we roll our eyes at that.
You get into these unfalsifiable, kind of idealized worldviews.
Exactly.
If every little thing in society was exactly how I say it is, things would be perfect.
Right.
Which is just not even a meaningful statement.
Yeah.
Things would work if they were done my way.
Right.
The heroes that she puts into her books, they're not just businessmen in the sense of they inherit wealth.
I mean, the people who do inherit wealth in her books tend to be pretty scummy.
Yeah, that's true.
With the exception of the guys who inherit it and then end up going farther.
They all tend to be inventors.
They all tend to be people who really conquer nature and who aren't held back by any forces in their way.
They're just willing to go through everything.
And they're not dependent on anybody else.
Whereas if you look at success in business today, particularly if you're making your money off things like social media, if you're making your money off things where you need the permission of the system to even participate in the economy.
You know, it's not Francisco Danconia or John Galt who's arising today.
It's somebody who can That's how you become a billionaire today.
Not by creating some bold new thing, but by creating an Amazon plant where you basically treat your workers terrible and squeeze out a little bit of margin of profit every given point.
She had this idea of an economy where human excellence is furthered because we're going to have these extraordinary men and they're going to give these things to the world and capitalism is the way we can all benefit from this.
And I would argue that's just not the nature of the way the economy works, then or now.
It's just much more obvious now, which is why I think so many people on the right Start out with her, but then go beyond it and say, no, look, we're going to have to use the state.
There is such a thing as society.
Margaret Thatcher was wrong.
Things don't just magically work out just because we have the free market.
And this is particularly true of us white advocates who look at it and say, well, look, big businesses, it's not an enemy.
It is the enemy in terms of what's really pushing all this stuff.
I mean, if I had to reduce the rise and fall of civilizations to just two words, I would say cheap labor.
Yeah, you might be onto something there.
But I mean, what's the attraction of leftists to her?
I mean, I think that's interesting.
Oh, what is that really?
Unsufferable.
It's got to be one of the most left-wing shows ever put on television.
Orange is the New Black, or whatever, and I remember the protagonist in that show played Dagny Taggart.
In one of those awful Atlas Shroud movies they made.
And of course they put her out there and she's saying, Oh, you know, Ayn Rand was a hero of mine.
I love these books so much.
And then fast forward five years and she's reciting all the democratic talking points and everything else.
Cause obviously she's, she's past that.
And I think Angelina Jolie even said something along the lines of like, Oh, Ayn Rand was so inspirational to me and everything else.
And it's like, but how?
Well, this is one of those things where like, Ayn Rand is so popular where I always like kind of wondered like maybe like I must be missing something everybody likes this you know everybody likes these books except me but it's funny what you what you brought up is like a like all of her characters are not dependent on on anybody like they're these heroic individuals.
And that's a very leftist modernist theme.
Well, that's something I actually really never liked about the novels.
I think that's actually what makes a lot of the novels so weak.
Yeah, and when you grow up you realize, like, wait a minute, this is just bad writing.
Right, well, and it's like everybody's kind of dependent on the people around them.
I've also never...
I've never really caught that individualist bug.
I know I've always, at any stage of my life, I've always seen myself as part of some group, whether it's a student at a particular school, or with a group of friends, or for a political cause, or something.
I've never really seen myself as devoid of everything around me.
And I'm very dubious, generally, of people who do see themselves that way, like when you meet people who are Oh, I don't need to have friends.
I don't need anything from anybody.
I take care of everything myself.
Well, that's not really true.
And this is a strength of her novel We the Living, when we were talking about it at the beginning of the show, right after the Soviets have taken power.
In that novel, you do actually have two characters who do depend on each other and who do rely on one another, and it's like, because they are in love, so they try to help one another survive this horrible world.
And they make moral compromises because that's what people have to do.
Right, right.
And none of her other novels, especially The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which are two most famous novels, the novels she was the most proud of and the ones that have had the most influence, You know, even like the heroes kind of rarely really help
each other.
I mean, like, they will work together and stuff, like, towards a mission or something.
They will collaborate, but you never really see any of these big sacrifices that, like...
Well, sacrifice in general is the worst thing imaginable, as she explicitly says it.
And the way she gets around this...
Don't you find that horrifying?
Yeah, well, that's the thing.
A viewing sacrifice is like, oh, if you're making a sacrifice for somebody, you know,
you are just cucking.
That's because you are weak.
You know, you should just keep your eyes on the horizon, keep walking forward.
