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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:30:57

The Truth About Ayn Rand: Objectivism [2 of 4]

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Hope you're doing well. Yes, I first read her when I was 16.
	This presentation has been 32 years in the making.
	Hey, does that help you feel young? I bet it does.
	So this is The Truth About Ayn Rand Part 2, Objectivism.
	Now, before we dive into what Rand herself had to say about philosophy, let's just go over the five major branches which are important to know.
	Metaphysics. Oh, it's exciting, isn't it?
	That is, what is the nature of existence?
	What is out beyond the little flesh, skull cage, ball of brain that we all have?
	What is out there?
	And of course, the objective is answer is objective reality, or as she put it, existence exists.
	So metaphysics is the study of reality.
	What is outside our brains?
	The second is epistemology, which is a $20 word for the study of knowledge.
	So how do I know what's out there?
	How can I determine what is true and what is false?
	What is valid and what is invalid?
	And the objectivist approach is the five senses and conceptual rationality, which are derived from the stable properties of things we see with our five senses.
	And we'll get more into that in a sec. Ethics follows from epistemology.
	Ethics is how should I act?
	And of course, what is the purpose of life?
	And for most philosophers, at least in the Aristotelian tradition, the purpose of life is happiness.
	Happiness is the one thing that we strive to achieve, not in order to get something else, but for its own sake.
	It is not a means to an end, it is an end in itself.
	So how should I act to achieve happiness?
	How should I live? And the objectivist answer is through rational self-interest.
	And then we move to politics.
	And politics is the study of institutionalized force.
	And the basic question is, where is government force?
	Where is political violence or coercion?
	And coercion is the essence of politics.
	Government is the agency which has a monopoly on the initiation of force in a geographical area.
	In what ways is government force legitimate?
	In what ways is it illegitimate?
	And for objectivists or for Iran, the answer is the rule of law is how you know that...
	The rule of objective law is how you know that force is legitimate.
	Ayn Rand, of course, also as a novelist and a playwright, was very interested in aesthetics.
	Aesthetics is a study of beauty, of art, and in many ways, Rand would say that the purpose of aesthetics is to give you compelling portraits of happiness.
	You know, like those after shots in the before and after skinny pill pictures.
	You want to have something to strive for, to strive towards, and she spent Most of her literary career attempting to portray heroes that were motivating enough to have people strive towards virtue.
	So romantic inspiration is what she would argue, I think, is the goal of aesthetics to inspire people to virtue and integrity through the portrait of virtue in a positive light.
	And from that, she comes straight out of the romantic tradition, Victor Hugo and so on.
	So with these sort of five major branches, and I've done more work on this if you want to check out on YouTube or in my podcast at Freedom Aid Radio, the introduction to philosophy.
	But so let's look at the context of this.
	Now, this is really the most important thing you can do.
	Start off with the most important and then trail off into inconsequentiality later.
	This is the most important part of this.
	Objectivism, I'm going to make the case, is post-industrial, post-scientific Aristotelianism.
	Now, the fact that objectivism is Aristotelian in nature is not controversial.
	In fact, it was admitted explicitly, and we'll get to the quotes, by Ayn Rand herself.
	She named the three parts of her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, after Aristotle's three laws of logic.
	Now, Aristotle did not know much about the free market.
	There was very little free market in the slave-dependent economy in ancient Athens.
	And he did not know much about the scientific method.
	Aristotle was himself a physical scientist, as he was just about everything.
	And he said, yes, empiricism trumps theory and so on.
	But until the Baconian scientific revolution of the 16th century, it really wasn't as rigorous as it should have been.
	So, objectivism, I'll make the case, is Aristotelianism updated with a deep appreciation of the economic productivity of the free market and with the value of the post-scientific methodologies of the scientific method.
	So what Ayn Rand said was, she said, if there is a philosophical atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle.
	He has been opposed, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and, like an axiom, used by his enemies in the very act of denying him.
	Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests on his achievements.
	Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer, she said, of Western history.
	Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant errors.
	Whenever it fell, so did mankind.
	The Aristotelian revival of the 13th century brought men to the Renaissance.
	The intellectual counter-revolution turned them back toward the cave of his antiquity, Plato.
	So, I think we can basically say she's a fangirl.
	She also wrote, There is only one fundamental issue in philosophy, the cognitive efficacy of man's mind.
	The conflict of Aristotle versus Plato is the conflict of reason versus mysticism.
	It was Plato who formulated most of philosophy's basic questions and doubts.
	It was Aristotle who laid the foundation for most of the answers.
	Thereafter, the record of their duel is the record of man's long struggle to deny and surrender or to uphold and assert the validity of his particular mode of consciousness.
	So, very, very briefly, and of course it's a huge topic, I did a whole master's thesis on this basic issue, but Plato rejected the efficacy of the senses in determining the truth about reality.
	For Plato, there was a higher realm called the forms.
	The forms were the ideal essences of everything that there was, from a chair, to virtue, to justice, to nose hairs.
	And to perceive the truth, you had to reject the senses and try to intellectually apprehend or enter into this world of the forms.
	Aristotle said that this was not true, and he of course was a student of Plato's, but he said, which I think all good people uphold, that we must value the truth even over our friends' opinions.
	And he said, no, it's the five senses, it's empiricism, there's no higher world of the forms, and that the essence of things are embedded in their very nature, so you don't have to go to some abstract realm.
	And this is really, really a very fundamental difference.
	Because that which is empirically testable by the senses can be communicated to other people, right?
	Look, I say, I have an orange.
	And I can say to you, look, it's an orange.
	It's orange. It's round. You can eat it.
	It's got seeds inside and so on.
	I can communicate that which I can delineate or understand through my senses.
	I can't communicate some inner vision of a perfect universe that can't be communicated through the senses.
	Which is why... Plato, in the Republic, is fundamentally a dictator, and most dictatorships are followed along the Platonic lines of, we, the elite, whether we are priests or politicians, we, the elite, have a revealed truth which can't possibly be communicated to you squirming irrelevant masses, therefore you must just obey us and do what we say, because we know the truth, we can't communicate it to you, so obedience is the only way to do what is right.
	Whereas Aristotle would disagree with that and say that truth, reality, and virtue is open to all.
	So, in her work on epistemology, and there's a book called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology that's well worth a read, So Ayn Rand wrote, let us know the radical difference between Aristotle's view of concepts and the objectivist view, particularly in regard to the issue of essential characteristics.
	So an essential characteristic is something where if you change that essential characteristic, the thing becomes something else.
	So I'm trying to remember how...
	So I had a professor of Aristotle when I took a year-long course who said something along the lines of the following.
	He said, look, if I show you a blue baby, you're going to say, whoa...
	That baby is blue. I don't think that's good.
	If I show you a blue baby that's 10 foot tall, you'd say, oh my god, that's a blue baby that's 10 foot tall.
	If I show you a blue baby that's 10 foot tall and it has tentacles coming out of its chest, you'd say, whoa, that's a blue baby, it's 10 feet tall, and it's got tentacles coming out of its chest.
	And then I'd keep adding things, and at some point you'd say, I don't know what the hell that is.
	And whatever that thing is that you change at the end, that is the essence.
	And so how do we know things are what they are?
	I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad for almost six years now, and it's amazing.
	It's astonishing.
	It's astounding to see the speed at which the human mind grasps concepts.
	You know, I showed my daughter two chairs, and she's able to identify a chair in an Ikea commercial on television, right?
	The degree to which we're able to grasp concepts and extend them beyond direct experience.
	You draw a picture of a chair.
	You say, oh, that's a chair, right?
	It's incredible.
	Now, Aristotle said that the essence of things was embedded in the matter somehow.
	He didn't know how.
	No microscopes, no electron microscopes.
	Didn't know how.
	He said the essence of things is embedded in the thing itself.
	Whereas Plato said, as I said before, there's this perfect world of forms floating out there.
	We see the perfect chair, the perfect chair, which I'm sure is perfectly shaped to King Kardashian's butt.
	We have the perfect chair, and then we see all this before we're born, and then after we're born, we look at these chairs and we have this vague memory of the perfect chair.
	That's how we know what a chair is.
	Aristotle said, no, the chairness, the essence of chairness is embedded in the thing itself.
	Objectivism changed that.
	Ayn Rand changed that.
	So Aristotle, she said, who first formulated...
