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The Haters v. Ayn Rand
46 Plays1 day ago
Helen and Sarah join Ayn Rand's war on haters... on the side of the haters.
Check out our patreon at https://patreon.com/OdiumSymposium.
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Transcript
Opening Remarks & Introductions
00:00:01
Speaker
There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:00:16
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you. The right calling name. Let's get. Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:00:32
Speaker
level of masochism.
Political Satire & Dark Humor
00:00:35
Speaker
Hello, I'm Helen. Hi, I'm Sarah. and this is Odium Symposium. We read bigoted historical texts, mostly misogynist ones, but it varies.
00:00:46
Speaker
How was couple of weeks since we last recorded? It's been pretty good. i mean, this is kind of a crazy time to be recording with what's going on in the news. We found out what the medical issues with Trump were.
00:00:59
Speaker
out he's pregnant and he gave birth to some goblins. And did you watch the video? Yeah. Yeah. It was disgusting, honestly. Like when he was crowning and those pointy goblin years were sticking out, like I wanted to turn it off, but I couldn't. i didn't watch that video. I watched, there's a YouTube video essay. It was very well researched. It was a little long, but they explained like what political succubus was. And I think I have a a better grasp. I That's beautiful.
00:01:26
Speaker
I mean, you say it was an hour long, but you watch everything on like 5x speed. Yeah. So I was done in like 10 minutes. That's the beauty of ChatGPT, right? Is it's like infinite X. Exactly. And if you miss something, it doesn't matter because ChatGPT sucks.
00:01:40
Speaker
Right. You just download the wrong information directly into your brain. It's totally content free. So you can read
Women's Voices & Ayn Rand Discussion
00:01:48
Speaker
it as fast as you want. And you're not missing anything because there's nothing to miss. it's It's a beautiful future. Today, i wanted to branch out our podcast a little bit. I've been talking about a lot of men mostly. So I thought it's time to bring in some women's voices into the pod. Yeah. Unleash your misogynist instincts, Helen. You know, let's talk about some misogynist she.
Ayn Rand's Early Life and Career
00:02:09
Speaker
This episode is going to be about Ayn Rand. So okay, cool. Yeah, she wrote those Bioshock games, right? Exactly. i Actually, haven't played Bioshock. But as I understand it, it is a takedown of Randian philosophy. But we'll get to all of that.
00:02:24
Speaker
I want to just start very quickly with some biographical details. i don't want to spend too long on her biography. I think it is kind of relevant for where she ends up. She was born in the Russian Empire in 1905. So in 1905, Russia was still
00:02:38
Speaker
the Russian Empire. You know, they had a czar, they had all these, this you know, glorious empire that also was not in great shape. In 1917, when she's 12 years old, the October Revolution happens.
00:02:50
Speaker
She was from a bourgeois family. Her dad owned a pharmacy that was nationalized, and they fled to Crimea. i don't really want to get into Soviet history, the October Revolution,
00:03:02
Speaker
These things are really complicated and they're not really relevant. Yeah, it's tricky. I mean, we want to keep things to a presentable length, but also we really want to present the stories of the victims of communism in this podcast. Exactly. So, okay so she comes back to St. Petersburg, which by then was renamed to Petrograd.
00:03:21
Speaker
And she starts attending Petrograd State University. So her family comes back when she is 16, 1921. She goes to the university and there's this interesting thing happening where just before she's about to graduate, she gets like purged from the university along with several other bourgeois students.
Rand's Philosophical Influences
00:03:41
Speaker
Some international students make a fuss and she's reinstated. But this clearly has some effect on her vision of of communism. The other detail, though, that's interesting is that she was one of the first female students to go to Petrograd State University because they only started accepting women after the October Revolution.
00:03:57
Speaker
But also things were not great materially for people. I mean, there were lots of food shortages. So it's it's a very complicated story. And I don't want to rehash like age old debates about communism, whatever, like we will get into it probably on another episode. I actually have some really interesting material about misogyny and the role of women in the Soviet Union and after the Soviet collapse and all that stuff.
00:04:16
Speaker
That's going to be covered in a later episode. But that's not what we're talking about today. She graduates in 1924. She moves to America and wants to become a screenwriter. So she manages to get a visa to go visit some relatives. And then it seems like she manages to get citizenship by getting married. She marries this aspiring actor named Frank O'Connor.
00:04:33
Speaker
She manages to sell a screenplay, but it never gets made. And then she writes a play and it gets staged on Broadway, but it closes that week. Like she's not that good. And then 1943, she
00:04:45
Speaker
She writes this book, The Fountainhead, that's her first big success. Massively successful. She sells the movie rights to that and writes a screenplay for it.
00:04:56
Speaker
They make the movie apparently with very little editing to her screenplay, but she still hated it. She still was like, oh, my God, terrible version of the movie. Colleen and Alan Moore. leaves LA, goes to New York, but by this time she has a lot of fans.
00:05:11
Speaker
She starts this like literary salon with her fans and her husband, and they're kind of all talking about philosophy. One of the people who attended this is Alan Greenspan, future chair of the Federal Reserve and like famously huge fan of Ayn Rand.
00:05:28
Speaker
She also got a letter from this guy Nathaniel Brandon. She got a letter from this guy, Nathaniel Brandon, who was 19 at the time. And I couldn't find the exact year for this. This would have been after 1943. So she's like around 40.
00:05:42
Speaker
She gets his letter. This guy who is hugely into her work is like, oh my God, this changed my life. He's also married to this woman, Barbara, by the time they're in New York and they're all hanging out together.
00:05:54
Speaker
With this salon, she starts also sharing early drafts of what is going to be probably considered her magnum opus, which is Atlas Shrugged. She starts having an affair with Nathaniel. I just wanted to give you this little detail. This is from Wikipedia.
00:06:11
Speaker
Nathaniel, about half her age, Nathaniel?
Atlas Shrugged & Literary Impact
00:06:14
Speaker
Yeah. She writes Fountainhead in 1943, and then the affair starts in 1954, it seems. In 1954, her close relationship with Nathaniel Brandon turned into a romantic affair.
00:06:26
Speaker
They informed both their spouses, who briefly objected, Until Rand, quote, spun out a deductive chain from which you just couldn't escape, end quote, in Barbara Brandon's words, resulting in her and O'Connor's assent.
00:06:41
Speaker
Sorry, what the fuck does that mean? She facts and logic them into being like, listen, we two gotta fuck. Exactly. That's from a biography about Ayn Rand.
00:06:54
Speaker
Now... Details about her life are complicated here because basically Barbara later wrote a biography of Ayn Rand called The Passion of Ayn Rand that hardcore Randians hate.
00:07:07
Speaker
And there's like some there's another book written specifically to take down all of the things said in that book. A lot of that book is also based on stuff Ayn Rand said about herself that she was just making up to make herself sound cool because Barbara had this very like ambiguous relationship to her. It seems like in in some ways really idealized her and in some ways was really bad that she took her man, it seems, and then was just not even open to emotion about it, I guess.
00:07:33
Speaker
In 1968, Nathaniel Brandon breaks up with Ayn Rand. And then this is from another biography, quote, Outraged and humiliated, Rand denounced Brandon for alleged philosophical and financial improprieties and expelled him from the movement.
00:07:49
Speaker
So, okay. So a little bit more on that in a second. Like there's a lot of stuff to cover. So so I'm jumping around a little bit. But basically in 1957, so back while she's still with this guy, she publishes Atlas Shrugged.
00:08:00
Speaker
Huge success. And it's continued to have massive success. There were a lot of people who didn't like it at the time also. A lot of literary magazines gave it bad reviews, even conservative ones. Actually, William F. Buckley hated it.
00:08:15
Speaker
But it has had this huge influence and continues to. i don't know if you remember the story that the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, who ran on the Romney ticket, gave his staff as Christmas presents copies of Atlas Shrugged.
00:08:29
Speaker
And also like... made them read it. I've never opened Atlas Shook, but I've seen copies of it before. And it is a tome on par with Mein Kampf. It is often listed on there's all these different like polls of like most important book, most influential book, it wins all these like internet polls, basically of like the most influential book ever written, like it's hugely popular.
00:08:52
Speaker
Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, and Peter Thiel are all at various times commenting that we're basically living through Atlas Shrugged. So what is Atlas Shrugged about? It's this dystopian society where America has become collectivist.
00:09:08
Speaker
It kind of takes place in this unspecified time where World War II is not mentioned conveniently, so there's no conflict with this triumph of the will type of philosophy.
00:09:21
Speaker
Basically, it's about a guy who is fighting against this conformist society. And basically, a bunch of people get together who are all these, you know, great creative thinkers, and they decide they're going to go on a sort of creative strike and withhold their creativity from this collectivist conformist society. And so it's all about like individualism and egoism, and why that's better and why altruism is actually poisonous.
00:09:45
Speaker
The omission of World War II is quite funny. If you're essentially propounding an anti-communist philosophy, and also you want your philosophy to sound anti-hierarchical, non-conformist, then it's very convenient to forget like the Nazis and so on existed. Exactly. And so that's actually one of the things that I really wanted to draw out, but also struggled with in prepping this episode. Because...
00:10:12
Speaker
To an extent, the book is sort of speculative or science fiction. i do think, yeah, fails to engage with the reality of the Nazis in World War II.
Critique of Objectivism & Philosophical Misunderstandings
00:10:24
Speaker
Now, I'm not saying there has to be a World War II event in the book, because it's science fiction, right? It doesn't have to match historically. At the very least, you need to look at the metatextual reasons. Like, did you know that in the Minions series,
00:10:39
Speaker
Their whole deal is that they serve the most evil overlords in history and just conveniently they were all imprisoned in an ice cave during World of War II. There are meta-textual reasons for that. It speaks to what this franchise is about.
00:10:53
Speaker
Exactly. And so it's got this kind of some of the politics seem to be like it's 19th century and then there's some 20th century technology, but not not computers. But there's lots of trains. She seems to be really into trains as well. Oh, oh, have we got another candidate for the autism diagnosis? I don't want to claim her because I really hate her, but it's possible.
00:11:18
Speaker
Obviously, the two books she's most famous for are Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. but I don't want to spend too much time on them. One, because I didn't want to read Atlas Shrugged. I haven't read out I've read little pieces of it. I haven't read Atlas Shrugged and I wasn't going to for this podcast read all of Atlas Shrugged just so I could take like two paragraphs from it.
00:11:35
Speaker
And then the other thing is, more broadly, like talking about these metatextual reasons is hard, right? Talking about fiction and saying, okay, here's something a character is saying. This is what the author thinks. Like, I don't want to necessarily reinforce that connection, even though largely in Ayn Rand's case, like especially in Atlas Shrugged, there's this long radio speech that the main character gives that's basically just like, here is the philosophy you should be following. And it's very clear that this is what Ayn Rand thinks you should be doing.
00:12:02
Speaker
And so it's actually not too hard to say this is what Ayn Rand thinks because it's actually written explicitly to be philosophical. People do get away with these sorts of like, oh, it's fiction or oh, it's more complicated than that because these are fictional characters. And so I don't necessarily want to be supporting this glatt reading of fiction. But at the same time, we have to talk about what Ayn Rand believes. The only element of the fiction that I'll bring in is Fountainhead follows a very similar plot in some sense to Atlas Shrugged. It's about a like anti-conformist individualist struggling against conformist society. But in this case, it's an architect.
00:12:36
Speaker
And he has this relationship with this woman and she is not depicted very well. And at one key moment in the book, he rapes her.
00:12:50
Speaker
And then she is into it. And it like awakens her to how like powerful and cool he is. Oh, that sucks.
00:13:03
Speaker
Yeah. And so this is like even more complicated because I don't want to be on the side of saying you can't ever depict rape in fiction. Or if you depict rape in fiction, you have to have a big, you know, disclaimer, like, by the way, rape is bad, right? Like depictions of violence and cruelty in fiction have a place. And I think analyzing those is really complicated.
00:13:30
Speaker
I don't think Ayn Rand's depiction is good, but I was really curious, like, what do fans think about the rape scene?
00:13:41
Speaker
So I googled it. Wait, is this is this really, like, what the episode is about now, Len? No, this is just a brief thing. We're going to get into the episode. Okay. We're, like, swooping into hell here already.
00:13:54
Speaker
oh yeah. No, it's it's getting, yeah. It's it's pretty bad. Okay, so this is from the Ayn Rand subreddit six years ago, and the author is... HornyBard69.
00:14:07
Speaker
Who else read the part in Fountainhead where Howard straight up raped Dominique and then it was played like she wanted it and thought, Ayn Rand has a rape fetish? Okay, seems like a reasonable question from HornyBard69. What does the top comment have to say about the matter?
00:14:23
Speaker
The top comment, wait, I'm going to guess before I look, okay? The top comment is that it wasn't really raped. Mmm, From Robot American, it was a different time.
00:14:34
Speaker
This wasn't unusual compared to other media that was around then. I don't read much into it aside from it being an old romantic trope. I'd be curious to see any epic romances of the time that feature actual consent to see how they did it, because I haven't seen any examples.
00:14:50
Speaker
So... Consensual sex wasn't invented yet. I see. Exactly! They hadn't invented consent! Fascinating. So there's a couple other answers on this thread and I've seen around and some of them are like, oh yeah, it was something that she was into as a fetish, but because of her kind of weird philosophy, which we'll get into, she's not able to just accept that she has a fetish. And so she kind of needs to work it into her understanding of how the world works.
00:15:16
Speaker
Or yes, it's problematic. We should like reject this part of her philosophy, which is this kind of connection between her support of like volition and domination and like a sort of misogyny, right? Like it's okay for men to do these things because any kind of domination, any kind of egoist domination is fine.
