Introduction to Objectivism, by Leonard Peikoff

Objectivism is the philosophy created by Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was born in Russia in 1905 and educated under the Soviets. Even as a child, she rebelled against the mystical doctrines and oppressive practices of that culture. At the age of nine, she decided she would be a writer. At 13, she decided she was an atheist. In high school, when she was introduced to American history, she immediately took America as her model of what a nation of free men could be. At the age of 21, she escaped the Soviet regime and came to America alone. The theme of her first two novels, we the Living and Anthem, is the individual versus the collective. In the Fountainhead, published in 1943, she presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing. The ideal man, man as he could be and ought to be. That man is Howard Roark, an uncompromising architect who battles a tradition worshipping establishment. Roark's independence, self esteem and integrity have inspired millions of readers for more than half a century. Atlas shrugged, published in 1957, is Ayn Rand's masterpiece. It is the story of the mysterious disappearance of leading innovators and industrialists and of how the world collapses as a result. In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand dramatizes her unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that integrates ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics, and sex. Its theme is the role of the mind in man's existence and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy, the morality of rational self interest. After Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand went on to define her philosophy more explicitly in in nonfiction works including Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, the Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, and the Romantic Manifesto. She named her philosophy Objectivism and characterized it as a philosophy for living on earth. My philosophy in essence, said Ayn Randall, is the concept of man as a heroic being with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. The following lecture by philosopher Leonard Peacock is a brief introduction to the philosophy of objectivism. Dr. Peekoff is Ayn Rand's legal and intellectual heir. He was a close associate of ayn Rand for 30 years, until her death in 1982, and today is the preeminent authority on objectivism. Dr. Peacock has taught philosophy at numerous schools, including New York University and the Objectivist Graduate Center. He is author of the Ominous Parallels and of course the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, which presents all of the key principles of Objectivism, from metaphysics to art in a logical, hierarchical Structure. Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, is the definitive statement of Ayn Rand's philosophic system.

