 Welcome to this edition of Parallax Views, an IEA series of conversations about cultural politics and in particular freedom of speech. My name is Mark Landening and today I'm hugely honoured to be joined by Yaron Brooke, Chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute in America. This interview has been arranged at short notice because Yaron was due to be addressing a meeting at King's College this evening, but for reasons that he will go into in a moment, that meeting has had to be rearranged at very short notice and so we'll now be taking place once this conversation is over. So King's loss is our gain and in particular it's my gain because I have long been and admired of Yaron and have seen and heard many of his talks on the internet about the philosophy of objectivism and related subjects and we'll be coming on to that a bit later. Before we come on to objectivism, please tell me about the circumstances in which you find yourself here tonight because I find them very revealing and they relate to a sort of horrific experience you had a few years ago at King's. Yes, a few years ago I was doing an event with the person known as Sagan Avakad. We were doing an event on free speech. It was going to be a conversation about free speech between the two of us. The weekend before there was some chatter on the internet that some Palestinian groups were complaining that I was at King's College giving a talk because I am pro-Israel. I'm known to be an advocate for the Israeli position in terms of foreign policy. But that developed over the weekend and it seems like the protests were growing. King's College is a consequence, beefed up security. They restricted attendance at the event to only students. So a lot of people who had planned to come in by train from outside of London were turned away at the door. So we started the event. There was security where you were put in a separate room. We started the event and about ten minutes into the event there was loud bangs. Antifa had jumped over whatever barriers they had put to enter the college. They threw smoke bombs. They knocked the security down. One of the security guards landed up in hospital and they rushed into the room where we were having the event and came up on the stage and grabbed the microphones and were making noises of violence. Although they didn't do anything. Ultimately they were shoot out of there and they shut down the whole university because the smoke bombs set off their alarms and the event of course was cancelled. Since then King's College seems to be very, very hesitant to allow me on campus. With regard to this event they demanded that the students pay for private security in order to hold an event with me present. And of course King's College while an extreme case is not the only case where this has happened. It's happened to me in the past at Exeter University where again a group of pro-Palestinian kids wouldn't let me speak. Again a talk on free speech. They stood up yelling slogans and for half an hour wouldn't let me say a word until security came, cleared them out and allowed the event to go on. And then just a few weeks ago I was at Bristol University giving a talk on capitalism and the causes of war. And again students claiming that I am Islamophobic whatever that means came and as I started the event they were banging on the doors yelling and playing loud music over a speaker they had received in order to try to disrupt the event as much as they could. So for whatever reason I've gained a reputation here in the UK as some crazy radical in terms of I don't know in terms of what I don't think these people have actually read what I have to say about about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or about Islamic immigration to Europe. But they've made me out to be some kind of monster and have denied my ability to speak or tried to deny my ability to speak at universities. It's very shocking to hear that obviously from a liberal perspective. And I mean have you experienced similar things in America, similar acts of sort of barbarity from the new left? So I have over time it's been a while so it's interesting the last few years most of what I've experienced has been here in the UK and less so in the United States. I think there's more, I think students here care more about kind of the foreign policy issues, issues around maybe Islam and issues about around Israel than they do in the United States. I think that maybe is the motivation. But some of the other speakers have experienced this, this idea of making noise outside the door. I've seen videos of Jordan Peterson having to deal with that and other speakers we all know, well-known speakers, not particularly crazy in my view, have been banned from campuses or not allowed to speak or attempts have been made to disrupt them. So this is a pattern. It's, you know, COVID has slowed things down. So for two years we weren't on campuses speaking. Now that we're back, it seems like the new left is alive and well and actively involved in trying to silence points of view they don't like. I'm broadening the conversation out a little bit. How does the contemporary hard ultra-left in America groups like and and Tief Black Lives Matter and that those kind of groups, how do they relate to mainstream democratic party politics? Because it does sort of seem to me extraordinary that the party of JFK, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and what have you now has people like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and these kind of people who are sort of ill-defined, but ultra-left, sort of verging on Marxism, but not in a very specific or intellectually persuasive. How are they becoming sort of concertina? Well, it doesn't really surprise me. So the new left, the