Objectivism is a still-birth philosophy, and yet it hasn't inflamed the world the way it promised to do. How did this happen? And why hasn't it caught on in the 21st century?
00:00:40.000Now, as most of you know, objectivism is the philosophy promoted by Ayn Rand, authored by Ayn Rand.
00:00:48.000She's the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and it's worth noting that she is an incredible figure.
00:00:56.000She escaped communist Russia to move to the United States, learn a brand new language, and become an incredibly accomplished author in a language that's not her native tongue.
00:01:08.000And when I say incredibly accomplished, I mean she is arguably the best novelist from the 20th century.
00:01:16.000Atlas Shrugged, from its construction, its language usage, and even its characters, is a stunning work. It's a masterpiece.
00:01:24.000And upon first reading it when you're 21 or 22, you know, maybe the villains seem a little bit cartoony.
00:01:31.000But as you get older, you start to realize that they're not cartoony at all. These people are all over the place.
00:01:40.000Now, objectivism promised to be this new philosophy, a modern philosophy of pure rationality, of capitalism, of atheism.
00:01:52.000It proposed to create a civil society without God and without superstition.
00:01:58.000It wound up just becoming so incredibly popular at a time when we were fighting socialism and communism head-on in the world, as opposed to indirectly as we are these days.
00:02:10.000It still sells incredibly well, and yet objectivism is a still-birth philosophy.
00:02:19.000It hasn't inflamed the world the way it promised to do. Certainly her books are still very influential, but the philosophy itself hasn't really gone anywhere.
00:02:31.000Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine described it as the world's most unlikely cult.
00:02:37.000And if you meet the members, the hardcore adherents of objectivism, many of them do seem to be a little bit off, much like cult members.
00:02:47.000So why is it? How does this come about? How does such a reasonable philosophy that seems such a perfect fit for the 20th and 21st century, how does it go nowhere?
00:03:01.000Well, let's start off with the simple critique. The critique of overweening greed.
00:03:13.000Now, Ayn Rand championed greed. She championed selfishness, the free market, you know.
00:03:20.000She wrote about the tyranny of the selfless and how, through selfish motives, everyone is better off.
00:03:29.000You know, a form of radical honesty in a way.
00:03:32.000And yet, what do we see when we look at this amazing woman, this extremely accomplished woman that did so much with her life, but who is also an imperfect human being?
00:03:44.000What do we see when we examine her personal life?
00:03:47.000And so the simple critique of it is simply Nathaniel Brandon.
00:03:54.000Now, Nathaniel Brandon was a member of objectivism, part of her inner circle, who became her lover, even though he was 25 years her junior.
00:04:06.000Both he and she were married at the time, but they rationalized this.
00:04:13.000They rationalized the cheating on their spouses by saying that, obviously, our minds are so perfect, the only reason that you fall in love is because you meet a perfect mind.
00:04:23.000So in our case, it's okay to break our wedding vows.
00:04:26.000They did inform both of their spouses about the whole thing, but nonetheless, they were taking their needs as more important than the needs of those around them.
00:04:37.000Because they were selfish, it was okay for them to break a contract.
00:04:42.000But what happened that really drove all of this, that really caused things to explode, is that Brandon wound up getting another lover.
00:04:52.000And when Ayn Rand found out about this, she just flipped out.
00:04:58.000She kicked him out of the inner circle.
00:05:00.000She posted a memorandum excommunicating him from the objectivist movement to all of its members,
00:05:06.000without detailing specifically what he'd done, because the affair was kept secret for most people, but utterly blasting him.
00:05:13.000So you see this selfishness again and again, that if you have this sense of self, if selfishness is your highest value,
00:05:26.000if honor isn't, if honesty isn't, beauty, truth, etc., if selfishness is your highest value, why would you ever honor a contract?
00:05:37.000Because with any contract, there's going to come a point where it becomes inconvenient.
00:05:42.000If you get paid in advance, for instance, actually producing the product is now a little bit inconvenient.
00:05:49.000If you promise to meet these specs, and it proves to be a little bit more difficult than you thought at first, now it's inconvenient.
00:05:58.000And if you're thinking with selfishness, with no differentiation between long term and short term, then you are very prone to rationalize things.
00:06:09.000To rationalize the short term over the long term.
00:06:13.000And when you have an entire society embracing this sort of radical selfishness, an implosion is guaranteed over the long run.
