Feb. 27, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| We're partnering up with the Ayn Rand Institute this week, and joining me in studio are two of their top intellectuals, Tara Smith and Ankar Ghate. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| We're gonna be talking about selfishness and the virtue of selfishness. | ||
| How could selfishness possibly be virtuous? | ||
| I thought selfishness was evil. | ||
| How could it not be virtuous? | ||
| I love talking about selfishness. | ||
| I found the two most selfish people I could possibly think of. | ||
| I try, I try, and it's going pretty well. | ||
| And part of what I mean by that is, In a sense, you know, it works for me. | ||
| If you want people to be happy, I mean, I'll give you one quick kind of capsule just to get us going. | ||
| If you care about people's being happy, genuinely having fulfilling lives, you know, feeling good about their lives, but with good reason to feel good about their lives, then I think you need to, people need to think carefully about what's in my best interest. | ||
| And that's largely what selfishness is all about. | ||
| Doing what's really going to be good for you, best for you. | ||
| So that you can have the best life that you can have. | ||
| I mean, you're going to have to... I can go on and on. | ||
| Well, that's why we're here. | ||
| You may have to interrupt sometimes. | ||
| Alright, so when Ayn Rand sort of first was writing about this, it was pretty radical to say selfishness was virtuous, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think it still is radical. | ||
| In a weird way, it may be more radical now at some level. | ||
| She's basically the only person who will say that selfishness is a virtue. | ||
| And people often say, well, look, we obviously know that it's a vice. | ||
| You know all kinds of people that you label as SOBs. | ||
| They're cheaters. | ||
| They cut corners in their work. | ||
| They're always trying to take advantage of other people. | ||
| And she has a completely Different conception of what it means to be selfish. | ||
| What she thinks about those people is they're actually not pursuing what's in their self-interest. | ||
| They're not doing anything that's going to make them happy. | ||
| And if you really took seriously that it's your life, you have one life to live, I'm trying to make the most of it, you would not act like that. | ||
| And I think even more important, the way she thinks about it is that we bundle together into the concept. | ||
| So the idea of selfishness, so the used car salesman who cuts corners, he put the odometer back and he's trying to cheat his customers. | ||
| We put that together with a Bill Gates. | ||
| who's labeled as selfish because he makes oodles and oodles of money. | ||
| But he makes it. He doesn't steal it. He doesn't cheat his customers. | ||
| He's offering a tremendous value. | ||
| We call a kid who wants to just play with his toys and doesn't want to share. | ||
| Maybe he's saved for a year to buy a bike and now he wants to use it. | ||
| And someone who hasn't done anything comes by and you're, well, | ||
| he doesn't have a bike, you have a bike, so you're supposed to share. | ||
| Like, why? | ||
| And we put all this together. | ||
| All these people are selfish. | ||
| And some of these people are bad, and some of these people are profoundly good. | ||
| You can't think with that kind of concept. | ||
| I think we have a very crude vocabulary for bad behavior. | ||
| So we just throw it all, oh, it's all selfish. | ||
| Well, not if you're really thinking about what is in your self-interest. | ||
| Now, a lot of that behavior is bad and should be condemned, but because it's inconsiderate or non-objective about the other person, or abusive in some cases. | ||
| I mean, there's all sorts of bad, exploitative behavior, and Ayn Rand is certainly against that. | ||
| Doing what's good for you, and sometimes that means turning away the appeal of somebody else, you know, or, oh, but this person needs it, or this other person is more important than you. | ||
| It's like, no, my life is the most important thing to me, just as yours should be to you, and just as yours should be to you. | ||
| And, in fact, that's really the only path by which people can lead the kinds of fulfilling lives, and rewarding lives, and genuinely good lives. | ||
| So one of the things that I really like to do on this show is define words, because especially these days, we live in a time where everyone's sort of defining words or ideas their own way. | ||
| So partly what we're talking about here is a sort of misunderstanding in a modern sense of what the word selfish means, right? | ||
| What's the best way if you wanted to lay out what that other person is? | ||
| The used car salesman who's not really, they're acting selfishly at some level, but they're really not would be I'm not sure that there's always going to be a term that's, you know, a single best term to use for some of these cases. | ||
| Ayn Rand advocates what she calls rational selfishness. | ||
| It's got to be thoughtful selfishness. | ||
| It's got to be about what really is in my interest Not just long term, but long term, not just today, what's going to make me feel good now, but all things considered. | ||
| I mean, think about, for instance, when you go to a wedding and you wish the young couple all the happiness in the world, right? | ||
| All the success in the world. | ||
| Or you go to a college graduation and you hope they have a really successful life that's good for them, right? | ||
| You're thinking about I mean, it's not that you hope they'll do whatever will make them feel good. | ||
| They'll get the right drugs and they'll just be, you know, they'll be dumb and happy, but they'll think they're having a good life, right? | ||
| So the used car salesmen, the cheater, the philanderer, some of these creeps, right? | ||
| I mean, they've gotten into relationships that then they're cheating on their wives or whatever it might be, or cheating on their clients. | ||
| Is this, I mean, if you step back and actually think about it a little bit, Is that making them a genuinely good life? | ||
| A genuinely satisfying life? | ||
| I mean, you'll read about the Madoffs who are wracked by not just guilt, but hating themselves the entire time they're, you know, engaged in the kinds of games that they're engaged in. | ||
| So it's not, I think, that there's always going to be a single type. | ||
| Now again, in some cases it is something like, that was really inconsiderate. | ||
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Right. | |
| this, you know, sometimes it's a smallish thing. Well, that was really non-objective. | ||
| You weren't realizing, well, from his point of view and where he stands, he had good reason | ||
| to be concerned about this and you had good reason to be concerned about that, too. And | ||
| just one broader point. Sure. Well, I do think some of this is about what we mean by the | ||
| term. It's not just, oh, Rand is saying what everybody else is saying, but she's using | ||
| the word a little differently. | ||
| I mean, she is saying, no, radically different from just about everybody else who talks about ethics, you know, when she was writing Today Forever, your life is yours. | ||
| You should make the most of it in a way that's respectful of the fact that others' lives are theirs and so on. | ||
| But to do that, you need to be focused primarily on the value of your well-being to you and trying to think about what's really going to put together or compose that mosaic that is the best life for me. | ||
| So would it be fair to say that acting in your own self-interest is the most It's sort of the best way you can live if personal responsibility is of primacy to you. | ||
| Yeah, if personal responsibility and your own life, so I think another way of thinking about that She's advocating selfishness, and it's not the only term she uses as Tara was saying I mean rational self-interest is another one and another one is the pursuit of happiness But if really taking that seriously it means the pursuit of your own individual happiness that that's what you should be aiming at and Part of, I think what she's, when she's trying to reclaim the term selfishness, I think part of the way it gets a bad rap is people are presented with a false choice. | ||
| And the false choice is either I give up my values, the things I really care about, the stuff that makes me happy for the sake of other people. | ||
| Or else I'm losing and they're gaining apparently. | ||
| Or else it's I victimize other people and the idea is I'm somehow gaining by that and they're losing. | ||
