 Bye Mr. You're on Brooke. Welcome back to the what is money show? It's good to be back Robert Glad to have you again. I think we will be continuing our journey today through iron rands essay the virtue of selfishness um, and Today, I think she I think we're gonna be getting into a bit of her discussion on ethics um So per usual i'll just start out reading an excerpt here to get us rolling. I'll see where it goes So i'm on uh on page 17 of the pdf And we'll link this in the show notes as well if anyone wants to follow along rand writes Psychologically the choice to think not is the choice to focus or not Existentially the choice to focus or not Is the choice to be conscious or not? Metaphysically the choice to be conscious or not is the choice of life or death And she goes on to write that that which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice What is open to his choice Is only whether he will discover it or not Whether he will choose the right goals and values or not He is free to make the wrong choice But not free to succeed with it He is free to evade reality He is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases But not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see so You know, she's obviously putting the primacy on Choice here, you know making the point that I guess we're free to choose our own Means and ends, but if we choose improper means Then we will not necessarily get to the desired ends In particular Referring to reason and or ethics here. Sorry go ahead. Yeah, I mean She's really You know arguing here that there's one fundamental choice that all other choices are derivative, but really there's one fundamental choice Uh, there's one core to the whole idea of free will and that is Do you choose to think or not to think? Do you choose to focus your mind or not? Do you choose to be conscious? i.e of your environment and of your own mental activity, or do you choose To not be conscious of it And once you make that choice once you make the choice to focus everything else You know leads from that because once you're engaged with reason once you're focused once you're conscious then Now You know you now what does consciousness do? It's it's integrating the facts of reality. You're thinking you're doing the work That's necessary for human survival She's also staying here. So that's one is kind of it's a unique perspective on free will free will is not about Am I flicking up my finger now and am I doing that because I chose to do it or whatever? you know like the experiment There's a bunch of experiments around these things free will is the fundamental choice that you make In some sense every morning when you get up, but in some sense every every minute that at least you You're engaged with the world to think or not to think So if you think about hamlets to be or not to be She's arguing fundamentally that is to think or not to think and and if we if we want to live a good life We have to think and and that's the second point she makes the second point. She's making here is human beings have a specific nature And that nature requires specific action in order for the human being to be successful So think about it's like a nutrition We have a particular You know biology and certain foods are good for us certain foods are poison And it's sometimes hard to tell, you know, we know nutrition is a pretty pretty uh, Dismal field sometimes, but we know that some food is probably good and some food definitely is poison the same thing she's saying about human life in a more spiritual sense, you know in a more Integrated sense mind and body some things are poison. Some things are good for you and The thing that a allows you to differentiate between the two and the thing that really guides you towards what's good for you Is reason and therefore the choice to think the choice to reason Is the fundamental choice for life and to choose anything else Above reason is a choice towards death towards poison Yeah, that makes sense to me that um I recently just did this series on uh Platonic and neoplatonic philosophy and I was making this one of the core points there is that reason Human reason has this ecstatic dimension to it that it's always somewhat paradoxically trying to undermine itself like, you know, if you have You use reason to figure something out But the idea of figuring something out is so you can figure something better out, right? So this is kind of the the process of civilization the process of maturity at the individual scale, right? We're constantly learning and then reforming our I guess Lens or presuppositions about the world to you know improve right to become more civilized or more mature in the process Well to discover the truth to discover the nature of the world Right, you know, I mean this is Not exactly this is different than play dough in a sense that For rand reason is very much tied to reality. It's to this world Play dough reason is always tied to another dimension another world Because for him, there's a world of forms which we cannot observe directly And which reason connects us to that world of forms rand rejects that there is no world of forms What reason is tying us to is is the reality in front of us is the world That's out there and it gives us the tool to understand it to know it And then to know how to deal with it And yes, it's a constant process of improvement because constantly we get new data We learn new things. We we build microscopes. We build telescopes We we develop the tools to to refine our knowledge of reality over time Makes sense the I guess the question I would have here is though is If reason is that which properly couples us to reality Who is the arbiter of rather whether we are being reasonable or not in any given action? You know, you use the example of nutrition, for instance, and I agree There are objectively some foods that are good for the human body and some that are bad But there's also this You know element of subjectivity as well, right? Some people I I don't do well with carbs, for instance My partner can eat carbs all day long. No problem So there's this little bit of This individual element to the consumer as well. Is that Similar to reason that you know one person could think a certain action Is reasonable another person could say it's not like who absolutely so So, you know for you, it would be unreasonable to eat carbs if you don't do well with carbs, right? And and it For your partner, it's not an issue. So one of the One of the inputs that you need in order to decide what food is good Is my biology. It's not just what the characteristics of the food It's the interaction between the characteristics of my food and my biological nature as an individual human being and we know That individual human beings have different somewhat different Natures in a sense of how we process food and how some people are allergic to gluten other people are not things like that We take that into account when deciding what food is appropriate and that is true of other things But there are certain principles, for example That are true of all human beings. That is for all human beings all adult human beings Thinking is the way in which we survive thinking is the means. Um, and and that's not Individualized if you will but it is true that the particular values The particular things that turn out to be good for us are not good for us Will depend on Who we are and what our specific nature happens to be So so the choice the core choice being To think or not to think What does not thinking look like is that the pure imitation that she talks about? Uh, I can't remember as earlier