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Feb. 15, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:00
646 Jennyism Part 1
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Good evening, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It's the 15th of February.
It is 5.40pm.
And yes, we have a scad of background music.
I'm actually in a pub. You know, I just...
I don't feel that we eat together enough anymore.
We just... we never seem to have time to do dinner together.
So I thought I would try and alleviate that by giving you some pearls of wisdom combined with some horrible gnashing and mashing sounds as I chew my way through a fine slab of Canadian burger with salad.
And I have a light beer, so I should be slightly more incoherent, probably within about...
Oh, actually, no, it's already happened.
So, I wanted to have a bite to eat before heading to the gym.
Christine is seeing some patients tonight.
And I also wanted to have the chance to...
Have a chat about a fine and very intelligent and very linguistically skilled lady, a woman, Frieda Mainer, potential Frieda Mainer, who has posted some interesting stuff on the board.
She was brought to our attention by a listener who had asked her opinion of Ayn Rand's novels on a message board.
And she kindly gave said impressions to the message board.
And she posted them, or this gentleman posted her responses on our board.
And then there was a minor hullabaloo.
And then she came to bravely come along and clarify her position, which I certainly appreciate.
I think it's great.
And so I thought I would read a little bit of her post in response to some clarifying questions.
She had objections to Ayn Rand.
Is it really worth going into or not?
It's hard to say.
Could be yes, could be no.
Let me just take a moment to think about it, or hit the pause button, rather.
Well, why not?
Let's have a look at a critique of Rand, which is interesting.
She says, That and everyone likes it oh so much.
Her philosophy isn't founded upon any single deductive supposition, and she's parading her propaganda as literature in possibly the most annoying way possible.
If I wanted to read about the fantasies of the perfect and perfectly shallow who live in their perfect world, I'd go on by a people or turn on E! If you want to write a political book with a model of how the world is supposed to work, please, for the love of God, don't pretend it's some pretentious literary triumph and write it as it would apply to the real world.
That, and it reads like Catcher in the Rye, only longer and shittier, because, you know, Catcher in the Rye was short and to the point, while Atlas just throws in pages and pages of unnecessary crap.
The best books are under 200 pages, or require a lengthy conversation to go over all the subplots.
Her book can be summarized as follows.
Shallow perfect woman meets shallow perfect man.
They have hot perfect sex in a perfect world, and then talk about how socialism sucks.
The end. That, and she has the stupidity to call it objectivism.
I find nothing objective about her stupid views.
I mean, at least other philosophers have the balls to call it something other than, this is the truth and reality, and if you don't believe it, you are stupid.
That, they actually write philosophic books about their philosophy, instead of the literary masturbation that was Atlas Shrugged.
Finally, Nietzsche basically said all the good points, the free will and power of the individual, of her philosophy, 60 years before she did.
So she just ripped off Nietzsche, wrote a really long book about nothing, then added a bunch of superfluous crap that made the otherwise rational and meaningful foundations of her views look like crap.
The entire thing read like a sick little daydream of Trump or Greenspan.
I mean, Marx was really wrong about a lot, but at least he was intelligent about it.
I don't see anything around that alludes to any other philosophical or scientific movement without ripping it off and mutating it into something sophomoric and dull.
Anyway, I'm not going to go on because it's not a very good review.
Just she finishes off like, I hate Ayn Rand, she's a traitor to her own sex and to mankind.
Now, a horrible writer, I mean, whether that's important or not, I really couldn't tell you.
Whether it's important whether Rand was a good writer or a bad writer, I don't think it's particularly relevant.
This is not literary criticism, but philosophical criticism.
And her philosophy isn't founded upon any single deductive supposition.
I don't think that's the case.
She went over her three basic suppositions quite continually.
That A is A, that capitalism is the best moral system, and she had lots of reasoning that worked from the bottom up.
Probably one of the stupidest modes of thought of the 20th century.
Now that really is quite an astounding claim when you think about it.
I mean, the 20th century includes things like Fabian socialism, it includes Marxism, it includes fascism, national socialism, or Nazism.
It includes, I guess, Scientology.
It includes a lot of things, a lot of really bad ideas floating around the 20th century.
Ayn Rand is probably, as she says, one of the worst.
And this is just a series of statements, though.
There's no sort of actual reasoning.
So I asked for some sort of additional explanations.
I don't think that we're going to get too far, because this is not a particularly rational response to the novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, pretty much.
So then she posted and says, So, hello everyone, I'm the courtesy socialist who posted the critique of Rand.
What prompted this, you might ask?
Well, being a member of academia, as most people my age are, I had a lunch conversation with a bunch of fellow philosophy majors.
We somehow got into the topic of objectivism, which is not objective at all, I might add, but not proven, right?
And Ayn Rand. Before I had a sufficient reply to what my colleagues were talking about, I collected my thoughts about Atlas Shrugged later at home and checked out a copy of some of her collective works.
Thank you.
What a mess I got myself into.
Before I start, I want to add this.
I'm probably more leftist economically than a good portion of you.
I have socialist leanings.