| And those are your two choices. | ||
| So you can be selfless without a self and then you're sort of like a patsy and you give up everything for the sake of other people. | ||
| Or else you're selfish and that means you're exploiting and taking advantage of other people. | ||
| And she says this is a false choice. | ||
| And I think that's really important. | ||
| And both are not selfish. | ||
| So if you're really thinking about your self-interest, neither is the way to pursue it. | ||
| So there has to be some kind of third alternative. | ||
| And what she's putting out is a third alternative. | ||
| That you can live a life that you're aimed at your own happiness that's radically non-exploitative. | ||
| So you don't think of other people as prey. | ||
| So, I'm glad that you mentioned the term selfless, which seems like the reverse of selfish, because it seems like we live in a time right now where with all the virtue signaling and everything that's coming out of this sort of social justice warrior crew, that there's a facade of selflessness, as if they're doing all these things to be selfless, but I would argue they're doing it Probably because of some deep need within them. | ||
| It may not be scratching that itch, but how did the idea of selflessness become so thought of as so obviously right? | ||
| Well, that goes way back. | ||
| And I will say, I don't think that, you know, it's a separate discussion, but I don't think that all of these social justice warriors, or whatever you want to call them, I don't think they're all necessarily seeing themselves, a lot of them are seeing themselves as virtuous. | ||
| I think some of them are virtuous. | ||
| I don't think they see it all in terms of being selfless. | ||
| And there's some real good that can be done for certain causes, but that's a separate issue. | ||
| You know, I mean, think of Christ, think of scripture, and certainly other religions and other philosophies have this as well, but, you know, it's do for God or do for your other, you know, I am my brother's keeper. | ||
| There's something greater than me. | ||
| I mean, the individual, the you as you, has often, just from religious traditions, been, no, no, you know, you are a lucky wretch that God loves you, you know, and if you're lucky, if you earn salvation, how do you earn it? | ||
| By serving others. | ||
| By serving the Lord, by serving... So it's sort of been drilled out of people just... | ||
| For centuries, I mean it goes back in that sense. | ||
| Yeah, as two people that do this for a living and get in and out of these ideas, what techniques have you found to take a young person who's been so taught that either being selfless is the right thing to do or doing for others is the right thing to do and putting yourself secondary or the greater good, all of those phrases. | ||
| Do you have any tricks to kind of wake people up to some of this? | ||
| I'm not sure it's exactly a trick, but I think there's a question that it's not easy to ask and you can help people ask, which is why? | ||
| So why do you have to do these things? | ||
| Why is it that the nation counts more than you? | ||
| And so you're asking where this comes from? | ||
| Yeah, it has deep, deep origins, I think, in religion and even prior to that when you look in philosophy. | ||
| And it goes, it's for centuries and centuries. | ||
| If you just think of the Republicans and the But you basically can take any president in a state of the union, when he's trying to say, like, this is morally what you should do. | ||
| Live for a cause greater than yourself, greater than your desires. | ||
| That was George W. Bush. | ||
| Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. | ||
| So there's always this kind of conception that there's something higher above you. | ||
| It can be God, the nation, your race, and so on. | ||
| And your obligations are to that, and to sacrifice. | ||
| Why? | ||
| So that's the question. | ||
| Well, no, and it's a, yeah, I think it's, that's so important because these ideas of selflessness and service | ||
| are so taken for granted, people don't know why they're supposed to think that, but they know that they are. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| It's like, whoa, this is what I'm supposed to think. | ||
| But everybody thinks this. | ||
| Everybody respectable, everybody likable, everybody good, everybody decent, you know. | ||
| So, but it is this article of faith much more than a product of reason. | ||
| So, I mean, what you try to do with anybody is, A, get them to start questioning. | ||
| But I think another thing, sometimes it's helpful, is think about some of the concrete virtues. | ||
| You know, think about honesty, and how that might be self-interested. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Or justice, and how that might be self-interested. | ||
| Or certain alleged virtues, maybe aren't what they're cracked up to be, if you actually think about them in very specific kinds of circumstances. | ||
| And that's something I know that with students, you know, they can relate to the justice of dealing with roommates who don't pull their weight around the house and do the Dishes when they're supposed to do the dishes, or whatever it might be. | ||
| Right, so just being selfless in that case and always cleaning up after your roommate would not be the wisest thing for you, nor your roommate, nor the other roommate, or anyone involved. | ||
| Of course, of course, right? | ||
| It would be stupid. | ||
| You'd be a patsy. | ||
| Now, I mean, what most people, and you were speaking of the three alternatives, well, I'm either gonna exploit you or just be a sucker, right? | ||
| And Rand is offering a third alternative, but in a sense, I think of it sometimes as a fourth alternative, because another alternative that most people say, well, of course, you gotta be selfish sometimes. | ||
| You know, of course. | ||
| You're not being stupid. | ||
| You've got to take care of yourself. | ||
| You've got to go to the doctor or whatever. | ||
| But of course, you've got to put others first. | ||
| So it's a balance. | ||
| You play exploiter sometimes. | ||
| I mean, that's their version, right? | ||
| And what you're saying, it's not a zero-sum game. | ||
| Morality, having a good life, if you become happy, God bless you. | ||
| I don't believe in God, but you know, you get the point, right? | ||
| I mean, that's good, that's great. | ||
| That's no, that doesn't mean he can't be happy, that doesn't mean, there's no zero-sum there. | ||
| Right, I guess there's an idea that somehow if you're selfish that that precludes other people's happiness, that you're just gonna run rimshot of the world. | ||
| I've done selfish things today that I don't think did a damn thing to anybody else. | ||
| I did my little exercise this morning. | ||
|
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You ate all the snacks in the green room and left nothing for on bar. | |
| They were good. | ||
| Two good snacks. | ||
| I mean, there's much that we do to try to take good care of ourselves on a regular basis. | ||
| That has nothing to do with me. | ||
| Ripping off other people, or anything like that. | ||
| But again, if you're really thinking about, what is a person's well-being? | ||
| What is in their interest? | ||
| If you're really thinking about that, as opposed to, well, we've got these throwaway lines about it, then you have to start taking seriously what might be required. | ||
| So is that the key part of this, then, that most people just don't think these things through? | ||
| So if you ask the average person, well, are you selfish? | ||
| They say no, as if you've attacked them. | ||
| But if you really whittled it down to, well, how do you live your day? | ||
| Do you mostly do things that make your day Go well, basically, be it at work or at home or anything else. | ||
| Usually they'll say yes if they're living somewhat of a decent life. | ||
| Yeah, and I think part of what happens with the demonization of selfishness, it's part of the whole split that there's morality and there's practicality. | ||
| So you can either be moral or practical, or as Tara was saying, it's sometimes you want to be moral, so you're going to be selfless and give up things, but most of the time you want to do stuff that's practical and pro my life, but it's put in a completely different category. | ||
| And what Ayn Rand is saying is it's hard to be practical, to really devote yourself to your life. | ||
| And if you do that, it's moral. | ||
| And so she's uniting two things that most people split apart. | ||
| She would basically say that's the most moral thing you can do, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's hard. | ||