or later. Is that what what does not thinking look like? It looks like what most people do most of the time. I think it's I mean, I think it's true. I think most people drift most people Um, you know, they're awake, but they're not engaged They just go through life accepting what's around them. Or maybe Maybe they engage they turn it on like the thinking when they would work Right, but as soon as they get home, they flop in front of the sofa They put on something stupid on tv. They get a beer or whatever it is a glass of wine or whatever And they they veg right and there's a reason why it's called vegging because you're shutting down your mind So but but some people even at work, uh, they're not ambitious They don't really care Or they just they're good at following orders or they're good at mimicking the co-walker, but they never engage They're never on they're never pushing things forward And I think it work most people Somewhat engaged because they know in the sense their paycheck depends on it But so many people go through life Not really engaging when it comes to their life their choices And and and the way they live their life. They do what their parents tell them they do what they said, you know What society tells them they do what they co-workers tell them they don't actually Think for themselves. They don't engage fully and that would be a Just hypothesizing here, but I'm presumably you're going to be a bit more challenged at work And that will activate your engagement to some extent whereas at home You can it's easier to fall into a pattern of of not being challenged. So you can just veg Yeah, that's part of it. I also think that it's it's there's a direct survival Instead of motivation, right? You don't get to paycheck. How do you feed your kids? If you don't do anything at home or if you don't think about politics or you don't think about all these other things The consequence are not direct, right? We all we all are suddenly awake and alert and focused when the tiger is right in front of us, right? um, and we we plan strategies on how to get away or we we we keep but If somebody tells us the tiger is a week away Yeah, how you know, so many people just just they can't think a week in in they don't they don't engage, right? so so one guy will prepare and one guy will not and and uh, you know, you put you put somebody on a desert island One guy's a robber to caruso and another guy will just eat the coconuts and survive somehow But the robber to caruso will thrive on the island and the other guy will not so um People this is a this is a fundamental choice that I think people make and sadly. I think most people partially Because they're not you know, when you're a kid when you're a little kid How many times, you know, you ask why and you're curious and you're engaged and you you alert and you're focused And how many parents slap their kids down, right? Don't ask stop asking. Don't be obnoxious. Why do you want to know? Why do you have to know everything? Right? And so some kids the lesson they learn from that is You know being engaged being focused asking questions Not worthwhile. I'll just shut it down. It's it's just not worth it. So Partially, it's education partially. It's some fundamental choice people make that's how that's impossible to explain But the fact is that we see so many adults out there who don't think for themselves who don't who are not Really alive not really engaged with being alive Yeah, that's uh actually kind of scary to think about if we're living in a world of mostly unengaged unawake humans I think there's probably a lot of negative consequences to that Well, I mean we've talked about, you know, there's so many for example economic truths that Pretty straightforward, right? We've talked about central banking and so on. This is not rocket science um, and you know right now people are living through inflation and they're living through and everybody's like Okay, there's inflation. It's not good. I don't like Joe Biden, right? And but there's no Thinking beyond that. Well, what about the system? What about the Federal Reserve? What about other bouts of inflation? How does this compare? What causes it? What are the relationships? Some people engage in that thought and some engage in the thought and come to the wrong conclusion, right? but Very few engage in the thought right most people just Okay, it sucks to have inflation. I hate Joe Biden today And that's the level at which they engage with it and they don't go anywhere else um, and That's the world in which we live. That's a world in which we live where we're a russian part, you know People can engage in war. Why would anybody ever want to go to war? I mean, it's lose lose, right? Nobody wins in a war And and and you see you see so much human behavior out there That when you sit back and look at it just doesn't make any sense if people actually want to live good lives They shouldn't be doing this and the only explanation is They're just not thinking they're just not engaged. They're just not aware. They're just drifting along or following the leader Is there some element of purposeful misdirection as well as even those Say you're an individual that chooses to engage in reason you want to actually think about what's going on I mean, for instance the show, right? What is money? You could go research a lot about money and I don't think you're going to get to central banking often I mean, there's a lot of Misdirection misinformation out there. So even those that choose to activate choose to think it seems like there's another cohort of people That are choosing to think to mislead the first cohort So it's certainly really difficult, right? Yeah, there certainly is a group of people who either Know or more accurately, I think should know That what they're what they're advocating for is a lie What they're advocating for is a deception And they continue to do it and and I would put Many if not most academics In that category, uh, you know Probably most of them are in the category of misleading and it's not that they hold See it's very hard for a person to hold. I'm a liar. I'm a cheat. I'm a crook. I'm a bad guy People don't hold that they rationalize it and and they and they evade The fact that what they're doing is wrong, but I'd say most academics most politicians Are it's not that they have big conspiracies It's just that they you know, they've got a certain theory. They've got a certain academic, uh, I don't know they've they've published a bunch of stuff on the central bank And uh, when you offer them kind of your perspective, they don't even want to hear it They don't want to listen to it. They and and they have a lot of incentive Because they you know, they bought into this to Spread misinformation and yeah, yeah, so we we live in a world where There's misinformation everywhere everywhere you go to class and you study history today You don't know what they're telling you is is true I mean you have to cross-reference and check. I mean, I often reading the newspapers They will quote somebody and I'll go and listen to the actual talk from which they're quoting and they're quoting the amount of Context or they're not even quoting the right. They're changing words. They're actually deceiving And and you see that, you know, one of the tests of this is if you take A newspaper and you read an article about something you know What happens to me is I read it and I go they don't know what they're talking about And now I extrapolate all the things I don't know All the subjects I don't know anything about it. My assumption is that I can't trust any of it and I