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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:13:18
The Truth About Ayn Rand: Criticisms [3 of 4]
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Inn Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
This is part the third of The Truth About Ayn Rand.
No cheating!
Make sure that you go back and watch the last two.
These are common criticisms of Ayn Rand and I will, of course, in part four, put my own specific criticisms to her approach and philosophy.
Okay, so just because critical thinking, Socratic method, and the Trivium are not particularly taught or understood these days, Let's look at how one can criticize another person's ideas.
So there's basically two forms of criticism.
Number one, civilized.
Number two, barbaric.
So first, the civilized one is you examine the axioms, the essential building blocks of the argument.
And if you can overturn them without using them, then you have decimated someone's philosophy.
So if I say to you, language is meaningless, well, I'm detonating my own statement.
It's a self-detonating argument or axiom because I'm using the fact that language has meaning to try and communicate that language has no meaning.
So, you can look for self-detonating statements at the basis of philosophy, something like, self-ownership is impossible!
And then you can rebut that, but you're using an exercise in control over your own body to make the arguments to rebut.
The arguments made by someone else, in other words, the effects of their actions, of their self-controls, if that doesn't work.
You do not exist!
That, of course, is a self-detonating statement because I'm referring to someone who I say does not exist.
Reality is subjective.
Well, I'm using the objective properties of reality, sound waves, vision, light, and so on, to make that argument.
Truth is subjective.
Well, of course, if it's subjective, It's not truth.
And, of course, if I'm saying truth is subjective, I'm creating a universal truth statement that universal truth statements do not exist.
These are all self-detonating statements.
Fairly easy to demolish a lot of modern relativistic nonsense with this sort of stuff.
So this is how you can criticize.
They're not personal attacks.
I think personal attacks do have a place in philosophy, but I've dealt with that in other areas.
You can find logical contradictions in the arguments.
So even if you accept the basic building blocks, the axioms, the sort of irreducible facts at the base of a philosophy, you can find logical contradictions in the arguments.
You can find counterexamples that deny universalizations.
So if I say truth is subjective, I'm making a universal statement.
And the counterexample in this case is the actual statement, truth is subjective.
So you can find counterexamples that deny universalization.
You can find trends that potentially counter generalized predictions.
And this is tricky, but it's still important.
Rent would argue capitalist economies do better than communist economies.
So if you can find a significant number of communist economies that defy Ludwig von Mises price calculation problem, which is that without a free market you can't determine prices, without prices you can't efficiently allocate goods and services, because of course it's the pull of prices and demand that determine how resources should be allocated.
So if you can find a number of communist economies that do Better than capitalist economies, in other words, where coercive intrusions into voluntary trade results in a healthier, better, more vibrant, more growing, more productive, more innovative, more creative economy.
Then you are going to be able to begin to chip away at someone's argument.
So this is very very basic and there's lots more to talk about but this is a civilized way of how to criticize arguments.
The barbaric way is the bonobo monkey poo projectile technique where basically you load a giant catapult full of shit And you continue to hurl insults and slurs at an individual until people shy away from their arguments.
You know, racist, sexist, misogynistic, elitist, poor-hating, wants people to die.
You just keep hurling invective and it kind of sticks.
People tend to shy away from someone who has a lot of sniper lasers on their forehead because, of course, In a tribe, which is where our social sensibilities evolved, in a small tribe, if you were hated by a number of people, your days were probably not long in this world.
We don't fundamentally recognize in our bones that the internet is not composed of literature or reviews or not composed of people within jawbone striking distance of our craniums.
So you just keep hurling slurs and insults at an individual until it becomes disrespectful to even examine that individual's arguments.
And this is straight out of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
He said, number five, ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule.
Also, it infuriates the opposition.
Which then reacts to your advantage.
So you just you keep hurling something like racism or racist or sexist or whatever and you just keep hurling that at the person until the person spends his or her energy trying to splutteringly defend against these terms and it consumes their energies and it gives life to the attack.
Number 13.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
In conflict tactics there are certain rules that should be regarded as universalities.
One is that opposition must be singled out as the target and frozen.
And frozen basically means just continue to hurl invective until the person can't get any kind of single argument across.
Any target, Saul writes, can always say, well, why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?
But when you freeze the target, you disregard these rational but distracting arguments.
This is basic leftism.
He was somewhat on the left.
He was a mixed bag, but somewhat on the left.
And you can just see this.
I mean, if you don't like Obama, you're a racist.
If you have problems with feminism, you hate women.
Like, this is just, they're not arguments.
It's just barbaric, idiot, but challengingly effective, right?
Because a lot of people aren't taught how to think critically.
And this is basic on the left, right?
The Tea Party is composed of racists and reactionaries and angry white people who are upset that their seat of power is being overthrown by a more diverse culture.
I mean, there's no actual argument there.
You're just continuing to portray the person in a negative light so that you portray them as so deranged and so irrational that nobody even bothers to examine their arguments.
It's a very effective technique in an undereducated world.
So, A little bit of background as to why Ayn Rand has so much invective thrown at her.
Ayn Rand is a virulent, powerful anti-communist and she can't really be convicted of anti-semitism and so on because she was a Jew and so Marxists, of course, expected capitalism to implode and lead to communism, right?
So they say feudalism leads to capitalism, capitalism inevitably leads to communism, Because the capitalists start taking so many profits and the workers are starving and there's this revolution which leads to communism.
They felt it was an inevitable scientific progression of human society.
So yeah, wages go down, workers starve, there's a revolution, but this didn't really happen at all in the 19th century.
Calories per worker massively increased, wages massively increased, and so capitalism was defying the supposedly scientific predictions of Marxism, and therefore they were not happy.
And therefore they decided to rig the game, to cheat, right?
If this is supposed to be some inevitability, then this in the scientific field would be called like leaning on the scale or just basically fudging the results or introducing some other element that further confirmed your theory, even though it didn't happen in reality.
So they couldn't find the victims that they wanted.
And so they had to, to some degree, invent them.
And so, Ayn Rand's novels are not full of victims, right?
And the victims are victims of state power, which is, of course, what Marxists really wanted.
They wanted a totalitarian dictatorship with themselves at the top.
Because the alternative of actually working for a living and providing value in the free market is kind of anathema to these nasty sophists, so they want an extension and expansion of government power.
This is not what happens in Ayn Rand's novels and in her fiction.
She definitely relies upon, as we talked about in the last show, the efficacy and competence of human thinking.
And she has women who are heroes, women who run railroads, women who are incredibly powerful and authoritative and clear thinking and brave and so on.
So this goes against the women as victim
Standard of the left and of course most early feminists were explicit Marxists and so on so During the 1940s 1950s 1960s really up until Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty Blacks and women were all doing better for the massive infusion of labor-saving devices for women Black families were doing better black per capita income was increasing and so Marxists were kind of freaking out
Because capitalism was doing the opposite of what they predicted and was eclipsing their grab for power.
And they didn't like that.
And then, of course, the horrors.
Khrushchev did a speech where he revealed some of the horrors of Stalinism.
And Stalin was a real hero to most of the Marxists.