00:15:39
Speaker
Or somebody talked about this was Rand's way of quote unquote waking up Dominique, the dominique's Dominique's libido. The fact that there's not widespread denial that this is a sexual assault is actually crazy to me. There actually also is that because especially built into that like this was Rand's way of waking up Dominique's libido is like she secretly wanted it and there's actually pretty long like confirmed in the narrative of the book that the character enjoyed like eventually enjoyed it and then and and wanted it
00:16:10
Speaker
oh o people do make that argument that it's not a sexual assault on that basis. And it's like, well, okay, but you have to understand metatextually the choices that Rand is making about these kinds of things. And this is exactly the kind of conversation that I just like, you you get in circles, right? Because it is fiction, but you have to look at the fiction not as like, these are all real people doing things. You have to understand the choices that the author is making in the fiction and what that means, right?
00:16:34
Speaker
So luckily for us, Ayn Rand didn't stick to fiction. After she wrote Atlas Drugged, she was like, actually, I've discovered this new philosophy. This philosophy is called objectivism, which is a very funny name.
00:16:46
Speaker
She called it objectivism because the name existentialism was already taken. and she wanted to be like, my philosophy is based on existence. So she writes this book, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
00:17:00
Speaker
which I did read a bunch of and we're not really going to get into today because it's not that interesting. The thing is that Ayn Rand's objectivism is kind of built in opposition to all these other philosophical trends.
00:17:12
Speaker
She really, really, really hates Immanuel Kant, despite it seems not really understanding Kantian philosophy on any level. Many such cases.
00:17:22
Speaker
We're going to see some funny quotes about Immanuel Kant throughout the readings that I picked today because she really thinks like he is responsible for the downfall of civilization.
00:17:33
Speaker
She couldn't even get into the racism. I mean, if there's one thing there that I think should be found of. i will see what she has to say about racism. Okay. Again, there's this temptation I had is to like go through all these different philosophers she talks about and give what they actually said and then talk about why she's wrong in her criticisms, but it's kind of not really what the podcast is about. And so essentially, very broad strokes, a lot of especially modern philosophy going back to the beginning of the Enlightenment, going back to, let's say, Descartes as kind of a founder of Renaissance and after philosophy, early modern philosophy and forward.
00:18:13
Speaker
There's this attempt. I mean, Aristotle is also concerned with this. Plato is also concerned with this. It's much older. And also other philosophical traditions outside of Western philosophy are concerned with this. But really, there's this moment where Descartes wants to begin from a place of skepticism in order to shore up some notion of truth.
00:18:29
Speaker
Right. And this is what a lot of that modern philosophy is about. How do you know what's real? There's this whole tradition and then it ends with sort of Kant is this really big turning point and from Kant you then get all these stuff other strands and really this is where a lot of people trace the like analytic continental divide, which I'm not going to explain.
00:18:47
Speaker
Don't worry. But basically, there's this gap between like the world and then the world as we perceive it, and then the sorts of knowledge we can have about the world based on our perceptions.
00:19:00
Speaker
And there's all these attempts to try to reconcile the noumena of the world around us and then the phenomena of the world, right? So like what is actually there? And then what are the phenomena we can perceive? And then what can we rationally think about? And that these things are actually different.
00:19:13
Speaker
And actually, the way we think about the world might actually affect the conclusions we come to. And a lot of especially 20th century philosophy was dealt with this kind of problem. And we kind of talked about this last time. and then I think I actually went into it last time a bit more. And then we cut it. And so i'm going to do a much, much shorter version this time because it's it's much more relevant. But a lot she hated, absolutely hated a lot of the sort of mid 20th century French philosophy that dealt with things like how does the choice of our concepts and the way of thinking about the world affect the world around us and affect the the conclusions we come to? And how do we reconcile the fact that to some extent our concepts are constructed by us to understand the world around us? And there's this interplay between what is there and how we think about it.
00:19:57
Speaker
Objectivism wants to say, okay, we do need to have concepts in order to understand the world. Concepts are actually super important to objectivism.
00:20:08
Speaker
But it's called objectivism because in Rand's view, concepts have an objective reality. In a way, it's kind of like a super-Platonism where by thinking about the world and reasoning about the world, you can actually come to objectively true concepts about the world.
00:20:28
Speaker
So I'm actually going to send you, as the only bit of actual objectivist philosophy, but I think that'll give you an idea of the kind of thinking and the kind of reasoning we're dealing with here, This is from the Wikipedia page on objectivism, and it's about her notion of axioms.
00:20:45
Speaker
Rand's philosophy begins with three axioms, existence, consciousness, and identity. Rand defined an axiom as, quote, a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge.
00:21:03
Speaker
a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it.
00:21:18
Speaker
End quote. Yeah. That's just not what an axiom is. No. Like, sure, you could redefine the word axiom to mean this thing, but that's really not what people mean when they say axiom.
00:21:30
Speaker
And of the people who I've known who have subscribed on some level to this kind of philosophy, there's often this attempt to say that what you're doing is somehow connected to mathematics because of the use of this like axioms and propositions, right?
00:21:47
Speaker
And I think both of us having training in math, I think it's important for us to say, like that's not what an axiom is in any understanding of even mathematical reasoning, right? There's kind of a two-step error here. And the first one is, you cannot have this kind of mathematical truth about...
00:22:06
Speaker
things in the world. Or if if you think that you can, like that is a serious claim that needs to be backed up and you can't just be like, oh, it's obviously true. And the way language and concepts work about the world around us is very different from the way language and concepts work about mathematical objects in like pure abstract reasoning.
00:22:25
Speaker
And also, pure abstract reasoning is not grounded on these inescapable axioms. You get to pick what axioms you're working with. And I think it would be fine if she were redefining axiom and it were simply a churnum of art that's lived within her philosophy having its own meaning. What you're communicating is that her use of the word axiom is actually in communication.
00:22:47
Speaker
with the everyday or external use of the word axiom. In other words, it's named this way in order to suggest that what she's talking about is actually an axiom in our everyday sense.
00:22:57
Speaker
Right. And so she basically just says to the philosophers who are worried about how do you know whether there's fundamental truth.
00:23:08
Speaker
By the way, the philosophers are not all saying there's no such thing as fundamental truth, right? There's all sorts of different answers to that question that deal with it in various complex ways. She just says, no, there is. Clearly there is. Look around you. Obviously the world around you is there.
00:23:22
Speaker
A lot of philosophers don't really engage with the work of Ayn Rand, or at least academic philosophers. And the reason for that is that on a certain level, she's not a philosopher. She's an essayist, and you can talk about her as a thinker, whatever. But what she's doing is not engaging in academic philosophy. And so it seems just on its face appropriate for philosophers not to deal with it.
00:23:40
Speaker
Which is really remarkable because she seems to have the sloppiness of thinking and the incapability to reason through everyday things and cause and effect that an academic philosopher has.
00:23:51
Speaker
Exactly.
00:23:55
Speaker
That's the thing is like throughout this, I was like, Ayn Rand, the thing I hate you the most for. Actually, that's not true. There's some stuff later that we will both hate her the most for. But the thing I hated her the most for at this point is you're making me defend analytic philosophers. Like,
00:24:14
Speaker
Anyway, can I point out something about this excerpt? And I don't know how much of this is just the phrasing of the Wikipedia article, but Rand's philosophy begins with three axioms, existence, consciousness, and identity.
00:24:26
Speaker
And then an axiom is a statement that identifies something. Right. Those are not statements. Existence is not a statement. those are the those Those are the names of the axioms. And then it gets down into what each of those axioms is. And it's just, it's not good. It's not interesting. Or the amount of time it would take to, like, I think it's,
00:24:47
Speaker
One of the things she's really good at is saying stuff that you would be like, oh, okay, I can kind of see that. And you really, once you dig into it, it's just there's nothing there. It's sort of bottomless.
00:24:57
Speaker
But if this were a bad philosophy podcast, that's what we'd be we'd be doing. i thought about that. That was my first vision for this episode was, okay, going to get into objectivism. And we're going to trace through how does this veneration of so-called, you know, of a supposed kind of like rationality and consciousness actually lead to bigoted things.
Rand's Critique of Modern Movements
00:25:17
Speaker
But then was at a used bookstore and I found this treasure trove of material. It is a book of essays called The New Left, The Anti-Industrial Revolution, which was published in 1970. That's so promising.
00:25:33
Speaker
Yeah, right. Okay. So New Left. What do you know about the New Left? Nothing. Okay. The New Left is a very broad movement, and it's basically used in a lot of contexts to just refer to left-wing, especially American politics.
00:25:53
Speaker
starting in the mid to late 60s, bit earlier, maybe the 50s. Basically, one of the pillars is like the left became disillusioned with some of the massive failures of the Soviet Union, especially with totalitarianism and Stalinism.
00:26:12
Speaker
A new generation of leftists who wanted to focus on certain social issues Usually it's sort of used to refer to this combination of sort of widespread student movements, but also organizations like the Black Panthers, radical feminist organizations, kind of the um Red Hampton Rainbow Coalition. Like all of these would be considered part of the new left.
00:26:34
Speaker
It's this kind of movement away from building the Communist Party and these kinds of explicitly... Bolshevik adjacent movements, although mostly they were also Marxists, right?
00:26:47
Speaker
So it's hard to pin down, like, there's one thing that the new left believes, but it is this word that is used. And so when Ayn Rand starts talking about the problems of the new left and who the new left are, she is talking about a movement that exists. She just doesn't, it's just making stuff up basically about what they believe and why.
00:27:05
Speaker
I haven't seen that from a conservative pundit before. This is going to break new grounds. Yeah. So the first essay in this is called The Cashing In, The Student Rebellion.
00:27:20
Speaker
And it is about the Berkeley Revolt, as people often referred to it at the time, in the 60s. She names like specific activists and specific moments.
00:27:31
Speaker
She moves on to an essay called Apollo and Dionysus. which is a critique of what she thinks is Nietzschean philosophy in which she completely misreads Nietzsche's birth of tragedy.
00:27:46
Speaker
This is how the essay opens, and I think it gives you a good sense of her kind of not explicitly philosophical but nonfiction political writing style. On July 16th, 1969, one million people from all over the country converged on Cape Kennedy, Florida to witness the launching of Apollo 11 that carried astronauts to the moon.
00:28:08
Speaker
On August 15th, 300,000 people from all over the country converged on Bethel, New York, near the town of Woodstock, to witness a rock music festival. These two events were news, not philosophical theory.
00:28:22
Speaker
These were facts of our actual existence, the kinds of facts, according to both modern philosophers and practical businessmen, that philosophy has nothing to do with, but if one cares to understand the meaning of these two events, to grasp their roots and their consequences.
00:28:37
Speaker
one will understand the power of philosophy and learn to recognize the specific forms in which philosophical abstractions appear in our actual existence. The issue in this case is the alleged dichotomy of reason versus emotion. A couple things going on in this.
00:28:55
Speaker
It seems strange to go from Apollo 11 and Woodstock are reason versus emotion. It's a nuzzy-esque leap for sure.
00:29:06
Speaker
I think, okay, one thing that I liked of the last episode is you pointed out that I'm too charitable to everyone we read. And so I want to stake out as we go forward.
00:29:17
Speaker
The reason I'm going to attempt charitability is because I think this stuff is so bad that it doesn't need our help of reading it uncharitably to really expose how bad it is.
00:29:30
Speaker
She is saying, I'm not against emotion, right? She says, alleged dichotomy of reason versus emotion. And so she's actually saying, there is something here I want to look at, which is not exactly reason versus emotion.
00:29:42
Speaker
She then goes on to an essay that just makes no sense at all. She talks about the Nietzschean dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus or Apollonian and Dionysian and experience, which is what Nietzsche writes about, which is not the reason emotion dichotomy. So again, just very, very quick, broad strokes. Nietzsche talks about the birth of Greek tragedy as a specific art form blending Apollonian and Dionysian experiences.
00:30:10
Speaker
Apollo is the god of music. and the god of all sorts of art forms that are associated to like reason and thought. Whereas Dionysus is the god of these kinds of intuitional and other sorts of emotional experiences, right?
00:30:30
Speaker
So there is an element of kind of a reason versus emotion thing, but not really because they're both emotional. They're both about aesthetic experience, very much not a kind of reason versus emotion split.
00:30:41
Speaker
in a very neat way, but that's how Rand reads it. And then she objects to him giving any value at all to the Dionysium. Like to to who Rand, like the Apollonian is supreme. We should always support the Apollonian. And also she doesn't know what Nietzsche means by Apollonian.
00:30:58
Speaker
Right. I wrote here just like some emotions are more reasonable than others, question mark. The vision of ideal personhood and society that she seems to endorse seems so Muskian as to be like parody.
00:31:13
Speaker
Yeah. I think part of the reason for that is that Musk, I don't know if Musk actually read the stuff, but Musk lives in this world in which her thought is ambiently dominant.
00:31:26
Speaker
He literally got into launching rockets. Right. Yeah. So this essay is really a response, it seems, to, okay, Apollo 11 happened. Lots of people celebrated. For Rand, Apollo 11 is the ultimate achievement of like reason, right? Because it is this thing that we manage to accomplish as humans by wanting to do it and thinking very hard and conquering all sorts of physical challenges and like intellectual challenges and constructing something in the world and then doing it. And that is cool.
00:32:01
Speaker
and she saw some people on the news who were offering kind of mixed commentary of like, oh, you know, for the rest of us down on Earth, we still put our pants on one leg at a time, or like, what does this change materially for people's lives? You know, not much, which I don't know if I fully agree with those commenters, right? Like, I do think there's something cool about Apollo 11, but she really wants to say, like, this is the kind of thing that it is appropriate to be emotional about because the emotion is downstream of this celebration of reason and value.
00:32:32
Speaker
And then she gives this like utterly denigrating view of what Woodstock was. She talks about all these dirty hippies who just wanted their music and their drugs. I suppose if I inject an element of charity here, it's that I think there could actually be a pretty great essay in comparing Apollo 11 and Woodstock.
