 It's a real pleasure for me to be speaking in St. Petersburg about the fountainhead and Iron Man. She was born not far from here, she lived not far from here, so it's quite emotional and moving. Somebody like me was kind of grown up on Iron Man and being a fan and an advocate of different ideas for, I hate to say how long, you'll know all day, but you know for 40 years, 41 years actually, exactly, to be here, to be in St. Petersburg and have an opportunity to talk to you. And particularly I want to talk to you about today is about the fountainhead. So I'm curious, how many of you have read about the shrub? How many of you have read the fountainhead? Okay, a smaller number. So for us, let me say everybody should read both books. And those of you who have read about the shrub should definitely read the fountainhead because I don't think you get the full richness of Iron Man's ideas and Iron Man's philosophy and Iron Man's defense of freedom and liberty without reading the fountainhead. Why is that? Now who is, who here is for freedom? Who wants to be free? I want to see who doesn't raise their hand. Now the funny thing is if I ask that question in front of a group of leftists in America, every hand in the room would go up. If I ask the question in front of any group of conservatives in the United States or in Europe or my guess is maybe even in Russia, every hand would go up. There's not a torso on the planet almost who doesn't say they're for freedom. Indeed I would argue that freedom has kind of lost all meaning because everybody's for freedom. Even as they try to oppress us, they claim to be doing it in the name of freedom. Liberty. Who's against liberty? Nobody. So I think it's really important for us to understand what we mean by freedom. What the term means to us and when we talk about liberty and freedom, make sure we explain what it is we mean. And I think it is equally or even more important for us to understand the foundation why we are for freedom and liberty. Why we believe in these ideas and why they are true. They are right and they are objective. Not just because we feel like it, not just because it's cruel right now to be pro-limity. But to understand why it is right, why outside the side of freedom, real freedom, is the side of truth. So what is freedom? What is freedom? Anybody want to take a shot? What's freedom? In English though, yeah. But you have to yell, you just have to yell. Free decision. Free decisions, so you have to make your own decisions. Is it just about decisions that you make? It's about responsibilities. It's about responsibilities, is it? Is freedom about responsibilities? Responsibility to whom? About yourself. In this group we can't even agree on what freedom is, yeah. So it's to do what you want equally with other people. Equally? Really? So we all have the same equal opportunities? No. Legally. Legally, not equally, okay, legally. So that's close. Freedom is a negative concept. All freedom means, all freedom means is the absence of coercion. It's the absence of coercion. It's the absence of force. The absence of authority. The absence of somebody telling you what to do and have the power to force you to do it. It says nothing about what you should do. It says that others have no right to cross you. Others should not be allowed to force you to do things you do not want to do. That's what freedom means. Because on the left, when they say freedom, they talk about freedom to have opportunities. And therefore they say, you know, I don't know if you know the line that at least the Marxists use in the United States. They say, you can't be free on an empty stomach because you have no opportunities because you're hungry. That is a perversion of the concept of freedom. Of course you can be free on an empty stomach. You can be free to go, try to find a job in a free society. Freedom is not somebody something else provides to you. Freedom is the absence of something. It's the absence of force. The absence of coercion. And on that definition of freedom, almost nobody agrees. Because that definition of freedom is a radical definition of freedom. And it has radical implications about how we structure our lives socially. It means that the state cannot cause, because to the extent that it causes, it violates our freedom. It means that coercion needs to be eliminated. Force, authority needs to be eliminated from every single aspect of our life. To be free means I get to make decisions for myself. Somebody said that here, right? And I get to act on those decisions and nobody can stop me unless I am using coercion on somebody else. Unless I am violating somebody else's property rights or physical space. Physical space. I am free when I can act on my own judgment in pursuit of my own values as an individual. So there is no such thing in a sense as freedom for a society independent of the idea of freedom for an individual. Freedom rests on the idea that you, everyone of you as an individual has a right to your own life. Owns your own life. That the standard of value is your own more being. And that you as an individual should be morally and politically left free to pursue your life. Again, left free means, no coercion, no force, no dictating what you should do and what you should not. And indeed this is the sense, the idea of freedom, the idea of a free society rests on the idea of individualism. We will not have freedom. We will not achieve a society with no courage unless we recognize the importance