don't I I try whenever, you know, because I do a show and I talk about current events I try to cross check cross-reference Find as many sources try to figure out try to get as deep as I can before I make a statement because I'm Constantly worried that I've read something somewhere and it's just not true and this is not the left Or the right. This is the left and the right. This is, you know, everybody in politics today And think about this. I mean, um, we might ultimately disagree about About fundamentally about religion, but think about, you know, religious dogma For for thousands of years. I mean if that's not a con game I don't know what is and it's a con game that they've sold, you know You know, is is the glass of wine the blood of jesus or isn't it the blood of jesus? Does it convert on the spot? What does it do? Is it a metaphor? Is it not? I mean, these are the kind of serious discussion. This is all a scam. It's a con game that Pretty much everybody in western civilization is bought into Under the catholics and the protestants were bell and but but there's a there's a there's a fundamental What's the truth? How do we know what the truth is? What did god really want? What's really in the text and how do we interpret the text? Who's the guy I'll guide to the text do they want us to read the text, right? One of the ways in which catholicism thrived was by not encouraging people to read the bible Indeed, most people couldn't read and what happened with the protestant revolution happened because the printing press came into being And suddenly people were reading the bible and they could tell for themselves what was written in there And they were saying what are these catholics talking about? So We being conned in a sense by the authorities from the beginning we've always have been and One of the things that happened in the renaissance and the to some extent through information And then the alignment is individuals started to question and say But wait a minute if I have a mind for myself, I need to figure these out things out for myself I I can't depend on these authorities to tell me yeah a lot There um, it does seem to be this element of You know ideological possession perhaps that we A lot of these things we're describing whether it's religion whether it's your company whether it's your nationality like these are all Forms of imaginary play, right? We're imagining these things these stories and then we're inhabiting these stories And so there seems to be and that first of all that's that's very indispensable for For humans to conquer the world, right? We need to organize ourselves flexibly in large numbers. We do that inside of these Ideological structures if you will but there seems to be this this age-old struggle where To get in the position of controlling that ideology or shaping the ideology Gives one so much power Um that you see people like, you know a marks for instance or Any any ideologue, right? They can come into this position support this ideology with full force and they gain all this power over people um So we seem kind of trapped in that because then they you know The people the ideologue then starts to bend and twist the rules to their own advantage and it breaks down the structure over time um, and you said this earlier too with central banks, right if you've been a A phd economist your entire career and you've been writing research papers on central banking If someone comes to you and be like, hey, this is the biggest fraud in human history You have an incentive to be blind to that, right? You're like, no the central bank pays me. I've studied it for years I have my I'm in this echo chamber with all these other I I know and call that evading I know and call that evading and and she considered that the essence of sin, right? So the the the essence of immorality Was to evade the facts the vade reality You know somebody presents you with a fact and you go no, I don't want to see that right? You know, I'd rather it didn't exist. I'm gonna pretend it doesn't exist. That's That's what leads us down All the the bad outcomes it always does But with regards to ideology The challenge with ideology is you have to evaluate it Ideology in and of itself is not bad right one could argue that your views about about The evil of the central bank is an ideology, right? So it's a set of ideas Some ideologies are true and some are false and uh in the challenge as human beings we face is Discovery of truth that that's that's the fundamental goal that we all have Is to discover what is true, you know, and our only tool to do that is the rayans argument is reason a fact So if we're trying constantly to discover truth and what happens is people get caught up in Big explanations that might not be related to reality might not be related to the truth And then they spend their life evading. So a Marxist, I think is constantly evading reality In order to justify his Marxism because it it doesn't work, right? It does the the advocate for the central bank is constantly evading Inflation and facts and and all the bad things that happen and the theory that just doesn't make any sense But he's evading it in order to justify his beliefs An honest person a good person and this is where a thinking person This is where the great tragedy is I don't think that you know that many of them at least not at the most sophisticated level Is always trying to look for the truth, right? So the ideology is ultimately the truth and if if I say something and you say but here's a fact that contradicts it My responsibility is to think that through is to figure it out. Maybe you're wrong. Maybe I'm wrong But what matters is not who's right or who's wrong. What matters is what is right? What is what is true? Yeah, agreed with that. It just seems like a really Pernicious problem because even in my mind. I'm coming to I'm thinking of people that are incredibly bright Probably have even discovered truth to some extent, right? You know, what am I thinking of here? Someone understands how money works, right? Let's just say a hundred some odd years ago. You're kind of faced with the situation You could one go out and educate the public. Hey central banking's a scam. We need to move to a gold standard You become a traditional gold bug, right? That would be one path Yeah, pretty hard path, right? You're just going to go out there try to educate an unwilling mass of people that doesn't want to learn There's this kind of first order thinking Your second option would be oh, I guess I'll go engage in central banking, right become a shareholder or whatever start your own whatever you could In that case, there'd be a much more profitable path to deception and a much less profitable If not pointless path to trying to educate the masses and I know things are changing over time You know in the modern today. We're fortunate to have digital media. So maybe education's Working a little bit better. I'm not sure but um, I guess the point to make is that we've been we've been Trapped in a way And that it just hasn't it's been more profitable to deceive and coerce Than it has been to not do that. So people have been led astray over time. Is that how we got into the situation? So partially partially for some people It's been more I would say superficially profitable because I don't think it is more profitable to deceive Um, I don't think it's more profitable in the sense of happiness To deceive. I think it'd be more profitable in the sense of money. Yes agreed with that. I mean purely financially Yeah, but money money is not happiness. So Financially, yes, I think a lot of people incentivize