	It is Aristotle who first formulated the principles of correct definition.
	It is Aristotle who identified the fact that only concretes exist.
	But Aristotle held that definitions refer to metaphysical essences.
	Things in the real world, which exist in concretes as a special element of formative power.
	And he held that the process of concept formation depends on a kind of direct intuition by which man's mind grasps these essences and forms concepts accordingly.
	So... You know that you can put on infrared goggles and you can see heat.
	So Aristotle believed that in the brain there was kind of like a capacity to see the essence of a chair which was embedded in its physical characteristics.
	Now, of course, you cut up a chair, you don't find the essence.
	It doesn't bleed essence juice or anything like that.
	But he said it was in the thing itself.
	Now, I believe, and I've made this case before, that one of the reasons that concepts work is because of atoms.
	Right? And because of elements, right?
	So atoms are common, elements are common.
	And when we are looking at things, like things that are made of wood, are made of the same atoms, pretty much.
	They're made of the same cell structures.
	They're made of the same kind of living organism.
	So because the atoms and the cells are in common, we can see trees and understand them for what they are.
	So concepts, the most abstract, refined capacity of the human mind, directly ties in to the tiniest, non-observable Aspects of matter.
	Now, of course, Aristotle didn't know about atoms.
	Derivium natura came much later.
	And did he really know about cells?
	Well, without a microscope, you couldn't really get those things.
	And lenses didn't come along until much later.
	So, without an understanding of cells and of atoms, he had to believe that there was basically magic essence juice in things that allowed us to identify them.
	Which is kind of true, except it's not an essence.
	It's atoms and cells.
	And so that, I think, is really important.
	So what objectivism did was he said...
	Objectivism said, no, no, no, no.
	Concepts are not identifying something that exists in matter.
	Concepts are the grouping of like characteristics in the mind.
	So Aristotle regarded essence...
	What a thing is in its fundamentals as metaphysical, in other words, in the real world.
	Objectivism said, no, no, no, no, it's epistemological.
	It's how we learn things.
	It's what we know. It's not in the real world.
	There's no essence of chair in the chair.
	Essence of chair only exists in the mind, not in the chair.
	And that's where the shift was.
	And you can look at this more in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
	And so I'm saying basically that objectivism is Aristotelianism plus the advances in the scientific method.
	So a lot of what is criticized in Ayn Rand is this idea of selfishness, love yourself, and she wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness and so on.
	Is this particularly original?
	No, it's really not.
	And for Aristotle, this is what Leonard Picard, Feinrand's intellectual heir, wrote in what I think is a good book called Ominous Parallels.
	He wrote, For Aristotle, a good life is one of personal self-fulfillment.
	Man should enjoy the values of this world.
	Using his mind to the fullest, each man should work to achieve his own happiness here on earth.
	And in the process, he should be conscious of his own value.
	Pride, writes Aristotle, a rational pride in oneself and in one's moral character is when it is earned the crown of the virtues.
	So this is...
	Unfathomable to a lot of people who are raised in, say, Christianity or other religious traditions, where the goal of life is to achieve unity with the deity, often in an afterlife in heaven, and to avoid hell and so on.
	And so the purpose of life is not of this world.
	It is not your happiness in the here and now.
	It is the achievement of happiness in paradise with the requisite number of virgins after you are dead.
	This is antithetical to Aristotelianism.
	Because Aristotle said, it is your happiness in the now that counts.
	Now, not just in the moment, but over a reasonable time frame.
	In religion, the time frame is eternity.
	You know, for a two-year-old with a bag at M&M's, the time frame is the next five seconds.
	So somewhere in between the two is the best thing.
	We don't want to sacrifice everything else.
	That brings us happiness in life and then die.
	For Aristotle, this would be, well, what was the point of that?
	You could have been happy and you weren't.
	You just wasted your life.
	You wasted your opportunity to achieve happiness.
	However, in the religious traditions, and to some degree in the tradition of, certainly in the totalitarian tradition, you sacrifice your current happiness for the sake of a happiness that is either collective in nature, so social good, society as a whole, or is a reward in the afterlife.
	And the happiness that you have in the moment is often diametrically opposed to the happiness you're supposed to achieve in the afterlife or for the common good.
	So Aristotle writes, look, be virtuous, be good, and you will then achieve the crown of the virtues, which is pride, in your own moral actions, which have gathered your own happiness.
	This is not even remotely dissimilar from what Rand is talking about.
	So, Ayn Rand wrote in the Objectivist Newsletter, Throughout history, the influence of Aristotle's philosophy, particularly of his epistemology, has led in the direction of individual freedom, of man's liberation from the power of the state.
	Aristotle, via John Locke, was the philosophical father of the Constitution of the United States, and thus of capitalism.
	It is Plato and Hegel, not Aristotle, who have been the philosophical ancestors of all totalitarian and welfare states, whether Bismarck's, Lenin's, or Hitler's.
	Bismarck, of course, was a 19th century Germanic politician who first introduced unemployment insurance and welfare state and so on.
	Where that led Germans was not particularly positive in the long run.
	So, again, very briefly, if your senses and your brain are competent to understand and determine the truth of reality...
	Then you do not need somebody else to tell you what the truth is.
	I mean, they can help. They can give you arguments.
	They can provide evidence. But if the truth is revealed, if the truth is some sort of mystical revelation that you cannot experience yourself, then you must be told what the truth is and you cannot rely upon yourself to achieve it.
	So the other day I was playing with my daughter.
	She's got a little cat with wings she calls Sparkle Wing.
	And I picked up Sparkle Wing and my daughter said, Dad, she doesn't like to be held like that.
	Checkmate! Mysticism.
	What could I say? Could I say, no, she told me she does.
	Because then she's going to say, no, she told me she doesn't.
	Who's right? Obviously the Sparkle Wing is not telling anything.
	He's a tough toy. Not saying anything to anyone.
	But... One of us had...
	It was win-lose then. Either I assert something which is not true, which is Sparklewing told me she does like to be held this way, or my daughter, who is the one who's Sparklewing's friend, she only talks to me, Dad, right?
	So now Sparklewing's preferences are communicated through my daughter to me.
	I can't possibly oppose them without saying Sparklewing doesn't talk.
	It's all made up. And you're a liar!
	Right? Which I'm not going to say. She's five.
	The essence of imagination is delightful at this, at any age, really.
	So, in the case of the Sparkle Wing, I could not determine the truth.
	I had to receive the truth from my daughter and could not oppose it.
	And that's platonic.
	Aristotle argued that self-love...
	I know this is probably being watched on the internet, but that's not what he's talking about.
	Aristotle argued that self-love was the highest love and maintained that rational self-interest not only contributed to, but was a requisite for virtuous living.
	So what Ayn Rand called selfishness or rational self-interest is pretty much identical to what Aristotle said.
	And Aristotle was resolutely opposed to the idea that human beings were solitary animals.
	He recognized the tribal nature.
	He said anybody who can live alone is either a beast or a god.
	And so for Aristotle, virtue was a social.
	For Ayn Rand, it's a little bit more personal.
	But for Aristotle, virtue had a lot to do with society.
	Aristotle wrote, for without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
	Ayn Rand wrote that there is no conflict of interest among rational people.
	There are no conflicts of interest among rational people.
	For Aristotle, who wrote a lot about friendship, his books on ethics are significantly devoted to friendship.
	Friendship is unsullied by sexual lust or financial gain, and so he viewed it as really, I dare say, the ideal or platonic.
	No, I'm just kidding. So friendship, he said, is rooted in virtue.
	So he said, surround yourself with good people so that by doing what is noble, he will at once benefit himself and others.
	By doing what is noble, he will at once benefit himself and others.
	So if you tell the truth and people around you hate you for it, then you are not surrounded by good people.
	Being virtuous is a great way of finding out who is also virtuous in your life.
	Right, so let's say you go, you find out your friend's wife is having an affair on him, and you go to your friend and you say, Sally is stepping out on your brother, and then he says, what's stepping out?
	He's like, I don't know, look up the Urban Dictionary from 1957 or something, but she's having an affair.
	Now, if he's like, I hate that you told me this, I never wanted to hear about it, and he slams the door in your face, then this is a person who does not value truth, does not want the truth.
	Whereas if he says, oh, that's incredibly painful, I'm so glad, how difficult it must have been for you to tell me, thank you so much for telling me, and then does whatever he's going to do, then you have told the truth.
