"Thinking Versus Writing" by Leonard Peikoff

Good morning. I have been inundated by letters. So if it's not up here now, I mean, that you've done for the exercise. So if you haven't given it to me now, it's hopeless. I got here early this morning, so people who hadn't handed it in last time could. And several people took advantage of that. And I read right up until the last second. Now, ideally you would all have copies of these and it would make it much easier. But I will try to compensate for that by reading the letter through slowly once, and then focusing on only one issue in a given letter. Not trying to rewrite every letter completely, but just enough to illustrate the type of points and hopefully you will be able to get that. Actually, though, the class today is divided into three parts as an opening brief statement on the distinction between writing problems and thinking problems. And then I want to go over as, and it must be 10 or 12 letters that I've got comments to make on in that abbreviated form. I am not going to identify the writer of any of the letters simply because they won't have a chance to come back and say I meant so and so on. It's perfectly clear. And therefore it's awful for them to be excoriated without the chance of, you know, responding. So they will know in their own mind and nobody else will pick on them. And then at the end, I have some general questions about more or less about writing that I want to conclude with. And then if there's still any more time, you can ask questions. I just have to be careful with the fan there, that all doesn't blow away in my face. There's a basic distinction that's very important for you to grasp between writing decisions and non writing problems, thinking problems. With regard to any content, you can go through two stages. One is you understand it, you integrate it to the rest of your knowledge. You define the terms, you see what the reduction is back to reality. You play the devil's advocate and hammer it from every point of view until it's absolutely solid and you really get it. You answer any questions at the back of your mind about, well, what does this really mean? And this is awfully vague to me, and so on. And throughout that whole process, who are the two participants? You and God. In other words, reality. You only want to understand it and you have no idea that another person exists in this world. Only when you say, okay, I get it, I really know it now do you? Then if you want, turn to write a letter about it or a lecture about it, or a book or a magazine article or whatever. By the time you come to write, you must already know the content of what you are writing. You must understand it, because the act of writing it introduces a vast number of new considerations that cannot be dealt with so long as you don't understand the material. If you try at the same time to understand something while writing it for publication, you are in a hopeless contradiction. Because the trying to understand it means follow it wherever it leads, however absurd this would seem to somebody else. Until I really get it clear and write it for publication means do it in such an objective and straightforward and condensed way that they'll publish it. And that is an impossible dual assignment. And all it ends up in, in practice, if you try to understand while you're writing, is that you write for what you think people expect you to say, and you give up trying to understand altogether, so it becomes a complete second handedness. Now let me make sure you understand what I mean by writing here. It's perfectly all right to think on the typewriter or think on the computer, and I often do that, and I know Ayn Rand did that all the time, where you just bat out your confusions and your chaos and what do you want to know and what's clear and what isn't clear? Oh, in a sense that's writing, but that's not writing for showing anybody. That's just like the verbal record of your inner movement from chaos to clarity. So you could, you could certainly do that in writing. I'm not saying don't use writing as an adjunct or expression of thinking. I'm saying find the point in regard to a given content where you say, okay, this much I understand, maybe I don't understand anything else, but this is clear to me. And now you then turn to the question, how should I present this to somebody who doesn't know it? If you don't do that, you are going, your writing is going to be a nightmare to you and your thinking will be completely unproductive if you try to solve it by writing. Now let me give you examples of the type of choices that you have to make even when you entirely understand the content. Now I had lectured on objectivism for over 20 years when I started my book, so I had every reason to believe I understand this completely. There were still massive, difficult, complicated decisions that had to be made, which I'll give you examples of in a moment. And one of the things that happened, which I also want to let you know about, because this will happen to you too, is you think Something is perfectly clear to you. You start writing, you've made all the basic writing decisions, and suddenly you don't know where to go. And, and you realize that now that you're writing, this point is no longer clear to you. You thought it was clear when you anticipated putting it down. You thought over the whole subject, but you hadn't hit this exact point, and now you're stumped. Now, what I always did at a time like that, at the moment I realized not I don't know how to present it, but I don't know what this point is, what the real truth is, on this point, I stopped altogether, took out the paper, started on a different paper and called it thinking. And then I just for myself switch completely back to what am I confused about here? Forgetting the book, forgetting, etc. And I could go on like for 15, 20 pages until finally I say, oh, that's what the answer is. Of the whole 20 pages, there's maybe one or two adjectives that I now see would have solved the problem if I put them in. So I take those two, throw the whole thing out, and go back to the writing at the point where I blocked and reconstruct it so that it flows on. That's actually what happens in practice. You can't quote 100%, understand it, and then just bat it out. In writing. You try to understand it thoroughly, then you make your basic writing decisions, and then every time you get blocked, you try to decide what's stopping you as a writing problem or a thinking problem. And if it's thinking, put the writing aside. Now. Here's what I mean by writing problems. And all of these have to be solved if you're to have, whether it's a letter to the editor or, or a book or whatever it happens to be. These are more or less in order of importance, but not really. Number one, you have to motivate your audience. And that applies to any form of communication, including a letter to the editor. You want to say something startling at the outset, something attention gripping, something controversial. You do not want an opening sentence like Your letter from Mr. X of January 13th made many substantial points with which one could not agree. But from one point of view, it is open to criticism that's finished. I mean, no human being is motivated to go on like that. It's much better to say your letter made an egregious mistake and that's it. Don't bother to be so fair and say about all the good things in the letter something that hits them between the eyes when you start because the rule of browsers in a bookstore that you're taught if you write novels is that if they haven't been hooked for life by page three, they'll never buy that book. So therefore, editors read only the first three pages of submitted manuscript, and if they're bored at that point, they reject the book. Now, readers of Letters to the Editor read about the first three lines. So you've got to get your hook. It's like fishing, and you've got to get them between the eyes and then suck them into the letter. So that's motivation. Now, you see, that's an entirely different question from thinking. You might know absolutely that the hierarchy of that knowledge is hierarchical. But it would be a son of a bitch to try and think of an opening line that would drag people into the motivation to hear that. You see, it's an entirely separate problem from understanding. And of course, it depends what audience you're writing for. You motivate children, you motivate adults, you motivate specialists. You might be able to do it easier with people in computers who have some background and harder with the gardeners who don't in this topic, etc. Now, the second thing is this. If you. This is all these are writing distinctively, writing, not thinking problems. If you have understood correctly, you have busily integrated it, the thing you're understanding, to everything else you know. So it's part of a whole total, and that's what gives it its clarity. Only now you have to do the exact opposite. You got a short letter, even a book, believe me, of mine, which is what, 500 pages? I had to leave out most of it. Just the bare tip of the iceberg got on the paper. In other words, what am I saying? You have to do the opposite of integration to write. You have to delimit, you have to condense, you have to say, of the thousand points that are interconnected here and which I could write if I had a whole book, which one am I going to take? Which two am I going to take? And if you start off with the idea this is going to be the definitive article that says everything, you're finished. There is no such thing as a definitive article. My book is not the definitive final comprehensive omniscience statement, because every chapter could be a book and every sequence of that book could be another book, and it would all include new material. So you have to have a tremendous sense of what is essential and what isn't. And when you're writing a letter, the shorter the letter, the harder you know that story about the man Ms. Rand used to quote, who wrote a friend, please forgive me for this 20 page letter. I just didn't have the time to write a shorter one. And that is absolutely true, absolutely true. The shorter, the harder the. Because the longer it is, the less you have to delimit, the more you can just pour in. And that's why it's easy for teenagers to write a short letter to the editor, because they don't know anything more than three or four sentences, so they can exhaust the totality of their knowledge and that's it. Whereas when you get to the stage like we are, there's 100 possibilities and which way are you going to go? And they're all interconnected. Now, this is not understanding, this is disintegrating or delimiting, picking out a little area that you think you can present by yourself. And that is very, very hard. Now, a corollary of that, let's call it number three, is how not to raise questions that you have no space to answer. This is again distinctively a writing problem, not a thinking problem. You've always got time to answer a question in thinking, but you can't write a piece and delimit it, but leave glaring questions jumping out of the way you worded it. You have to word your points in such a way that they will carry the reader without him saying, what what about so and so? If he says what about so and so? Now, of course on a short letter you can, anybody can say what about so and so? But you can't give him that opening. For instance, you couldn't in the context of a brief letter, with no other context, et cetera, established, you could come up with a statement like, all wealth throughout history has been produced by capitalists, because what questions does it rise, does it raise right away? Well, yes. Oh, you don't know what questions it raises? Well, if I read it, I'd say I thought capitalism. You try to look at it like objectively, capitalism is supposed to be a system of the modern period, after Adam Smith, since the Industrial Revolution and so on. There's a lot of wealth in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece and so on, and