But this is the thing, is that in the book there are ideas that she half explored and
So, for example, in Atlas Shrugged, there was initially going to be a character of a priest who would have preached to the Taggart children about always trying to serve the highest and the greatest within us.
I think there's actually a church somewhere around that, or a famous evangelist who said, you know, my utmost first high is something like that.
That was like the Christian theme.
And this idea of serving greatness, of serving what is best, and it's put in the mouth of a priest and the priest would have come to understand that the creed he's preaching is actually the antithesis of this and I think he was going to kill himself or something like that.
And she ditched that character because she said, oh well there's no way to make that believable.
And I would say, no, it's pretty believable.
That's probably a lot of people who say actually sacrificing for those around you is not just cucking and you're not, you know, oh, I'm trying to lift up the lowest.
It's like, no, I'm serving something greater than myself.
I'm looking upward when I do these things.
I mean, one of the big problems with their books that a lot of people have pointed out was with very few exceptions, there are no kids.
There's no children.
I mean, the idea of being something unto yourself, utterly free of any dependence on others
and everything else, when you become a parent, that goes right out the window.
Because you're looking at this kid and you're thinking to yourself,
this thing is completely, totally dependent on me and it is terrifying.
Because also, then you have to think to yourself, well, that was you.
I mean, they could have just left you outside if they wanted.
You exist by the grace of the people who are more powerful than you,
who decided to help you and invest in your future.
That's right.
And this is true of everybody.
And if you say, if you build a society on individualism, if you build a society on, you know, to the devil goes the hindmost, it's a society that's going to last only one generation.
That's right, yeah.
And there are a couple times in the book where, in Atlas Shrugged, where the characters will say, We may have to compete with each other, and we may have to destroy one another, but I don't think we will, because the market is big enough that we can both prosper.
And it's like, well, isn't that convenient?
Because at the end of the day...
All businesses strive not for the best, they strive for monopoly.
That's just the nature of the system.
In fact, it's only once a business is monopoly that it can actually fund some of the more interesting projects that allow it to achieve great things.
You have to basically take over something.
You have to be pretty secure in your place in the market to be able to really generously fund research and development.
The reason Amazon got to where it is, for example, is because for years and years it was able to operate essentially at a loss.
And it was able to undercut the competition.
And then once it had a certain grip on the market, then it was able to do all these other things.
This is true of, I guess you could argue, this is true of Tesla and a lot of other companies too, where they get some sort of a government grant, they get some sort of market dominance in this area, and that allows them to accumulate.
Or they're just turbocharged by investors.
Or that, yeah.
And investors are just willing to take losses for a long, long time on the bet that this is going to be something great in the long run.
And now there are some people, I think there are some investors out there who are willing to lose money to bring about a vision of the world that is greater than what we have now.
I think there are quite a few people in Silicon Valley who really do look around and say, this is garbage, another world is possible and we should strive to bring that into creation.
I'd say that's one of the strengths of America's Silicon Valley as compared to the Chinese tech industry.
We're there.
It's really just about stealing each other's work, and undercovenant competition, and corporate espionage, and all this kind of stuff.
They don't really create much new stuff the same way America does.
So, like, regarding all these critiques, I mean, like, when you started to kind of, like, have your doubts about, you know, the greatness or the brilliance of Ayn Rand and objectivism, like, which- Well, that came pretty early in my 20s.
Great.
And no judgment, but I'm curious, like, which came first?
Was it kind of like these these more like economically focused critiques like like
what you were just talking about with monopolies or was it more of like kind of like the
spiritual side of like wait none of these people have kids like what kind of parents would they be or like
the total absence of religion in any of her books it's i didn't know that she's got this priest
character um or like even just kind of like the you know hitting up against the kind of the vacuity of
like individualism like what was the first thing that kind of made you be like oh maybe this
book isn't like the end-all be-all about human existence.
A lot of it I mean I figured out pretty quickly actually that wasn't the end-all and be-all and that actually came from just reading about her own life You know, when I wrote that essay, because... Really?
Because here's the thing... Like a never meet your heroes kind of thing?
Sort of.
I mean, I would never really call her my hero.
I'd say the books were influential in my life, but there was never a point where I was like, I am a capital O Objectivist.
Or if there was, it didn't last for very long.
When she was, because she experienced the Russian Revolution, she can, she used to say that she had experienced and learned about Marxism.
Because she had to live through it and she would actually basically was indoctrinated with Marxism because that's what the Soviet school system was back then.
