What is the truth behind Ayn Rand, writer of such blockbuster novels as 'The Fountainhead,' 'Atlas Shrugged,' 'Anthem' and 'We The Living'? Rand - and her philosophy Objectivism - have been enormously influential to public figures as diverse as Paul Ryan, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Rush drummer Neil Peart, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, Hunter S. Thompson, Murray Rothbard, John Stossel, Penn Jillette and many others. Some of her adherents - such as former Federal Reserve Chairman Allan Greenspan - have been criticized for enacting Rand's 'Virtue of Selfishness.' Was she an advocate of egoism and 'me-first' selfishness? Why did Rand hate altruism - not to mention Immanual Kant? What was her ideal society? Is her vision achievable? Should we even try? Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, uncovers the hidden history behind the Ayn Rand phenomenon, in part one of a multi-part series.
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world, pretty much talking about one of the largest and most popular and influential thinkers of the 20th century and now, of course, only gaining influence in the 21st century.
This is The Truth About Ayn Rand, Part 1.
So, why would we even discuss this lady?
Well, she's very, very important and influential in 20th and 21st century thinking.
In a 1991 survey jointly sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, Americans named Atlas Shrugged, her tree-leveling magnum opus of over 1,100 pages, Americans named Atlas Shrugged, the book that had most influenced Second only to the Bible.
Given that the Bible is going to take the gold, getting the silver is pretty much the gold for non-religious literature.
When the Modern Library asked readers in 1998 to name the 20th century's 100 greatest books, Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead were numbers 1 and 2 on the list.
Anthem and We the Living were numbers 7 and 8, beating The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, and Ulysses.
Not the Greek hero, but rather the Irish novel.
So together the Fountainhead which came out in 1943 after five years of work in Atlas Shrugged that came out in 1957 after 13 years of frankly amphetamine-fueled creativity have typically sold more than 300,000 copies a year.
To put that in perspective up here in the frozen witch-tick tundra of Canada A bestseller is considered to be a book that has sold more than 5,000 copies.
So 300,000 copies a year is pretty good.
They are the equivalent of bestsellers every single year.
Recently, in the midst of a financial crisis, In America and of course in Europe, that has been the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
The proximate setting of Atlas Shrugged, sales of her last and most ambitious book, has nearly tripled.
More than 13 million copies of the two books are in print in the United States.
In 2008, of course, when people were looking for the root causes of the financial crisis, which had been ably predicted by Ayn Rand 50 plus years ago, 2008, the sales of her novel Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and We the Living and Anthem topped 800,000.
We the Living is her autobiographical novel about her time in Soviet Russia.
Anthem comes from a long tradition, which we'll talk about, of speculative or science fiction coming out of Russian writers about the loss in the future of the personal pronoun I. Another reason I think to be interested in Ayn Rand other than that other people are interested in Ayn Rand which she would consider a terrible reason and I would too is that she was actually quite prophetic.
I mean one of the things that we really need to talk about when we talk about Ayn Rand is that she was pretty much on the mark.
Now being on the mark More than 50 years before events transpire is pretty good, right?
So Rand first warned about the dangers of growing governments when governments are about 5% of their current size.
So not to get into too deep a history, but of course, Ayn Rand said, look, the welfare state is not going to go work.
Imperialism is not going to work.
The war on drugs is not going to work.
Public education is going to get worse.
Greedy crony capitalist financiers are going to end up taking over the government and buying them out.
And political favors are going to become the new currency in a semi-fascistic government controlled anti-free market business environment.
And this has all pretty much come to pass and pretty much how she prophesied it.
She doesn't have a crystal ball.
She has reason, evidence and principles that Really accurately predicted what was going to happen.
Remember, this is long before, and this is right after governments had beaten Nazism and won World War II. So to be skeptical about the power and positive effect of governments in the post-war period, not really the easiest thing to do.
This is even before, this is after Social Security, but before the great optimism of LBJ's great society welfare programs, which were supposed to eliminate poverty.
Ayn Rand repeatedly said, it's not going to happen.
You're going to get an entrenched underclass Poverty is not going to be solved and in fact poverty is going to increase, which was unthinkable to most of the intellectuals of the time, but really has borne out to be the case.
Of course, Rand, as mentioned, warned that a coercive redistributionist welfare state, not solve poverty, but create a dependent underclass.
Rand warned about the dangers of regulatory capture decades before public choice theory established it pretty much as a fact.
So regulatory capture is if you want to regulate the financial industry, then you need experts from the financial industry.
Because they have to know what they're regulating and what goes on.
And so the financial firms send experts to become the regulators, but those regulators still have ties to those financial firms.
And you can see this all over the bailout with Goldman Sachs and Paulson and so on.
Regulatory capture is you are supposed to have an agency to control And to make honest and good a particular industry, but it's full of people with ties to those industries.
And so it ends up asking, it's like, you know, the cop stops you and says, I think you've been speeding.
And you say, well, thanks, officer.
I will take that up under internal review and get back to you.
I mean, it's not going to be the most objective evaluation.
Rand warned about influence peddling, what she called the aristocracy of pull, which is sort of political power, how much you donate, how embedded you are in politics, how many fundraising dinners you can sell for Bush or Obama or McCain or Romney or whoever, and reminded us all that business people, particularly big business people, Not exactly giant fans of the free market.
Big businesses really like to use the power and influence that they have in politics.
To get preferential legislation, to get cheap workers to come into the country, to bar foreign goods from competing with the country.
And they are not fans of the free market.
And she talked about this quite consistently.
And we've seen that large companies generally tend to prefer to focus on government benefits and preferential legislation than they do necessarily with innovation.
Not all, but it's a significant proportion.
Rand correctly.
Identified the source of wealth as free trade and property rights and this has been established at least in economic circles pretty well.
I mean there's a couple of things that economists generally agree on that free trade is economically valuable that the That the division of labor is one great source of economic strength.
And she really did talk a lot about the free market and respect for property rights and respect for the objective rule of law and having a minimal government as being the precondition for the growth of wealth.
And as economists have analyzed various economic structures around the world, ranging from fascism, of course, to Nazism, to communism, to various forms of mixed socialism, They have found that the more free market there is in general, the more growth there is in the economy.
So she really did correctly identify this, again, long before a lot of the experts in the field.
Rand argued against racism, which she viewed as primitive and ugly tribalism.
She argued against racism and for the power of women in the 1940s, decades before civil rights and feminism became hot political And this is something, you know, she has in her novels.
She has women in charge of giant businesses that span the entire country.
She has very powerful women in positions of influence and control who are excellent bosses and excellent thinkers and very productive and engineers.
And this is at a time when a lot of engineering students weren't even accepting.
Sorry, a lot of engineering schools weren't even accepting women.
into the engineering program.
So she had some very forward-thinking views of what women could achieve and how they could be portrayed.
And from what I've talked about with women, a lot of women viewed the Rand novels as permission for greatness, as permission for high ambition, because they saw women portrayed in very powerful positions and very influential positions and being moral heroes against recalcitrant and corrupt men.
Rand warned about the dangers of government-funded science and the unholy weapons it can produce.
She was, of course, researching and writing this before even Eisenhower made his famous speech against the military-industrial complex, which he conveniently made just as he was leaving office.
Oh, really wish I'd gotten to the big issue, but I'm afraid I'm gone, so put me on a stamp, okay?
So let's have a look at Ayn Rand's early life.
It neither proves nor disproves any of her philosophical arguments.
I'm fully aware of that.