and sanctity of the individual. And that the individual becomes the standard, morally and politically. Particularly in the age in which we live in right now. An age at least in the West, and you can tell me what's happening in Russia but at least in the West. Well we're seeing a rise of collectivism, a rise of tribalism, a rise of nationalism. And a decline in the respect and the importance and the significance and the sanctity of the individual in his life and his values and his choices. Particularly given those forces that are collectivizing today. And we thought forces that I thought at least had gone into the trash bin of history. It is so important today to not just fight for freedom, even if you've got the right definition. If you've got the wrong one, I'm not sure we're fighting for the same thing. But to fight for the individual. So what does that mean? And this is a great contribution to the debate. Rand is the defender of the idea of individualism. The idea that what matters in morality is not what is good for the group. Nobody knows what's good for the group because the group is just a bunch of individuals. Individuals, there is not such a thing as a group. Just a bunch of individuals. What happens when we say we want to fight for the good of the group? What always happens? Because we don't know what's good for the group. Who gets to decide what's good for the group? What's that? No one. No one? No, there's always somebody. Who gets to decide? The leader, the one who's willing to take charge, the one who's willing to say I am special. Because I can communicate with the group. I have mystical powers. I know what the voluntarily wants. Or I know what the Aryan race wants. Or I know what Russia wants. The hell does Russia want? Russia doesn't know what it wants. You might know what you want. There's no Russian consciousness up here. There's no Russian mind. There's no Russian stomach. Russia doesn't eat. America doesn't eat. America doesn't think. You think, you think, you think. You can't eat for me. And you can't think for me. So all that exists in the world are individuals. What is it? What is it that is unique to human beings? What is it that makes it possible for individuals to live well, to succeed, actually even to survive just to be alive? What is it that makes it possible for us as individuals to live and survive? What's uniquely human? What makes us human beings? Our mind. That's good. Usually it takes the audience about 10 minutes to get to that. So you guys are way ahead of the curve. You never heard that thumbs make us human? Thumbs. In anthropology in America, everybody talks about thumbs. It's important. It's bizarre. What makes us human is reason. What makes us human is the ability to think. Every human value, every human value that we possess from this building, this beautiful chandelier to this technology we're using to light this screen this to the whole world is the product of one thing. It's a product of some individual, some ways, ability to think, ability to reason, and ability to create. But that creativity comes from this ability to think. It all starts with the ability to identify reality as it is as an objective fact to create new information into new ideas and new creations like this chandelier, or like this microphone, or like the chairs that you're sitting on. Anybody have the gene for hunting? We got one gene for hunting. I doubt it. I doubt it. I don't think anybody have the gene for hunting. Because you try from scratch, naked, running down a pretty gamble in Russia that you hunt for you. A deer. Chasing it, catching it, biting into it, killing it. You can't do it with your hands. You can't run it fast enough. So how do we catch a deer? How do we hunt a deer? With a gun. Where did the gun come from? Somebody had invented it. So even 10, 20,000 years ago, somebody had to create a bow and arrow. Somebody had to create weapons. Somebody created tools. Somebody had to think of strategies. We as an animal cannot hunt without our minds. We cannot eat without our minds. We have to create and build agriculture. Nothing we do as a human being can be divorced from our minds. No achievement can be divorced from thinking. The most important thing that individuals possess, the most important thing that human beings possess is our capacity and ability to think, to reason, to figure stuff out, to be rational, to adhere to the facts of reality and to build on those facts. What is the enemy of thinking? What is the enemy of reason? What is the thing that would shut your mind down? Shut it down. Well, death, yes, okay. Violence, authority, absolute, force. Religion can be overcome. How many people here have overcome religion? I'm in the minority. Okay, few of us have. So it can be overcome. Using reason, by the way. That's the way to overcome it. But you can overcome it. Unless you ever get to yourself. Somebody puts a gun to your head and says, this is what you must think. And if you don't and pull the trigger, you're stuck. Two plus two equals five, from now on. You can't build a bridge. You can't program a computer. You can't do much in life if you're under the assumption of a false dogma that is forced upon you and if you don't and hit you and you are going to be killed. Force, authority, is the enemy of reason. It is the enemy of human life because reason is our means to human life. When the first individual invented the bone arrow or agriculture or pretty much anything in human history, what