to be part of the system and why challenge the system when it is And that's why some people argue that you're not going to get dramatic change until the system collapses and maybe that's true but I I fear that what happens when a system collapses is you get even worse Because because people people are looking for not for solutions. They're looking for authoritarians are looking for somebody to tell them How things should work But who knows maybe we do need a collapse of a part of the system in order to come up with a new one education is hard education against the status quo is hard educating people to tell them That everything they believed up to this point was wrong. But look, it's it's happened Think about the united states in 1776, right? This country that was founded on the principle of freedom and lots of flaws and lots of problems But the fundamental principle on which this country was founded was a positive good one, right? and and one could argue that periods in in this country that really manifested itself but Before 1776 there'd never been a country like this And before 76 everybody everybody in the world basically their conception of politics was a king A council a tribal leader some kind of dictator telling me what to do and I just go ahead and do it and then I'd say somewhere in the between the 16th and the 19th century. There was a real revolution An intellectual revolution a educational revolution people were taught to think for themselves People were taught that they featured, you know people used to not to decide what profession they had they used to Do whatever their father did By law, right? But you had you belong to a guild and you did what your father did or you didn't choose who you married Everything was arranged. You didn't choose where you lived. So there were no choices open to human beings and then they learned That choices were a good thing and they could make choices because they had the capacity to reason So the enlightenment from the Renaissance the enlightenment what you saw is a process of education Where a lot of the corruption and a lot of the bad ideas and a lot of the horrors of the past were dumped And we got on a better path So it is possible to change the world. It is possible to educate people. It is possible To to to have a positive impact on the world. I mean look at the civil rights movement, right? There was this attitude that Blacks only half human and we had Jim Crow laws and we treated them really really badly And then you know it changed people people rose up against it and educated people and ultimately I think racism is a lot less of a problem today than it was You know 60 70 years ago So there are certain ideas that can change and I think that's true of every one of the issues that We think is a problem in the world today We can't change it. It's not easy. It takes a long time and sometimes it takes a catalyst sometimes it takes something like a crisis or or A movement or some drama to get people to think outside of the box But it is possible and you know, there's no real alternative to it The other alternative is to impose it on people by force And and that's never a good solution Yeah, I can never work because you just can't While you can't force people to freely choose, right? It's a contradiction in terms Well, one of the things here I think and as or Rand is really doing well as she's taking this Uh, typically considered subjective realm of ethics and trying to root it in something more objective and that seems really important Um, I'll read an excerpt here I'm on page 19 now. She writes Ethics is not a myth a mystic fantasy nor a social convention nor dispensable subjective luxury to be switched or discarded in any emergency Ethics is an objective metaphysical necessity of man's survival Not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor your whims But by the grace of reality and the nature of life I quote from galt's speech Man has been called a rational being but rationality is a matter of choice And the alternative his nature offers him is Rational being or suicidal animal Man has to be man by choice. He has to hold his life as a value by choice He has to learn to sustain it by choice He has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues by choice A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality And she finally goes on to write if some men do not choose to think but survive by imitating and repeating like trained animals The routine of sounds and motions they learn from others never making an effort to understand their own work It still remains true that their survival is made possible only by those who did choose to think and to discover the motions They are repeating So maybe that partially answers my question earlier is that You know a lot of people can get by without thinking by benefiting from the previous thinking of others They're just imitating Yep, and that's a lot of what we're doing right in in culture as you grow. That's what kids do That's how children develop is they imitate the people they see around them So partially so this is part of the part of the issue is is if a child Only learns to imitate and it it dedicates himself only to imitating. He grows up to be an adult. I think mostly That is is an imitator. I think It's one thing to just imitate another thing to try to understand what the other person is doing And to maybe copy it but with understanding Right and then one gains understanding and then there also, you know, if you think about I don't know how much you know about Montessori education But what Montessori does in in in pre-k Is she lets the kids work with Stuff themselves so you learn not by imitating they learn by Doing by creating and and by figuring it out and then what you're teaching kids, hopefully Is to use this this tool that we have this reasoning capability And and to yeah, you're rediscovering something everybody else knows But you're discovering it for you Rather than just imitating and being a monkey. So It matters even as children how we learn what we learn and how we develop how we develop ourselves and like what we're saying is You know in the evolutionary process something happened between animal and human being Animals don't have free will human beings do animals. It's all coded Um, and in a sense they don't have choice and and what's good for them and what's bad for them is coded It's in the programming Human beings Can be animals We can just go by what's in there by emotion by whatever coding by imitation by whatever But to and then we're just animals But to be human is to engage in what makes us uniquely human which is reason and to do that one has to choose it So the whole issue of free will Boils down for her to this choice Do I choose to be a human being and that means do I choose to think for myself? Do I choose to engage with reason? and Hard to tell how many people actually do that or how many people do that consistently in their lives I would argue that a few people do it consistently in their life But that's what it means to be a human being it means to engage your mind consistently With the challenges you face and not be an imitator It doesn't mean you don't do things that other people do but if you do it understand what you're doing understand why you're doing Yes, well well said i'm okay, so Just thinking out loud here if I'll say a few things and I'll Please tell me if you agree to disagree where you think I could be wrong if reality I've heard it put this way that reality Is that to which life is adapted? And it sounds like animals are essentially Just adapted to that