00:32:52
Speaker
I think you could get something fun out of that. What is happening in 1969 in America and what is happening culturally Yeah. I also want to point out she opens with this huge discrepancy. One million people went to Cape Kennedy. So many more were also watching it on television. This was a huge national event.
00:33:11
Speaker
Woodstock was not televised in that way. And only 300,000 people were there. So if she wants to claim that we are in this society which is under threat being run over by these Dionysians...
00:33:26
Speaker
She has to address the fact she brings up at the beginning, which is that the Apollonians are clearly winning on the numbers if that's how you determine an Apollonian from a Dionysian. One of the ways that far-right types usually deal with this sort of thing is to portray the Untermensch as sort of an infection.
00:33:46
Speaker
It's just one right now, but it's spreading. Their influence is like a series of tentacles that's reaching into every corner of society, even though their visible influence might be marginal.
00:33:57
Speaker
How did you know that's what she was going to say? We're going to get there. that's That comes later. i want to i want to get through a little bit more of her like vision of society, right? but But I thought this this piece was very funny, and this gives you an example of of what I was talking about earlier with respect to Kant.
00:34:12
Speaker
Such are the Dionysian followers. But who are the leaders? These are not always obvious or immediately identifiable. For instance, the greatest Dionysian in history was a shriveled little square, well past 30, who never drank or smoked pot, who took a daily walk with such precise, no way, with such precise, monotonous regularity that the townspeople set their clocks by him.
00:34:37
Speaker
His name was Immanuel Kant.
The Age of Envy & Societal Criticisms
00:34:40
Speaker
Kant? Kant was the first hippie in history. i could see that Kant was coming when she talked about the Daily Glock. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that like people who are aware of Kant's history, like that's one of the little stories that everyone knows. And it's like a cute little fact about him, but it signals, like oh my god, is she really going to go there? That Kant is the ultimate Dionysian, right?
00:35:03
Speaker
And again, like her whole criticism is Kant is really credited with this the analytic-synthetic distinction which is this kind of idea about, okay, that the statements you can make just by thinking about things and the statements you can make where you have to actually base that on looking at the world and the difficulty of coming this putting those things together. And as far as her critique goes of Kant, right, she talks actually a lot. There's like a whole chapter in this introduction objectivist epistemology about what's wrong with Kant.
00:35:35
Speaker
She constantly ragging on Kant. Well, she kind of has to deal with him, right? Because she wants to reduce all of experience and argument to a few axioms. Yeah, she wants to say there's some axioms, and then everything is achievable from these axioms by an application of pure reason. And so i sometimes it reads like she just read the title critique of pure reason and then said, oh, but pure reason is so cool. How dare you critique it? Like it really is not meaningfully engaging with Kant. Yeah.
00:36:05
Speaker
in ah in a deep way, at least of the stuff I've read. And so I am uncharitably asserting that she doesn't do it anywhere. We see here already, like, she wants to talk about real political events. She wants to analyze these cultural trends. She understands philosophy as underpinning everything, but also doesn't really seem to understand the project of philosophy.
00:36:28
Speaker
I here wanted to just talk about This is an interesting thing to put into conversation with some of the Sartre passages we were reading last time.
00:36:40
Speaker
Sartre talks about the difficulty of truth and how bigotry can emerge because it is hard to face up to the fact that truth is a difficult thing and that your opinions or your thoughts, your conclusions have to change on the basis of new data. And so you're constantly in this very vulnerable state of having to update what you think about the world if you are committed to truth.
00:37:04
Speaker
And so bigotry in these kinds of very reductive narratives that, oh, it's all the Jews, can stem from a desire to have a solid foundation that you just never really have to change.
00:37:16
Speaker
And Rand really wants to turn this around and say, actually, we do have a solid foundation. And that solid foundation is like man's volition and the ambition to go out and change things and the ah fundamental belief that everything is understandable if you just go out and decide that you're going to understand it.
00:37:35
Speaker
So it's a very opposite opinion on truth. And so all of that context, the main essay I want us to talk about today is an essay she wrote in this book called The Age of Envy. Age of Envy is kind of like the centerpiece of this book as far as I understood when reading it, where she explains, here's what's wrong with society.
00:37:56
Speaker
Here's the opening of the essay. A culture, like an individual, has a sense of life, or rather the equivalent of a sense of life. an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence.
00:38:11
Speaker
This emotional atmosphere represents a culture's dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style. Thus, Western civilization had an age of reason and an age of enlightenment,
00:38:26
Speaker
In those periods, the quest for reason and enlightenment was the dominant intellectual drive and created a corresponding emotional atmosphere that fostered these values. Today, we live in the age of envy.
00:38:39
Speaker
Envy is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless. It is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.
00:38:53
Speaker
So we're going to get to her definition of what envy is or what she means by envy, what she's trying to point to by envy in a second. And there is a pretty concise, clear definition. But I just wanted to pause here to say huge citation needed on this age of reason and enlightenment, right? Like the dominant intellectual drive in European history was a quest for reason and enlightenment. And that created an atmosphere, created an emotional atmosphere that fostered these values.
00:39:22
Speaker
Well, it's an extremely abstract claim. It's it's impossible to examine. And it doesn't sound like it amounts to much more than people did cool shit during the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment. And I like that. And I think the vibes were good.
00:39:38
Speaker
I want her to explain, like how is the transatlantic slave trade fostering an emotional atmosphere of the values of reason. It's this huge claim. It's very abstract and it is taken as given. She's not actually going to really back this up with any kind of example. It's just, yeah, that's it.
00:40:00
Speaker
It really seems like what's being portrayed is reactionary thought in a very pure form. In other words, there was an age of heroes, meaning an age of reason, and do we need to return to it or at least create our own version of it.
00:40:14
Speaker
She talks a lot about man as heroic. She has this heroic vision of man. And as we've seen in The Fountainhead, our discussion of that scene, like, she does kind of mean man, although we're going to see what she has to say about women.
00:40:31
Speaker
But okay, here's her definition of the emotion that she's titling envy. That emotion is hatred of the good for being the good. She immediately clarifies like not a difference in values, right? It's not saying, oh, I have different values from you.
00:40:46
Speaker
it is saying, i agree with you about what values are and I just want to destroy your values. So she says like, a student who is envious of another student for getting better grades because the teacher is being unfair, like that's not what she's talking about. But if a student hates another student for getting better grades because he can't get better grades, that's what she's talking about.
00:41:08
Speaker
Yesterday, i read a speech that was given at the University of Austin. I forget whether it was a commencement address or something else, but it was very much in the spirit.
00:41:19
Speaker
And the only difference was that they substituted the word excellence for good. They said explicitly that you as students here are bravely stepping forward as heroes of excellence against the drives of anti-hierarchical thinking.
00:41:38
Speaker
Interesting. it's Exact same shit. This book is sort of aimed at college students. It is right. The back of the book describes it as. Ayn Rand's call to American youth to reject the tribal conventional irrationality of the new left.
00:41:54
Speaker
So one of the reasons she focuses so much on Berkeley, I think, is because she is trying to reach like campus conservatives and I see. so it's interesting that this is like still such a site for this kind of battle.
00:42:07
Speaker
Let me also mention that hatred of the good for being good is very much a value of the current right. I mean, you've heard the phrase virtue signaling, which is a way of denigrating any display of virtue as being motivated by selfishness, painting virtue, true virtue as impossible, thereby providing cover for vice There are times in this essay when I think you could rescue some kinds of critiques of conservatism. She talks about sort of in abstract the idea of a person who is motivated by actually almost directly talks in a very Sartrean way, like a person who is motivated by fear.
00:42:47
Speaker
And instead of engaging directly with the difficult project of building concepts, just decides they're going to reject reality and move forward in this fantasy world where they are sort of automatically in power.
00:43:05
Speaker
And so it's it's interesting. There is this really deep contradiction because she sees all of that happening in these kinds of leftist movements. I don't want to say that I, you know, support every leftist ever or whatever, right? Like i I reserve my right as a leftist to talk shit about other leftists, right?
00:43:22
Speaker
What else is the point of being leftist? Exactly. That's one of our proudest traditions. But yeah, we'll see that I think there is a certain sense in which there are types of guys who are similar to the way she describes. It's just that when she gets into examples, we'll see exactly how bad her reasoning is.
00:43:36
Speaker
She explains a little bit more about this hatred of the good for being good and also has this rhetorical trick that she uses all over the place, which we'll will come acquainted with in the next excerpt.
00:43:47
Speaker
To be exact, the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but it is set one way. Its exponents do not experience love for evil men. Their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference.
00:44:00
Speaker
It is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one's automatized response to values is hatred. In any specific instance, this type of hatred is heavily enmeshed in rationalizations.
00:44:15
Speaker
The most common one is, I don't hate him for his intelligence, but for his conceit. More often than not, if one asks the speaker to name the evidence of the victim's conceit, he exhausts such generalities as, he's insolent, he's stubborn, he's selfish, and ends up with some indeterminate accusation which amounts to, he's intelligent, and he knows it.
00:44:40
Speaker
Well, why shouldn't he know it? Blank out. Should he hide it? Blank out. From whom should he hide it? The implicit but never stated answer is, From people like me.
00:44:52
Speaker
Sorry, what is blank out? Right. So before we get into the content of the actual argument here, this is a rhetorical trick that she loves and which is hilarious.
00:45:05
Speaker
She is imagining an interlocutor. This is a very common rhetorical. It's like stunned into silence by the brilliance her claims. doesn't have a response to her objection. Exactly. That's so fucking and funny. It's hilarious. And it's so funny.
00:45:19
Speaker
it is a huge gamble because if the reader reads blank out, but then immediately can see, wait, what about these other three or four objections?
00:45:31
Speaker
Then the author just sounds like an idiot. Exactly. Which, guess what? So let's talk about some objections.
00:45:41
Speaker
It's so funny. This is like the purest expression of what a straw man argument is. Yeah. Literally just imagining the person you're arguing with being unable to come up with any sort of objection. Yeah, it's literally like, nice try, but I have already depicted myself as the Chad philosopher and you as like Immanuel Kant stunned into silence.
00:46:03
Speaker
Oh my God. And this is another thing that is all throughout her essay here is she needs to just take it that the things that people are saying they're just wrong about.
00:46:15
Speaker
And so they don't even need to be engaged with, right? Like when people say that someone is stubborn or selfish, it's actually just that they hate how smart they are.
00:46:27
Speaker
There's no argument being presented here. This is just a direct appeal to the reader's narcissism, which is presumed to reflect her own narcissism. And so like imagine a situation where let's say you are telling your husband that you're having an affair with a young acolyte. Right. This is hypothetical. Let's imagine this hypothetically. And he and also the other guy's wife are upset.
00:46:52
Speaker
But you have managed to spin out a long deductive chain of arguments from which they cannot escape. They're not actually mad that you are leaving that, right? Like they're not actually mad that you are leaving them for this guy or that you're breaking up these marriages or that you've possibly been having an affair and cheating on them.
00:47:09
Speaker
They're just mad because you're so good at argument and they're not. Just hypothetically. You know, the person who came up with that sort of chain of argument would really have to be such a fucking genius that anyone who disagreed with her, who argued with her, was actually just jealous of how smart she was. Exactly.
00:47:26
Speaker
okay Here she kind of concretizes a little bit this concept of envy. For example, if a poor man experiences a moment's envy of another man's wealth, the feeling may mean nothing more than a momentary concretization of his desire for wealth.
00:47:42
Speaker
The feeling is not directed against that particular rich person and is concerned with the wealth, not the person. The feeling, in effect, may amount to, i wish I had an income for a house or a car or an overcoat like his.
00:47:59
Speaker
The result of this feeling may be an added incentive for the man to improve his financial condition. The feeling is less innocent if it involves personal resentment and amounts to, i want to put on a front like this man.
00:48:12
Speaker
The result is a second-hander who lives beyond his means, struggling to keep up with the Joneses. The feeling is still less innocent if it amounts to, I want this man's car, or overcoat, or diamond shirt studs, or industrial establishment.
00:48:30
Speaker
The result is a criminal. But these are still human beings in various stages of immorality, compared to the inhuman object whose feeling is, I hate this man because he is wealthy and I am not.
00:48:44
Speaker
So she doesn't talk too much about communists explicitly in this essay, although she does a bit. But obviously she hates communists. like This is like her ultimate enemy of a good society is like the collectivist or the communist. Yeah.
00:49:01
Speaker
This passage is saying like, it's okay if you feel bad because you're poor, but it's not okay to think we should abolish the system that makes poverty. It's okay to feel envy for another man's wealth. I think she means here is is straight up not immoral, right? If you feel a moment's envy of another man's wealth, it's just a momentary concretization of your desire for wealth.
00:49:22
Speaker
And that's fine, right? That's just saying, I wish I had this thing, which like which he has, right? And and to her, this right this desire for wealth is actually good, right?
00:49:34
Speaker
It starts to get worse if you're going to start living outside your means. The critique is really you are letting these other people dictate what you want and how you live, and that's not good from an egoist perspective.
00:49:48
Speaker
The critique of the third kind of person, the criminal, is of a different sort and also I think is a little bit hard to back up what is wrong with criminality. I certainly have answers to the question of what is wrong with criminality, but within the world of Randian egoism, it's hard to understand.
00:50:08
Speaker
there's There's a point that needs to be made about why is it not okay to take stuff if ultimately what matters is your volition and conceptualization? Where does legality enter in as a value in Randianism from these axioms? And and they they have answers to this, I assume, but i it's not talked about in this essay.
00:50:29
Speaker
Well, I think we can uncharitably read an answer into this. Her project here is to reduce the actual grounded experience of the misery of poverty and the negative feelings that engenders to envy and to say that, you know, sucks to suck if you're poor, sucks to be so unmotivated.
