Leo D.M.J. Aurini - July 09, 2015


The Fatal Flaw of Objectivism

Topics
utilitarian philosophy
Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Ayn Rand John Brennan Hobbes Leviathan Gödel Frederick Cordell Michael Shermer Atlas Shrugged Bill Taylor Mathematica
Yes, Margaret, There is a Devil： An Explanation of Extant Evil NotAPodcast： The Political Compass Test

Episode Stats


Length

31 minutes

Words per minute

130.92

Word count

4,168

Sentence count

316

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:28.000 Hey folks, this video comes from Billy Taylor, who asked me to explore the failures of objectivism.
00:00:38.000 Thank you for your support.
00:00:40.000 Now, as most of you know, objectivism is the philosophy promoted by Ayn Rand, authored by Ayn Rand.
00:00:48.000 She's the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and it's worth noting that she is an incredible figure.
00:00:56.000 She 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.
00:01:08.000 And when I say incredibly accomplished, I mean she is arguably the best novelist from the 20th century.
00:01:16.000 Atlas Shrugged, from its construction, its language usage, and even its characters, is a stunning work. It's a masterpiece.
00:01:24.000 And upon first reading it when you're 21 or 22, you know, maybe the villains seem a little bit cartoony.
00:01:31.000 But as you get older, you start to realize that they're not cartoony at all. These people are all over the place.
00:01:38.000 The moochers and the looters.
00:01:40.000 Now, objectivism promised to be this new philosophy, a modern philosophy of pure rationality, of capitalism, of atheism.
00:01:52.000 It proposed to create a civil society without God and without superstition.
00:01:58.000 It 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.
00:02:10.000 It still sells incredibly well, and yet objectivism is a still-birth philosophy.
00:02:19.000 It 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.
00:02:31.000 Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine described it as the world's most unlikely cult.
00:02:37.000 And 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.
00:02:47.000 So 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?
00:03:01.000 Well, let's start off with the simple critique. The critique of overweening greed.
00:03:13.000 Now, Ayn Rand championed greed. She championed selfishness, the free market, you know.
00:03:20.000 She wrote about the tyranny of the selfless and how, through selfish motives, everyone is better off.
00:03:29.000 You know, a form of radical honesty in a way.
00:03:32.000 And 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?
00:03:44.000 What do we see when we examine her personal life?
00:03:47.000 And so the simple critique of it is simply Nathaniel Brandon.
00:03:54.000 Now, Nathaniel Brandon was a member of objectivism, part of her inner circle, who became her lover, even though he was 25 years her junior.
00:04:06.000 Both he and she were married at the time, but they rationalized this.
00:04:13.000 They 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.
00:04:23.000 So in our case, it's okay to break our wedding vows.
00:04:26.000 They 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.
00:04:37.000 Because they were selfish, it was okay for them to break a contract.
00:04:42.000 But what happened that really drove all of this, that really caused things to explode, is that Brandon wound up getting another lover.
00:04:52.000 And when Ayn Rand found out about this, she just flipped out.
00:04:58.000 She kicked him out of the inner circle.
00:05:00.000 She posted a memorandum excommunicating him from the objectivist movement to all of its members,
00:05:06.000 without detailing specifically what he'd done, because the affair was kept secret for most people, but utterly blasting him.
00:05:13.000 So you see this selfishness again and again, that if you have this sense of self, if selfishness is your highest value,
00:05:26.000 if honor isn't, if honesty isn't, beauty, truth, etc., if selfishness is your highest value, why would you ever honor a contract?
00:05:37.000 Because with any contract, there's going to come a point where it becomes inconvenient.
00:05:42.000 If you get paid in advance, for instance, actually producing the product is now a little bit inconvenient.
00:05:49.000 If 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.
00:05:58.000 And if you're thinking with selfishness, with no differentiation between long term and short term, then you are very prone to rationalize things.
00:06:09.000 To rationalize the short term over the long term.
00:06:13.000 And when you have an entire society embracing this sort of radical selfishness, an implosion is guaranteed over the long run.
00:06:23.000 Contracts will eventually become meaningless.
00:06:27.000 And it's ironic that one of the best examples of this is the modern marriage contract, which has just been completely eviscerated.
00:06:34.000 Modern marriage is nothing but dating plus one. 0.96
00:06:36.000 And so we see an early version with Ayn Rand breaking the marriage contract for short term selfishness,