But the early life of an artist, and she was primarily an artist, the early life of an artist is important to understanding.
Why they hold certain beliefs.
It doesn't prove or disprove them, but it is important.
Because for most of us in the West, and I remember that I started reading Ayn Rand when I was, I think, 15 or 16.
I'd already read a lot of the Russian writers before then.
Oh yes, a tad precocious, I'm afraid to say.
So I'd already gone through Dostoevsky and stuff, but I got into Ayn Rand in 15 or 16.
And her Arguments and ideas and philosophy came across as very alien to me, very foreign to me, which really is quite a tragedy given that she is, as I argue later in this series, Aristotelianism plus the Industrial Revolution plus the post-scientific revolution understanding of matter.
The fact that Aristotelianism, which is really a foundation of the majority of Western philosophy, The fact that an updated form of Aristotelianism should strike me as weird and alien and odd and creepy and freaky and so on is a real tragedy.
Now, of course, it wasn't alien to Ayn Rand, which is why she was such a proponent of her arguments for reason and the free market and so on.
So why weren't they alien to Ayn Rand?
Whereas for a lot of people in the West, they do seem kind of freaky and alien.
Well, it has a lot to do with the influences of her early life.
So Ayn Rand was born Alicia.
Rosenbaum, a Russian Jew, on February 2nd, 1905 in St.
Petersburg, just three weeks after the 1905 revolution and of course a few years before the 1917 revolution, 12 years before.
Alice's father, born Zelman Wolf Zakharovic Rosenbaum, but known outside the family by the non-Jewish name Zinovny, was a pharmaceutical chemist who managed the shop downstairs from the apartment they lived in.
Her mother, Kana Berkovna Kaplan, known as Anna, had been trained as a dentist but had stopped practicing after her marriage and pregnancy.
So, well-educated professionals were her parents.
During the time of the 1905 revolution and for a short period thereafter, there were massive strikes, insurrections and anti-Jewish violence.
In the fall of 1905 alone, when Alyssa was not quite a year old, there were 690 anti-Jewish pogroms and 3000 Jewish murderers.
So it really was a dangerous time to be Jewish in Russia at this point.
In one pogrom in Odessa, in the Crimea, where Rand's family would relocate after being booted out of their house in the 1917 revolution, they relocated there in 1918.
One pogrom in Odessa, 800 Jews were killed and 100,000 Jews were made homeless in an absolutely brutal pogrom.
Now, between 1897 and 1915, over a million Jews left Russia.
Of course, most of them settled in the United States, which had generally open borders.
Of course, if you were ill, you were not allowed in and you were quarantined.
A little different than what would be happening almost 100 years later.
So there was a huge exodus of Jews from an increasingly anti-Semitic revolution that was occurring in Russia.
And the legal circumscription or restriction of Jewish activities were huge.
So by 1914, the laws that forbade Jews from doing certain things ran to nearly a thousand pages.
And anything that wasn't explicitly permitted It was a crime.
So, remember, young Alyssa is growing up in an environment where her father's behavior, her mother's behavior, their legal capacities, their freedoms, are being whittled down and crushed and reduced and circumscribed at all times.
The power of the state is growing within the family like sort of an invisible wall, pushing people back up against the wallpaper.
So for decades, Jews who did not have a trade or profession considered useful to the Tsar, useful to the ruler of Russia, were barred from St.
Petersburg and in most cases unqualified Jews, Jews without those professions, couldn't even stay or visit other relatives for a night.
And by law in St.
Petersburg, Jews were not allowed to make up any more than 2% of the city's population and residency papers for Jews had to be renewed each year.
This is important to really, really understand.
So without directly comparing the plight of, say, blacks in the south of the United States or in other places of the United States or Chinese on the west coast of the United States, it's not a direct comparison.
But when you are legally discriminated against, By the state, when you are really barely more than a migrant laborer in the eyes of the state's legitimacy and residency requirements, when you are legally discriminated against and your relatives can't even come to visit you for fear of being thrown in jail for violating the capacity of Jews traveling in St.
Petersburg, well, you're going to have a problem with the state.
If you are legally discriminated against, you're going to have a problem with whoever is doing that legal discrimination.
So when we look at some of the famous black writers, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W.B. Du Bois, they had significant problems with the civil authorities of the time because there were huge restrictions on black travel, black occupations, black education, and so on.
So we don't read those people and say, well, I can't understand why They might have a problem with state power.
But if we understand that the Jews were in some ways analogous to despised minorities and restricted minorities in the United States, it's not that foreign a concept to understand why Alyssa might have grown up with significant hostility towards state power.
Again, this does not prove or disprove any of her arguments, but hopefully it helps make it seem less alien.
When we read black writers who've suffered from discrimination, legal discrimination, it doesn't seem foreign to us that they are upset with the authorities, that they dislike the authorities, that they have problems with the authorities.
When we read Ayn Rand, knowing the background that her family was subjected to, and really we've only scratched the surface of what was going to happen to these people, Hopefully this helps you at least understand that she was a persecuted minority, wherein the power of the state stripped her family of security and peace and livelihood.
So Jews often changed their name in the turn of the last century Russia to avoid detection.
Their persons and homes were subject to police searches at all times.
Police could just beat in the door and come in at any time whatsoever.
Something that I guess wasn't going to be replicated until some neighbor thought you might have drugs in America in the 21st century.
Alyssa's father, who was born in the poor and pogrom-ridden Russian Pale of Settlement, a vast checkerboard of Jewish ghettos encompassing much of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, went variously by the names Zelman, Zelman, and Zinovi.
And so this is a dangerous time to be a Jew in Russia.
And one of the reasons that Alyssa's father became a pharmacist is one of the few professions that permitted Jews to enter the city relatively freely.
So, Alyssa or Ayn Rand wrote about her first memory and I think this is just delightful.
I really, I think this is wonderful and I hope that this gives you a glimpse into some of the amazing benefits of the parenting and particularly the fatherhood that Alyssa was exposed to and one of the things I think beautiful things about a lot of Jewish parenting.
Alyssa's first memory was sitting at a window by her father's side.
She was two and a half and she was gazing at Russia's first electric streetcars that were lighting the boulevard below.
Her father was explaining the way the streetcars worked, and Alyssa remembered being very pleased that she could understand his explanation.
Now, speaking about physics and electricity and momentum, a two-and-a-half-year-old is treating that two-and-a-half-year-old with great respect.
And it is a sign of intelligence, of course, that she could really understand the explanation, so she was born, I mean, ferociously intelligent and worked very hard to expand and refine her intelligence.
And there's an interesting note about this.
She didn't know it then, but the American company Westinghouse had built the streetcar line for free in a gesture to the city's workers from the embattled Tsar.
So I think that's right.
So the Tsar had built this to help the workers because he was obviously going through difficulties with rebellions.
And so her first memory is looking at the beauty and magic and power of a product of the American free market.
And I don't know about you, but my first memories are very much deeply imprinted in me and presaged a lot of my adult beliefs.
Again, it doesn't validate or invalidate, but it's important to know where people are coming from.
So Rand's father was a very able businessman.
He became the co-owner of a large pharmacy by 1912.
So the family had so much money that her mother hired a cook, a maid and a nurse for her daughters, and even a Belgian governess to help the three girls improve their French before they entered school.
This is back in the day when, like some European countries, particularly in the north, kids don't usually enter school until seven or eight.
And this was really much the case in Russia at the turn of the last century.
So Mommy issues.