00:50:54
Speaker
Us rich people, we're doing pretty good. That's because we're virtuous. Yeah. And it's interesting because she doesn't talk about communism here. And I don't even know if she conceives of this as necessarily about communism because she is unable to, within this framework, even realize that last solidarity is a thing that might be supported by something other than envy, but actually by...
00:51:20
Speaker
I mean, solidarity, right? Like it's it's it's something which she's just totally blind to either intentionally or just as a function of her philosophy. and she's saying, you know, the one, the most immoral, the most empty thing of all is to think we should get rid of this system that immiserates people into poverty.
00:51:42
Speaker
Which is class solidarity. Right. She's exhibiting class solidarity for the wealthy. Right. Earlier, she was exhibiting solidarity. She was trying to create solidarity for narcissists.
00:51:54
Speaker
Yep. We are going to get a little quote from Atlas Shrugged here because one of the things she also loves to do is quote other things she's written. So here is a passage she just inserts from Atlas Shrugged ah that doesn't like know like, oh, as I say in Atlas Shrugged or this point, right? Like the next paragraph of this essay is just this quote from Atlas Shrugged.
00:52:15
Speaker
They do not want to own your fortune. They want you to lose it. They do not want to succeed. They want you to fail. They do not want to live. They want you to die.
00:52:27
Speaker
They desire nothing. They hate existence. Dot, dot, dot. Is there any indication of who this they is? They is... Okay, i didn't clip it, but she defines this emotion, envy, and then she defines the person who is sort of structured in this way by envy, who she refers to as the haters.
00:52:47
Speaker
ah Because they hate value. And so it's the haters. i identify with the person she hates more and more the more experts we look at. Yeah, like we are the haters, Sarah. Absolutely. gotta say, I don't want, say, Elon Musk's fortune.
00:53:03
Speaker
I want him to lose it. yeah Absolutely true. i don't want his fortune at all. I don't want him to have it. She is saying, you know, the one part where I do not identify with her picture at all, she is saying that the only reason for that is that we hate the fact that someone has a fortune and not the immense political power that that fortune entitles him to.
00:53:28
Speaker
as well as what he has been doing with that political power, right? Like people like us are being immiserated by Elon Musk on the basis of his fortune. There's real material effects in our lives.
00:53:43
Speaker
This isn't just, oh, he has a fortune and we can't stand it. Well, it's because we don't live on the abstract conceptual plane enough, Helen. Literally, yeah. We're unable to recognize the truth of what's going on, which is that we just feel personal animosity toward Elon Musk because he's so brilliant that we interpret his existence as cringe. She has some really great stuff about like the haters are actually killers, not physical, but metaphysical killers, because we don't kill people, we kill values. Yeah. And it's just so pathetic. Like, it reminds me of... It almost reminds me of Cato talking about how you can't strike down laws because what's next? Striking down a completely unrelated law? Like, we can't get rid of the Oppian law because what's next? Striking down a different law, right? And it's like... Yeah, like, what's going to be the point of laws if people can get rid of them?
00:54:38
Speaker
And how... right You're really getting fenced into this position where like because you believe that values and concepts can actually be objectively discovered and and have some objective existence, there's no possibility to ever change your values. right like The reason...
00:54:59
Speaker
that I critique values is because I'm worried about what my values actually mean and I have actually changed what values I have throughout my life. And this isn't because I am a hater. It's because I don't think that my values that I've achieved exist in some objective way, right? Like you have to subject your values to critique. And it's interesting because she does talk about the need for introspection, but it seems to always fall short of this idea that actually sometimes a value should be critiqued and destroyed.
00:55:26
Speaker
And to take it even a step further, like what she's describing here with envy is exactly a value that she wants to destroy because it's not a good value. So she just doesn't think of it as a value because she has defined values to be like objectively good. And so this is just a thing you believe that structures your life. It's not a value because values have to be good. But that's a really convenient definition that just leaves everything still on the table, right? There's no actual engagement with this fundamental philosophical problem of like, how do you know what the good life is, right? Like I think ethics is an actual philosophical field that she just wants to completely dissolve with the word
00:56:05
Speaker
objectivism. it It's maddening. It's so funny, too, how clear a portrayal there is of her target audience, because like she's talking about the need for introspection, but pretty clearly she doesn't think there is any need for introspection on the part of the people who are reading the book, because the people who are reading the book are the people that others are envious of. They are the ones that own the fortune. They are the ones that go out and do things. The people that really matter in the world. The people who need to introspect are the envious little shits on the outside. But this book is not for them. Exactly.
00:56:41
Speaker
okay I think we've seen some odium already. And I think especially with this denigration of poverty as just a matter of envy and not something which is actually creating misery She's got that stink on her already, Helen.
00:56:55
Speaker
it's It's not good. And for a while, I was like, okay, this is going to be a sort of more abstract episode. We're going to talk about this stuff, and then we're going kind of look at what's not there and look at what she's ignoring and understand her bigotry that way. Luckily, we don't have to make quite that big of a leap.
00:57:11
Speaker
There's this really funny bit where she talks about... She's like, i'm going to give you some examples. And a bunch of examples she has are like a professor who said this thing and a student who said this thing that aren't backed up with and like I couldn't find any sources for any of these.
00:57:25
Speaker
So I just am not including them. But she does just like make up like literally on the level of like, oh, this professor said he wasn't going to hire this student because they're too good at teaching and it would make other people feel jealous. And this exactly proved my point. And I really just wrote in the margin of the book like and that professor's name, Albert Einstein. like It's just all made up.
00:57:44
Speaker
She actually, no, i need to clip this one. This one is too funny. Let me give you some examples. An intellectual who is recruiting members for Mensa, an international society allegedly restricted to intelligent men, which selects members on the dubious basis of like IQ tests, was quoted in an interview as follows.
00:58:04
Speaker
Intelligence is not especially admired by people. Outside Mensa, you had to be very careful not to win an argument and lose a friend. Inside Mensa, we can be ourselves, and that is a great relief.
00:58:16
Speaker
New York Times, September 11th, 1966. A friend, therefore, is more important than the truth. What kind of friend? The kind that resents you for being right. Like, again, it's like... Oh, we've got layers of cringe here. Yeah! Mensa itself immediately cringe. Her criticism of Mensa members is having the issue of being unwilling to be massive dicks to their friends and lose them.
00:58:43
Speaker
Extremely cringe. Exactly. Like, you know, OK, I brought in the thing about like arguing with your husband and your lover's wife about, you know, the necessity of your affair or whatever.
00:58:56
Speaker
But then the second part of that story is like, This guy broke up with her and she accused him of philosophical improprieties and ejected him from the movement. Like there's this utter rejection of any like emotional content to human experience that isn't immediately downstream of reason.
00:59:14
Speaker
And so a friend who wins an argument and is just continuing to be stubborn and a dick and about it. The only reason you could object to that is because you resent them for being right.
00:59:29
Speaker
Such an impoverished vision of human life. Yeah, yeah. The only value is just go around being a brain shed. Yeah. And so she she then locates actually, you know, this is actually an age-old impulse, right? This isn't new.
00:59:47
Speaker
She goes back to all these legends, the Tower of Babel, Icarus, Arachne being transformed into a spider because she won a weaving competition against a god.
00:59:58
Speaker
Interesting. All these myths are about how ambition is self-destruction. And you shouldn't aspire to things. And it continues to today. And you got Hollywood movies. She talks about the Hollywood movie in which the boy goes to seek a career in the big city and becomes a wealthy, miserable scoundrel while the small town boy stays put and wins the girl next door who wins over the glamorous temptress.
01:00:20
Speaker
And she's saying all of these are the haters. Yeah. voicing their hatred of value. Helen, what's the tweet about hubris? Do you know the one I mean? Yeah, the one that's like hubris, like rip to those guys, but I'm built different, maybe even better than the gods. Yeah, exactly. And it's so funny because, again, it's funny that she's bringing in Greek tragedy again after her complete misread earlier in the book of apoll Apollonian versus Dionysian.
01:00:48
Speaker
What all of those things are trying to get at is... the ambiguous nature of values and right. What is Oedipus is also about hubris, but it's about this guy and he is actually very smart. Like Oedipus is this rational, heroic man at the beginning, but all of these things are trying to encounter like human limitations. And she just utterly rejects that dimension of human experience. Now, okay, this next passage is a little long, but here we're really going to get a laundry list of examples of where we see the haters throughout society.
01:01:30
Speaker
Observe the nature of the various methods used to accomplish this goal. Since equal pay for unequal performance is too obvious an injustice, the egalitarians solve the problem by forbidding unequal performance.
01:01:44
Speaker
See the policy of many labor unions. Since some men are able to rise faster than others, the egalitarians forbid the concept of merit and substitute the concept of seniority as the basis of promotions.
01:01:57
Speaker
See the state of modern railroads. Since the expropriation of wealth is a somewhat discredited policy, The egalitarians place limits on the use of wealth and keep shrinking them, thus making wealth inoperative.
01:02:10
Speaker
It is unfair, they cry, that only the rich can obtain the best medical care, or the best education, or the best housing, or any commodity in short supply, which should be rationed, not competed for, etc., etc.
01:02:25
Speaker
See any newspaper editorial. Since some women are beautiful and others are not, the egalitarians are fighting to forbid beauty contests and television commercials using glamorous models. see women's lib Since some students are more intelligent and study more conscientiously than others, the egalitarians abolish the system of grades based on the objective value of a student's scholastic achievement and substitute for it a system of grading on a curve based on a comparative standard.
01:02:55
Speaker
A set number of grades ranging from A's to failures is given to each class, regardless of the student's individual performances, with the distribution of grades calculated on the relative basis of the collective performance of the class as a whole.
01:03:09
Speaker
Thus, a student may get an A or an F for the same work, according to whether he happens to be in a class of morons or of child prodigies. No better way could be devised to endow a young man with a vested interest in the inferiority of others, and with fear and hatred of their superiority.
01:03:27
Speaker
See the state of modern education. Okay, first off, I gotta say, the way she keeps putting these parentheticals, see this, see that, is fucking painful. Yeah, see what? What labor union policy? like Right. Are you talking about... See this abstraction I just invented. The only thing i could possibly think of for the labor unions thing is maybe in like factory ah production, sometimes the labor contracts specify like amount of production, like basically the labor union negotiates in and advance, like how much work is going to be done in and a matter of time, right? And and standardizing numbers of hours, right?
01:04:12
Speaker
That's not forbidding unequal performance. Like it's it's a very weird connection to draw. And that's even being as charitable as I can, because that's not even really she doesn't make that point or she doesn't really elucidate that. That's just like the only that's the closest I can think of. But there's a lot of gaps I'm already filling in there.
01:04:30
Speaker
I don't know what she's talking about with railroads. Like, I think she just is sad that the train system sucks. See any newspaper editorial is maybe my favorite. That one really drove me crazy because, like, I i mean, I did. i went and I looked at what newspapers were talking about at the time, and I had a very hard time finding a newspaper editorial that was seriously making the argument that for communism, which like which is what she's saying here, right? Like limiting wealth, like making wealth inoperative.
01:05:01
Speaker
That is like once you've built full communism, what newspaper editorial is she talking about? There were so many newspaper editorials at the time about... Like, is she talking about people saying that it's like a horrible situation that there's many people who are unhoused without medical care? Like, that's what she's talking about, that some people are noticing, hey, it kind of sucks how many people don't have homes and how many people are dying of preventable things.
01:05:27
Speaker
And she's saying, oh, that's all just jealousy about wealth. Like, it's fucking infuriating. And then... To move on to women's lib, I can tell, okay, I'm getting a little heated. I'm gonna calm down a little bit.
01:05:38
Speaker
Be a hater. Be a hater. To move on to women's lib and to say that the reason that women are ah objecting to turning women into sex objects is just jealousy that other women are more attractive than them is so fucking misogynist.
01:05:54
Speaker
i I can't even, like, but that's not what women's lib was about. Women's lib is saying, look, culture treats women as objects, right? Also, women's lib as ah as a umbrella term ah there's is complicated, but she is eventually going to talk about women's lib more, and she means this kind of like second wave radical feminism.
01:06:14
Speaker
What That movement is about, to a large extent, to saying, look, culture treats women as objects. Culture commodifies women. And this is bad and we need to fix that. And things like beauty contests are part of that machine.
01:06:30
Speaker
it has nothing to do with jealousy over some women being more attractive. that it's That is such a, like, intentionally misogynist misreading of what feminism is about.
01:06:42
Speaker
Feminism as a secret project to make women in media ugly and tear down beautiful women is a theme that echoes through the ages. It's so common. And you get the like, oh this is, you know, video games are woke now because like... Exactly where I was going with this. hire fans.
01:07:01
Speaker
Oh my God. And then to end it all with this like... Longing to return to a time when grades in college classes were based on an objective assessment. Like, that's my favorite thing to do as a teacher is to sit down with an exam and then access the platonic realm and objectively assess the value of the work in front of me.
01:07:22
Speaker
Like one by one with no comparison from student to student do no reflection on the design of the course or reflection on the dialectical nature between teacher and student and the understanding that I have a responsibility to students as much as they have a responsibility to the course that we're invested together in this project of their learning.
01:07:41
Speaker
Fuck all that. I just objectively assess their value bit by bit. And then I go and I curve it because I hate values. Like it's so uninterested in actually understanding what a value is or how people live. It's so fucking infuriating.
01:07:58
Speaker
Okay. Are you ready to talk about racism? Helen, I'm always excited to talk about racism. Yeah, so it will maybe delight you to know that Ayn Rand has some harsh words for racists.
01:08:12
Speaker
She is coming out and she is coming out against racism. Let's see that in action. Racism is an evil and primitive form of collectivism.