Good morning. I have to motivate you before I present Ayn Rand's philosophy in essence to you. Why should you care about anybody's philosophy? Why do human beings need philosophy? First we have to know what is philosophy? Philosophy is the subject which studies man's relationship to reality. That a capsule definition, and it consists of five branches which I will put on the board and briefly define. There's a definite structure here for a reason. Metaphysics is the branch which studies the nature of the universe as a whole. What is real? How does reality operate? Are there two realities, etc. Epistemology, Theory of knowledge. How do you know you know? What qualifies as knowledge? What test does an idea have to go through to be able to say, I do know it? Can you ever really know? Can you be certain? All questions of knowledge is epistemology. These two together give rise to the central, not the basic, these are the basic branches of philosophy. But the central branch is ethics or morality, approximately synonyms. That's the branch which provides a code of values to guide human choices in action. How should you live? What should be the goal in life? What is right, what is wrong? And then in turn, out of there comes two derivative branches. One is politics, which is the branch which studies the nature of society and the proper role of government. And I don't think you need an example of that right now. And then coming off in another direction is aesthetics, about which you're going to say only a sentence or so in this brief overview that is the philosophy of art. What constitutes an artwork? What makes an artwork good or bad? How do you establish the standards? The overall view gives you man's relation to reality, how he knows how he should live, and therefore how he should govern his most crucial products, government and art. Now, the first thing to see about this subject is that you cannot escape it. You may escape it consciously, but then your subconscious will pick up from the world around you views on all these questions. You may have consistent ideas or contradictory ideas, but this is not like physics or astronomy or even zoology, which you could blessedly live your whole life, never hear about, and never be in any problem as a result of that. All these questions are central to a man living his life, and therefore, in some form or another, perhaps inconsistently, you have a view on all. Take for the sake of an example from the field of ethics. You want to go into a career, you decide you want to be An MD in private practice is that good, is that bad? Your priest or your mother or your mother in law tells you this is very selfish. All you're after is money. You should really be a missionary like Albert Schweitzer and go to Africa. Or you should work in a storefront clinic. You should be unselfish. You should sacrifice yourself for others. You have some view. You may have an inconsistent view. You may do one and feel guilty that you're not doing the other. But you can't escape the question, who is to benefit from your behavior if you try to escape, to switch the example and say, well, who knows these questions? There are no absolutes. Nobody can be certain of anything. And that applies to more than just ethics. That applies to all knowledge, and that comes under epistemology. And if that's true, how do you establish what you call knowledge or even whatever ideas you do hold? Do you turn to others? That's one theory of epistemology. Take public polls to find out the truth. But how do the others know what to believe? Do they get it from God? Well, God offers different revelations. Do you go by logic? What is logic? What if somebody says what's logical to you isn't logical to me? Do you agree with that? You have to have some idea, or you couldn't even let an idea into your mind. Suppose you say, well, I don't know about all this. 50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong. And I'll follow them. Well, if 50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong, that means there is no reality whatever they say that will determine the nature of reality. Well, is there a reality? If there is, 50 million Frenchmen might be wrong. Isn't that true? And I don't think I have to illustrate politics and, and aesthetics. Objectivism holds that one way or another, everyone has views on these questions, on the central questions, and that actually shapes your life and character and shapes human history. Now let's look briefly at the Objectivist. You're motivated, hopefully at the Objectivist position, at least the key position on these issues. Now, under metaphysics, the central word would be existence or reality. Objectivism begins with the axiom existence exists. There is something. What is this something? Nothing esoteric. Everything that you see, everything available to the senses, everything in the heavens, down to the contents of this cup of coffee. The sum of that is existence or reality, and that is the axiom on which Objectivism begins. What is the basic law of reality? Very simple. The law of identity, formulated first by which philosopher? Aristotle. Aristotle. I thought everybody in this room knew nothing. But that's correct. It's not nothing about anything, but nothing about philosophy. The law of identity says A is A. Things are what they are. If you fail an exam, then however unhappy that makes you, you fail. It's a fact. You might get the teacher to change the grade on paper, but still the performance that warranted the F is still that performance. And this is true of every fact, human or otherwise. So we say, well, reality being what it is, is independent of consciousness. Independent of consciousness, or what's another word for independent of consciousness? Objective. And thus, if 50 million Frenchmen, or any number smaller or greater, want something to be true, it is not true simply because they say it's true. You can wish, desire, believe. Alone or in combination with the rest of mankind. That leaves reality as such, utterly unaffected. It is what it is. A is A, no matter what the content or beliefs of the human mind. Equally, since it is what it is, it's independent of any other consciousness. And the big candidate, if you don't believe that human consciousness controls reality, is the man upstairs a supernatural being that controls reality, and that's known as God. Now, for the very same reason that we reject the idea that human beings, the content of their mind, can change reality, we say the same about a supernatural being. So in essence we say this in metaphysics. There is a reality, that reality is this world all around us. We deny subjectivism. That's the idea that the human subject, simply by manipulations within its mind, can change reality. And we deny supernaturalism, which is the idea that there is some superpower force, God, whatever, that controls or affects this world. So we are therefore atheists, but also a gremlinists and a Santa Clausists. We're against all forms of the supernatural. Only the natural. And the natural world operates how? By causal law, by cause and effect, each thing acting in accordance with his nature. There are no miracles, no chance in the sense of strictly causeless events. No use praying, because there's nobody to pray to. And even if he could hear your prayers and was there, he can't do anything about it. His things are what they are and do what they do. Does this mean human beings are subject to cause and effect? Absolutely they are. But we go on to say that one form of cause and effect is human will, that man does have the power of choice, the power of volition, the power to think or not. And that is the first cause in a whole subsequent chain. Now let's turn to epistemology. You have a tiny sketch of our view of metaphysics, epistemology. The key word is reason. Reason. We believe that reason is the only means of knowledge, And thereby we contrast that with mysticism. Mysticism is the view that there is a non rational, non sensory means of knowledge. Reason means starting with the senses and then using logic to come to conclusions. On its basis, mysticism means you can dispense with the senses, logic, argumentation. You get a direct, unmediated insight somehow into reality, which could be faith. One form of mysticism, revelation, intuition, esp, et cetera, et cetera. Now, we reject any form of mysticism. Obviously, in this brief overview. I can't give you the detailed arguments that I presented in my book, but just a sketch, sort of a table of contents of Objectivism. Now, reason has three crucial elements that are central. As I say, to begin with, reason starts with the evidence of the senses. Seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling. We regard those as completely valid and as the foundation of all other knowledge. Therefore, we reject out of hand every idea from the early Greeks on up that suggests that the senses are invalid, that they give us illusions, that we can't tell the senses from hallucinations, that if they were Martians they would have different senses from us, et cetera, et cetera. All that is covered in Objectivist literature. But I'm just giving you a blanket viewpoint on the basis of sensory observation. Human beings have the unique capacity to form consents or abstractions. And Ayn Rand's book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is entirely devoted to how to form concepts. And she holds that concepts are also objective. In other words, they are not a product of the arbitrary decree of society, and they are not a revelation from God. As, for instance, Plato and his Christian followers later held, Concepts are our way of organizing sensory data, but they are an objective way, and there are definite rules of forming them. And therefore, when you use them properly, you can claim to have objective knowledge, but now to use them properly, you have to put them together using logic. Logic is the method of reason. Logic, of course, was invented by Aristotle, not by Objectivism. But we subscribe entirely to Aristotelian logic, the essence of which is you can't have your cake and eat it too. Nothing can be A and non a at the same time and in the same respect. That's the essence of logical thinking, to put the data together in a way without contradictions. And why can't you have contradictions? Because we're trying to know reality. And the basic principle of reality is A, is A. There is no contradictions in reality. Now the result of using reason as your means to knowledge is that you can rely on the conclusions that you come to. Your knowledge is certain. And we therefore reject skepticism. Skepticism is the idea there are no absolutes. Nobody can be certain of anything. It's all a matter of opinion. What's true for you isn't true for me, et cetera. We reject that entirely. We hold that truth is objective, rational, and that every truth properly understood is an absolute. Even the truth that there are less than 100 people in this room. If you specify time and place is eternal and immutable for all time, it'll be true that today in