reality, right? That's what the process of natural selection is that the organism is fit to its environment But it seems like perhaps humans have a different relationship with reality that we're actually To some at some extent changing our realities, right when we engage in these imaginary, you know, whatever I'm an american citizen. That doesn't mean anything an objective reality That's something we constructed, but it's a very useful fiction that changes the way we interact with one another So is that the the step change that humans are sort of reshaping their realities? Or maybe another way to put this is creating alternative realities That we're operating within No, I don't I don't think it's an alternative reality and the fact that you're an american Is reality? It's a reality now that human beings are created. We've created Laws we've created borders. We've created a structures that don't exist If there are no humans, there's no america, right? And and there's only in america if if we've created something So what human beings have the ability to do which animals do not for that, you know You could argue birds make nests and stuff but at a very minimal scale. We shape reality We change the world and we shape it both at the Concrete physical level we knock down mountains and build skyscrapers, right? And we we we knock down trees and we farm no animal does that right? They just accept reality accept nature as it is and they either adapt to it or they die we If it gets you know, this is my whole claim about climate change if it gets warmer We'll adapt right. We'll change the world. We'll build dykes. Well, I don't know suck seal to out of the atmosphere We'll do something. This is not, you know, this is how we survive as human beings. We change our environment so And so some of that is in the physical world But some of that is also the fact that we have the ability to abstract we have the ability to create abstractions Like the united states of america. It's an abstraction It's an abstraction that represents a certain geography and a certain set of laws But it's an abstraction, but that abstraction is tied to reality. It's related to Things that are actually going on, but it's a reality that only exists because we have chosen it We've chosen to create it And it represents something real. So it's not an alternative reality It's taking the world as we see it and adding to it, you know building on top of it I'll give you an example We talked to I think we talked in the past about concept formation and Does furniture exist? Well, yes in a sense that you can point to a bunch of different things that are furniture but Furniture as an abstraction that represents all these things Is something that we create in order to explain the world out there so we can More easily communicate but more importantly more easily think about the world so You know chair is a concept that represents all chairs that have ever existed that ever will exist No matter what their specific shape or everything. So there's differences between chairs, but we understand what chair means And that is a tool A cognitive, you know the basis of our cognition, which no other animal has But it's it's an abstraction that represents Concrete reality something real in the world out there Yeah, so then animals would be somewhat strictly Subjected to reality, but humans are in this co-evolutionary relationship, right? We're like we reshape reality But if reality is that to which we're adapted and we're also changing our own adaptation Right, we're dead. We're different now. We're we're different running literacy. For instance, and we are not running literacy Absolutely. So so evolution did this amazing thing with human beings. It allowed us to self-program right so Is that the key difference in the self-programming between man and animal? In a sense. Yes. I mean, I the analogy is not perfect. But yes, you know, we Can change us ourselves because we can change our attitudes. We can change our you know, we can get healthier We can get strong. I can go lift weights and get stronger. I can I can decide on language Yeah, I can learn a foreign language. I can learn to climb a mountain I can do all kind or I can take equipment to climb on my that's the beauty of it, right? I can take oxygen to climb Everest, right? That's a way in which I've used I've changed reality. I've created this machine to help me overcome a certain part of reality have air conditioning if it gets warm. So it's it's we get We get to write the program and that's what reason in a sense is reason as our ability to understand the world out there and then to adapt at least our mental capabilities to it and then Use it to take that reality and reshape it to take nature and reshape nature And look and in the end Reality doesn't change because we you know the atoms and the molecules are still there. We just But we're changing we have the ability to change the form From one to another Yeah, it makes makes a lot of sense. So I mean again the way I'm interpreting this Uh, and I've heard it put this way before too that thinking is like a Simulation engine for action, you know, you can spin up If I do this, I think a b and c will happen if I do that D and f will happen you can sort of compare and contrast different paths of action and then you choose right you You rationalize or you reason and you choose a path that you think is most suitable to your desired ends Yes, um, so I want to that all makes a lot of sense to me Um I want to ask you about the furniture concept though. You just said is that essentially what is the difference between Abstracting into furniture for instance right in the concept of a chair for instance with a single one piece of furniture out isn't that The the form isn't that the platonic form of a chair and then we have all these instances where actually physically manifest that form into reality No, so there is no chair in another dimension that we're Linking to and chair didn't exist in our in our mind before We came up with it. So chair comes from looking at this and this and this and seeing the similarities Abstracting away the differences And saying what I see here all is united under a particular concept But it's a concept that's tied to these chairs It's not a concept that's tied to another dimension and then somebody can tell me Oh, I have a means to communicate with other dimension and you've got your chairs all wrong Like they would in banking or like they wouldn't something a lot more abstract where they can where they can fool us so platinism Is the heart of all I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit here, but but maybe not so much At the end of the day platinism is the source of all um fakery of all Of the deception that we experience right because Plato is the villain in human history In in a sense of in a sense of all the bad outcomes because what is more powerful than me saying I can communicate with another dimension where the truth is really hold what you're seeing here It's not the true truth The true truth is up in some way else and only the philosopher can communicate with him So only a handful of people can actually communicate with the world of truth But the rest of us are in shadows in a cave seeing shadows We don't see reality So we need to listen to the guy who communicates with the truth whether that's the pope whether that's You know, uh lennon who communicates with the with the world of the proletarian Whether that's hitler who knows exactly what's good for the arian race You know most Most bad ideas at the end of the day We accept because some authority Has told us