01:08:23
Speaker
Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority, but as an n oh no but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority. The notion that one's culture is superior to all others solely because it represents the traditions of one's ancestors is regarded as chauvinism if claimed by a majority, but as, quote, ethnic, end quote, pride, if claimed by a minority.
01:08:51
Speaker
Resistance to change and progress is regarded as reactionary if demonstrated by a majority. But retrogression to a Balkan village, to an Indian teepee, or to the jungle is hailed if demonstrated by a minority.
01:09:05
Speaker
Oh no, Helen. Okay, this is racist on many levels, but I it's so just just want to bring out the point that that she would lose her mind over her lack of access to the N-word past if she were alive today. oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. There's zero recognition here of the possibility that a minority might, in being oppressed, be coalesced and forced to adopt defensive measures that
01:09:38
Speaker
such as pride in oneself, there's no recognition of the possibility that the majority's pride may be pride in being oppressors of others.
01:09:51
Speaker
There's, oh my God, there's so much that's not going on here. Yeah. And to add to that, saying that any sort of interest or examination of the history of different cultures is actually a desire to quote unquote retrogress is right. She doesn't think of it as retrogression when she talks about like Greeks or, you know, the philosophers she likes, although she doesn't actually like many philosophers.
01:10:20
Speaker
Like if it's like dominant white people talking about like the history of Western civilization, right. And when she talks about this, like age of reason and enlightenment, like She is venerating history, not as a desire to go backwards technologically, but that is her reactionary thing. And then to say that that another culture that might be interested in understanding its own history as having value is actually retrogressive because shouldn't they all be grateful? I mean, the unstated thing here, which she then states later, is like, shouldn't they all be grateful that we, the Western white people, like brought them forward?
01:10:59
Speaker
Yeah, the real problem with their alleged retrogression is that the cultures that they allegedly want to re retrogress to are primitive and disgusting. That's her issue with it.
01:11:10
Speaker
um We're going to get there. She actually almost basically explicitly says that. But I want to just expand out this this argument a little bit in a couple more excerpts. Tolerance and understanding are regarded as unilateral virtues.
01:11:23
Speaker
In relation to any given minority, we are told, it is the duty of all others, i.e. of the majority, to tolerate and understand the minority's values and customs.
01:11:34
Speaker
While the minority proclaims that its soul is beyond the outsider's comprehension, that no common ties or bridges exist, that it does not propose to grasp one syllable of the majority's values, customs, or culture.
01:11:48
Speaker
and will continue hurling racist epithets, or worse, at the majority's faces. How come I'm not allowed to say the N-word, but these N-words are allowed to call me a cracker? Exactly. Exactly.
01:12:05
Speaker
it's It's so weak. Like, this is one of the reasons I wanted to do all the other readings charitably, is because we get here, and it's like, there's nothing to be charitable about. Here's...
01:12:17
Speaker
The thing, you might read this and you might think, wow, is she really going to totally ignore the plight of all these minority people and just talk about like the dangers of racism against a majority?
01:12:29
Speaker
But actually, she wants to complicate that view a little bit. The real victims are the better members of these privileged minorities. The self-respecting small homeowners and shop owners are the unprotected and undefended victims of every race riot.
01:12:45
Speaker
The minority's members are expected by their egalitarian leaders to remain a passive herd crying for help. Those who ignore the threats and struggle to rise through individual effort and achievement are denounced as traitors.
01:13:00
Speaker
Coming out hard for Clarence Thomas. She explicitly talks about the use of the word Uncle Tom and calling people Uncle Toms as just a matter of being envious at success.
01:13:14
Speaker
It's tricky because I don't really want to get into the politics of the word, you know, two white people on a podcast. Right. It also goes back to a very similar problem, I think, that I was having when we were talking about the philosophy, which is that these things are complicated. There's a bunch of different sides, and she's not really engaging with it in any substantive level.
01:13:34
Speaker
I don't necessarily think it's unproblematic or problematic. you know, obvious that, oh, there's this great, you know, that that it's great to have this idea of an Uncle Tom, whatever. But the implication that basically it's impossible to be a pick me, right? and And especially when I think about like taking this into a realm where we could talk about it, right?
01:13:57
Speaker
She would say the only reason we hate, you know, Caitlyn Jenner or Brianna Wu is not because they are offering their voices on these issues in a way that is empowering the people who want to destroy our lives to do so, and they don't really care.
01:14:11
Speaker
because they have other material protections or they think they do at least. Like that's all not nothing, right? Like we're just jealous of their fame and wealth. And it's just so maddening again. Like, I don't know what else to say.
01:14:26
Speaker
Also the shout out to the, the real victims of race riots today, the concept of like local ownership and so on is so degraded.
01:14:37
Speaker
Half the time they're actually just talking about these people burnt down their Walmarts as if it's well, first off, as if a Walmart actually got burnt down, which usually it didn't. And second, as if it were their Walmart.
01:14:49
Speaker
Yeah. And this phrase small homeowners is also funny because it's again this kind of like, don't you just mean homeowners? Like. Small business owners is a common thing, but I feel like small homeowners is like a funny, different phrase.
01:15:03
Speaker
i don't know. I feel like there's unacknowledged difference in the culture around housing. Like, for example, there used to be this concept of a starter home, which you still see cited sometimes, but it's just such it's so ah it's so absurd with economic conditions as they are.
01:15:16
Speaker
And a lot of concepts like that are just unrelatable to a current audience. I was thinking about this a bit also in the Powell episode when we were talking about like the woman, the extremely racist woman who was complaining that like it was becoming financially impossible for her to be racist in the way that she wanted to Too racist to be a landlord.
01:15:37
Speaker
And exactly. And I was saying, you know, there is this issue, and I think you start to see it around this time. I mean, these are similar time periods. There is this issue you see of like, okay, coupling together, you have to have this place where you live also be an investment that is going to financially...
01:15:57
Speaker
support you, it leads to these kinds of problems, right? Where you end up with this culture that you need to have this notion of a starter home because your wealth needs to continue to grow because there's no other social safety net.
01:16:08
Speaker
One thing I do want to point out, she is, i mean, we didn't really mention it, this thing about the Balkan village. She does seem to have like a genuine racism toward, like she doesn't like the Balkans. Like she is like anti-Slavic racist.
01:16:24
Speaker
And so we're going to see that a little bit in this next passage too. It is primitive cultures that we are asked to study, to appreciate, and to respect. Any sort of culture except our own.
01:16:35
Speaker
A piece of pottery copied from generation to generation is held up to us as an achievement. A plastic c cup is not. bearskin is an achievement.
01:16:46
Speaker
Synthetic fiber is not. An ox cart is an achievement. An airplane is not. A potion of herbs and snake oil is an achievement.
01:16:57
Speaker
Open heart surgery is not. Stonehenge is an achievement. The Empire State Building is not. Black magic is an achievement.
01:17:08
Speaker
Aristotle's organon is not. And if there is a more repulsive spectacle than a television broadcast presenting as news any two-bit group of pretentious, self-conscious adolescents out of old vaudeville performing some Slavonic folk dance on a street corner in the shadow of New York skyscrapers, I have not discovered it yet.
01:17:31
Speaker
This is so disconnected from reality, it's crazy. This is fascinating. In what world do we not celebrate open heart surgery or study it or celebrate airplanes or study air, right?
01:17:45
Speaker
How did she hear about Aristotle's Organon? Did she hear about it because it's so disparaged and she went into the archives? She went into the trash to find what nobody else was talking about? I don't think so. Exactly. it's And it's exactly this thing of, right, it's this thing of of being upset when you have the Spanish option on the phone. it's It's that the mere fact of being interested in historical pottery or, you know, what you know, early clothing made out of bare skin, right? Like the the mere fact of being interested in other cultures and historical uses of things and and how things were made or interested in the history of like herb use and which by the way has also produced medical advancements. I'm not going to be sit here and say like, Oh, like whatever, you know, homeopathy is great or whatever, but like, yeah, like all our homeopath listeners are going to write in.
01:18:44
Speaker
Understanding that, right, that over thousands of years, like sometimes people found stuff that worked and other cultures might actually have something worth studying and looking at in all these different contexts. Or being interested in Stonehenge. Like, why are these stones there? How did they put them there?
01:18:59
Speaker
It is an achievement because it's like there is these massive stones and how do you move them without... electricity, which is how we would do it today with like, and ah you know, a powered crane.
01:19:10
Speaker
That doesn't mean that people aren't interested in the Empire State Building, right? Like more tourists probably line up every year by an order of magnitude to go up to the top of the Empire State Building than go to Stonehenge.
01:19:20
Speaker
But the fact that someone is interested in Stonehenge is taken as an assault on the values of the Empire State Building. It's so grievance based. It's so. it's Yeah, I think maybe we should locate this not just as racism, but as specifically a hostility to pluralism.
01:19:39
Speaker
Right. So now we're going to get to what you were kind of already seeing as as latent before, which is she's not just saying we should be allowed to celebrate our own culture.
01:19:54
Speaker
She's actually going much further about the value of other cultures. Why is Western civilization admonished to admire primitive cultures? Because they are not admirable.
01:20:07
Speaker
Why is a primitive man exhorted to ignore Western achievements? Because they are.
Cultural Misunderstandings & Racism
01:20:13
Speaker
Why is the self-expression of recadolescent to be nurtured and acclaimed?
01:20:20
Speaker
Because he has nothing to express. Why is the self-expression of a genius to be impeded and ignored? Because he has? Awkward writing.
01:20:31
Speaker
It is to the Mohammedans, the Buddhists, and the cannibals, to the underdeveloped, the undeveloped, and the not-to-be-developed cultures, that the capitalist United States of America is asked to apologize for her skyscrapers, her automobiles, her plumbing, and her smiling, confident, untortured, unskinned-alive, uneaten young men.
01:20:52
Speaker
it is not for her flaws that the United States of America is hated, but for her virtues, Not for her weaknesses, but for her achievements. Not for her failures, but for her success.
01:21:04
Speaker
Her magnificent, shining, life-giving success. And most of that was a quote from The Obliteration of Capitalism, The Objectivist Newsletter, October 1965. Yeah, so she's quoting herself again. At length. This is vile. It's really disgusting.
01:21:22
Speaker
and The only bit of value I can take out of it, which is very much in the negative sense, is to note how neatly she has understood a connection between racism and ableism.
01:21:38
Speaker
Like both the primitive culture as well as the R word, R slur, adolescent, she understands as not having anything of value to say. And that's why the haters are so interested in their admiration.
01:21:56
Speaker
It's a little surprising to me at this point that she isn't explicitly a Nazi. I've seen this rhetoric many times before. And let me tell you, a lot of the people saying it have exciting tattoos. Yeah, it's interesting. i i i think it is interesting to...
01:22:12
Speaker
juxtapose this with like the complete absence of Nazism in books or the absence of engaging with World War two It's very close to like some of the Anglin stuff we were reading. Yeah, absolutely. This idea of quote, the Mohammedans, the Buddhists and the cannibals as quote, the underdeveloped, undeveloped and not to be developed cultures.
01:22:35
Speaker
I guess I want to bracket the place of like the cannibal in this imaginary for a moment because... Of course, neither of us is saying cannibalism in itself is okay.
01:22:46
Speaker
We're not saying that, but you can figure out what we mean. But this use of the specter of the cannibal as a figure of the uncivilized that is then used against any kind of non-Western, especially like African culture...
01:23:01
Speaker
is extremely racist. It's exactly that thing we saw with Leacock, where you create this image of a savage, and this image has no real referent. It just kind of floats out there as something that the person you're speaking to is expected to be able to create anew and connect to whatever they dislike.
01:23:25
Speaker
Yeah. And I think especially all these references to cannibals or the primitive jungle in these lists of like, oh, the Balkan village, the Indian teepee or the primitive jungle.
01:23:38
Speaker
She's not coming out and saying like, this is like, quote unquote, like black culture or whatever. This is the culture of black people in America or any, you know, she's not really saying out loud what the group is, but this is like her way of doing anti-black racism.
01:23:57
Speaker
And especially in the context of 1969, 1970, when we're talking about new Left, explicitly like one of the figures that people are thinking about or one of the groups people are thinking about in this context is like the Black Panthers. There's these movements towards, okay, there is a culture of being Black in America that has this complicated history with being brought over as slaves, right? Like there's all these- I was really wondering, did did you ever see her mention slavery? Not, it's possible that I missed it, but-
01:24:29
Speaker
No, there doesn't seem to be this engagement with it. and And this reduction of this style of, oh, we want to reconnect with this kind of, you know, what our ancestry was and what our heritage was before being kidnapped and brought violently to America to be slaves as just like, oh, you're venerating the jungle.
01:24:50
Speaker
is basically like genocide denial, right? Like if we understand American slavery as a genocidal project, which it was, to say that the cultures that all these people lived in when they were kidnapped is just quote unquote the primitive jungle is really vile and extremely racist.
01:25:10
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I will admit like if, you know, if if a listener wants to be like, oh, you're reading into that, she's not saying that explicitly. Like, sure, she's not saying that explicitly. But come on.
01:25:22
Speaker
like We're all adults here. You know, it's not for her flaws that the United States of America is hated, but for her virtues, not for her weaknesses, but for her achievements. I mean, to write that in 1965, like sort of at the height of civil rights activism.
01:25:38
Speaker
I think we have to understand it in that context. and We have to understand that people who are saying, know, the war in Vietnam or the like, or, you know, segregation or all these different things, which were eminently critiquable and which did need to actually be like changed as like, oh, that's not the real target. They just hate us for our success.
01:26:02
Speaker
I mean, it reminds me of like Bush and his, you know, in early 2000s in the lead up to the Iraq war saying they hate our freedom. right It's this total, like no, it couldn't have possibly been that all this violence is actually a response to American imperialist actions, you know bombing hospitals, et cetera, et cetera.