| That's part of what's different in her conception. | ||
| It's hard to do. | ||
| Yeah, and I think here again, you know, one of the caricatures of selfish. | ||
| You're just saying, do what you want to do. | ||
| Do whatever you feel like doing. | ||
| Now, again, think about that. | ||
| Try that for a week. | ||
| I'm not going to study for the test. | ||
| I don't feel like it. | ||
| I'm not going to go to the dentist. | ||
| I don't hate going to the dentist. | ||
| I mean, live that way. | ||
| I don't feel like thinking about what I can actually afford and how much money is in the bank. | ||
| See how that works out for you. | ||
| I mean, no, it takes thought. | ||
| And think about, I sometimes use these examples of where it's really clear you want to do what's best for you. | ||
| You're trying to decide which college to go to. | ||
| Let's say you've decided to go to college. | ||
| OK. | ||
| You know, there's a range of considerate. | ||
| How much does it cost? | ||
| How far away is it? | ||
| How good are they in the subjects I'm interested in? | ||
| You know, there's a variety. | ||
| What's the culture like at that college? | ||
| Is it too big? | ||
| You know, there's a lot of stuff to weigh. | ||
| Where even though the objective is, I want to do what's going to be best for me, that might be clear, unequivocal in your mind, doesn't mean it's a no-brainer what's going to be best for you. | ||
| And people face, that's just one example, I mean, you know, medical treatments in some cases, should I take this job? | ||
| There are a number of cases where it's not transparent, it's not always easy, it sometimes takes discipline to, you know, be on that paleo diet or make that marathon and train for it and so on. | ||
| So we're not saying just always take the shortcut or something like that. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| I suspect, if you remember when Mother Teresa died years ago, that they said that on her deathbed she was realizing that she wasn't as happy, basically, and that she had had doubts all along. | ||
| I suspect that wouldn't surprise you, as someone that tried to live for others all the time. | ||
| Yeah, I think she had, when you read some of her diaries, doubts about what she's doing. | ||
| I think part of the doubts are, it's, I've given up everything, and there's the big question of why, is there's really no reason to do it, and you need to invent a God, and all the particulars of it, that the God wants you to sacrifice and give up your things, and it's, you don't have any reason. | ||
| Really to do it. | ||
| You've never been given a reason. | ||
| That's part of what the faith is, that I'm going to subordinate myself to this alleged higher power. | ||
| And to live a life like that, you're going to have doubts. | ||
| Did Ayn Rand ever link any of this to just how we're wired? | ||
| That if you leave some people to their own devices, purely, that they will do some of the shadier, selfish stuff, let's say. | ||
| Because not everyone operates in a purely rational way of thinking all the time. | ||
| Do you know about if there was any connection to that? | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't put it as it's exactly wired, but it's sort of a default in that it's a real achievement to think. | ||
| So just to think and think what is right and wrong, what is true and false. | ||
| That's an achievement. | ||
| It's not you have to do something wrong. | ||
| Most people do that automatically and you have to be doing something wrong. | ||
| That is a positive achievement that a person has to choose. | ||
| And if he doesn't choose to do that, then I think there's all kinds of defaults that he's going | ||
| to follow what other people do. | ||
| He needs some kind of guide and he's not in this idea of self-responsibility. | ||
| He's not his own guide. | ||
| He's not figuring out what to do. | ||
| So the typical thing is to look to other people and that easily then can become | ||
| your sort of living for other people. | ||
| They're telling you what to do. | ||
| It's the authority and taking order kinds of things. | ||
| And it leads to so she has a lot from that perspective, I think. | ||
| But she thinks of it as a sort of default of you've got this tremendous capacity | ||
| that you could choose to realize and you can make something of your life. | ||
| And if you don't, then there's all kinds of things that happen. | ||
| And doing your own thinking. | ||
| is one of the major virtues that she talks about. | ||
| She talks about it in terms of independence, but it's, you've gotta do your own thinking. | ||
| Learn from others, be open to, and you can learn tremendously from others, | ||
| but you've gotta think it all through for yourself, whether it's on moral issues | ||
| and how I should lead my life or what I should do, or whatever, that's actually one of her | ||
| central selfish virtues is do your own thinking, try to understand for yourself | ||
| so that you can make good decisions about what's true, what's real, what's right, what's moral, | ||
| what's gonna serve my well-being and my happiness. | ||
| Are you guys particularly enthused at this moment for some of these ideas? | ||
| Because when I hear you say that about people thinking for themselves, I'd like to think I'm a little part of something that's happening online right now where people are doing it. | ||
| It doesn't mean they're all objectivists, per se, or anything else, but there does seem to be a resurgence, especially amongst young people. | ||
| And when I've done events with ARI, I meet all sorts of young people who maybe agree on this or disagree on that, and they're every color and race and sexuality and all of that stuff, that are thinking again. | ||
| And I don't know that if I was doing this exact thing, say, ten years ago, that it would have been as influential or effective. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very positive sign that there's these... I mean, you do long-form stuff with deep conversations and it gets a big audience. | ||
| And I actually think that part of what's going on, when you think particularly of the young people, it's this is what they expected college to be more like. | ||
| And unfortunately, college is not like that anymore. | ||
| It was I think more when I was still a student undergraduate student than it and so this deep exploration of ideas ideas I haven't encountered before I might not agree with but it takes work to even just listen and like what's this other perspective and let me think about it in the space to think and You're not supposed to just fall into lockstep with everybody else. | ||
| There's too much of that now So I think the fact that you can't you've got an audience and other people it's a it's It's a really positive sign. | ||
| As someone that's teaching young people, are you seeing sort of a resurgence of an interest in ideas? | ||
| Somewhat. | ||
| I mean, even though I'm at a big university, the University of Texas, I often teach small classes and somewhat selective honors classes, often at least. | ||
| So in that sense, I can't give you the most representative spectrum. | ||
| But I definitely see For instance, I've had free speech dialogues for several years. | ||
| I was hosting these sorts of things and just as Encore was saying, people, students, all sorts of students attended and really responded positively, again, in the sense that they really seemed like they wanted to engage with different ideas. | ||
| And I do think you're right that ten or twenty years ago there wouldn't have been as much interest in hearing other ideas, but I think it's just the bankruptcy of the reigning philosophies The reigning political philosophies and moral philosophies, and the fact that this selflessness, you know, really be selfless and serve it, even though that's still, you know, what you're supposed to think and what everybody says. | ||
| How long can you, I mean, you have to cheat on that in order to actually live. | ||
| You have to be prudential or practical, as Ankar was saying, right? | ||
| How long can people cheat? | ||
| And people are, I mean, Enough people, and often young people, are honest enough with themselves to realize maybe we need some different, broader theories here about what is good and bad, and maybe there is more to be said for self-interest. | ||
| So you've both mentioned morality here. | ||
| So let's try to link selfishness to morality. | ||
| So obviously, just look at America. | ||
| We live in a country of, I don't know, 350 million some-odd people who have all sorts of different moral beliefs. | ||
| Does that then complicate a society's ability to operate in a selfish way | ||