do you think we did to them? Shame them, you're moderate. You know? We killed them. Yeah, we burned them, we burned them alive. We don't like people showing us off that they're smarter than us. In history, typically what we do with the great innovators, the great producers is we shame them in modern societies, in friendly societies and we burn them at the stake in not so friendly societies. It's only when we free the mind. It's only when we allow for intellectual freedom and then the freedom to act on that that we become prosperous, that we become wealthy, that we become rich and successful. If you look at human history from 100,000 years ago most human beings lived on about less than $3 a day. I mean, even you guys would struggle to live on less than $3 a day, even in Russia. I think that's true. What is that in Google? $3 a day. Some pathetic amount. 200 Google a day? Something like that? For 100 years, that was what human race was. It was about, here, this is a graph, right? It went up a little bit, human life got a little bit better during, I don't know, the recent Rome and then it went down to the great, you know, the dark ages and went up a little bit during the Renaissance only in certain parts of the world. The rest of the world was good for us. And then what happened? Something miraculous happened. Something miraculous happening. It went like that. I mean, I have to jump. I mean, it reaches almost the ceiling in terms of how better off life suddenly became, in particular in the West, in Western Europe and the United States. What happened that made this possible? Just yell it out and stop with the hands. You're way too polite. Yeah, the Industrial Revolution but what's the Industrial Revolution a product of? Free minds. She's got all the answers today. Free minds. Suddenly, we liberated the human mind. We liberated the human mind from coercion. We liberated the human mind from superstition. We liberated the human mind from religion and it went like that. Because what happened during that period? When did this happen? When did this go like this? When did that inflection point happen? Anybody have a date? What did you say? 1980s. 1980s. 1900s. 1900s. Yeah, that's late. Happens before that. When does that happen? When does the Industrial Revolution happen? I like one year. I like a particular year. It's partly untrue what I'm going to tell you but it's close enough. I like a particular year from the inflection point. I like 1776. Somebody else likes it. That's good. Three reasons why 1776 is a good year for human beings becoming suddenly freer and wealthier. The Declaration of Independence is written. The Declaration of Independence is not just some document. I believe it is the most important political document ever written in human history. Because for the first time in human history the first time in human history a political document declared that every individual, every individual human being has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of harmony. That means that every individual human being is free to pursue the values necessary for their life, for their intellectual freedom and for their happiness. You have the right to pursue happiness. To go on and do what you think you think is necessary. That's not what other people think. Not what some ancient book thinks but what you think. The second thing that happened in 1776, a famous book was written in economics do you know what that is? Well, the nations by atmosphere was written in 1776. A third thing that was happening in 1776 was the first commercialization commercial use of the steam engine which then exploded into industrial pollution. But 1776 is a combination of a period that came before that. What do we call that period in history? Before 1776. Intellectual history. What do we call that period? It's called the enlightenment. It's called the age of reason. And I'm sorry to give you a bunch of history but it's important history. And you're not going to get any wealth power. Around 1700 people started suddenly not suddenly but they evolved to this point they started advocating for using reason to discover the world. Newton does it in science. Locke does it in political philosophy. And he starts saying we don't rely on revelation. We don't rely on philosopher kings that tell us the truth. We don't rely on an ancient book to communicate ideas to us. What we rely on is our own senses and our own mind to discover the truths for ourselves. And hey you've always wondered about motion of things. I'm Newton and here's how we explain it and it's pretty simple. Anyone who can understand Newton's laws of motion and if you didn't do well in physics it's not because it's hard it's because you had a lousy teacher because it's easy. And people suddenly said I can understand all the stuff that's going on about him by myself I don't have to rely on experts to tell me to understand it and figure out from me wow if that's the case then maybe I could choose my own profession and maybe I could choose my own spouse who to marry because until then you couldn't. And maybe maybe I can even choose my own political leaders and my own political opinions and maybe I can be left free to pursue my own values and not be your slave and that's the revolution it's a revolution in the way people started thinking they started thinking about their own lives their own abilities their own ability to construct their own life to live their own life to choose their own values and to