01:26:22
Speaker
It's all just they hate our freedom. They hate how good we are. and They hate our virtues. These primitive jungle dwelling or you know undeveloped Mohammedans. I mean, it's a really vile way of thinking.
01:26:35
Speaker
The way she collapses every form of racism she approves of into the one undifferentiated unit is and fascinating to me. Like this anti-black racism is specifically anti-black racism, and she uses it as such, but she takes care every time to make sure that she's bundling in like the Slavs or Arab people or Buddhists to whatever form of racism she's talking about.
01:27:04
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. Basically, these people are all just lesser. And I don't know that she really cares about the specific form of the lesserness. She just asserts it's there qualitatively and permanently.
01:27:18
Speaker
Yeah. It's also worth pointing out this book was republished. The publication history of this book is kind of funny. think it's published in the late 60s first or 1970 first.
01:27:28
Speaker
And then it includes this letter, which is basically like, oh, I wrote all these articles. And then I got this letter from someone who was like, oh, these articles are really good. You should publish it into a book. And normally I don't like responding to my fans letters, but...
01:27:41
Speaker
I took it to my publisher and they were like, you know what? It would make a good book. So you're welcome. Here's the book. That's the preface. It then gets expanded a couple of years later and republished to include this Age of Envy essay, which I think was a little bit later and was kind of more of a synthesis. And why I want to focus on this is it includes a lot of the stuff and it really gives this kind of systematic overview of what she sees see as a problem in society.
01:28:04
Speaker
It then seems to get republished with more material also from this dude, Leonard Pitekopf, who she named as her intellectual heir. Like she actually said, like, this guy is the guy who I want to carry on my intellectual project, which is a very funny move. That move doesn't appear to have worked because I've never heard of this guy.
01:28:22
Speaker
Yeah.
Egalitarianism & Capitalism
01:28:23
Speaker
Objectivists love him, obviously. But it gets republished a couple years later as um the return of the primitive in the anti-industrial revolution.
01:28:34
Speaker
And some stuff is reordered. There's like a little material change here and there. And I think it's partly because the new left wasn't really something people were talking about anymore. There were big political changes, but she still wanted to, they still wanted to bring out all these different things.
01:28:46
Speaker
So, but yeah, she's sort of obsessed with this notion of like the primitive and it's, it's sort of all encompassing and it doesn't, care about specificity. Like she doesn't have this notion of like, oh, different cultures are different and they might do things in different ways. And actually like a an attempt to recover sort of various Eastern or Central European cultures, which were subjugated by the Russian empire might actually look different than anti-racist movements in the US among black people, which might look different, that right? Like this idea that actually different forms of oppression
01:29:25
Speaker
share some similarities but also contain differences and so their movements might be different and you have to understand these things as related or interconnected but different struggles is just totally abolished by oh they're just primitive they're all just primitive and they don't have values and they hate our freedom and they hate our values and they hate our virtues and that's it and it's all it's all just one big clump Yeah, because the only historical reality is allowed that's allowed to exist is the historical reality of this mythic West that she's come up with. Nothing else is allowed to have its own concepts, ideas, and crucially, no other cultures are allowed to be like actually impacted by historical events because they don't have history. None of that is allowed to impact how you think about these groups or their status
01:30:14
Speaker
or their internal cohesion in the present day. Exactly. She's got some bits here and now she talks about, okay, it kind of weaved into all of this. There's this whole critique of fighting for equality.
01:30:29
Speaker
and we've seen a little bit of it already. She's talked about how equality as such is, you know, there's two different types of equality and we already have equality under the law. I mean, we hear this over and over today. I think we're both very familiar with uses of this argument that we have equality under under the law, but what what these egalitarians who are poisoning everything are really talking about is equality of outcome, right? And we saw that talking about the the labor unions and that and that passage above.
01:30:53
Speaker
And she just outright says like, it is impossible to have equality of outcome because it is, quote, the faculty of volition that determines a man's stature and actions. But the closest we can get to equality is laissez-faire capitalism. Of course. Right. And this is really a central part of her thing we haven't really talked about yet. Ayn Rand fans would say she wrote these novels, she discovered this new philosophical system Because that's really what objectivism is. It's not just like a kind of philosophy. It's different than existentialism, which is like a way of thinking about things, or it's different than all these other philosophical trends. It is a closed philosophical system in which the basic concepts and axioms and ideas are established and not subject to change, and like it's the conclusions or the analyses that are subject to change, right?
01:31:44
Speaker
And this kind of thing, i think, used to be much more common in philosophy or was common in older philosophy, but it's not so much done because people understand that, like, this kind of systematizing thinking is very, very hard, and you will often miss things by nature of, like, what your system is unable to see, right?
01:32:02
Speaker
you really can't hit everything. It's just not humanly possible. I mean, one of the big people she hates, this is like Derrida's central thing, right? That like every system, all these organized systems of thought are anchored by something which fundamentally the system cannot accommodate, right?
01:32:19
Speaker
And the sort of easiest to explain idea of this is like, theology as a system. This is one of the first, I think, easier examples to think about is like theology is structured around God, right? So theology is the study of God.
01:32:30
Speaker
If God ever shows up, theology is over. So there is this kind of absence center that is the anchor, but is fundamentally unreachable by the system, by its very structure. In a very similar way, philosophy is this way with the notion of truth.
01:32:44
Speaker
Like philosophy exists because there is this grounding central thing we are trying to study, which is truth, but we can't reach it. Right. That's what Gรถdel proved. It's called Gรถdel's incompleteness theorem.
01:32:55
Speaker
Oh my God. I'm terrified that the listener is going to think i meant that seriously. I did not. That was a joke. That's not what it says. Anyway. So objectivists, fans of Ayn Rand would say, okay, she wrote these novels, she discovered this philosophical system called objectivism, because of course, in in objectivism, you don't develop concepts, and you don't you don't make concepts, you discover them. So she discovered objectivism.
01:33:19
Speaker
And then she realized through objectivism that laissez-faire capitalism is the best thing. I think people who are more critical of Ayn Rand and and listeners know which camp of these two we would fall into would say she wanted to justify why laissez-faire capitalism is the best and then kind of backwards made this philosophy of objectivism around it.
01:33:43
Speaker
But all of this is really like I think there's literally a line from Atlas Shrugged that people are constantly quoting of free minds, free markets. Like this is her main thing, of course. so So it's here where she really gets here. And she says, look, you want equality. You have equality.
01:34:00
Speaker
Lafayette Fair capitalism, baby. The only thing that's keeping you down is your own ambition and your own ability to survive and thrive in laissez-faire capitalism. And what the egalitarians are actually trying to do is bring everyone down to their level because they don't have the volition to succeed.
01:34:18
Speaker
I think I figured out why she's not a Nazi. It's just the individualism. The individualism itself stemming from a deep-seated need to believe that merit is the only driver of outcomes.
01:34:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is where I think it's interesting. There's like a hint of resemblance to some of the stuff we read in Sartre where he's talking about the bigot reacting with this fear response to the difficulty of actually living authentically as yourself. I mean, there's something there, but Sartre, of course, understands that there's a lot more dimensions to human experience than just rational argument. Yeah.
01:35:00
Speaker
And so he ends up saying, yeah, the problem here is Nazis. But yeah, you're right. Like she doesn't like Nazis because Nazis are collectivist fundamentally. And actually, yeah, here's, here's, ah she, she sort of expands this in the realm of politics a bit in this next excerpt.
01:35:17
Speaker
In politics, observe the sanctimonious smugness of any ward healer who receipts the ritualistic formula about defending the interests of, quote, the poor, the black, and the young, end quote.
01:35:29
Speaker
Why these? Because they are, presumably, weak. Who are the other kinds of citizens, and what about their interests? blank out. God damn it.
01:35:40
Speaker
The implication he conveys is not the opposite kinds are, quote, the rich, the white, and the old, end quote. The hardhats are not rich, the Uncle Toms are black, and the old are the heroes of Medicare.
01:35:54
Speaker
The implication is that there is only one kind of opposite, regardless of age, sex, creed, color, or economic status, the competent. So this is like a mirror image of her folding of all the different races or types that she considers lesser into one little package.
01:36:12
Speaker
Here, everyone who's greater is folded into one little package. It's really good that, you know, we had we went through all the Sartre and stuff last week because we can point out this is the like Manichean dualism that Sartre talks about as like a source of bigotry on the nose.
01:36:29
Speaker
It's just exactly that. It's everything reduces to this death struggle between the competent and the incompetent. And protecting poor people or people who have are victimized by racism or the young, this is the political this is the politics of people who like Margaret Thatcher, who very soon after this would remove you know milk from school lunches and all these people who don't want free school lunches like today.
01:36:59
Speaker
right I'm thinking of more than one American politician and, you know congressman who has said we shouldn't have free school lunches because hunger is a good motivator. There's no acknowledgement that maybe kids should have a right to eat.
01:37:14
Speaker
And maybe that's actually why these people are talking about defending the interests of the young is because young people need help with getting fed because they like children can't.
01:37:29
Speaker
I mean, I'm going to go ahead and say it. Children are weak. Yeah, it's it's hard to say this without sounding absurd, right? And I'm caught in that other thing we were talking about last week where you argue with this and then you sound absurd. And so then your interlocutor could be like, well, you're crazy. But it's like, yeah, young people, like we need to raise children. Like you need to take a collectivist approach.
01:37:54
Speaker
you can't you You can't raise children by saying, oh, as soon as you're born, you have to be a volitional egoist. That doesn't work. I'm having some strong suspicions about her opinions on child labor.
01:38:09
Speaker
Yeah. The blank out bit is killing me. The blank out is so funny because it's it's exactly what i was saying. Every time she does this,
01:38:20
Speaker
it's this moment of rhetorical pause where it's like, okay, pause here and notice that I've won the argument. And it's like, well, no, you haven't won the argument. I mean, i don't want poor people to die of preventable diseases. And I don't want, I don't know if I mentioned on the podcast before that I have type one diabetes. So I'm in a situation where literally if I'm without access to insulin for like 12 hours, I could just die from that.
01:38:46
Speaker
This is extremely stressful in for reasons that it doesn't have to be, right? Like it's stressful for reasons that are fundamentally not changeable, that I need this exogenous hormone in constant supply.
01:39:01
Speaker
There's sort of no way to remove a fundamental level of stress there. But... The dysfunctional American health care system has added so much stress because of that. And the idea that that's all just envy that I'm not wealthy and like it's so bad. And the idea that, oh, actually, you just have no response. Blank out is like, fuck you.
01:39:23
Speaker
God. Alan, if you consider being more motivated, then maybe your insulin issue would resolve itself. Yeah, I have. it hasn't worked. Okay. Hmm. Well, maybe we need to figure out some greater urge than preventing you from dying.
01:39:38
Speaker
Exactly. okay Okay. So we talked about racism. Are you ready to talk about feminism? You know what I think this is actually going to be the turning around point for her. I think she's going to be pretty feminist. She's going be pretty cool.
01:39:51
Speaker
Okay, here we go. Time to get validated. A cultural movement often produces characters of itself that emphasize its essence. The hippies are one such character.
01:40:04
Speaker
These ecological crusaders are the physical embodiments of the spirit of today's culture. Much more can be said about their motives, but for the moment, observe the intention of the physical appearance they choose to assume.
01:40:18
Speaker
The purpose of flaunting deliberate ugliness and bodily dirt is to offend others, while simultaneously playing for pity. To defy, to affront, debate those who hold values, any values.
01:40:32
Speaker
But the hippies were not enough. They were surpassed by the character and all characters. Women's lib. Okay, I might have been slightly mistaken. I don't think she's actually coming out as a feminist here, Helen. My bad. I don't think she's going to come out as a feminist. Here's the thing is, there are people who want to do a feminist reading of Ayn Rand.
01:40:56
Speaker
To some extent, I actually think it is a byproduct of a certain kind of misogyny where people assume that any woman who had something to say must have something to say about feminism. There's this kind of like assumption that, oh, of course she's feminist.
01:41:09
Speaker
And so to some extent, if feminism is just a word we're going to use to talk about more broadly, like people who talk about themselves as feminists and understand themselves as part of feminism,
01:41:23
Speaker
including in that all of what the writer Sophie Lewis calls enemy feminisms, right? There's this kind of movement now of of trying to understand, okay, instead of trying to recover like, oh, what's real feminism, and what's good feminism and calling that actual feminism versus like all these other anti-feminist positions within feminism.
01:41:40
Speaker
then maybe, yeah, there is this, like, feminist Ayn Rand. But in the sense that we really mean here, and no, she's not a feminist. So, okay. It's the caricature to end all caricatures, women's lib.
01:41:52
Speaker
So, who is women's lib? What is women's lib? What is this a caricature of? What is a women's lib? Exactly. Let's... See what she has to say on the matter.
01:42:04
Speaker
just
Women's Liberation & Feminism
01:42:05
Speaker
as the egalitarians write on the historical prestige of those who fought for political equality and struggle to achieve the opposite so their special sorority womens live rides on the historical prestige of women who fought for individual rights against government power and struggles to get special privileges by means of government power.
01:42:25
Speaker
Screaming that it is out to fight prejudice against women, this movement is providing evidence on a grand public scale, on any street corner and television screen, to support the worst prejudices of the bitterest misogynist.
01:42:39
Speaker
As a group, American women are the most privileged females on earth. They control the wealth of the United States through inheritance from fathers and husbands who work themselves into an early grave, struggling to provide every comfort and luxury for the bridge-playing, cocktail-party-chasing cohorts who give them very little room to turn.
01:43:00
Speaker
Women's Lib proclaims that they should give still less and exhorts its members to refuse to cook their husband's meals with its placards commanding, starve a rat today. Where would the cat's food come from after the rat is starved?