there was no capitalism. So what kind of statement is this? Or I might look in the other way and say capitalism created all wealth and no poverty. What about the Depression? Now surely there was widespread poverty in the Okies, in the Dust bowl, et cetera, and so on, and that was, was under capitalism. Now, you know, there are answers to that. But the thing is, you can't give those answers and give a brief history of the world and of the Depression in the sidelines of your letter. So you have to word your claim for capitalism in such a way that it says something, but it doesn't open the door to all kinds of other things. One of the biggest difficulties of writing is to say something provocative, which you answer in the framework of your letter, and not just leave these blatant, unopened questions to go by, because then you lose all conviction. Now, fourth, which has to be pretty much simultaneous with one, is setting the context. Remember, these people don't know a as a and the validity of the senses and life is the standard and even individual rights. They don't know where you're coming from. Now, if you're setting the context, you don't have to justify it, you just bluntly assert it. And that can combine, you see, with your motivational sentence to be a shocking statement. And then the reader says, well, where the hell is he going to go from here? And then your letter is, if you can state the context with any plausibility, not a proof, but just any plausibility, and then go on from there. You will be able to make the subsequent part clear, but you have to set it briefly the briefest you can. We'll see examples of that in particular papers. And some people just said bluntly, I start here, zip. And if they say something remotely graspable, that's okay, because then we know where you're coming from. A fifth crucial thing, of course, is the logical order of development of your points. And in a letter, I urge you to follow the following rule as far as possible. Make one crucial point and make it first. Don't build up to it. By make it first, I don't mean it's the first sentence. First should be something motivational, startling, and context establishing. But then once you're ready, they want to hear, they know where you're coming from. Hit them between the eyes with your point as boldly, as tersely as you can, and then develop it in whichever ways your space allows. Give the proof or give the examples, or show the absurdity that comes from denying it, or whatever you're going to do, whatever kind of logical thing you're doing, do not begin with the idea that you're going to make your letter really dramatic. So first you're going to give something subsidiary and then something tertiary. And then at the end, say, now you're ready to hear my point, bang. Because they will have tuned you out and they won't know how to interpret those other points, because those other points. Now, somebody here in this class whom I'm looking at, but I won't mention, did exactly the reverse of that. They saved the point for the end. And therefore the whole first part is misinterpreted as meaning something entirely different from what, let's say I switch the sexes. So if I say he, you know, I mean a she and vice versa from what he intended. Now, there is a couple of other things that you have to decide. All these, you see, are writing decisions. This is not thinking decisions. The order of development that you would use in thinking is hierarchical. What depends on what. But the order that you use when you have 50 words is entirely not hierarchical. It's got to be one thing, and what can you say about it? So it's a completely different choice. You could know a subject inside out and not know what order to present. And in fact, the more you know it inside out, the harder it is to know what order order to present, because you have so many more options. Now, you see, I decided to make my book easy by presenting the entire thing hierarchically. I gave up motivating, I gave up the attempt at a mass audience because it was impossible to give the structure and the motive at the same time. So I decided I'm not writing a book for the broad public. I'm going to give the structure for the ages. So I set my basic structure by following hierarchy. Well, that you could do in a book, but you can't do that in a letter. Now, the next thing to consider is you're always talking about abstractions when you discuss philosophy or ideas. Should you use an example, and if so, can you make it brief? And where will you put it? Examples take more space than generalities. Examples are treacherous because you have to go on and on explaining. This man came and he found this girl, and then they went and she said this and he said this and so on. And by that time your whole letter is gone. So your example has to be ideally one that people already know, and you're just bringing it in to remind them to concretize what you're talking about. Now, how many examples you use is a function of how difficult the point is and how much space you have. But in a letter, if you can get one example, that's fine. Now, I mentioned to you, even in a sequence, in a whole book like mine, I try to restrict myself to two examples per topic, because the example, you remember that one example of under Honesty of the guy with the phony gold Mine. Now, that took about six pages of print to get that one example in. Well, I had to figure to myself, I've got six virtues here, plus force. And if I'm going to have one example that takes six pages in each, one of these, 36 pages is gone, and my chapters are supposed to be 50, and I haven't even given the theory. So right away, that begins to terrify you. Either you're going to cut this example or you're really going to chew this example, and that's it. And that's what I did. Whereas in Integrity, I went the other way. Instead of chewing one example to the ground, I gave four or five and kept them running throughout. Now, there's different considerations, but the point is this. You have to know consciously what you're going to do with an example. And if worse comes to worst, leave it out. Because the worst that will happen if you leave your example out is your abstraction will be generalized, but they'll get the overall message. Whereas if you put it in and stint what you need to make your point clear, they'll draw God knows what conclusions from it. Now, I would also say the last thing you have to do is the very last. After you've figured out the motive and the context and you've delimited and you've got the order and you've covered yourself against possible questions and you figured out your example, etc. Go over it for the precision of wording. You say, this man is able. Is he able? Is he capable? Is he proficient? What is your exact thought? You say so and so is the source of so and so is it the source, the precondition, the cause, the fountainhead, etc. Now, I carried that to bizarre lengths, which is one of the reasons that the ominous parallels took me twice as long as my second book on Objectivism, because I just methodically had a huge thesaurus. And every time I came to any word other than oven, though, I looked up and saw what all the possibilities were. Ayn Rand, I may say, was truly stunned that that would occur to anybody as a method. She said she couldn't have written a paragraph if she had tried that method. But that's why it took me a year to write each chapter of that book. But I finally came to this settlement if, when. I mean, to this policy, for myself. If, when you reread it says exactly what you want to say, don't challenge the wording. If you get the sense of this is clear and this is really what I mean. But if something is off and you can't say what, and you've checked all the other considerations, then look and see if one of the words is throwing you off because of its connotation, because of a double meaning, because it's perhaps the wrong level. It's a gutter expression, and you want to be elevated and formal, or it's colloquial and you want to be slangy or whatever it happens to be. So don't overdo that, but don't underdo it either. It's the golden meat. And then the last is any miscellaneous stylistic touches you wish to give it. If it seems sort of awkward, can you smooth it out? If it seems that words are repetitive, any word that you can get rid of is worth a dollar to you. So if you can say the five words in two, you made $3. You should try to make as much as you possibly can out of every letter. Squeeze everything out of it. It's worth. I spent 10 minutes to get a the out of a sentence by reconstructing it so the article is not necessary, because every word is another, you know, obligation to the reader. Oh, God, I gotta hold that one too. To get his thoughts, you see. So the idea should be squeeze out and that you can always do the second and the third day. Particularly if you look at your piece as though it's written by somebody else whom you vaguely dislike. Now, if it's written by somebody else whom you like, you tend to be sympathetic, but it's not somebody you hate. But you get a mental set, this is somebody else. And you're slightly impatient, you know, and then you what the hell is he saying that for? See? And then you can cut out words right and left until, you know, if you start to hate him so much, he'll X out the whole letter. But you need to have a slightly negative, jaundiced eye, you know, within limits. Now, you see, all of those are such complicated decisions. Where to start? Put the context and the motivation and the order. Should I use an example? What wording it, et cetera, et cetera. It is absurdity is lunacy to say, I don't understand this subject, but I'll figure it out as I write. There are so many things that don't pertain to understanding that are required to write that if you don't understand it first, it's a complete, complete impossibility. They have actually got opposite purposes in a way, because your understanding is entirely between you and reality. As I said, you do it for you. And you can write a hundred or A thousand pages until you get it. And I actually wrote in connection with one discussion in Ms. Rand, I typed something like 300 pages, pages of confusions that I had, and then each confusion listed further confusions. And she read through about 50 pages of it and she said, oh, I see where you went off. Anyway, we went back to the beginning, but that if I had been on the idea, I'm writing this as part of a book, you know, hundred and hundreds of pages that aren't on the outline and I don't know where they're going or what it's all about. The sheer conflict would have driven me insane. What usually happens when you get confused? You have to ask, am I confused about the truth or about how to present it? Do I know the answer and I just can't figure out how to make it short or how to make it eloquent, or do I literally not know the answer? And then you'd have to project. If you were on TV and the host asked the question, would you know what the answer is? And if you say, oh, sure, I'd say yes. Because then say, well, now, why doesn't yes because work in the letter? And obviously you're counting on something. And then you have to try to dredge up what context, what order, et cetera. But you must make that distinction. Otherwise you write, you take a medium such as writing and a goal such as appealing to other people, and you substitute for understanding yourself what you think they will understand, but you have no possible way to know what they require because you don't understand the point yourself yet either. So you're in like a Peter Keating's no man land. You're writing for everybody and nobody, and there's no one mind controlling it. And the result is you write bad letters. It may have the illusion of understanding, then it all falls apart. But if you make this absolute distinction, Then I think you avoid a terrible pitfall. I used to find when I switched and said, now I'm thinking, not writing, that 95% of what I typed I had to throw out because I was following all kinds of irrelevant trails, not realizing