and has devised a whole scheme around and that authoritarian ideal idea that only authorities know the truth Comes directly from Plato Whereas Aristotle if you think about the difference between the two Aristotle tells us Every single individual has access to the truth Every single one of us can see the chairs every single one of us can form that concept. We don't need A philosopher king. We don't need a an authoritarian to come and tell us what it is We can see it. We don't live in a cave. We're all out in the sunshine. We could be mistaken We can make errors, but they're all fixable. They're fixable by means of reason so Plato In a sense is anti reason. He's he says he's pro reason, but his reason undermines The very foundation of what reason is because it detaches it from reality. It detaches it from my experience of reality So it detaches the chair from the chair that's right in front of me so That is not at all how I understood play but I would also just throw this in there There have been many analysis analyses of Plato's work from a lot of different angles and I I can't even begin to speak intelligently to it. I've read just a few um, and maybe the analysis I read was different than that one, but uh, what I'd like to ask that was what about Okay point taken on chairs. We can all see chairs. We can Establish the form of chairs. We can convert perceptions into conceptions and then communicate about them What about beauty? Goodness justice. What about things like this? How do they fit into? the iron rand Objectivist worldview They're exactly the same as chair just harder, right? Uh at a much higher level of abstraction so, um to let's take Beauty's hard. Let's take justice and we can go back to beauty if you want, but let's take justice Um, what does justice mean? Well justice means You know, uh, the people get what they deserve, you know, what they deserve to get um, so We look at the world as children or as uh primitive humans and um, and we see somebody who, um We view as Doing good things right things you know in Yeah Consistent with reality and then we see I don't know the tribal leader chopping off his head For no reason and we go Wait a minute. Something here is wrong, right? Um, and then we see a criminal Uh getting his head chopped off And we say okay, but both of them that they chopped out something is off here, right? The good guy got his chopped head chopped and the bad guy didn't and maybe from now we get the sense of Well, one of them is right and one of them is wrong and but right and wrong in a particular way In getting your dessert or not getting your desserts. Well, let's give that a word Call it justice, right and really probably kids experience it with I don't know I didn't get the slice of pizza. Other people did get the slice of pizza, right? Um, and and and and a lot of other, you know, a lot of other experiences the bully Um, the bully gets away with it, right? He he trip every time I walk by him It trips me up and he gets away with it and then when I attack him when I defend myself I get suspended from school, right? Something's wrong here It's unjust, right? It's I'm not getting what I deserve to get so you see we form The concept of justice for my experiences and for my understanding of the world now It depends on a bunch of other Concepts because it depends on the idea of right and wrong It depends on the idea of a good person a bad person things like that It depends on the concept for example with the thief of theft is wrong so Justice is way up here. There are a lot of other concepts we have to build before we get to it, but it is Just as connected to reality to the fact as a cherries it's just Requires more work to see the connection, but it's it if we do it right the connection should be there Got it. So those would be this the highest order Conceptions all right built on top of other conceptions. Like you said good and evil you have to build your way up to justice I mean if we look at beauty You know beauty's beauty is difficult because We don't Justice we can argue about definitions, but we all have kind of a sense of definition beauty is very difficult because We haven't yet as a civilization really have a good conception of beauty, but You know what we look we you know when we see something as a child we see oh That is you know Creates a certain positive emotion in me. I I feel attracted to that. I feel attracted to this You know, that's pretty music. That's a pretty woman. That's pretty a view And all of these what's common to them? And then that's how you'd form You know a certain symmetry a certain emotional evocation And and you start forming that oh, these are all beautiful. They're all But again, you have to extract it from your experiences And the more abstract you get The the the the more difficult it is But but it's all the same process and it's all the process that you should ultimately be able to take any concept you have And bring it down to the to the level where you're just pointing See there it is. There's justice. There's beauty. There's this Because you should understand how all these concepts are related. That's What doing the real work to really understand your own thinking requires Yeah, it seems difficult especially to interpret beauty through the objectivist lens given that you know beauty is in the eye of the beholder as is said and so it's I don't want to say entirely subjective, but at least there's a subjective element to it. Um, Now, let me ask you about this. So I talked to cognitive scientist John Revekey for a while and he has this notion, um there's there's certain aspects of reality that he he deems neither subjective nor objective for instance, uh Adaptability or or you could use a real simple example the graspability of a cup. He says Okay, where is the graspability of a cup? Is it objectively in the hand or is it Is it objectively in the cup? He's just objective wrong, right? This is the problem with the point would be this on the question I want to ask is It exists between the hand and the cup, right? The cup is purpose built for the hand the hand purpose built the cup for the hand So where where does something like graspability? reside in a subject object paradigm So I don't buy the subject object paradigm that is I don't like that terminology subjective is Is is refers only to what's what's What's for you or it basically says there's no relationship to a reality. It's all whatever I want it to be It's it's it's it's fundamentally a whim based reality The the alternative to subjectivity has always been in the history of ideas intrinsicism Intrinsicism it's intrinsic in the thing It's intrinsic in the cup right that it it beheld well, right? But then you go but my hand is too small for that cup So it doesn't work. So but that's intrinsic It's in the thing and and so something is good because goodness is in it And again that would be Plato Plato the goodness is in the thing that you're observing is good and Some philosophers would say no goodness is whatever I want it to be whatever I feel like it is And what Rand is saying is that there is something called objective Which is not the way most people use the term but the way she uses it And objective is that interaction between our consciousness and the reality. So objective is The cup to the size of my hand, right? Objective is that thing is good For me given my nature given who I am. It's good for me. That's objective fitness or fitness Is objective right fitted nurse Is would be a site is is is objective fit. It's fit for the purpose. It's fit for What I am as a human being Okay, so that Then that term as