Can you believe that there's a rational philosopher out there who gets occasionally accused of having mommy issues?
We'll look right into that.
Alicia respected her father and loved her father, but had a pretty strong dislike for her mother.
From the beginning, she and Anna Rosenbaum did not get along.
So, Alicia viewed her mother as capricious, nagging, and a social climber, and she was painfully convinced that her mother disapproved of her.
Anna considered her eldest daughter to be, in the catchall that holds so much, the word difficult.
But we can also see the influence of Anna's thinking on the young Alicia.
In a letter from the 1930s, Anna wrote to Rand, quote, Every man is an architect of his own fortune, and every person is the maker of his own happiness.
Anna liked the idea of America and wanted to visit.
She even named the family cats after American states and cities.
And of course, America was very much the promised land back then.
There's a lovely movie called Avalon about this, which you might want to check out.
Anna also seems to, Ayn Rand's mother, also seems to have had a cruel streak.
She told her eldest daughter that she never wanted children in the first place.
She only looked after them from a sense of duty and pointed out how much she sacrificed For them, once she got angry and broke the leg of a doll that Alyssa loved or was fond of.
So, as we're going to see when we get into Ayn Rand's philosophy, one of the things that Ayn Rand argued strongly against was the ethics of doing things out of a sense of duty when you gain no personal pleasure out of it and sacrificing your own interests for the sake of others.
Now, if her mother was basically snarling at her, I don't want, I never wanted kids, I hate taking care of you guys, I just do it because I have to and how much do I sacrifice for you?
It may have had some potential emotional influence on her later dislike of what she called altruism, which is probably different from what you mean by altruism, which we'll get into Later on in the presentation series.
But this is pretty brutal stuff to tell your children.
You didn't want them.
You don't like them.
You don't love them.
You only spend time with them because you have to.
That is a very vicious and ugly series of statements to make to your children.
And therefore, I'm not sure that Anna is correct in considering her eldest daughter to be, quote, difficult.
She sounds like a verbally abusive and destructive of the bond kind of mother.
So here's an incident that I also think is important.
When Alice was five or so, her mother came into the children's playroom and found the floor littered with toys.
And remember, Alice was the eldest, so...
Five and younger daughter, it's not that unlikely that it's going to be toys around.
She announced to Alyssa and Alyssa's two and a half year old sister, Natasha, that she would have to choose that they would have to choose some of their toys to be put away and some to keep and play with.
Now, in a year, she told them they could trade the toys they had kept for those they had put away.
I mean, this is a pretty brutal and incredibly long lived A recreation of what's called the marshmallow test.
There's a psychologist who puts down a marshmallow on a plate for kids and says, if you eat it now, you don't get any more.
If you can wait 15 minutes, you get two.
And it's pretty strongly predictive of future success in life if you have the capacity to defer gratification.
Now, explaining to a two and a half year old what a year is, well, I guess I'd rather do streetcars.
It's just not going to be possible.
Now, Natasha at two and a half held on to the toys that she liked the most.
Keep these, take these toys I don't like and put them away for a year.
But Alyssa imagined how much fun and how much pleasure she would get having her favorite toys returned to her later in a year.
She handed over all the toys she loved the most, including a painted mechanical wind-up chicken that she could actually describe vividly 50 years later.
These first impressions are so powerful in people's thinking processes.
That's really an amazing thing for a five-year-old to say, take my favorite toys, give them back to me in a year, because I'll really let shows a range of thinking, a conceptual grasp of time and consequences, and a capacity to defer gratification.
That is truly extraordinary.
Now, when the time came a year later to make the swap and Alyssa asked for her toys back, her mother laughed.
Anna explained that I gave everything to an orphanage, she said.
Because she said, look, if...
You guys really wanted their toys, you wouldn't have given them to me in the first place.
In other words, she probably Thought that Alyssa was trying to game her or play her by giving her toys.
She said, oh, these are the ones I like the most, when they were, in fact, the ones that she liked the least.
But this is a very important moment, I would say.
So somebody says, it's too messy.
Give me your favorite toys.
I'll give them back to you in a year.
And then she just gives them away.
It means that if you relinquish your property rights, you can't trust the people in authority.
And I would argue that this has some effect on how she approaches or what she's interested in.
So this way of looking at people's early life is a way of helping us understand why they're interested in what they're interested in and what emotional and experiential influences might be occurring for them.
Why was she so interested in property rights?
Why did she believe that you could not control those in authority from a subservient position, which was her relationship to the state?
Well, these are going to have some impacts on her thinking.
So Rand's father Zinovi was for the most part silent, but he was very proud of his accomplishments as a self-made businessman.
He also admired Alyssa's proud spirit and original razor-sharp mind.
And he was an avid reader of Russian literature.
And of course, if there's one language I wish I knew it would be Russian to read, especially the 19th century writers who are just amazing.
Her father encouraged her efforts to write her first stories and later her drive to craft a fiction of ideas.
Now, Ayn Rand's father wasn't religious, but he tolerated her mother's Sabbath and holiday celebrations with a kind of better safe than sorry shrug.
They grew very close, Alyssa and her father, after the 1917 revolution when he refused to work for communists and spent most of his time at home.
So when the Communists took over, and we'll talk a little bit more about this in a second, when the Communists took over, Ayn Rand's father went on strike rather than participate and work with such evildoers.
And of course, the original title for Atlas Shrugged was The Strike.
And the idea that men and women of ability go on strike rather than submit to the capricious violence of the state, again, it doesn't come out of nowhere for people.
So, Alyssa's first conscious memory of experimenting with the idea of God took place at the age of six.
She and a maternal cousin decided to pray for a little white kitten belonging to their grandmother Kaplan.
Not of the Gabe kind, but probably with a similar mustache.
And this is an empirical test.
This is an empirical question, and it shows her sort of rational and scientific bent and the primacy of evidence over concepts, right?
What's in the head is subject to error.
What's in reality is not.
Therefore, in conflicts between concepts and things in the world, concepts must adapt and give way to what actually happens.
So they decide to pray for a kitten, and the kitten was sick and dying.
And Rand's cousin said, look, if we pray sincerely, God hear the prayers, save the kitten, and so on.
So they retreated to a corner of a room and prayed, but the kitten died.
And although she still half-heartedly believed in God, she wasn't surprised by the ineffectuality of prayer.
Later she said, well, she hadn't really believed that it would work.
And of course, if it did, it could be coincidence you'd need to keep testing it.
During religion classes at her school, Jewish girls were excused to the back of the room and left to their own devices.
So again, she wouldn't be subject to the standard religious catechism or indoctrination that would be occurring in the schools.
So Alyssa did receive significant attention and praise from her family and later from her teachers and classmates for her startling intelligence.
However, her actual ideas and feelings were of little interest to anyone, including her extended family, except For her youngest sister, Nora, who did ask her and was curious about her thoughts and feelings.
And this is something that I've certainly taken to heart as a stay-at-home dad, that to be interested in what my daughter thinks and feels is really primary and so essential.
Ask your children what they're thinking and feeling, what their favorite things are, why they're thinking and feeling, and get them used to Self-knowledge, introspection and so on will serve them very well in the challenging rollercoaster journeys to a life of steady virtue and happiness.
So about the age of nine she began reading a book called The Mysterious Valley and there was a hero who was a prototypical 19th century British hero and she completely fell in love with this fictional man as I would argue she did and as other people have argued she did later with Howard Rourke and John Galt and the other heroes of her fiction.