they're irrelevant. And then when I finally got the understanding, I see that all the rest of this was groping and just throw it out. And the value of it was that it released this one trail. And then I have to go back and see, well, what can I do by way of presenting it now? It's much easier that way. You'll get into the worst agonies if you try to understand the point while you're presenting it. Is there any question right on that before we proceed? Jack? Oh, no, I'd like to stay on that because we're going to be going into other topics. But that's the main pitch that I want to make for you today. The others are just some lesser advice and practical tips on writing. Did you want to ask about that? Yeah, let me ask a question, because when I first saw this, I had a question that came up and I wondered if since an awful lot of us are students and I had heard that writing was good to learn about the topic, and since a lot of us are writing in that vein for professors and. Or, well, for professors, it's okay. Anything you write for professors has to have no motivation, no context, no structure. It doesn't make any difference. You're just filling up paper. But I'm talking about when you either seriously want to understand or you seriously want to present. And neither of those would be applicable to a professor, as far as I know. Well, if you had a rational paper for him, yeah. You were writing a paper for him, right? You were trying to learn the subject while you were writing a paper. No, sir. If you had a rational professor and you had to write a paper, you would think the subject through first, which may involve a great deal of writing. And then you would separately decide the best structure for this assignment, the way to set the context, what kind of examples to use, etc. It's still two different assignments. You do not learn by writing. And one of the worst things they do is give you these meaningless assignments and tell you just bat them out. And the more you write, the better off you are. It has to be writing informed by thought. That is of value not. And that kind of groping feeling your way around is okay at home if all you're trying to do is empty out your subconscious. What I try to do when I get stuck is just at random on a piece of paper. Ask any question which I feel the answer would help me, even if I don't know how. Anything that's bothering me is like a pressure, you know? And I'll just back down. What is the difference between few and a few? I never did that. But just for example, is quantity even relevant to this subject? You know, or whatever, whatever I try to follow wherever the pocket of chaos is and get down some question, or just even if it's as bad as why am I so confused about free will? So that at least delimits my confusion, you know? And I'll get pages of these questions and what happens very often is that the next day, usually not the same day when you reread them. You see there are certain running themes between these questions and one or two you really have got a clue to. So you start typing out what the clue is and so on. You know, you keep going until finally by enough thinking you sort out, or at least you delimit, I don't know this property, I don't need to know this for what I'm doing right now. And then you go on to writing. But that is the main message I want to communicate to you today is that there are two distinct skills you can understand excellently and be unable to write or equivalently unable to give a speech on, which is just another form of writing because it's a separate skill to know how to condense and string things together in a short way, etc. And by the same token you can write very facile prose, which I won't but could name several one time objectivists who were able to just, you know, and the very facility of the prose showed that they did not understand. The very fact that it came with such ease that they could go from anything to anything and make it seem smooth was professional writers masking their inability to understand. So if you get tricky enough, I mean schooled enough in this, you could tell who knows and who doesn't just from what they write. But you should decide it in your own mind first. Did that answer your question? Now I had a whole thing here, but I don't want to kill the whole day today. So I'm just going to give you an indication of you better call this random tips preparing an article. And this is really random because my essential I've given you already the crow. Epistemology is very important in getting an outline, I find. And let me concretize that right away if I have a Ford hall speech and it's on, say what's wrong with socialized medicine or what's wrong with the American school. I could not. And that's going to be an hour talk, which means by the normal reading it's about 28 double spaced type pages, counting drinking water and the audience laughing. To get to the 60 minutes. No. And you have to hit the 60 minutes because the radio ends at that point. So if you go one minute over, you have to cut one minute later from the speech, which is a real pain. So I got to figure I got to write 28 double spaced type pages. Now that is too much for my mind to cope with. I couldn't just say, write 28 pages on socialized medicine book. Where would I start? Or what would I do? Or, I mean, it's just too much. Even though I know the subject, what I do, therefore, I've already gone through, you know, this topic, came from somewhere, so I must already have read something or heard something, had some thoughts, have some clippings, have some horror quotes. And they're all there in chaos in front of me. I just in whatever, usually thrown in a box, like I sketched a thought and threw it in the box, or underlined newspaper clipping and threw it. I just pull them up as they come with no order, take a look at one. If it still interests me, I put it down as one category, whatever it is, X rays under socialized medicine. And then I pull up the next one, it's on insurance. Then I pull up the next one, it's on a different kind of insurance. And I have to think, well, am I going to have one discussion of insurance or break it up into HMOs and then private insurance? Well, for now, I'm not sure. So I'll make HMO a special category. And then I keep pulling it up or as I'm thinking, and I finally end up if I've got an hour speech with about 10 categories, if it's much more than 10, you can't cope with it because that's the core epistemology. You just can't hold it. If it's much less than 10, it didn't do you any good. For instance, if you say I got two categories for my speech, the first half and the second, you're nowhere. But I try to come up with about a category per six minutes. And that would be in effect like 10 letters to the editor, a little longer than we're doing. And then I try to figure out how would they possibly go together and just, you know, work with shuffling them in different ways, try to get an idea of a continuity. And then finally, when I figure out the place to start the rest of it, you know, I go according to what context does it need and should I put an example in? And all the other things. But in facing it from scratch, you have a mammoth problem of all kinds of things and not know where they go. I just categorize them all as however they strike me and list them on a long yellow sheet. And as soon as I get to 10 or 12, that's it. The next one either has to fit into one of these or something else has to go. And so you finally end up with 10 or 12 of the most important, and then find a logical order. And then I found that helpful because people tend to go to one or the other of the two extremes. They make a separate point for 40 or 50 or 70 clippings, and then they're absolutely lost because your mind can't digest that. Or they just say, I have a theme, the evil of socialized medicine. And then they don't know where to start. It's just like physics. Where are you going to plunge in? So if you try this method, you might find that it helps. Now, completely different. These are all isolated tips that you might find helpful. What should you do if you're unhappy with the way your writing is going? You don't like it, it's coming out badly, you think it's disgusting. Now, there's two choices here, and I strongly recommend one. One choice is keep on going, no matter how agonizing, until there's nothing more you can dredge out of your subconscious. But I find that a very undesirable policy, because the more I dislike it, the more my mind rebels against continuing with it. So I take a different policy, which is stop, but change the subject in your mind to not, what should I say? But why don't I like this? What is so bad about this? And I actually will type on the paper errors or confusions or ugly things in the above. And then at random, I'll start reading it. Oh, much too wordy. I don't understand why the second paragraph is there at all. I don't know what the main point of it is. How does it connect to the rest of the book? Is this even part of Objectivism? What is the truth on such and such a point? Finally, there's so many questions you don't know the answer to that you can see why you couldn't possibly plow ahead anymore. You're just absolutely overwhelmed with ignorance. So you say, it's too early to write, let me try to figure out what I think, why I'm selecting it, etc. And usually that'll take a night or two, and you'll discover that you are unclear on something, or you have a contradiction somewhere, or what often happens is you have included a point because you feel you're logically obligated to, but you don't care for that point. You don't like it. It bores you. Now, very, very often, believe it or not, nine times out of 10, if you are bored writing a point, that means the logic of your presentation does not require it. If Your subconscious were convinced that this was essential. You would not be bored in writing it. Boredom most of the time is when you're writing something you're not sold on, because theoretically, you should be putting this in. You could just hear, well, Peekoff would put it in if he was lecturing, or Ms. Rand would put it in. But maybe it's not essential to your context. And I found that on things which I'm, you know, bored out of my skull talking about, like, you know, capitalism and monopolies and stuff that I wouldn't even dream of writing about. And sometimes I get into a structure like in the book, where I have to mention monopolies, but it's so clear to me that I have to, that I didn't even hate it. It was easy because there was a hole there that had to be plugged, and that's all. But on the other hand, if somebody had given me, without that broader motivating context, had given me the assignment, write a letter that capitalism doesn't lead to monopolies, I would be paralyzed. I couldn't do it. I could probably recite from memory something in capitalism, the unknown ideal, but my mind would just close entirely because I have no interest in that. It's outside of my field. I've answered it enough times in my life, but. And I don't care whether people understand it or not. So therefore, if I sit down to write, my subconscious will just stop completely. That's all. Now you have to be able to tell whether your subconscious is stopping for that type of reason or simply because it's too hard, you're too confused. But after a while, you can tell. There's a glazed quality of unavoidable yawning. And suddenly you had eight hours sleep and three cups of coffee, and you just can't keep your eyes open. That typically means you don't want to write this point and you should question, do you really need it before you force yourself to go on any further. Well, there's a couple other little things somewhere in here. One piece of advice, which I think I've said, but I want to just reiterated there is no such thing as the unanswerable presentation. Ayn Rand used to stress this. She said that, in effect, it's a form of Platonism. Every time somebody starts to write an article or a letter, they feel, if they're not Aristotelian, that up in the sky is the