pursue those values guided by reason and we tried it and this is what happened every country that adopts an attitude of individualism every country that adopts an attitude that you are left to think for yourself and you can act freely based on those thoughts for the most part I wish there was a country that did it 100% but for the most part we're allowing you to do that we're leaving you alone to do that acting coercion to the extent that that is done people have tried succeeded become wealthy, materially and spiritual in spite of what you might have read is not a materialist the alternative to life is not between being a mystic and a materialist Iron Man is not a mystic and she's not a materialist she believes human courage is human reason which is not just pure material so at the core of the idea of freedom at the core of a free society is the idea that every individual can and must as an issue of personal responsibility somebody said responsibility earlier can and must live his life live her life because they see fit that they have the tool that makes that possible if you think about Plato's philosophy Plato teaches us that we cannot take care of ourselves that we are dependent on philosophy for kings to guide us because we live in a cave and only see shadows and never engage with real reality Aristotle blows that out of the water and says no we do live in this world we do see this world and the truth is accessible to everybody Iron Man takes that idea even further you every one of you can live your life by using reason can take responsibility for your own life if you choose to do so you are capable of it you're not dependent on authoritarians telling you what to do with life and the contrary you cannot live a good life if you're living somebody else's life the reason I want you to read the fountain I really think everybody should read the fountain it's about an individual who chooses his own values objectively based on reality using his reason and fights the system of people trying both to cross them but just to argue with them just to impose their authority on them not in the realm of politics but in the fountain it's in the realm of architecture and it's not just him expressing himself however he feels no, it's a book about the mind it's a book about his reasons and his ability to show and to prove that he is right and it's a book about the victory at the end of such a man so I need to fully understand Iron Man's vision of individualism what it means why it's not subjectivism why it's an objective view of individualism in the sense that it's guided by reason not guided by emotion it's the book to read I also encourage you to read a nonfiction book a book of essays of Iron Man called The Virtue of Selfishness selfishness that's a pretty radical title the idea that morally your moral responsibility is first and foremost or not just first and foremost your moral responsibility totally total is to yourself it's to your own happiness it's to your own success it's to your own values it's to living the best life you can live for you now if you think about people who want to live their life for themselves want to pursue their values want to use their thoughts their reason to make their life the best life that it can be to pursue whatever career they want whatever romantic relationship they want whatever whatever they want then what kind of political system would people like that want people who are confident people who are assertive that they have a moral right to live a happy life for themselves on this planet what kind of political system would a bunch of people like that want Russia what's that Anarchy no I mean I told I was interviewed by VKO yesterday for his podcast for his YouTube channel and I said that the first thing I would do if you guys succeeded in establishing anarchy is I would leave I believe anarchy is the worst of all political systems because it is the most violent no I don't think that's true what they would want is freedom you can't have freedom in anarchy but we can get into that if you want what they would want is a system with physical force with coercion and authority have been eliminated from society and I believe in order to do that you have to have a government a government does one thing only and that is eliminate coercion from society and protect the individuals right to life liberty, property and pursuit happen so individuals with self esteem individuals who want to pursue their own values individuals who trust their own mind who know how to use their own reason would never tolerate authoritarianism would never tolerate a government to eat and what not to eat who to marry who not to marry what profession to go into what not to go into or even today what they can take in an airplane what I think really pisses me off in America is to go through TSA security I always imagine in my head George Washington was tall strong guy I always imagine him walking through TSA and then stopping him and frisking him he would beat them up who the hell are you a bunch of government bureaucrats frisking you don't touch me in the name of security we now have it's okay to touch so the key to freedom is to empower the individual the key to freedom is to show the individual that they are capable of living for themselves they are capable of thinking for themselves they are capable of choosing the values for themselves they are capable of succeeding for themselves the key to freedom to political freedom is individuals