They wrote lovely books and made movies praising him as a far-seeing visionary who could walk on the blood of capitalists, carrying the proletariat to a brave new world of peace and abundance.
And this all turned out to be false.
So Marxism was doing really, really badly.
It was an explicit 1921 I think was the year and The Truth About Immigration has more about this.
But Marx's goal was to mobilize blacks in particular and mobilize them against the free market by saying that the free market was inherently unjust to women, blacks, other minorities and so on.
But this was being counteracted by the free market generally rising tide lifting all boats and so on.
Because Marxists say that capitalists are all about profit.
Yeah, like workers don't want more wages.
Somehow, the desire for profit is only part of the capitalist class.
And of course, if workers are generally underpaid, then a capitalist can make a fortune by offering them 10 cents more an hour.
Because they'll all start swarming over to him.
So bidding up wages is part of the greed of capitalism.
So Marxists had to say, That people were bigoted against blacks, people were bigoted against women, and that bigotry eclipsed their natural capitalistic greed.
In other words, there were personal or tribal or social considerations that vastly eclipsed profit.
And then they'd have to say, well, it's not profits that drive capitalism, but rather bigotry.
And that goes against the Marxist theory that profits drive capitalism and profits are the source of injustice.
Because if there's bigotry, In capitalism, then there's no way to eliminate that by becoming communist, right?
Because if they can eliminate the profit motive, but they can't eliminate bigotry, at least there was no clear plan to do so, because then that would be, I don't know, part of human nature or whatever, right?
They also couldn't claim that the bigotry came from the capitalist system, because just about everybody in the United States at the time was raised in government-run schools, right?
Which is a foundational backbone of communism and Marxism, which is why we continue to drift further and further to the left, because people are indoctrinated For 12 years in a leftist institution, by leftist teachers, in leftist principals.
Kind of inevitable, right?
As the Jesuits would say, give me a child until he is seven and he is mine for life!
So this is sort of the context.
And Ayn Rand comes along and says free market is good, free market is not bigoted, and the free market punishes bigotry.
Right?
So if Hispanics are as able as whites and I'm prejudiced against Hispanics, then I can only hire from a significantly and shrinking pool of white applicants and therefore my competitors who are not bigoted will end up hiring from a wider talent pool.
They'll do better.
So you can be bigoted in the free market but your bigotry will be punished where that bigotry is irrational.
So this was a big problem for the Marxists and then along comes Ayn Rand, a Jewish free market advocate like Murray Rothbard and so on.
It was a big problem for them.
So they have to convince significant portions of society that freedom is injustice, right?
Because the blacks who suffered for over 300 years of government bigotry, as slavery was enforced by the government, the Jim Crow laws were enforced by the government, and so on.
Naturally, a free market advocate would go to the blacks and say, government's kind of your enemy.
My friends, so let's reduce government power and you will naturally become freer.
That wasn't the Marxist's goal.
So the Marxist had to point blacks and women at the free market and endlessly say, freedom is injustice.
If you have equal property rights, if you have equality under the law, you will suffer because of the sexism, bigotry and racism of the capitalists, which mysteriously goes against the profit motive that is supposed to be the driving force of the free market and blah, blah, blah.
So they had to say freedom is a horrible injustice.
And the only way to save yourself from the horrible injustice of freedom is to run into the arms of the nanny state and get pay equity laws and get affirmative action laws and get you name it.
Right.
All of the hundreds and hundreds of laws that are supposed to benefit minorities and women and so on.
So this is sort of the basic context of why there was so much invective from the left towards Rand.
So let's start digging into some of them.
Ayn Rand is an elitist.
Well, what does this mean?
We all love elitism.
I mean, let's be honest.
Come on.
Who should be the singer in the band?
What's the best singer and the best frontman?
That's why they didn't have John Deacon up front during Live Aid.
Who should be the lead actor?
Well, the person who has the most appeal, the person who has the best acting ability, or has the most charisma, or is the best looking, or whatever combination gets the asses into the seats.
Who should be the dancer?
Do you want Kevin Federline when he was doing a backup dancing for Britney Spears?
Or do you want Kevin Federline when he basically is a backup dancer for his couchsurfing these days?
Who should be the gold medalist?
Well, the person who wins.
Who should be the quarterback?
The person with the best throw and the best knowledge.
Who should be the model?
It's the prettiest person, blah blah blah, right?
So we all love elitism and we reward elitism with huge amounts of money and endorsements and so on.
So the idea that being an elitist is some sort of terrible thing flies in the face of what all of our preferences are.
So some critic wrote, Rand espouses an elitist, oligarchic philosophy that is both fundamentally anti-American and deeply at odds with the Tea Party's own We the People course.
Rand and her heroes hold ordinary people in great contempt.
You see, this is not an argument.
There's no evidence provided.
The moment people just fire the cannon full of negative adjectives at someone without any supporting arguments, or the moment they give you, like, Quotes without context, without an examination of the syllogisms of the argument.
You just know they're reaching for your pocket through their words and are definitely people to keep at taser length or further.
Because random heroes hold ordinary people in great contempt.
So what they're saying, what this person is trying to manipulate you into feeling is that, well, you're an ordinary person.
I mean, you're not a random hero, so you're held in great contempt and that evokes dislike on the part of people.
So this is just aimed to make you dislike Rand and her heroes and so on.
Another critic wrote, Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites.
First of all, parasites aren't useless.
Parasites are negative.
If they're mutually beneficial, it's symbiotic.
So, not even a good biological metaphor.
As the producers of all wealth, see, this is again just mad.
I mean, even within the confines of Rand's novels, Howard Rourke, the architect, didn't build all of the houses himself.
You just have to read iPencil to realize how much coordination has to go into the production of a simple pencil.
The lead has to be mined, the paint has to be made, the eraser, the metal for the tip around the eraser, the ring around the eraser, the wood for the pencil.
Huge amounts of coordination.
There's no one person in the world who knows how to make a pencil.
And that's something as simple as a pencil.
Howard Roark, of course, employed people to create his buildings.
He was the designer.
He certainly was on hand.
He knew how to do a lot of the work.
But there was cooperation.
Different levels of ability, but cooperation.
And Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged did not run the entire Intercontinental Railroad by herself, right?
She didn't go up and dig up the coal and then carry the coal and put it in the locomotives, go get the oil and dig, right?
I could go on and on, but of course it's a cooperative venture.
The capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth.
Well, that's nonsense.
The other thing, too, As a former capitalist, I guess I founded a company and grew it.
The idea that the capitalists or the entrepreneurs are not the workers, but the people they hire are the workers is fundamentally insulting.
Dividing people into capitalists and workers is insulting.
I worked more hours than they were in the day sometimes, literally, when I was growing the company that I co-founded.
I worked two nights straight at one time.
I traveled all the time.
I put in 80 hours a week, much more than the average employee.
So the idea that they're the workers and I'm just the lazy capitalist, well, it's just silly and it just shows you that people are talking about the economy who've never actually really participated in it.
It all struck me.
I had this Marxist professor.
The rise of socialism, no, the rise of capitalism, the socialist response was this course at Glendon College of York University that I took.
Basically, this barrel-shaped Ewok Marxist professor had never actually worked in the market at all.