But the only reason she was able to leave the country was basically because there were some random relatives in America that somehow got a letter through to some to her parents to her relatives in Russia and basically through some bureaucratic hole that got quickly closed right afterward and a mistake that she caught somehow that somebody had made on a form She was able to leave and get to America and she never really expressed any gratitude or
She admitted that it was the sacrifices of other people that let her escape from this.
I think her parents died in the siege of Leningrad after the Germans invaded, and she, by all accounts, just didn't particularly care.
When she got to America, the first thing she did, which is a special answers thing for somebody who's so obsessed with the idea of taking reality as it is, first thing she does is she goes to Hollywood.
where she tries to write screenplays and gets involved.
Well, yeah, it makes total sense. I mean, she's like a character in one of her novels.
I mean, she goes to the big city to try and, you know, like become a star of some kind.
In a way, she was a pioneer of that idea of hyperreality, of the media-saturated reality,
because that's how she saw the world.
When she looked at America, when she looked at Britain, she had these stereotyped images that came to her via pop culture and movies and stories.
And so she read into this country, into the Anglosphere, what she wanted to see.
Okay.
And so once you read that, you say, okay, well, this person is not taking reality as it is.
This person is imposing her own ideological blinders on something.
She's being like the people that she critiques so heavily in the novel.
The other thing is just, It's fundamentally not the way human beings operate.
At the very beginning of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark is on a cliff and he's looking at nature.
And the only thing he thinks of, this is literally how the book begins, is he sees trees and he immediately thinks, these are going to be cut down to build houses.
Here's like some rocks, I'm going to blow them up and use them to build whatever else.
And this idea of nature having a certain value in and of itself, of being with a capital B, that's just completely absent.
I mean, we're here to just kind of run around and everything is raw material so we can make slightly better stuff.
And, of course, if you look at it from the idea of the capitalist system where everything is just purely about economics, purely about squeezing a profit from every little thing, you never get buildings that are great, or very rarely I should say, You don't get things that are great, or things that are worth remembering, or things that people travel continents to go visit from that kind of system.
You basically get cookie-cutter houses that fall apart after 20 years.
Right, like most beautiful architecture haven't been built by artists who weren't interested necessarily in the functionality of it.
Religious structures tend to be the most beautiful or the ones that make the biggest impression on people at home.
Or they would be something that maybe it would marry form and function well, but the people who were building it weren't going to live to see it completed.
And this is especially true of, obviously, medieval cathedrals, where you have this as a collective.
And she brings those in for a pretty Pretty hard critique in Atlas Shrugged, where I think the architectural critic, who's like the great enemy, praises this because they're anonymous.
They're the collective product of humanity, and so therefore, this is a good thing.
And she never really comes out and says, well, these things are ugly, because that would be a pretty hard case to make, you know, like Notre Dame or something.
But she basically says, no, Modernism, the skyscraper, like this is the true monument to what humanity is.
But that's not really true.
I mean, even in New York, the businesses that created some of the most iconic buildings, they don't own them anymore or they're long gone.
I mean, people built these things as a monument to something greater than just whatever the next quarter's earnings were going to be.
And I think one of the biggest reasons that this gets into the whole question of modernism and what leftists take from it.
I mean, I think this idea of being completely independent and recreating your identity to be whatever you want and having no ties to tradition, no ties to an ethnic group, no ties to a nation, no ties to even the sex you're born with now.
Right.
You can just be whatever.
I mean, that's all there in her work.
There would be nothing there to critique that.
The only thing she would have an issue with is the plea for victimization part of it.
Right, right.
But aside from that, as long as you're just kind of remaking yourself or the world in your image, that's great.
Full stop.
I mean, if you want to get like weird and spiritual about it, I mean, it's like the ultimate left-hand path type stuff where it's just nothing will exist other than me.
I am the ultimate liberated individual.
I will impose my will on the entire world.
And of course, People like that tend not to get along very well with other people.
Yeah.
Nor are they the type of people who build great societies.
Right.
Well, they don't seem to be generally very happy people.
I mean, we don't have to go into the pop psychology at all.
But you can see why entertainers especially would get into this.
Yeah.
Because there's a lot of that.
Because what is an entertainer?
They spend their entire lives pretending to be other people, taking on a million different roles, constantly remaking themselves over and over again.
I mean, I think that's why she's so important to all these Hollywood celebrities who have left-wing political views but constantly cite her as an influence, and the fact that she came out of that world.