AOCs of the world are coming to become more and more important and more dominant within the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party has taken a shift to kind of these new left positions, which doesn't really surprise me. It's something that I think I ran predicted in the 1960s will ultimately happen. The JFKs, the LBJs, Johnson, even the FDRs, whatever they represent, they don't represent anything principled. They present some mushy, welfare state mixed economy position that doesn't really have any principles and every really guiding lights. I mean, John F. Kennedy was a known pragmatist who didn't really stand for anything substantive. When you have an environment in where the consensus is kind of wishy-washy, neither here nor there, that is incredibly vulnerable for people who actually believe in something, even something really bad to start tilting people in that direction. Long term ideas are what matters. Long term, it is the radical positions, the more consistent positions, the win-out. The mixed economy is not sustainable. The mixture will either move towards more authoritarianism or towards more freedom. And I think what we've seen at the Democratic Party is this mixture of some freedom, but a lot of constraints and certainly in the economic sphere, a lot of regulations and controls and redistribution of wealth and so on, this mixture in the Democratic Party has led to those advocating for more controls and more consistent controls to dominate and to move the Democratic Party towards a more authoritarian positioning. I think they've done the same thing on the right. The party of Richard Nixon and certainly the Bushes, which stood for nothing, stood for vaguely free markets but never not too seriously. Cutting taxes, the one thing the Republicans have always been good at is cutting taxes, but not in the name of liberty or freedom or anything like that because they never cut spending and they never really deregulate. And of course that mishmash, that inconsistency, that unprincipled position opens Republicans up to the kind of, I'd say, new right, which is much more nationalistic and much more fascistic and much more authoritarian. So I think both left and right are moving towards authoritarianism, different brands of authoritarianism, as a consistent application of the underlying ideas that are behind each one of the left and the right. In that sense, I don't like that spectrum anymore because what we're seeing is collectivism of the left and collectivism of the right and people like us don't belong anywhere near there. We're like in a different dimension and the political dimension I like is collectivism versus individualism with much of the collectivism of the left and right on the collectivist side and the few of us who are still staying for individualism on the other side. So in a way what you're describing is very much what Hayek was writing about in the context of the Germanic world when he wrote his famous book The Road to Serfdom where he argued that actually fascism and hardline socialism which were generally seen as being polar opposites in fact he saw fascism as being the logical outcome of a very heavily regulated socialist economy and society in that the real continuum is between liberals at one end and various forms of collectivist at the other. Absolutely. So I agree with that completely and more than that I think Hayek was also right in the sense that he kind of talks about the slippy slope in the road to serfdom that is what you know once you give in a little bit once you concede some of the collectivist agenda once you concede to them then you concede more and more and more because the more consistent party again which other you know a little bit of collectivism versus a lot of collectivism there are a lot of collectivism the fascists and the socialists are more consistent about the collectivism than this Mishi Washi middle ground of a mixed economy and and so there's a slippy slope that once you set once you go to the JFK route or once you go to the Richard Nixon route the left is going to become more collectivist and the right is going to become more collectivist because neither the Nixon or the Republican Nixon or the Republican Bush or the the Kennedy neither one of them are stand for individualism stand for liberalism in its in its proper conception. Yeah what's interesting about the the current political scene both in your country and here is the way in which cultural politics has now moved to the the front of the stage so to speak and in particular and this is something I associate much more with the new left then then the right a particular obsession with language and the desire to regulate control language prevent people like you from even speaking what do you think philosophically lies behind this yes well you know so what lies behind it is a rejection of the idea that reason is the mechanism by which we discover truth that reason debate reasoned argument is the way in which you convince other people and using our mind our senses and our reasoning capability is the way we discover truth about the world to one extent or another they believe either in a complete subjectivism or some kind of way in which truth is revealed to them by by some mechanism they know it maybe it's through the racial identity or maybe it's through the intersectional identity depending on kind of who you talk to on the radical left but once they have that truth since they didn't achieve that truth through a reason mechanism there's no way for them to explain it to us and therefore the only reason they can the only way they can get us to come along is by using force right and this is this is all totalitarian it's right I you know the communists can't actually explain to us why we