I also have a healthy streak of anarchism, and I agree with the basic libertarian, or whatever it's called these days, too many labels for the fringe group's premises, of as much civil and political freedom as possible.
I just have a very contrasting view of what economic freedom is.
I'm saying this because, although trolling is a lovely pastime of mine, I'm not trolling right now.
I'm not cursing nearly enough for that.
Rather, I want to say this.
I read a lot of books, and I don't agree 100% with any of them.
Even my favorite philosophers have a good pile of bullshit in their writings.
I don't even particularly like Marx, and you thought I was a flaming commie.
What I do not like, however, is cults and sheep.
And what I see when I encounter a few supporters of objectivism in Rand are cultists and sheep looking for any philosophy to justify their values.
I'm not calling you a sheep.
I'm saying that there are sheep.
What particularly bothers me about Rand is that she was not a good writer.
And she is not a philosopher.
Yet her book is the most rightly read after the Bible.
These are my points about why I strongly dislike Rand other than...
What I've already stated from what I've gathered from interview transcripts and other works.
She is not recognized on the academic circuit as a philosopher.
She is not read alongside Nietzsche, Marx, Smith, Rousseau, Locke, or Hobbes.
She has clearly and blatantly insulted basically every philosopher that came before her, including the ones she swiped most of her material from, such as Nietzsche.
Actually, not true. Aristotle was a high, high praise of hers.
In fact, the basic chapter headings, the section headings of Nietzsche, Atlas Shrugged were based upon her respect for Aristotle's Three Laws of Logic.
She has claimed that we women should delight in our subservience to men and that we should not, nor ever will be, president.
Yes, absolutely true.
I think that may be to some degree nonsense.
I can't claim to speak for all women, or even any women, or any men, other than myself, but...
I certainly would accept that it's rather foolish to say that about women and about the presidency and so on, and that women should delight in their subservience to men.
I don't really think that that's the case.
But, you know, when it comes to judging philosophers, it's a rather dangerous thing, I think, to say, well, this philosopher said something stupid out of the thousands of pages that she wrote, and therefore this is not something to be taken seriously.
And I think that's just sort of a mistake.
Because if you're going to have that standard about philosophy and philosophers, then you're not going to be able to read anyone, right?
Because, I mean, Ayn Rand certainly made far less of a mess of her life than lots of other philosophers.
So if you're going to have that standard, then you have to ditch out all the philosophers that you have for work.
A good portion of her logical statements are so circular.
They make circles look square.
Again, that's a statement. That's not proof.
She has a cult. And she's Russian.
Does anyone read her for context anymore?
She was critiquing the USSR, which we all know was the crappiest form of communism.
I'd be pretty angry myself if I were Russian in those ten.
That said, I agree with one basic point.
The power of the individual is limitless.
However, this was said 60 years ago much more eloquently by Nietzsche.
That's the answer. I agree with her foundation.
Humanity is awesome and fantastic and can do anything.
It's just that she takes this to such an illogical extreme, contrary to any and all sense of morality, humanity, and emotion, that I simply cannot respect her at all.
That and the anti-feminist thing really set me off.
One, it's interesting to me that feminists get upset with Ayn Rand and get upset with Margaret Thatcher.
Isn't feminism supposed to be pro-woman rather than pro-ideology?
And Margaret Thatcher and Ayn Rand, two of some of the most influential human beings in the 20th century, are rightly derided by feminism.
Feminism to me is just socialism with tits, but I could be wrong about that.
It's just because they're all so hostile towards right-wing.
I mean, Ayn Rand said, as a woman who wrote the second most influential book after the Bible, you'd think that as a woman, she would be quite pleased with that achievement, that a woman would have such power in the realm of ideas.
And you'll notice that all of the philosophers that she's quoting as being acceptable to academia are men.
And as a feminist, she has no doubt whatsoever that the only reason that Ayn Rand is rejected as a philosopher is because she is a bad philosopher rather than the fact that she might be a woman.
So that's another sort of interesting fact to get into.
So I don't think that it's a particularly sensible approach to just start a slag and, oh, she's a bad writer, oh, this is too idealistic, and so on.
I just think that that's not particularly proving anything.
Although this is obviously a very intelligent woman and, of course, very good with language and an acoustic kind of wit, which I can certainly admire.
So I replied to her and I said, if you're going to talk about critiques of philosophers' lives, that's perfectly valid.
But she talks about her respect for Rousseau.
Rousseau, of course, was an absolute monster.
Abandoned his own children and then wrote books on how to raise children.
So it's kind of tough for me...
When people say, well, you absolutely have to judge a philosopher by her personal life, and this standard is applied to Ayn Rand, but then it's not applied to other philosophers that people have respect for, you know, Nietzsche being one of those.
So then she talks about, in response to this, she says Rousseau is probably one of the worst, single worst examples of her parents ever.
And that's fine, but she still respects him individually, even though he actually harmed children, rather than a couple of impressionable cult members or culty style members.
And she says, Rand is fantastic for getting into the style and subject of political debate.
Her work can be used as a benchmark for the modern anarcho-capitalist movement, minus the statism.