this room there are less than 100 people. So, so far from there being no absolutes, every truth is an absolute. But you must use reason to arrive at the truth. Mystics think that there's truth, but you just have to expose yourself passively to the world and the truth will write itself on you. Skeptics think the truth, if there is any truth, is really just inside your head. It's subjective and it varies from person to person. You really can never know an outside reality. Objectivism holds the truth lies, and the proper relation between your mind and reality, between consciousness and existence. You have to look out to get the truth, not look in. But you can't just look out and wait for a dogma to strike you. You have to look out and work. Use the correct method. And the method, as I tried to indicate, is observation, concept formation and logic, rather than just waiting passively for an illumination. And then you will be given guaranteed knowledge. What about emotions? You ask. And we say, emotions follow from your convictions. They are fine and you should enjoy them as much as you can. But they are not means of knowledge. The fact that you feel strongly that 2 and 2 make 6 does not count. All right, now let us go to ethics. This is a lightning like survey of the philosophy. And if I had to put one word down under ethics, I would put selfishness or egoism. Now, when we get to ethics, we must follow our basis. Epistemology tells us we have to get knowledge by reason. And therefore that applies to every field, including ethics. And therefore ethics can't be based on whim, on my feeling or your feeling, or society's feeling, or God's feeling, if there was one. The battle today, of course, is God gave revelations. One side says, the other says no. Society sets ethics and we say both are wrong. Both of those are a form of not recognizing that reality is objective and reason is objective. And therefore, when we come to ethics, we have to ask what in reality gives rise to ethics? It's not anybody's arbitrary say. So what makes ethics necessary? And Ayn Rand's answer is the fact that man is a living being who has to act in a certain way in order to keep himself alive. Now you might say, isn't that true of animals too? Yes, certainly. But animals don't need ethics because they have no choice, no free will. They're automatically programmed to support themselves and keep themselves alive. Man has not as witnessed the state of the world. He can commit suicide, murder and all purpose, mayhem. So if he is to remain alive, he has got to have man's life as his standard and then figure out all of the means objectively required by the nature of reality in order to achieve this goal. Which leads us to the question, well then, how does man achieve man's life? What is the basic virtue? According to Objectivism, virtue means the kind of action in virtue of which you achieve your values. That's the old initial meaning of virtue. It doesn't mean, for objectivism, chastity and poverty. And the fundamental virtue we hold is rationality, the use of your intelligence, the full use of your mind in thinking and understanding. We hold that man survives by the use of reason. Reason is not simply, is not at all a side issue for chess players or professors detached from life, it's a vital practical necessity. It was required to make the earliest tools, to grow the earliest crops. Everything that we have that keeps us alive, medicine, modern technology, you name it, is a product of man's ability to think. And all our disasters and failures through the years is a product of of errors which were anti reason errors or individuals. Therefore, for objectivism, the primary virtue is rationality. And that leads to a whole further series, justified not as ends in themselves, but on the grounds that they are required if you are to achieve man's life. For instance, independence is a crucial virtue. You using your mind to come to conclusions on the basis of your own best judgment as against being an authoritarian and just mouthing what the authorities around you say. Obviously that is a corollary or result of rationality. Because if you don't think independently, you're really not thinking, you're just copying what other people say. Similarly, integrity, acting according to what you think is a crucial virtue. Otherwise why think it if you're not going to act on it? Productivity, using your mind to create physical wealth is a crucial value, otherwise mankind cannot survive. And there are many other such virtues. Who is to be the beneficiary of all of Your behavior, is it somebody in another dimension? No, there's just one reality. Is it society? No, there are only individuals. And each individual has the same choice, life or not. And which choice confronts you, Your life or not? So you, according to Objectivism, are to be the beneficiary of your actions. That means an ethics of rational self interest. Each man lives by his own mind and for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor others to himself. Now we're given the choice as it stands today. You're an altruist, you sacrifice yourself for others. And a selfish person is supposed to be somebody who sacrifices others for himself. Cut my throat for you or cut your throat for me. We regard this as a false alternative and reject both sides. We're against throat cutting. We believe that you achieve on your own. If you want something for someone, you offer a trade and you trade value for value to mutual benefit by mutual consent. And if you practice this type of value or this type of ethics, you will never have to worry about should I be moral or should I be practical? Now that whole dichotomy comes from defining ethics as self sacrifice and then finding that you can't live by it. So you got to be moral and practical. You're constantly torn, which most people regard as self evident. But according to Objectivism, there is no such dichotomy. Since moral is what preserves and enhances life. It's definitely practical. And the only way to be practical is to be moral. And now that brings us to the main social application of ethics, which is politics, is simply the application of ethics to social questions. And here I would put down capitalism as a one word summary, laissez faire capitalism, in other words, the complete separation of state and economics, just as we have the separation now of state and church. So I do not mean by capitalism the mixed economy, which is basically what we have today, which is some fascism and some socialism and some capitalism and a few other things all tossed into apart a melange of conflicting ideas. I mean by capitalism, pure laissez faire capitalism, where the foundation of the system is individual rights. But I hasten to say that by individual rights I mean it as the founding fathers of this country meant it. I do not talk about the rights of an embryo, only of human beings once they're born. And I do not offer them the right to a trip to Florida, a guaranteed job, guaranteed hospital bed, daycare, night care, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They have only got the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and Property, the property they can earn by their own effort. And we say that the function of government should be to protect the these rights and only these rights. How can you violate these rights? What does the government have to protect us from? Basically, there's only one way to someone to take away your life, your liberty, your property, and that's to initiate physical force against you. Steal your property, tie you up, stab you in the heart, et cetera. There's an indirect form of force which, which is fraud, where I rook you out of your property by misrepresentation. So you're still doing it against your will. The government, for an objective of society, is strictly an agency to bar the use of physical force, direct or indirect, and thereby to leave each individual secure in the knowledge that what he achieves by his own effort, his rights, are inalienable within his own sphere. No one and no group can interfere. By the same token, the government offers him nothing. It doesn't offer him welfare or special favors of any kind. It's not in favor of any individual or group. It doesn't offer special, quote, protection to TV watchers or stock traders or big businessmen or small businessmen or labor or farmers, or subsidies for college students, etc. Etc. Etc. Laissez faire means hands off, leave us alone. No welfare state, no Social Security, no Medicare. What would there be then in under capitalism? Three main agencies of the government. The police to protect the citizens from domestic criminals, the military to protect the citizens from foreign aggressors, and the court system so that citizens would be able to resolve disputes in a civilized, rational fashion without the need to have recourse to war on the streets, which would be back to the rule of force. Now we hold that only this, quote, extreme, in other words, consistent approach to government can or ever has or ever will work. If you try to mix this approach with some elements of government control, as we have today. And of course, the government controls have been growing and growing. We hold that the end result of this mixed economy is got to be dictatorship. Not in the sense that it's inevitable, but it is inevitable if the country doesn't change its direction. A mixed economy tells you the government can step in on behalf of some group and give them a favor, of course, which makes all the other groups hurt because that favor had to come from them. Since the government produces nothing, it can just hurt one group in order to help another. So, so that group clamors for some more, controls, handouts or whatever, and then another group does. This has been the history of the United States for well over 100 years. And if you look at the whole history, you'll see that every set of controls has necessitated further controls and further controls. And today our political movements don't even question that we need more and more controls. They simply divide over which control should come next. The liberals, for instance, tell us we need more and more economic controls, but let's not have spiritual or moral controls. And the conservatives say, no, we need economic freedom, but we need more controls over thought. Have to legislate against obscenity, we have to legislate against abortion, we have to mandate prayer in the schools, we have to teach creation as on a par with the theory of evolution. So the conservatives are actually worse from the point of view of injecting the government into intellectual, ideological matters and trying to mandate a viewpoint down the throats of helpless young students. The point being that although these two groups fight vociferously, they are both for the same end result. Bigger government, more controls, no matter what their rhetoric is. And that brings us to art, which I can't really summarize very briefly, but I think the best way is if I just say value oriented. And by that I mean art should