| because people have, people are, their bedrock of morality is starting in a different spot. | ||
| I think it does. | ||
| So, and if you think back to the founding of America, you need, it's not everybody has to agree with this, but you need a significant minority who thinks that the pursuit of happiness is a good thing to engage in. | ||
| And you can have different conceptions of all the details of what that happiness consistence, and the founding fathers were creating a system in which you're free. | ||
| And so you have an enormous amount of latitude of the kind of life you're going to build and so on. | ||
| But if you really have a perspective that it's a sin to pursue your own happiness and to exhibit, so another one of Ayn Rand's virtues, pride. | ||
| And pride is about making something of yourself and you can I mean, put it very colloquially, you can look in the mirror and have a moral approval, like, I'm morally good to have that, and that takes work to achieve that. | ||
| If that's regarded as a sin, then I think the whole system, political system, that the Founding Fathers designed, there's something deeply problematic about it. | ||
| And what you saw in the 19th and into the 20th centuries, with the rise of fascism, communism, various forms of socialism, I think was targeted at It's selfish to pursue your own happiness. | ||
| And it isn't. | ||
| And it's, yeah, I mean freedom is what's, you know, once you're talking about a society, an organized political society, I mean what allows people to have great variations in the gods that they pray to, or whether they pray at all, and the moralities that they practice, what allows that is a common commitment to individual's freedom. | ||
| But that's incompatible, I mean truly, and this is one of the things that I ran You know, what's really, I think, insightful on, you can't defend that idea that your life is yours and you have a right to it if you think, oh no, it's not. | ||
| It belongs to this god or that god or these people or society. | ||
| It's like, so no wonder we're losing freedom. | ||
| Again, that's another political conversation to have, right? | ||
| But no wonder, when will the underpinnings, the moral underpinnings, Yeah. | ||
| You briefly touched on the phrase rational self-interest. | ||
| Do you see any, is there any distinct difference between rational self-interest and selfishness? | ||
| Or is it just another way of saying the same? | ||
| I just mean them as the same, yeah. | ||
| You know, true, genuine selfishness, I mean as, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that, so that's a little bit of a branding thing, right? | ||
| I mean, if the word selfishness is going to scare a certain amount of people, I think rational self-interest sounds maybe a little more palatable to a certain amount of people. | ||
| Yeah, it's part branding, and I think it's important. | ||
| She didn't only use selfishness. | ||
| She used rational self-interest. | ||
| She used pursuit of happiness. | ||
| So it's not like she's saying, this is the term you have to use. | ||
| Don't use any of these others. | ||
| But I think she's using selfishness to be deliberately controversial, deliberately provocative, but in a very deep way. | ||
| And that goes back to some of what we were talking about. | ||
| People's attitude is sort of, we know what selfishness means, you don't, to Ayn Rand, and her perspective is exactly the reverse. | ||
| I know what it means, you don't. | ||
| You lump all kinds of people together under this rubric selfish, and they're so different, and some of these people are good, and some of these people are bad. | ||
| You don't really have a concept of what selfishness means, and this is how to think about it properly, and that's what she's trying to do in the book. | ||
| So it's deliberately provocative, but there's a deep point about, like, I understand this better than you do. | ||
| And people think the reverse. | ||
| So that's a good segue then to altruism. | ||
| How do we fit in how much should you say do for others? | ||
| Because a certain amount of people are going to watch this and go, these guys, I get it, okay, but what are they doing for other people then if they're just doing things for themselves all the time? | ||
| Which again gets to that definition, that more narrow definition of selfishness. | ||
| Rand, and I agree with her completely, opposes altruism. | ||
| By which I mean, you know, the elevation of others above oneself. | ||
| You know, up the value, you know, presuming that there is greater value in another person or the need of another person trumps my life, my needs, my values, right? | ||
| That's what she's against. | ||
| Now that's not the same thing as being against ever helping other people. | ||
| Or certainly not against benevolence. | ||
| Again, they think, oh, you're just a... I don't know. | ||
| Solipsist isn't even the word I'm looking for. | ||
| You know, you just don't like other people. | ||
| You're anti-social. | ||
| No, are you kidding? | ||
| Again, think about your life. | ||
| I don't know about you, but I love people. | ||
| I like people. | ||
| You know, they're individuals. | ||
| I like people a little bit. | ||
| You get to know them a little. | ||
| You know, you get to know some people and that goes away. | ||
| Would you? | ||
| Is your life better? | ||
| I mean, just broadly, again, to start, right? | ||
| Is your life generally better because of people? | ||
| Good things. | ||
| They came up with fantasy football. | ||
| They came up with all... No, I mean, there's like, you know, I mean, they came up... Don't get me started. | ||
| But you can value other people. | ||
| You can have very different kinds of relations. | ||
| I mean, there are some people who will become good friends. | ||
| There are some people you'll love. | ||
| I mean, my God, you're in love with this person. | ||
| I mean, there are people who you just like as a tennis partner or as a student. | ||
| We have all sorts of relationships. | ||
| And then there are circumstances in which it makes sense to do things for those people, but not as a sacrifice. | ||
| Not at the expense of, okay, I'll give to him because he needs it, and now, damn it, I'm not gonna get to do that serious thing I've been wanting to do and saving to do. | ||
| That's what she's against. | ||
| Self-sacrifice, putting others first. | ||
| And one of the things I talk about, I have a book which talks a lot about Rand's version of selfish virtues, and I have a section in there where I talk about generosity and charity and where they shine in, because they're not virtues for her. | ||
| But nor are they thou shalt nots. | ||
| You know, oh my God, that would be a mortal sin. | ||
| And you know, how can, oh Tara, you're going to be excommunicated. | ||
| No! | ||
| So there are circumstances. | ||
| They're not virtues in and of themselves, but they're good. | ||
| They're not obligations. | ||
| They're not standing obligations. | ||
| You know, when the opportunity arises, you must give. | ||
| Yeah, sorry. | ||
| Yeah, no, no. | ||
| I get, I get, I get into it. | ||
| No, no, I think that, that, that's really interesting. | ||
| I mean, so you were asking a little bit before about thinking of this from a more biological perspective, and I think part of the way she thinks about it is, so the whole issue of fact and value comes from biology. | ||
| So when you think about living things, you think about them as having values. | ||
| That is, some things are good for them, and some things bad. | ||
| Some things beneficial, some things harmful. | ||
| And that any living thing, I mean a plant, If you don't water it for two weeks, is that good or bad | ||
| for it? | ||
| And everybody has this perspective, "Well, it's obviously bad for it." | ||
| And any living thing you look at like that. | ||
| And it's true of human beings as well. | ||
| And it's how you should look at your own life. | ||
| There's values in the world that I have to pursue, given that I'm a human being. | ||
| But the selfishness as exploitation, the idea is it's dog-eat-dog. | ||
| dog. | ||
| And that's what she's rejecting completely. | ||
| And I think this is what's radically different about human beings, that we're capable of trading. | ||
| And so her principle, she calls it the trader principle, it's that you should be giving value for value with other people. | ||
| So you should seek out other people. | ||
| It's not just, okay, they happen to be here, so I'll go talk to them. | ||
| Seek out, there's all kinds of values. | ||
| You can learn from them, there's companionship, and there's trade and specialization and so on. | ||