Nevertheless, the way she presents her ideas as working, quote, in the real world and continuing to place her characters in a utopian world tells me a lot about her.
I also read heavily for context, and I think that a lot of her hatred for socialism has less to do with an understanding of the philosophies of liberalism and more of a hatred for what Russia had become because of interpretations of Marxist work.
And that's quite telling, right?
That Marx is misinterpreted, and that's what causes the evil, right?
Ayn Rand hates misinterpreting of Marxist work, but of course the cult that Ayn Rand's philosophy had as an aspect of it is not considered to be a misinterpretation of Ayn Rand's work, even by Ayn Rand herself.
That's just considered to be basic to the point.
And what comes up next is that she says that her foundation in ethics is based upon the claim that one's life for each and every individual is the only ultimate value because it makes all other conclusions and values possible.
To make this argument sound, Rand still needs to explain why somebody wouldn't rationally prefer dying or suicide and or having no values, which happens a lot with angsty teens and corrupt CEOs, respectively.
Her attempt, therefore, to defend the morality of selfishness is a good example of begging the question.
And her solution to Hume's is-ought problem is not logically sound.
And that, of course, I agree with, but I still think she went a heck of a lot further than most philosophers do in dealing with the problems that are involved in trying to understand or trying to explain ethics.
She had a good approach to ethics, in my view, but she had a great deal of problems because she was violating the is-ought dichotomy of things.
So, another gentleman asked her to explain in more detail what the logical problems she had with Ayn Rand were, and she said, I have trouble peeling down my personal stances simply because I really don't follow the party line for any particular party or sex, and my views and opinions on each and every issue change regularly the more reading I do, and the more people I talk to that are more informed about certain issues than I am.
Now, that's true, of course, except it doesn't seem to be true when she's dealing with people who may be more knowledgeable about objectivism than she is.
For reality, I agree partially with Descartes' logic that I think therefore I am, and that everything else might be an illusion.
Except I have here developed that point into a complex proof of God and absolute morality.
I'd share it here, but I'm writing my honest thesis on my argument for the existence of God, and I'm reluctant to share it before I publish, or even have all my thoughts properly formulated and written.
Of course, that says a lot about the human being as well.
For morality, she says, I take a lot of it from Rousseau.
I somewhat believe that the only original human motivations are self-preservation and pity, both instituted to balance the other.
However, I interpret love as a better example of the first human emotions than pity, because it accounts not only for the method by which we are driven to reproduce, it also causes human beings to band together to crave intimacy and have pity upon their fellow man.
Nevertheless, everything else that motivates people has come about because of the nature of primitive life, and how could it not be sustained unless humanity collectively changed its views?
In effect, the modern lust for material wealth and pure esteem is not an intrinsic part of man and is due to a cultural and societal pressure.
I think it is possible for man to create a society in which what we regard as property is held semi-collectively and warfare and corruption is eliminated.
Of course, I haven't formulated a plan as to how this is going to happen, or even if it is possible, given all the weaknesses of our, quote, civilized lives, for example, the life-shortening effects of fast food.
Politically, I would place myself as a European liberal.
I support things such as the legalization of drugs, Second Amendment rights, even though I would never personally own a gun, but I defend others' right to do so, and gay marriage.
However, I think that capitalism is not possible in a large community, example the U.S., without a large amount of corruption, and that political systems in which representatives are not easily accessible to the public and the government's actions are not transparent contradict the notion of liberty and democracy.
I do support welfare, subsidies, I guess she means, and deficit spending and government intervention on the Keynesian model, however, which places me economically as a Democrat socialist.
I say I have streaks of anarchism because I think the less the government tells its people what to do, the better.
I say I have streaks of libertarianism because I support as many political and civil liberties as possible.
I say I have socialist streaks because I support nationalized health care, government intervention, and free education.
My stances are not completely logical and sometimes contradict a lot.
That's why I say that I have a hard time pinning down what I think, because I have to go through ideas and issues individually before I can make a judgment call, and then address problems it causes in my other stances accordingly.
In fact, I recognize that a lot of people can poke holes all over my political ideology.
I don't take it personally merely as an indication that I will probably change a lot between now and the time I get out of college.
If I ever do, I think she means I might teach.
Well, it's a very interesting post.
It's a very interesting thinker, and I think it's worth having just a little bit of a chat about it, because this kind of stuff is pretty common.
I mean, I came across this kind of stuff.
I know that this woman feels like an iconoclast, and she's eclectic, right?
Everybody likes to be eclectic, even the therapist, right?
You say to most therapists, what school do you subscribe to?
And they say, well, a combination.
I'm not a Freudian. I'm not a Jungian.
I'm not an Adlerian. I'm not a However, I subscribe to a variety of models, and I use whatever seems best at the time in a sort of utilitarian, pragmatic manner.
So I know that this woman feels like she's an iconoclast and an individualist for not subscribing to any particular party ideology, and while I certainly recommend and value not subscribing to party ideologies, I don't think that the solution to that is incoherence in one's beliefs.
Now, that having been said, There but for the grace of God, right?