He was brave and rational and calculating a 19th century hero who would be put in terrible situations and then you know MacGyver style find some way to reason or trick or Put things together to save himself.
And this was, it really became, I hate to use the word obsession, but it became somewhat obsessive.
As she approached adolescence and she started school, began to write, her feelings for this fictional hero were of, as she said, unbearable intensity and practically all-consuming.
And this hero worship that was such a part of her early life did become very much part of her adult literary career as well.
Alyssa thought of Joan of Arc as the most heroic woman in history because she stood alone against everyone, even to the point of death.
Now, of course, Joan of Arc was a religious heroine, but the fact that she stood against what she perceived as the false beliefs of others, even to the point of death, was very important for Ayn Rand.
Now, her perspective on her childhood was summarized in a composition she wrote as a young teen, wherein she said childhood Is the worst period of one's life.
And...
It is to me somewhat tragic that aside from a tiny vignette in Atlas Shrugged, she really never wrote much about children and not really much about parenting.
In fact, in objectivism as a whole, there doesn't seem to be a lot of writing about parenting, the questions of spanking and is it a violation of the non-aggression principle?
It's not really addressed in the objectivist community, which I think is a great tragedy and a great missed opportunity for objectivism to have a significant Say in how people treat her children, and part of it has to do with she just seemed to have a really terrible time.
Part of this, of course, had to do with her mother, but part of it had to do with how helpless she felt as the communists took over.
Now, she got an undergraduate degree, which we'll talk about in a sec, but I think it's important to understand that more than 100 years ago, or about 100 years ago, education was Very rigorous.
And what was taught to children vastly outstrips the sort of lowest common denominator crap that cuts out of public school and scrubs children's brains free of usually reasoned evidence of any capacity to think.
In public schools at the moment, like now, there are studies that show the longer a child is exposed to government schools, the worse that child is at thinking and reasoning and so on.
So she went to a school called Stoinen, which was renowned for teaching in the humanitarian disciplines and in the natural and mathematical sciences.
And Elisa was very good at math and science.
She was a student there from 1914 until 1918.
And she received a general education.
And again, it's hard to really understand just how great an education she got.
She studied French and German mathematics, natural and physical science, European history, Russian language and literature, drawing and painting, and some evidence for music, medical hygiene, jurisprudence, gymnastics, and needlework.
Okay, one of those not specific to her adult literary output.
And this was an amazing education.
And it's hard again, hard to compare different types of education, but it would be far more than anything you would get, certainly in a modern public school.
In a school assignment, the girls were once asked to write a few paragraphs about why being a child is such a joyous thing.
Alyssa didn't agree that it was joyous and shocked her classmates with a scathing denunciation of childhood.
At the top of the page, she copied quotations out of an encyclopedia from Descartes.
I think, therefore I am.
And Pascal, I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise, to make her point, which was that children couldn't think as clearly as they would be able to once they had grown up and learned more.
And what was the point, she asked, of playing boring games and reading silly books while waiting to be an adult and to be independent?
So this was sort of her relationship to childhood.
I think those burdens would be eased a lot with better conversations within the family, but that really didn't happen as much.
So by the time Melissa was 12, sort of 1917, in the First World War, six million Russians had been killed, captured, maimed, Or wounded.
It was absolutely brutal on the Eastern Front, just as it would be in the Second World War.
Thousands of deserters poured into St.
Petersburg.
There was very little food, very little fuel.
The railways had been destroyed in the war.
And so, of course, that's the primary method of getting the grain and other farmer produce into the city.
Cities are incredibly dependent on the constant flow of food into them because they're not exactly full of farms.
And crime was rampant.
People were starving.
It really was a literal hellhole.
So she became best friends with Olga Nabokov.
Yes!
That man that Sting doth sing of.
The sister of Vladimir Nabokov, later writer of Lolita.
And they would have, of course, very intense political, intellectual debates.
And it was pretty clear that the existing system was breaking down.
A revolution was coming.
And Olga argued for a constitutional monarchy.
And Elisa wanted a republic.
And really, when you think about this, this is quite amazing that at 12 and 13 years old, how many 12 and 13 year old girls or boys do you know of who are having discussions about the best form of social organization, the best form of government?
That's really quite amazing.
Also, when she was 12 or 13, she wanted a republic.
And of course, in the closing lines of Atlas Shrugged, that is her prescription for the future.
And that remained her prescription for a peaceful society.
Republic, of course, is where you get to vote, but not on basic human rights.
Alisa was a ferocious debater, which Olga liked, and I'm sure they gave as good as they got each other.
February 1917.
The war is going so badly.
The railways are destroyed.
There's no way really to get food into the cities.
Russian bakeries closed down.
There is no bread.
This is what precipitated in Egypt what was called the Arab Spring, which was that the food prices doubled or tripled and people couldn't afford to live.
There was a They anticipated the end of their existing society, the fall of the Tsar.
In the street shops and cafes of St.
Petersburg, people spoke jubilantly of a coming political freedom, economic revival, and an end to the war.
Rand later remembered this as a period of unparalleled excitement, hope and happiness, both for her And for the country.
Ah!
Isn't it always, though?
Like every movement, it's all fun and games, until the trolls show up, who are dedicated to blackening out the very sun of human progress at all times and in all places, it would seem.
So everybody was giddy and enthusiastic, and therefore their defenses against evil were down.
But some, including the popular writer Maxim Gorky, He, of the later named Park, took a dimmer view.
Gorky predicted that the dark instincts of the Russian people would flare up and fume, poisoning us with anger, hate, and revenge.
They will kill one another, unable to suppress their own animal stupidity.
Beginning in February 1917, Rand's father began hoarding and hiding cash and family jewelry, of course, anticipating barter and so on.
Of course, the provisional government came into power and granted freedoms of speech and press and assembly, but rationed bread and did not end the war.
That is a profoundly and foolishly intellectual approach to your social problems.
I know you can't eat, but here's some freedom of speech.
I think eating is slightly higher in terms of priority.
And not ending the war was, of course, suicide for any government that was set up in that time period.
And I've gone into this and you can look at my stuff on 20th century history.
October 25th, 1917, Lenin and his Bolsheviks took over, largely as a result of America entering the war and Germany funding and arming Lenin and his compatriots, sending them through Finland to Moscow to foment a revolution.
And it was a relatively easy revolution.
And of course, things went incredibly downhill from there.
So Ayn Rand was a fiction polemicist in many ways.
I don't mean that in a negative way, but she advanced her arguments for truth and reason and virtue in an ideal society through the use of fiction.
There's nothing wrong or bad about any of this.
It's been done many times.
George Bernard Shaw explicitly did it in his Shavian dramas.
Bertolt Brecht did it repeatedly with Mother Courage and her children and other explicitly socialist or communist plays and programs and so on.
But in Russia, there's a strong trend towards these kinds of writings.
Again, when you read something like Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, in particular Atlas Shrugged, you are getting a lot of political information under the guise of a plot, of a novel.
And this is a very strong Russian tradition.
It feels foreign to us who didn't grow up with this tradition, but political science historically was banned in Russia.
And so literature thus became a subversive political You know, why didn't she write treaties?
Why didn't she write the equivalent of John Locke's Second Treatise on Government?
Well, because she wanted to not be in jail or be shot.
And so she had, you know, at least she grew up in an environment where any kind of explicit political writing was extremely risky.
Dostoevsky was arrested for his participation in a political group, and he was kept in prison.
And he was sentenced to death and they dragged him out of his cell and dragged him up and tied him and he was going to get shot.