	Or if you stand up against an evildoer and your friends are like, hey man, you hurt that mugger's feelings by not giving him your wallet, then not really great friends.
	Whereas if they say, wow, that was really noble, I'm happy to help it next time you get mugged or something.
	So... You want to surround yourself with good people so that when you do something that is virtuous and noble and honest and good, it benefits you and it benefits other people even if it is only by example.
	If you show someone that virtue is possible, you raise their capacity to pursue virtue because it now moves into the realm of possibility.
	You've probably heard, you know, you can't love other people until you love yourself first.
	This is sort of a trope of modern self-help movements.
	Ayn Rand's way of putting it is saying you cannot say the words I love you without first saying the word I, having an identity, having values, having virtues.
	Aristotle said you must love yourself more than you love others.
	You must. Wanting to love others more than you love yourself is like pointing a flashlight at a dusty mirror and expecting the beam of light that bounces off to be brighter.
	You must love yourself more than you love others.
	You certainly have the most control over your own behavior.
	You have the most capacity to directly control your pursuit of virtue, and thus all the pride that you have achieved will be legitimate and self-sourced and under your control.
	You must love yourself more than you love others.
	All friendship, or what you call it, philia, is rooted in self-love, philia.
	The right kind of self-love is an achievement.
	Love for what is best in us.
	Motivated by self-love.
	And if you think about it, you know, we all borrow our lives from the future.
	So I could sit home and eat my favorite junk food, never exercise, and then I would be delivering my body to my 50 or 60 year old self, 50 or 100 pounds overweight.
	But having respect for myself and my body and wanting to deliver a healthy body to my future self is what motivates me to eat reasonably, to exercise and all that kind of stuff.
	Now, a deficiency...
	Okay, the Aristotelian mean is really important to touch on here.
	The Aristotelian mean is if you have too much courage...
	Then you're called what's called foolhardy, right?
	So if you're in some battle and there are like 50 guys with machine guns and you have a butter knife and you go and charge them, is that brave?
	No, that's suicidal, right?
	You have, quote, too much.
	You have an excess of courage, which is called foolhardiness.
	If you have a deficiency of courage, then you're called a coward.
	And so for Aristotle, the mean was very important.
	He didn't mean this in terms of good and evil.
	He didn't mean to say, well, too much axe murdering is really bad for society, but too little axe murdering is really...
	He didn't mean this in terms of evil.
	Too little rape is bad, too much...
	There's no happy medium for good and evil.
	But in terms of the virtues...
	If you have too much self-love, then that would be called vanity.
	If you have too little self-love, then that would be called self-sacrifice, which is basically just letting other people walk all over you, enabling their bad behavior, doing whatever it is to make them happy with having no sense of your own pride or your own virtue.
	So, for instance, if I don't tell the truth to someone because it might upset them, that is a deficiency in courage.
	So, I think those are important things to remember.
	So, Aristotelian friendship is opposed to what is commonly called altruism.
	There is no sacrifice of the self to others.
	There is no sacrifice of the self to others.
	So, I mean, so put it this way.
	If you were a surgeon and five people needed heart transplants and you stabbed yourself in the side so that you could die and die, Give your heart to other people and there were no other heart surgeons around, then you would be making a huge mistake and instead of five people being dead, there would be six people dead, right?
	So that would be an example of self-sacrifice.
	Now, if you are a mother or a father and you jump in front of a lion that's charging at your child...
	You want to save your child, right?
	I mean, so that's not self-sacrifice.
	So there is no sacrifice of the self to others.
	You don't refuse to tell people the truth.
	You don't refuse to tell people if you think they're doing something immoral.
	You don't refuse to praise people who are doing things that are moral.
	You do not refrain from bringing the truth to people around you.
	You don't lie to other people to make them feel better because that would be cowardly.
	and like the heart surgeon who stabs himself and then there's six bodies instead of five, you have killed your capacity to love other people if you have sacrificed your virtue for the sake of their immediate comfort, right?
	Because if you have sacrificed your virtue, you will not be able to love others.
	And so to sacrifice your virtue for the sake of others' immediate comfort will end up with nobody in that situation being capable of love.
	They will lose respect for you even if it's subconscious.
	They will lose respect for you for lying to them and you will lose respect for yourself for not holding fast to your values for the sake of other people's immediate comfort, which would be a deficiency of integrity and courage.
	And the reason I'm talking about all of this It's because it really is important to understand that Ayn Rand does not exist as an isolated phenomenon.
	I mean, just look at the footnotes for her books, right?
	I mean, there's Bastiat, there's Mises, there's lots of people who, and she has guest writers in her books and so on.
	She does not come out of a vacuum.
	And most people want to criticize objectivism as if it has no antecedents, as if it just simply sprang out of nowhere, like some Greek god popping out of someone's forehead.
	So what did Aristotle actually say about self-love?
	How does this relate to objectivism?
	Well, Aristotle said, It is said that we should love our best friend.
	And the best friend is he who, when he wishes for someone's good, does so for that person's sake, even if no one will ever know.
	Right? So you don't do virtue for praise.
	Because if you do virtue for praise, you're saying that other people know more about virtue than you do.
	Because it's their praise that guides you, which means their knowledge must be superior to yours.
	If you know what is virtuous, then other people's praise or condemnation is irrelevant.
	It's not like saying, if you know what you need to do to lose weight, then whether other people praise or condemn you for losing that weight is irrelevant.
	And he went on to say, now, a man has this sentiment primarily towards himself.
	And the same is true of all the other sentiments of which a friend is defiant.
	For as we have stated, all friendly feelings towards others are an extension of the friendly feelings a person has for himself.
	All these sentiments will be found chiefly in a man's relation to himself, since a man is his own best friend and therefore should have the greatest affection for himself.
	This is confusing for what Ayn Rand called social metaphysicians, who don't say, the people who say not, is this true, but is this popular?
	Not, is this virtuous, but will I be liked or disliked for it?
	The person who has a relationship with his conscience It's fundamentally bewildering to a lot of people, because your reference is to your conscience, to reality, to philosophy, to integrity, to the deep study of virtue and wisdom.
	It's very confusing to people when you consult yourself rather than the masses for correct action.
	But he's very clear in this.
	You have to have the greatest affection for yourself.
	As Ayn Rand said, selfishness, acting for the benefit of oneself and one's long-term happiness, is a virtue.
	Now, this gets twisted, of course, which we'll get into in a sec.
	Well, sacrifice other people to yourself and you'll be happy.
	Well, this is not what she was saying at all.
	Certainly not what Aristotle was saying as well.
	And there's almost no doubt that Ayn Rand, who studied Aristotle for quite a long time as a teenager in her 20s, almost no doubt that she read all this stuff.
	So Aristotle wrote, his self-love is different in kind from that of the egoist with whom people find fault.
	As different in fact as living by the guidance of reason is from living by the dictates of the emotion.
	And as different as desiring what is noble is from desiring what seems to be advantageous.
	So by egoist, selfish, narcissistic, a user of people and so on.
	And so the self-love for genuine pride of achieving virtue and being surrounded by virtuous people with everyone reinforcing each other's virtue, that is not the same as somebody who is a financial advisor who rips off his clients for money, right?
	This is the complete opposite.
	So it's pride versus vanity.
	Okay, so why am I talking about Aristotle?
	Because I believe that this conflict between the census and revelation, between reason and mysticism, between this world and some imaginary world where whoever can claim that they have the facts about it is automatically supposed to be your boss.
	It is a very fundamental conflict.
	Now, in the next presentation, we'll talk about criticisms of Ayn Rand.
	But, you know, she's a hack.
	Ayn Rand is a hack. She's a terrible writer, a terrible third-rate philosopher, whatever, right?
	But if we understand the degree to which Rand got her ideas and extended her ideas from core Aristotelianism, we understand why people would rather attack Ayn Rand than attack Aristotle.
	So if someone comes up to you and say, Ah, Aristotle, what a hack!
	A terrible third-rate philosopher.
	Nobody cares about him. He was a terrible writer and all that, right?
	If somebody says that about Aristotle, you'd be like, hmm, that is quite a strong case to make.
	You must be super smart.
	You're going to think that that person is an arrogant idiot for hitting Aristotle with ad hominems.