| I mean, the civilization we live in, you couldn't live in each person on a desert island. | ||
| I mean, it's ridiculous. | ||
| But there's a vast, vast difference if you're dealing with someone where you're both profiting from the relationship, or only one person is. | ||
| And if it really is win-lose, whatever the direction, it's not a good relationship. | ||
| And we're capable of having win-win relationships. | ||
| That's particularly interesting to me, 'cause I think a lot of people think | ||
| you can't have a win-win situation. | ||
| I think a lot of people think in the terms of, if I'm getting something, | ||
| as if there's a finite amount of something, and that means that I have to be taking, | ||
| and I will now have more. | ||
| And that's where we're different. | ||
| Human beings are different, right? | ||
| We're not just like animals who have to scavenge and, oh no, there's only so much meat and if this wolf gets it, this one won't or something. | ||
| It's like, no, we create values. | ||
| And this was obviously, well, as anybody who's read Rand knows, a major theme. | ||
| It's our minds, our use of reason that enables us to create the values, not just find them somewhere, oh good, got there first, right? | ||
| Create the things that we need to survive, to flourish, to enrich our lives, to make our lives so good, right? | ||
| I mean, again, you just think of some of your best relationships. | ||
| Now, again, that's starting with your best relationships, right? | ||
| But hopefully, I don't know if you're married or what your situation is, right? | ||
| I'm married. | ||
| It's pretty win-win, I think. | ||
| Hopefully it's good for the two of you, right? | ||
| I mean, we're friends. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's good for the two of them, you know? | ||
| All sorts of relationships. | ||
| No, but I mean, there are all sorts of relationships. | ||
| Again, less personal, not the best ones, but, you know, not just to focus on the very best ones where, hey, this is good, this guy likes being a butcher, I like his meat, or whatever it might be. | ||
| And think how bizarre, so there's this common view that love is selfless. | ||
| Think, if you really try to spell it out, and this is you were asking like for tips for people, | ||
| ask what, like what does that mean? | ||
| And why, is this true? | ||
| And what it would really mean is you're in a relationship with another person and you would be telling them, | ||
| like I don't get anything from this relationship. | ||
| I don't really know why I'm in it, but you seem to be benefiting, so that makes it good. | ||
| Right, or they'd be that way too, and then. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, both of them, it's, and you can't, when you really project it, | ||
| it doesn't make sense. | ||
| And when she talks about trade, so she means it both in economic and material values, but also spiritual values. | ||
| You gain from being around good people. | ||
| And gain in a way just not like in your pocketbook. | ||
| Exactly, right. | ||
| I think sometimes the word trade does have those narrowly economic connotations. | ||
| And it's not like, oh, you calculate how much you get. | ||
| You know, the more good, successful people are around you, the richer the pool from which we all have to benefit. | ||
| I mean, I will write just, you know, thinking of another natural win-win. | ||
| That's great if the woman who wrote all the Harry Potter books is richer than Midas or whatever. | ||
| She brought a hell of a lot of pleasure and so on to other people, right? | ||
| I will frequently write an author if I really like their writing. | ||
| It might be fiction or whatever, you know? | ||
| Or a singer, a performer I really like. | ||
| That's great! | ||
| She's getting the accolades, or she's getting the money, and I really enjoyed this book, or that concert, or something. | ||
| It's win-win. | ||
| I see it as an application, in a way, of justice, of respecting what I think somebody deserves. | ||
| Like, wow, that was out of the ordinary, in my view, so I just want to tell them that. | ||
| Lots of win-win out there. | ||
| So when someone says, well, wait a minute, J.K. | ||
| Rowling has made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, and nobody could possibly need that much money. | ||
| She didn't get it, because she needed it. | ||
| She needed it. | ||
| She got it, because people wanted to. | ||
| They thought, I'm better off. | ||
| I want that book. | ||
| I actually haven't read those, but I've been reading her mysteries, which I like very much. | ||
| There's a plug for you now. | ||
| Let's make that woman a little money. | ||
| Yeah, the poor thing. | ||
| Hey man, she worked hard to do that, and people want it, so they want to pay, so it's right. | ||
| And if you think about the question, when she has more money than she needs, that only seems like a criticism if you have the zero sum. | ||
| So she's amassed so much, and that means other people are losing out. | ||
| But what you should want, and again, if you're selfish, you should want everybody doing what | ||
| she's doing. | ||
| Like, you should want more people like that, more people like Bill Gates, more people like | ||
| Steve Jobs. | ||
| I mean, think of how Steve Jobs transformed the world with the iPhone. | ||
| And would you, like, you want to get rid of him or you want ten more people like him? | ||
| And just from the perspective of your life and your benefiting, it's for sure I would rather have ten more than try to take him and then discourage these potential ten upcomers because, look, when he gets really successful, which is what happened to Bill Gates, we're going to go after him. | ||
| It's in their interest to be free like that. | ||
| It's in my interest to be. | ||
| Right, because everyone wants to be that person. | ||
| If you're living a sensible life, you want to do something, not because necessarily you just want to be rich, but you want to do something that has value. | ||
| So it's interesting. | ||
| Let's try to bring this into a little bit of what's happening right now. | ||
| You know, there's all this talk about taxes now and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talking about this 70% marginal tax rate. | ||
| And I saw this really interesting Twitter thread where someone took The Rock, they said, Dwayne Johnson, he makes $250 million a year. | ||
| And then they tried to break it down, what it would look like if he was having to pay all these taxes. | ||
| And because over 10 million, then it's at 70%. | ||
| And basically, after this long Twitter thread, they got it down to something like, even if he's making 250 and we tax him out of the wazoo, he'll make $35 million a year. | ||
| And who couldn't live on that? | ||
| And I just was reading it, I thought, That just doesn't make it right. | ||
| Makes you kind of feel good. | ||
| So we sort of outsourced our brains on this, in a way. | ||
| Well, I think it's... To feeling good about something that has nothing to do with you. | ||
| But you're making him sacrifice. | ||
| You're making him give up values for other people. | ||
| And that's supposed to be good. | ||
| So they think of it as they're doing something good. | ||
| But it comes from a view that selfishness is wrong and being selfless is right. | ||
| And if someone's not going to do it voluntarily, we're going to force him to do it. | ||
| Which is directly correlated to just state power and the role of government, which obviously Ayn Rand talked about a lot too. | ||
| What about some of this is just that we live in a way in a society where we have outsourced our virtue so that, you know, it's like if the government does everything and the government takes care of poor people, whether they do it well or not is a separate issue. | ||
| That we don't have to do certain things that perhaps if we lived in a society that was a little freer, we might actually do more and feel good about it. | ||
| Well, we'd have to think more. | ||
| It goes back to something we were talking about much earlier in the conversation, I think. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of outsourcing of conscience. | ||
| Um, both to the government and to just society in general. | ||
| Like, there's a sense in which it's easy to be the altruist or the selfless. | ||
| You say all the things that all the respectable people say, right? | ||
| You give variations of those. | ||
| You were reading or mentioning some of the kinds of things that State of the Union addresses or commencement addresses, right? | ||
| So you seem like one of the, you know, One of the with-it guys or whatever, right? | ||