And then at the last minute they commuted his sentence to 10 years in Siberia.
So she probably didn't want any of that as neither you and I would particularly enjoy it.
By the way, you should just read Dostoevsky's writings about his time in Siberia.
It's amazing stuff.
So, Rand referred to her own novels as anti-communist propaganda.
And you may or may not like that, but this is where it comes from, from this Russian tradition of you can't write about politics, you can't get involved in politics, and therefore most people would turn to literature.
The novel Dead Souls is a scathing indictment of the serf system, and it's in the form of a man...
Go read it.
It's worth it.
So, why was she so fervidly anti-communistic?
To ask this question is astounding to me.
It's astounding to me.
It's like saying, well, why on earth would Spielberg make an anti-Nazi movie?
Because, you know, the Jews suffered horrendously under Nazism and they've got issues with Nazism.
And rightly so!
That's a pernicious and evil ideology.
Why would blacks have anything against Bull Connor?
Because he was a big ignorant, racist, and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So why would Ayn Rand have issues with communism?
Because she grew up and saw her family and her father destroyed by it in incredibly brutal and dangerous ways.
So Rand's father's pharmacy, along with many of the city's factories and banks and shops and offices, were raided by Lenin's communists, stamped with a red seal and shuttered.
Lenin called this looting the looters.
Now, one of the main themes in Ayn Rand's novels are the difference between people who generate value and people who simply steal or take value, right?
The creators versus the looters.
Well, she saw the looters firsthand who destroyed her father's life.
Twelve-year-old Alyssa was in the store on the day the Bolshevik soldiers arrived bandishing guns.
So they kick in the door, they drive her family, her beloved father, out of the store and the shop that he'd spent his life growing and creating.
And the anger, the fear, the helplessness, and the frustration in her father's face remained with her all her life.
You know, So much of what we do in life has a lot to do with attempting to save parents' agony in the past.
We almost forever wish to ride to the rescue of our hurt parents.
It's certainly a big driver for my life, for reasons I've gotten into in podcasts, my desire to bring reason to the world directly stems in many ways from my failure to bring reason to my family members and her desire to save the world from her father's fate is a very powerful motivator and we can surely,
surely sympathize and understand with why a twelve-year-old girl who so loved her father Would feel a lifelong anger towards communism and collectivism and centralized planning and violence against peaceful traitors.
It's entirely understandable.
And people who claim not to understand this are just being hypocrites and liars.
Because it's so easy to understand that a young black kid who saw her father being lynched would have a hatred of racism.
And we can understand why a young girl who saw her father's entire economic life lynched would have a hostility and fear of communism and attempt to raise people's awareness of the dangers of communism and collectivism for the rest of her life.
So it's hard to understand her business heroes without this context.
And she is unique in the degree to which her heroes are business people.
That's not the standard template.
The standard template is Mr.
Burns, right?
That business people are like relentless, rich monocled prayers upon the huddled and teeming working class masses of gray faceless cogs in their capitalist machines.
But her father was her hero.
And her father's life was destroyed by communism and her father went on strike.
Communism deeply and permanently wounded, if not downright killed, her father's spirit and joy in living.
And that which wounds those we love automatically becomes our enemy emotionally, whether we like it or not.
We don't have to do anything about it, but whatever harms those we love becomes our enemy.
So, she bestows, of course, a huge amount of tenacity and blindness on her American business heroes.
And Hank Reardon's tenacity as he confronts the U.S. government's bureaucratic luchars and moochers in Atlas Shrugged is the rewriting of history where her father wins.
Right?
Because in the reality of 1917 Russia, the communists kicked in the door and forced them all out at gunpoint to flee.
Penniless.
But, Annette was shrugged, she rewrites her personal history so that the businessman wins, the businesswomen win.
And that is what she wanted to rewrite as different from what her history had.
And of course, we all know, or at least anybody with any reasonable amount of historical knowledge knows, that the communists in Russia are estimated to have slaughtered 70 million people.
More than 10 times the Holocaust.
Almost twice the entire deaths of the Second World War.
70 million people murdered by communists.
I, for one, am damn glad that she raised the specter of what had happened.
So they had to flee.
Alyssa's family left Russia for three years.
They traveled 900 miles from St.
Petersburg to Odessa, partly on foot and being robbed along the way.
And again, this is incredibly traumatic for a 12-year-old girl to be forced to march.
She said sometimes it was a whole route, and it's hard to say, but she certainly had to walk hundreds of miles.
It incredibly dangerous conditions in a situation of near starvation where people were being robbed and killed every night in a situation of almost complete social breakdown from a life where she had in her household a maid, a cook, a cleaner governess from a very civilized upper middle class life to being an absolute refugee in danger of being killed in her sleep every night.
They lived in the Crimea.
They found a small, damp, unheated house to take up a boat.
So this was not the end of her father's ambitions.
Zinovi eventually opened a pharmacy, but it was looted and shut down, either by renegade white Russian soldiers invading Reds or the staunchly anti-Semitic local Orthodox peasants who rampaged against the Jews whenever the whites were in retreat.
The town changed hands in this war four or five times.
Fifty-five years later, Rand remembered the terror of the Red Army and the empty, smelly, holy Russian religious bromides of the whites with almost equal loathing.
The family lived on a battlefield, she said.
So her horror of tribalism, her horror of religion, her horror of collectivism and the brutality Of religious and communist ideology and the degree to which it simply smashed and destroyed the lives of those around her and her own life.
As far as she saw, nobody knew where this was going to end.
It's important to understand where she's coming from.
So the girls went to private school studying math and Aristotelian logic.
She also studied economics and American Republican theories.
So Alicia's mother, Anna, pleaded with her husband to let the family emigrate.
But Alicia's father was as certain as one of Ayn Rand's later fictional characters had been that communism couldn't last!
Can't last!
One day, he said, we're going to get our business back and our property in St.
Petersburg.
By spring, however, the Bolshevik victory was complete and uncontestable with a few far-flung exceptions.
All of Russia was under red control and of course would remain so for many decades.
So the communist victory meant that Yiv, Pretoria and nearby towns were overrun by an army of ragged, hungry, illiterate red soldiers.
Many of whom had also served in World War I. As a group, they were of course desperate and hungry, looking for beauty and rape, and tragically not uncommon in these situations.
They were a classic mob.
They wanted revenge and to spread terror.
There were mock trials and burnings and hangings, and later Rand recalled that one classmate's father was summarily and publicly shot.
And this was the outcome of the Communist Revolution.
This was the primitive brutality and collectivism and base ugly as Maxim Gorky had predicted the base and ugly aspects of some of human nature and in particular traumatized and starving soldier of human nature that she saw the capricious randomness of mob violence and had a horror of course of mob violence in the future.
So Her father's old-style rubles were now toilet paper.
They were worthless.
The Bolsheviks issued their own inflated rubles, which became the legal tender in the South.
By 1924, it took 5 billion of these rubles to buy what one ruble had bought in 1914.
If you want to know why she wrote about economics and was a staunch supporter of the gold standard, it's because she had lived through hyperinflation.
And when you live through hyperinflation, You realize the degree to which your entire livelihood, your savings, your capacity to buy the food and shelter you need to live, particularly in Russia where it gets pretty damn cold, is all under the control of other people who can steal and siphon off the economic value of your entire life's work remotely.
It's like remote control theft.
It's like just sending evil little butterflies in to steal all half the rubles and three quarters of the rubles and 99% of the rubles off your dresser.