	But when they attack Aristotelianism through Rand without ever mentioning anything about Aristotelianism, somehow they're not seen as arrogant idiots.
	So what you look at, and I don't know what proportion you could say Rand's philosophy is Aristotelian in its essence.
	There's some similarities, particularly in the metaphysics.
	So... If you can reject Aristotelianism by attacking a proxy called Ayn Rand, somehow people think that you're smart.
	Whereas if you actually try to attack Aristotle, that's quite a difference.
	So the degree to which Ayn Rand was simply delivering the Aristotelian message is sort of like if some secretary types up Einstein's notes, do we then reject Einstein because the secretary is not a physicist?
	Of course not. If the secretary is simply passing along the information, shooting the messenger doesn't destroy the source.
	And so one of the things you can say, which is important to people who are trashing Ayn Rand, is to say, wait, wait, wait.
	Is it the Rand ideas or the Aristotelian ideas that you have a problem with?
	Because, you know, if they say, oh, I can't believe she talked about the virtue of selfishness or whatever, immoral pig or whatever, it's like, well, wait, wait.
	Because she got that from Aristotle.
	Are you saying that Aristotle's definition of the value of self-love and rational self-interest and selfishness, are you rejecting the Aristotelian source or Ayn Rand's repeating basically that same mantra?
	And, of course, people then won't have any idea that Aristotle said a lot of very similar things.
	Not identical, but similar things.
	So, let's just have a quick tour through the objectivist philosophy itself.
	So remember we started with metaphysics or the study of reality.
	So Ayn Rand said, reality exists as an objective absolute, facts are facts independent of a man's feelings, wishes, hopes, or fears.
	And this is foundational to Aristotelianism, which is why Aristotle said, don't live by your emotions, live by that which is noble and rational.
	I think we all understand this, right?
	I mean, you can't will an eclipse from not happening, right?
	You can't put a firefly out by staring at it and concentrating at it, right?
	So, reality exists as an objective, absolute, facts are facts, independent of man's feelings, wishes, hopes, or fears.
	Your whims cannot directly affect reality.
	The primacy of existence, she said, of reality is the axiom that existence exists, that the universe exists independent of consciousness or of any consciousness, right?
	Because in the religious tradition, tangible reality is created by and in a sense within the mind of God.
	The axiom that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity.
	The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
	And that man gains knowledge by looking outward.
	We do experiments in the world.
	We look outward to gain knowledge.
	Whereas for Plato and for other mystics, you retreat into yourself, you meditate, you look inward, and that is how you gain objective knowledge.
	It's knowledge about yourself.
	I can say, oh, I dreamt about an elephant last night.
	I wonder why. So you can gain self-knowledge by looking inwards, but self-knowledge is not the same as objective knowledge about reality.
	Me having a dream about an elephant is not the same as there actually being an elephant.
	So existence exists.
	There's something out there.
	We perceive it objectively.
	Now, of course, the senses can be misinterpreted.
	The senses usually don't err, but the senses can be misinterpreted.
	You know, you put a pencil in a A cup of water and it looks like it's bending.
	You could be standing in a desert and you think, wow, a long way away is a lake.
	Turns out it's a mirage, right?
	The light waves bouncing between differently heated layers of air.
	But it's not your eyes that are saying it's a lake.
	It's your brain. Your eyes are simply giving you the light waves.
	And the way why we have five senses, the argument goes, is because we can validate things, right?
	So if you put the pencil in, the cup of water looks like it's bent.
	If you run your finger down it, you find it's not bent.
	It's just the way that the light is refracted through the water.
	If you think that there's a mirage somewhere out there, then you go and you try and swim in it.
	And if you swim in it and you drink it, then it's obviously real, right?
	Because all your senses are corroborating.
	But where you run and you dive into sand and the water still keeps moving, then it's clearly an error.
	So it's not like any one sense can be misinterpreted, but in combination, all senses validating the same thing, then that's truth.
	That's an empirical, objective view and correct interpretation of that which is outside your flesh position of your brain.
	So what does she talk about in terms of epistemology?
	How do we know? How do we learn?
	So she wrote, Since man is not omniscient or infallible, you have to discover what you can claim as knowledge and how to prove the validity of your conclusions.
	Does man acquire knowledge by a process of reason or by sudden revelation from a supernatural power?
	Is reason a faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses or is it fed by innate ideas implanted in man's mind before he was born?
	This is the Platonic idea. Is reason competent to perceive reality or does man possess some other cognitive faculty which is superior to reason?
	Mysticism, prayer, revelation, God's sprites dancing in your brain or whatever.
	Can man achieve certainty or is he doomed to perpetual doubt?
	The extent of your self-confidence and of your success will be different according to which set of answers you accept.
	In the same book she wrote, in the history of philosophy with some very rare exceptions, epistemological theories have consisted of attempts to escape one or the other of these two fundamental questions, which cannot be escaped.
	Men have been taught either that knowledge is impossible or Skepticism, or in the moral realm, nihilism, or that it is available without effort.
	Mysticism. You may be meditating and then it just comes to you.
	These two positions appear to be antagonists, but are in fact two variants on the same theme.
	Two sides of the same fraudulent coin.
	The attempt to escape the responsibility of rational cognition and the absolutism of reality.
	The attempt to assert the primacy of consciousness over existence, right?
	Why do we need philosophy?
	It's the same reason why we need nutrition.
	I mean, because everything that tastes good is not good for us, and some stuff that tastes bad is bad for us.
	And sometimes in the realm of medicine, we will accept pain in order to prevent or cure us from an illness, right?
	And so we need philosophy because we make mistakes.
	We don't know everything and we can make mistakes.
	So how do we correct those mistakes?
	Well, some people correct those mistakes by looking it up in an ancient religious text.
	Some people correct those mistakes by attempting to take more drugs and recapture some unifying emotional experience.
	And objectivists attempt to correct mistakes with reference to objective reality and the universality of reason.
	Walt Whitman once wrote, you say I contradict myself.
	Very well, I contradict myself.
	That's not acceptable in science or mathematics.
	It's not acceptable in engineering.
	It's not acceptable in philosophy.
	You don't just get to walk away from your contradictions.
	You must resolve them to be virtuous and responsible.
	She wrote, man is a being of volitional consciousness beyond the level of percepts.
	Which is just, you know, things that you sense directly.
	A level inadequate to the cognitive requirements of his survival.
	Man has to acquire knowledge by his own effort, which he may exercise or not.
	And by a process of reason, which he may apply correctly or not.
	Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of his mental efficacy.
	He is capable of error, of evasion, of psychological distortion.
	He needs, we need, a method of cognition which he himself has to discover.
	He must discover how to use his rational faculty, how to validate his conclusions, how to distinguish truth from falsehood, how to set the criteria of what he may accept as knowledge.
	Two questions are involved in his every conclusion.
	Conviction, decision, choice, or claim.
	What do I know and how do I know it?
	What is the truth of the origin of Earth?
	Is it Genesis?
	Or is it something involving geology, carbon dating, Pangea, the scientific investigation, fossil records, you name it, right?
	And what do I know and how do I know it?
	So you'd say, well, I know that God created the earth because it says so in Genesis.
	That's not philosophy, right?
	Because that's not universal, objective, provable to others and so on, right?
	You can show somebody who's never been exposed to your way of thinking that two and two make four.
	That's objective. It doesn't rely on personal authority or some ancient book.
	You can show them that directly.
	But this other stuff, which is subjective and mystical and so on, you can show.
	So concept formation, as we talked about, the difference between Aristotle, who thought the essences were embedded in the structure of the thing itself, which is, I think, an analogy for atoms and cells.
	Concepts are important.
	Because the question is, which is primary?
	The group or the individual?
	This is a huge, huge question.
	I mean... Spock, right?
	Nanu Nanu, he says, blowing up the heads of many Star Trekkers.
	Spock said, you know, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few or the one.
	Of course, a collective can't have needs.
	Food can't be digested by a group, right?
	I mean, you can put it in individual stomachs and so on.
	The social good, the common good, the good of the many, the good of the masses, the pragmatism for society as a whole, self-sacrifice for the group.
	There is no such thing in Aristotelianism as a concept of That is bigger or deeper or overrides any characteristics of an individual.
	An individual thing.
	Right? You can't have a concept called a tree that also includes a squid that happens to look a little bit like a tree.