should all be sacrificed why we should all be killed in the name of the proletarian right they they there's no reason why the proletarian should rule and their dictatorship of the proletarian should arise or what even is the proletarian who are the proletarian how do they make decisions because again they get that through some kind of revelation and they get it through the only way you get revelation really is through a leader like Stalin or Lenin who sees the truth right and they have to use violence the the fascists how do they know what the Aryan race wants well they get it you know somebody has to lead the Aryan race and have the revelation yeah and he can't explain it to us because he didn't get it through reasons he has to use force against us the new left is the same way how do they know that this intersexual pyramid is the right intersexual pyramid not through reason not through fact not through logic and once you abandon fact reason and logic you're left with force so you're left with silencing people who are trying to use logic and reason to object to your stance you're left with trying to enforce your beliefs and other people through force and that's you know that's why philosophically the thing we must fight for is reason and truth the idea the truth exists the truth there is a truth there is objective reality and that the only way to know it is through reason and if it is through reason and if there is objective truth then I should be able to show you I should be able to explain it to you I should be able to argue about it and I might be wrong and we can have that debate but using the tools of logic not a fist yeah and it's when you abandon logic when you're bad reason a fist comes into the picture so they're taking us all these different types of authoritarian are taking us back to a really pre-enlightenment period when at one point you know it was the Catholic Church or some other religious organization saying we know the truth and if you don't go along with it we're going to burn you alive and torture you you have to sort of you have to subjugate your own consciousness yes to the priesthood or to whoever it is and in a way what we're seeing now is a reversal of this incredible liberating period that was brought into being by the Renaissance by by the Enlightenment whereby individuals were then became free to utilize their own absolute cognitive capacity and now we seem to be going back with these well I would say that what has happened over the last 200 years really since the Enlightenment made these ideas explicit and actually created a political system to manifest that which is a free political system whether it's American or when the Western European political systems that are that are free and respect free speech because they recognize that reason is only means to achieve and therefore argumentation is only means to achieve to achieve truth but what we've seen is really from the beginning of the Enlightenment certainly from the beginning of the 19th century that is the the end of the intellectual enlightenment what we've seen as a rebellion against it whether it was conservatives in the 19th century particularly German conservatives who resented the idea of individuals having opinions and individuals coming up with their own ideas and individuals leaving the the wonders of the farm to go to the city and be engaged in capitalism or whether it's ultimately communism and Marx rejecting rejecting the Enlightenment or even Kant and Hegel Hegel is massively rejecting the Enlightenment in in his philosophy but we see coming out of Germany in particular but also out of France a real opposition to the Enlightenment thinking and I'd say the rise of communism and the rise of fascism in Europe are these pre-enlightenment ideas rebelling against the Enlightenment so they're new forms of sort of counter-enlightment constantly we're seeing counter-enlightment in in in the West and we're constantly having to fight back against the counter-enlightment and unfortunately the Enlightenment left a lot of holes philosophically that are being exploited by these counter-enlightment forces and one of I think Rand's contributions here is that I think she is the Enlightenment philosopher of the 20th century so she is she helps fill in the holes that the Enlightenment created that the Enlightenment philosophers didn't fully articulate for example the Enlightenment philosophers many of them were quite religious and and she kind of brings a secular perspective and a secular foundation for a lot of these ideas and and but we're constantly and I think she provides us with tools to now continue the fight against the pre-enlightenment ideas but this is this is the fate of the West or the fate of the world now because Western ideas dominate the world it's this constant battle between the Enlightenment and the pre-enlightment and and in that sense most of these ideas have a religious tinge to them right communism had a religious tinge to it fascism certainly had a religious tinge to it and you're seeing this new left ideology and I'd say populism on the right both have religious aspects to them a priest what do you mean by by religious because I mean many of the sort of modernist authoritarians of the 20th century whether they were fascists or Marxists certainly said that they they didn't you know hide against it you know it was certainly sure even God so they were high religion place God with another mystical entity so communists replace God with a mystical entity called the proletariat its consciousness and how do we know what again we need a leader to tell us we need a pope to tell us what the proletarian wants fascism replaced God with the Aryan race or whatever or the nation right nationalism places the nation above the