This remote theft through inflation remained a kind of horror for her throughout her life, having really experienced it directly and brutally.
She was very focused on stable currency and the value of the gold standard.
And of course, it really strikes those with savings.
There's a story, of course, in the Weimar Republic of a man who cashed in his entire life's pension and was able to buy a cup of coffee with it.
This is a huge blow against the former middle class.
And as we've seen time and time again in history, when a society destroys its middle classes, the center cannot hold and things fall apart.
You need those conservative people, the hard workers, the white picket fences, the family men, the family women, the stable ballast of society.
When you destroy those, and inflation does it pretty much the most effectively, when you destroy those, all that are left is enabled in extremists.
So Ayn Rand and her mother needed work, needed food, so they signed up to teach these illiterate red soldiers to read and write.
To Alyssa's surprise, she found the men actually eager to learn and polite in the classroom.
So she'd seen these people drag people out, shoot them, rob, rape, kill.
You get them in a classroom and they're actually kind of innocent, kind of eager to learn and write.
This is the power of education, the power of reason.
The power of enlightenment.
And of course, she attempted to do to the world what she did to the Red Soldiers with her mother.
Now, she was a great teacher by all accounts and reports, and her friends and followers would later remark with almost universal awe how good she was.
And she loved to make a misunderstood or murky concept exquisitely clear, which comes to some degree, of course, out of her innate intelligence, but also out of her training in Aristotelian logic.
I myself have taken an entire university course on Aristotle and Aristotelian logic and it is quite a taskmaster, let me tell you.
After returning to Leningrad, under a brief amnesty for private merchants called the New Economic Policy or NEP, her father got a position in a cooperative pharmacy.
So basically, right before half of Russia starved to death, Lenin relaxed some of his anti-free market rules and some private businesses were allowed to flourish.
And of course, he joined in this.
But then ideology won over life, as it so often does.
And these semi-private businesses were soon closed down and all of their wares were impounded.
And that was it.
That I think after this third or fourth time of trying to start a life and having it closed down by arbitrary state power, Rand explained later her father wouldn't do anything.
To begin with, he wouldn't have been accepted as a former owner into any Soviet job, and he didn't want to do it.
He was enormously on strike.
And her father's attitude of refusal to cooperate with a dictatorial regime seemed heroic.
And again, we want to rewrite our parents' histories.
So that they end up winning.
And this had a lot to do with driving her fiction.
Now, the mother that Elisa felt was a sort of social climber and shallow and so on, she actually stepped up.
She kept the family afloat after returning to St.
Petersburg.
So Anna, who of course was a former dental assistant and literary lady of the house, applied for and got a Soviet teaching certificate in 1921.
And for many years thereafter, she traveled The city by tram, teaching impoverished workers and their children in reading, writing, and foreign languages.
By the mid-1920s, it was Alyssa's mother who was earning the much needed money on the side by tutoring and translating politically correct books and magazine articles for the Soviet state publishing house Gozizdat.
That's great.
Anna was unusually resourceful and seems to have thrived in her new role as the family's breadwinner.
There's nothing like tragedy and an economically inert husband to get women to Shed some of their former shallowness, at least as Elissa described, and step up and become successful.
Of course, a lot of women went through this in the Second World War as well, this sort of Rosie the Riveter, although Rosie the Riveter was a complete fraud.
The general idea that women stepped into the economic sphere and found the satisfactions of working and earning quite strongly, this also happened to Anna.
At one point, after Rand was in America, her mother wrote to her and said, You and I have our love of work in common.
In a diminishing turnabout, her father was placed in charge of keeping house.
He waited in lines to ration food and cooked the millet or, in flush times, peas or potatoes that typically made a meal.
And some of these were chores that Rand's husband Frank would also perform.
So, of course, many years later, she found an enormously handsome and dapper man.
And I married him and he became sort of a house husband.
He did a couple of jobs, worked in a shoe store and things like that, got a couple of roles in the night of January 17th, one of her plays.
But she had this template of, you know, a hardworking, hard-earning mother, a woman, a wife, and an economically inert but very helpful house husband.
And that did somewhat replicate itself in her later marriage to Frank O'Connor.
August 1921 Rand was admitted without having to pay to Petrograd State University as a student in the newly formed are you welcome are you ready for a lovely name social pedagogical division of the college of social sciences also known as the widest business card in the known universe so this course curriculum combined the old disciplines of history philology anthropology and philosophy And philology,
this was also Nietzsche's area of study as philology as a language and grammar and history of language.
And so this is very close to the perfect training ground for a philosopher.
She declared a major in history and a minor in philosophy and began attending classes in October.
When her father announced his departure for a political meeting one evening, Alyssa boldly asked to accompany him.
Surprised yet pleased, her father agreed to take her and afterwards the two had their first real conversation.
He listened to Alyssa respectfully and offered his own opinions.
And this goes all the way back to him sitting with her in the pre-revolutionary relative paradise of their life explaining the streetcars to his two and a half year old daughter.
So the fact that she finally had a connection with someone other than her younger sister to her beloved father in talking about politics and philosophy and ideas will, of course, have a huge impact on her later pleasure in philosophical debate and discourse.
So there were still in her university older and classically trained Western-leaning liberal professors.
But they were being slowly phased out, arrested and deported.
But she did get some of the last lingering best ones.
So what did she study?
She studied ancient medieval Western and Russian history.
She studied logic.
She studied the philosophy of the mind, which is a forerunner of psychology, French, biology, historical materialism, the history of socialism.
These were required courses.
And what did she read?
She read Hegel and Marx, Shakespeare, Schiller, and the great proto-Nichean novelist Dostoevsky.
And she loved Dostoevsky.
She admired his integration of plot theme and the philosophy of mind or the psychology.
For Elisa, Dostoevsky was the world's best interpreter of the psychology of evil.
He, quote, gives me the feeling of entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide, she wrote in 1971.
And it's certainly true.
I mean, an audiobook website I like called Audible.com has a reading of Crime and Punishment that will absolutely give you goosebumps.
When I first picked up the book, I read it in a day and a half straight without sleeping.
And yeah, it is like being dragged ass backwards through a chamber of horrors, but it's irresistible and it's examination of evil.
The only problem, of course, To me, with Rand and Dostoevsky, to put a minor aside in, is that they were writing prior to the knowledge of the degree to which child abuse evokes adult moral dysfunction.
And so Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of crime and punishment, comes from a very nice family with a loving mother and a very lovely sister and has a best friend named Reason and so on.
And so we're still...
I mean, I just...
I just watched Gone Girl, where there's this crazy evil woman who comes from a pretty nice family.
So we still are not very good at explicating the link between adult evil and child abuse.
And neither Dostoevsky nor Rand were particularly great at that.
How could they be?
It's like asking the pre-Socratics to know about atoms.
So by 1924, the year she graduated, a degree was issued barring admission to students from families who had owned property before the revolution or who had employed one or more servants at any time during the last three generations.
Of course, that pretty wide net captured her family as a whole, but she just squeaked out in time.
During her stay in the Crimea and as a university, sorry, during her stay in the Crimea and as a university student, Alyssa grew closer to her father, who almost was always at home while her mother was out working.
She later said that it was only after she and he began to be allies in opposition to the Bolsheviks that she felt real love for him, love that meant something beyond family affection and abstract respect for him as an individual who's making moral choices rather than, you know, the father and so on.
They shared a contempt for communist ideology, which was perhaps best summarized by the slogan, from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
And their contempt grew deeper and more acrid as need was increasingly revealed to be a euphemism for the demands Of those in power.
