You're listening to the Ayn Rand Institute Live
podcast series.
Good morning. Thanks for coming.
So it seemed like the world is going
to hell.
If you think just here in Europe that
the war has broken out in Europe,
people did not expect that. There's Israel is
at war.
There's a growing authoritarianism
through the world. China is warmongering.
If you look at the U. S, it's
in political
disarray. It's hard to
project and kind of believe
how bad the 2 main political parties now
in the U. S. Are.
You have religion
having a resurgence
across the world, the crusading
religions, you see that in the Middle East,
you see that more and more in the
U. S.
That
abortion rights were stricken
I mean, basically, stricken from the constitution, that
the constitution
was deemed does not protect the right to
an abortion,
that's a recent development in the U. S.
And it's part of what a crusading
religion looks like. I don't think you can
understand what is happening in the U. S.
Without understanding
the religious backing of it. So and
there's
is an authoritarianism,
there is a tribalism,
there is an increase
in
governments exerting control
over individuals I think
throughout the world.
It's on the rise.
Now if this is your interest
in ideas, in Ayn Rand's ideas, in objectivism,
that the world's going to hell and it's
important
to kind of expose
the evil and to fight the evil.
I can certainly understand
that as a motivation of interest in Ayn
Rand's ideas. But I don't think it should
be one's primary
motivation. It should not be what how one
thinks about the ideas, the philosophy
and what it's about. It's at most,
a secondary
issue. It's an important issue, but it's a
secondary
issue. And part of what I want to
emphasize today
and what the talk really is about
is that objectivism is a positive
philosophy and it's about having a positive
orientation.
And I, one I don't even think it's
true that the world is going to hell.
Politically,
it's in I think dire straits and there
is a real issue of will the world
kind of broadly descend
into more authoritarianism.
But from a different aspect,
life has never been as good as it
is now today on the earth. And if
you look at just the the worldwide, the
population
in the 1,000,000,000 and billions, it's never been
higher. Standard of living,
kind of average standard of living has never
been higher. And if you look across the
world of the the regions and the countries
that have that you can think of as
they've been touched by the enlightenment
ideas and enlightenment
ideals,
Those places across the globe are doing well.
I mean, the fact that we could just
gather here from all over the place. I
mean, if if you,
met a lot of people yesterday, you saw
there are people from all over
the globe
that we could gather here so easily. I
mean, some of us probably had travel delays
and travel problems, but that you can just
navigate the globe like that and come to
a conference like this. I mean, you can
do this 200 years ago. So the it
the it might seem like the world is
descending into hell, but if you take, I
think, a real
perspective on it and broader than politics,
it's not true.
It's not true and
the
the I think the orientation
to a philosophy and particularly to objectivism, I've
said it's to the positive.
And it should be the world is good
but it could be way better.
It could be way better than what it
is
and that's what objectivism
is about. That's what Ayn Rand's ideas are
about. Who here has read either The Fountainhead
or Atlas Shrugged or both?
Yeah. Okay. Virtually everybody.
And those novels and the reason I think
they're bestseller
novels and they remain
best selling novels
today, I mean, 50 plus years after their
publication,
is that what they offer is a vision
of the positive.
They offer a vision of what life could
be and that your life could be better
than what it is and then more broadly
speaking that life on the globe or on
the planet
could be way better than what it is.
And so the it's the
objectivism is not about fighting evil though it
is from a secondary consequence that like if
you have a vision
of the good and of what is worth
striving for in life, then you are going
to as a consequence have a view of
well this
is undermines that, this is destructive to that
positive vision and to that positive
goal, but it's secondary
in that sense. So what objectivism is about
and what it should do for you
is it gives you all kinds of ideas
and
a value orientation
towards what your life could become.
So I mean, just to take some of
the random,
kind of a random list of things from
the objectivist ideas and from Ayn Rand's philosophy.
A perspective on selfishness
that you should take your own life seriously
and that you wanna build something for your
life, that you should be about the pursuit
of your own happiness and that that's a
demanding responsibility.
It's not easy to achieve your own happiness
but that you can do it and you
can do it if you set out to
have the right kinds of values, the right
kinds of virtues, the right kind of orientation
towards life. So you get a whole list
of virtues in objectivism from independence
to pride
to,
to justice to productiveness,
a vision for what you could build within
your own character
and within your own soul.
You got a vision of that self esteem
is possible in life and that it's important
and possible in life and that you have
to have pride
in order to achieve self esteem. That pride
is not the
worst of sins, it's the height of virtue
to take your own life, your moral character,
seriously and to take seriously what you want
to become in life and then to have
the ambition
to really pursue it, to really try to
achieve it. And you could go at the
the
Ayn Rand's ideas, it should give you a
new conception of what logic and thinking and
rationality
and objectivity is. It should give you a
new perspective
on atheism,
on religion
that part of the perspective you get on
religion is that there's a sense in which
Ayn Rand is anti religion, but there's a
sense in which she is not. There's a
sense in which she understands religion was a
primitive form of philosophy.
It tried to offer something of a vision
of what you can achieve.
What was defective about it is that vision
is wrong and in some ways
it's perverse.
But that that that's what it's trying to
do is not a fault. It's a virtue
of what religion is but what a philosophy
is is doing that. It has the same
orientation
as a religion to offer a world view
but to offer a positive world view that
you can defend, that you have reasons for,
that you have evidence for
and that that's what you are then trying
to achieve.