individual and again the nation is kind of a mystical entity you see in in Putin right now you know the nation has kind of a Russian spirit has kind of a mystical entity and you need that powerful leader to be able to tell you what is good for the nation and what you should do for the nation and I think the new left has in a sense this mystical entity this this knowledge that somehow they have accessed but it's it's fundamentally anti-reason and when you don't have reason what's left you have left emotion and I would say that at the end of the day religion is based on emotion it's it's the end of the day it's based on this truth as revelation truth is coming since there's nothing to reveal it's ultimately the emotion and so I think that the all these supposed secular movements by rejecting reason are left with emotionalism and in that sense it becomes a kind of an omnipresent all-powerful agency that kind of replaces God yeah so whether it could be the state it says everything or it could be the intellectuals right it could be it could be the intellectuals that tell you which group today you have to sacrifice to right which group today is at the top of the hierarchy of need and therefore the require your sacrifice but note that they've taken in a sense they've taken Christian morality they've taken the morality of sacrifice they've taken the morality of the neediest in society need your help or a group that they define as the neediest again whether it's the parliamentarian we must all sacrifice for the parliamentarian or whether it's the Aryan race we must all sacrifice the Aryan race or whether it's transgender you know minority ethnic this that or the other that we must all sacrifice to there's always a group where morality demands that we give up our rights give up our freedoms for their sake and that again I think is religious is religious based that you're all these people are put up on a cross as some kind of ideal that we must live that we must sacrifice to I ran towards the end of her life while she was primarily I suppose fixated in terms of promoting the cause of liberty against more traditional forms of collectivism towards the end of her life she she did write a book about the emerging new left and it would be fascinating would it not to to see how had she lived on she would now be evaluating movements such as transgenderism and and all the other stuff that now comes under the sort of collective umbrella of the new left how do you think she would be looking at the kind of developments we've seen I mean again hard hard to tell she was a genius I am not so she would have had profound things to say that I can't even imagine but she was already writing about this in the late 60s and early 70s she was writing about in a sense balkanization the elevation of ethnicity as some kind of elevated wondrous thing that we should be promoting and she talked about balkanization before we saw this slaughter in the Balkans in in the 1990s right when Yugoslavia fell apart she was already predicting that based on this idea that we were elevating the ideal of ethnic groups were both within the United States and globally she saw the rise of environmentalism as a phenomenon of the new left and and she talks in one of her essays apollo versus Dionysus about the difference between kind of the woodstock new left attitude to what life which was the rejection of reason the elevation of emotion versus their polonian view of life which was represented by the the flight to the moon which represented reason and the use of science and reason and she said the world unfortunately is drifting towards this this Dionysus view this view of emotions if you combine kind of the ethnicity with emotion I think that's what we're seeing today we're seeing little groups who express their emotions that have no no connection to reason deny the efficacy of reason the whole postmodern movement which basically says there is no truth there is no logic none of that matters I think all of that would be completely consistent with what we saw back then there's a sense in which the hippies of the 1960s were the new left they they failed and the primary failure was in 1972 and politically if you think about McGovern who was a clearly new left candidate and real authoritarian and a real statist a real socialist he failed dramatically against the very mediocre Republican Richard Nixon but he was crushed by Nixon that kind of put the new left on a side on the side and what happened to those hippies is what many of them became university professors and what we're seeing today is the result of 40 50 years of these new left hippies of the 60s educating multiple generations in this philosophy of emotionalism of rejection of truth and rejection of reality and rejection of reason and we're reaping the the evil consequences of their dominance of our educational institutions primarily in the United States and then the exploitation of those ideas to the rest of the world so there's a sense in which everything we're seeing today have it roots in the 60s and of course really have their roots I would say in German romantic philosophy going back to Manuel Kant yeah a Labour Party friend of mine believes that he's very much on the sort of traditional social democratic wing of his party but he believes that the new left are what he calls a proto fascistic movement in that just as you say they're elevating the politics of emotion and that this is a sort of primitive politics which is also a tribalistic movement whereby society is being analyzed in terms of groups rather than individuals who have rights and so that the new left is creating through their theory these categories these identity groups that don't actually exist in reality absolutely and you know groups generally