present the world according. Also. This was Aristotle's idea and Ayn Rand's, as it could be and as it should be, as it could be, because we want to always stay with reality. That's the foundation of the whole system. We don't want a fantasy that has nothing to do with reality, or that's impossible in reality, but not merely as it could be, as it ought to be. Art is an inspiration. It's a way of giving man fuel to continue to fight the struggle. Life is difficult no matter where you live. And art which focuses on values, on the good, on giving you an inspiration, is called Romanticism. So Ayn Rand calls her aesthetics Romantic realism, to capture what could be and should be. And in literature, which is the easiest one to talk about, this means novels with heroes, with a logical plot, as against the naturalism, which would say, for instance, that there are no plots in real life, so the characters just amble on. And there are no heroes in real life, just the Joe next door. So you have a portrait of the babbitts of the twenties or the Russian aristocracy of the 1870s, et cetera. Whereas the Romantic approach gives you larger than life characters, not tied down to one decade or country, which become timeless and universal, like Cyrano de Bergerac, for instance. At the same time, of course, in addition to being opposed to naturalism and art, ayn rand was 100% opposed to what's called modern art. You can figure out easily enough when you think that modern art is called non objective art and it's smears and dots and so on, which he, the artist, mystically feels or subjectively feels represents some other dimension. And of course that's completely out on philosophic grounds from our point of view. In addition, so far as this modern art portrays a content, it's the message of horror. It's not the ordinary Joe next door, but the depraved, dipsomaniac, homicidal monster next door. And when you get that presented al at James Joyce with these 400 page sentences filled with neologisms, that is where we draw the line. Or a lot sooner than that. In music, it means melody, as against atonalism. In art, of course, it means in the visual arts, objectivity. And just to give you a clue, my favorite of the visual arts is Michelangelo. That is not mandatory on you or on anyone as an objectivist, but it gives you an idea of a view of art, what this kind of aesthetics would sanction. Now that's a quick survey, and I hope you get at least an indication that it forms one total system. Given the foundation, a certain ethics is necessary. And given the ethics, certain politics and aesthetics is necessary. So it's not just a collection of views altogether it forms a system. As I said, we do not regard philosophy, we Objectivists, as just a game. We regard it as a vital force that actually moves the world. Man survives by his mind and his ideas, while philosophy is his basic ideas. It's the ideas that are so fundamental that they extend to everyone in a society, regardless of his profession, his socioeconomic bracket, or his education. You don't have to go to school to get philosophy. You get it from anywhere, from the comic strips, from the kids on the street, wherever you get your ideas, your values. That's philosophy. So Ayn Rand gave a speech in West Point One's called Philosophy who Needs It? And the answer is, you do. Now, we not only think that you need it, we think that the whole world needs it, which of course follows. We think that philosophy is the cause of history. I'm going to give you now a little capsule history of the world. This is going to be even briefer than the history of, than the presentation of Objectivism, but give you an idea why we attach so much importance to philosophy. We think that basically all of philosophy is a duel between Plato and Aristotle. Plato was basically a man who believed in mysticism and a Supernatural world. In ethics, he believed you should give up your happiness in this life for the sake of service to the collective. He was in favor of a dictatorship by philosophers, many aesthetics. So he's the exact opposite of objectivism. Aristotle was much, much closer. He had some remnants of Plato, but he was much, much closer to the objectivist viewpoint. Now, Plato had his innings in Western history in the medieval period. And during that period, if you know the living conditions, you know that the life expectancy was in the teens, that the they were plagues of insanity, that the truly moral people, the saints, went out in the desert to mortify the flesh and drank laundry water, et cetera, et cetera, whatever they could do to get back at and destroy this horrible physical body so that they could escape and go with the pure soul to heaven. In the 13th century, Aristotle, who had been lost to the west for a long, long time, he was over with the Arabs, was rediscovered by Thomas Aquinas, and his ideas were brought back by Albert the Great and Thomas aquinas. In the 13th century. Nature or existence is here and reason is what we have to use and you should live for fulfillment. Now, he didn't get as far as politics, but those basic ideas were a charter of man to escape the medieval period. And they led within a very short period of time. Remember, there were no TV or mass media, so you didn't have overnight changes. They led to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Of course, the climax of the Enlightenment was the founding of the United States. The Founding Fathers were Aristotelians in all of the ways that I've mentioned. They believed in nature, reason, pursuit of happiness. They didn't say the pursuit of suffering or self sacrifice of the next world. The tragedy is that the Founding Fathers were also Christians, at least as far as ethics is concerned. And they tried to combine basically an Aristotelian base with a Christian Platonic ethics. They didn't really believe in God, but they were deists and they tried to bring in an element of God. And that is a contradiction at the very root of this country, at the very basis we had a country which was founded on reason and the individual, but with a big dose of altruism and self sacrifice along with it. And that combination can't exist. And it then becomes a question, which way is it going to go? Because it's an unstable radioactive mixture. And the man who made the difference was immanuel Kant in 1724-1804. His philosophy became the dominant force ever since, for the last two centuries. And he is so Mystical and so opposed to reality and so opposed to the self that he makes Plato look like an objectivist. The whole world is Kantian today. And of course the Kantians had the effect of completely destroying the American politics, wiping out capitalism, wiping out the idea of self interest, telling us reason is helpless, telling us existence is unknowable, and bringing us to the cultural anti value, anti liberty state that we're in right now. The only philosophy around that builds on and extends the Aristotelian heritage is Objectivism. So in that sense, we regard Objectivism as a revolution, a revolution away from Kant and any form of religion or mysticism. We regard it as the true original basis of America, as the philosophy that the founding Fathers were implicitly accepted but contradicted unwittingly. And therefore we hold that Objectivism is the only hope for the future because it's the only pro reason, pro self individualist philosophy. In our judgment, it's the essence of Americanism, taking away all the religious contradictions, the mystic, the pro sacrifice element. Now, we don't believe in determinism, the idea that everything is inevitable. We do believe there is hope for the future, even given the state that we're in right now. There's no certainty about the future. There's certainty about knowledge. But since human beings have free choice, no one now can predict what the future is going to have to be. A negative outcome is certainly possible and we're a long way down a very bad road. And that negative outcome could include civil war, economic collapse, international war, and a new Dark ages. I certainly think that is possible and possible in your lifetime, if not in mine, because I think things have reached a very bad state. On the other hand, the positive is also possible and there is still time for it. And that is what Objectivism stands for. A new American Renaissance based on the fundamental ideas and values that made this country so great. But those ideas consistently defended philosophically with no concessions to their antitheses. That's the battle that we are fighting and I invite you to join us. Thank you. Yes, you say that we should be selfish, and yet at the same time you say that we don't, we shouldn't go around, you know, cutting other people's throats and whatnot. I just don't see how the two are compatible. I mean, what, how is it consistent to say, be selfish and don't cut other people's throats? Selfish means take those actions which are to your interest. Now, your interest has to be defined by what will enhance your life, your life as what A fish? No, your life as what you are, a rational being, a being who survives by reason. Now you have to determine what's to your interest objectively. I might say to you, for instance, after I've had some lsd, which I don't take, but as an example, I'll go up to the top of the Empire State Building and what will give me true fulfillment and really enhance my life as leaping off and flying around the Chrysler Building. I may feel that that's to my interest, but obviously I'm engaged in a totally self destructive action that is not to my interest. By exactly the same reasoning, I may feel that robbing a bank or stealing from someone is to my interest. But Ayn Rand offers, and in my book I offer a very lengthy discussion of why you actively harm yourself by so doing. Why if you do gain a million dollars and even if the police don't catch you, you suffer tremendous harm in your actual ability to cope with reality, in your confidence, in your ability to perceive and grasp facts. It's like you are taking a delicate mechanism and by that one act you are throwing sand in the gears. Now that is a metaphor that I'm saying right now, but I would suggest you read my chapter on honesty and see why attempt to survive through fraud has to lead to the destruction of the perpetrator, even if he gets away with any one crime. And this is true of every crime, if you attempt to survive by the animal means. Animals can survive by brute force. That's all they have. Man has the faculty of reason. And just as a plant can't try to survive as anything but a plant and an animal as an animal, a man must try to survive as a man using his unique faculties. He can't survive by brute force the way animals do, any more than animals can survive by just sinking their feet in the earth and saying this feels good. Let them serve as roots, because they won't do it. I haven't given you the ins and outs, but that's the principle of the answer. Yes, I was wondering. I don't understand what objective means because at the start you said that reality.