| So whether it be we outsource it to government, to... Well, yeah, I have a guilty conscience, so tax me so that I'm fulfilling my duty, but then I can still go buy the purse I want to buy or whatever it might be. | ||
| Again, are we serious about, do you want to be a good person? | ||
| You've got to think about what it is to be a good person. | ||
| But from the more positive end, too, I think you want to be happy. | ||
| Do you think it's a good thing for people to be happy? | ||
| Who's against that? | ||
| Then we have to seriously think about how you're going to get that. | ||
| How is anybody going to be happy? | ||
| And I know for me, one of the real turning points as I was discovering objectivism and coming around to, yeah, this self-interest, you know, on the right understanding, and her is really good, is when it clicked for me, and I had been thinking about it a while, like, you can't make other people happy. | ||
| I think this is really important. | ||
| There's all sorts of things you can do for other people, and that can be of substantial, serious benefit to other people, right? | ||
| But I can't make you a happy person. | ||
| I can't make you fulfilled. | ||
| I can't make what it's like to be you feel good to you, feel fulfilling, feel rewarding, feel like this is a life worth... I can't give that to you. | ||
| Even if I know you really well, and I do everything... | ||
| There's more to say there, but if that's the case... | ||
| Then the only way for anybody to be happy, to have the best life they can have, is for them to go after it for themselves. | ||
| And that's going to take, again, really thinking. | ||
| Maybe I'm inclined... So then what can you then do for somebody? | ||
| So let's say... Oh, there's circumstances in which you can, you know, your rich uncle can pay for your tuition. | ||
| You know, I mean, right? | ||
| You can be the good friend who really listens and tries to understand and, you know, I mean, so there are a variety of ways in which we do benefit. | ||
| Again, we were talking earlier about relationships as potentially real win-winners. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So there are all sorts of things you can do, but you've got to know what somebody else can't give me. | ||
| You know, it's like, ah, that comes from... Let's say I'm learning chess, okay? | ||
| Quick example. | ||
| You're teaching me chess, and now it's the first time I'm actually going to go have a match with this guy over there, right? | ||
| And you're like in the room, feeding me all that, you know, you're telling me everything to do. | ||
| And I do everything, and I beat him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| Am I going to feel good? | ||
| Am I going to be learning? | ||
| Am I really getting ahead? | ||
| I won, right? | ||
| That's a rough analogy. | ||
| You've got to do it for yourself. | ||
| You have to lead your life. | ||
| And, you know, thinking about what's going to make me fulfilled, happy, feel good, you know, what's actually going to be me using my resources, my capacities and growing and self-realization and all that. | ||
| That's the kind of thing somebody's got to do for themselves. | ||
| They could still have great relationships with others and that can be part of, you know, them building their good lives. | ||
| Yeah, so a lot of this also comes down to the right way of parenting, probably, too, which is that you just want to give this person that you brought up into the world the right tools so that they can go ahead and figure it out for themselves, as opposed to just handing them a bag full of, you know, the problems are all fixed and, you know, do whatever the hell you want to do. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's the parenting and wider education. | ||
| I mean, we're both teachers and we both know there's a lot of things you can do to help students learn. | ||
| But if they're not putting in the work, you can't shove the knowledge into their mind. | ||
| And if we're thinking about valuing as it requires a lot of knowledge and of really thinking things through. | ||
| Is this the right career for me? | ||
| Is this really worth doing? | ||
| Is this producing a value? | ||
| And having a first-hand view about that. | ||
| You can't shove that into somebody's head. | ||
| You can help them see certain things, but they have to do a lot of work and you're trying to encourage them and show them like there's an end result that's really positive. | ||
| But they have to put in the work. | ||
| And this is the, both, I think, Ayn Rand thinks of two virtues as virtues, the moral traits of character that most people don't. | ||
| They might think of them, again, as practical, but not as moral. | ||
| And that's, you need to be rational, which is really think things through for yourself. | ||
| Don't be too quick to just agree with everyone else. | ||
| Do I really understand things? | ||
| And to be really Pursuing and loving knowledge and then to be making stuff to be producing and I think that's the most distinctive and it goes back to this she views life as trade when you're interacting with people you can create new values and If to go back to the Cortez the 70% She's seen as moral because she's gonna take somebody else's money and give it to somebody else and the guy who's created it | ||
| is not seen as moral, and he has no say about what happens to his money. | ||
| He's an afterthought. | ||
| Yeah, because he made it! | ||
| Because the money's here, because he already did the dirty work, right? | ||
| He's got enough. | ||
| Now, I mean, there are circumstances which say, that's enslavement, but somehow, oh no, this is moral, this is, oh yeah, this is the higher ground that we should all be on. | ||
| Well, it also, at some level I suppose, comes down to that a certain amount of people think that they can control the universe, or something to that effect, right? | ||
| Like she's trying to build a system that if she could only build her perfect system, we would all behave in the way she wants us to behave. | ||
| Which is pretty authoritarian. | ||
| Which is called dictatorship. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| There is a word for that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not polite to say of Saint Cortez right now. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Well, we just opened the YouTube comments up. | ||
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| Let's link this though to justice as long as we're talking about Cortez. | ||
| And you mentioned justice before. | ||
| Now everyone that watches my show knows how frustrated I am with the social justice crew. | ||
| But as you alluded to earlier, there are, it's not, | ||
| first off, I would never argue that it's totally malintended. | ||
| I think most of these people think that they're doing good. | ||
| I think ultimately what they're creating is not good. | ||
| But where does justice, well I guess how would you define justice and where would it fit into this conversation? | ||
| Justice is definitely one of the central virtues in Rand's account of selfish virtues. | ||
| She says justice is a matter of judging other people objectively. | ||
| And treating them accordingly. | ||
| So, you know, a couple parts to that, right? | ||
| It does involve judging people, as opposed to judge not and be not judged, or who are you to be judgmental, or who are you to judge, and all that. | ||
| No, no, you have to judge individuals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| People always say, don't judge me, but we do this every moment of the day. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have to judge. | |
| Every interaction you have is a judgment. | ||
| And notice that if you're good, you're not going to say, don't judge me. | ||
| But if you don't like things about you. | ||
| Oh, don't judge. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But it's, again, judge objectively. | ||
| So you have to go by the evidence. | ||
| And sometimes you don't have enough evidence. | ||
| So don't judge prematurely. | ||
| Don't be like, oh, I gotta reach a judgment. | ||
| I don't know enough yet, or I don't have enough to go, or whatever. | ||
| So you have to judge, judge objectively, and act accordingly. | ||
| Treat the person as he deserves. | ||
| And yeah, so it's definitely a virtue. | ||
| It's a virtue, again, it's an application of being rational, as Ankar was talking about earlier. | ||
| Be realistic about people. | ||
| People vary in many, many different respects. | ||
| It's not just a matter of judging their moral character. | ||
| I have to judge my mechanic. | ||