So objectivism,
it's radically
and
I wanna really stress this because there's a
way in which given the world today, one
can think what it is, it's about fighting
the evils that exist in the world. Objectivism
is a radically positive
philosophy. It offers a vision for what you
can become
in life, what you want to strive for
and why.
And as a consequence,
I think you have an orientation towards the
world that you want to see these ideas
spread.
You want to see people sharing these ideas,
but but it should really come first from
your own perspective that they've helped me
live, they've helped me achieve values, they've helped
me achieve my own happiness
and it has that has to be real
to you that that's that's what the ideas
have done, this is what the philosophy has
done for me and then it's a as
a natural consequence, you would want to see
that philosophy, those ideas
shared by other people and again from the
perspective that
as good as the world is today, it
could be even better and I think part
of what
of thinking about objectivism and one's orientation towards
it,
I I wanna stress it could be way
better. The world could be way better than
it is even though it's really good right
now in essence in in the quality of
life that we enjoy. I'll take I'll take
to
that
that this orientation of it the philosophy has
helped my life and so it would help
other people in the world and particularly,
the orientation should be, it will help other
people who are trying to do something good
in the world, who are trying to achieve
values, who are trying to achieve
positives. And I'll take you the two things
of the way that I hold this. They're,
they're not these are two examples, so they
don't have to be the way that you
hold it. But the kind of orientation
to the philosophy and to the ideas that
I think is important. 1 I hold is
Bill Gates. So from early on, I admired
Bill Gates and Microsoft for what he was
able to build for, I mean I was
using Microsoft products but the the scale at
which Microsoft
operated
that we have now like everyone networked
through computers and so on, that is a
significant part and achievement
of Microsoft and of Bill Gates
and he was damned for and particularly when
he became so successful and then he was
the richest man in the world, he was
really criticized
and damned for that achievement. I mean, the
I remember one, I think this was in
Seattle where there was protest against globalization
where he gets a he got a tie
slammed in his face from protesters as though
like he's the height of evil and he
achieved something really good and in a better
culture, that in a culture that had more
of
Ayn Rand's ideas and of objectivist ideas
in the culture that that people understood and
shared these ideas, Bill Gates would have been
viewed as the,
achiever and producer and hero
that he was. And if you look at
his career,
that he went into philanthropy, I view as,
like, that's a loss to me. It's a
loss to my life that he if he
could've still been at Microsoft building
and part of the leaders in tech, the
world in my life, my own personal life
would be better if that had happened. But
then if you look at what happened with
him, he's a a
fairly intellectual
widely read person
and
you can see him questioning like, is the
world right about me? Is it is is
is what I'm doing? Is it wrong? Should
I feel guilty about it? Or maybe if
it's not wrong, it's certainly not the height
of virtue.
And if I went into philanthropy and so
on and gave up my fortune, gave up
my business,
Well, maybe that would make it that that
I'm now doing something better.
And in a in a world with better
ideas,
it would be he wouldn't really be thinking
that or if he were thinking that, there
would be some people telling him, no, you
re all wrong to think that. It s
not that what makes you good is that
you give your money away. What made you
good is that you achieved it, and it
was an enormous achievement. You should feel proud
of it and we as a culture should
recognize that achievement, not try to denigrate it,
criticize it, tear you down.
And that's a sense like it's an enormous
achievement
that, that he accomplished and more widely the
whole tech industry
accomplished.
And that's a positive it's added to our
lives, but it could be so much better
if it existed in a culture that really
valued
these people and valued them from a moral
perspective that what you're doing is good. It's
morally good.
So that's one example in terms of just
that
that life could be so much better.
The other I hope is healthcare. I find
healthcare so the people in health, the doctors,
the nurses have a real dedication
to their profession,
to fighting disease,
to achieving health,
people having a longer lives, better quality lives,
being able to to do all kinds of
things into old age. They have a positive
orientation.
They're so crippled
by the whole social political system that exists
around health care. It it's
again,
it that you go into a doctor's office,
they have no idea how much the services
cost,
You have no idea how much the services
cost. You don't know what they're going what
you're gonna pay. Now in in more,
kind of government run system as well as
the government, it's free
is the way it's conceptualized because the government
pays for it. Nobody has any idea what
they're paying for for the hurricane. Is this
worth it? Should you spend your money in
a different kind of way? In the US,
that's nominally more free. It's their sort of
prices but you go into a doctor's office,
you can ask them, I mean you can
ask them, how much is this gonna cost?
I don't know, we have to run it
through your insurance, we will see what happens,
and you get a statement 2 months later
and sometimes if the cost is 0 and
then like how can the cost be 0
for this? Sometimes it's $500 for a minor
procedure
and it's you've got no no anybody in
the system has no clue what is happening
in terms of prices. And yet prices are
the way we figure out, what's worth producing
and what is it.
And if you had in the in the
health care system that it was governed by
prices,
it would it would be so much more
creative,
productive,
and our I mean, just
thinking of if healthcare had been free for
the last 40 years,
how much progress there would have been in
medicine and as a result, like what kinds
of diseases would have been
either either those treatments that in effect are
like a cure or there would be cures.