perfect unanswerable letter. And all they're trying to do is get as close to that as possible. So that when it's finished, it's worthy of inclusion in the world of forms as the perfect instance of this letter. And she used to think there is no such answer in the sky, no matter what you say, since everything is integrated, you're going to leave open thousands of questions. And that is equally true if you write a 500 page book, if you wrote 500 encyclopedias, everything you say leads to something else and leads to new knowledge. And consequently, if your standard is make this so guarded and so perfect that no one could possibly disagree, you may as well stop writing. And in that way you have to be as vulnerable as an author as you have to be as a person. I'm giving a psychological analogy here, but you know the type of person who's defended psychologically at every point, so he's never vulnerable, he's never open to being hurt by anyone else. He's got this wall that protects him. And of course you know that's a neurosis, prevents you from forming values in the human realm, keeps you unhappy, repressed, etc. Well, there's an analogy to people who want their writing to be just as defended so that they're afraid if they don't hammer every point into the ground, someone will say, well, I don't accept that. Why that? And that of course means that the other person got to them. But you have to be vulnerable. This doesn't mean you have to be arbitrary. Sometimes you do, but it does mean you can only try within the context of your space. If you have 500 pages, you can make a hell of a better case, although not the definitive case. Still, if you have a one page or a six, let's say 28 pages of one hour, basically you're giving just a little sketch, which could be self contained and interesting of what would be the 500. And if you have one paragraph you can do something, but then you know, you know all you're doing is waving a flag saying there's material here, but that's all. Now I, I know this from experience in many different ways. I went on a media tour in 82 with my first book and I was on 4, 5, 6, radio or TV show as a day, day after day. And they varied in time from oh, some of the better ones was two hours, including call in questions and the very worst one was in Atlanta, Georgia where I was put on in the noonday news. And the guy introduced me as the author of a book, the ominous parallels. And he pointed to me and he whispered 15 seconds. So I said this is a book about how the Christian ethics of self sacrifice is leading the United States to be like Nazi Germany. And he said, oh, really? I said, for more details, read the book. That's it? That's all you can say in 15 minutes? I mean, it's completely arbitrary, but it gave some idea, you see? That's all you can do. Now I want to say a word about squirms. Squirms is the name that Ms. Rand gave to the inability of a writer to write. And she suffered from them terribly all her life until she went to nonfiction. Then she didn't have squirms. But in fiction, she has squirmies. And there was a feeling, she said, it always felt like, how could I ever have written? This is an impossible activity, and I don't even know how to begin. Everything I put down is awful. And it's a miracle to me that anything ever came out in my past. And she identified that the cause and the scrims is because she felt that she couldn't stay there and she couldn't move, and it was just a nightmare feeling. What she did is a combination of things. She turned it into a question. And she always found that she had given herself a contradictory order subconsciously that she didn't realize. And as soon as she asked herself, what is the conflict here? What are the two opposite things my subconscious wants? She wouldn't immediately get the idea. But what she would basically do is this. She would pose the question as clearly as she could, and then she just sat at her desk and played solitaire. And she would play solitaire sometimes for three, four, five hours and get nowhere. But what? By staying at the desk and playing solitaire, she got. Her subconscious was convinced she's not giving up. She's not, you know, taking off. This question has to be solved. And after that period of time, she'd come out, the day was over, but the subconscious would still be working on it because it knows there's no way out. And the next day, at most, 48 hours later, the answer would occur to her. And of course, she hated that period where she was playing solitaire. She wasn't thinking about the cards, but she was focusing. And she didn't know what she was focusing on. And she was trying to clarify the unclarifiable. She called that the squirms. And she thought that was the curse of most creative writers. Not all, because some people have one novel in them that's already all prepared when they sit down and they can pour it right out. And it's good. And then they can never write another thing. Or they're hacks and they just turn out, you know, to specification without thought. But the squirms are basically unavoidable. And the question is, what do you do with them? Now she played solitaire. What I do instead is turn to asking questions. I used to play solitaire the way she did, but I got so involved in the solitaire I forgot. So what I'd simply do is change the paper to thinking, not writing, and start asking questions. But either way, you have to have a strategy because the temptation, what she called the white tennis shoes temptation, she called that because she said no matter what time of year it is, if you get the squirms, it always sounds plausible to say, I gotta go and clean my white tennis shoes for, you know, for next summer. And that, that, you know, there are Jean Kerr that the wife of the Broadway critic who writes these comedy books. And she reported the same thing in one of her books. And she said she would go into her automobile when she got. She didn't call the scrims, but that was the idea. And she would start by reading everything in the car. Full, half, full, empty, W C until she couldn't stop. There was nothing else to read. And then she would have to. But if she stayed home, she would right away start reading, exit, anything, because it's so painful you want to take your mind off it. So the trick is to get something of an act of will where you keep your mind on it. And if you can do that, time alone will. Time alone will solve the problem if you keep picking away at it. Now, a couple of other. I see we're going on a little too long. Are you finding some value in these? I have a few more little things here. Do you know what we mean by chewing? Chewing is the detailed digesting of a point, the detailed elaboration with many, many examples, and looking at it from all kinds of different ways until you finally get it. Another aspect of the distinction between thinking and writing is that there is no chewing in writing. Chewing is what you do for your own, understand? But when you write, that's impossible. The amount you would have to do to chew any one point would swamp anything. And that's why there is room for commentators on books or for whole courses of lectures on books. On one level, the book is self contained, but every sentence raises possible questions and they have to be chewed. And of course those sentences raise possible questions that given a different context, you could go on chewing and chewing and elaborating and concretizing until you're done. Now, there are people who feel my writing isn't clear unless it's chewed on the page. And that is entirely wrong. Your writing isn't clear until it's been chewed in your mind. Having done that, you then give the clearest abstract statement with the necessary details and examples and say to the reader, now I've done my part. Now you take this home and chew it. I've given you enough for you to do at home what I've already done at home. But I can't transpose my mental processes for many reasons, not the least of which is they simply are too personal to me. And they wouldn't be necessarily helpful to you. I have often found that a point that makes something really clear to me baffles an audience. And I discovered that the reason is they never had the question that baffled me. They weren't warped in that particular direction by schooling. Therefore, they can't imagine why I'm making that point. Whereas to me, it finally clarified something that a professor had said. So you have to make a sharp distinction between what you need to understand and then what is objectively necessary to understand whether people have had your experiences or not. And your writing has got to be what's objectively required by your audience. You get that it doesn't follow that something that's really clear to you, you could just dash by in your writing. Nor that something that's difficult for you, you can give a lot of space to, because it may not be difficult for others. Now, the only case where I know where I violated that, and I did it deliberately because I didn't care, was in the virtue of integrity. Or I had too many examples, but I liked every one of them. And I had a lot of trouble. I was the turning point in writing the book for me. So I would be damned if I was going to cut them out. So I figured the reader will just have to suffer through this, that's all. But I made a deliberate choice then. I was basically being selfish in the wrong sense. I was sacrificing the reader to myself, but I couldn't help it. But almost every time I cut out stuff that I really like. And Mr. Ang used to say that the test of a professional writer is the ability ruthlessly to cut out stuff that he thinks is great writing if it doesn't fit into and is necessitated by the total of the project. Now, I asked a question. How do you know when to stop editing and send the piece? Finally, in for publication. Now, I don't suppose I would answer you If I said eight times. That's what I do. Ms. Rand used to go over it five times. But it really is not a numerical answer. What you need is first to get distance from it. And that means, above all, you must not stay at it for so long that you memorize it. When your first draft starts to sound like four score and seven years ago, you know. You know it so well that you could rattle off your statements. Impossible to edit it because you just can't change it. Those words have the ring to you and they're perfect. So you. You have to go over it enough times so that you can do consciously the order and the context and so on, but you can't read it over one time more than absolutely necessary. Because if you get to the point where you really know it, you can't edit it. You have to. Then you have to wait a day, a week, a month, however long it takes for the thing to recede from your memory. Now, I used to be able to do it. Finally, the next morning, the first or second editing, I would do a rough draft and then maybe do one editing, and then the next day a couple more editings, and then the next day a couple more editings. And then I would leave it, finish the whole chapter and then start from the beginning editing it, and then edit it one more time all the way through the chapter, and then wait till the whole book was written and edit it all the way through from beginning to end, and then wait till the galleys came and edit them again all the way through from beginning to end. Each time your changes are correspondingly smaller, but it gets. It's just like perfecting the details. It ended up that I gave every word Eightfold consideration, eight chances to get out. And of course, one reading was exclusively to reduce verbiage. Wherever I could nick a phrase or an adjective or whatever. I considered that a splendid day's work. But the point is, you have to get distance in order to edit. In the beginning, you may have to read. It would take a week or more and do something else. Don't wait during that week and just for the time to go get yourself immersed in something else intellectually. And then one morning, read it cold, that is, you don't remember it and read it as though it's somebody else's. You don't