| Gee, every time I bring the car to that guy, I always have to bring it back three weeks late or whatever, right? | ||
| Or this place charges too much for whatever it might be, right? | ||
| You judge roommates again, you know. | ||
| college roommates, whatever kind of... | ||
| Who should I... | ||
| Who should I have babysit the kid? | ||
| I mean, we judge people for all sorts of things, minor, major, | ||
| you know, very consequential or not. | ||
| It makes sense for your own self-interest to try to be very clear-eyed in the judgments that you make | ||
| and, you know, I'll give my business there or not. | ||
| Or, no, I'm really interested in that person. | ||
| Let's see if she wants to go out Saturday night, or whatever it might be. | ||
| So you judge people, you treat them objectively. | ||
| So if we live in a society, though, where people have a different moral bedrock, and I know that even though you'd love for everyone to live by these rules, obviously you're not going to impose it on them, I know that much. | ||
| How do we get a consistent definition of what justice is, then, as a society? | ||
| I think it has deeper foundations, and there has to be some agreement on those deeper foundations. | ||
| Again, not every single person has to agree, but if you have on the foundational issues in a society everyone disagreeing about everything, you can't build a culture. | ||
| You don't really have a culture. | ||
| You have a clash and an ideological clash. | ||
| We seem to be sort of in that right now, actually. | ||
| And I think it's because there's various competing issues. | ||
| There's still the enlightenment heritage of viewing people as individuals, and that they have control over their lives, over their thinking and action, and I can therefore judge them as individuals. | ||
| And that justice is an issue of judging individual by individual. | ||
| You can't have blanket and collective When we're talking about moral judgment, that all blacks are all gays, there's no such thing if you're really thinking of... Men are the abdomen. | ||
| It's like, guys! | ||
| And the more you have, again at the deeper foundations of the culture, the more it's pushing that what your identity is, is your group. | ||
| And it can be different groups. | ||
| The more that your conception of justice is totally different, because you don't think of it as an individual in control of their lives, and I have to judge individual by individual. | ||
| And if there's not agreement about that, like if most people think, no, we're just these group of tribal... And rich people are exploiters? | ||
| 70% I'll take. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| And this is tremendously what's happening right now. | ||
| I mean, this is what I would say the sort of oppression Olympics of judging us by those traits and looking at somebody and going, you have darker skin, so I should think this, or you're a woman, so I should think this. | ||
| I mean, this seems to have become mainstream thought right now. | ||
| So it's funny, when I've had Yaron Brook on a couple of times, he'll talk about how, well, when he goes to Eastern Europe where they're starved for ideas because they've lived through communism, Well, they love Ayn Rand because they need a spark of individual. | ||
| I've had just a few, nothing like your own, but a few Eastern European countries and spoken there, and yeah, the reality of the alternatives is more palpable to these people, even younger generations, but they remember their grandfather's farm and, you know, do it all because you didn't have A freer economy and so on. | ||
| It's all much more real to them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yeah, I think we've definitely kind of socialized the idea of justice. | ||
| I mean, justice is an interesting virtue in that it goes way back and many different cultures, East and West, have very strong ideas of justice. | ||
| And many of them are essentially this idea of you treat people as they deserve. | ||
| But it's gradually over the years been Distorted and ideas about individual deserve, oh, no individual can deserve anything, you know. | ||
| You are what the community made you. | ||
| You are just, you know, it takes a village. | ||
| You know, you didn't build that, God forbid. | ||
| It's like, well, I kind of did in some cases, you know. | ||
| It is the individuals who did. | ||
| But it's a sort of transposition of the anti-individualist that's really perverted justice in some of these ways that we're seeing. | ||
| So this has been a through line through everything we've done here, but let's just bring this to honesty also and why honesty is so important. | ||
| It's, again, I think she has a very distinctive view. | ||
| So most people think of honesty back, linking it to selfishness, that if I were to be selfish, I'd be dishonest. | ||
| Because I'd exploit other people. | ||
| I'd lie to them. | ||
| I'd cheat. | ||
| I'd tell more than one story. | ||
| I'd switch that odometer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's what's selfish. | ||
| But honestly, well, I tell the truth and I'm interested in the truth for other people. | ||
| And Rand's view that I think it's really important to get that this is right is, you should care about the truth for yourself. | ||
| Her conception of honesty is a passionate commitment that I want to know what's true about my life in the world. | ||
| If I'm in a bad relationship, I don't want to fake and pretend that I'm in a good relationship. | ||
| I'm never going to get to being in a good relationship. | ||
| If I don't face the fact, I'm not in a good relationship. | ||
| I don't like my job at work. | ||
| People on Facebook will think you're happier than you are. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And that's, I mean, if you really have a conception of It's my life, I've got one to live and so on. | ||
| It doesn't matter what other people think about it and if they think you're happy or they think you're not. | ||
| You know from the inside, you have a perspective on your own life. | ||
| Is it going well or not? | ||
| And part of honesty is to Look at yourself in a deep way and think, do I like everything about myself? | ||
| Are there things that I don't? | ||
| Things that I can improve? | ||
| Do I like my situation in life in thinking about happiness? | ||
| I'm in a dead-end career, or I liked it, but I'm now just going through the motions, sort of. | ||
| I need a change. | ||
| And if you pretend or fake, you don't gain anything. | ||
| You're still in this job that you're not really fulfilling. | ||
| You're pretending to yourself and maybe other people 'cause you have to be respectable | ||
| and you can't have a midlife crisis or whatever. | ||
| But if that's what's happening, you should really face it. | ||
| I mean, the way I think of it often is just, faking things doesn't change things, right? | ||
| You can pretend to other people or to yourself, right? | ||
| But faking things doesn't change things, so the sooner I figure out what things are and, like, face that honestly, the better position I'm in to pursue my happiness, you know, to have a good life, to get out of this... And a lot of it is avoiding self-deception. | ||
| I think that's really important. | ||
| It's not just a matter of, are you honest? | ||
| Do you tell lies? | ||
| Right? | ||
| The road to hell is paved with evasion, or fudging, or just kind of, you know? | ||
| You've got to be honest with yourself. | ||
| You've got to be honest. | ||
| You've got to try to face facts and find out when you don't know what's what, so that you can make the best decisions, right? | ||
| So faking isn't going to help. | ||
| But again, what's interesting, I think, is usually when people are taught, well, you've got to be truthful, you've got to be honest, because The reasons given are, well, you'll get a bad reputation if you're found out to be a liar, right? | ||
| Your credibility will suffer. | ||
| People won't want to deal with you. | ||
| Or, in general, this is bad for the social fabric of trust, reliability. | ||
| You know, we need a lot of that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, no, those things are both true. | |
| But one solution would be become a better liar. Don't be found out, right? | ||
| It's like, no, that's not really going to help. | ||
| Because more fundamentally than what other people think or your dealings with other people, | ||
| if you're alone on a goddamn desert island, I don't know, on that old movie castaway or something, | ||
| I'm like, you've got to be honest about it. | ||
| I've got something here that I think I should worry about. | ||
| I think there's a storm coming this way. | ||