I mean, she was a screenwriter.
Yeah, that's right.
I kind of wish you'd stuck to that.
So why do you think people...
I mean, especially, obviously, like, leftists who enjoy Ayn Rand's writing for whatever reason, or for this interesting kind of modernist point that you're making, they obviously, like, move beyond the ideology of it, but why do you think there are so many people on the right who, you know, read these books and, you know, and I do sympathize with the idea of, like, any kind of libertarianism is, like, the safest way of kind of exiting the sort of boring Political binary, but why do so many people get stuck there?
And why do so many people seem to fail to see the real limits of this worldview that I think are even really obvious in the novels themselves?
A lot of these people don't really seem like...
Good human beings, in a lot of ways.
They're very cold and self-centered.
It's almost cliched.
Everyone's always on the brink of hysteria and they're always coldly suppressing emotions.
It's almost this comical Nordic stereotype of people seeing death and destruction before them but they look upon it coldly because they've overcome these emotions and this type of thing.
You know, the blonde beast of prey is like, that's all there in her books.
And you're like, what is going on here?
This is crazy.
But I mean, the really like, you know, rapey sex scenes also really... Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.
I think some leftist critic at the time said that the height of sexual exaltation to a Iranian hero would be being raped on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange.
And there's definitely a lot of weird gender politics.
I mean, there are books beyond count about the gender politics of Ayn Rand.
There's been a lot written about this.
There's a lot to go at it from a feminist point of view.
But it is really striking.
I mean, you were talking about at the beginning of Fountainhead, Howard Rourke, looking at this, on this cliff, looking at all of this nature and being like, well, how can I transform this into houses?
All of the men seem to kind of see women that way, of just like, oh well, how can I conquer this?
Right, there's this line where I think one of the heroes gives Dagny, I think it is some piece of jewelry, and she has this throwaway line that it gives her the most feminine of looks, or most feminine of aspects, that of being chained.
And it's like, female author writing this, like, alright, interesting.
But this is where she's going.
So why do people get stuck on this?
Well, the conservatives and the libertarians, I think it's a lot easier.
It's because even though initially it kind of comes at you as like a wrecking ball, comes at you as sort of like a less profound Zarathustra, you know, where you're just kind of taking a hammer to all these truths that you think you've been told your whole life.
It also gives you a perfectly packaged, internally coherent ideology that you never have to step outside of for the rest of your life.
And if you're a conservative movement staffer, and you're in your 20s, you're getting paid 20 grand or whatever it is to lobby for the interests of billionaires, and you want to tell yourself that you're actually on a heroic quest to defend all that is good in man, Ayn Rand.
Objectivism.
There it is.
And you always have ready-made pat answers.
Hey, look, society's falling apart.
We should do something about this.
Well, we can't because then that would be state intervention.
That's evil.
You know, we're anti-socialist and all this kind of stuff.
And so what starts off as being this weird You know, there's something noble to it, this kind of idealism ends up becoming this very deeply cynical thing where you have this ideology that is transparently covering for power and for mediocrity and basically you're preaching to people
Yes, we know that you see these problems.
We see these problems, too.
But our ideology tells us we can't do anything about them.
You just have to sit there and take it.
Furthermore, the fact that you're being crushed by these problems, maybe you're not one of those Randian heroes.
Maybe you don't deserve anything.
Maybe you deserve to be, like, stamped into the dirt.
And that's also... That is brutal.
I mean, a lot of that is there in Conservatism Inc.
You know, there is sort of a... I'm trying not to swear.
There's just sort of this idea of getting off almost on the suffering of others, particularly the working class.
I mean, which is why you have some 19-year-old in a suit with a business card smoking cigars like he's some kind of a big shot.
Even though he's going out there showing consumer commerce.
So do you think Ayn Rand's worldview makes it easier for people to essentially LARP?
Yeah, I'd say that's a part of it. I think that it gives people a vision of heroism and makes
them view themselves as conquerors even when they're not doing anything.
And also, it's a heck of a lot easier to just get out there and be like, oh, free markets are good than it is to actually do what any of the people do in the stories, which is, you know, invent a new metal or find some way to, like, build a railroad through a mountain or something like that.
Or become a pirate and steal from bad people.
Yeah, that too.
Well, yeah, Ragnar and Daneska Jald.
I think I butchered the pronunciation there.
Me, of all people, butchering the Nordic pronunciations.