It's it's it it's hard. I think it
would it would boggle our minds if you
could run an experiment and go back 40
years, like you had a time machine 40
years and you had free health care and
what the state of health care would be
today versus what it actually is and again,
it's good. It it's, I mean, it's compared
to a 150 years ago, I mean, who
would wanna go to a doctor a 150
years ago?
If you could go to a doctor with
their their technology and state of knowledge today,
but it could be so much better.
And so the the whole orientation
I think for towards
ideas and particularly towards objectivism
is it's about building a better future. It's
not about well, we're about to go off
a cliff, so we need to do something,
but if that weren't happening, then well, you
don't have to be concerned with ideas, with
philosophy,
with moral values. But the whole reason to
be concerned with them is that they could
make life so much better
than what actually exists.
And that that's sort of the lead in
to what is my basic topic which is
that
so I'm speaking here from my work at
ARI, the Ayn Rand Institute as Niko said,
and our mission
is an educational
mission. And one way to think about it
of what we're trying to do and then
I wanna talk a little bit about why
we're trying to do this. What we're trying
to do is get more objectivist
and more objectivist
intellectuals. We're interested
in these ideas spreading
spreading through
the world
and we think and this conference is evidence
of that of of it as the world.
So this is a global
the the ideas are not restricted to the
US. It's a philosophy. It pertains to any
individual as an individual wherever you live in
whatever political system in which you live. So
we're trying to the ideas
that are spreading on a global
scale
and they'll the way that ideas spread
is and philosophical ideas spread is basically,
the the way I think about it is
that you'll have,
people who understand the ideas and then people
who advocate the ideas.
And, so I asked,
if you're were gonna do some prep for
this,
lecture to read the
essay of Ayn Rand's, what can one do?
And in that essay, one point she makes
is that it's too soon
for an organized
movement.
It's not that she's against an organized movement.
It's too soon. And it's why is it
too soon? Well, this is what she says.
Quote. So there's a quote from that article.
What can one do? Quote. An intellectual movement
does not start with organized action.
Whom do I not organize?
A philosophical
battle is a battle for men's minds,
not an attempt to enlist blind followers.
Ideas can be propagated
only by men who understand them.
An organized movement
has to be preceded
by an educational
campaign.
Close quote. She go she goes on from
there and says a few other things but
it has to be preceded by an educational
campaign
and that in essence is what the institute
is about. It's about
education
in objectivism's
ideas
that for the ideas to spread, people have
to understand them and that they have to
really then advocate them, but the first is
they have to understand them and
part of what she's emphasizing, I think in
that article, but it if you think of
the whole philosophy, to understand them is to
understand the positive
vision
that objectivism
offers.
And this came up,
a few people brought this up in conversation
last night and we can talk more about
that through the conference.
When you learn about
Ayn Rand's philosophy
and about objectivism, and if you're taking the
ideas seriously,
one thing that happens
is and I think it should this is
what should happen. It's you look at the
world and it's a lot of things that
I thought were good turn out and they're
not good.
And a lot of things that I thought
are good are actually evil
and evil. Like she puts them Ayn Rand
is a moralist. She puts them in the
category of it's not, well, just a mistake.
Some things are mistaken
but some are just, no, there's a corruption
in here and there's an evil in here
and the it so it reorients you to
values that things you thought were good, you
no longer do and things that you thought
were evil, now you think, oh, well maybe
they're not and actually maybe they're good. Like
the Bill Gates is an example of that.
And what can happen then
is a feeling like I've got to denounce
the evil. And
there are moments and times where I think
it is very important to denounce the evil
but the much more important
is it's taught me that things that I
didn't think are good are actually good
and that's what what one should appreciate, like,
that's what it's shown. It's shown me there's
values in the world that I didn't see
before that now I'm going to go after
and I'm going to pursue,
And then it should be in a kind
of a wider cultural,
political, social sense.
It's I want other people to see that.
I want other people to see what is
good,
both about themselves and in the world and
particularly if they're thinking of it as something
destructive or something
bad but that that the what one should
be thinking about is
the this kind of positive orientation and that
people lack this.
And so what the spread of objectivism
will look like, I think, and what we
at the institute are really interested in people,
I mean, so we're on a crusade in
that sense. We're interested in these ideas really
spreading through the world.
And what will it look like for the
ideas to spread?
And
I think when you look at other cultural
movements,
you see 2 kinds of things and whether
you're taking positive or negative movements, movements that
you think were,
successful but destructive
and movements that were successful
and achieved something positive. They were not destructive
but constructive.
They achieved something positive. When you look at
these movements,
I think what you see is 2 broad
phenomena.
1 is a lot of people getting involved
in the movement and self identifying
as part of this as I'm a Christian
or I'm a Marxist.
To the I think I view these as
2 destructive movements, but when you think of
the spread of Christianity or of Marxism and
Nikos,
later in the conference will be talking in
more detail about some of the thinking about
the
Marxism as a movement.
When you think of it,
one of the things it does is there's
people who are embarking on it and are
proud
to be a part of it. They're proud
to identify
as
I'm a Christian. I'm adopting this new,
universal religion. I'm a Marxist
and and unless there's people willing to do
that,
I don't think the ideas will spread and
this is particularly true. Those are 2
negative movements. But if you look say at
if you look at the founding of America,
of the amount of people at just at
not at the kind of leaders in the
society
who were talking about the ideas, discussing the
ideas, discussing the need for independence,
discussing the need for a new form of
government.