Go we, right?
I mean, this was not far off from any of my sorts of thinking before I began to really bear down on the rigors of philosophy.
And I'm sure that this woman is going to, and I can sort of hear it in my mind, and I fully sympathize with that.
Maybe she's right.
But I can certainly almost hear her saying, you know, who are you to lecture me about philosophy?
I'm in academia and so on.
Well, that's fine. I was in academia too.
And did graduate work and studied a lot of philosophy and did my master's thesis on it.
But what does that matter? She's doing her master's thesis as well.
And good luck to her proving the existence of God.
But I think that it's worth understanding just what this indicates about our modes of education and our modes of thinking that are currently laid out or rather smashed up in the modern world.
This is what people call thinking in the modern world.
And it really is an astounding, an astounding, an astounding thing once you've sort of gone past it and you've worked from first principles up, as I've sort of struggled to do, however successfully, when you look upon this kind of mode of thinking, this what's called an exploratory mode of thinking or a non-dogmatic mode of thinking or a pick-and-choose, a salad bar, a buffet, whatever you want to call it, where it is really an emotional aesthetic kind of thinking.
But this emotional aesthetic form of thinking is very, very interesting and very instructive.
And I think it can lead to some good things if you sort of keep at it and don't relinquish the desire or the demand, really, to have a logic at the root and first principles at the root of your thinking.
So I'm going to start with a couple of things which I think show bias to me, at least.
And Jenny, I mean, if you're listening, if you do listen to this, I certainly appreciate your patience with me as I hack through some of these things that I'd like to point out, and you can let me know if they make any sense or not.
Now, the first thing that I see is that she says, well, she's met objectivists who are culty in the present, but that she's very careful to say that the Marxism that Ayn Rand experienced In Russia, in the 1920s and 30s, I guess, that that was a misinterpretation of Marx.
And Marx, of course, had his revolutionary circles and his cults.
He had a huge cult member.
If by cult, what is meant is by the transfer of income, because of ideological necessity, then for sure Marx had his cult in the form of Engels, right, who transferred an enormous amount of money to him.
And Marx, although he did achieve some wealth later in life, didn't really work very much and had lots of people supporting him.
Based on his ideology, that seems, you know, that could be the definition of a cult, certainly is one that I'm trying to achieve.
Although not from one person.
At least Ayn Rand sort of had honest labor in exchange in the free market, her books, and did not rely on benefactors to support her, which seems a little bit more culty than what was going on in terms of objectivism.
But you see, the failures of Marxism, or how Marxism constantly gets turned into this nightmarish gulag slaughterhouse death fest, this is ascribed to a misinterpretation of Marx, or how Marx happened to be applied in a particular context.
However, the culty objectivist that she meets, and of course, to call somebody who really likes a philosophy culty, is not a particularly apt use of the word culty.
I mean, a cult is a pretty specific thing, as we've talked about here, as we've tossed around the idea of whether what we're doing here lands in the realm of cult.
A cult is a pretty specific thing, the deification of an individual rather than principles.
So, to call somebody who likes a particular philosophy culty, well, is somebody who likes Nietzsche a lot in the cult of Nietzsche or a Nietzschean cultist or whatever.
It's just a word that people use to denigrate philosophies that they disagree with and the people who like those philosophies.
Yet, when something goes awry in Marxism, it is a misinterpretation.
It's not the problem. It's not with Marxism and so on.
The problem is with how it's executed.
So the Marxism sort of remains pure.
It's the execution that becomes problematic.
But that's not the case with Ayn Rand and her followers, like even now, if they come across as sort of monomaniacal.
It's not their misinterpretation of the doctrine that has caused the problem.
It's the doctrine itself, which is not the case with Marxism or with Rousseau, of course, as well, as we sort of saw.
So that's sort of one thing that I would say.
The other thing is that she is, of course, a feminist, and nothing wrong with that, of course, as long as it's logical.
Now, Ayn Rand, as I mentioned, did write an astoundingly influential book of philosophy.
Whether it's good or bad philosophy, it's up to you, but it's still an enormously influential book on philosophy, which is quite a bit beyond Deepak Chopra and, you know, these kinds of fools.
So you would think that she would take a little bit more pleasure, but she says, well, Ayn Rand talked about the need of women to subjugate themselves to a noble man and so on, and let's say that that's totally false.
I mean, what do I know, right? But let's say that that's a totally false idea, and then that is what is the reason for dismissing Ayn Rand.
Well, the problem that I have with that is that there's no sense of context or gradation.
There's no sense of context or gradation.
In other words, when you look at a mud hut, and then you look at a stone hut, then there is an improvement.
It's not the Empire State Building improvement, but it definitely is a graduated improvement.
If you look at the Empire State Building, and then you look at the Stone Hut and the Mud Hut, they both look pretty crappy.
But if you are historically and logically sensitive and accurate, then it's possible, I think, to make the argument that you could look at Ayn Rand as a massive lead forward in terms of women's intellect, women's effect upon the intellectual life of the world.
And did she get it all totally and perfectly right?