Is independent of consciousness, so it's objective. And then later you said that concepts.

Are objective, but they're in your mind. Very, very good point. Objective actually has two senses. In the metaphysical sense, which is the least important, it means simply independent of consciousness. But when we apply it to the products of the human mind, like ideas, thought, truths, value judgments, etc. We mean by objective that that content, the idea or whatever it is was formed in accordance with a deliberate method based on the nature of reality, so that it is objective in the sense that the object, reality is what the subject, the mind, was looking at at each stage, informing it. Objective does not mean true. You could even have an objective idea and yet make a mistake, as science sometimes has done. But by the very fact that it's objective, that it's based on a method based on reality, it becomes self correcting, you see, from a thousand different ways that an error has been made and you re correct it. So objective means, in effect, a volitional adherence to reality in the process of forming your mental content. Now, what that method and adherence consists of, that's the whole subject of epistemology. How to form concepts, logic, etc. That's a very good point, though. That is that epistemological sense is by far the most important meaning of objective. That's actually why Ayn Rand called her philosophy objectivism, because there were philosophers before who believed in reality independent of us. But she's the first to believe that concept formation, and that's the key to the whole role of the mind, is objective. It's neither from another world a la Plato, or just a social convention, which are the only basic choices that history offers. I want to give everybody a chance for one. Yes, I was going to ask you.