It's tremendous when you look in the history
of it and the kind of just at
the level of newspaper stories and so on.
The people
discussing this
and advocating
for this but at just an individual level,
not at a professional
level. If you take one aspect of the,
what comes out of the American
revolution, the abolitionist movement.
There were a lot of people
who aren't the leaders of the movement who
were just would identify
as
were abolitionists
and it it's hard to
imagine how scary it was to do that
in a society that it had embraced slavery.
These people were persecuted,
denounced as evil even though what they were
embracing was something good, but there was a
willingness to do it. They have seen like
this is right,
this is good,
the slavery is not just like a little
destructive. I mean, it's an abominable
evil
and of to speak out in regard to
it, but the primary wasn't
the evil of slavery. The primary was
that look, men are created equal. They use
their language.
Men are created equal.
They should be treated with that level of
respect,
that rev level of acknowledgment
of their rights and the abolition movement in
its,
you can think in its
kind of lived experience,
It was something positive
that if you get away from the prejudices
of judging someone based on the the color
of their skin, It's an enormous positive in
your own life
that is if you're willing
to to to take Martin Luther King's phrase,
to judge someone by the content of the
character
not by the color of their skin, your
own personal life
is way better
because you're gonna associate with good people whoever
that wherever you find them and whatever the
color of their skin and you're gonna avoid
bad people
again
wherever they are and whatever the color of
their skin. It's not like if they're white,
they're good
and your life because you can navigate your
life like that without that form of prejudice,
it's way better and part of the reason
I think the abolition movement spread
is people could see that. They could see,
yeah, like this is a way better way
to live. Your own personal life would be
way better if you abandon this prejudice
and then at a political social level, it's
yeah, we should get rid of this. It's
an abomination to have this in the form
of law but it there that
inherent element
of at an individual level
is really important and I think it's
much more important for movement that says what
we're offering
is
positives.
So the I put the title of the
talk, the need for objectivist
and objectivist
intellectuals.
The first part, the need for objectivist.
I would put like this. So,
if I were the
it's not just the need for objectivist.
I put that in just as the title.
But what it that really means, it's the
need for successful
objectivist
who will talk about objectivism
as being an aid to their success.
So for for these ideas to spread,
they I think it it what you need
is you're actually adopting and living the ideas
in your own life.
So if if what they offer is a
positive, if what they offer is a path
to the pursuit of happiness,
that there has to be evidence for that.
And the evidence for it really is
individual people adopting the ideas and their lives
being better as a result of it. And
this is the sense that it's successful and
successful doesn't mean it's you're you're famous or
you're you're some kind of world celebrity. It
just means your life is going well
and it's gone better as a result of
discarding all kinds of wrong ideas
and embracing right ideas. The objectivism really is
knowledge. It's you're embracing right ideas and your
life should be better as a result of
it. And it should then appear from the
outside
to other people
as, yeah, they're like, this person knows something.
It would be and that it might be
worth me knowing about that you see the
evidence of, yeah, this person's life in various
ways is going well. He lives in a
different kind of way than other people do.
He's not conventional
is one way you can put it. And
this in terms of if you just think
from the novel's perspective, this is one of
the things I think of for people who
the novels really resonate. It's you meet a
Howard Rourke or you meet a Dagny Taggart
and one of the first things that strikes
you is they're not conventional.
They don't just think in the ways that
we've been taught to think. They think outside
the box in certain ways
and their life seems better. Like, it seems
like your life would be better
if you did this.
That's from the fiction and but there has
to be a parallel in real life.
It has to be that people look and
see objectivist and think,
yeah, okay. These people think differently. They're not
conventional and they don't live their lives in
a conventional way
and it seems like there's something here worth
emulating,
worth learning about, worth pursuing.
And anybody, like, anybody at any level
can do this. If you're objectivism and you
take the ideas seriously.
You can do this. So everybody in that
sense can be an advocate
for the ideas and it it and it's
not it there's not any kind of self
sacrificial
duty here that it's all I have to
spread objectivism.
It's you what you should do is want
to live it but that if you're living
it well and you're living it successfully,
that will naturally
spread the ideas
because people will act like like
like
whatever it is, your family relations are very
different. Most people's family relations are a mess.
They are a mess of positive things that
they get real values from
their family, from relatives and so on and
real negatives that it's, yeah, I've got this
aunt or uncle who I we can't stand
but of course, we invite them to every
family gathering because how can you not invite
them to a family gathering?
And it's so it's a mixture and a
mess of positives and negatives.
And if they see people, look, there's a
better way to navigate this. It's not you
don't have a duty to every family member
and every extended relative and so that is
all a family, everyone has to get along
and and and so we don't talk about
anything important at any gathering and so on.
That's just a way of erasing yourself from
your life,
and people can see that and they they
can see, yeah, okay. May maybe there is
a better way to live and like, how
do you deal with your family? And they
can ask you about that. But the second
point, so that that that in terms of
spreading the ideas, that that's the value of
the ideas and why they would spread that.
But the second thing I wanna emphasize
is
the more you speak and that you openly
speak about the positive role that Ayn Rand's
ideas have had for you and in your
life,
the more the ideas will spread. So it's
a combination,
I think, of you're actually embodying
and living the ideas and you're trying to
live it, the ideas, and you're taking them
seriously.