But I mean that was the one that everybody Loved.
That's probably the favorite main character of a lot of the ones because it's, oh, now there's a way where you can use military tactics and violence and conquering, but it's okay.
It's against statism.
It's good of you to bring that up.
Walter Block, who's this really important libertarian, you can find this on YouTube.
He has a speech called, I think, Atlas Shrugged the Greatest Novel of All Time or something like that.
And he brings up that one of the big appeals for him about it, about Atlas Shrugged specifically, is that it brings up this question of, like, if you go to a public library and you take it, you know, and you're lent a book and then you just never return it, like, is that, have you liberated it?
You know, have you done something good?
And he's really fascinated by that question of, like, if something is paid for by the public, which is through taxation, which is through everybody, which he views as theft, if you then, yourself, like, take it, like, Is that a moral good?
Is that a legitimate way of fighting back?
That's an excellent point.
It gives you a kind of permission to do the sorts of things that you want to do anyway, if you're looking at it from just a purely individual point of view.
So suddenly if you're, I don't know, taking advantage of a welfare program, helping yourself to some sort of public good, Exploiting the tragedy of the commons.
These aren't flaws.
These are actually heroic acts.
Well, and you're a pirate now We'll do our first Our first horseshoe theory of the of the podcast like you see that on the left when people read Books by like Noam Chomsky or whoever about how evil corporations are and they're like, oh well This makes it this gives me a moral like permission slip to like steal from Walmart for just things I personally want to take right because that does this this way I'm like sticking it to it's like these corporate giants Ideology is always the mask power wears and interest wears, and so, you know, even if it's something as, like, I'm gonna steal this bag of chips, it's like, hey, you stole that bag of chips, like, no, this was a bold strike against the oligarchs and the state.
So you have this, like, kind of libertarian version of, like, you do that, but just for the public libraries.
I'm like a new, like, I'm an anarchist in, like, Catalonia now because I've taken this thing.
That's right, that's right.
So I guess, again, from somebody who just, like, doesn't, he just doesn't really understand this, this whole thing, I remember, I just graduated high school when I read all this Ayn Rand, but when I was a senior in high school I read Hans Hermann Hoppe's Democracy the God That Failed, which is another influential libertarian text.
And what Walter Block talks about for Atlas Shrugged, like, so if you steal something that's like a public good, is that liberating it?
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, he talks about that, not exactly, but he gets on kind of a similar theme throughout Democracy, the God that Failed, where he really views taxation as this kind of ultimate evil in society, because it isn't voluntary, it's just like imposed theft by a governmental body, and like, his You know, philosophically, he's really looking for a way to, like, solve that moral evil.
And for me, for both Walter Block and for Hans-Hermann Hoppe and for these lefties who are, like, listening to NOFX and reading Chomsky and shoplifting to destroy the corporate, you know, underline.
Right.
For me, it's like, I never really got any of that because, like, you know, one, I have a really hard time, like, surveying the world around us and being, like, Yeah, taxation is the greatest evil.
That's the worst thing that's happening to people right now.
I get that taxes can be excessive, taxes can be punitive.
I mostly think that they're being used for the wrong things.
Sure, I get all of that.
I just have such a hard time, like, the question of, like, whether or not you stealing from a library is, like, morally good, I just don't find very interesting.
I, you know, I find this to be kind of, like, selfish, like, look, like, libraries aren't, like, a really big problem, like, I, you know, libraries aren't really hurting anybody, like, maybe you don't want to pay taxes for libraries, like, sure, like, that's annoying, that's not great, maybe it would be better if we didn't pay taxes for libraries, you know, and the same with, like, you know, like, roads or public schools or all of these things, but it's still, like, Is that really like the worst thing about society that you could find?
Like is that the most awful thing that you encountered?
I think this is where we have to bring in kind of the racial undertones behind all this stuff because over the last 50 years after the So-called civil rights movement and everything else.
And I think people like Barry Goldwater, for example, did oppose civil rights, not on racial grounds, but on libertarian grounds.
They basically made the case, which is logically consistent, if the government can tell you who you can and cannot serve within your own business, do you really own your own business?
Yeah.
Now, he championed desegregation in the military and public institutions, but he said these places have the right to do with whatever they want on private times.
Now, of course, leftists are the ones who say this now because they control these institutions and they can use it against political opponents.
Sure.
Private companies can do that.
By itself, I think it's important because it tells you how artificial this public-private thing is.