don't exist in a sense that only individuals exist we can conceptualize people into groups but they are elevating the group above the individual which all collectivists have done throughout history but I would tell your friend that he's at blame I mean at the end of the day it's a social Democrats that are to blame for this appearance on the left look the social Democrats have forever wanted to in a sense enslave us economically they want to control us economically I want to tell us what we can and cannot do economically and generally they said what you do in your private life we don't want to intervene you can have that you can do what you want indeed it was the right at least in America who said you know in in your economic realm you can do what you want but in the bedroom we want to control you but what's happening what's happening today and by the way that's because each one viewed what was important like the Marxists believe in the material world so they want to control the material world they don't care about the spiritual world because they don't believe in it so they just want to control the material world which means economics the right believes in the spiritual world they tend to be religious and they want to control the spiritual world they don't care about the economics that's just that's just this worldly ugly kind of phenomena so you can do what you want that's the reason you have that split between Republicans and them because but what is happening today on both sides is you're seeing more consistent people so people on the on this new left are saying wait a minute if you guys think that it's okay to control people materially through economics why shouldn't we be able to control people spiritually as well and spiritually and well and that's linguistically linguistically is spiritually so we want to be able to get into the bedroom and tell them what they can and cannot do and how they should be shouldn't behave and we want to get into issues like gender and so on and we want to use the same tools you use in economics force coercion authority authoritarianism to impose our views about these other issues as well and on the right what you're seeing is you're seeing the populace come into the right and say well you wanted to control the bedroom and all of that fine but why can't we control the economy shouldn't we also control the economy ultimately the economy you know affects these spiritual values as well she is seeing both left and right completely abandoned freedom the left used to stand for freedom of speech and free and spiritual freedom they've abandoned that they're purely authoritarian the right used to stand for economic freedom they've abandoned that the pure authoritarian and what you've got today is the dominant trends of both left and right at least in the US and I think to some extent here is the authoritarians are winning on the left and they're winning on the right and there is nobody on the political spectrum standing for liberty so the what we what we call the classical liberal point of view is not represented today on the politics I mean who is a classical liberal politician in America it one or two maybe you could find maybe there's a couple in the house and a couple in the Senate but that's it you certainly can't identify that with Republicans or Democrats they both abandoned whatever elements of pro-liberty and pro-freedom they used to have they've abandoned them completely in the name of authoritarianism so this brings me to my last question what do you believe it is that liberals should now do how how should we further our beliefs how what is the strategy or why one why no there has to be a strategy and there is a straight yeah I mean I mean I think the strategy has to be one to be consistent we've seen that this wishy-washy mixture a little bit of freedom here a little bit of freedom there doesn't win it's it's we've lost we're trying to do that we have to be more consistent we have to be more radical we have to actually stand for freedom and liberty in all realms of human life not pick and choose the realms in which we feel more comfortable talking about but we have to be much more consistent in terms of that and then I think we have to become the defenders of reason we have to become the defenders of individualism and the individual capacity to reason for himself we need to become the defenders of truth the defenders of science but science properly understood and you know it's only if we defend reason as the fundamental means of human knowledge and the individual as the entity that reasons and therefore the entity that has moral sway that has agency so two things we have to defend it's what the Enlightenment defended reason and individualism and if we can defend the reason individualism we win we have to complete what the Enlightenment started late I meant start us on the path or the Renaissance through the limit I might start us on the path of reason individualism we need to continue on that path we've we've abandoned I think many people on the liberal side have abandoned those ideas and become much more wishy-washy about them or just focused on economics or just focused on this we need to embrace the Enlightenment more fully and I think more consistently and and here I still encourage people to read I ran and to take a more seriously you know I I wonder what the world would be like today if people like Hayek and what von Mises and Milton Friedman are taking ran more seriously I think would be much more closer to a free society than we are right now I think our voices would be much more powerful if they had yeah on thank you so much for giving me your time giving my pleasure the the the supporters and viewers of the IA your time thank you very much my pleasure thank you