And you talk about that,
that this is what I'm trying to do.
The like, I think these ideas are to
the extent
that you think the ideas are right,
and that they're true, that you're willing and
open about talking about that.
And the so one way I think about
this and I I think I'm putting it
deliberately like this because I think there's real
parallels.
It's
there's an issue of whether are you in
the closet
about your interest in objectivism
or are you out of the closet?
And the the metaphor of the closet was
used for people who were gay, homosexual,
but there's a similar thing for when you
were an abolitionist
in the 19th century, surrounded by people who
think,
if not slavery, if it's not right, it's
at least tolerable.
And you certainly don't wanna rock the boat
and say, well, we should get rid of
this whole institution.
So they've
the so it's the
all every,
positive movement starts small.
And when it's small, there's a real temptation
to
like, I wanna stay in the closet. I
don't want people to know this. It's scary
for people to know this. And part of
the reason it is scary is you are
in opposition
to a lot of what's going on
in the world and in society. So like
the abolitionists, it's like
this
this system that is integral
to our whole economy,
I am opposed to completely. Not it's where
we need to modify it a little bit.
We need to abolish it.
That is if it's a radical position,
it's a position that will
naturally,
encourage opposition to it or will naturally have
a lot of opposition to it. But if
you really think it's right and you really
think it's true, there is an element
of
bravery and courage, I think, in just,
being open about what your actual ideas, what
your actual position, what your actual stand is.
And when you read about the abolitionist, I
mean, to say that it was scary, I
mean,
from various towns in the US, they were
literally run out of town
for being an abolitionist and it in that
kind of situation,
I mean, that is way more scary than
I think the kind of opposition that one
faces
today that is largely
you'll get frowns, scorn,
and kind of criticism but not
physical violence though it you can sometimes have
that. But there in any positive movement, when
you look at how it develops,
unless
people have the courage to do that, it
never gets off the ground. And my view
is that so there's
still not
enough objectivists
and people interest like seriously interested in Ayn
Rand's ideas to have an organized movement
But it's large enough now that people should
be open
about their interest
in Ayn Rand. And if you're interested in
the spread
of these ideas
and but interested in the spread of it
from a very personal
self interested perspective that these I really think
these ideas are true and they can,
move the world in a better direction.
It's in your interest that they become more
and more known,
and more and more talked about, and you
never know
when you'll engage
a mind with the ideas. And this also
came up,
a little bit in some of my conversations
yesterday.
Even when you meet opposition
and people tell you, oh, you're crazy for
thinking laissez faire, really?
There would be a complete separation of the,
government from the economy?
That's crazy.
And we've our new often gal, we've tried
that in the 19th century which is not
true and it was a disaster which is
also not true.
But that you'll get so it there's no
question that you'll often get
opposition,
often defensive
in regard to it. Often it will be
like you're crazy. How could you possibly think
that?
And yet I've met
the not like not just 1 or 2
people where that happens
and you meet them 3 or 4 months
later and it was, you know, I thought
a little bit more about what you said
in this conversation and
yeah, maybe you were more right than I
was thinking. Now, I'm not saying that this
is gonna always happen or even the majority
of time have it, but it happens more
often than one thinks
that it's and and particularly because there's it's
it's
the that conventional
in part you should think about the world
of the fountainhead. And like this is what
I'm supposed to say and this is how
I'm supposed to react and the more you're
in a social gathering, there's other people, I've
got a single that, yeah, like I I'm
supposed to think that's crazy, so I'm gonna
say that that's crazy
and yet when the person in the,
sort of the privacy of their own mind,
When you have a better kind of person,
it will be,
you know, but okay. I said all that.
Was anything I said true?
And do I really know it? And and
I told the other person they're crazy, but
do I really know they're crazy? And I
told them, well, that was tried in the
19th century. Do I know anything about the
19th century? Do I actually know any of
this that what I've said? And better people
will
they will pause and they will think more
even if not in the kind of immediate
circumstances.
And that's part of what it looks like
for ideas
to,
spread and to so the the fact that
you can't convince someone
immediately,
automatically,
with this sign of almost no effort, that's
not going to happen, but the idea that
you can't convince people when you think of
it as a longer term project,
I think is false That there's many reasons
to think that you can't. And and what
can one do that I think is part
of what Ayn Rand is emphasizing. That there's
no shortcut.
There's no
easy path to the spread of ideas, but
that shouldn't then the the the consequence shouldn't
be, well, okay. I'm gonna give up on
trying to spread the ideas. You just have
to be realistic about what that looks like.
And there as I said, there I think
there really is an element of courage
in regard to doing this when one has
a kind of minority
viewpoint, a viewpoint that's way outside of what
is deemed conventional.
So that's at a, at a individual
level
of thinking about the spread of ideas. So
and why we need more objectivists, I think.
We need as I said, you need more
successful objectivists
who are open about talking about the value
the philosophy has brought to their own life.
And the second thing that you need is
we need way more objectivist
intellectuals. So intellectuals
as a profession
that's dealing with the spread
of a philosophical
ideas,
but that that's
integral to one's profession. So it's not everybody.
I think everybody who's interested in Ayn Rand's
ideas, as I said, can participate
in their spread
in in
them kind of seeping into the culture. An
intellectual is somebody who's this is their profession.
And
the why do we need more objectivist intellectuals?