I mean, he'd gone from government schools to largely government-run and subsidized higher education, and then he had got tenure through his government-protected and sponsored union, and he'd actually never spent a day in the free market, to my knowledge, and yet he was talking all about capitalists and entrepreneurs, which is like me explaining the black experience to a classroom of blacks, having never actually Had a black friend or talked to a black person.
When you get all your knowledge from books, all you learn is prejudice, not empiricism.
So economic influence versus political power is a very big distinction in objectivism.
And it's not just in objectivism.
So economic influence is, yeah, I got a lot of money.
So I can spend it and that, right?
But that all requires voluntary.
Participation, right?
If I'm staggeringly good-looking, then I guess I can go to bed with a lot of shallow women.
But that's not the same as rape, right?
That's just supply and demand.
Political power is very different from economic influence, and the co-joining of the two is wretched and completely wrong, and so ignorant that it can only be motivated by malevolence.
Political power is I can go and bribe a congressman through campaign contributions and sending out fundraising dinners.
I can go buy bribe a congressman to give me preferential legislation, which means that anybody who acts against my economic interest goes to jail, right?
So if I'm a sweater manufacturer, I can lobby my congressman to put a $5 a sweater import tax on sweaters from China.
That is the use of violence.
That's completely different.
And economic influence?
Yeah.
We vote with our dollars.
Every time you buy a copy of Windows, you're voting for Microsoft.
Every time you buy an Apple product, you're voting for Apple.
And it's true some people have more votes than others, but that's just the result of previous votes.
Even if it's inherited, it's the vote of the parents in terms of giving people money.
So economic influence is not the same as political power.
Any more than being good-looking is the same as rape.
So as we mentioned, the creation of victims who need political protection is constantly used in criticisms of Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand is an elitist.
She wants to control you.
She has nothing but contempt for you.
She wants people to rule over you.
She wants the capitalists to have all the power.
This is the creation of victims.
And the moment you create victims, you create a hunger for a protector, which is the white knight of the state who comes in to, quote, save everyone and ends up pretty much enslaving them.
So from Capitalist and the Unknown Ideal, she wrote, Wealth in a free market is achieved by a free, general, democratic vote, by the sales and purchases of every individual who takes part in the economic life of the country.
No one has the power to decide for others or to substitute his judgment for others.
Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value.
Political power is exercised by means of a negation, a negative, sorry, By the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction.
So if I run a pizza place and I give you a coupon for a free slice of pizza, I get you to come in and try my pizza.
It's an incentive.
It's an offer.
It's a reward.
If I'm a politician and I pass a law, then you go to jail if you disobey it.
The only thing I can reward you with is not throwing you in jail, which is not much of a reward.
when you think about it.
So this idea that she's elitist is not even really an argument, and there's really no evidence for it.
She recognized different levels of ability, don't we all, right?
I mean, American Idol doesn't vote some random guy in the audience who squalls like a cat being fed ass backward through a Cuisinart as the best singer.
It's a competition and the best win.
Ability equals virtue.
So a lot of criticisms of Rand's universe is that, Well, if you're really competent, you must be really virtuous, and those who are incompetent must be evil.
So did she make the argument that the most talented and productive are morally superior?
Well, there's plenty of brilliant evil characters.
Tooey in The Fountainhead, Robert Stadler, the evil scientist who just needs basically a bald head and a bald cat in his lap to complete the Bond villain picture.
Lots of brilliant evil characters.
And that's not really the case.
There's plenty of very smart evil businessmen.
So James Taggart in Oren Boyle, in Atlas Shrugged, set up a cartel through the power of the state to undermine competition and fight against a rear end metal, I think it was.
The novels of Ayn Rand are full of worthy people of lesser abilities and ability and morality are clearly differentiated in her work.
So in the "Objectivist Ethics" she writes, "Productive work means the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability, It is not the degree of a man's ability, nor the scale of his work that is ethically relevant here, but the fullest and most purposeful use of his mind.
Again, straight out of Compton.
No, straight out of Aristotle.
That's probably a little bit more appropriate.
So she's saying, look, the degree to which you pursue excellence is fantastic.
That's a mark of your productivity and so on.
It's not moral.
It's not evil to not pursue excellence because you're not initiating the use of force against anyone else.
I guess with the exception that if you're a parent and you don't pursue excellence in parenting, your children suffer because they can't leave.
But that's neither here nor there at the moment.
So the idea that ability equaled virtue, she explicitly denied it.
The novels are full of counter characters for that.
In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark has a friend, Mike I think his name is, an electrician of very modest abilities, but a person of great integrity who he has as a great friend and so on.
Ah, wealth equals virtue.
So, in Rand's universe, apparently, according to our critics, if you are rich, you are a virtuous person.
That is not true.
There are plenty of evil rich characters in her novels.
Plenty of noble poor characters.
Rourke, his friend, the electrician I mentioned.
There's a homeless man who tells the story of the 20th century motor company to Dagny on the train.
He's dirt poor, but has learned a huge amount about virtue.
Wealth was not the central issue or any issue at all.
Force was.
The accumulation of wealth through trade in the free market is the degree to which you have been of service to the needs and preferences of other people.
Let me say that again.
This is really unclear to a lot of people.
The degree of wealth that you attain in the free market is the degree to which you have served the needs and preferences successfully of other people.
If people want an Italian restaurant, You open an Italian restaurant, lots of people come.
It's because lots of people want the Italian restaurant.
They're voting for it.
You're serving their needs.
You're making them happy.
That's why they come back.
So in a free market, the degree of wealth is the degree of service.
Of successfully serving and meeting the needs of other people.
Can be in the porn industry.
It doesn't necessarily have to be the most noble of pursuits, but you are successfully meeting the needs of people.
If you use force to transfer wealth as a mugger, as a counterfeiter, Federal Reserve, or as somebody who uses political power to transfer wealth, well, that's immoral.
But the connection between wealth and virtue is not at all made in her novels.
Is she right-wing?
She's a hero to a lot of the right-wing people.
Paul Ryan, of course, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, and so on.
Was she right-wing?
Objectivism, reason, individualism, Personal happiness.
Again, sort of boiled down a little, but that's the way it rolls.
Conservatism tends to be about faith, tradition, duty, and sacrifice.
So, Ayn Rand loathed the draft as violence, servitude to mostly evil ends.
She was, of course, an out-and-out, explicit, strong-as-strong-can-be atheist.
Not, well, I don't know, or it could be, but there is no God, don't be ridiculous.
So, faith, tradition, she was explicitly anti-traditional.
As you can see from her writings, she's put forward a number of startling new ideas.
Duty and sacrifice.
It's impossible to imagine Ayn Rand saluting, except perhaps in, you know, sympathy for his victimhood, a Vietnam veteran.
But of course, conservatives do this sort of stuff all the time.
So, she was Believed in the right of a woman to kill a fetus in her belly, abortion, she of course opposed religion of any kind, and so on.
Is she family values?
Family values?
Well, Reardon, Hank Reardon, was a man who ended up, once he realized that his family was committed to his spiritual, emotional, financial, and legal destruction, left his family.