even have to be in an ugly frame of mind. Just read it as though it's somebody else's. And does it strike you as convincing? Where does this guy always use the third person. Where does he start? Or she. Where does she start? Is this interesting? What's the point? Do I see why this example is necessary? Do they mean this word, you know, et cetera? And you get to the end in one cool reading, and either which may be fortunately the case, you say, gee, this is really pretty good. I'd like to get to meet this person. Or you say, no, and this just comes out of nowhere. Why does he say this? And so on and so on. And then you start making angry remarks in the margin, and then you come back later and fix it up. Now, if you do this, you will see that there is a point of diminishing returns. There is a point at which you know what you've written so well that if you make any changes, you've lost all sense of whether the change is making it better or worse. And at that point you have to go with it. That's what we call the threshold of dis. Improvement. You keep getting better until you reach a certain threshold, and at that point any change becomes for the worse. And there are many. I didn't bring any into class, but there are many horrifying examples of famous writers who edited one level too much, and thankfully, their editor. In those days there were editors in publishing houses, which there are now, the way they used to be. Their editor caught the earlier draft, and if you saw the two side by side, you would be amazed that a great writer would think of changing this paragraph to such and such. So you can disimprove your work by editing and past a certain point, a rough working test is if you're so sick of it that you hate it, you've overdone it, and anything you do is going to hurt it. So either quit it or go with it and hope for the best. Let me see, what other. Well, there's one other point I want to make, which I'm sure is going to strike you as being completely contrary to everything I've said, because I've been telling you to write. First, write what you need to understand, and then write what objectively is needed. But there is a sense. Now, you tune me out if this confuses you. There is a sense in which you are always writing for yourself, even when you are writing for others. You still have to have some idea what is required for your writing to be clear and logical, and you have nobody's mind to judge that by but your own. So you can take account of objective requirements. You can remember. Yes, these points had to be understood and My readers won't understand them, so I'll have to put them in. All right, this example is much too complicated. I won't have the space, et cetera, but up to a point. In other words, you can keep your own thinking on one track and what your reader requires, but at a certain point, your writing starts to change according to your knowledge. It keeps pace with your cognitive development. And that's why there's such a thing as a writer who is excellent for beginners but is no good unless he changes his style and his level for experts in the field, because he has trained himself to write on the level at which he was thinking when he was six or eight or nine, whereas the other one, another person, trains himself to think on the higher level. And that's why, for instance, a lot of people find Ayn Rand's technical writing, like Introduction to Objective Epistemology difficult. Or, let's put it more broadly, all these major scientific and philosophic classics are hell on wheels to try to understand, because the people who write on that level, like Helmholtz and so on, on that level of abstraction, are thinking on such a. Such a difficult, complex level of perception and integration that the rest of us simply can't follow them. Somebody once said about Helmholtz that every time he says, and thus it is obvious, the guy knows, he had to stop for 45 minutes to figure out what the connection was. So there is room, you see, for the genius who functions on one level and then the rest of us, you know, who can chew it down to a point. But then there's a point where even we are bored and we need somebody to do it on that same level for beginners. In that sense, you can't go beyond. You can't go extensively different from your own actual level in your writing. And I may say, for instance, I don't think I'm as good a teacher now as I was 20 years ago, because 20 years ago, I had a lot more interest in details that completely bore me at this point, and therefore they just are not fed to me by my mind, or I would tend to hammer home every transition. So the student always knew. Now we're making a new point. Now that point is over. And now I'm not traumatized by that, and I don't attach. I take it more automatically in my own thinking. So I just go on. So it is true that in my experience, the better a teacher is, at a certain point he starts to become less good simply because he's past the point of understanding where the ideal is to have a very intelligent, ignorant teacher. And then, you see, he will try to make it clear for himself and in that process will make it clear to you. All right, that's my imagined one hour long, five minute statement. Let's take a break for seven minutes and then we'll come back. All right, Now I've got about a dozen letters that people have written to the editor. Some of them make are good examples of points we talked about and some bring up things that different, but they all had something worth commenting on. But I also have a series of questions on writing. So if you work it all out mathematically, I have two to three minutes per letter, if I can follow that. Okay. If not, at some point I'm going to have to just leave these. But you'll get the idea. We were just talking during the break about the possibility, maybe at another conceptual conference of my giving you a whole course on writing with everyone having mimeographed copies of what's submitted that I would enjoy doing because there's nothing more fun than to teach somebody else what to do when they're in trouble as opposed to getting in it yourself. In any event, I'm going to really seriously disguise these people. I'm not going to automatically make a man or woman just sometimes. And I'm going to change professions or whatever I have to do do, because I think they have a right to their privacy in this situation. Now, here is a letter I'll read you. The first is three paragraphs. I know it's impossible to do. The only person that I know that is able to understand through hearing better than through writing was Dwight D. Eisenhower. And if you know how little he understood, you see that the problem of understanding through hearing. But this is the most we can do with the facilities available. So we take for granted. They all say to the editor, dear sir, etc. Here's the opening paragraph and you tell me, is this good or bad? That's all. You have to do it fast because Barry lost all our time on this example. The recent Supreme Court decision on abortion substantially undermines the recognition of a woman's right to her own body in making, quote, an undue burden, the standard by which restrictions on abortion are to be judged. The court has made convenience, not right, the rule of law. How many like that as an opening? How many do not? Well, I do. So since there's no time for discussion, I'm not saying, you know, you couldn't come up with a more brilliant one, but the good thing about this is we know the subject right off the bat. It's a controversial one. If person isn't interested in it from this, nothing else is going to make him interested in this issue. And he states the essence of his point right off the bat that this really amounts to destroying a woman's right and making it a matter of convenience. Not right now, he hasn't proved that yet, but you know, right away the context from which he's coming, he's going to be one of those types that says a woman has a right. And this court decision, contrary to what everybody says, violates that right. Now, the only word I would take out of that is substantially undermines. Do not put an adverb or an adjective in if you can get away without it. It's worse to undermine a house than substantially undermine it. If you undermine it, the thing's going to fall. If you substantially undermine it, some part of it is still there, you know, hanging on. Adjectives and adverbs weaken much more often than they strengthen. And plus it saves space. A long word like substantially, if you're a trained writer, should leap out of the page at you. There has to be substantial justification for such a word as substantial. Now, this is the second paragraph. So he's got a motivation and he's got a context and he's got his point across. And he did that in the first paragraph. Now he wants to argue, he wants to give a logic to, you know, what's wrong with this. And never mind he wrote a comment on his second paragraph or she did, but I will just read it as written. The court's majority was clearly attempting to uphold the right to abortion. But in qualifying that right with an irrelevancy, in placing other considerations above that right, in treating it as non absolute, the court effectively abandoned the right to abortion, just as the right to one's property would be made meaningless if property could be confiscated, quote, if the government really needs it, unquote. That's the essence of his argument. You follow that. And then he has a parenthesis, he has a P.S. to me, she making clear that I meant contextually absolute rights versus right to do whatever you want. I was not satisfied with my second paragraph. It seemed somewhat unclear, but I wasn't sure what to do about it. Now, this second paragraph is unclear for one very good reason. What is there? Two, but one above all, what is the reason? Now listen, he's giving the reason why the court is actually harming that right. He says they qualify that right with an irrelevancy. Now, what does that tell us with an irrelevancy that's a reaffirmation of what was stated already, that we're talking about convenience rather than right. So he's not adding any big point by saying it's irrelevant. He's already told us that what they use has nothing to do with rights. So he's added nothing to the argument in placing another consideration above that right. Well, does he give us any reason why you can't place any other consideration above that right? There's all the question, you know, what about the if the fetus is viable, doesn't it have any right to life? What if the whole country were attacked and there's only one abortion would save the country, one more soldier would save it, et cetera. He's just got this other consideration above that right in the most sweeping terms, without any reference to what kind of other consideration and how would it work in this decision, in treating it as non absolute, he gives us his third state stab at it. Well, that is going to antagonize or confuse as many people as it converts because they are brought up to hear that an absolute is a dogma unrelated to reality. Now you don't want to capitulate to that, but you don't want to wave the red flag until you have it prepared. So we strip all that paragraph of that. You're really saying the reason that you wreck the right by doing this is because it's something other than the right. And that is too tautological. It is not convincing, it's not clear in your own mind. Now if you tried to chew in your own mind, how would you concretize his first point? The court has made convenience not right the rule of law. I would do it like this. I haven't time for you to tell me because I'm running out of time. But I would do it like this. The court held that this right is subject to any state ordered condition that did not place an undue burden on the woman. What is undue? Question mark. Who decides? Question mark how? Question mark. And right there, without saying it's an irrelevancy or it's non absent or whatever, I show that in the actual and briefly in the actual practice of implementing this decision there has