with self-esteem and confidence to live their own life the key to political freedom is ultimately a philosophy and morality and individualism which means the idea that the individual is what is sacred so I truly believe that what we need in the world today is not a political revolution we'll get to that one day we'll need a political revolution it's way too early for a political revolution we're not going to win it so white trial what we really need today is a moral revolution what we really need today is a philosophical revolution what we really need today is to build up an intellectual army of self-confident self-assured people who want to live for themselves and when the time comes we'll be ready for that political revolution thank you all the question is to give me a little bit of a pose but you want to move on you can ask in English or Russian if you ask in Russian I'll get the translation you can ask in Russian so why are you against anarchy against anarchy it's a question I get almost every time I speak in front of young people because anarchy seems to have this amazing appeal, particularly Europe and also in America on young people in particular anarchy is linked to the legitimization of violence it is the idea that violence, force, coercion it's just one other thing that we have among human beings we have bread, we have iPhones, we have violence and the way we create bread the way we create iPhones is we trade we have market institutions and since violence is just like everything else then we need to trade violence you have your police force, I have my police force they have their police force and we just engage in market activity to figure out what is right now that is the most scary thing I can think of that's Somalia I only invited her to Somalia no, violence is not something you trade violence is not something you create a market for violence is anti-market violence is anti-trade violence is anti-reason violence is anti-human life violence is what is what you eliminate in order to create a market violence is what you put separately you create a monopoly over the use of a territory force to eliminate violence so that markets can arise indeed there are no markets when there is anarchy because we are too busy killing each other and fighting over stuff we have negated the idea that human interaction should be truly volatile by advocating for for anarchy and the idea of a narco-capitalism in terms capitalism requires government because it requires an agency that protects individual rights and if you don't like the word government that's fine we can use a different word we can use a Greek word I don't care about the word what matters is the institution there has to be an institution not all institutions when we are free of for profit trading institutions all kinds of institutions is to make sure that people are not violent against each other and our committee fought against each other and that arbitrates disputes between us so we don't have to go into the street and duel it out or that our agencies don't duel it out and at the end practically I think anarchism always leads to authoritarianism I think it always the guy with the biggest guns legitimize guns as means of exchange the guy with the biggest gun wins because he takes over all the other guys with smaller guns and he dominates and controls so I wish I wish I'm not going to get my wish that anarchy was excluded from the ideas that we typically call liberty and freedom ideas but I'm in the minority you anarchists are more than I am so but yeah that's basic an outline of my views if you want a full explanation I actually did the debate on this topic with a so-called anarcho-capitalist in Poland a few months ago it's on my youtube channel please subscribe to my youtube channel and that particular debate is on my youtube channel and you can see it there if you're interested there's more discussion about this issue next question my name is Manuel Yosef and let me ask you what do you think is the right way to build what the government provides so it's not to allow it to drop into a bureaucratic machine what's happening yeah I think the question so what kind of government should we have to prevent it from going so first let me say this there's no way to prevent it from going if that's what people want so Benjamin Franklin when he exited the Constitutional Convention somebody came up to him and said what kind of government have you given us and he said to a public collar if you can keep it so it's our responsibility to hold them accountable for living up to the kind of government we have established and every generation has to recommit themselves to liberty and recommit themselves to the fight for liberty in order to keep them the goliath from being established but there is in which you could slow the process down or at least make it very very hard for them for example the American Constitution has been pretty damn good right so even though America today is dramatically in decline the Constitution has kept it mostly free and I hesitate but mostly free for 200 years now I would rewrite the American Constitution when Americans hear me say this they can't touch it but no I would rewrite and I would have four separations of state from in order to ensure that the state never grew first I would have the separation of state from ideas you might call it state from church but I consider church just being one set of ideas and it should be many ideas the state has no opinion