Once he realized that his family was committed to exploiting him through the power of the state and desperately needed him, but kept insulting him, he left them.
In other words, as Aristotle said, we love our friends, we must love the truth even more.
And when the two contradict, it is our friends who must lose and the truth who must win.
This is a standard philosophical argument that has been made throughout the ages.
Because if blood ties, DNA sharing, and kinship is the highest value, why bother studying any kind of philosophy or morality or truth at all?
You just say, I don't know, what do the elders think?
What does the family think?
Well, that's what I pretend to think as well.
She herself had no kids.
Her husband, Frank O'Connor, was a very good-looking guy and a very sweet and gentle guy.
And he basically was a househusband.
And he cooked, he cleaned, and so on.
He had a couple of jobs, I think, as a shoe salesman and stuff like that.
So how could this be considered traditional right-wing family values?
Ah yes, Ayn Rand is not a serious philosopher.
What does that, what does serious philosopher mean?
She was not an academic because she was doing philosophy.
She was bringing philosophy to the masses.
She was engaging the public in philosophical discourse, not just sitting in the library, chewing the end of her bic and footnoting.
Most major philosophers present their own thoughts and arguments.
They don't reference others except in passing.
You'll hear a little bit from Plato's rendition of Socrates about pre-Socratic philosophers, Spinoza, Hume, and so on.
They will reference other people, but they're basically concerned with presenting their own thoughts and arguments.
This is fundamental.
So just off the top of my head are the people that I've read and studied.
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Kant, and so on.
They weren't academics!
They're not influential because they analyzed other philosophers.
They weren't cover bands.
They created their own arguments, their own ideas, their own perspectives, and forcefully persuaded other people of their viewpoints.
This is kind of the irony, and I remember When I was studying philosophy, both in undergraduate and graduate school, I remember this being enormously ironic, that we were simply supposed to study other philosophers.
And I remember bringing this argument up with my prof and saying, well, but we're studying these philosophers because they thought for themselves, not because they studied other philosophers.
Right?
So if a philosopher, in other words, people whose thoughts you examine when studying philosophy, if a philosopher is someone who comes up with original arguments and doesn't particularly study other philosophers, Then philosophy professors are by definition not philosophers because they mostly study other people's arguments.
Ayn Rand had an enormous amount of influence because she was in the free market, she respected the free market, so she's not going to go into academia.
What do academics have to offer their students?
Well, the Willy Wonka golden ticket to academia.
If you please me, then I will give you the PhD, I will write you letters of recommendation, and I will help you get a job Where you teach a couple of hours a week, get sabbaticals, get summers off, get paid six figures plus and have tenure, job security and so on, right?
So I'll get you into the Elysium fields of state-sponsored, the state-sponsored biosphere of exaggerated income and prestige.
I will get you into this ticket if you do what I say and do what I like.
That's political.
That's gross.
That is so anti-philosophical that you could not imagine an environment that would more seriously compromise any human being's integrity.
Now, if you are a true philosopher, you go to the market.
You go to the people, like Socrates did.
You go to the marketplace and talk with people about truth and reason and evidence.
You listen to people's concerns and you address, as best you can, with philosophical principles, the challenges that people are facing in their lives.
That's what Socrates did.
It's what a number of other philosophers did.
It's what I happen to do.
I do six plus hours of call-in shows a week.
I do listener responses to questions.
I want to know what people are having challenges with, and I attempt as best I can to apply philosophical principles to the issues that people have.
That's called being in the market.
That's called having an effect and having an influence, which is why, you know, we have 75, 80 million downloads of the show.
So what is the influence?
Serious philosophers generally refer to those who sit in their ivory tower and do sweet FA to help society as a whole.
So when society has a big moral challenge, a big moral problem, how many times does it say, get a philosopher on the line?
We need a philosopher in the studio!
Mic him up!
Use the red phone to direct reason!
This doesn't happen.
Philosophers are completely ignored.
And who takes their place?
Pundits.
Ideologues, demagogues, sophists.
People with soundbites, not philosophers.
So, Ayn Rand was in the market.
She talked to the people, she listened to the people, she influenced the people.
Come on, some guy sitting there writing his thesis deconstructing the deconstruction of Wittgenstein?
Oh, she's not a serious philosopher.
I am.
Because the government gives me tenure and I bought my PhD through subservience.
To the whims and wishes of propagandized others in authority.
What more anti-philosophical position or result could you achieve?
Oh!
She took social security.
You see this all the time.
She took social security.
She took health care from the government when she was sick.
This lifelong advocate of the free market.
She took the government.
Right?
Okay, there's some evidence that she did.
I mean, it's complicated.
I don't want to get into the whole thing, but she signed over power of attorney.
Her attorneys wanted her to get this stuff because it was resources, it was money, and they weren't objectivists and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So anyway, but let's just say she did.
Fine, fine, fine.
The question is not, did she take Social Security or government assistance?
The question is, what was that action, how was that action related to her philosophy?
So Rand, of course, viewed welfare programs like Social Security as legalized plunder.
She argued that the only condition under which it is moral to collect Social Security is if one regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism.
Social Security, of course, is involuntary.
Participation is forced through payroll taxes.
If you consider such forced, quote, participation as unjust as Rand did, the harm inflicted on you would only be compounded if your announcement of the program's injustice precluded you from collecting Social Security.
Can you steal back a bike that was stolen from you?
Of course you can.
Of course you can.
If somebody steals my bike and I see it lying on their lawn, I take it back.
Oh, the supposed protector of property rights!
Bloody, bloody, he's stoned!
I mean, this is just nonsense.
And again, this is people who have no thought.
As to an examination of the action of taking Social Security vis-a-vis her philosophy as a whole.
She said, absolutely, take money back.
Steal back from the people who stole from you, particularly if they're giving it to you voluntarily and willingly.
Taking your money back, and it was a small proportion, she paid way more in taxes than whatever she collected through, it was a couple of thousand dollars she collected in this other stuff, she paid way more in taxes than she ever made back in Social Security.
So, if the Mafia shakes me down for a thousand dollars a month and then they have a free barbecue and I go and have a hot dog, this does not mean that I'm now fully in approval of the Mafia.
It just means, well, at least I can get a buck back from the amount of money that they've taken.
The extreme example is, can you steal food in a concentration camp?
Of course you can.
You're in a situation of coercion and therefore to be more moral than those you're surrounded by is not particularly rational.
So, from the question of scholarships, 1966.
Another interesting year for philosophy.
She wrote, The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of accepting Social Security, unemployment insurance or other payments of that kind.
It is obvious in such cases that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force directly and specifically without his consent against his own choice.
Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the right to force employers and unwilling co-workers.
But the victims who opposed such laws have a clear right to any refund of their own money, and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money unclaimed for the benefit of the Welfare State Administration.
Now, whether you agree or disagree with this argument is not particularly relevant.
Because most people say that Ayn Rand took Social Security and therefore she was a hypocrite.
No.
She was not at all a hypocrite by her philosophical argument.
She was acting perfectly in accord with her own philosophical argument, with her own philosophical position.
Not hypocritical.