About what you thought of a purely objective society in regards to an economical structure. What would happen to our current country as far as our economic system if we had an objective system, if we ran, if we got back to Puritan point of view?

Puritan, did you say? Well, a somewhat purist point of view or Puritan. Puritan without religion. Yeah. Well, Puritan without religion is as like Santa Claus without Mrs. Claus, you know, Puritan is the name of a religion. So let's just drop that and just call it pure. Pure. Okay, now what do you mean, what would happen? What would happen? I could answer you. We'd have tremendous wealth. Everybody who wanted a job would have one. Education system would be fantastic. Medical discoveries would be so unhampered that our life expectancy would probably be 150. You would have fantastic dramas on TV and in the movies. I don't know. Every aspect of the world would be transformed beyond your wildest dreams. But you obviously don't think that's going to happen. Who would regulate? You need some regulation. Well, you tell me what regulation you need. The only, quote, regulation that there would be would be anytime somebody tried to engage in a criminal act, an act of aggression or fraud or Force, the government would step in and put an end to it, but there would be no other regulation. Now, you tell me an example of the kind of regulation that you think would be necessary.

Well, I think that in today's current.

Society we have so much crime and.

So much fraud that without. It just seems to me that the government would have a very difficult time.

I think you could probably give a better example. But as far as crime is concerned, there is a reason why we have so much crime. I happen to have given a speech last year called what to Do About Crime and I traced the statistics. You know that the crime rate in the whole Western world fell for over a century from the mid 19th century, got lower and lower and lower until guess what decade, the 1960s, in which it turned around and has gone straight up. And they have a little bubble down now, which is making the headlines. Meaningless statistical blip. Now, why do you think crime turned around and became incredible after a whole century of dropping? Precisely because of the ideas that changed. The 60s is beloved by certain type of intellectuals because that's when the original American philosophy was finally thrown out and the counterculture came in as being the culture with the idea that there are no absolutes anymore, anything goes. Morally speaking, you should live for the community. Love is more important than personal happiness. Reality is what you reach on. Drugs, et cetera. They threw the whole philosophy out. And in methods and by definite steps that I show in this talk which is printed so you can get it. I show how and why that led and necessarily leads to an escalation of crime. Crime. But in a proper. This is simply an example of the collapse of the mixed economy. All the things which people blame on capitalism are actually not the fault of capitalism, but of the element of government that it's mixed with, which is corrupting. And it's just getting worse and worse as it goes. And the rise of crime is just one such thing. Now, if you read a book called Capitalism the Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand, she takes every standard charge against capitalism, monopolies, depressions, imperialism and war, adulterated food and drugs, you name it, the works and answers it one at a time. Shows why in theory this is bizarre, why in practice the real culprit was the government violating capitalism and why the only solution is. And there, by the way, as far as pure economics is concerned. I would suggest to you a very good economist named Ludwig von Mises. He writes big tomes, but on the subject of economics, he's very good. Yes, I have a question on a bit of a Different topic, sure. You said near the beginning of your talk that human beings are different, different from animals in that they're not programmed. But aren't they programmed in a sense, depending on which part of society they're born into or which. Even which culture in the world they're born into? You said that people pick up the philosophy from the culture that they're in, and they pick up the ideas from there. So aren't they programmed in a sense? No, I do not believe that people are programmed by the society or the culture or the subgroup in which they were born or brought up. A person can let himself be ruled by those influences, and most people choose to. And if you do, if you just simply are the way most people are, for whatever reason, they just simply let it go. They accept whatever is around them. They don't think, they don't question. Then you will grow up and be a clone of what's around you. Therefore, you'll find all the Catholics in one country, not because they independently arrived at Catholicism, but because everybody else was. So they are going to be two, and all the Jews in another, or all the Buddhists in another, etc. But you will notice that in every country there are some individuals who have all the same influences on them as everybody else, but they reject them. They can't maybe, as children, reject them outright, but what they do is say, it doesn't make sense to me. I don't get it. I don't see why. As long as you have that capacity, you're free. You won't know the answers automatically, but you're free to struggle, grow up, go out to the wider world, find other ideas, read think. That's the essence of free choice, to think or not. To exercise your mind and free yourself from your environment, or to say it's too hard. Who am I to know? And I give up. And when I say you absorb philosophy, you do, but it's not engraved on your soul till the day you turn 80, let's say, or 90. You can say, well, I accepted this all my life, but now I'm going to look at it and see if I think it makes sense. As long as human beings have this capacity, they're free. Now look at Ayn Rand, who was brought up in Czarist Russia, educated in communist Russia. Now, if ever anybody was going to grow up an authoritarian Russian mystic type, that would be her. And yet from the word go, she was opposed to it. So I think you do have free choice. It's just a question of whether you choose to use it or not. I don't believe we're programmed by environment or heredity or God or economic class or Freudian ID or any of that. Try to resist yourself to one so everyone will get a shot. Here at the back you talked about.

Capitalism and that the politics would just be the police and the law courts and the military. But what is going to be done for, like, the sick people that are in need of health care and they can't pursue their own happiness? If the government is restricted to just that, what's going to happen to them? I mean, isn't this just some cruel.