| I've got to follow the facts. | ||
| I've got to track the truth if I'm going to make rational decisions. | ||
| So it's a very reality-based Approach to honesty. | ||
| Yeah, faking things doesn't change them. | ||
| You can lie on the CV and pretend you can do something that you can't. | ||
| Good luck when you get in the job then, you know, if you can fool people for a while, but you can't fool reality. | ||
| Then are there moments where being dishonest is actually within your rational self-interest? | ||
| I wouldn't put it as dishonest, but if you have too concrete a view of what honesty and dishonesty mean, then... So, are there times when I would lie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I mean, the kind of standard examples of if some gang is going around killing people and they ask, well, where's your wife or whatever? | ||
| I'm going to lie. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I don't view that as dishonest. | ||
| So, I think of honesty as loyalty to the facts. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And dishonesty is I'm trying to get around the facts and trying to achieve something while getting around the facts. | ||
| I don't think you can achieve something. | ||
| You can try to put people off the scent for a minute and lie to them. | ||
| And I think that's the standard kind. | ||
| I think there are other situations where I would lie because someone's trying to invade your privacy and so on. | ||
| And if you just say no comment or something like that, it's often better if you lie and they go off looking in some direction where they should. | ||
| So there are situations, but I don't think of that as... Honesty is about... I'm loyal to the facts. | ||
| I want to know, because I need knowledge in order to guide my life and to succeed in everything that I'm trying to do. | ||
| And I think even when you think of it in regard to other people, the reason... You brought up Bernie Madoff before, who lied left, right, center. | ||
| Why does he feel out of control of his own life? | ||
| And when you read, it's because As Tara was saying, he knows that he's lying, so these are | ||
| not facts. | ||
| And the liar typically thinks, "I'm so sophisticated and a good liar, and these are all idiots | ||
| who can't discover any facts." | ||
| But the facts are out there to discover, and you know that. | ||
| So viewed long-term, someone's going to find out the way he's cooking the books and so | ||
| on. | ||
| And the more his scheme goes on, the more things there is to find out. | ||
| And he knows that. | ||
| He experiences a massive... that he's out of control, because he is out of control. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So basically, he's building a house, a car. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he might be the one that knocks... | ||
| Yeah, inadvertently. | ||
| He has to keep his five different stories straight and he tells the wrong thing to the wrong person who then starts to question. | ||
| And that's inevitable in this situation because the facts are still there, out there for people to discover. | ||
| Wishing doesn't make it so. | ||
| So that's an interesting way to link to the final topic that we'll talk about, which is pride. | ||
| So they say pride cometh before the fall. | ||
| He must have thought, Madoff must have thought, I can manage all this stuff because these people, as you said, they must be idiots. | ||
| And I can manage all of this. | ||
| But it was his pride, in a way, that was almost his downfall at some level. | ||
| Well, his, I would say, his fake pride. | ||
| Yeah, that's I think the thing. | ||
| Not his authentic pride that I think you guys subscribed to. | ||
| You know where we're coming from now. | ||
| You're getting the idea. | ||
| That's good, that's good. | ||
| I'm not saying he had the right virtue of pride in mind, but that he had concocted a system in his mind that he felt Yeah, that he's superior to everybody, so he can juggle this and so on. | ||
| He's capable, nobody else is. | ||
| But that is just, that's such massive self-deception, I think. | ||
| There's no reason to think that. | ||
| Just think of the investment world. | ||
| There's all kinds of people, like Warren Buffett and so on, who are Like, orders of magnitude a better investor than me. | ||
| If you were really thinking about it, there's no way you could think that I can dupe everybody about everything. | ||
| And there were rumors over a long period of time of people who understood that there's no way that this scheme is fraudulent. | ||
| I might not know the specific fraud, but there's no way. | ||
| And a lot of smart money avoided him. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| So there's such self-deception going on. | ||
| And Pride is about developing a character that's good, and therefore you can respect. | ||
| And he's doing exactly the opposite. | ||
| He's expecting someone that he can't look in the mirror. | ||
| And when you read about the account, it's more and more he feels like that. | ||
| And he's just trying to put something over on others, and that's where he's seeking his self-esteem by. | ||
| Ooh, what a good, clever guy I am. | ||
| Rand talks about pride as a virtue. | ||
| We're told pride is one of the seven deadly sins. | ||
| She says it's one of the six or seven major virtues. | ||
| What's she talking about? | ||
| She's not talking about patting yourself on the back. | ||
| It's not the self-congratulatory, oh, I'm wonderful. | ||
| Get ready for my close-up. | ||
| Pride is about, well, she describes it as moral ambitiousness, which I think is one of the loveliest phrases in her non-fiction writing. | ||
| Trying to be the best person you can be. | ||
| You referred to making your character. | ||
| You know, we talk of a self-made man, he made his fortune, or J.K. | ||
| Rowling made her fortune. | ||
| You make your character. | ||
| You can make your character as good as it can be, not as an end in itself, but so that you can have the best life. | ||
| Hey, I want to really live according to the principles that make sense for human happiness, for human beings to have rich, flourishing lives worth living. | ||
| So if I figure out what the right principles are, I want to practice those. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| I want to be perfect. | ||
| Now perfect, you know, everybody freaks out when you say the word perfect. | ||
| I want to be as good as I can be. | ||
| You know, when I'm 22 years old, when I'm 28, I have different capacities and so on at different times. | ||
| So it's make your life as good as it can be. | ||
| Be morally ambitious. | ||
| That means, again, you've got to be honest with yourself. | ||
| It doesn't mean you excuse. | ||
| It's like, no, no. | ||
| If you realize, ooh, Tara, that was not, that was not too good. | ||
| You've got to be honest. | ||
| If you really care about Your character, your life being as good as it can be, but that's what she's talking about. | ||
| Yeah, you should be proud. | ||
| You should feel good about yourself when you've earned that. | ||
| Aristotle said the same thing on that part. | ||
| You know, he said, yeah, pride is the crown of the virtues when you practice all the other virtues and can honestly look at yourself in the mirror. | ||
| But what it's about is not this gaze. | ||
| And it's not comparative. | ||
| It's not, oh, I'm so much better than him. | ||
| It's, I want to make my life as good as it can be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to be morally ambitious. | |
| That's pretty good. | ||
| I'll make one last comment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That felt like a good ending to me, and then we locked eyes. | |
| Give me something here. | ||
| Just to look at it back from the perspective of the moral and the practical, this is, when she's saying they go together, most people fear morality, they're suspicious of it, because they think of it as there to take their values away. | ||
| It's the Rock. | ||
| He's made 70 million, and now, well, to be moral, you would give 70% of it away. | ||
| And what her whole conception is, no, you live it to the fullest. | ||
| So pride is both, it's moral and practical, and you're trying to unite these things together. | ||
| So instead of fearing morality, you're interested in it, and you want to learn its principles because it's going to advance your life. | ||
| It's such a radically different view of thinking about morality. | ||
| That is a solid ending, my friend. | ||
| All right, well, it's been a pleasure chatting with you guys. | ||
| Thanks for watching, everybody. |
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