Now, if you can find a way to make this argument, to falsify this argument, you can say that she was incorrect to take it, but you cannot call her a hypocrite.
A hypocrite is when you act against your own stated values.
She acts perfectly in accordance with her own stated values.
So please, if you're tempted to post this, shut the hell up and do some goddamn reading and stop being an idiot.
Oh, right.
Rough sex!
She wrote about rough sex!
Oh my goodness.
Oh my goodness.
Well, you may have heard a little bit.
Grinding my way through it.
Certainly not fabbing my way through it.
Fifty Shades of Grey.
One of the most popular erotic novels, I guess you could say.
Consumed largely by women.
And it's about an S&M relationship.
It is a masochistic torture.
Clamps, hot wax on the you-know-whats.
So the idea that a woman who writes about rough sex is just a complete unholy mess and monster.
Well, you then got to go and talk to all the women who are buying Fifty Shades of Grey and say, Aha!
You nasty hypocrites.
She was not a Christian.
I mean, something to be reminded of.
We'll talk about this with the affairs and all that, but she's not a Christian.
She found it, I assume, since she wrote about her heroines, and she said that Dominique was herself on a bad day, in a bad mood.
So she liked the idea of being dominated by a man, sexually.
Okay, I'm not sure that that was really Frank O'Connor's strong suit, but nonetheless.
So yeah, the fact that women sometimes have fantasies about being dominated by a man sexually?
Duh!
Well, this happens, and there's lots of biological reasons as to why this happens.
Bonobo monkeys, other forms of monkeys, the aggression is a pretty strong trait for biological selection, right?
And so what happens is the women provoke, the female apes or monkeys, they provoke the men into almost attacking them, and then when they're just about to attack and kill them, they offer up their vaginas.
So this has a long and illustrious history among all the apes and ape cousins such as ourselves.
So yeah, she wrote about rough sex.
Clearly it wasn't rape.
So she's a dramatist, and so she wants dramatic sex.
Conflict is the essence of drama, and so on.
And if you've ever seen women talk about Vladimir Putin and his topless horseback riding, the fact that she's a Russian and kind of into dominant guys Yeah, I may not want to blame Rand herself particularly, but to some degree the culture of Russia.
She's not depicting rape at all.
I mean, the rape victims don't generally pursue and blissfully marry their, quote, rapist, so it was not.
Uh, rape at all.
So, I don't know.
That's just... It's just, it's just a funny kind of prudery.
Ooh, she wrote about rough sex.
Lord B, I'm a Victorian.
I must go faint on the couch.
What are you?
Are you blanched?
You what?
Shocked and appalled.
Get me my vapors.
Anyway, so yes, she wrote about rough sex.
Deal.
Was she Darwinian?
Oh, selfish dog-eat-dog.
Me, me, me.
Win-win, lose-win-win.
Well, you know, this dog-eat-dog stuff.
I mean, dogs don't even eat dogs in nature, let alone in...
So, Chicago Tribune movie critic Michael Phillips.
Rand's Pet Theory.
Ooh, don't you love it when someone says pet theory?
That is, again, a way of programming you to not give the person's viewpoint any respect.
Rand's Pet Theory is known as Objectivism, which can be described as, us?
There is no us!
In Rand's worldview, it's me time, all the time.
There's nothing to do but start anew in a civilization run by the mysterious John Galt.
Who respects the rapacious dog-eat-dog nature of humankind.
Now, even if we accept the dog-eat-dog nonsense, that's win-lose, right?
Win-lose.
Now, win-lose is political power, right?
I mean, outside of bare self-defense and the right of the state to help you protect yourself, your person and your property.
So when somebody passes the aforementioned sweater tariff, that's win-lose.
That person wins, who runs a sweater company domestically, and the consumers lose, and the Chinese exporters lose, so that's win-lose.
But as we talked about in the last presentation, a free market interaction is win-win by definition.
Doesn't mean there's never such thing as buyer's remorse, you can always change your mind, but when you voluntarily trade with someone, you expect to benefit more than you lose, as does the other person.
So dog-eat-dog is one dog eating another.
It's win-lose.
The free market is win-win.
This is praxeological.
There's no way to get around it.
Whatever you choose to do voluntarily must have a sense of benefit for you.
Otherwise, you simply wouldn't do it.
It doesn't mean it's going to be... Some people choose to smoke.
It means that they're choosing short-term benefits over longer-term benefits.
The same thing with apple pie all day and so on.
But you can't get around that a voluntary transaction must be considered beneficial to both parties, right?
I'm spending time creating this presentation.
You're spending time watching and consuming it.
You expect to benefit from the presentation.
I expect to benefit from the presentation, both in terms of getting philosophy out there, helping to get people interested in an often unjustly maligned thinker, and I, of course, survive on donations.
So, of course, I'm trying to provide as much value as I can.
FDRURL.com slash donate.
If you'd like to help out.
So what did she actually say?
Is she Darwinian?
She wrote that the objective of ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone.
It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash.
That there is no conflict of interest among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.
So, the idea that it's win-lose, dog-eat-dog, Darwinian, I win, you lose, I exploit you to my advantage, and I mean this all specifically and explicitly rejected, repeatedly, And this is what's so goddamn lazy about people, you know?
Lots of people.
Ayn Rand Institute.
Lots of places where you can go and call them up.
You're a journalist.
Call them up.
Hey man, I'm about to write about Ayn Rand.
I'm not an expert.
That's a lot of paperweight.
That's a lot of dead trees in the service of philosophy, so could you help a brother out or a sister out?
You know, give me some facts.
You know, my impression is it's dog-eat-dog.
Can you give me a quote?
Just some basic.
Basic journalistic integrity and research is necessary.
It doesn't mean you have to agree with everything I ran, says, or wrote.
Of course not.
That's not the point of philosophy.
It's not paint by numbers, right?
The purpose of teaching you to compose music is not to have you turn into a cover man.
But at least get accurate that which you're criticizing.
And I tell you this, I mean, this is just sort of by the by.
When you know anything about anything, and you see the mainstream media talk about it or write about it, It is chilling as hell.
It's like Stephen King's index finger frozen into a cadaverous worm crawling up your spine.
That is what happens when you know anything.
It's like, it's like knowing technology and watching Hollywood movies.
It's like, I don't think a USB drive can destroy an alien spaceship.
So, um, when you know something about something, and if you know something about random objectivism, every time you see the mainstream media talk about it, Talk about her.
They're so completely wrong that it should give you great pause and a great amount of skepticism as to anything else that they happen to write or talk about.
So, again, we talked about this before.
Should one stay in a miserable marriage?
Well, the general argument is no.
Work at it, go to couples counseling or whatever.
But no, if you're genuinely miserable, if the other person is a mean monster and so on, you don't stay.
So, if you stay, then you're sacrificing your happiness for the irrational prejudices of another person.
That's a sacrifice.
That's a huge loss.
And so, no, that's not Darwinian at all.
She wrote about the Palestinians.
Now, she actually only mentioned Israel once in her writings.
She had some misconceptions about the Palestinians.
She believed that without US support, Russia, which was supporting the Arabs at the time, would control the Mediterranean and its oil.