Why do you restrict your question to just the sick people? What about the hungry people? Well, them too. What about the homeless people, the people without clothes or the people without jobs? What about the people that are unhappy because they have to choose what job to take and the only way to pursue their own happiness is to the government to assign them a job. So, I mean, the logical end result of your question is going to be total omnipotent, totalitarian planning. Now, what we say is society must be geared, since the standard is man's life must be geared to the requirements of human survival. And the requirements which I tried to indicate are thought, independent thought, and then creative, productive work. If men were not capable of this, the whole species would survive. If the vast majority were not capable of this, they were all basket cases. The struggling minority couldn't keep them alive. So what you have to say is this. There is a minority who might be sick or malformed or run over by a truck or whatever and literally be unable to survive on their own. Then we say that minority does not go to the government. The government is the agency with a gun. The government is the only agency with the power of physical force. If you are in a problem, you have no justification in going to the government and saying, hold that gun against his head and relieve him of some of his sustenance for which he worked, because I'm in need. We do not hold need as a standard. The right to the pursuit of happiness was the exact wording. That didn't mean the right to happiness. It meant the right to take whatever actions you could take on your own. What do you have to depend on then? If you're helpless, and let's even say you're helpless for no fault of your own charity, voluntary, private charity, Remember, this will be for a small minority of people because there'll be no incentives built into the system for everybody to go on welfare. There is no welfare, but it used to be the case that if you had a disaster, for instance, if a farm was burned down in the 19th century through an accident, the farmer was richer afterwards than he was before because there was tremendous goodwill in society and all the neighbors would pitch in. There wasn't a problem with looking after hardship cases because they were a small minority. But once you make it a matter of right, then you can see yourself before your eyes. The needy multiply and grow because they get the rewards. And more and more people drop out of the productive realm because they are being penalized for success. So you have a completely inverted society. Now you say to me, what if absolutely no One would help Ms. X, if literally no one will, who is going to be the one that will go to the government and hold a gun on them and force them to do it? It's an unreal situation. The only way a wealthy country, which is what a capitalist country, becomes very soon, the only way they would let Ms. X die would be if there was a massive hatred of all for all, so that they were indifferent to human suffering. But that doesn't happen in a free country. It only happens in a communist or other slave state. So you don't have to worry about charity. It's always forthcoming. But the point is the system should not be judged according to objectivism, by how it helps the poor. It should be judged by how it helps, how it enables a human being to achieve human stature and achieve a human life as defined by the whole course of ethics. And therefore, helping the poor is a completely peripheral side issue. We do not give a man moral credit for giving to charity. He can't go around according to objectivism and say, I just gave to charity, so I'm a great guy and my life is justified. He has to justify his life by something hard, which is thought, work and creativity. Any bum can give money away, so it's okay to do it. But that's not what your virtue depends on. And that's not what the virtue of the system depends on. I want try to restrict it to one person so we get everybody. Go ahead. Didn't you ask one already? No, I was okay. In the same vein as that question actually is moving on to public health protection, like disease. Isn't that a responsibility of the government? No, no, not the responsibility. The spread of disease, like aids, for example, you've certainly not. It is only the responsibility of a government to step into the field of disease. If someone is actually radiating out, you know, germs or whatever from his body that become physical threats to other beings. Because that comes under the, under this fear that you cannot do anything physical to another person. So if you have a disease that is highly contagious, you are not allowed validly to walk around with that disease. And the government can properly see that you're quarantined on exactly the same grounds that you couldn't go around spraying bullets at people. In that sense, the government has a right to see that people are not messed with, even if it's involuntary and you have a disease. But they don't have any right or any ability to cure diseases. That has to be up to private medicine. The same about learning about them learning? Absolutely. There's no government research. No government research. Absolute zero. And if you want research to accomplish something, rather than have endless volume after volume of junk written to acquire a list of publications so you can go higher in the bureaucracy and get more research, funds for more, et cetera, all of it thrown down the drain. That's just what government research is. It's pressure group warfare. And really independent and innovative ideas are squelched out of it. That's one of the reasons age is taking so long. It's a very tricky and complicated disease. But the fact that the government has poured its money and its power into that is what's making it, you know, a typical post office bureaucratic empire. The solution is not to get government into things, but get them out. That's the only way you're going to have success. Just look at the medical system in Russia, either now or more when they had under communism versus in this country now. There they had government supervision and control, etc. It was a total disaster. People, people even had to bribe doctors on the side. They couldn't find the most elementary medical diagnostic tools. Stethoscopes disappeared. Now, is this because the Russians are inherently corrupt? No, it's because government is an agency of force. That's all it is. The ability to use force. Force and creativity are opposites. If you want people to discover the cause of diseases and the cure of diseases, you're counting on the mind and on creativity. The only way you're going to get any answers is to let those minds function freely. And that means it has to be removed from any agency which counts on a gun as its means of dealing. Yes. Okay, if the government doesn't fund research, then who will? Because it's not a lucrative business. It's not something that private investors would want to spe. Oh, you don't think it would be to the advantage of private investors to fund research? It Seems to me that all the medicines, prescription medicines, all of the technological inventions in medicine are all making a fortune for the drug companies and for the hospitals, et cetera. In fact, Mrs. Clinton, among other things, denounces the drug companies for making so much money. So you can't have it both ways, I would say. You see, you can't today have a long range investment. You know what I mean by a long range investment? It used to be the case, you know, that people signed 99 year leases and they put money in and they didn't expect to see the results for 20, 30 years. You couldn't dream of doing that today because everything now is so intermingled with government and pragmatism and there's so much intervention in the system, you have no idea what force is going to decide to do what and whether your investment is wiped out overnight and therefore all of business has become a kind of hit and run grab today and get out. And Americans unfortunately invest less than most other industrial countries, partly because of the taxes and because there's no stability here at all, comparably speaking. So you can't really judge today. Very few people would put money into a long range investment under today's conditions. But at a time where you could put money in and you could believe the government is not going to expropriate this company or make this whole industry illegal or suddenly give it under the power of the Food and Drug Administration, et cetera, then people did invest heavily in things like the Model T and look at computers, et cetera, from nothing. There are always people like Gates, Bill Gates, with the vision and the power. But it's harder and harder and harder now. But investment is the way to get rich in research. That was always what funded it. Nobody can afford it now because you get expropriated before your money pays off, or if it does pay off, the government comes in and says, this is an outrage. You're making a profit on people's sickness so you can't win at the back. Yeah, when you were talking about epistemology, you said, good, I'm not going to get to epistemology because we could kill a whole thing on just politics. But that's the least important branch actually. It's just a consequence of the more fundamental ones. So should be something on epistemology. You said something about reason being the.

Only means of knowledge.

And it made me think of psychics and people who like ESP and things like that and how one would know that that isn't a means of knowledge.

How do you prove it's not a means of knowledge?