she's using it is different than how most people use it Right. Okay. That's of a lot of terms. Unfortunately Rand uses she um You know, I think she's trying to stick to some kind of Definition of them that most of the culture often doesn't accept like, you know, she uses selfishness That's a term very differently than the culture uses selfishness That's why, you know, you're reading the virtue of selfishness Most people will say that's a contradiction of term virtue and selfishness. They don't go together But she And partially they're saying that because they view selfishness as lying cheating still doing whatever it takes to get your way and she's saying, oh, no, no, no Selfishness is doing what really is good for you What's rationally good for you. So in in that sense her selfishness equals long-term rational self-interest Right, but that's her. That's her definition. She would say it's the right definition definition that fits reality Um, but it's a definition. We have to convince people of it's not a definition itself evident to people That makes do you think a lot of the Maybe resistance Objectivism has encountered and becoming more of a a widespread Philosophy or idea is the the ambiguity of terminology Where you're using a word like I love this. I didn't know this until just now You said this that objectivism was more like fittedness or fitness But again, and if i'm looking at the world through verveke's eyes, he calls that transjective because he's saying that Objective would be like what is out there, right? Subjective is how you're seeing it But the actual relationship between the two things is something a little bit different But it sounds like that's how rand is using the term objectivism Yeah, because because I mean Um, how you see it is again, you can be subjective in how you see something You can make it up. You can you can uh, distort it on purpose. You can shut one eye and only see half of the picture Being objective about seeing something means Actually engaging with the facts with reality, right? So that's what being objective means and um That means that if both of us look at the same thing we will see the same thing and if we don't we will You know, we have a tool to communicate and try to figure out You know whether That what we're seeing is the same thing, right? So two people can look at the microscope That's a completely different thing because one's a scientist and one's a layman And the layman just sees a bunch of blotches and the scientist sees. I don't know bacteria, right? or or a virus or something and You know, so each one of them is seeing what they're seeing reality is exactly the same It's it's it is what it is But and both of being objective in a sense that You know their knowledge, but the scientist knows more so what he's showing in the slide represents More information about reality than what the layman is and he can potentially explain it to the lame He can show him using reason. Here's the theory. Here's what a bacteria looks like. This is what a bacteria is here Look again. Now. You'll see the same thing But your understanding of it will be completely different that so Sorry, that's be that's a you know, so reality is what it is You know object objectivity means you're looking at reality You're using your knowledge to help understand reality and and you're accepting reality as the reality is and that's being objective The reality doesn't implant itself on you And you don't make it up as you go along subjectivism In philosophy means I make up reality intrinsicism philosophy reality implants itself on on my senses and Objectivism says you have to make an effort Using your mind to engage with reality and the standard know it learn it and that's being objective Got it. Okay. So yeah this um Um Proper fittedness to reality and this is something Again in the platonic book that I read it was saying that reason and love both pursue that end that it's trying to get proper fittedness to reality And I the example you just gave where you have the scientists looking at the bacteria I'm in the layman the layman just sees blobs the scientist sees something Describable right within his theory That makes a lot of sense to me the the example I love on this particular point Is the rising and setting sun, you know humans watch the sun rising and setting for millennia We always assumed here. We are on earth. The sun just keeps going around and around and around us Then along comes this guy named Copernicus Says oh no, actually we're the ones revolving around the sun And all of a sudden in a flash of insight all of that past data of sun rising and sun setting is reinterpreted right through a new theory So the data didn't change but the interpretation changed But the yes, but the but there was new data as well, right? So the you cannot get a Copernicus without new observations right new data And therefore a new understanding and it's not that one theory is it's it's that we got closer to the truth That is and that's the beauty of the process if we do it, right Is we're constantly moving towards a greater understanding of the truth we're adding observations And then we realize that the previous explanation doesn't explain these new observations We have to have another explanation and then we test that explanation out again by observation To to confirm it and then if you think about Copernicus Galileo refines Copernicus uh capital refined, you know, so there's there's a process of refining because um, um Copernicus doesn't get it quite right, but he gets that we're going around the sun, which is a revolution and People hold on to the old dogma in spite of that, right? Just like in everything else you can you can you can come up We can discover the truth and people want to hold on to that old dogma Because it's comfortable because they don't have to reinterpret an ancient book Because the book said the other way around so they they stick with the book the authority said it The person connected to the world of form said that the sun goes around the earth so therefore it must be And so, you know, it's a challenge to all the authorities out there And and that's why Copernicus particularly it's not just the scientific It's a political statement because he's challenging the authority particularly of the church With regard to who discovers truth the truth is not an ancient book The truth is not what the pope tells us it is the truth is what we observe and we can as as individuals We can discover truth and that makes it a political statement, which is Massive In that sense and even a bigger way than just the understanding of the sun Now I'd like to tell you about a great new bitcoin show on the scene that you've got to check out Brought to you by swan studios and bitcoin magazine. This show is hard money with natalie brunel natalie is an emmy nominated journalist bringing unparalleled experience to the bitcoin media scene And personally natalie is one of my favorite voices in the bitcoin space Each week on hard money you'll get the top headlines of the week with analysis You won't find anywhere else hard hitting interviews with amazing guests like myself and other top minds in the bitcoin space And the show will take you directly into the lives being changed by bitcoin all over the world Check out hard money at swan.com backslash hard money Today I want to tell you about our sponsor crowd health So how does health insurance work? You send an egregious amount of money to an insurance company. They hold it in a pool of depreciating fiat currency Then when you have a large health event You have to pay them even more via your