And she saw the fight between Israel and the Arabs as a fight between civilized men and savages.
Generally, she said, in Q&A, she was asked about this a lot, she said, look, I support Israel, although Israel is a socialist country.
In that region of the world, Israel is the vanguard of civilization.
Now, According to objectivism, it is absolutely unjust and wrong to be forced to pay for Israel, to send over the hundreds of billions of dollars that is being poured over into Israel by the United States government.
That is absolutely completely and totally wrong, so she would not, if she were consistent, be in support of any of that.
There's some tribalism involved here.
She did grow up Jewish.
This doesn't make it right, but I just talked about this with Noam Chomsky the other day.
There are lots of Jews who are anti-state, and then when it comes to Israel, there's tribalism.
Absolutely.
So, I don't agree with what she said about the Palestinians.
I think it was brutal.
I think it was negative.
And I think it was wrong.
On the other hand, that having been said, I would rather live in Israel than I would under Sharia law.
And I'm not saying all the Palestinians are in support of that or whatever, but Israel has more tolerance and, of course, a vastly better record in human rights overall, with massive, of course, exceptions than the Arab world and the Muslim world as a whole.
Again, that's a very, very big topic, but she viewed it that Israel was a more civilized country than the Arab countries that surrounded it.
You can certainly make that case.
Sam Harris just made that case recently.
Again, it doesn't mean that he's right, but you can certainly make that case with some very good support.
Native Americans.
This is what she wrote.
The Native Americans didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived And we're not using.
What was it they were fighting for if they opposed white men on this continent?
For their wish to continue a primitive existence?
Their right to keep part of the earth untouched, unused, and not even as property?
Just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal or maybe a few caves above it?
Any white person who brought the element of civilization had the right to take over this continent.
Again, this is put forward as the most heinous possible situation that could possibly happen, and as complete wrong, there's context.
Again, the argument is startling, but there's context.
The Native Americans had very little sense of property.
I mean, again, this is generalizations and so on.
Generally, a hunter-gatherer civilization.
A hunter-gatherer civilization doesn't square off plots of land and plant crops, right?
They're generally following the bison, they're following the buffalo, they're doing whatever, right?
They're just roaming around.
Now, generally in history, when agricultural societies come in contact with hunter-gatherer societies, there's a fundamental incompatibility.
Because the agricultural societies, they want to plant crops, they want to raise livestock, and so on.
So they plant themselves down, they put fences around their property, and property is very important.
Property is not a concept that hunter-gatherer societies, other than sort of, you know, my teepee kind of personal property stuff, but they don't have any particular sense or need of personal property.
Now, in general, The societies that have pursued agriculture, particularly in colder climates, have developed particular skills, both intellectual and deferment of gratification and so on.
Whereas the hunter-gatherer societies tend to live in a more primitive and perpetually primitive kind of state.
There's a crippling amount of tradition, there's a crippling amount of violence, there's a crippling amount of child abuse, which is one of the main reasons why these societies tend to stay so stagnant.
So, Ayn Rand views a property-based society is vastly superior to a hunter-gatherer society.
I mean, she's an intellectual.
She is a writer.
She is a thinker.
She is a moralist.
And she vastly loved the free market.
And it's almost impossible for a free market to develop in a hunter-gatherer society, which is why they tend to remain at such a primitive and incredibly low rent and incredibly, like, every day is like the last for thousands and thousands of years.
They tend to remain in a very primitive A state.
So from her perspective, civilization was based on property, trade, and the free market.
All of which are fundamentally incompatible and impossible.
Incompatible with and impossible to a hunter-gatherer society.
So she viewed the conquest of the New World as the spread of civilization.
Now, I've spent time on Northern Reserves.
I have been around that Melio considerably, and the reality is that a significant portion of Native Americans and Native Canadians actually agree with her, in that they generally prefer a property-based society to a hunter-gatherer society, in that very few of them live out in the woods in teepees and have no access to modern conveniences, modern medicine, modern technology, and so on.
And I mean, I've hired them, I've worked alongside them, And they generally really like all of the stuff that the West has brought because of course like 98% of Canada is completely uninhabited and natives have vast tracts of land so they could easily revert to their earlier ways if they wanted.
But generally they tend to build casinos, they tend to enjoy free education, a lot of them integrate and so on and they like the money and goods provided by largely guilt-ridden and destructive Western government policies.
Right?
I generally work empirically with groups, and I look at the choices that they make.
And the majority of Native Americans would not return to their former lives if they could, and they enjoy the majority of the fruits of the labor, of the progress that has been brought by Western societies, and so on.
There is, of course, a tragedy in that Native Americans often lack particular enzymes to help them break down alcohol.
That's much more susceptible.
to alcoholism, but it's okay because they got us back with smoking.
So anyway, that of course is a biological fact which you can't really do much about.
So this is her argument that property societies are vastly superior to stagnant and mindless and savage hunter-gatherer societies, and that's why you couldn't grant the rights of property in land to native Americans because they didn't have a concept of really of property in land.
And of course, you know, there's this old thing that the natives use every part of a Buffalo.
That's complete nonsense.
I mean, they didn't do anything of the sort.
I mean, they, they use very little of the Buffalo.
They drove massive amounts of Buffalo off cliffs and then just ate a couple of them.
I mean, it's all just, I mean, it's all, I mean, a lot of what you hear is all kinds of nonsense.
It is a tragedy, of course, when, uh, Property societies run into undergather societies.
I mean, it's a mess.
Property societies are generally far more technologically advanced, have far better weapons of combat, and so on.
And, of course, a lot of the Native Americans were given, voluntarily, were traded the land away.
And it wasn't all like Manhattan Island for a couple of beads.
There were significant movements wherein the natives were paid for their right to their lands, and they understood, and they entered into contracts, and they were paid for it.
And then, you know, they spent all the money and got drunk.
And not all of them, of course.
Some of them used it very wisely.
It wasn't just a massive and blood-filled conquest.
There was a fair amount of trade that occurred.
And so this is where she's coming from.
Whether you agree with the argument or not, I just sort of wanted to put it in context.
Right.
Drug use.
Now, she was a, I mean, I don't think she, you're walking down the street, I sort of view Ayn Rand as this sort of wizened Russian ancient troll of looking basically like a Pullman train with smoke going out of her head.
She was a chain smoker.
And that, of course, has significant effects.
And for those who don't know it, nicotine, of course, being a stimulant that oftentimes makes up for an unhappy childhood.
Right.
So if you have what's called an adverse childhood experience score, that is, you can look this up.
I've got a whole series on this called The Bomb and the Brain, FDRURL.com slash BIB.
But basically, if you have a very bad childhood, you are far more likely to be a smoker.
And Ayn Rand had a terrible childhood.
So Ayn Rand was a habitual consumer of amphetamines starting in 1942 when she was prescribed a benzadrine for weight loss.
And she was under a deadline to finish the Fountainhead and she just made massive progress when she had these stimulants.
And that is A problem.
And of course, in the long run, it produces a lot of the symptoms that people criticized her, and rightly so, I think, in the 1960s.
Paranoia, irritability, and so on, right?