	So, Rand says, a concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by a specific definition.
	I mean, look at the things in your lives that are spheres, right?
	You can look at the thing on YouTube right now that is a sphere, more or less.
	Charlie Brown style sphere.
	So how do you know it's a sphere?
	Because you have, you know, roundness, right?
	I mean, a pencil and a thing in the middle and a string.
	You have a concept of three-dimensional circles called spheres.
	And you can see them all over the place when you look for them.
	And so... There's a process of abstraction, has to be round, has to be roughly equivalent, and so on, and united by a specific definition.
	By organizing his perceptual material, pure raw sense data, into concepts, and his concepts into wider and still wider concepts, man is able to grasp and retain, to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate concretes of any given immediate moment.
	So you can build a bridge you've never seen before because you understand the principles of physics and engineering.
	In any given moment, concepts enable man to hold in the focus of his consciousness, of his conscious awareness, much more than his purely perceptual capacity would permit.
	The range of man's perceptual awareness, the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time is limited.
	He may be able to visualize four or five units.
	So close your eyes. You can try this and close your eyes.
	And just try to get little glowing balls going in your brain, in your mind's eye.
	And you will find you can do a couple and then you can't.
	But we have a concept of a forest that can include millions of trees, even though we can't picture millions of trees in our mind's eye.
	He cannot visualize 100 trees or a distance of 10 light years.
	It is only his conceptual faculty that makes it possible for him to deal with knowledge of that kind.
	So to move beyond that which you can immediately see and sense and process into concepts that can allow your mind to correctly identify the characteristics of other galaxies requires concepts.
	She wrote, it is crucially important to grasp the fact that a concept is an open-end classification, which includes the yet-to-be-discovered characteristics of any given group of existence.
	All of man's knowledge rests on that fact.
	So, if we go to another solar system and we find a planet that looks like Earth, we'll say, that planet is a sphere.
	So, it includes all the yet-to-be-discovered characteristics.
	I mean, we won't find something that has matter, but does have no mass and is not subject to gravity.
	Right? So we know that if we find something that has matter, it has mass and is subject to gravity.
	We know all of that because that's the universal.
	Conceptual awareness is the only type of awareness capable of integrating past, present, and future.
	Concepts are independent of time.
	And they're independent of mere geographical location.
	Gravity works the same way in Philadelphia as it does in Timbuktu.
	She writes, sensations are merely an awareness of the present and cannot be retained beyond the immediate moment.
	Percepts are retained and through automatic memory provide a certain rudimentary link to the past, but cannot project the future.
	Like you ate some bad berries, you'll remember that physiologically, right?
	I once ate a bad banana, it took me like a year to eat a banana again.
	It is only conceptual awareness that can grasp and hold the total of its experience, extrospectively the continuity of existence, introspectively the continuity of consciousness, and thus enable its possessor to project his course long-range.
	The physics of the magnetic compass just work.
	And so it works through time, it works through geography, and so on.
	So, moving on to morality, the objectivist approach is the moral is that which best serves man's life in the long run.
	So she writes in Atlas Shrugged, my morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom, existence exists, and in a single choice, to live.
	The rest proceeds from these.
	To live, man must hold three things as the ruling values of his life.
	Reason, purpose, self-esteem.
	Reason as his only tool of knowledge.
	Purpose as his choice of the happiness that tool must proceed to achieve.
	Self-esteem as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness.
	Which means worthy of living.
	These three values imply and require all of man's virtues.
	I'm not sure I can add a lot to that.
	Reason is the only way we can know things according to objectivism.
	The purpose of life is happiness and reason is how we achieve it.
	And self-esteem means that you're confident in your use of reason and your ability and right to be happy.
	As I mentioned before, you cannot say I love you if you cannot say the I. Your own life in happiness is the ultimate good.
	And of course, people trash this often without recognizing this is pure.
	It's Aristotelianism plus massive amounts of nicotine.
	Happiness requires a morality of rational selfishness.
	Do not give undeserved rewards to others and do not ask them for one's self.
	Undeserved rewards to others.
	Now, she's not talking about giving some guy on the street who needs something to eat 10 bucks to go and buy a meal.
	Not talking about that. What she's saying is, if you hate someone, don't pretend that you love them.
	Don't go and praise them. If you love someone, don't betray them.
	Pay people what they have earned.
	Pay people what they deserve.
	So, with regards to selfishness, it's really, really tough for people to really grasp and understand the degree to which we as a society, as a species, have moved beyond win-lose.
	So in hunter-gatherer societies, it's win-lose, right?
	Let's say you and I are competing to hunt a rabbit.
	And if I catch the rabbit, I guess I could share it with you, but I'm going to eat...
	It's my rabbit. And my rabbit means one less rabbit for you.
	It's win-lose.
	If I want to enclose the best farmland in a particular area, you can't use it, right?
	It's win-lose. And those things are important.
	Subsistence farming... If we only just have enough to eat, if you take a couple of meals from me, I might starve to death.
	It's win-lose. There's not an excess production and creation of wealth and material and value that allows things to be win-win.
	And this is, of course, a lot of what Aristotle would have seen.
	He did not see the amazing power of the free market to create wealth.
	So in the free market, wow, we have situations that are win-win.
	And it's not like those are impossible prior to the free market, but the free market blows the concept wide open in a whole new way.
	So if you have a pen and I have a dollar, and we freely exchange those things, right?
	Let's say I've got a million dollars in my pocket.
	I need a pen to write down some cute woman's number.
	So I'll give you the dollar because I don't really value the dollar that much, but I value the pen because I need to write down the woman's number.
	Now you have 50 pens in your pocket because you're a pen seller and you need money.
	So you give me the pen and you take my dollar.
	We are both happier.
	And we know that that's occurred because it's been voluntary.
	Nobody's forced anyone. It's not win-lose.
	So we're both happier.
	I'm happier because I value the pen more than my dollar, and you're happier because you value the dollar more than your pen.
	This fundamental win situation is relatively recent.
	In human society.
	And all that's really required for the free market to operate and for win-win negotiations to become the norm as opposed to win-lose negotiations.
	You know, if I go and try and capture you and make you my slave, then either I make you my slave or you kill me or escape.
	It's not a win-win situation.
	So the non-aggression principle is all that is required for the free market to flourish.
	So if raping is the norm in society, then there's not going to be a lot of love poems and flowers and chocolate hearts and, you know, romantic restaurants and whatever, right?
	Motels that rent by the minute and have quarters for vibrating beds.
	But enough about my 20s.
	So if rape is the win-lose, right?
	Obviously, the rapist gets what he wants, but the victim does not get what he or she wants.
	When there's raping, there's no other tertiary things, creativity that comes about.
	When dating, which is a voluntary interaction, replaces a lot of ancillary benefits are brought into being.
	I mean, over and above the obvious moral ones.
	Now, objectivist ethics is based on rationality versus mysticism and whim and emotionality and the herd and all that kind of stuff.
	Holding evildoers accountable for their vices is very important.
	And as we saw in part one of this series, Alyssa Rosenbaum, the young Ayn Rand, saw immense and direct evil as a child.
	Men being dragged out of their homes and shot dead by communists and this theft of her father's productivity and so on.
	Now, when you hold evildoers accountable for their vices, they really don't like it at all.
	Evildoers are generally parasitical.
	Like, they're manipulators, they're fraudsters, they lie to people, they just get what they want.
	So the worst thing for an evildoer is rejection by others.
	A con man needs a victim.
	You could go farm in the woods and you can survive.
	It's not great, but you can do it.
	But a con man always needs a victim.
	And so when you hold evil people accountable for their vices, then you are telling people don't deal with these people.
	And if they're evildoers, they're by definition parasites, and therefore they can't survive without it.
	So they hold it accountable.
	Good people can survive even with occasional brush-ups against evil people, but evil people cannot survive without good people as their prey.
	A thief needs someone to produce something so he can steal it.
	There's always a general biological survival tendency for evildoers to get much more angry at good people who expose them than good people have at evildoers.
	Objectivism is about treating rational and productive people with goodwill and generosity.
	You pay like for like.
	My daughter says, nice to the nice, mean to the mean.
	So, the difference between win-win and win-lose was talked about in Capitalism and the Unknown Ideal.
	The trader and the warrior have been fundamental antagonists throughout history.
	Trade does not flourish on battlefields.