00:06:23.000Contracts will eventually become meaningless.
00:06:27.000And it's ironic that one of the best examples of this is the modern marriage contract, which has just been completely eviscerated.
00:06:34.000Modern marriage is nothing but dating plus one.
00:06:36.000And so we see an early version with Ayn Rand breaking the marriage contract for short term selfishness,
00:06:44.000and thus missing out on the long term potential.
00:06:47.000If she could have stayed friends with Brandon, if they could have stayed together, the movement never would have split along these two lines.
00:06:57.000But because she went for the short term, because she was selfish, it did split the movement.
00:07:03.000So that is the simple critique of objectivism.
00:07:08.000That, yes, selfishness in the sense of the free market, in the sense that people are self-interested,
00:07:15.000and rather than fighting this aspect of human nature, embracing it and using it for the good of society.
00:07:23.000But using that alone, this radical selfishness, raising it up above and beyond all else,
00:07:35.000will inevitably lead to the very chaos that Ayn Rand was trying to fight.
00:07:41.000That you need more for a society to function, that there is a role for charity.
00:09:32.000But it winds up being a snake eating its own tail.
00:09:35.000So if we go with happiness, well, there's a strange thing about happiness.
00:09:44.000As a society, and in fact, this has appeared in many societies in most periods, what you find is that people like having a scapegoat.
00:09:57.000People like blaming somebody for all of their problems, and assigning responsibility, and torturing that person, burning them alive, eating them, to make up for their own self-hatred.
00:10:12.000It's the sacrificial king that needs to be put to death every year so that his blood can fertilize the fields.
00:10:20.000In modern society, we see this with celebrity culture, where they take these poor young starlets and raise them up to be, you know, semi-divine deities almost.
00:10:33.000And then ten years later, just rip them apart.
00:11:13.000And yet, if you're talking from a utilitarian standpoint, people like that.
00:11:20.000If a million people get enough pleasure, enough hedons, you know, hedons is the hypothetical measurement of happiness.
00:11:28.000If a million people get enough hedons torturing somebody to death that it cancels out the hedons from the negative hedons that were experienced by the person being tortured, by pure utilitarian philosophy, that's justified.
00:11:45.000Now, utilitarians are very well aware of this.
00:12:45.000It's, if you, if we look at this from a, instead of hedons, if we look at it from a financial perspective, if you were arguing, if your justification, your definition of good is wealth, is GDP, and that's all you're looking at.
00:14:22.000And so we need to come up with this mathematical concept to create ethics out of nowhere.
00:14:29.000And yet all these patches that they apply to utilitarianism imply that there's a higher morality.
00:14:39.000Why is it that torturing one person to death a year, you know, throwing them into the volcano, feeding them to the dragon, why is that wrong?
00:14:53.000You know, by their math, you know, if you take the walking dead of India, the enormous underclass in India, and ask the question, do those people find value in their life?
00:15:11.000Each of those people finds value even though they are incredibly poor, sick, starving, they don't have the chance to become educated, they don't have opportunities like that, they don't have a lot of freedom.
00:15:24.000And yet they still find value in their life.
00:15:28.000In that case, utilitarianism would argue that you should have as many children as you possibly can.
00:15:34.000It doesn't matter, like, even if you can't afford them.
00:15:37.000Because each of your children will still find value in life, even though you can't put shoes on their feet or hot food in their bellies.
00:15:45.000So rather than having a responsible number of children, you should have as many children as possible, because the net hedons have increased.
00:15:54.000This strikes us all as incredibly evil and irresponsible.
00:15:57.000And the fact that, the fact that we can debate the particulars, okay, we can, you know, how many is too many, you know, is it better to have, like, one spoiled little brat that gets a car for her 16th birthday, or three kids that they get used cars for their 18th birthday, we can debate that.
00:16:16.000But we can all agree on the principle that the conclusions of this strike us as ugly and wrong, and that we can do better than that.
00:16:28.000So by the fact that they have to patch their movement, this is what demonstrates, ironically, that the very premise it's founded upon is false.
00:16:37.000The premise that there is no higher morality, no higher truth for any of us.
00:18:20.000Which is an absolute load of nonsense.
00:18:23.000Emotions can be either rational or irrational.
00:18:26.000A man who loves his wife because of her character, because of her beauty, because of the children she's born him, because of her faithfulness.