Already, right off the bat, there comes to a point where you're like, wait a minute, this distinction isn't even that hard and fast.
Something that we're just using because it's convenient to put in the categories.
But the biggest thing is I'd say arguably the biggest thing in American life over the last 50 years is the fact that you just count on public institutions to be crap.
Like, you move where you live, where you send your kids to school, the value of your house, all of these things are dependent upon basically fleeing what happened as a result of the Civil Rights Movement.
Right.
If you look at all these places that are, you know, the battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement, the Selma's, the Montgomery's, all the cities where they won these glorious struggles, nobody actually wants to live there.
Yeah.
The northern cities, of course, were complete disasters following the riots.
And so Republicans, or I should even say a lot of former Democrats who became Republicans, they were basically trying to look For a way you're allowed to oppose these institutions without making it about race.
Libertarianism allows you to do that.
Where you say, oh, I don't want to send my kids to government schools.
I have a right to do it to a private school.
I have a right to live here.
I have a right to isolate myself from these things.
This is the basis.
This is one of those funny things.
White advocates and liberals agree that a lot of the populist resentment towards And the data backs it up.
I've actually seen libertarians argue for immigration on these grounds, that the reason we should have mass immigration is because it undermines social trust and makes people less willing to support welfare.
And so that's sort of where we're at.
Let's just totally vulcanize society to destroy the state.
Those of us of a certain age I have never lived in a country where public institutions work.
Whereas if you were like a new dealer in the 30s, and the government came in and built something, you were still living in a racially more or less homogenous society, or one backed by segregation or wherever else, where it's like, oh, the government built this pool, it built this park, it built this, it built, you know, transportation, and everyone's like, wow, this is great.
Yeah.
Whereas, you know, if you look at this in like the 70s or something, anything public is almost by definition a catastrophe.
And so you basically have to spend your entire life trying to make enough money, and of course you need some sort of ideology that tells you it's okay to make this money.
You need to make enough money to flee the consequences of everything that's been unleashed since arguably 1965.
Right.
Maybe even before that.
And so I think that's why Libertarianism and Rand particularly has an enduring importance on the American right is because it lets people believe something ennobling while they're actually pursuing ends that they really can't recognize even to themselves.
And I think that's a lot of what's going on beyond the limited government thing.
Now maybe we're getting to the point now where that's no longer sustainable because you do have a lot of conservatives who are looking around, who were brought up essentially with capitalism and freedom and those types of libertarian texts, or who started Thine Rent, like so many others, and they're looking around and they're saying, wait a minute, Jeff Bezos is not John Galt.
Yeah, no kidding.
Mark Zuckerberg is not Francisco Danconia.
These are just people who are using algorithms and paying people nothing to sell us stuff that we don't need.
And basically, by making ordinary people worse, and making the society worse, they personally profit, which is sort of the opposite of what she was suggesting would happen in these books, where, you know, there are great people in the world But we should tolerate them and let them have money because they create these great things and let us have it.
And so we all get to live in a better world.
But once you start looking at it and say, wait a minute, that's not how the marketplace actually works, then the whole thing goes out the window.
Because then you have to start talking about things like state power and who controls the state.
Or you do what I think a lot of libertarians suggested, as you talked about.
You go into these weird ideological cul-de-sacs where you're trying to justify things like private governments.
Yeah, how can we have a total system for privatized sidewalks?
Yeah, market anarchists and my right to have a rocket launcher and all this kind of stuff.
I think what's more interesting in a way is what the leftists are taking from it.
And I think they're drawing on it too, is this idea of absolute individual liberation, which I would say their rhetoric has also changed over the last century.
If you look at the Soviet Union and you look at what Marx himself talked about, it was basically We're going to get rid of these bad social conditions and then every man will become a Shakespeare and his full potential will be unlocked.
The new Soviet man.
Right.
And also there'll be greater economic productivity and we'll leave the West behind and we're going to create this great thing.
All that's gone now.
What the left is now is, I am free to be a totally autonomous individual and to remake my entire identity.
I can remake it day by day and you are all obligated to go along with what I say, else you are oppressing me.
And this, that's arguably a pretty Randian theme.
I mean, we're basically, I don't have any ties to anyone and there's no such thing as society.
And obviously there's racial implications with that because you're saying that, I mean, and she would always talk about, oh, it was the crudest form of collectivism or something like that.
Yeah, she said racism was the crudest form of collectivism.
Right.
But I mean, she would have said the same thing about family.