	Factories do not produce under bombardments.
	Profits do not grow on rubble.
	Capitalism is a society of traders, for which it has been denounced by every would-be gunman who regards trade as selfish and conquest as noble.
	So, similar to Aristotle, Galt's speech, which is reproduced in For the New Intellectual, says, There is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traitors, giving value for value.
	The objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness, which means the values required for man's survival qua man, which means man's survival based upon man's nature.
	Fish can swim in the sea, we can't, right?
	Which means the values required for human survival, not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the aspirations, the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society, and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grubbing the loot of the moment.
	The objective is ethics holds the human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifices of anyone to anyone.
	It holds the rational interests of men do not clash, that there is no conflict of interest among men who do not desire the unearned.
	So what does that mean?
	Let's look at the Olympics. So people watch the Olympics because it's really the pinnacle of human achievement in particular sports.
	Now, if I were in the Olympics, I would want to win the gold, as would everyone else.
	Is this a conflict of interest?
	Not if you're rational. Let's say I'm a figure skater, a whole bunch of figure skaters, and let's say that I bribe the judges, something that's a little more subjective than how fast did you ski or something.
	Let's say I bribe the judges to have me win.
	Well, what's going to happen is, if I am the best skater, there was no point.
	If I'm not the best skater, then fewer people are going to tune into the Olympics because the quality of skating has gone down.
	If it ever comes to light that I bribed, then there's going to be that much of a diminishment in people's desire to see skating.
	So although I may get a gold, overall...
	Skating is diminished if lower quality people win.
	Like if I go and audition for a band as a singer, you know, and I'm up against Bono or the reincarnated ghost of Freddie Mercury, well, they should choose those guys and not me.
	Of course, I want to be the singer, but they're better singers, better frontmen, so they should be the ones who get the gig.
	And then I get all of the fun of watching them perform and, you know, maybe I'll feel some envy, but fundamentally I would recognize that that's a just thing.
	If I go for a job interview and someone else is better qualified, then they should get the job, not me.
	Because if I get the job, I'm harming the economy, the world becomes a little less valuable, and I'm probably going to end up getting fired anyway and not be in the right love interest.
	If a woman loves some other guy more than me, blah, blah, blah.
	I think we sort of all get that. I'm not saying it's easy, but fundamentally the degree to which there are conflict of interest is the degree to which people reject and avoid rationality.
	Alright. The A word.
	Altruism! Yes, one of the big bugaboos.
	So altruism is generally thought of as kindness, as niceness, as helping people and so on.
	And when people see, ah, Rand was against altruism, you know, some sort of predatory Bernie Madoff out sucking the kidneys out of homeless children or something.
	Well, what is the moral code of altruism according to objectivism?
	The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue, and value.
	Do not confuse altruism with kindness, goodwill, or respect for the rights of others.
	These are not primaries but consequences, which in fact altruism makes impossible.
	The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice, which means self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction, which means the self is a standard of evil, the selfless is a standard of the good.
	That which makes me happy is bad.
	That which makes other people happy is good.
	And that is something strongly rejected.
	She says, do not hide behind such superficialities as whether or not you should give a dime to a beggar.
	And before you think she's cheap, back when a dime really meant something, probably worth like two bucks, not a buck fifty.
	That is not the issue.
	The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime.
	The issue is whether you must keep buying your life dime by dime from any beggar who might choose to approach you.
	The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence.
	The issue... It's whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal.
	Any man of self-esteem will answer no.
	Altruism says yes.
	There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together into one package deal.
	1. What are values?
	2. Who should be the beneficiary of values?
	Altruism substitutes the second for the first.
	It evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance.
	Self-sacrifice, by definition, cannot be universalized.
	It can't be universalized.
	If I am supposed to sacrifice my happiness to make other people happy, then they must themselves sacrifice their happiness to make other people happy, and those other people must sacrifice their happiness to make yet other people happy.
	Nobody ever gets to hold the present.
	It's just a hot potato of happiness.
	They just have to keep passing along to others.
	And then it comes back to me, but I can't keep it because I've got to sacrifice my happiness to make other people.
	It simply doesn't work.
	It doesn't work logically and it doesn't work practically.
	For there to be self-sacrifice, somebody must be on the receiving end.
	So if I'm supposed to sacrifice my happiness to make someone else happy, then that person must receive that gift and their happiness must be unclouded by the fact that I'm unhappy.
	That's not good. I mean, if I say, well, listen, I'm diabetic, I really need my insulin, but you look like you could use a drink.
	Let me buy you a drink. Well, I'm sacrificing my own interest then to make someone else happy by buying them a drink.
	Now, if that person says, I think that's a good thank you.
	I'm obviously sorry that you're going to lose your eyesight and toes to diabetes, but boy, this beer tastes good.
	That's kind of being a jerk, right?
	If I know that somebody has made themselves enormously unhappy to make me happy, guess what?
	I'm not happy anymore because I don't want the eww, yuck.
	You know, I mean, so some woman sleeps with you and afterwards she says, God, that was horrible.
	I hated every minute of that.
	Ugh, you vile, you disgusting, halitosis, bad breath.
	And you say, well, why did you do it?
	To make you happy. Ew, who would want that?
	You gotta want me.
	It's a sacrifice, right?
	Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil.
	Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral virtue.
	As long as that beneficiary is anyone other than oneself, anything goes.
	Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own?
	If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you?
	If the sensation of eating a cake is of value, why is it an immoral indulgence on your stomach, but a moral good for you to achieve in the stomachs of others?
	Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so?
	Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away?
	And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it?
	If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?
	Does virtue consist of serving vice?
	Is the moral purpose of those who are good self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?
	And how does this even work in practice?
	She writes, observe what this beneficiary criterion of the altruist morality does to a man's life.
	The first thing he learns is that morality is his enemy.
	He has nothing to gain from it.
	He can only lose. Self-inflicted loss, self-inflicted pain, and the grey, debilitating pole of an incomprehensible duty is all that he can expect.
	He may hope that others might occasionally sacrifice themselves for his benefit as he grudgingly sacrifices himself for theirs, but he knows that the relationship will bring mutual resentment, not Pleasure.
	And that, morally, their pursuit of values will be like an exchange of unwanted, unchosen Christmas presents, which neither is morally permitted to buy for himself.
	Aside from such times as he manages to perform some act of self-sacrifice, he possesses no moral significance.
	Morality takes no cognizance of him, and has nothing to say to him, for guidance, in the crucial issues of his life.
	It is only his own personal, private, quote, selfish life, and as such it is regarded either as evil...
	Or at best, amoral.
	If you're supposed to go around sacrificing yourself to everyone, we don't always have the chance to do that.
	I rarely walk past a lake and see someone I hate drowning.
	So, what does ethics have to do with you?
	Well, it's like a vampire.
	Bleeds you dry, casts you aside.
	Out of blood, not interested.
	So, it's not something that you can really work with.
	And it would be absolute anathema.
	The idea that you should sacrifice legitimate self-interest for the happiness of others...
	Does set you in the service of narcissists who are happy to take whatever they want and have no concern for how much it makes you suffer.
	This is not love. And Aristotle would be repulsed, I would imagine, too.
	So where did it come from?
	Why is it such a common phenomenon?
	I mean, other than the fact that if you can convince people to sacrifice themselves, you can go around scooping up all the stuff and call them virtuous.
	So, she writes, it is obvious why the morality of altruism is a tribal phenomenon.
	Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes.
	The cause of altruism's perpetuation into civilized eras is not physical but psycho-epistemological.
	The men of self-arrested perceptual mentality are unable to survive without tribal leadership and, quote, protection against reality.
	The doctrine of self-sacrifice does not offend them.
	They have no sense of self or of personal value.
	They do not know what it is they are asked to sacrifice.
	They have no first-hand inkling of such things as intellectual integrity, love of truth, personally chosen values, or a passionate dedication to an idea.
	When they hear injunctions against selfishness, they believe that what they must renounce is the brute mindless whim-worship of a lone tribal wolf.
	But their leaders, the theoreticians of altruism, know better.
	Immanuel Kant knew it. John Dewey knew it.
	B.F. Skinner knows it.
	John Rawls knows it. Observe that it is not the mindless brute, but reason, intelligence, ability, merit, self-confidence, self-esteem, that they are out to destroy.