00:18:39.000You know, a man who loves her romantically, who loves her as a being, as a soul.
00:19:50.000But it needs to be disciplined by the objective.
00:19:53.000It needs to be held accountable to the objective level of reality.
00:19:57.000Because if it isn't, you get social justice warriors.
00:19:59.000And this is what Ayn Rand was fighting.
00:20:04.000It was the social justice warriors for time.
00:20:06.000The communists, the socialists, the people that said whatever I feel is reality is reality.
00:20:12.000As opposed to whatever I feel is because of reality.
00:20:16.000It's not enough to stop at the objective, however.
00:20:22.000You see, the scientific method has limits to it.
00:20:27.000You know, people don't want to admit this, but there are limits to the scientific method.
00:20:33.000The scientific method can only test hypotheses that are testable.
00:20:37.000Many social disciplines cannot be disciplined into science.
00:20:47.000You know, a particularly bad one is psychology, which pretends to be science by creating so many of these experiments that are supposed to show aggression.
00:20:56.000But what they're actually testing is rather, will these stimuli cause somebody to act like a jerk?
00:21:36.000And to have a definition of evil, to have a definition that fits into the objective realm, you need to apply to the absolute.
00:21:43.000You need to apply to that higher realm where beauty, truth, the ineffable lie.
00:21:51.000We see this with Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
00:21:54.000What Gödel discovered, he was trying to solve the problem of Principia Mathematica.
00:22:02.000That all of the math that we use in our day-to-day lives, that builds computers, that builds office buildings, that launches spaceships to the moon.
00:22:13.000All of this mathematics, we don't know that it's true.
00:22:17.000Principia Mathematica laid it all out centuries ago, but it didn't prove it.
00:22:21.000Frederick Cordell sat down to prove it, but what he accidentally proved was that we cannot prove it.
00:26:39.000If you take capitalism as your highest value,
00:26:44.000then you're throwing away the rest of the things that allow a country to have a good GDP.
00:26:49.000If capitalism is all that matters, you open up your borders.
00:26:54.000And you flood the country with low-skilled, low-paid immigrants that don't speak the language
00:27:00.000and have their own nationalist values.
00:27:02.000If capitalism is all that matters, young men don't join the military because, quite frankly, the pay's not that good.
00:27:09.000If capitalism is all that matters, then you destroy the family so that you can suck women into the workforce and tax them to death.
00:27:19.000And now, all of a sudden, you have no birth rate.
00:27:26.000Now, things like Hobbes' Leviathan, they attempt to solve this with the powerful monarch.
00:27:32.000But it's the exact same problem again.
00:27:35.000You're trying to build a mechanical god.
00:27:37.000You know, these atheists realize that there is no god, and it's like, oh my god, I need to build one now.
00:27:45.000And so if you have a monarch that isn't serving God, that monarch is going to become a petty, useless tyrant that does nothing to allow the country to move into the future.
00:28:01.000A monarch who serves God is going to be a responsible husband, and he's going to maintain the country for the sake of his children.
00:28:09.000As well, he's going to promote moral values in the country.
00:28:12.000Whereas the one that doesn't is just going to...
00:29:16.000And when people try and be faithful to God, when they try and work on themselves and become better people...
00:29:23.000Not in the slavish, hair-shirt manner that you get nowadays, but when they actually think deeply, when they pursue wisdom, you know, when they pursue knowledge, philosophy...
00:29:35.000What you get is a moral and industrious people who recognize it as their duty to cooperate with others, as well as their duty to punish those that defect.
00:29:50.000And so you wind up with this society that is very capitalistic, that is very moral, that takes care of its own and functions.
00:30:02.000You get all of these things that we're trying to reinvent.
00:30:07.000It is literally a case of reinventing the wheel.
00:30:09.000So Ayn Rand's work was absolutely amazing.
00:30:18.000Again, her arguments against socialism are sound.
00:30:24.000Her descriptions of the looters and moochers and the monsters that you get from the socialists, the communists, the social justice movement...
00:30:34.000Her description of these people is also bang on.
00:30:37.000But the problem is, what she does, she takes this argument that was meant to be addressed...
00:30:44.000You know, an argument that was meant to criticize and disprove nonsense.
00:30:51.000And she took it and she raised it up and tried to make it her God.