So, she was writing like a chapter a month on this stuff, whereas it had taken her years to write the first third of the novel.
So, from 1942 until at least 1972, which is 30 years, she continued to use amphetamines daily.
She moved on to dexedrine and dexamethasone.
This is a drug addict, drug dependency for sure.
And she was concerned about her appearance and so on, and she apparently, according to biographers, she gained weight easily.
And of course, as a smoker, she wouldn't be all kinds of keen on exercise, and she actually quite loathed exercise.
So because of the smoking, she generally didn't exercise.
She liked to eat, she gained weight, and she was prescribed these uppers for weight loss.
I consider that a tad lazy.
You know, I mean, but this is of course with the benefit of hindsight, but the reality was that she was a speed user for 30 years.
So this is from the Objectivist Reference Center Biographical FAQ says she took two pills per day until the early 1970s when another doctor told her to stop taking them.
If you refer to any and all amphetamines as speed, then she did take speed, although it is probably not accurate to say that she was addicted to it.
She certainly did not take the street drugs to which the term speed is more commonly applied.
So she got her drugs through a prescription.
It was a common medical practice at the time, although she did have a significant opposition from her friends.
Evidence from more impartial sources indicates that at times Rand used amphetamines heavily, at least heavily enough to cause her friends to be deeply concerned.
One of them, a good friend of hers, the journalist Isabel Patterson, wrote to her, Stop taking that Benzedrine, you idiot.
I don't care what excuse you have.
Stop it.
So, uh, this is, um, a reality.
So, uh, what is, uh, what she took, also known as Benzedrine, Speed, Go Fast, Cringe, Uppers, Bennies, Fat Powder, White, Whiz, Fettle, Throttle, and Bass.
Or, as it's also known, the alternative Incredibly Fast group of Santa's reindeers.
Dexedrine is called upper speed crank bennies and black beauties.
So there are symptoms of amphetamine addiction.
Irritability, mood swings, paranoia, and they did show up in her personal relationships, especially later in her life.
So the members of... cult-like is a strong word and I think people generally overuse the word cults.
I mean there's lots of people who genuinely suffer by being brainwashed, kept up for days, cutting their balls off, being born into this, being beaten, being programmed and so on.
People throw around the word cult pretty loosely, and I think it's pretty exploitive of the real damage that genuine and dangerous cults do to people where you sign multi-generation pacts and you give up 90% of your income or whatever.
So in a circle she assembled around her in New York.
They were terrified of the fierce, bitingly cruel attacks she would unleash against any of them who disagreed with her eitherly.
Even her devoted husband, Frank O'Connor, would sometimes be the target of her scorn.
So Rand claimed, of course, to value rationality above all else, and to live by the principles laid down in her novels.
She wrote, I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books, and it has worked for me as it works for my characters.
She wrote in the afterward, To Atlas Shrugged.
And she violently denounced drug use by others, writing in one essay that drug addiction and so on, it is so obscene and evil that any doubt about the moral character of its practitioners is itself an obscenity.
Yes, she may have overused the word obscenity from time to time.
So that I think is hypocritical.
I mean, but she would not characterize her own consumption of uppers as drug abuse because it's a medical prescription, which was common at the time, and so on, right?
So again, there's a differentiation.
She was talking about basically people injecting heroin into their eyeballs or whatever.
Now, she says that she didn't fake reality in any manner.
She was consistently devoted to reality, and I've never tried it, but apparently, as anyone who has had the experience knows, a good way to get a really, really distorted sense of reality is to swallow a couple of dexedrins.
If you want to take them anyway, don't go around bragging that you never fake reality in any manner.
So this is important stuff to remember.
Okay, but again, back to rules for radicals.
Why are we singling out Rand?
French existential philosopher and noted Ménage à Trois participant Jean-Paul Sartre was similarly dependent.
In the 1950s, already exhausted from too much work on too little sleep plus too much wine and cigarettes, the philosopher turned to chloridrain, a mix of amphetamines and aspirin that was then fashionable among Parisian students, intellectuals and artists.
The prescribed dose was one or two tablets in the morning and at noon.
Sartre took 20 a day, beginning it with his morning coffee, and slowly chewed one pill after another as he worked.
For each tablet, he could produce a page or two of his second major philosophical work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason.
Paul Erdos was one of the most brilliant and prolific mathematicians in the 20th century.
As Paul Hoffman documents in a book, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Erdos was a fanatic workaholic who routinely put in 19-hour days, sleeping only a few hours a night.
He owed his phenomenal stamina to espresso shots, caffeine tablets, and amphetamines.
He took 10 to 20 milligrams of benzadrine or Ritalin daily.
So worried about his drug use, a friend of his once said, you can't even give this stuff up for a month.
So he took the bet.
and succeeded in quitting his drugs cold turkey for 30 days.
When he came to collect his money, he told his friend, you showed me I'm not an addict, but I didn't get any work done.
If I get up in the morning and just, I'd get up in the morning and just stare at a blank piece of paper.
I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person.
You've set mathematics back a month!
After the bet, he resumed his amphetamine habit.
This does not have any bearing as to whether his mathematical arguments or Sartre's philosophical arguments are true or false.
It is a methodology of working.
You may disagree with the methodology of working, but it has no particular bearing on the validity of the arguments presented.
So, she had an affair in her late forties with Nathaniel Brandon, who I think was 24, with full consent of all parties.
So, Nathaniel was married to a woman named Barbara, and all four of them, Nathaniel, Ayn, Barbara, and Frank sat down, and they said, listen, we want to have an affair.
Everybody has to agree in order for it to occur, and so on.
There was a horrible and acrimonious breakup after, I think, eight or so years.
Nathaniel Brandon, following the dictates of Reproductive behavior ended up breaking up with the close to 60 year old Ayn Rand and taking up with a 24 year old model.
And this was a harsh and destructive and brutal.
Uh, she's, you know, when he broke up with her, she screamed epithets in him and so on.
Uh, and there was then this split right in the Randian circle, right?
So you either went with Nathaniel Brandon or you stayed with Ayn Rand and people who were on the wrong side were quote excommunicated.
Now, none of this is the initiation of force.
So, and of course, again, she's not a Christian.
And so she says, I don't faith reality.
So she said, I want an afternoon twice a week with Nathaniel Brandon to have an affair.
I'm putting this forward.
Everyone agrees.
Okay, then we're going to do it.
That's a contract and it's voluntary.
So again, it's not savory, but it's certainly not wrong.
So with the fallout of the breakup, according to, again, I don't know how true this stuff is.
I tend to believe it's true, but that's not proof.
You had to sign a loyalty oath to Ayn Rand that you had nothing to do with Nathaniel Brandon and so on.
Messy.
Ugly.
Vicious.
Ridiculous.
Is this the result of, at that point, close to 30 years of speed use?
No.
But I think, this is not proof, right?
I just, this is what I think.
She aimed to shrink the state.
That was her major goal, was to promote the non-aggression principle, her vow, and to shrink the state.
According to some reports, Leonard Peacock, her intellectual heir, believed that a year after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, most government interferences in the economy would have been dismantled because it was that persuasive a work.
And it is a very persuasive work.