00:06:44.000 and thus missing out on the long term potential.
00:06:47.000 If she could have stayed friends with Brandon, if they could have stayed together, the movement never would have split along these two lines.
00:06:57.000 But because she went for the short term, because she was selfish, it did split the movement.
00:07:03.000 So that is the simple critique of objectivism.
00:07:08.000 That, yes, selfishness in the sense of the free market, in the sense that people are self-interested,
00:07:15.000 and rather than fighting this aspect of human nature, embracing it and using it for the good of society.
00:07:23.000 But using that alone, this radical selfishness, raising it up above and beyond all else,
00:07:35.000 will inevitably lead to the very chaos that Ayn Rand was trying to fight.
00:07:41.000 That you need more for a society to function, that there is a role for charity.
00:07:46.000 There is a role for honor.
00:07:48.000 There are other values in addition to selfishness that need to be taken into account.
00:08:00.000 So as I said, that's the simple critique of objectivism.
00:08:04.000 And it's a little bit, it's a little bit unfair.
00:08:09.000 So to expand upon this, what I'd like to do, I'd like to step back from objectivism for a moment,
00:08:15.000 and look at utilitarianism.
00:08:18.000 Because utilitarianism is another one of these atheistic philosophies that proposes to save the world.
00:08:25.000 To be this modern, technological, rational philosophy.
00:08:29.000 And it has the exact same problems as objectivism, except far, far worse.
00:08:34.000 And so if we see what I like to call the utilitarian death spiral, we can then look at objectivism again.
00:08:44.000 And kind of apply those conclusions to it.
00:08:47.000 Now, utilitarianism.
00:08:50.000 Utilitarianism is the approach that we should manage society rationally.
00:08:57.000 We should say, if we value happiness, for instance, then we should try and maximize happiness.
00:09:03.000 You know, it's a very economics sort of way of looking at human civilization.
00:09:10.000 But it comes up with a fatal flaw, and the fatal flaw points to exactly why it's such a failed philosophy.
00:09:18.000 So let's say we're trying to maximize human happiness.
00:09:24.000 You know, and you can replace happiness with anything else.
00:09:27.000 You could replace it with economic productivity.
00:09:29.000 You could replace it with anything.
00:09:32.000 But it winds up being a snake eating its own tail.
00:09:35.000 So if we go with happiness, well, there's a strange thing about happiness.
00:09:44.000 As a society, and in fact, this has appeared in many societies in most periods, what you find is that people like having a scapegoat.
00:09:57.000 People 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.
00:10:12.000 It's the sacrificial king that needs to be put to death every year so that his blood can fertilize the fields.
00:10:20.000 In 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. 0.93
00:10:33.000 And then ten years later, just rip them apart. 0.98
00:10:37.000 Just destroy them. 0.99
00:10:39.000 The exact same people that were these sycophantic fans are now just insulting everything about them. 0.98
00:10:45.000 Now, we're doing pretty well in this society.
00:10:50.000 It's just psychological here.
00:10:52.000 You know, in earlier eras, we were literally torturing people for the sake of our collective sins, our collective problems.
00:11:00.000 You know, we were killing people in the gladiatorial arena, whereas now it's make-believe.
00:11:06.000 There's still a lot of human suffering involved, but at least no one's being tortured to death.
00:11:10.000 So we have got better at that.
00:11:13.000 And yet, if you're talking from a utilitarian standpoint, people like that.
00:11:20.000 If a million people get enough pleasure, enough hedons, you know, hedons is the hypothetical measurement of happiness.
00:11:28.000 If 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. 0.65
00:11:45.000 Now, utilitarians are very well aware of this.
00:11:51.000 This is an abhorrent outcome.
00:11:54.000 That even though it makes sense on paper, deep down, it's like, no, this is not right.
00:11:59.000 You know, the utilitarian philosophy justifies slavery.
00:12:03.000 The utilitarian philosophy justifies all sorts of monstrous behavior.
00:12:08.000 It justifies having a peasant underclass. 0.99
00:12:13.000 You know, because if the Brahmins get enough pleasure out of what the untouchables do for them, then that can be justified. 1.00
00:12:22.000 And on a humanistic level, we all know that's wrong.
00:12:25.000 And so what they try and do with utilitarianism is they patch it.
00:12:31.000 They add another layer and another layer to say, well, you can only cause so many negative hedons. 0.55
00:12:39.000 Or you can, et cetera, et cetera.
00:12:44.000 Et cetera, et cetera.
00:12:45.000 It'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.
00:13:00.000 Nothing but GDP.
00:13:01.000 Well, all of a sudden you have a lot of very ugly behaviors that are being justified.