And of course, if you've read Atlas Shrugged, you'll recognize that she has the tramp in the train tell Dagny the story of the 20th century motor company and the degree to which this communist slogan from each according to his ability to each according to his need destroyed the entire community,
the business profits, the sense of affection and respect between the workers and shredded the entire Industry and the entire company, just as, of course, the 20th century motor company, which is the free market, was shredded by the same thing.
From each according to his ability to each according to his need is not abstract.
It's the graduated income tax and the welfare state.
The graduated income tax was a Marxist idea.
It entirely came out of communism.
Alice's father was openly supportive of his daughter's brilliant analytical intelligence drive and the vocation she really, really wanted to become a writer, which she came up with very early in life.
In the late 1920s, when he wrote to her in America, quote, You must see clearly that you are not like everybody else and be proud of it.
Eschew or cast aside all doubts and continue firmly and with assurance to walk toward your goal.
She clearly returned his love and admiration.
She spoke about him with more respect than I can recall her ever speaking about anybody, said a friend who knew Rand in the 1950s.
So we mentioned about the last remnants of the Western-facing professors at university.
She took a course called Ancient World Views, which is probably the last class that was taught by a very famous and great professor, N. Oloski, before he was deported.
The course surveyed the pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato and Aristotle.
Elisa was dazzled by Aristotle, as anyone with a brain is who reads Aristotle.
Particularly his logical starting point of the axiomatic existence of objective reality and his belief in human reason as the only means to understand the world.
A very, very brief explication of this is in order.
Plato believed that there was a world of perfect forms inaccessible to the senses or to reason that you just had to kind of wait until it happened to you.
And he also believed that we were born Before we were born, we floated in this world of perfect forms where we saw the perfect everything, right?
The perfect shirt, the perfect white wall, the perfect camera.
And then when we were born, we knew what these things were because we had a memory of these perfect forms from before we were born.
Aristotle, I can't remember the exact Greek word for it, but I think he referred to this as bullshit.
And Aristotle said, well, this is nonsense.
We get sense data and we learn concepts from what is replicable properties in the world.
And we'll get into more of that when we talk about Ayn Rand and her extension of Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology, reality and development of knowledge.
And This is a basic, and I did my whole Master's thesis on this as well, basically.
This is the basic division in the world.
Is the world something that we can understand through the evidence of our senses and through reason?
Or is reality something which cannot be understood?
Is it the mind of God?
Is it what Kant called the new aminal realm or some abstract realm of crazy opposites that can't be understood by reason?
Is it the world of Platonic forms?
Or is it sense data we organize using our rational faculties?
These two opposing belief systems have massive and enormous impacts on the world, which we'll get into later in these explications.
So for Aristotle, as for Alyssa, man was a rational animal.
She hated Plato and his mysticism.
Which is how she regarded the Platonic belief that the observable world is a mere shadow of ideal forms that can't be seen.
She associated this, and I think correctly, with mystical Christianity.
So you've probably heard the allegory of the cave, which very briefly is that When people think they're looking at something real, right?
Like I have this little control for my video camera.
Well, you may think...
Look at this.
You may think that you are looking at the control of a video camera and it's a real thing.
Boy!
According to Plato, are you mistaken?
Looking at this and thinking it's the real thing is the same as looking at the shadow cast by a fire on a wall with something in between, right?
So if you put this in front of a fire, you get all these...
Lights flickering and it's going to be flickering on the back.
You're looking at this, you think you're looking at a real thing, but you're just looking at all of the shadows flickering from the shadows cast by the fire against this thing.
And so Plato said, the point of philosophy, stop looking at the shadows and then look at the thing in front of the fire and then look at the fire and then walk outside and see what's actually real outside the cave.
And she hated this because it's not communicable, it's not objective, it's not scientific, it's mystical.
Which means it's a subjective experience, according to Aristotelianism and Objectivism, has no reality in the world and is simply a manipulative belief designed to cow other people into giving you stuff.
So she also learned from Professor Lasky an intensely dialectical method of thinking, thinking in principles, she called it, which is also the scientific method.
Now of course, Nietzsche was hugely popular among Russian intellectuals at this time.
In particular, his description of master and slave psychology and of the absolute right of the superior individual to place himself in opposition to the common herd.
The 17-year-old Alyssa valued his ideas, including his call to discard old values and create new ones, his condemnation of altruism as a slave morality, and his argument for the inviolate rights of the gifted person, whose only obligation is to refine and use his gifts as he sees fit.
I'm going to do something on Ichi, who is also very influential to me as well, as an aphorist, not as a Rigorous philosopher.
But this has some impact, of course, on Elisa.
Until reading Nietzsche, she had assumed that in order to defend man against religion, she would have to defend all men, no matter how weak or strong.
Zarathustra, thus begs Zarathustra, which is one of his denser and more allegorical works, demonstrated, quote, that it doesn't have to be collective.
In other words, the species can be vindicated by one man.
And this, of course, is a very powerful insight for anyone of intellectual ambition to get as a teenager, which is that you don't have to convince everyone of the truth of your position, which is obviously an impossible task.
But you can burn brightly enough in the human constellation that other people can navigate by you and join you in the constellations.
If they have the will and purpose to do so.
And you simply work on your own reason, your own communication, the fire of your own intellect, which then can serve as a guide to others, just as other people's intellects serve as a guide for you.
And you can bring people to reason through the example of your commitment to rationality, rather than going and finger wagging everyone to be more rational.
Ah, her first love.
Lev Beckerman, who was a Jew, and she said, the first time I saw him I remember being very startled by how good-looking he was.
Rand recalled when she was 55.
It was his looks that I liked enormously.
Well, not necessarily the deepest appreciation of a man's character, but this of course happened as well with Frank O'Connor, who was exceptionally good-looking and dapper.
She learned that Lev Beckerman shared her political views.
He had once hidden in his apartment students who were being hunted by the Soviet police or GPU. They dated but he rejected her hot pursuit of him.
Later he was married several times and then he was murdered in May 1937 under the Stalinist terror.
Rand later confessed that she would have stayed in Russia if he had accepted her pursuit and then she probably would have been killed as well.
It's one of the great lessons of life that sometimes what you want and what you would almost give your life to get is the very worst possible thing that can happen to you and that which you fear and hate and loathe which occurs can be the very best thing for you.
It is a way of not prejudging the long-term effects of everything that happens to you but being humble in learning how to ride these roller coasters to the benefit of yourself and those around you and with any luck the world as a whole.
So, 1924.
Diseases of dirt and poverty, cholera, typhoid, rheumatic fever, and tuberculosis swept Leningrad.
And both Alyssa and Anna had a terrible fear of germs.
Russia officially became the Soviet Union and the regime began busily eliminating the new economic policy that had given Alyssa's father some minor relief from inertia, destroying the jobs it had created and the useful products and services it brought to market, while the Russian government intensified its attacks on the remnants of the middle class.
Workplaces and schools were purged of political undesirables, which meant that becoming an informant against fellow students All workers and attempting to join the Communist Party were among the few strategies that you could take to try and stay alive.
Candid speech was dangerous.
Dissent was deadly.
The light of academic discourse was quickly going out across all of Russia.
This is how desperate things became.
Alyssa's family ate cakes made of potato peelings, carrot greens, coffee grounds and acorns.
At one point she was so hungry that she begged her mother for a single pee and she had no shoes and she had to tie newspapers to her feet if she wanted to walk outside particularly in the winter This economic fall from grace, from prosperity to starvation, close to starvation, homelessness, would leave an incredibly deep impression upon anyone.