And when I say we need more objectivist
intellectuals, I don't mean like we need 5
more or we need 10 more or even
a 100 more.
We need on a scale
that that there's a real issue of scale
here and issue of numbers, same for objectivist
as a movement,
but we need tens of 1,000.
And when you look at what other movements
did, when you look at how many people
so take marxism as an example.
How many intellectuals it had
or you might call them pseudo intellectuals but
they're in the profession of an intellectual
of spreading ideas and that doesn't mean like
just in philosophy
and in philosophy
departments,
though it includes that and when I went
to school in the late eighties in my
undergraduate, I mean, there's a card carrying Marxist
professor
in the tomorrow and more than one. Actually,
I was in a big, university in a
big department who like openly, yeah, I'm a
Marxist. What I teach is Marxism. What I
advocate is Marxism. I look at the whole
world from the Marxist perspective.
You have that in philosophy but you had
it in
basically
every field in the humanities.
You had history, I mean history, there was
a period, a long period of time, where
it was dominated by marxists.
That is of
people looking at history
from the perspective of the marxist philosophy
and how if marxism is true, how do
we understand history from that perspective?
And there,
I'm using history as one of the examples
because it they dominated
in history departments, but there's actually a reason
why. They had something
positive to say that
Marxists in comparison to other historians
were interested in economic history, that they thought
economics is important. It's part of what drives
cultures and they are right about that. They
are wrong about all the specifics about what
is good economically and what is bad economically.
But that economics is important and it's important
to understanding history. It's
as what kind what's the contrast to that?
But the kind of contrast that where you
learn history and you learn about the kings
and queens and what they did and the
court intrigues and so on on. And there's
an element that that's interesting. It doesn't interest
me, but there's an element that that it
is significant historically,
But it's not what drives history
and that kind of perspective, it empties
what history is actually about, which is about,
and one of the ways Ayn Rand puts
it, it's about the producer.
It's and that that's why economics is so
important that and she one of the ways
she puts it, if you read the if
you were ambitious and read the for the
new intellectual which was I I said if
you're if you wanna do a lot of
reading for this, read that
because that's a grand scale perspective on the
role of intellectuals in history.
The
but the way Ayn Rand characterizes the producer
is the forgotten man of history.
And forgotten man means that he the producer,
the creator, the achievers
in the language of the fountainhead, the men
of ability or the men of the mind
in the language of Atlas Shrugged. They're the
ones who've produced
material and spiritual well-being. They're the creators
who advanced human life. They're the most significant
figure
in history.
They're forgotten because they're ignored, denied,
their role is,
they're exploiters, they made life worse and so
on. So like there was a real war
against the producers.
The Marxist historians
had a modicum of respect
for production
and for producers.
So and so that they could go into
history departments and so and people thought,
yeah, there's something interesting here. There was something
interesting there, but
they went into this and they went in
in the 100 and the 100 and the
100 and that's one field in history
and we need the same thing from the
perspective of objectivism. We need historians
in objectivism
who would go and look at all the
various periods of history
and how to think about them, how to
think about their developments, their changes
from the perspective of the objectivist philosophy,
which gives us massive role to the producer,
a massive role to the role of ideas
for positive
or for negative.
But if you ask, like, is is there
an objectivist historian who specializes in world war
2 or World War 1 and World War
2 because they're very linked. That period in
history,
there's not one.
And if you ask like for marxist, you
could find 10
and more than 10 you could find. And
that's what
in terms of the
spread
and achievement of positive ideas, that's what's required
and that's what's required in history is required
in economics,
in psychology,
in law. There's there's a tremendous
amount of work that needs to be done
in all these fields of what it looks
like to integrate
a philosophy and a new philosophy into the
fields.
And that's what the work and the, of
a professional
intellectual. That's what the work is and it's
really interesting work.
And that that's the last point I want
to make. It's really interesting work. So I,
I've got this reaction
often
from,
people who I think, like, don't they equate
a philosophy
with a religion.
So they equate philosophy with dogma.
And
they ask, like,
don't you find it stifling
to be an objectivist?
Because
you're told what to think and what to
do. It's like you've been given 10 commandments.
It's not the 10 commandments of the bible,
it's the 10 commandments that supposedly come from
Ayn Rand and you're given that and now
you're supposed to live. Don't you find it
like a straight jacket?
And in that sense, religion is a straight
jacket. When you're given a list of 10
concrete commandments
that you're supposed to live, you don't really
have any idea why you're supposed to live
these, why these 10, aren't there other things
that are more important than the obey your
father and things like that,
and
like if you take the religion seriously, it's,
yeah, I'm not supposed to think about any
of that, not supposed to question any of
that. It's it is dogma and dogma is
a straight jacket. A philosophy is not a
straight jacket.
What it should do is illuminate the world,
not I've got to ignore all kinds of
things in the world because they don't fit
my preconceived
ideas that is they don't fit my dogma.
That's what happens to a dogmatist. It's part
of why they become
so,
defensive and negative.
It's because everything's a threat to them. Anything
that could expose their dogmas, well, you don't
really have reason for this. That's a threat
and so they don't want don't want to
push it aside. What a philosophy should do
and what objectivism should do is an eagerness
to embrace
the whole of the world to try to
understand it and that there's a lot to
understand and it takes all kinds of first
hand thinking. You can't there there's no,
algorithm, there's no deduction to go from this
is the philosophy of objectivism,
this is how to understand every period in
history. There's not there's nothing you can't what
you have to do is actually study the
historical periods
looked at from, like, if you think objectivism
is true, that knowledge should be guiding
the interpretation
and understanding
of it of like how to think about,
I I mean, I brought up the world
wars, because I'm,
out of some curiosity currently reading about them.