00:13:08.000 You know, it could very well be that the company store is one of the most efficient ways to increase GDP.
00:13:14.000 Even though that creates an underclass that's being absolutely abused and manipulated.
00:13:19.000 Again, it can potentially justify slavery.
00:13:22.000 It can justify enormous gaps in wealth.
00:13:27.000 And just complete mistreatment of the poor.
00:13:31.000 And so then they add a patch.
00:13:33.000 It's like, okay, well, we're going to have a minimum wage.
00:13:35.000 We're going to have a minimum standard of living for everybody in this country.
00:13:39.000 Except that's still not addressing the dishonest business practices that led to this in the first place.
00:13:45.000 And so they apply patch after patch after patch.
00:13:48.000 But it never quite fixes things.
00:13:51.000 There's actually an excellent critique of this.
00:13:54.000 Very brief.
00:13:55.000 In the, it's a philosophy video game called Socrates Jones, which you can find on Newgrounds.
00:14:01.000 I highly recommend it.
00:14:02.000 Now here's the irony of all of this.
00:14:07.000 People subscribe to utilitarianism because they say there is no universal moral law.
00:14:16.000 There is no higher truth.
00:14:18.000 There is just objective reality.
00:14:20.000 There is just atheism.
00:14:21.000 That's all there is.
00:14:22.000 And so we need to come up with this mathematical concept to create ethics out of nowhere.
00:14:29.000 And yet all these patches that they apply to utilitarianism imply that there's a higher morality.
00:14:39.000 Why 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?
00:14:49.000 By their math, it isn't wrong.
00:14:51.000 By their math, it's fine.
00:14:53.000 You 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? 1.00
00:15:08.000 And presumably the answer is yes.
00:15:11.000 Each 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.
00:15:24.000 And yet they still find value in their life.
00:15:28.000 In that case, utilitarianism would argue that you should have as many children as you possibly can.
00:15:34.000 It doesn't matter, like, even if you can't afford them.
00:15:37.000 Because 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.
00:15:45.000 So rather than having a responsible number of children, you should have as many children as possible, because the net hedons have increased. 0.97
00:15:54.000 This strikes us all as incredibly evil and irresponsible.
00:15:57.000 And 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.
00:16:16.000 But 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.
00:16:28.000 So 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.
00:16:37.000 The premise that there is no higher morality, no higher truth for any of us.
00:16:46.000 So now let's return to objectivism.
00:16:49.000 Now, Ayn Rand, she once laid out the principles of objectivism in very short form.
00:16:56.000 She had four bullet points of what is objectivism.
00:17:00.000 Metaphysics is objective reality.
00:17:05.000 Epistemology is reason.
00:17:09.000 Ethics is self-interest.
00:17:12.000 Politics is capitalism.
00:17:20.000 So what are the issues with this?
00:17:23.000 Well, let's take the first, objective reality.
00:17:26.000 Now, it's been noted elsewhere.
00:17:29.000 No man wrote extensively about this, and I think his writings are absolutely brilliant.
00:17:35.000 He laid out that there are three levels of reality.
00:17:39.000 The subjective, the objective, and the absolute.
00:17:47.000 Now, the subjective is the world of emotion.
00:17:50.000 And the subjective needs to be subordinate to the objective.
00:17:56.000 One of the interesting things you see nowadays, one of the terrible things you see nowadays, is the primacy of feels.
00:18:06.000 You know, you have to be concerned about how other people feel.
00:18:10.000 You know, how what you say to them makes them feel.
00:18:13.000 And there's this idea that emotions are not rational.
00:18:18.000 Emotions are just emotions.
00:18:20.000 Which is an absolute load of nonsense.
00:18:23.000 Emotions can be either rational or irrational.
00:18:26.000 A 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.
00:18:39.000 You know, a man who loves her romantically, who loves her as a being, as a soul.
00:18:47.000 That is a rational emotion.
00:18:50.000 It is based upon objective, true things.
00:18:54.000 Whereas a man that loves a lump of rubber that's shaped to look like a woman. 1.00
00:19:00.000 When a man feels romantic attraction to that, that is an irrational emotion.
00:19:05.000 That it is being tricked, is being fooled by something that looks a lot like a human being, but it's just a piece of rubber.
00:19:15.000 That it's not rational to love a piece of rubber.
00:19:20.000 Similarly, if you are angry because somebody stole your car, that is a rational emotion.
00:19:29.000 You should be angry that they stole your car.
00:19:31.000 But if you're angry because your neighbor has a better car than you, that is irrational.
00:19:38.000 He did nothing to take your car.
00:19:39.000 He did nothing to harm you.