And I believe it is to Ayn Rand's eternal credit, however awkwardly she may have at times implemented it, her desire to bring to the vision of mankind, to the Cultural, artistic, and philosophical view of mankind, the principles she felt destroyed her entire world was, I think, incredibly noble.
Again, however awkwardly she may have implemented at times, how many mistakes she may have made along the way, she did attempt to bring to mankind the principles behind the destruction of not just her father or her family, but of an entire Culture holding together ballast of middle-class lives and of the destruction of human potential that she saw in her father.
So she wanted out.
There's an old story about Russian kid.
People say, what do you want to be when you grow up?
And he says, a foreigner.
In the army, I think it was in the First World War, in the army, there was a guy who kept complaining about wanting to live in the West, so they stuffed him in a cannon and shot him over the front lines in pieces.
Hey, Red Mist, enjoy your freedom.
So the films were, of course, still available.
She saw the films that invited Alyssa to picture America as a kind of Atlantis, the ideal existence for intelligent, purposeful, ruggedly individualistic men and women.
She was also, as we mentioned earlier, very influenced by Russian futurist and surrealist writers.
At the age of 19, she enrolled into a performance art school to learn screenwriting.
In the spring of 1925, Elisa applied for a Soviet passport and just in time, because within two years, almost every other possibility of escape was closed.
She had to travel 300 miles to Latvia for her US student visa.
Her mother reportedly sold the last of the family jewelry to pay for the trip.
And it's hard to imagine, and she later said she had no intention of returning.
And just as a father myself, the idea of basically handing my daughter to rescuers in a frozen sea when I'm about to go under so that she can have a better life is...
A very noble and tragic and destructive thing that she had to do.
Both her parents had to give her up for freedom.
I think that they knew that she was not going to survive in Soviet Russia.
And by the selling the last of the family jewelry to pay for the one-way trip to get the student visa.
And she did make it out.
She never returned to Russia.
She was the only one of her family.
To escape.
And she was talented enough, of course, that she could have had a fairly easy life polishing up screenplays and so on.
The fact that she became one of the most influential writers in English when she arrived in America not knowing the language at all is truly an astounding act of will.
I mean, try going to Japan and becoming one of the great Japanese novelists within seven or eight years.
It's an astonishing thing.
That she was able to achieve.
So, there's some things that I think are important to get from this.
When Jews write about Nazism, we understand.
We get that Nazism destroyed Jews, murdered Jews, and we understand why Jews would write angrily about Nazism and constantly reveal how destructive and evil Nazism was.
When Jews write about communism, for some reason, there's this short circuit.
Jews writing about communism, it's just considered incomprehensible.
Now, I get it.
Of course, a lot of the founding members of communism were Jews.
And a lot of founding members of the Communist Party itself were Jews.
They were like 50% Jews.
Jews were like 2% of the population as a whole.
Jews writing about communism gets sort of into a tribal conflict, but we really do need to understand that it was not Ayn Rand's Jewishness that caused her to write about communism.
It was the fact that the family, the father that she loved, the sisters that she loved, the mother that she did grow to love and respect when her mother stepped up after her father stopped working out of protest in the communist regime, That these rotten bastards destroyed this woman's entire family,
destroyed the families of her entire neighborhood, destroyed the families of her friends, that she saw people dragged out and gunned down in the street, that she saw people starving, that she saw people dying in the streets, that she was so hungry she had to beg for a pee after growing up relatively middle class when she was younger, that she saw her father's intelligence and ambition crushed and destroyed, By these human vermin, these communists.
And the fact that she then escaped to the West.
And where did she land?
Where did she land in the West?
She landed in the great bubble caused by the Federal Reserve, a quasi-government agency.
She landed in the great stock market bubble.
And then she landed In the Great Depression.
And she saw, under FDR, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she saw so many of the same policies being enacted in America that had so destroyed Russia.
And this galvanized her.
This is like a horror movie, you understand?
You put the stake through the vampire, you're walking away from his grave.
Out comes the leg.
It's back to life.
She thought she had escaped the worst nightmare to go to the shining example of freedom and volunteerism and property rights called America, her salvation, her paradise.
She flees a storm to sunny climates and the clouds begin to gather and blot out the sun she so loved, the freedom that she so loved in America.
The sun was blotted out by the same clouds that destroyed her childhood, her family.
And she strove mightily against the inertia and the growing collectivism and the growing reliance on the state and addiction to state power.
She fought against it magnificently.
She fought against it bravely.
She fought against it against all opposition.
Was it embittering for her?
Of course it was.
Was it frustrating for her?
Of course it was.
Nietzsche wrote very eloquently about the man who sees the truth, who brings the truth to the people and cannot get them to pull their fingers out of their ears and save their lives and the lives of their children.
She was separated from her family who she had really grown to love.
She was separated from her family by these rat bastards of communism and she bent every ounce of her prodigious literary and intellectual and philosophical capacities to warn human beings of what was coming that where she fled from was now arriving in the shores of the paradise she thought would save her forever she
saw The end of the disease, and now she saw the beginning of the disease.
And like an ex-smoker who nags at you to stop smoking because he's dying, she tried to tell us about the dangers of collectivism, the dangers of irrationality, the dangers of tribalism, the dangers of relying upon the power and violence of the state As a form of social engineering, as a form of conscience-satisfying, self-righteous attempts to change people by shoveling and herding money around.
At the point of a gun, printing money, borrowing money, stealing money.
She had seen all of this and where it leads to.
Starvation, death, murder, mass murder, frankly, a kind of genocide.
You look at what happened to the kulaks, you look at what happened In the Ukraine, you look what happened in the great famines.
You look what happened to her first love.
Her first love.
Murdered!
He was supposed to have sabotaged a factory making tanks.
He was murdered.
So she had reason to complain.
We understand that.
We can sympathize that.
Does not mean that her arguments are true.
But what I'm trying to do is help Her perspective seem less alien to you so that you can evaluate her ideas rationally rather than through reactive emotions.
Personal experiences deeply shape belief systems and look to someone's experiences to really help understand where they're coming from.
I really thank you for your time.
This is incredibly important stuff.
I am not invested in you coming out of this liking or disliking Ayn Rand, liking or disliking me for that matter.
I don't want you to become an objectivist.
I don't want you to subscribe to any of my beliefs.
I want you, like Rand did, like good philosophers do, I want you to think for yourself.
You must think for yourself.
Nobody else can think for you just as nobody else can digest your meal in their belly.
That is my goal, to stimulate thought and to have you truly, truly understand how powerful these basic beliefs are, how much they shape everything that happens in society, how much they will shape your life and the life of your entire culture, how much they will shape the kind of world that your children are going to grow up and live in.
That's what matters.
That's why we look at philosophy.
And that's why we look at Ayn Rand, because her influence is enormous.
Her breadth of thought is enormous.
The charisma of her novels is deeply powerful.
And the questions she raised, just as the questions raised by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, you name it, the questions that she raised are not yet answered to the satisfaction of the majority of people in society, which means we still sail blindly into the storm of the future.
No compass, no sextant, no GPS, no way of knowing when the storm ends or where to go in its midst.
So the purpose of this, my friends, is to get you deeply interested in contributing to the march of ideas.
That is the only thing possible to save the species.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio.
Thank you so much.
I look forward to seeing you in part two, which will be a deep examination of her actual philosophical arguments.