	If you have no values, then you're always going to be on the receiving end of sacrifice.
	And so it has appeal, right?
	I mean, if you have no money, you will always be a net beneficiary of a welfare state, of a redistributionist state.
	And so if you have no integrity, have no values, have no virtue, have no ambitions, seems like a good deal.
	But for people like Ayn Rand, of course, who have massive ambitions and abilities, not so good.
	So what does she mean by sacrifice?
	Well, she doesn't mean something that you would choose to do based upon your value system.
	So the guy who fell down the mountain and got caught and pinned his arm, got pinned in a rock, cut off his arm with a penknife, crawled for help.
	Was that a sacrifice?
	No. Otherwise he was going to die because he was pinned by his arm.
	Sacrifice, she says, is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a non-value.
	Thus altruism gauges a man's virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces, or betrays his values.
	Since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less, quote, selfish, than help to those one loves.
	The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite.
	Always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one.
	And this question of greater and lesser values is to some degree objective and is to some degree subjective.
	If two children are at peril, I'm going to save mine.
	I'll certainly do my best to help the other, but I'm going to save my child.
	The idea that I would pass over my child and save some stranger's child would be altruistic in nature.
	Conversely, I would not expect the other mother to come save my child and ignore hers.
	So, again, this is not things that you run into at any particular point in your life.
	It's just a way of illustrating the example.
	Let's put it another way.
	If there's just someone, someone that I love and someone that I hate.
	I don't know. Who do I hate? I don't know.
	Just come up with someone. Imagine someone I hate.
	Someone I love and someone I hate.
	I could save one of them.
	The idea that I would save someone I hate is incomprehensible to objectivism and would be actually wrong.
	Because as a virtuous man, I only hate evil people.
	I don't hate good people.
	I love good people.
	I love them long time.
	And so the idea that I would allow a good person to die while saving the life of an evil person would be sacrifice.
	A sacrifice of higher values for lowers.
	So she said this concept of surrendering a greater value for lesser or non-value, this applies to all choices, including one's actions towards other men.
	It requires that one possess a defined hierarchy of rational values, values chosen and validated by a rational standard.
	Without such a hierarchy, neither rational conduct nor considered value judgments nor moral choices are possible.
	So this, you know, when Fichy first started writing about this stuff in the 1940s, I mean, that's...
	What, 70 years ago, the Fountainhead came out.
	Think of a woman in a bad marriage.
	Like a woman in a marriage, the guy is drunk, is lazy, hits her or whatever.
	Should the woman stay?
	It makes the man happier if she stays.
	But she's miserable.
	I think most people these days would say, if you can't fix it and you're miserable, get out.
	YOLO! Only got one life to live.
	So get out. Now, this is new.
	Up until the 60s, it took an act of parliament in Canada for you to get divorced.
	Till death do us part, you made a vow.
	What God has joined together, let no man or woman break us under and so on.
	You were supposed to stay and get your reward in heaven, right?
	That is really, really important because now there's this language in self-help circles and certain psychological circles called enabling or codependent.
	Now, an enabler is someone who supports the bad habits of someone in order to avoid conflict or in order to avoid having them or the other person feel bad.
	So, you know, if you're married to some guy, he's supposed to show up for work and he gets drunk the night before and he wakes up with a hangover and he says, oh, you got to call in and tell him I'm sick.
	Well, if you do that, you're enabling, right?
	If you give money to a drug addict so you won't be forced to steal, you're enabling that addiction, these sort of examples from objectivism.
	This is called enablement.
	It's considered very unhealthy psychologically.
	This is relatively new.
	Because beforehand, self-sacrifice and these decisions about marriage and relationships were in the realm of religion.
	Now, they tend to be in the realm of mental health, Of the self-health movement, of psychology, to some degree of philosophy.
	So it's different now.
	So when you think of altruism, think of enablement.
	Of sacrificing truth because someone's a drunk.
	Of sacrificing money because someone is an addict who refuses to get help.
	She says, the proper method of judging when or whether one should help another person is by reference to one's own rational self-interest and one's own hierarchy of values.
	The time, money, or effort one gives to the risk one takes should be proportional to the value of the person in relation to one's own happiness.
	So, let's just take...
	Every example can be countermanded, but let's just take an example.
	You are a British person...
	In 1940, you walk past a lake, and lo and behold, both Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill are drowning.
	Who do you save?
	Right? I'm obviously going to take Churchill and throw his big bloated beluga, Rob Ford-style carcass on Hitler to drown him quicker.
	So, self-defense is rational selfishness.
	Some guy is going to kill you and you shoot him.
	You're saving your own life at the expense of his.
	He doesn't want to get shot. You are asserting the value of your own life over someone else who's harmful, who's evil, if they're initiating force.
	To illustrate this, she says on the altruist's favorite example, the issue of saving a drowning person.
	If the person to be saved is a stranger, it's morally proper to save him only when the danger to one's own life is minimal.
	When the danger is great, it would be immoral to attempt it.
	Only a lack of self-esteem could permit one to value one's life no higher than that of any random stranger.
	And conversely, if you are drowning, if one is drowning, one cannot expect a stranger to risk his life for one's own sake, remembering that one's own life cannot be as valuable to him as his own.
	We all know this every time we fly, right?
	What do they say? If the oxygen masks come down, put them over your own mouth and then go and save, help other people.
	If the person to be saved is not a stranger, then the risk one should be willing to take is greater in proportion to the greatness of that person's value to oneself.
	If it is the man or woman one loves, then one can be willing to give one's own life to save him or her for the selfish reason that life without the loved person would be unbearable or could be.
	So, let's just deal with selfishness.
	In popular usage, the word selfishness is a synonym of evil, she says.
	The image it conscious is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.
	Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word selfishness is concern with one's own interests.
	This concept does not include a moral evaluation.
	It does not tell us whether a concern with one's own interests is good or evil, nor does it tell us what constitutes man's actual interests.
	It is a task of ethics to answer such questions.
	She writes, if it is true that what I mean by selfishness is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism.
	It means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man, a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others.
	It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers on sacrifice, as victims and parasites, that it permits no concept of a benevolent coexistence among men, that it permits no concept of justice.
	Concern with one's own interests.
	Now, only narcissistic monsters have their own interests which coincide with no one else's interests.
	I like going to a computer store.
	My daughter, she likes going to a play center.
	My daughter's happiness is the majority of my interest.
	Therefore, we go to a play center.
	And actually, it's quite a lot of fun, too.
	And the idea that selfishness means only for oneself is a straw man.
	Because my interests include happiness.
	Your interest right now.
	I mean, I'm trying to be engaging, enjoyable, entertaining, informative, not wildly wrong in this conversation.
	Because I'm recording this to put in front of you and hopefully to engage you in what is a very long presentation.
	So I care about whether you're interested.
	I care about... Whether you learn something, it matters to me.
	Reading, putting the PowerPoints together, it really matters to me.
	My selfish interest is for you to learn something about philosophy, even if it is to think I'm an idiot and Ayn Rand is a...
	Beowulf in a cloud of smoke.
	I want you to learn something because I found so much value out of learning philosophy.
	I share that. Make the world a better place for my daughter.
	My interests even include...
	I don't even know you! Another side of this screen.
	But my self-interest massively includes your enjoyment of what it is that I'm doing.
	Like sex.
	If you've got any brains...
	Or even if you just want to give your naughty bits a perpetual workout, it matters whether the other person is enjoying what you're doing, right?
	Don't do something a person says, ow, and say, no, no, no, you're wrong.
	You really like that. It's not going to work, right?
	I know.
	So, the objectivist ethics hold that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action, and that man must act for his own rational self-interest.
	But his right to do so is derived from his nature as a man, and from the function of moral values in human life, and therefore is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles, which define and determine his actual self-interest.
	Actual self-interest, not illusory self-interest.
	It is not a license to do as he pleases, and it is not applicable to the altruist image of a selfish brute, nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes, or whims.
	So, if I want to build a bridge...
	That my family and loved ones are going to cross.
	My friends, if I'm going to build that bridge, that's my interest.
	I want to build that bridge. Do I just build it how I feel it should be?
	No. I have to study engineering.
	I have to know stresses and tensions and supports and buttresses and struts and all these other words I don't understand from the fountainhead.
	For me to achieve my selfish pleasure requires that I subjugate my desire to rational and empirical and objective standards.