00:19:42.000 So the subjective level, now we can't ignore the subjective level.
00:19:46.000 It's what motivates us.
00:19:47.000 It's what gives life meaning.
00:19:50.000 But it needs to be disciplined by the objective.
00:19:53.000 It needs to be held accountable to the objective level of reality.
00:19:57.000 Because if it isn't, you get social justice warriors.
00:19:59.000 And this is what Ayn Rand was fighting.
00:20:04.000 It was the social justice warriors for time.
00:20:06.000 The communists, the socialists, the people that said whatever I feel is reality is reality.
00:20:12.000 As opposed to whatever I feel is because of reality.
00:20:16.000 It's not enough to stop at the objective, however.
00:20:22.000 You see, the scientific method has limits to it.
00:20:27.000 You know, people don't want to admit this, but there are limits to the scientific method.
00:20:33.000 The scientific method can only test hypotheses that are testable.
00:20:37.000 Many social disciplines cannot be disciplined into science.
00:20:47.000 You 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. 0.99
00:20:56.000 But what they're actually testing is rather, will these stimuli cause somebody to act like a jerk? 0.95
00:21:03.000 It's not asking what is aggression. 0.98
00:21:08.000 Because talking about aggression, well, now you're talking about ethics.
00:21:11.000 If a man points a gun at you and says, give me your wallet, and you pull out your gun and you shoot him, that is a just and noble action.
00:21:24.000 It's, so saying, is that aggression?
00:21:28.000 You know, did this person shoot back because something happened earlier?
00:21:31.000 That's missing the problem.
00:21:32.000 The problem is not aggression.
00:21:34.000 The problem is evil.
00:21:36.000 And to have a definition of evil, to have a definition that fits into the objective realm, you need to apply to the absolute.
00:21:43.000 You need to apply to that higher realm where beauty, truth, the ineffable lie.
00:21:51.000 We see this with Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
00:21:54.000 What Gödel discovered, he was trying to solve the problem of Principia Mathematica.
00:22:02.000 That 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.
00:22:13.000 All of this mathematics, we don't know that it's true.
00:22:17.000 Principia Mathematica laid it all out centuries ago, but it didn't prove it.
00:22:21.000 Frederick Cordell sat down to prove it, but what he accidentally proved was that we cannot prove it.
00:22:31.000 It is, by definition, unprovable.
00:22:35.000 Math itself only works if you take it as an article of faith.
00:22:41.000 If you make the moral choice that, yes, I'm going to believe in math, because math is beautiful, because I have faith in God.
00:22:51.000 You know, the creator of the universe, the prime mover, the thing that came before time began.
00:23:00.000 Without that, it all collapses down into chaos.
00:23:03.000 Without the absolute truth pinning up objective truth, objective truth very quickly collapses into subjective truth.
00:23:11.000 Objective truth, the universe, science, it's a container which cannot contain itself.
00:23:23.000 So either you start with the principle that there is an absolute truth out there.
00:23:29.000 We are never going to know it.
00:23:31.000 We're not capable of knowing it.
00:23:33.000 By definition, we're not capable of knowing it.
00:23:35.000 But without that higher truth, without that perfection of beauty and love, all of this other stuff wouldn't work.
00:23:45.000 Because if math is nothing but an opinion, then the people that say 2 plus 2 equals 5, they're equally right.
00:23:56.000 You know, the people that say that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is nothing but Western imperialism, they're just as right. 1.00
00:24:01.000 They're just as right.
00:24:02.000 It collapses down into the inverse.
00:24:04.000 And this is what you see from the social justice movement.
00:24:07.000 This is what you see from the monsters out there.
00:24:11.000 Is that they start with subjective truth as their highest value.
00:24:17.000 Whatever I feel right now is the truth.
00:24:20.000 And so because I feel like I'm a furry otherkin, you all need to pretend that I'm a furry otherkin.
00:24:28.000 And perfection, life perfection, utopia, that's their absolute truth down at the bottom.
00:24:36.000 Utopia is a product when everybody follows the mass delusions of the crowd.
00:24:45.000 So that's the problem.
00:24:46.000 Right off the bat is Ayn Rand is choosing objective reality, but completely renouncing the higher reality that is needed to support it.
00:24:56.000 And this continues on.
00:24:59.000 Reason, again, is just part of objective reality.
00:25:02.000 It's the scientific method.
00:25:05.000 And science works great inside the universe.
00:25:09.000 It doesn't work outside the universe.
00:25:12.000 You know, at the light speed limit, that's where the universe ends for us.
00:25:18.000 You know, there is more universe beyond it, but it doesn't exist as far as we're concerned.
00:25:23.000 Science doesn't work beyond that.