to be a body of people with no known method to analyze and decide what to put above the woman's right and that it's completely arbitrary and that it's tantamount to say she has no right. Then I would go into the analogy to property, but not in the way that this person wrote it. Listen to the way this person wrote. Just as the right to one's property would be made meaningless if property could be confiscated, quote, if the government really needs it now, immediately what would any ordinary reader come back? That's exactly the way it is now, the eminent domain clause and 10,000 other things. But it's not meaningless. We still have some claim to it. So you're giving a mixed economy analogy that people don't think supports your point. So it's much better if you have to get away fast with an example, to take away liberty, but nobody wants to touch a liberty, see. So you could say, just as the right to one's liberty would be made meaningless if the state could violate it in the name of, quote, undue burden. You know, every pro freedom person in the world would say, jesus, if you let the state decide by, you know, their decision of what's an undue burden, whether this does or doesn't interfere with liberty, that's the end of liberty. Then you go farther than the actual countries already gone. And therefore you become completely clear with the analogy is. And then I would say something like, would Hitler have objected to a formulation like that? No, he did not. He was all for liberty so long as it was within due regard for the state's prerogatives. You see, that is actually less word, word count than what he has here. And yet it actually concretizes what would it mean to say undue burden. And what this needs is now to concretize what is undue burden and why. Therefore it's the destruction of the right rather than to go in the direction of making undue burden more abstract by calling it relevancy, non absolute, other considerations. All he's doing is making his initial statement more abstract, but no more plausible, and then tying it to a concrete which is implausible because it's already happened, you see. So by just reconstructing that second paragraph, you could make a much more powerful case in the same number of words. And then he concludes, validly, rights are absolutes. If they are regarded as anything less, they will soon vanish. It is an ominous sign for all individual rights that such a basic right as abortion has been defended so weakly by the highest court in the land. If you have space for a peroration like that or a wrap up, fine. If not, you can drop it, because you're the two things that count are getting them to read and getting them to see the point. Then if you have a zigger at the end, okay, at the there's no space. Cut it. Now, that's a good letter. This is not a bad letter by a highly intelligent student. So I'm just trying to give you an idea of in what ways you can make this better. Now, I think in my own mind that the person wrote that he wasn't satisfied. It seemed somewhat unclear, and I think that means there was a deficiency in his actual understanding of the point. He was trying to think of it in a rationalistic way. If undue burden is above a right, then something other than the right is above the right. And if that means some other consideration is above the right, and that means it's non absolute. But that is all deduction and avoid. We want to look and see, what would it mean? Who would decide? How would they decide? You see, push us into, in this case, the concrete of what the undue burden would be. And that speaks the horrors for itself. Okay, I wish we had time to go back and forth and get your input, but now here's one that commits one of the errors that I discussed. This is a perfectly good letter, but it does commit one crucial error. Now, I have to read this whole letter. It's two mediumish paragraphs. How do you say his name? Kevorkian, the suicide doctor. Kevorkian. Dr. Kevorkian the suicide doctor should be hailed as a brave example of heroism. Today. He has stood up for his principles in the face of negative national press coverage and opposition. He has continued to render aid to the terminally ill despite pending lawsuits and the threat of a jail sentence. Such an uncompromising man is hard to find today. That is the entire first paragraph. That's the motivator. Motivator and the context establisher, in the light of which we read what follows. Now, what false philosophic context screams out of that? Despite the intention of the writer, the writer doesn't believe what that implies. But it's objectively there. Namely, what? I'm reading a letter from an unknown person, and I say he's heroic. He stood up for his principles even though everybody was against him, no matter whether they sued him. He is uncompromising. Great. Now, out of context, is that necessarily a virtue, Glenn? Absolutely. Subjectivism screams out of that paragraph because the big question is, what are his principles? Hitler in some sense, didn't compromise his principles. He went to the kill every Jew he could find and then the Poles and all the rest of them. So the fact that you're uncompromising out of context doesn't tell you that it's good unless you know what he's uncompromising about. Now, of course, you could give an ethical treatise here that if you're uncompromising about any one rational principle, you're uncompromising about all of them. They're all interconnected, and you have to have life as a standard, and that's the only way to do it. But you can't do that in a letter. Therefore, in a letter, you can't start off with a suggestion. Doesn't make any difference what principles, but being true to them is what counts. Because then you get the idea, okay, subjectivism. And that right away undercuts where he goes into the reasons, the actual principles. And it continues, not only does Dr. Kevorkian stand up for his principle, but he is also upholding a pro human principle. Now, there, you see, is a clear statement. I may as well say, she repeats again, that he's standing up for his principle. And now she's saying, on top of that, it's a good one. Well, you wonder if it's a good principle. Obviously, in logic, it's much more important to tell us his principle and then pay him compliments for living up to it than to tell him compliments for living up to the unknown. For all we know, she's for sadism, and he's getting rid of these people. It's a great principle. First, what is the issue at stake? And then the compliments, not the other way around. Now, here she said, no, what is the pro human principle? It may seem ironic to some, but by fighting for the right of an individual to end his own life as he sees fit, Dr. Kevorkian is actually fighting for the individual's right to his own life. After all, the right to life means the right to full use and disposal of life, and that includes ending it. And I would put, parenthetically, any right you have, you, in logic, are entitled to delegate just to cover the issue that you yourself didn't administer. But in any event, this is the actually completely right content. If you have a right to life that has any meaning, it means the right to use, live and dispose of, and that means the right to end at your hand or by any designated agent. Period. Now, if that were stated at the outset, and then we read the letter as here is a man, and here's the end of hers, fighting for the same right that the founding fathers put forth as sacred in our declaration of independence. Now we're ready for that kind of compliment. And it becomes even unnecessary to say, he's an example of heroism. You can say it if you Want. But your main point is to give the one intellectual point. The right to suicide is a corollary of the right to life. It's basic Americanism. And this man is being persecuted for following the logic of the founding fathers. But to do that you have to head home right away. And you have such a great chance in this one. The so called. I would start with something like this. The so called suicide doctor is in logic a champion of the right to life. And then go on as to why, because that certainly, you know, is paradoxical and it shows you where you're coming from. You're defending him and then go on. Now the only other thing I want to comment about this is whenever you find yourself writing like this, take it out. Now I'm going to read two sentences again. The content is okay, but I want two different sections. Phrases struck. It may seem ironic to some, but by fighting for the right of an individual, etc. Dr. Is actually fighting for the individual's right to his own life. After all, the right to life means etc. Now what are the two things that I object to in that it may seem ironic to some? And after all, those are concessions. Never put concessions in your writing. That's in other words, that's a way of saying I know you think I'm crazy and you must never allow that. If your writing allows that it's wrong to begin with, your writing should be self contained. Contained and self explanatory. You do not acknowledge such a mind as would find this bizarre. If you do, if you make any concessions to an alien context, you can establish your own. So never say it may seem ironic, but after all, you know, you really have a good point. But you come on like a bulldozer. Dr. Kevorkian, the so called suicide doctor is one of the few champions of the right to life today. And then the right to life means so, etc. You see what I mean? And that's a much more powerful letter than He's a really great guy. He lives up to his principles. Now I know you think it's fantastic, but by the time you get to her argument, the you lost the reader and you diluted it into a little dribble. What could have been a powerful blow. Oh boy, this is a long one. But there is something worth saying about it. What's our time here? All right, let's just take his opening sentence. This I can't obviously change this excess. I can't program my mind that well. This letter replies to Mr. X's of June 21, 1992, in which she denounces our founding fathers as quote, slave owners and women haters, unquote. Well, what side of that is he on? He's obviously on the side of it. I mean against the letter. It's an answer. And what is the one word that lets us know that he disapproves of that letter which he denounces. But then he's giving the fervor to the letter writer. He's saying the letter writer makes this huge case. And then calmly, here's my reply. Now you want to start off from your terms, not from his. And therefore the thing you have to. I would start off with something like this. Contrary to your correspondent, you can put the date in if you want. Our founding fathers were not in italics, quote, slave owners and women haters. Then you're making your statement the focus rather than I want to give an answer to his statement that he argued so strongly for. And then what's the answer? Well, it's wrong. You see, the whole thing is backed into from the point of view of his letter rather than coming out and saying what is going to be in your letter? Now what in fact is the thought that would validate the statement? What is the real defense? After all, slave ownership was included in the Constitution and women were not enfranchised at that time. So what is it? In fact, the Constitution made certain errors. I don't know whether you could necessarily argue that the disenfranchisement of women is an error because contrary to all the propaganda today, I think in a proper society only property holders should be voters. And therefore it wouldn't be an issue of sex, it would be an issue of an income on qualification. But leaving that aside, let's just assume we're going to go along with the Democrats and they were wrong to think to leave women out. Certainly slavery was wrong in the Constitution. What is the founding fathers achievement for which you can't blame them for not grasping those points? It's very analogous to saying about Aristotle. Well, he did a lot of great things, but after all he's flawed. He didn't grasp the right theory of concepts. He had