And not just because she's an interesting and powerful writer, but because her arguments are very powerful and very strong.
So she failed.
I mean, she published this book in 1957.
You know, 20, 30 years later, the government was much bigger.
The Vietnam War had dragged on.
The welfare state was massively increased.
Nixon went off the gold standard.
There was stagflation, which according to Keynesian economics was impossible.
Massive growth in the economy.
Significant inflation throughout the period.
So her life's work failed.
And continues to fail.
And not just a little bit, but spectacularly.
Not only has the government not shrunk, But it's hard to imagine that its growth has even slowed a tiny bit.
So her life's work failed and continues to fail and enormously spectacularly.
And now when there's a huge failure, we must look at things critically and figure out what went wrong.
And I'm sort of half and half about whether to do that here or later.
But I don't know that she, I don't think that she ever admitted that her life's work had failed and went back to review what went wrong.
Very, very briefly, it's sort of a taster part for what failed was that she believed that you could reason people into good thinking, but you can't reason people in.
You can't reason people out of beliefs that they have not been reasoned into.
And, um, reason is not enough to change people's minds.
It's not even close to enough.
In fact, uh, studies have shown that counter arguments tend to reinforce initial prior prejudice.
So there's a huge amount of confirmation bias.
There's a huge amount of after-the-fact reasoning, justifying earlier beliefs.
And this all comes out of, in my argument, according to the experts and the research that I've done, this all comes out of childhood trauma.
You can't reason people into better beliefs until they have a capacity to reason.
Children who are traumatized can't very easily reason.
It's enormously painful and difficult for them to reason.
If I lose an arm in a shark attack, You can't reason me into regrowing my arm.
If my brain is damaged in its development through abuse and neglect...
You can't regrow the part of my brain that was damaged through words alone.
Doesn't mean it's impossible to change.
There's neuroplasticity.
I believe therapy, talk therapy with a great therapist is particularly powerful.
But in things as basic as the growth of empathy, you can't reason people into developing what are called mirror neurons or empathetic parts of the brain that allow for empathy.
Empathy is a complex system of about 13 parts of the brain, all interacting.
And it's not as common as we would like.
It's the most scarce resource and the most essential resource in the world.
The presence and existence of sociopaths is not an insignificant proportion of the population.
We are not one group of human beings with all the equal capacity to reason and the equal capacity to develop empathy and so on.
There are significant numbers of people in the world.
1 in 10, 1 in 20, depending on your estimates.
You put them in front of a video and show them purposeful human torture and they giggle.
Their happy centers light up.
Their dopamine lights up.
They are happy.
When other people suffer, and so this, you can't reason, but this is a, that's a brain chemistry, developmental, and to a large degree, irreversible phenomenon.
I mean, as far as sociopathy goes, I mean, the psychiatric and psychological profession try just about everything you can imagine.
Dosing them with LSD, massive amounts of talk therapy, punishment, ice baths, empathy, love, scream therapy, I mean, you name it, they've tried just about everything, can't fix it.
The part of the brain that fails to develop cannot be fixed later in life, according to any of the research that I've Ever read?
And so the idea that you could write a novel and fix evil, that you can make arguments and fix evil, is exactly the same as saying, I can talk you into regrowing your arm.
It simply doesn't work that way.
So I don't think that she admitted any error by not accounting and dealing with childhood and attempting to reason with everyone as if they had her capacity for rationality, which even she didn't have later on in life, was, I think, her fundamental error and her fundamental problem.
And when you want to change, everyone's impatient for change.
I run into this with my listeners, or maybe you're the same way too.
I'm the same way too.
Love to snap my fingers and have a better world.
One of the things that comes out of communism is this idea that you can have a new economic man, right?
That if you change the economic environment of people, then you change their fundamental nature.
So instead of seeking advantage and seeking profit, they will Surrender themselves to the good of the community and so on.
So if you want to change quickly, then you look for politics and education, right?
Fundamentally, if you want to change quickly, you either aim to pass and repeal laws.
And as part of that, or as an arm for that, or probably as a presage of that, you try to educate people into free market philosophies, rational thinking, ethics, and so on.
So if you want to change quickly, it won't work.
Because if human dysfunction is rooted in early childhood experiences, then you need to talk to parents, you need to get parents to do better by their children, to not hit them, to not yell at them, to not intimidate them, to not neglect them, to hold them, to breastfeed them, to do all the things that are as proven to grow empathy as manure is proven to help agriculture.
So you don't get to invent a new man through your arguments or through adjusting economic conditions.
You don't get to change people's brains through arguments, politics, or an environment.
You have to grow new human beings with the capacity to reason if you wish to reason with human beings.
I think this is, to me, as scientifically established as anything can be in these fields.
And because you Barely talked about.
There were no children in the circle that she had in New York.
And frankly, most of them were all related anyway.
I mean, all second cousins and brothers and cousins and so on.
So she wanted change quickly.
She wanted change in her lifetime, which meant she focused on politics.
And like Murray Rothbard's alliance with the New Left and so on, she got into Goldwater and Nixon and various other campaigns and so on.
So she wanted to change things through politics.
She wanted to change things through reason, through education and so on.
And it didn't change.
It didn't change.
It got worse because she's ignoring the cause, which I think is, and I think I have good reason for thinking that, is early childhood experiences.
This is why I spend so much time on parenting and talking to parents and helping parents to understand how to parent better and so on.
So she was in a hurry and like the tortoise and the hare, if you're in a hurry to change the world, you will get nowhere.
Because it's a multi-generational change and we need new kinds of people.
And new kinds of people arise from different and more nurturing and more peaceful and more loving early childhood experiences.
But we'll get more into that a little bit later.
There's this idea that, and this was her idea explicitly, that emotions are value calculations, like instantaneous value calculations based upon prior thoughts.
Now there's some truth to this.
Certainly what you think has a big effect on how you feel, but also there's lots of evidence that shows that you get a feeling first and then you start to think later.
And this is particularly true for people without self-knowledge.
People have to become passionate for change.
If it's true that all emotions slavishly follow your thinking, then if you change people's thinking, you will change their emotions.
But there's a significant amount of evidence that shows this is not the case.
That if you provide people information counter to their emotional preferences, you actually just reinforce those emotional preferences.
And 30 years of drug dependency can have an effect on one's stability.
So, I go with Voltaire's Candide.
that you tend your own garden.
You have peace and reason in your own life.
You demonstrate its efficacy and value to others.
You live a peaceful and rational life, and you encourage people to be more rational, of course, but you fundamentally recognize that it's an incremental, multi-generational change based upon philosophical and peaceful parenting more so than any other single factor.
I don't have much to add.
I just wanted to say thank you, everybody, so much for your enthusiasm and the positive responses to this video series.
We will be working on part four, which is more of my specific philosophical objections to objectivism, which are not huge, but significant enough that there is an important deviation.
FDRURL.com slash donate.
This is a huge amount of work, as you can imagine, and I really, really appreciate everybody's support in helping to get the word Our philosophy, reason, evidence, peaceful parenting, the value of science and the free market out to the world as a whole.
So thank you everybody so much for your support.
Stefan Molyneux for Freedomain Radio.
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