about what is right and what is wrong ideas wise it isn't communist, capitalist socialist or anything it protects individual rights based on the idea of the sanctity of the right to life liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness that's based on ideas but it doesn't quibble about the ideas it follows that second, a complete thorough separation of the state from economics the state doesn't have an economic saw or an economic minister or a treasury it doesn't have any function there's no central bank there's no regulations the state has no business in the economy all it does is it violates the rights about to be violated then it intervenes but it cannot pre-empt it cannot violate the rights of businessmen of employees to negotiate salaries to negotiate anything that should be left in the voluntary markets among us third, the state should be separated completely from education there should be no state schools there should be no public education of government schools there should be no again government ideas to teach if they get the schools they have your kids minds they get to control everything the most important thing in the world is education and if you give it to the government forget it plus what happens to the quality of it I always ask people to not show America anyway but design it everybody laughs because it wouldn't look like a joke but we're quite happy to let the young design what goes into our kids brains we're quite happy for them to design our educational system we're quite happy for them to design our healthcare system so no government interference in education and fourth, this is a new one but I think as important these days and science no government funding for science no government opinion about science no government opinion about the temperatures of the globe 20 years from now or not, one way or the other it's none of government's business what is true science and what is false science that is determined by scientists not by government so if you had those four separations you'd be free and I think you could hold on to that freedom and be clear what you meant in that constitution by the wall of government and you would have to define individual ways not to kill it what that can mean my name is Alexander thanks for watching it's interesting I have two questions first, you said that do you believe that the creation of society causes cost industrial demand then why industrial inclusion happens in united terms of government not branch or management program and second don't you think that's an idea of equality of outcome that's a stupid idea it logically comes after an ideal equality opportunity that's all okay let me try to answer those two questions one is why did the desert revolution happen in the united king I think because that was the country it was free it wasn't free but it was free that is by the time of the beginning of the 19th or the end of the 18th century the role of the king had been diminished and the role of parliament which is a much freer institution had been railed the recognition of property rights was very very strong in the UK going back to the Magna Carta and to the civil legal system where you would arbitrate disputes and you could sue people if they caused you damages so it was a tradition already built into the UK out of respectful rights and respectful property they have evolved, why evolved exactly there it's hard to tell to Magna Carta and on and then finally the United Kingdom is where the enlightenment is the most important thinkers lived, books, taught, spoke John Locke is there Newton is there ultimately Adam Smith is there in between all these Scottish thinkers amazing thinkers who talk about liberty and freedom and that was true in France to some extent but in France the king was everything the son the king was still imbued with a holy spirit in England already the king was not that important so I think that's why it happened in the UK and of course it really happened when it happened the fastest is in the United States of America we didn't have a king who really had freedom that's where the Industrial Revolution completely took off and overtook everybody else by 1914 the United States was the largest economy in the world what was the second question about equality equality look this is a long talk I have a book, here's another plug subscribe to my YouTube channel and buy my book I've got a book called Equal I think you'll like the title Equal is Unfaith right because I think fan is justice requires inequality we produce different amounts I think the same is true of opportunity is no such thing as equality of opportunity the fact is we all have different opportunities the only sense in which equality means anything is equality of rights equality of freedom equality of before the law so you all have a right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness all of you, every single one of you because of America didn't believe that unfortunately because despite all men and created equal there were slaves and there were not slaves but the declaration of dependence is the idea that there should never be slaves they were all equal in terms of our freedoms in terms of our rights that's the only sense in which equality means anything in terms of actually practice sorry, how are you going to date this? now I'm an atheist, absolute since the age of 6 that was not Iron Man everything else is Iron Man atheism I did by myself only thing I did by myself thank you