Well, of course not. The Empire State Building will look like a stone hut relative to some structure of the future, assuming that zoning laws are eradicated.
So Ayn Rand made a huge and massive leap forward in the respect that lots of people have for women's intellect.
I mean, she's the most influential female thinker of the 20th century by just about any measure outside of academia in terms of people who are interested in her works and people who read her philosophy and get interested in philosophy as a whole, or maybe even just her philosophy.
So that's a massive step forward in the realm of acceptance and interest in a woman's ideas.
And the fact that Ayn Rand talked about the woman's need to subjugate, a woman couldn't be president, and so on, well, assuming that she's wrong, and I don't care if she is or isn't, but let's just assume that she's wrong, well, so what?
So the sun has sunspots.
Does that mean that it's not bright?
I mean, if you're going to say that Ayn Rand, while making a massive leap forward in acceptance of women's ability to reason and ability to speak coherently and intensely about philosophical ideas, well, that's pretty impressive.
And any feminist who is interested in women, rather than a sort of stereotypical kind of feminism, which really tends to be sort of lefty and vaguely spiritual...
Would be thrilled at the advance that Ayn Rand made in terms of women's penetrations into the world of ideas.
The most influential female philosopher of the 20th century, but because she said some things that may be false about women's relationship to men, then boy, she's just to be thrown out with yesterday's refuse.
And I think that's obviously a bias and bigoted and so on.
So that's sort of another aspect that I would say is important in this, you know, in Jenny's thinking.
And this is just sort of my perspective.
I'm certainly willing to be corrected.
I would be very interested to know what Jenny thought of Margaret Thatcher.
Is she considered to be a feminist hero or heroine?
I've certainly never heard any feminist refer to Margaret Thatcher with anything other than contempt.
Not for the right reasons in that Margaret Thatcher was still a statist, but the woman who first achieved power in a Western country politically in a sort of free market or semi-free market democracy.
Feminists don't talk about her.
There are no feminist books about her.
She's just considered to be vaguely not a woman because to be a woman is to be lefty and semi-incoherent.
And I think that to me is real sexism.
But again, that's just a provocative perspective on my part, so let me know what you think.
The fact that Ayn Rand was an atheist and that this woman is explicitly religious, explicitly pro-God, and explicitly working her tail off to try and find a proof for the existence of God, that may be a bias that has something to do with it as well.
Insofar as, if you dislike a cult, I have no problem with people who dislike cults, and why not, right?
The first cult, of course, you've got to get rid of is the state, right?
Which we talked about. The state is the ultimate cult because it gets control of the children for 14 years and indoctrinates them and then indoctrinates them further in university and then pays the teachers and taxes people and threatens them with guns.
I mean, the state is the ultimate cult.
So if people have issues with cultism, I have no problem with that.
I think that's well worth having a look at.
But that they pick on a couple of objectivists and say, this is the cult I'm going to focus my energies on?
Well, that just seems kind of silly, in my opinion.
The second cult, of course, is the church, right?
Religious institutions, the madrasas, the Christian churches, the synagogues, and all of the other ones, the Rastrian temples, and the Hindu, all the stuff that you can think of.
Well, that stuff is culty, for sure, right?
I mean, without a doubt, they indoctrinate the kids, they put them into Sunday school, and The madrasas train the children to, I don't know, rock back and forth and scream out bits of the Quran while being poked with a stick.
I don't know. But that's definitely culty.
And that, of course, is, if you're really interested in cults and their power over human beings, if there is an objectivist cult, that's going to be like 10,000th on your list of things to get done in your lifetime, but people seem to focus on that pretty extensively and not in proportion to the amount of damage that, say, the objectivist cult is doing relative to the state, the church, and the final cult, of course, which is the family.
Which we don't sort of have to get into.
I've gone into it a number of times before.
But if you're really interested in cults that indoctrinate people and claim value where there is none and bind people to them with chains of guilt and obligation and are all around the transfer of resources, time and energy, then you've got to look at the family first.
I mean, the family first and then the state second and religion third.
That's all fine. If you're really interested in cults and human freedom and so on, that's where you'd want to start.
So, she doesn't mention any of these other things.
Maybe she's dealt with all of those, and I missed the news articles, and she's getting to objectivism now, because it's ten thousandths on the list of cults, and maybe I'll check CNN.com when I get home and see if all those other things have been dealt with.
But that's sort of where she's focusing her energies, and maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like that would be fairly far down on your list of things to deal with if you were really interested in cults and so on.
The other aspect that I'd like to talk about is this sort of cherry-picking thing, which is I like freedom.
I think that we should have as small a government as possible, but we should have the government run the healthcare and the education and poverty programs, and that property should be held in a semi-private manner, and that it might be possible to eliminate corruption, and that it would be great if we could have freedom, and we could also have freedom in a political sense, and the freedom to own property would also be great.
Or at least the freedom to avoid political coercion, but then at the same time we should also have all of these free things like education and health care and pensions and unemployment insurance and housing and whatever, whatever, whatever.
Now that's incoherent, but it's perfectly sensibly incoherent, right?
I mean, it's perfectly sensibly incoherent.