01:43:13
Speaker
A blank out. Oh, the blank out at the end just coming in as a gut punch. God damn it. Yeah, it's so funny. And it's also funny that she does it after completely twisting around this metaphor. Like the metaphor of the rat, right? Starve a rat today. The rat is...
01:43:28
Speaker
understood. got i got a little Jordan Peterson there. The rat, the rat is understood as a metaphor of someone who's taking your shit, right? Like you open the pantry to go get your food and the rat has taken it, right? A rat is like traitorous and scheming and taking your stuff.
01:43:49
Speaker
Women are not the cat in the metaphor. So you're changing the metaphor and then you're dunking on them by not being able to answer your complete misinterpretation of the slogan. it's it's It's really weak stuff.
01:44:02
Speaker
I'm confused about how this where would the cat's food come from line of arguments and another level, like from the humans? Yeah. I don't know if you've ever had a cat, but I don't think you fed them on just the wild rats that were running around in your house. Yeah, so in her imaginary, she's like, oh, if men are rats, then women are obviously the cats who are eating the rats.
01:44:28
Speaker
That's what she wants to understand as the metaphor for women who... just go off and do cocktail parties and play bridge while their husbands work. Why can't she just use bite the hand that feeds you? It's so established. It's so easy instead of this tortured nonsense. Because she's a bad writer. Oh.
01:44:48
Speaker
There's a lot going on here. like And here we really start to see this move, which she will kind of bring back around to the other prejudices she was talking about earlier. But She's saying not only are these women terrible, but actually they're in a sense responsible for misogyny today because they are proving the misogynists right by being terrible.
01:45:10
Speaker
Yeah, they're screeching feminazis. I had to be racist because you called me racist argument again, but which, you know, same thing. I had to be misogynist because you called me misogynist. I think, again, without trying to get too much into a sidetrack about different strands of philosophy, but this movement she's discussing is really trying to start to make more of a materialist argument about feminism instead of women as a class are doing all this unpaid domestic labor that supports the economy and are subjugated by men because they are the ones who are are engaging in the recognized economic production.
01:45:51
Speaker
And this is one of the things that women's liberation is about, is saying, look, all of the work that women do to support the economy is to completely unacknowledged. and Right.
01:46:03
Speaker
The concept of domestic labor as actual labor. Right. And so she is saying, and she continues to say and expand here, the same thing she said before, which is, no, that's it's not that at all. So the the people who read this and are like, oh, she's a feminist, are pointing to the fact that she is supportive of women having careers.
01:46:24
Speaker
She is supportive of women having ambition and going out and doing work. And she says there's no fundamental, right? She doesn't support the idea that women should not be allowed to work a job or do whatever they want, right? She says at various times, like, there's nothing, there's no job or work that is fundamentally, like, for men or only or masculine or is unavailable to women. Oh, what about male stripper design?
01:46:47
Speaker
Blank out. Blank out. There is this... strand of like girl boss feminism that is being evinced here. But her explanation for women's liberation is this is stay at home women who are envious, right? They hate the career woman's ambition.
01:47:07
Speaker
And that's where all this is coming from. And so that's kind of the... Okay. Can I just point out the thing that we see so commonly, which is the claim that the people who are campaigning for rights are actually campaigning for special privileges? Right. And in fact, again, as part of the argument of, oh, in the past, there were problems and there was a lack of equality, but but now we have political equality, right? All of these, right? You're riding on the historical prestige is basically saying, look,
01:47:44
Speaker
Maybe in the past, feminism had some good points. But today, you're all a bunch of privileged bitches, and you need to like stop mooching off your husband by raising his kids, doing all the domestic labor. Of course, writing on the prestige of the past is something she's very happy to do, and it's the works of Aristotle or something like that. What's funny is she does...
01:48:08
Speaker
criticize a lot of historical philosophy and I think one of her answers to that would be like oh all of these things that I'm rescuing from the past it's not because they're right the the fact that they're from the past is not what makes them prestigious I have done the objective valuation of these values, and that's why I'm including them. And that's one of the things about this objectivism is that it lets you just say, all these things I believe are objectively true because I am rational. And it's it's one of the most irrational and just baseless ways of doing philosophy is to just declare that the things you think are objective, right? And so she doesn't actually
01:48:44
Speaker
That's not a contradiction to her because she's not venerating Aristotle for being the past. She's venerating Aristotle because what he did was objectively good. Well, what she deems to be objectively good is, and you can tell because she's objectively correct because she's very rational. And you can tell she's a very rational, objectively correct person because she correctly identifies the things that are objectively good. Yeah.
01:49:05
Speaker
So it's this kind of really strong circular structure to her reasoning that is just unassailable. You know how when you're working with axioms and then you prove some stuff and then you prove the axiom from the axiom, that actually means it has to be true?
01:49:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's how it works. yes That's actually what we do in mathematics. A little glimpse into the mathematician's life for all you lay people out there. Exactly. Yeah. So going on a little bit more, she really has a lot. She really has an axe to grind against women's lib, so as we'll see in this next excerpt.
01:49:36
Speaker
There are men who fear and resent intelligent, ambitious women. Women's Lib proposes to eliminate such feelings by asserting that intelligence and ability do not matter.
01:49:47
Speaker
Only gender does. Some men believe that women are irrational, illogical, incompetent, emotion-driven, and unreliable. Women's Libs sets out to disprove it by the spectacle of sloppy, bedraggled, unfocused females stomping down the streets and chanting brief slogans over and over again, with the stuporous monotony of a jungle ritual and the sulkiness of a badly spoiled child.
01:50:15
Speaker
Denouncing masculine oppression, women's lib screams protests against the policy of regarding women as sex objects through speakers who, too obviously, are in no such danger. Oh my God.
01:50:29
Speaker
Yeah. It's so bad. She'd be so good at being on Fox, especially like it's obviously really bad. it gets worse when you think about like who were the big name people here.
01:50:44
Speaker
Like one of the people she's undoubtedly thinking about here is Andrea Dworkin. And a lot of this radical feminist tradition, by the way, like I have a lot of critiques of, there's like a lot of things, right? Like a lot of transphobia emerges at this point.
01:50:55
Speaker
Second wave feminism was by no means this like perfect movement, right? But Andrea Dworkin was raped. Like these women were...
01:51:06
Speaker
victims of sexual violence, like famously, it is infuriating to read this like, oh, too obviously you're in no such danger, like fuck off. And then the added thing that you pointed out before of the merging together of all these things, right?
01:51:22
Speaker
Women's lib, with the monotony of a jungle ritual, and the sulkiness of a badly spoiled child. It is this amorphous thing that includes all people who ever have any complaint about society are all just haters. Yeah, it's painful. It's really painful.
01:51:41
Speaker
There's zero willingness to engage with the reality of what is driving these women out there. Exactly. also these women are too ugly to rape. That is the subtext. Right. I mean, she's not even saying they're too ugly to sexually assault. She is saying they're too ugly to sexualize, right?
01:52:00
Speaker
Protests against the policy regarding women as sex objects through speakers who too obviously are in no such danger. She's saying like even more broadly, like these women are just jealous. I mean, what she's saying is these women are venting their envy against the sexually attractive women and they want to destroy like heterosexual society on that basis. And in fact, she does, and we'll see in this very next excerpt, she does talk specifically about one of the big elements of this liberation movement, which was sexual liberation and access to things like birth control.
01:52:36
Speaker
Also, she looks like a woman version of comedian David Mitchell. Yeah, you're not wrong. Where does she get off exactly? Yeah, I... Yeah.
01:52:47
Speaker
God. So let's see what she has to say about about sex. Proclaiming women's independence from and equality with men. Women's lib demands liberation from the consequences of whatever sex life a woman might choose.
01:53:00
Speaker
Oh no. Such consequences to be borne by others. It demands free abortions and free day nurseries. To be paid for. By whom?
01:53:11
Speaker
By men. The sex views professed by women's lib are so hideous that they cannot be discussed, at least not by me. To regard man as an enemy, to regard woman as the combination matriarch and stevedore,
01:53:26
Speaker
to surpass the feudal sordidness of a class war by instituting a sex war, to drag sex into politics and around the floor of smoke-filled backrooms as a tool of the pressure group chalking for power, to proclaim spiritual sisterhood with lesbians, and to s swear a eternal hostility to men is so repulsive a set of premises from so loathsome a sense of life that an accurate commentary would require the kind of language I do not like to see in print.
01:53:55
Speaker
What's your problem with lesbianism, Ayn Rand? Blank out. I do want to call out explicitly here. It is obviously a silly move to be like, oh, I can't even address this because it's so upsetting and the language is so upsetting.
01:54:11
Speaker
It is completely pathetic in the context of Randian objectivism. after staking your whole thing about volition and conceptualization and rationality and the power of reason and discourse, to actually say that you cannot engage with these ideas because they make you too upset to think about is fucking pathetic.
01:54:39
Speaker
I have no respect for it. It's hilariously stupid. Oh, and also Helen, the language she would have to use would be impolite.
01:54:50
Speaker
And we can't have that. Remember earlier, she was giving shit to some random Mensa member because he was unwilling to like ruin his friendships. Yeah. I was talking about her implicit claim that feminists were too ugly to sexually assault.
01:55:07
Speaker
Again, the implicit sexual assault is coming back here. She talks about at the beginning, women's lib demanding liberation from the consequences of whatever sex life a woman might choose.
01:55:19
Speaker
And having children as a consequence of rape is a huge part of the harms that having access to abortions or other forms of like support for pregnant women ameliorates.
01:55:38
Speaker
I think she views women's sexual assault as something that it's kind of beneath her to address the reality of. I mean... Do you ever read passages like this and think, huh, maybe Ayn Rand had a rape fetish?
01:55:53
Speaker
Helen. Oh, I'm so stupid. I didn't put that together. Okay. To her, sexual assault is sex. not assault, right? This is one of the things that i think I forget where I first heard somebody talking about this, right? But this is an idea that I think unlocks something. If you understand sexual assault as a kind of having sex, you're totally misunderstanding what it is. It's a kind of assault, right? And not to say that people don't like eroticize these things and there's not people who play around with whatever, like BDSM scenes, right? That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about like actual assault and
01:56:32
Speaker
She's just not able to visualize that because she's eroticizing it. So to her, like sexual assault is just like man's volition and it's hot. Ooh, Ayn Rand is really fucking evil. Helen. Yeah. I knew she sucked. I don't,
01:56:48
Speaker
and no idea it was this bad. i will
Rand's Critique of Intellectuals
01:56:51
Speaker
say like I will put an asterisk there of like if somebody can come around and say here's another passage where she talks about this it's not about sexualizing rape in this way i would be willing to reconsider that but on the basis of what I've read which again is not even most of the stuff she's written because she's written thousands of pages and I we have a month to prep these.
01:57:10
Speaker
We're going to start wrapping things up. We've got just a couple more excerpts here where I want to say where is she going with this essay bringing back some ideas we talked about earlier. To the credit of the majority of American women, the lib movement did not go over too well.
01:57:25
Speaker
But neither did the college activists, nor the hippies, nor the nature lovers. Yet these are the loudest voices we hear in public, and these are the snarling figures we see on television screens, displaying their sores and brandishing their fists.
01:57:40
Speaker
These are the commandos of the hater's army, who crawl out of the sewer of centuries and shake themselves in public, splattering muck over the passersby, over the streets, the plate glass windows, and the clean white sheets of newspapers, where the drippings are scrambled into a long, steady whine that strives to induce guilt and to receive compassion.
01:58:02
Speaker
In return. Yeah. The haters army. She has this problem, right? Which is like, these groups are not politically dominant and they're not majoritarian. So how do you understand them as ruining society? And it's kind of the invasion thing you were talking about. She just says it's demoralizing for people to constantly be surrounded by all these complainers all the time.
01:58:29
Speaker
And... She makes this move just after this where she talks about the average person ends up hating everything too because they're demoralized by constantly being disgusted by seeing all these haters around.
01:58:44
Speaker
It's not clear why that demoralization... doesn't stem from a lack of volition. Like it's the leftist's fault. Right. Yeah. it's It's really just very weak. But she does say like most people are being manipulated.
01:59:03
Speaker
Yeah, she doesn't she doesn't have room in her moral system for people who are sort of on intermediate ground, persuadable. Yeah, so it's like there's these manipulated people, and the manipulated people do need to like practice more volition, basically, but the fact they end up hating everything is just because they're being manipulated. But there's really these manipulators, and who are the manipulators? Yeah.
01:59:24
Speaker
The manipulators, she explicitly says, the manipulators are the intellectuals, i.e. those who disseminate ideas and whose professional work lies in the field of humanities. So she's explicitly saying, yeah, this is all like the project of the humanities.
01:59:40
Speaker
The clearest example of the psychological abyss, this is again quoting her, the clearest example of the psychological abyss between the people and the intellectuals was their respective reaction to Apollo 11. so she again brings this like Apollo 11 thing back where she's really angry that some people pointed out like, hey, we should, you know, celebrate Apollo 11, but also think about like, what does this materially mean for people? And Now that we have demonstrated this advance in technology, like, shouldn't we rethink our responsibilities to each other? And maybe what can we accomplish technologically towards caring for people and like eliminating starvation? Like all of that to her is the haters.
02:00:19
Speaker
Okay, but then the intellectuals in her imaginary are partly killers, because remember, they're killing values, but they're partly victims because they don't realize that that they are also being subsumed by this more fundamental critique.
02:00:38
Speaker
And so this is like one of my favorite little passages near the end. Who, then, are the killers? The small, a frighteningly small minority who, by the grace of default, have monopolized the field of philosophy and, by the grace of Immanuel Kant, have dedicated it to the propagation of hatred of the good for being the good.
02:01:01
Speaker
I see. It's her... The people who are really killing society are the people in philosophy who refuse to recognize their greatness. Yeah.