Yeah, I think she really, yeah.
It's the exact same thing in her book.
And so, you know, she might come up with some theory like, oh, if you rationally respect, like, your family members, you can love them and stuff, and it's like, no, you don't, like, when you see your kid, you don't say, like, oh, well, someday he'll do math, so, uh, like, won't let him starve to death.
There are certain things that are so obvious that if you have to rationally defend them, maybe we should just dispense with the rationality.
Yeah, well there was, like when I was reading just like everything I could about Ayn Rand to try and, you know, get this, you know, essay in this perfect form to go in this scholarship, I came across this essay on Salon.com back when it was like one of the bigger like left-wing websites.
I think it was literally just called How Ayn Rand Ruined My Life, and it was this woman author was writing about how when she was like a teenager Her dad, who had always been kind of a libertarian, had always, you know, liked Ayn Rand, just went full objectivist.
Just, like, went completely off the deep end.
So, like, when she was, like, 14, started, like, charging her rent and stuff, because he was like, you know, well, it doesn't make sense for you to just live live for free in this house that I paid for.
I mean, you're not just entitled to that.
You need to go out and get a job and do something with your life.
It's just this really horrifying story.
Well, we've come full circle on that though too because one of the things that's being
talked about now is they're saying, well, let's say you're a homemaker.
Why aren't you paying me a wage?
Why are women's emotional labor, why doesn't that come with a price tag and all this kind
And the obvious retort is like, well, because there are supposed to be some things that are beyond commodities or there are some things that are joint enterprises where we're not just trying to rip each other off all the time when you're married, when you have a family, this kind of stuff.
But that's gone because if your whole thing is about individual liberation and your whole thing is about the totally autonomous individual, You know, that's emotional labor.
That comes with a price tag.
Who are you to say that we have some sort of joint thing?
What, are you trying to oppress me?
So what, you think it's kind of Randian when lefties are like, well, you've made me really sad.
Ergo, you should send me some money.
I think it's kind of a horseshoe theory thing again.
But I mean, we are at that point now where they say, how often do we hear arguments now, particularly when it comes to issues of race, where Such-and-such a system or such-and-such a person that's caused me emotional harm because they wrote an essay somewhere that makes me sad or somehow made my life worse.
Ergo, I am entitled to money.
Because now we're not, if we're talking about reparations even, we're not even talking about Real economic theories anymore where you say, well these people don't have this amount of wealth because these structures were set in place.
You have all these kind of fuzzy critiques about, you know, what counts as racism, what counts as harm, whether stereotypes have some mysterious power of their own to hold people down because it like gets into their brain and freaks out like their own expectations of themselves.
I mean there's both sides are sort of on this doomed quest to Have this individual who is totally free and not held down by any strictures whatsoever.
And both the libertarian right, and I would argue probably the radical, especially the anti-racist left, are saying that is the new man, that is what we want.
Or maybe the new XEN or whatever.
Yeah, not new man.
Whatever the new pronoun will be.
Right, right, right, right.
The new gender, new pronoun.
Yeah, the new whatever, the new NPC.
And that person will be totally free of anything.
And at some point, you grow up, essentially, and say, no, I am part of this thing.
And particularly if you're a white advocate, you say, I'm not just part of this thing, I'm at the vanguard of this thing that goes back thousands upon thousands of years to the very dawn of time, and if the slightest thing had gone differently, I would not be who I am.
There is no version of myself other than what exists.
Because you are, ultimately, Not just your upbringing and your social conditions, but your biology.
And you cannot reconcile that view with the Randian view of the autonomous individual, which is why even though there are some themes in there that are worth using, At the end of the day, we're not autonomous individuals.
Sure.
Well, I mean, yeah, to have the totally, like, autonomous view of yourself, you have to have some way of sort of, like, dismissing inheritance, like, whether it be, like, biological or cultural or anything.
There can't really be anything that came before you.
Otherwise, that begins to sort of, like, let slip the idea of, like, oh, maybe, like, It's not entirely up to you.
Maybe you are part of a lineage, or you are part of a group, or a collective, or something.
Well, at the risk of... I don't want to go off this too much, but this is something that's going to become increasingly politically important, because now you're seeing people advance the argument that well.
Whites have benefited from wealth that has been passed down from generation to generation, whereas these other groups have not.
Therefore, we need to tax this excess wealth and redistribute it fairly.
And I think the American right is going to find it hard to oppose that because it's already accepted the premise that we're all individuals.