How do you know that reason is the only means of know? How do I know? Well, the question you have to ask me is you're asking, how do I know that reason is the only means of knowledge? What method are we going to use in evaluating the answers? If I say to you, well, I had a revelation, is that acceptable? I had a revelation that reason is the only means of knowledge. Is that okay? Or I feel it. I have a strong feeling. So what you're telling me and asking the question is you want a reason to believe in reason as the only means of knowledge. So you've already accepted reason as the only judge. You've already, by asking the question, you have committed yourself to reason as the way of proving it. Now I can take every element of reason, the senses, concepts, logic, and anatomize it for you, break it up, show how it operates, how it's related to reality, etc. But if somebody comes up and says to me, how do you know there isn't something else? Then it's exactly like this, how do you know there isn't a pink elephant right now sitting on this lectern? Well, prove that there isn't. You can't. But the logical principle that covers that is the onus of proof is on him who asserts that something is. So if I say reason is a means of knowledge, I have to be able to show by, by defining its elements and so on. But if somebody else comes in and say I have an intuition that operates in the fourth dimension, prove that I don't. I'll say, you show me that you do. And how is he going to show you? If he points the sensory data, then he's wrecked his super dimension because he's coming back to the senses. So the only thing mystics have ever said in answer to that question is to those who understand, no explanation is necessary. To those who don't, none is possible. Therefore, in either case we don't explain. So that's it. Now I believe. Yeah. How about something from one of these earlier branches? Yes, you said that's a good question.

You said that an anti reason approach is against me morality. And you also said that religion is against reason. Yet it seems to me that the dominant way of approaching morality is through religion. So how could religion be opposed to morality when it's all that's there?

Well, when I say religion as opposed to morality, I'm meaning it is opposed to a rational view of morality. Religion of course, has had a monopoly on Morality throughout most of mankind's history, religion was originally a very primitive form of philosophy. It's like the precursor to philosophy before man was civilized enough to be able to use his mind scientifically on the questions of how to live. There were stories of gods and there was very often valuable moral teachings in those stories. I don't think all of the ten Commandments are wrong, for instance, most, but. And I don't think you should have commandments in ethics any more than you should in physics. But leaving that aside, there are valuable lessons here and there in religion, but the problem is they're in the form of primitive myths. They're not organized, they're not proved, and at root they preach some very corrupt things. The whole idea of sacrifice, the idea of original sin, of man being stained at birth, for instance, the idea that it's your obligation blindly to follow a superior being, even to the point that if he tells you take your innocent son and sacrifice him, you'll do it, you get the reference, etc. In this sense, the Bible is filled with corrupt moral ideas. So certainly, since that's what people accept as morality, religion in that sense has been the monopoly of morality. But I say since it's anti reason, it's against a rational morality and that's the main thing that is destroying the world. You can't have an industrial civilization or a free country based on a primitive, irrational code of ethics. Just as in the old days they used to actually have human sacrifices to God. Well, today they still believe in human sacrifice, but it's supposed to be to society and not to God. But it's the same primitive idea. I think we can do one or two more. So yes, you say that we have to rely on our senses to gain knowledge. But I'm wondering if our senses can fool us. Like when we think that we see a mirage, for example. Can our senses fool us? I'll give you a short answer to the that a mirage you mentioned. No, a mirage is not an error of the senses at all. The actual light waves, for instance, from the desert, heated light waves are coming to your eyes only. It's like looking in a mirror. You're getting the reflection of a city at the distance, not the actual city. What do you have to do? You have to learn to interpret the message that the senses give you. The senses are infallible as far as they go, but they do not interpret their own message. Just as when you put a finger in water and it looks bent, the senses are giving you valuable information, but you have to Learn that the cause is not the structure of the finger, but the different speeds at which light travels through water and through air. This point actually goes back to Aristotle. So you're taking us there into a good but more technical point of the validation of the senses. I want to take one last question from the very center now. Ethics. Does anybody have one question on ethics? Okay. In the Fountainhead, Ayn Rand seemed to depict Howard Rourke as being happy on the inside, but not happy on the outside. Couldn't he just have sold maybe one.

Building that he didn't like in order to make some money?

Wouldn't he be happier? No. The whole point of her novel and of her philosophy in this regard is that virtues must be an absolute. One violation of a virtue is tantamount to abandoning the whole principle and thereby putting yourself on the opposite premise. It should be just exactly like if you were a judge and you had to weigh as one man, innocent or guilty, and, you know, you went according to the evidence most of the time, but once in a while, the boss has offered you a big sum of money if you would free a guilty man or execute an innocent man. You say, well, I don't want to be an extremist. Every once in a while, you took the payoff. You had a bigger home and a boat and so on. You didn't do it all the time or even dominantly. You are a thoroughly corrupt, rotten judge and person, but inherent in that, and you will end up in the pocket of those people. Your life is just living there, waiting. And every other attribute, if you trace, if your character will suffer, your opinion of yourself, your ability to think independently because you're dominated by fear now, etc. The same is true if someone from organized crime says to you, look, I know you respect life. Every once in a while, I'd like you to go out and make a hit, pay you a lot of money. After all, there are no absolutes. You say, well, look, you want me to become a killer? They said, not all the time, just now and then. No, that's exactly the same thing as compromising your in the case of Rorke. So we do not believe in compromise unless it's within a moral principle. For instance, let's say I agree, I'm going to talk for 45 minutes. And he wanted me to talk for an hour and I wanted 30 minutes. So we compromised at 45. We both agree on the principle, we're just adjusting the detail. But if he said, I want you to talk on Buddhism, defend it. And I said, no, Objectivism. And the compromise was, I'll come out half for Buddhism and half for Objectivism, or even three quarters for Objectivism, with just an occasional reference to the Atman in the middle. It would blow your minds and wreck the whole thing. The way Ayn Rand put it in. Adler shrugged. Is it any compromise between food and poison? Only poison wins. With that, I thank you.