02:01:12
Speaker
And who instead kowtow to the traditional icons of the field like Immanuel Kant. Well, even more specifically, like, who accept Kant's examination of a divide between reason and perception. Like, it's so abstract and there's so many leaps that are just papered over by, have you just tried objectively perceiving reality? Just objectively perceive reality. It's easy.
02:01:38
Speaker
Helen, I think she might be our first crank. She's a crank. So what I mean by a crank is a crank is a person of little technical skill or knowledge, typically.
02:01:50
Speaker
who is obsessed with the development of their own theory and techniques outside the realm of traditional expertise, and who propounds those techniques passionately and develops a contempt for and often a spiritual attitude toward the people who are within the professional bounds of the field they're they're working in.
02:02:19
Speaker
So for example, the person who writes into their daily paper every month for 40 years about their revolutionary new technique for curing cancer or trisecting angles or something like that, that might be an example of a crank.
02:02:34
Speaker
And I think that fits Ayn Rand perfectly. Yeah, I really think that that's... a very good description of of what she's doing and how it's functioning. okay so she's really wrapping up now. She says, look, concept formation is hard.
02:02:47
Speaker
So she does recognize like, okay, it's not so easy as just look around and decide what the world is. There is this process, which she does talk a bunch about in this introduction to objectivist epistemology. It's not a short book of how you actually go through the process of forming concepts. It's not good, um I'll just say.
02:03:11
Speaker
It's very much on the level of the writing we've seen so far. But she's saying, look, what happened is concepts are hard. And it's actually a very Sartrean argument. Concepts are hard. And so people who she says she uses the phrase rats rushed in where lions feared to tread.
02:03:26
Speaker
That's terrible. Yeah, it's yeah She's saying, look, in order to survive, we need to understand, we need to have a comprehensive view of existence, which we rely on consciously or not. I also don't know if that's true.
02:03:40
Speaker
She says... You know, most people were struggling just trying to live their lives. People were like engaging in this kind of concept creation. And then these haters were able to just come in and undercut everyone's values.
02:03:53
Speaker
And it actually doesn't take that many people to like do this demoralizing thing. And so for most people, they just get surrounded because they have no philosophical guidance. They just get surrounded by this like general chaos of hate.
02:04:07
Speaker
And people just are trapped in this struggle with no philosophical grounding. So of course, it's like, you all need to become objectivists now so that you have a proper philosophical grounding for engaging in society.
02:04:22
Speaker
And then here's how she wraps everything up. There is no giant behind the devastation of the world, only a shriveled creature with the wizened face of a child who is out to blow up the kitchen because he cannot steal his cookies and eat them too.
02:04:38
Speaker
Quote, take a look at him now when you face your last choice, and if you choose to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply how small an enemy has claimed your life.
02:04:48
Speaker
End quote. Atlas shrugged. What is the weapon one needs to fight such an enemy? For once, it is I who will say that love is the answer. Love in the actual meaning of the word, which is the opposite of the meaning they give it.
02:05:04
Speaker
Love as a response to values. Love of the good for being the good. If you hold on to the vision of any value you love, your mind, your work, your wife or husband, or your child, and remember that that is what the enemy is after, your shudder of rebellion will give you the moral fire, the courage, and the intransigence needed in this battle.
02:05:27
Speaker
What fuel can support one's fire? Love for man at his highest potential. This to me really gives the whole game away, right? If anyone comes to you and says, hey, we have an entire class of people in this country who functionally isn't allowed to vote because of extremely racist laws across the country, and this has created massive disenfranchisement and like poverty and suffering and immiseration of millions of people.
02:05:54
Speaker
Ignore all that shit. That's not what they're saying. They hate your kid. That's right. They're coming for your wife. They hate you because you're better than them.
02:06:06
Speaker
So ignore all the shit they're saying. They don't have any philosophical guidance. They don't have any potential for introspection. Develop and cultivate a love of your own mind, and that will give you the moral fire and the intransigence needed to win.
02:06:25
Speaker
Just channel what a self-obsessed
Closing Thoughts on Rand's Legacy
02:06:27
Speaker
piece of shit you are, and pair that with some fear for your possessions and for your loved ones, and then you'll be standing in the right spot. The only thing more infuriating than how stupid this is,
02:06:41
Speaker
is how widespread this ideology is now. Like literally this is the they hate our freedom ideology, right? I'm not sure if she uses that specific phrase, but like it's there. Yeah, I mean, it's almost explicitly, it's like when she quotes Atlas Shrugged earlier when she's talking about, oh, they don't want your wealth. They just don't want you to have it.
02:07:05
Speaker
They don't want what you have. They hate existence. i mean, that's the same thing, right? It's just rephrased. Yeah. Yeah. Rip Ayn Rand. You would have loved Dennis Prager.
02:07:16
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, Dennis Prager is a big Rand head. Like, that's where all these guys get it, right? Like, that's why it's like, oh, she would have loved all these guys. It's like, well, because they all love Ayn Rand.
02:07:27
Speaker
I think a big lesson I'm taking away from this is that being a hater works. It rules. And we really ought to keep doing it. Yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine if she was on Twitter? Her brain would get so fucking fried every time someone came into her replies and told her what a piece of shit she was.
02:07:42
Speaker
Not only does being a hater work, but it actually won't take that many of us to take down society. So go on Twitter and get in people's mentions. Don't go on Twitter. Don't don't go on Twitter. Do not go on Twitter.
02:07:59
Speaker
But yeah, she would have, she would have been incredible on Twitter. Yeah. It would have ruined her life. Yeah. I mean, and here, like we really see again, as I sort of seated throughout the thing, this is the like Sartre's critique of the bigot as wanting the durability of the stone, but from the point of view of the person who is bigoted, right? It's,
02:08:18
Speaker
You just need to focus on what you have decided is your value, because of course you didn't decide, you discovered objectively what the value is. so you just need to focus on that. And then nothing can ever challenge your worldview beyond a certain level, right? Like, I think it's really telling that this is like...
02:08:38
Speaker
Right? Objectivism, the objectivists say it's a closed system, right? Like the conclusions, the analyses and understandings of specific examples can change, but the axioms are not subject to change because those are fixed and we've solved it and we've objectively determined what underpins reality. And it is like the fact that existence exists, like literally the axiom of existence is existence exists. That's the sentence.
02:09:01
Speaker
And we perceive existence through consciousness. That's the second one. And then the third one is things are basically it's like the axiom of identity, but just like about things in the world. So like a very empty statement about just like things are the things that they are because of what they are. And she gets from that to we should celebrate plastic cups and not ancient pottery.
02:09:24
Speaker
And, you know, I wanted to talk about her because we talked about Powell. And with Powell, I focused a lot more on these kinds of cultural things. But I sort of said at the end, like, look, Powell also had this economic vision.
02:09:35
Speaker
And it's very similar to Rand's economic vision. Both of them were actually at some point interested in like the Austrian School of Economics, which we will talk about on a later episode. But there is this link, which is like, there's this link between this like very almost classical liberal, but kind of libertarian, like laissez-faire capitalist economic understanding.
02:09:58
Speaker
and this approach to bigotry that I think she just demonstrates really well in this essay, right? Because if you believe that laissez-faire capitalism is perfect and everyone is able to rise to the level of their volition by capitalism, and that's what determines somebody's success, there is a fundamental limit to what you can accept when it comes to critiques of society, critiques about critiques of racism, of misogyny,
02:10:27
Speaker
of nationalism, of all these things. And they're they're not like separate. It's not like, oh, she was a libertarian and also a racist. it I think she does a really good job explaining here. It's maybe the one successful thing about this essay of showing how how and why these two things have to go hand in hand and why it is the case that all these like Silicon Valley tech guys who are super into Ayn Rand and who are constantly like, we're living through Atlas Shrugged or whatever, are also misogynists.
02:10:55
Speaker
and racist. So yeah, that's Ayn Rand. Of the things we've looked at so far, none of them have needed the audience's narcissism so significantly as this does. You've got this philosophical shell, but it's so clearly just like a flimsy veil over ah her ego, her sense of hubris, her desire to be acknowledged as superior and to exert that superiority as power over others.
02:11:24
Speaker
Like you have to be kind of a fucking weirdo to like this. On some level, I think you're absolutely right that this philosophical shell is wrapped around this fundamental like veneration of the ego. But the thing is, the philosophical project is the veneration of the ego, right? Like she would not object to being described as an egoist. She described herself as an egoist. Her whole thing is that ego is good.
02:11:47
Speaker
So it is not even like subtly hinting at saying at like preying on the reader's narcissism. It is openly inviting you to be narcissistic as the fundamental source of all values. If I found out someone was a fan of Stephen Leacock,
02:12:11
Speaker
that actually might not tell me that much about their personality. If I found out someone was a big fan of Enoch Powell, that would tell me a lot about their political beliefs. There would still be a lot of room for variation in their personality.
02:12:26
Speaker
Even the same with Andrew Anglin. There's a variety of Nazi personalities. If I found out someone was a huge Ayn Rand fan, I feel like I'm i'm like 80% of the way to having their personality picked.
02:12:41
Speaker
Yeah. I think it's time for us to do a little science and give Ayn Rand an FAG score. That's right. We rate our authors on a three-point scale.
02:12:52
Speaker
F for ferocity, a for arrogance, and G for gullibility. One to five on each. Yes. So where do we think Ayn Rand sits on ferocity?
02:13:09
Speaker
she would be relatively low if it were not for the fondness for Ray. Yeah. That's the thing that really, I think she doesn't get specific enough for me to rate her higher on ferocity. Like,
02:13:24
Speaker
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that she had much more specific and ferocious attitudes. But sort of because of this thing where she just says everything is just people being a hater, right? She doesn't get into like specific stereotypes or like some of the really vile stuff we've seen in some other writing because she's not even really able to like work at that level of specificity.
02:13:51
Speaker
What did I give Peck on ferocity? We both... Oh, I gave Peck a 3, and you gave Peck 2. Interesting. I think I'll give her a 3 on Ferocity.
02:14:05
Speaker
I think that's where I'm leaning to. Or I guess I rated Peck 3. So... she's She's sort of in the same class as Peck to me. would maybe say she's a little worse than Peck, but definitely not up to 4.
02:14:17
Speaker
And it's also questionable, like, Peck... also had that whole thing about right like disbelieve women when it comes to them making claims about being assaulted like but Ayn Rand does go in for a bit more racism I think than Peck did although it's sometimes hard to compare these guys because they're you know but I think you're I think yeah I think I'm gonna go with three as well It's weird how these ambiguities keep interposing into our scientific and objective system.
02:14:45
Speaker
Well, that's the nature of science. Actually, this is one of the things that i kind of glossed over. But when she's kind of summering everything up and she's talking about the problems with society, she really has harsh words for like different disciplines having different techniques, right? So she's really upset that like...
02:15:01
Speaker
physics and math and sociology and chemistry and literature all look at the world in different ways and aren't necessarily interested in integrating all that into a system. And she thinks that's like further like mystification of the humanities and like further like downstream of the like corruption of knowledge by Immanuel Kant. Classic crank shit right there. Yeah, it's really it's really crank stuff.
02:15:27
Speaker
Hopefully she would appreciate our so our our attempt to set things in order with this scientific assessment. Okay, moving on to arrogance. I think I might need to crack a six here. Yeah, I agree. Because this is definitionally arrogant. Like, this is what arrogance is. Like, in the future, when I want to know how arrogant someone is being, i will be thinking about how similar they are to Ayn Rand. Like, and I think she would even enjoy being a six because that means that we are recognizing her acute power of volition.
02:15:59
Speaker
Okay, Ayn Rand, you get our air against six. Enjoy. So I think she would appreciate being welcomed into that rarefied air.
02:16:09
Speaker
Gullibility. Yeah. I mean, there is, for the same reason that Powell is a five, she is a five. She believes wholeheartedly she's fighting the good fight and has completely swallowed like the glory of imperialism and colonialism just without any...
02:16:29
Speaker
even ability to recognize that there might be something there. Okay, Helen, how do our scores shake out? have given her a f FAG score of 14.
02:16:40
Speaker
And so did you because we agreed on all of our ratings. So a victory for science, because sometimes we don't agree, but this time we did. how How does that place her on her overall f FAG rankings? Well, same as Enoch Powell.
02:16:54
Speaker
And you also actually gave Andrew Anglin a 14. Because Anglin was much less gullible for you, but made it up in ferocity. I think that's a correct read.
02:17:05
Speaker
I have Anglin at 15 just because I bumped his gullibility up a little bit. For me, she's tied for second with Powell. For you, it's a three-way tie of our last three episodes. So we've been getting progressively worse with each of these finds. Like, we read Leacock. I lost my mind reading some of those Leacock excerpts. That was maybe, yeah, that was objectively the best thing we've read so far in terms of being, like, not bigoted.
02:17:32
Speaker
We've just been getting worse every time. Okay, well, next week we're doing Mein Kampf, so. Oh my God. You know, it's important to read sometimes. I should really put this table up on our website, which we have a website now to the listeners who didn't know.
02:17:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's www.odmsymposium.com. So if someone asks you for a link and you're too embarrassed to link to our Patreon, you can use that.
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02:17:59
Speaker
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02:18:09
Speaker
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02:18:22
Speaker
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02:18:33
Speaker
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02:18:49
Speaker
Yeah, we neither of us have any experience with like media or promotion in this way. And all of these podcast episodes take hours and hours and hours of us like researching and recording and editing. And we are just sort of doing it because it's fun. I mean, I'm having a great time doing it, but it would be nice if we had a little more support there.
02:19:11
Speaker
so yeah, check patreon.com slash ODM symposium. See you all next time. Bye. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live. Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! turn against us like Darth Vader.
02:19:39
Speaker
Do it live! Now listen, you. Write a calling name. Let's get it. Let's get it. And you'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
02:19:52
Speaker
level of masochism.