00:25:24.000 There are limits to how far we can go with it.
00:25:29.000 You know, and if we don't presuppose the existence of the universe, there is no science.
00:25:37.000 Science itself cannot prove the existence of the universe.
00:25:40.000 It cannot prove causality.
00:25:41.000 And finally, we've got, we've got, those are the foundational problems, the foundational philosophical difficulties.
00:25:54.000 Then we've got the products of these, which are self-interest and capitalism.
00:25:58.000 As noted, self-interest, without anything higher guiding it, just turns into a death spiral once again.
00:26:08.000 Because if everything is self-interest, you wind up with Hobbes' Leviathan.
00:26:13.000 And Hobbes' Leviathan starts out as this powerful monarch that forces everybody to cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma.
00:26:23.000 But bit by bit, pieces get eroded from that.
00:26:26.000 Exceptions are made.
00:26:28.000 People bend the rules until the rules start to break.
00:26:31.000 And soon there is no cooperation.
00:26:33.000 There is nothing but defection.
00:26:36.000 And capitalism qua capitalism.
00:26:39.000 If you take capitalism as your highest value,
00:26:44.000 then you're throwing away the rest of the things that allow a country to have a good GDP.
00:26:49.000 If capitalism is all that matters, you open up your borders.
00:26:54.000 And you flood the country with low-skilled, low-paid immigrants that don't speak the language 1.00
00:27:00.000 and have their own nationalist values.
00:27:02.000 If capitalism is all that matters, young men don't join the military because, quite frankly, the pay's not that good. 0.51
00:27:09.000 If capitalism is all that matters, then you destroy the family so that you can suck women into the workforce and tax them to death. 1.00
00:27:19.000 And now, all of a sudden, you have no birth rate.
00:27:26.000 Now, things like Hobbes' Leviathan, they attempt to solve this with the powerful monarch.
00:27:32.000 But it's the exact same problem again.
00:27:35.000 You're trying to build a mechanical god.
00:27:37.000 You know, these atheists realize that there is no god, and it's like, oh my god, I need to build one now.
00:27:45.000 And 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.
00:28:01.000 A 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.
00:28:09.000 As well, he's going to promote moral values in the country.
00:28:12.000 Whereas the one that doesn't is just going to...
00:28:17.000 You're the king.
00:28:19.000 Why would you get married?
00:28:20.000 Why would you have children?
00:28:21.000 Why not have children with 50 different women? 1.00
00:28:24.000 Because that way you'll guarantee more genetic lineage that way anyway.
00:28:28.000 Why not do that?
00:28:29.000 Why would you attempt to maintain the country when you could just get another ivory backscratcher? 1.00
00:28:37.000 You know, the past few centuries have seen time and time again that, as Nietzsche said, God is dead and we killed him.
00:28:48.000 And we keep trying to reinvent God by building these horrible death machines that wind up eating people alive between the gears.
00:28:56.000 We keep trying to build utopia.
00:28:59.000 The great irony is that we already had the solution.
00:29:03.000 The funny thing about morality...
00:29:08.000 Morality, it's a personal thing.
00:29:12.000 Everybody can glimpse it.
00:29:13.000 Everybody can see it.
00:29:14.000 Everybody can feel it.
00:29:16.000 And when people try and be faithful to God, when they try and work on themselves and become better people...
00:29:23.000 Not 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...
00:29:35.000 What 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.
00:29:50.000 And so you wind up with this society that is very capitalistic, that is very moral, that takes care of its own and functions.
00:30:02.000 You get all of these things that we're trying to reinvent.
00:30:07.000 It is literally a case of reinventing the wheel.
00:30:09.000 So Ayn Rand's work was absolutely amazing.
00:30:18.000 Again, her arguments against socialism are sound.
00:30:24.000 Her descriptions of the looters and moochers and the monsters that you get from the socialists, the communists, the social justice movement...
00:30:34.000 Her description of these people is also bang on.
00:30:37.000 But the problem is, what she does, she takes this argument that was meant to be addressed...
00:30:44.000 You know, an argument that was meant to criticize and disprove nonsense.
00:30:51.000 And she took it and she raised it up and tried to make it her God.
00:30:59.000 She tried to make herself her God. 0.97
00:31:02.000 And the thing is that any of us who try and do this, who try and raise our own ego up, wind up making complete fools out of ourselves. 0.88
00:31:13.000 Because we are very, very good at self-delusion.
00:31:18.000 Folks, thanks for watchin', and keep fighting the good fight.
00:31:26.000 Irini out.
00:31:27.000 Irini out.
00:31:28.000 Irini out.
00:31:29.000 .
00:31:45.000 .
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