Because if you don't reason from first principles, and Lord knows isn't that a migraine in the making, or a 20-year migraine as it was for me, if you don't reason from first principles, why would you not want to have your cake and eat it too?
I mean, why not? Wouldn't it just be churlish?
I mean, if everybody could have a magic pony and ride it and be joyful and everyone could have Superman as their bodyguard and live forever and never get sick, Who would be against it?
I mean, that's not exactly a radical position, right?
Yeah, I want lots of political freedom, and I want as small a state as possible, but at the same time, I want the state to tax everyone at the point of a gun, to transfer resources to pay for education, health care, old age pensions, unemployment insurance.
But that is an unassailable position.
And it's the position, I would say, of somebody who's just not been taught the theory of constraints.
Somebody who's just not been taught that all resources are finite.
To be a libertarian and a Keynesian is like being a free marketer and a communist, simultaneously.
It's like being for animal rights and hamburgers and fur coats at the same time in one sort of big mishmash.
And there's no reason why this would ever have been pointed out to Jenny, right?
I mean, to you, if I can speak to you directly, if you're listening to this.
There's no reason why this ever would have been pointed out to you.
It certainly wasn't pointed out to me.
It's not really been pointed out to many people that I know of.
It's something that I think does need to be pointed out.
That if you want to work from first principles, then you're going to have to end up with some unpopular positions.
And maybe there are people, maybe in sort of your graduate school circle, there are people to whom your defense of the Second Amendment is a plus, and you want to defend people's rights to have guns, and maybe that's sort of surprising to a lot of people, and that's great.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with that.
But why? Why?
Well, you know, you have this thing where everyone should be allowed to have guns.
Well, that's great. Nothing wrong with that, I guess.
Nothing right with it. It's just interesting opinion.
And then you want to have a smaller government as possible, but the government to run all of these programs and to do that, of course, the government has to have the power of taxation, which means the government has to have a monopoly on the right to initiate the use of force, and of course the government has to have severely extended weaponry compared to the average citizen.
Otherwise, the average citizen is going to sort of say, get away from me with that toothpick, I'm not paying your damn taxes.
So the government still has to have overwhelming force.
The individuals within the government still have to have overwhelming force.
And then, of course, there's the usual stuff.
And there's, again, nothing particularly critical.
I'm not trying to be particularly critical.
This is just what's in the mix, right?
This is just what's in the general ideological mix within the world, right?
Which is that capitalism is corrupt.
There's a consumer society, that fast food is making us live shorter lives, and so on.
And all that's very interesting.
To me, it does sort of run bump up against the fact that our lifespan keeps expanding.
Which is not particularly convenient.
But this idea that there's this wild consumer culture that is not natural to humanity, that we like nice houses and sofas and big screen TVs and so on, because we're told to like them by...
Capitalists, if it wasn't for those damn ads, we buy the TV to watch the ads which tell us to buy the TV. I don't mind the logical problem with that so much.
If you are really interested in the inculcation of false needs and beliefs, Well, that's fine.
I mean, that to me seems like a very noble and forthright and valuable service to provide to humanity is to oppose the propaganda that human beings receive on such and such a regular basis.
I think that's wonderful. But what's conspicuously absent is the three kinds of propaganda, which we mentioned briefly in this podcast already, which people who talk about capitalist advertisements never seem to get round to, right?
Which is the propaganda of the state, What's more important, a couple of ads on TV or 14 years of the indoctrination of children in public schools, or the indoctrination that occurs in terms of religion, where you're damned to go to hell if you don't believe in this or that God, and if you don't pay the money to the priest, and if you don't do X, Y, and Z, then you are damned to hell and all things that are bad will occur to you.
Then that seems to me, and of course that's inflicted upon children at a very early age, not to mention the intense buggery that many priests seem to inflict upon children at a slightly later age, that would seem to me to be fairly high up on the list of corrupt propaganda, and of course the final propaganda, oh, your family, your family has value, regardless of how they treat you, regardless of what they do, regardless of how good or bad they are to you, you must never be free, you must never judge your family by any objective moral standards, and find them wanting and refuse to participate with them due to that.
So, this is just a kind of regurgitation of propaganda that this woman is involved in.
And again, this is not a critical...
I know it sounds critical, but it's really not.
Because this is just what's in the mix, right?
It's brutally difficult to reason from first principles.
And, of course, nobody has solved the Humean-is-ought dichotomy, I think, with the minor possible potential exception of myself.
And I know that Hans-Hermann Hoppe has, with his argumentation ethics, tried to do some similar stuff, though I haven't really read much about it.
So, I don't think that Ayn Rand solved the Izzot dichotomy, but so what?
I mean, this woman is down on Ayn Rand because she didn't solve the Izzot dichotomy, so what?
Hume wrote in the, what, late 1600s?
So basically for the past 400 years, sorry, last 300 odd years, nobody has been able to solve the Izzot dichotomy with the possible exception of the German guy and my stabs at it as well.
Does that mean that you're going to respect no philosophers?
Well, a lot of the philosophers that you quote are writing in that period.