some subjectivism in his ethics. So Aristotle is pretty much of a rat. He has subjectivism and intrinsicism and unmoved mover and all the rest of it. What would you say in answer to that? What it was recognition of reality and principle. He was the one who gave us the tool to recognize in principle the method to recognize the subsequent errors that he made. Human knowledge is Hierarchical. And nobody can grasp everything. So the one that you get on your knees and thank is the one who grasped it first and thereby enables everybody else to go on. Now, it's exactly the same here. There were two subjects that were wrong at this time in the general consensus. One is philosophy and one is anthropology. Anthropology includes who is human. And philosophy includes how should human beings be treated. The Founding Fathers accepted with every blessed other person in the world through history that human equals male whites. The Greeks and thereafter never thought that women were fully human nor slaves. And they recognized in some sense they were, but they thought they were inferior type of person, that they just simply didn't have the intellect to compete with men. So this was an error of anthropology, of what qualifies as a man. Now, what is it that in fact showed the country and the world that these. These are the same as men, that they're part of the same species. When they finally grasp that the essence of the species is the ability to think and not manual labor, and that thinking was possible across the board. Male, female, black, white, etc. Then the whole basis for this anthropological distinction collapsed. Now, who is it more than anyone else that made it possible for us to grasp that the essence of man is the ability to think. That that's the thing that must be treasured and protected. The one that brought that down to reality is the Founding Fathers. They're the ones who said right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, meaning by liberty, liberty of thought, action. And therefore they were inconsistent. But it's bizarre to call them inconsistent because they have to be omniscient. They laid the very found work for the Civil War, which everybody knows. If they had had an essentially bad constitution, then the war would have been over, enslaving the rest of the people. But instead, they were so clear on what was the requirements of freedom that when it became apparent that the slaves could think there was simply a war to extend the franchise to them. And consequently, the very system that they laid down necessitated that that contradiction be removed. So they get the credit for the subsequent Emancipation Proclamation. Now, I grant you it's hard to say all that briefly. You have to really work to get that in briefly. But what you can't do is ignore their achievement and do what this writer does. He goes on to say, a concept of individual natural rights was revolutionary in human thought. The Founding Father's achievement was adopting and transforming this concept into political action. Okay, but now we need something there to say. This was essential before we could recognize freely functioning men and what their essential capacities were and see it in other spheres and end up extending the franchise and so on. But instead of him saying, howe, that pursued that role, which I'm not going to try to work for you here, he says, it is true that now, right away, you know what? It's a concession. It is true that southern economies were built on slavery and women could not vote. These facts represented inconsistencies on their parts. Half of his letter is already a concession. And then he says, this is his argument. Since the founding fathers had identified natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as applicable to white males, most would have understood the following. Similarities between all members of the species. Man are so striking that they too must possess the same rights. Well, why didn't they? If this argument is true, you wipe yourself out of there if one implies the other. Unless you say, throughout the centuries, there's been this unquestioned distinction as to who is and who isn't fully human. And they had to have the experience of some generations to see that this is what is the essence of man and that it's equally applicable to women, because this is the first time man was ever defined as the rational being in a functioning political context. Other than that, they can say, yeah, they have similarities, but the women can't think, you see, or the blacks can't think. And that's what they thought, the great majority. And the fact is, they had never seen a context in which these people were given even proximity to freedom to try to think. Now then he says, although, unfortunately, this point was never articulated. Well, again, unfortunately, it's like saying, you know, it's unfortunate that Aristotle didn't discover the objectivist ethics. There's only so much you can discover at any one time. And then this is, I have to say, a tremendously weak statement. He's trying to defend the Founding Fathers. And he says, although, unfortunately, they didn't get this point, they would have been more amenable to it than Stalin, Hitler or the Ayatollah. Now, that's really pathetic. I mean, if all you can say in the person you're defending is, he'd be better than Stalin or Hitler, you're better off not to defend him because that means he's second to the lowest depravity on earth. So that is much too weak. If your thought in this case is, thank God that we had Jefferson and Madison with all their mistakes and not Stalin and Hitler, say it that way, you know, rather than, well, Jefferson was very inconsistent, but at least he would be more receptive than Stalin. So there's a lot of concessions in this, but because again, I don't think the person fully understood the point, the distinction between the anthropological and the philosophical. If the founding Fathers had thought women and blacks are fully human, they would never have had this problem. Alright, I'm taking way too long, but I think it's very good that you get an idea of concessions. Now I'm going to read a brief letter that appeared in print simply because it has it. Well, I won't even tell you. I'm just going to read it first. This letter is in praise of Mr. X. I won't bother with his real name. His article on Thomas Sowell and the causes of poverty was one terrific example of his intellectual honesty. When Mr. X comes up against unanswerable arguments that challenge his own ideas, he does the courageous thing and changes his ideas. Remarkable. Not everybody does that. I think, however, that looking for the cause of poverty is wrong. One should follow Adam Smith and look for the causes of wealth. Period. Then it's signed by the author. Now, he's got two intentions here. Apparently some common letter writer or columnist changed his mind after he read a conservative column and he wants to give him a pat on the back and say nobody ever changes their mind in the face of an argument. You did. Congratulations. So his first paragraph is fine, but now he wants a little hook, a little teaser to get some ideological propaganda in. But listen to what he says. I think, however, that looking for the. Now I'm going to read it very carefully. Looking for the cause of poverty is wrong. One should follow Adam Smith and look for the causes of wealth. Now there's a big mistake right in there. What's the big mistake? Why is it the cause and the singular of poverty and the causes in the plural of wealth? For both poverty and wealth, you can say there's a dozen causes, or for each you can say there's one, depending upon the level of fundamentality and abstraction that you're going to. But to put the singular for poverty and the plural for wealth is very counter to your own intention because it suggests poverty. We can think about in principle the cause wealth. All we could do is make lists of contributing factors. That's what the plural suggests to you. And if that's all you can do, then it's going to be pretty hard to find the cause wealth. So that one little S there throws the epistemological balance into the side of poverty as being more intelligible. But another thing there you can say, follow Adam Smith but will Adam Smith give you the cause of wealth? Well, what is the cause in the singular now of wealth? Is it free trade? What is it? Because they won't get from that. What is the cause of wealth? They'll get from it that there's a whole book on the causes, but it won't come in juxtaposition to their idea of the cause of poverty. What is the cause of wealth? The mind. The unenslaved mind. There's words to that effect. You have to combine the idea of thought and freedom, you see. So I would have done it like this because I would want to get some propaganda in, even though this is a tail end flip. I would say, I think, however, that looking for the cause of poverty is wrong. One should look for the cause of wealth instead. Period. And then I would just make a flat out statement, the cause is man's unenslaved mind. For detailed c. Adler shrugged. That's it. That wouldn't have been too long to publish, you see, and you would get your zinger in easily. Now, I realize these are small editorial changes, but does it accumulatively give you an idea of anything? Now I'll take one or two more of these and then I've got some. I can't obviously get through them all, but this one I'll take. The new law that requires bike helmets for all riders from ages 3 to 100 has taken away one more right of the individual to be free to make his own choices. The government certainly has the right and responsibility. What's that concession? The government certainly has the right and responsibility to guard me from the dangers others might do to me, but not from injuries I might incur myself. Will we next legislate knee pads for all skaters, running shoes for joggers, and headlights for those who walk after dark? Let the government maintain its function of defending my freedom, not attacking it. Now that's pretty good, right? There's just a couple of things there that I would want to suggest. It's got a good open because it's the situation, the context, the position she's going to take. And in a colorful way, right off the bat, the new law that requires so and so has taken away one more right of the individual. So she's against the law. She's against it on the name of individual rights. And now we want to hear why. Now then she says certainly has the right and responsibility. By putting that in, she's saying, I know, of course you think it has this right, and I grant you absolutely, that definitely has A responsibility. But just wait. Just give me a hearing. But you shouldn't take cognizance of that. You should say something like, in America, the government is the servant of the people, not its master. It protects us from physical violence. It doesn't issue commands to innocent individuals, even when their own limbs are in danger. And then go on to. So you state the principle that way more broadly than just. It has the right to guard me from dangers, but not from dangers I caused myself. Well, why? Because it's simply your servant. That's the simplest way in a letter to say the government is the servant, not the master. We hire it to protect us from thieves, not to tell us how to run our lives or even how to be more safe in our own private lives. Now, I like this last thing, but I would like one more, a little more fantastic, but of the same principle, so that we can see where it's going. Because someone might say, if you're going to have a list, have the reduction ad absurdum go right to the point where people say, Christ, there's no way out of this. See, now you've got. Will we next legislate knee pads for all skaters? Well, how bad? You know, it's the same thing. Running shoes for joggers. Well, most people use them anyway. Headlights for those who walk after dark. Well, I begin to see that there's an area. But now let's get one example where you would see grossly that the government is stepping in to look