We should all have like a fair shot in life.
We should all be starting from the same place and outcompete.
The only way you can really come at that is say like, no, but we're not.
Individuals.
We're part of this thing.
And if you're leaving something to your children, your children are part of that tradition too.
And they work and they build something to leave to their children.
Right.
Like the whole idea of sacrifice so your kids can have a better life and they sacrifice so their kids can have a better life and everything else.
I would call that the highest ideal of human endeavor.
Yeah, absolutely.
But it left us, we can just call it white privilege.
I mean, what is white privilege except inheriting the accomplishments of your ancestors and then trying to take it to the next level?
Okay, so what would be, like, it's probably, I mean, you've left Conservatism Inc.
for, how about, you've been out of the game for... I've been out of the game for a while.
Yeah, for a few years now.
But did you ever find any, like, Any sort of question or any comment that you could make to
people who were still really into this sort of individualism that Ayn Rand so epically articulated that ever managed to
make anybody have their doubts?
I mean, the religious thing was a big thing for a lot of people, but I found a lot of people just willing to use,
sort of, just double-think, like Paul Ryan.
Some people would be like, oh, I'm a Christian objectivist.
Yeah, which is a really, really, yeah.
Congratulations.
But I mean, look, I draw on people who are like diametrically opposed all the time.
Burnham and Evelot being probably the best example.
So I understand this idea of like having two major influences in your head at the same time.
But if you try to put that in the policy terms, it's just not going to work.
Yeah.
And again, I think that the answer is Not really, unless you're willing to get somebody to embrace the role of... The answer to how to get somebody to kind of drop the stuff... Yeah, you basically have to have appeal on the grounds of interest.
You basically have to say, look...
We are in this position.
These bad things are being done to us.
The only way we can fight back is by using state power.
And for many conservatives, especially many libertarians, that's a line they are not willing to cross because once they cross that line, in their eyes, they cease to be conservative.
And that might be something that's uniquely a problem for Americans because, of course, the right in Europe traditionally has been Or has been like explicitly about defending the state as such, especially if you get into like the whole crown and altar old style conservatism.
And I think this is also like part of the danger of American power is that you see Some of these ideas creeping across the pond.
Sure.
Where you've got these European conservatives saying things like, well, the free market doesn't let us do this, that, and the other thing.
But luckily it hasn't quite gotten as bad there as it is here.
I mean, here it's arguably been with us from the beginning, which is why Ayn Rand has been so popular in the United States.
I mean, maybe the way she viewed America wasn't just her reading into this country what she wanted to see.
It's what a lot of Americans wanted to read into this country, even if it's not actually what's real.
I think that's very true.
I'll admit, much like you, I've had really little success.
Generally, I find if somebody is in the throes of just loving Ayn Rand, Most do.
I mean, I'd say like 90% of them do.
own schedule in terms of leaving it, like if they ever are going to.
Most do.
I mean I'd say like 90% of them do.
There's just sort of, it's a phase.
But a lot of them, I mean even when you leave, even when they leave like objectivism, just
sort of become like kind of more generic libertarians or more sort of generic conservatives, you
know, they don't necessarily go to a much better place or even like a very different
place ideologically.
Yeah.
Sometimes it might even be worse where they say the good themes that are in her work, this idea of greatness, this idea of overcoming, this idea of I don't know.
Advancing some upward cause where you're going, you're building something greater than what existed before, even that gets cut away and it just becomes like, well, you don't interfere with me and I don't interfere with you and we just kind of guard our front lawns and that's the purpose of human existence.
Well, it's, what I'll say, and maybe we'll end on this, is the protagonist in Atlas Shrugged says, That their mission in the world is to, like, abolish, like, the myth of Robin Hood.
Like, they want to live in a world where, like, the story of Robin Hood is not in any way, like, lionized or celebrated.
Right.
I would say, like, I want to, I want to, like, live in a world in which, uh, like, nobody really cares about, about Atlas Shrugged.
And nobody thinks that this is, like, a really, like, powerful or, like, or, like, moral tale.
It's just something that's studied in literature classes for that particular era of American writing, and that's kind of it.
Yeah, I mean, if the American right is going to get anywhere, we have to leave libertarianism behind.
Maybe not in terms of an issue-by-issue thing, obviously things like property rights, gun rights, and all the freedom of association, these sorts of constitutional guarantees are important, but the idea that we are just autonomous agents who carry, I don't know,
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