So, why is Ayn Rand the only one who gets...
Oh, because Ayn Rand was the only one who really tried to solve it.
And that's fine. I think she failed, but so what?
It was a noble attempt, a noble effort, and a lot of the conclusions that she came to, regardless of her failure to overcome the Izzot dichotomy, are still valid once you do understand how to get around the Izzot dichotomy, which is universally preferable behavior, as we've talked about before.
But this cherry-picking stuff is fascinating, and it's sort of like this.
I mean, this to me is sort of how it works metaphorically, and you can let me know if this sort of makes any sense.
And then we'll just sort of stop the whole podcast with a couple of the first principles things that I was talking about, not to be too much of a god-awful tease.
To cherry-pick in the realm of philosophy, in the realm of ideas, to me, it seems kind of like this.
I say I am the most amazing coach in the world.
I'm a great coach. I can help any athlete, right?
And I take on athletes and I tell them I'm so great, I'm so great, I'm so great.
And then what I do is I have a whole stack of videotapes to go back slightly in terms of the metaphor in time.
And I've got this woman who's a gymnast, right?
And she says I want to be a great gymnast, right?
So I show on The soon-to-be-doomed-and-tortured-by-Cechesco Nadia Comaneci participating in, I don't know, what's the 80 Olympics or something like that?
And I say, well, do that.
That's really great stuff.
And she's like, yeah, I know.
I can do that, right?
Sure. And I say, well, go do that.
And then someone comes in and says, well, I want to be a really great hurdler.
So then they show up to the video of some great hurdler and say, you need to do that.
And I'm just going through all of these sports showing the best people in the sports and saying, I like what that person's doing.
That's a good thing. Or similarly, if I'm a doctor and someone comes to me with a broken arm and I take them over to my assistant who has a non-broken arm and I say, that's a non-broken arm.
That's better. Somebody comes to me with a diseased tongue and I stick out my own tongue and say, that's a healthy tongue.
That's better. And so for everybody who has a sickness or a weakness or a problem, I show them the healthy organ or the healthy appendage or whatever and say, that's better.
Well, I'm not really much of a doctor, right?
I'm just showing things that are better.
Individual things that are better with no sense of systematization, no sense of experimentation, no reasoning from root causes, no reproducible...
So, to cherry-pick is just to point out that there are some high mountains in the world, and then consider yourself a mountaineer, and I don't really think that that's the case.
Of course Nietzsche's a great writer, and he's very stirring to read, and he is a tricky trap for the careless.
And, which I'm not putting Jenny in this category, I'm just sort of pointing out my experience of Nietzsche.
And sure, there's, you know, great stuff that Hume has to say, there's great stuff that, or interesting stuff at least, that Rousseau has to say, and so on, and there's stuff that Ayn Rand says that is wrong, and all this, right?
So saying, well, I like this, and I don't like that, and that's good, and that's not good, well, that's quite a bit different.
Than being a philosopher and reasoning from first principles.
It's like walking through a gallery saying, I like that painting, I don't like that painting.
And you don't have to become an artist, let alone come up with a theory of art as to why, as to why things are good or things are bad.
So just cherry picking is interesting, but sort of fundamentally pointless.
I mean, this is the intellectual equivalent of following someone through a furniture store and them saying, oh, I like that couch.
Oh, that's a nice side table.
Ooh, that lamp's bad. I don't like that lamp.
I mean, that's sort of really all it comes down to.
I like this philosopher.
I don't like this. Philosopher's got some good stuff to say.
I like some of Keynes.
I like some of Marx, although he was misinterpreted.
I like some of Smith. I like some Hume stuff.
Ooh, don't like the Randian stuff.
It's so what, right?
Who cares? It's just a bunch of personal opinions.
It's not reasoning from first principles.
So, while I find this woman a good writer and a bit snarky, although I'm one to talk at times, but it's just listening to somebody talk about their opinions.
And it can be interesting.
I enjoy listening to Nietzsche talk about his opinions, though the man could not stitch a syllogism together with two hands and a staple gun.
But listening to someone say, I like this, and I don't like that, and Ayn Rand was a bad writer, and she had this thing which wasn't feministically approved of, and then she didn't solve this problem, but there's that.
It's like, well, that's interesting.
You know, I like turtles, and I like Rocky Road ice cream.
And now it's your turn.
What do you like, and what do you not like?
There's no sort of knowledge that's advanced, other than I now know that you like or dislike this, that, or the other intellectually.
But to reason from first principles is much more of a challenge, right?
So to sort of take a basic example of reasoning from first principles, and this isn't from axiomatic, but just sort of from some basic aesthetics, and we say, well...
Human beings have a couple of different ways to interact with each other.
They can voluntarily exchange value, they can be charitable, or they can use violence, deception, theft, fraud, or whatever.
Through dishonest or violent means they can gain what they want.
You can trade kisses with someone who you hope enjoys kissing you as much as you enjoy kissing them, which hopefully for both of you is a lot, and that's an exchange of values, which is good.
You can breastfeed a baby even though the baby is chewing your nipple off because you love your baby and you want to make your baby happy and so on.