But it's what happened in the 19th century.
Ayn Rand views it, well, I think she's
right about this. It's the greatest century in
human history,
or at least you could say it's the
greatest century,
after Christ.
There's a way in which you might think
of ancient Greece as it's even greater than
the 19th century, but it's it's one of
those two periods I think or that in
terms of human development,
they're the greatest centuries.
What happened in the 19th century?
How did the the positive ideas spread? What
were those ideas that spread?
There's so much work that needs to be
done to understand that and to convey
it to other people. So part of the
what, the spread of a philosophy looks like
is it
so I'll put this as a way to
package the two points.
At a personal level, a philosophy
should look like it illuminates a person's life.
That illuminates it in the sense it
shines something on what's good about the person
and helps that grow.
That so that people think of objectivism,
yeah, like this person's better off because they've
discovered
some of Ayn Rand's ideas and are trying
to live those ideas That the more people
see that, the more the philosophy will spread.
And the more the philosophy
illuminates
the whole world
which
means the world of knowledge that it illuminates
history,
economics,
psychology and that people are doing the work
to show how it illuminates these things. That's
what the what it will look like for
the philosophy to spread much more widely. That's
the work of professional
intellectuals
and it's really, really interesting work. I mean,
I feel like I learn something new every
day in terms of thinking about the philosophy
and thinking about its application and role in
the world and it's new thinking. It's not
dogma.
It's not taking 10 commandments
and trying to fit everything into them. It's
thinking about the world from the perspective
of philosophical
ideas that one thinks are true.
And it is so that like that's part
of how
at ARI we think of what it means
for a philosophy and for objectivism to spread
and it's so it's why we're so interested
in these two things of that. There's more
objectivist in the world who will talk openly
about the positive role of objectivism
in their lives and there's a more objectivist
intellectuals
who will do the work necessary, that it
it's necessary. It's not sufficient. There's other things
that have to happen, but it's necessary
for the spread of the philosophy. And unless
there's
we're getting this
increasingly at scale,
the philosophy won't propagate. That is it won't
have a worldwide
influence.
And so the the founding of ARU and
why we're so interested in education
is you both have to know
the
role the ideas to really apply them in
your own lives. You have to really understand
them. That's again something Ayn Rand is emphasizing
in what can one do. And then at
the role of professional intellectual, you really have
to understand these ideas and you have to
understand the other ways of looking at the
world,
what's right or plausible about them and what's
wrong. So I brought something up for marxism,
like there's something very right in its emphasis
on economics
and that history had ignored that. And then
there's something very wrong in the way it
thinks about the essence of what drives economics.
It's a labor theory of value. I mean,
there's so much wrong in the details, but
through the work of a professional intellectuals to
be able to see both of those, to
be able to talk about them, and so
to be able to illuminate the world
for other people.
Okay. Well, I I think we have about
10 minutes left, so let me stop here.
Those are the basic points I wanted to
make. We'll open it up,
for questions or comments. But the if you've
seen from the schedule, there's a lot of
opportunity
to ask,
questions. So certainly don't if there's something that
that you're thinking about in regard to what
I've said and you don't have time to
ask it now, certainly feel free to ask
it
formally or informally in the rest of the
conference. Okay. So thank you. And
And this is the mic we are using
for questions, comments.
Do you want to come to the mic?
Test test.
Yep. I think it works. Oh,
yeah. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Alright.
Yeah. First, thank you for the the splendid
talk.
You talked a bit about,
that you think it's too soon for
an organized movement
or organized action.
Well, I'm currently
working,
on the Dutch Libertarian Party.
And, a question that I have for you
is,
don't you think that, well, ideas would,
well, take way more traction,
in a society when they are organized in
a movement.
Okay. So
an organized movement here means
organized
objectivist.
Not any form of organization.
They don't have any form of organization including
political
organization, political party. I think there's ample reason
to do that. I mean, you can view
ARI as it's an organization,
and we are organizing
people in that sense. I mean, we have
conferences, we have a classrooms and education, all
that's organized formal.
So the point is not that,
the point is as
a organized objective as movement and even
in the way that of thinking of other
intellectual movements, it's too soon for that because
I think there's still too few people. And
even that, it doesn't mean one like everybody
organized
in one movement and if you look at
other movements, that's not how
they,
what they actually are. If you look at
the abolition movement, It's not like there is
one
organization and everyone revolves around it and so
on. There was various forms of organization but
that you look at it
from a kind of historical
perspective and think there was an abolition movement,
is there was enough people
who were interested in and advocating for abolition
that you could think of it as now
organizing
into a movement or movements.
So that's the issue. But the issue of
a political, I want to say something, I
cut that from the talk, but it's something
important because people take
I think a wrong lesson
from objectivism and from Ayn Rand, which is
it's too soon for political
action, political
organization.
Ayn Rand was very interested in politics.
In politics at the level of the candidates
running for office, who one should vote for
and so on.
So
just from her own
kind of writing
experience, I don't think one can take don't
be interested in politics.