	If I want to find out the truth about...
	The nature of matter. Not much point me praying to a dead chicken.
	I have to learn the scientific method.
	I have to subjugate my intellectual activities to rational objective standards in order to achieve my goal.
	So this is said, right?
	This is said as a warning against the kind of Nietzschean egoists who in fact are a product of the altruist morality and represent the other side of the altruist coin.
	The men who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one's own benefit.
	Just as the satisfaction of the irrational desires of others is not a criterion of moral value, neither is the satisfaction of one's own irrational desires.
	Morality is not a contest of whims.
	So to build this bridge, I could go and kidnap An engineer put a gun to his head and say, build me this goddamn bridge.
	But that's obviously not a good thing to do.
	Aristotle fell a little bit into this sometimes when he said that there are certain kinds of men that either must be ejected from the city-state or must end up ruling the city-state.
	The sort of Napoleons or whatever it is, right?
	But this is very...
	It's win-win. Any sacrifice of one person to another, which is a sacrifice of a higher value for a lesser or non-value...
	Not right. So the standards of value, the standard of value of the objective ethics, the standard by which one judges what is good or evil, is man's life, or that which is required for man's survival.
	Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good.
	That which negates, opposes, or destroys it is the evil.
	Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are thinking and productive work.
	You must be able to reason and you must be able to translate your reason into productive work that you can own.
	Right? And this is the foundation for unfettered free trade, property rights, and so on.
	So, in politics...
	And there are questions which we'll get into in the next one about the degree of the size of the state.
	But let's look at... Ayn Rand supported the notion of the state generally around three areas.
	National defense, the courts, and the police.
	The prisons, depending.
	So, she wrote, the only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means to protect him from physical violence.
	A proper government is only a policeman acting as an agent of man's self-defense and as such may resort to force only against those who start the use of force.
	This is called the night watchman state.
	It's passive unless somebody breaks into the factory.
	There's no social activism.
	There's no welfare state. You can't force people to pay for other people's health care.
	You can't force them to send money to dictators in foreign countries.
	You can't have tariffs and tax.
	It's only An agent of everybody's right of self-defense.
	That's all the government can be.
	Responding in a proportionate manner to those who initiate the use of force with force.
	So the only proper functions of government are the police to protect you from criminals, the army to protect you from foreign invaders, and the courts to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others.
	To settle disputes by rational rules according to objective law.
	But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, think war and drugs, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed citizens is a nightmare, infernal machine designed to annihilate morality.
	Such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man's deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right To the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense.
	Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct.
	You may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.
	And this is, of course, democracy.
	America, which was her conceptually ideal society, was founded as a republic, which means democracy confined within respect for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and so on.
	Almost all philosophers throughout history have had massive problems with democracy as, you know, two wolves and a sheep voting on who's for dinner, you know, two rapists and a woman voting on who gets raped.
	I mean, the fact that this brute majority rule is somewhat codified and made to appear more civil, according to democratic institutions, doesn't overcome the final mob rule aspect of democracy.
	Of course, the founding fathers had huge problems with it as well.
	She wrote, The principle of voluntary government financing rests on the following premises, that the government is not the owner of the citizen's income and therefore cannot hold a blank check on that income.
	That the nature of the proper governmental services must be constitutionally defined and delimited, leaving the government no power to enlarge the scope of its services at its own arbitrary discretion.
	Consequentially, the principle of voluntary government financing regards the government as the servant, not the ruler of the citizens, as an agent who must be paid for his services, not as a benefactor whose services are gratuitous, who dispenses something for nothing.
	Finally, we end with love.
	Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another.
	The spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man's character.
	Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person's virtues is an act of selflessness.
	That as far as one's own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut.
	Love is an emotional response to the moral qualities of another person.
	And if those moral qualities are virtue and we possess virtue ourselves, straight Aristotelianism.
	Love is the appreciation of shared virtue in another.
	To love, she wrote, is to value.
	Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love.
	Because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values.
	The man who does not value himself cannot value anything or anyone.
	Virtue is consistent.
	Virtue is consistency.
	Look, if you want to be a weightlifter, it doesn't do you any good to go to the gym once.
	Or ten times.
	You must consistently go to the gym.
	If you want to lose weight, you have to consistently consume fewer calories than you use.
	Consistently. Virtue is consistent.
	Now, love requires predictability.
	And the most virtuous people are the most consistent people.
	And trust in somebody else's character is trust in the consistency of their behavior, which is trust in their adherence to virtue.
	So we can only love, in a reliable, trusting manner, consistent virtue, if we are virtuous.
	If we are evil, we will hate consistent virtue.
	And if we are consistently virtuous, we will hate evil.
	These are win-lose predations on each other.
	The practical implementation of friendship, affection and love consists of incorporating the welfare, the rational welfare, of the person involved into one's own hierarchy of values, then acting accordingly.
	There's things in here which bother you, which annoy you.
	But I'm aiming for something more than your immediate enjoyment, as is the case whenever I do shows or have conversations.
	I'm aiming for more than the immediate enjoyment.
	Just as when you go to the gym and they get a push, it hurts, right?
	It's uncomfortable at the moment, but they're aiming for something more.
	You're hungry on a diet, you're aiming for something more than...
	The contentment of the moment.
	The contentment for the moment is a kind of death.
	There's nothing wrong with it when you've worked, but sit around all day, don't eat, don't get up, or just eat junk food, crap, smoke, whatever, you're just going to die.
	So the rational welfare of the people involved, this is what is opposite to enablement and to codependency, where you serve the needs of the other person no matter what.
	No matter what. If it's good for them, bad for them, it doesn't matter.
	I just don't want to have conflict. I don't want to upset the other person.
	That's not rational love.
	Hopefully you're interested in the philosophy as a whole.
	It is well worth studying.
	It is well worth studying. Study Aristotle at the same time and you'll be really struck by how much in common they have.
	Again, post-industrial with the knowledge of the win-win capacities of the free market to generate wealth.
	Aristotle lived in a slave society and himself advocated slavery.
	So some inconsistencies, let's say, there.
	Plato, on the other hand, was against slavery.
	But for totalitarianism, in other words, there just aren't enough slaves.
	We will, of course, be continuing to work.
	I'm going to be doing more work on philosophers as a whole.
	Truth about Aristotle and so on.
	Because these guys, you've got to study them.
	You've got to study them to be happy.
	Don't reinvent the wheel.
	People have put immense multi-millennial efforts into delineating truth and virtue and goodness.
	You don't have to agree with them.
	Certainly you don't have to agree with me.
	But it's important to not reinvent the wheel.
	Know that there's a car before you build a new car.
	Otherwise you'll be wasting time. And the degree to which people attack Ayn Rand, though Ayn Rand is updated Aristotelianism, is the degree to which they're confessing massive catastrophic ignorance of intellectual history.
	Anybody who trashes Ayn Rand without pointing out that they're only trashing the parts that they consider wrong relative to Aristotle is simply showing that they don't know anything about intellectual history.
	How can you trash a philosopher without Without knowing that there's an intellectual history that they themselves have admitted and said, this is my biggest influence.
	This is the guy. He's the guy.
	Aristotle's the guy. It's...
	You know, when I was younger, oh, we were all so shallow and so into music, right?
	And... So, Van Halen did a cover of Dancing in the Streets, which I think was originally the Shirelles or something.
	Van Halen did a cover, and people were like, I love that Van Halen song, right?
	And we were like, it's not a Van Halen song!
	There's a cover band! Freddie Mercury didn't write The Great Pretender!
	Come on, people! And so, knowing that it's a cover band is important.
	Like, if you say, I love the Van Halen song, Dancing in the Streets...
	And the people will look at you like you don't know anything.
	You don't know anything about the song. You don't think about history or whatever.
	You just, you know, heard the song and now you went.
	And you might gently correct them or whatever, but you wouldn't consider them a music expert.
	And when people say, Ayn Rand's a hack, without recognizing that so much of what she does comes from Aristotle, they're just confessing that they don't know the source material.
	They don't know the history of philosophy.
	They don't know where she's coming from.
	They don't know where she fits. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
	So much for your patience to make it to the end.
	Please tell me if there's anything I can do to improve what it is that I'm doing.
	I hope that this has awakened in you some interest to study philosophy as a whole.
	And I really look forward to seeing you in the next presentation.
	This is Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.

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