So that's more of a charitable kind of thing, which is not negative or bad.
It's just a sort of description, right?
Or you can stick a gun in somebody's ribs and take their wallet on threat of shooting them, right?
I mean, there's just different ways that human beings can interact with each other.
Or they can choose not to interact with each other or go live in the woods or something, right?
Now, in terms of the hierarchy of values, well, I think we can all pretty much agree that theft and violence and rape and murder, that those are bad things.
I think that we can all recognize that living in the woods is neither a good or a bad thing.
I think we would generally say that a parent who does not care for his or her child is not a very good thing, and that two people kissing is fun to watch.
Now, two people kissing is, you know, we may have some opinions about it, but...
You know, ew, too much tongue.
But nonetheless, we're not going to say that that's good or evil.
That's, you know, just people taking pleasure in each other and so on.
If you go in to buy a candy bar, that's neither good nor evil.
If you decide not to buy a candy bar, that's neither good nor evil.
If you go in and steal the candy bar, that's not very good, right?
I mean, these are sorts and basics that we can deal with.
And there are even axiomatic proofs for this, which we've worked out through this conversation, but we don't have to get into those right now.
So that's sort of one sort of basic way that you would approach it, to say, well, you know, theft and rape and violence and so on is bad, relative to these other ways of dealing with each other.
And then the next thing you'd say, well, of course, there's no such thing as the government, there's no such thing as society, there's only individuals, right?
There's no such thing as a human body, even really in many ways, there's only atoms, right?
So there is only, it's just a metaphor for a collection of atoms, the same way society is a metaphor for a collection of human beings.
The body as a concept doesn't exist independently and superior to the atoms in the platonic sense, or the cells.
So, you would say that there's no such thing as a government.
There are only individuals, right? And this is not that hard to figure out.
It's not the government who collects your taxes.
It's some bureaucrat who takes some salary for himself or herself, passes along to somebody else, and the person who comes to take your money if you don't pay your taxes is some guy in a usually blue suit with a gun who'll shoot you if you resist kidnapping in any sort of strenuous manner, the kidnapping and being sent to jail.
And this is not stuff, it's not like learning Chinese, right?
I mean, this is the very interesting thing about philosophy, is that the basic stuff that we talk about is really, really simple.
It's really, really, really simple.
Dead simple, you might say.
Learning Chinese takes years, years and years of hard, hard work.
Figuring out that the government uses forces to collect taxes, 30 seconds, 20 seconds, maybe 10.
Five if you're a natural-born libertarian.
But if you're honest, it takes you no time at all.
So, and does the government exist?
how much thought does it take to figure out that the government is nothing more than a label we give to an aggregation of individuals?
Said aggregation not even existing, the label we give to that aggregation can't exist either, since a group does not exist anything more than a spatial relationship or conceptual relationship to a group of instances.
Since the group doesn't exist, any label we give the group, like the government, doesn't exist even less.
So that's just sort of another way of working from some reasonable first principles.
and And then you say, okay, well, if there's only sort of three ways of interacting with people, charity, trade, and violence, excluding indifference, and there's no such thing as the government, then when you're taking taxes to pay for things, then you have some individuals who have the right to initiate the use of force against other individuals, because that's how government programs get financed.
It's certainly not charitable, right?
I've never had Stephen Harper chewing on my boobie, so it's not the charity category.
George Bush, on the other hand, is a real biter.
I'd be careful.
Then clearly, when we say we want the government to do X, Y, and Z, we're violating that whole idea.
And then we can go back and refine the idea to include those in the government that may need to find out some way that they're different from everyone else, so that they get these rights to use violence that other people don't, and you can't sort of say, well, it's voted because then you don't need violence and it's not a government anymore because it doesn't have the right to impose taxes using force.
So this is just some sort of ways that you start to work from first principles.
And this stuff, I'm sort of tossing it off and making it sound easy.
It is, in fact, unbelievably difficult, mostly because of the effect that it has upon one's personal relationships to begin to slice and dice how human beings interact into that kind of manner.
But what I will say is that it is something that is well worth doing.
It certainly beats cherry picking.
It certainly beats being this cork in a stormy sea, bouncing up and down and seeing where you're going to come to rest and so on.
What it does mean, though, I'm afraid, Jenny, is that your thesis is never going to work.
In fact, your thesis is going to be a contribution to the most fundamental errors of mankind rather than any leap forward in a positive direction.
I know that you would reply and say that, well, Marx was an atheist, I have no problem with him.
Well, sure. But Marx believed in transcendental concepts like class and false consciousness and this evolving Hegelian historical imperatives and so on.
And so Marx, as much as any rabid priest, believes in these transcendental Platonic ideals And so, of course, you're not going to have as much problem with Marx as you are going to have with Ayn Rand, who definitively did not believe in these transcendental ideals, still had this weakness to do with the state and had this weakness to do with certain aspects of feminism, and her prescription for a good date would doubtless satisfy nobody with any decent self-esteem.
But nonetheless, I hope that this has been helpful.
Thank you so much for posting.
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