I think the caution is,
don't think that politics can do more than
what it can do. So be realistic
about one's entry into politics and particularly in
this regard of when youre radicals,
of thinking,
Am I going to enter into politics
and dilute and water down my ideas?
And that so what organization
looks like, I'm dubious that you can have
organization
yet at the level of political parties
that do but in a parliamentary system,
in the Dutch kind of system, there's more
reason to think a small party can have
some kind of impact than say in the
US.
But if you take the US example and
the abolitionists are again a good example,
they were interested in
impacting politics
but that didn't mean running a presidential candidate
because they had a view of what I
think right, no presidential
candidate running on a platform of abolition
would get elected and that includes Lincoln.
He was not an abolitionist and that but
they were interested in having an impact
on Lincoln
and seeing if they can make him better
than he actually was and I think when
you look at the relationship of some of
the abolitionists to Lincoln, that's part of what
happened. That's been politically
active, but being realistic
that if we had a political party,
what we would be doing to try to
get votes is we would end up watering
down and diluting our message, which our message
is
slavery is an abomination and should be abolished,
not don't let it spread to other states,
it should be abolished, and entering into politics
in one kind of way, you could completely
destroy your message. But you could what you're
trying to figure out is ways to do
it in a way that you are preserving
your actual ideas
and ideals. And I don't think from that
perspective, the message from objectivism is, it's impossible
to do that. I think it's very the
message is it's very hard to do that.
So it's it's it's so there's no kind
of thing that
organization at that kind of level is too
soon or impossible to do, but you have
to think a lot about how to do
it that you think it will have an
actual positive impact.
Yeah. Thank you. I I also think that
it's, well, hard to do it, like you
said. And, to be clear, I'm against watering
down.
Uh-huh. Yeah. I know. Yeah. And well,
to I also think that, good ideas or
great ideas start with well, the individual
start with a small minority.
And, well, it's an open question for anyone
actually who wants to,
during the whole event, extend the discussion how
to,
gain more traction for such ideas.
It's an open invitation. But, thank you for
the answer. Sure. Thanks. One more question. Okay.
And one minute question. Okay. Okay. That's enough.
Alright.
Thank you for the talk. Like, many of
these things resonate, and I personally really benefited
from the moral case for finance. Uh-huh. So
it it really does work.
I think sometimes part of the mistake is
when people,
like, invalidate someone's experiences or the real problems.
Like, people,
you know, flag real problems with, say, unemployment
or gap or factories moving out,
but they proposed the completely wrong solutions.
Right? So I think where the objective is
comes in is actually being clearly precise and
really going into detail. It's like, look. Yes.
That really is ridiculous, but I'm not saying
that. I'm saying this. Right? And you you
can see the difference between, let's say, GFC
and BB and T's approach and Jim Allison.
Right? And he said, no. I'm not going
into that. I'm not going to sell these
products I don't believe in. And really making
a case
versus, you know, like, other people just took
advantage, kind of run with it, and they
were rightly denounced, like, you know, kind of
it's it's there is nothing there to defend.
So I think,
being really philosophical
and deep and precise
makes the case stronger. It's it might be
more of a comment, but I want to
focus on, you know, the mistake of, you
know, kind of, oh, the capitalists is always
right. Everything the, you know, the companies do
is always right. It often really isn't. Like,
that's
Yeah. That's certainly true. And you're what so
you brought up the BB and T example.
So for people that don't know, the BB
and T, what is a, what what was,
it's merged was
a major bank that was for many years
led by the CEO John Allison
who was or in his an objectivist.
He is on Ayn Rand Institute's Board of
Directors. And he spoke openly about his interest
in Ayn Rand and Objectivism.
The, the episode you were referring to was
about, if I if it was this is
about eminent domain where and and the that
he wasn't so the oh well that's one
example I will use that example of where
he spoke. So eminent domain is the government
seizes
people's private property, give some compensation
and then use it for government purposes. And
in the US, it was being more and
more used to
give, to take from some private individuals and
give to other private individuals.
And he said that the banks not going
to do that, we are not going to
participate
in,
companies doing this, who are going to the
government to try to use their power of
eminent domain to take property from competitors and
take it for their own good. But the
and he did that and he won support
in regard to that. But I think it's
he was able to do that in part
because he emphasized the positive
that what we what we are in banking
is we establish win win relationship. What we
are trying to do is benefit our clients
and over the long
term, it's not we make money and our
clients are losing, we are all making money
together. And what this eminent domain, what it
does is it pits 1 person against the
other and it makes one the victim.
And so and that that gets
antithetical to business. It's what or if the
bank is about. It's against capitalism.
But it's making that positive case that that
I that that I think is why the
and relating to what I was emphasizing in
the lecture, that's what I think one has
to do. It's a good what business is
about and he talks often about this. It's
a win win relationship.
And what the eminent domain is doing is
making it seem like what business is, is
a win lose relationship. Some people win, other
people lose and that will destroy business, it
will turn people against
business, rightly so, if that's what they think.
Like if they think business inherently creates victims,
well, then let's get rid of it. And
but it's making the what business actually is
making that positive.
That's the important thing. And that is something,
again that Objectivism can clarify,
that it is, yeah,
it is about the profit motive and selfishness
and that's something good, not something bad.
Thank you. Sure. Thank you. Okay. Thanks.
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