after somebody by imposing something against their will and take something controversial. But that would have to fall. Now, I would put in is something like this. Are we being prepared for psychoactive drugs dispensed by government to depressives? You know, just something like that. You see where you get the idea, if we're going to go along this or put this in, the doctors are going to start prescribing. I mean, the government will prescribe what medications we have to take, you know, what our diets must be. There'll be federal food inspectors. We have to check in how many grams of fat we've had each day, you know, et cetera, and so on and so on. And that's the logical end. You have to have a graded series that starts to become horrifying at a certain point, and where the reader can see it's the same thing all the way through. You see? Okay, but I mean, this was good. But I just want. You don't feel guilty that you're taking an unpopular view and don't acknowledge it. Don't start your letters. I know you all think this, but it's wrong. Just come right out and say, two and two is four. Those who are so benighted as to think otherwise. And then you let go. You see, don't say, I know everybody thinks 2 and 2 is 5, but just for a moment, consider the possibility. You know, it puts you in a position of you've exiled yourself from civilization. Now, we don't have much more time here. If I want to get to questions, I think I'm going to do just the beginning of one more letter and that's all I can do. And then I have some written questions and I'm only going to do the very opening. This letter is a defense of Leona Helmsley, who you know was treated horribly by the government. She was railroaded into jail on a complete non offense, deliberately as an example to show that the rich are being treated the same as the poor and to terrify anybody with any money. So it's certainly a worthwhile case and it was perfect for them because she had a very abrasive personality. And it was widely known that she could be rude and that I know from someone who knew her and so she wasn't, you know, a warm Perot type. She was often called a bitch, but that's neither here nor there. That was perfect for the government. Now this person wants to write a letter defending her. And I just haven't time to go over it all. I just want to take the opening because here the whole thing in this letter is setting the context. The context has to be what? That she is a productive, creative human being. Right. And that all these penalties that are being poured on her is that now this is how. This is all the person says to establish that. In fact, I'll read the whole first paragraph and you have to read it. Listen to this. As just a person, your editorial condemning Leona Helmsley was misguided and destructive. See, I wouldn't waste the space on that. I would say Leona Helmsley is X whatever is good, you know, or it's an atrocity for you to say that she's so and so. But misguided isn't worth saying if it doesn't have any fire. The idea is to try to combine a fiery estimate with a very quiet, factual content. So you get them coming or going. Then the writer goes on. Editorial is misguided. It is wealth generated by people like Mrs. Helmsley that makes it possible for most of the rest of us to work and prosper. Now, what right Away is in the minds of 99 out of 100 people who hear the phrase wealth generated by people like Mrs. Helmsley. Wheeling, dealing, making deals, you know, signing papers, going out and meeting big shots. And, you know, or Boyle, no one can distinguish even particularly in a service industry like the hotel. They don't have the iron ore and the railroad, trains and so on. So so far we have no idea why he thinks she generated wealth. Then he goes on, the little people you defended in your editorial, oh, Mrs. Helmsley, their gratitude and admiration, not their snarls and sneers. Well, that would be fine if we knew why. But bad philosophy has reversed the moral standard for our culture and encouraged Mrs. Helmsley to be punished for her virtue. Well, again, we don't know what they are. Then she was hated for being productive, hard working, rich and proud. Well, rich we certainly can get and proud, but productive and hard working, which is the core of it, that's what made her rich and that's why she has a right to be proud. We don't know that. So something at the beginning of this letter has to give them the essential fact to which all of, of which all Atlas Shrugged was dedicated. Namely what the mind is the source of wealth. But if you just say it broadly, it's still not going to be clear. How is it applicable to a hotel owner? So you've got to say something Now, I didn't have the time to say it briefly, but this is the idea you'd have to condense into a sentence or so. Hotels don't go on trees. Nor did she get her money by deals with the government. What underlies the spectacle of six or ten or whatever luxury hotels is. And then you have to say the thought, the planning, the knowledge, the ability to respond to market conditions, the inefficiency, the lowering of costs on your supplies, the being on top of a thousand different things. How do you think you can survive in a competitive economy like New York and grow and prosper if you are not superlative, which takes every ounce of energy? You know very well how Mrs. Helmsley worked from morning to night. This is what the creation of wealth consists of, and this is the reward she gets for it. Then you can say all the rest of it. Now, you don't have to say it at that length, but just enough to make real to the reader that there is some kind of mental, intellectual, complicated, difficult process that she had to go through and not just go to cocktail parties and drunkenly sign her name on something which is their idea of what is well after that, you can say all the rest about what a tragedy that the best people are confronted by this and et cetera and so on. But if you don't make that clear, you can't assume, this is an issue of context, that because a person is wealthy even without inheritance, everybody else is going to assume, well, of course she had to expend her ingenuity to create that wealth, because the standard line is wealth is a creation of man's animal side, his greed and his love of matter has nothing to do with his mind, his spirit, etc. Well, if you know that that's the context in the world, you must attack it. You must state the opposite. You can't prove it, but you must state it at least. Otherwise they just. The letter goes right by them, they don't know what you're talking about. And they even show it to someone and say, can you imagine someone wrote that we should make wealth the way Leona Helmsley does? And then someone else will say, yeah, she's got paid defenders all over, you know, you can't trust the rich, you know. Now, I hope I haven't given you so many isolated tips that putting it all together paralyzes you. Just get what you can and forget the rest. That's all. Now I've got some written questions that I'm going to try to take about one minute each on written questions that pertain more or less to writing, because if they pertain to philosophy as such, I'm not taking written questions on that. I'll take those from the floor on, what is it, Saturday? This question, in meeting and talking to people, I'm cutting the question, but how they got into Objectivism. I've encountered many cases where the person read Atlas of the Fountainhead and said to himself, wow, I never realized there were others who thought that way. These people from an early age had certain positive values, and very often these were not held by their family or teachers or taught to them. Can you explain this phenomenon? Absolutely. Two things have explained this phenomenon altogether. Human beings have free choice, so the fact that they live in one environment doesn't mean they have to capitulate to it if it doesn't make sense to them. And secondly, the truths are incessantly out there in reality. So if you tune into reality, it's hard for everyone consistently to miss it all the time. And periodically someone comes up with the right attitude and then they say, oh, I always believe that they don't come up with the whole thing, but at least some of it I would Say the question is not explain the occasional person who makes sense, but explain all the people who don't. Now, a writing question. Should you edit your own work as if someone else wrote it? Yes, absolutely. Look at it in the third person. And then said, how do you edit someone else's writing? Same way, only this difference. An editor cannot change the content, the essential meaning. An editor has to respect the purpose and content of the writer and simply show him how he can make it more forceful, more condensed, more logical, etc. But the writer, if there's an ideological disagreement, always has the veto power to come in and say, no, that's not an issue of presentation, that is my message, like it or not. And at that point the writers have to back off. And in publishing, it's very clear, they make automatically all the changes that are self evident to make it grammatical and clear and non wordy, et cetera. And then they put queries in the margin. And the query in the margin means, I don't like this, but maybe you do. So you decide, you see, because they don't want to step on your toes. But that's basically, you only edit someone that you respect. I mean, it would be impossible to edit Mein Kampf because you wouldn't know where to start. I have answered the difference between an essence and a fundamental. An essence is a type of fundamental, so is a principle. A fundamental merely means that on which many other things depend. This is a purely philosophical one. Could you, by going to essentials, describe how you respond to someone who says that objectivism sounds like a cult? I wouldn't respond to that because I think that's just a plain insult. But just technically the answer is a cult is a form of association held together by faith in a person. Of no interest to them. How the person reaches those conclusions, what the proof of them are, how they relate to reality. They just take it as a matter of faith and follow that person around, right or wrong. Well, that is the opposite of any philosophy which claims to have a foundation and reach its conclusions methodically. And it's certainly the sub opposite of any philosophy called Objectivism. Now, are there people who treat objectivism as a cult? Yes, those people who dye their hair orange and move to New York because they want to be like Howard Roark. That's a cult. But it's the same issue as in my recent speech, patriotism versus nationalism. The patriots as my country is right and therefore I accept it. The nationalist says, my country, right or wrong. The thinker says, this viewpoint is correct and therefore I accept it. The cultist says this person's idea is right or wrong. So. But normally I would never respond to a. Sentence like that because it's obviously motivated by ill will and it's like saying you're stupid. What's the essential answer? Well, I think I've answered this. Do you have any suggestions on how to get essentials across to readers and still have enough substance in short written pieces such as Op ed and Letters to the Editors? Well, I've given you my suggestions. In essence, create the context, prepare the ground briefly, and then make one terrific point and quit. Just one point. You don't have to make two. And if you can give an argument in the closing line, fine. And I think at that we are just slightly over time on a Saturday we will have questions. I will not take written questions, just be from the floor. We have two solid hours of them, so you can prepare them for yourself, although not hand them in. And they can be at the beginning on anything in the entire course. And then let's say we'll give the last 15 or 20 minutes to going even farther afield to personal questions or the state of the future and all that type of the movie of Atlas and all that type of stuff. Okay, thank you very much.