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. Thank you for listening to the Ayn Rand Institute Live podcast. Remember to subscribe wherever you listen. You can also find us on YouTube. If you like this content, please share or leave us a review. For more information, go to Ayn Rand dotorg.