deductible And then you hope they will cover your bill And in fact one in six bills are denied by healthcare.gov plans It's time to take control of your own health care bills I'd like to introduce you to crowd health It's a decentralization of health care using bitcoin as an alternative to health insurance Instead of sending fiat currency to a big corporation you send that money to an account controlled by you A portion of which is converted into bitcoin Then if you have a big health event you have a community of bitcoiners that will use the money in their accounts to help you out To get more details go to join crowd health com Backslash breed love where you can find the promo code for 99 a month for six months All right, so i'm gonna read an excerpt from page 20 now Rand writes the men who attempt to survive not by means of reason But by means of force are attempting to survive by the method of animals But just as animals would not be able to survive by attempting the method of plants By rejecting locomotion and waiting for the soil to feed them So men cannot survive by attempting the method of animals By rejecting reason and counting on productive men to serve as their prey Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment At the price of destruction The destruction of their victims and their own As evidence i offer you any criminal or any dictatorship And she goes on to write that man has to be man by choice And it is the task of ethics to teach him how to live like man The objectivist ethics holds man's life as the standard of value and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man The difference between standard and purpose is in this context Is as follows a standard is an abstract principle that serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man's choices In the achievement of a concrete specific purpose Finally she says the three cardinal values of the objectivist ethics And the three values which together are the means to and the realization of one's One's ultimate value one's own life are Reason purpose self-esteem With their three corresponding virtues rationality productiveness pride okay, so I really like that opening part which is saying basically you know animals Can't live like plants in the same way that humans cannot live like animals If we Abandon ethics then we are This is equivalent to abandoning reason to some extent and this leads to Self-destructive patterns of action for the species basically Well for the individual and for species that is any individual she's saying any individual who abandons reason um and therefore abandons ethics is acting Towards his own destruction And yes, he might get the money But he is destroying himself in in some way and ultimately Um, he will not live to the full potential of it as a human being He won't live a human life And if you think and she says look at crooks, right? So if you look at any criminal um, yeah, they might And here you can see how the the popular culture is very different and Rand, right? So if you look at most movies The crook is always the happy one the successful one the one who gets the girls the one who's had Partying and happy and the good guy are always torn with guilt Divorced miserable or they have as a job. They hate, you know, like the carpet and the good guy and the bad guy, right? The bad guys are always more colorful and more interesting than the good guys, but in reality the bad guys Are horrible they live lives where they're afraid because they're gonna get caught They live lives where they They have no self-esteem because they know they didn't produce anything All they did was take it from people who actually did And if the value of our self-esteem as human beings is the use of our reason For the purpose of producing the things that we consume They have none And you know, so you look at you look at somebody like bernie made of Hopefully people remember here. I mean he's the guy who created the largest pyramid scheme You know illegal pyramid scheme a bunch of legal pyramid schemes, but the largest We've seen and you know, he says that he was happier in jail than he was before he was caught Why because He was stealing his friends. So he had no friends. He could never really open up to them He could never look them in the eye. He could never live Kind of freely. He he he was constantly in fear. Ultimately, he was discovered And turned into the authorities by his children Imagine being discovered and he turned into the police by your children. What that does to a human being So he was miserable. He was he had a horrible life even though he had like 50 billion dollars of other people's money He couldn't he couldn't use it. He couldn't live by it He couldn't do anything because he couldn't enjoy it because he had no Real self no self-esteem and you know, if you look at I like to say if you ever met a happy politician I haven't I mean you look at somebody like bill clinton or hillary clinton. They look like miserable pathetic human beings I mean, it's it's in their features and you know, these are not happy people. These are not successful people not success measured by the standard of human happiness so deception lying stealing cheating You know short term thinking We all know that when we make mistakes in life and we look back We we never say I thought about that too much. It's almost always. I didn't I didn't think it through I followed my emotions. I did what was short term. I didn't think about the long term Things like that, right? You know a husband who cheats on his wife regularly you know, he's He loves his wife and he wants that relationship to continue, right? He's lying to his He's getting a thrill. He gets the thrill of the moment of the sexual encounter But at what expense and if he thought about it in advance and he weighed the option Would you rationally say I'd rather have the thrill than a relationship with my wife? No But he gets caught up in the moment. So whenever we put aside reason whenever we reject the long term whenever we reject Our real values our long term values that's when we get into trouble and that's where we do ourselves harm and that's where we move If if life is a process of moving to life or to death every one of those actions moves us a little bit to death and and Reason is what moves us towards life and that's kind of what she's talking about and so the thief the criminal The many politicians they're not living not in the human sense So they are I mean whether it's legal or illegal. They're looting Or gaining some material advantage or wealth At the expense of destroying their self-esteem That's right. That's right and and destroying The potential to be happy right that makes makes a lot of sense Why do you think I'm not going to hold you to this because I would assume this is a speculative question and answer But why are the bad guys portrayed that way in films as the more colorful Interesting characters and the good guys are portrayed so dismally Oh, I mean that's a direct consequence of the morality that the mall code that I think our culture holds as primary and that is morality we are told Primarily from christianity onwards morality is hard morality is about suffering morality is about sacrifice Saints people who become saints always have miserable horrible deaths, right? Happy people don't become saints. So we we assume that somebody who's good Is going to be unhappy? uh, immanuel cons the the the german philosopher um Secularized this idea and he basically said if you meet somebody somebody happy You got to be suspicious of them. They're probably not moral They're probably not good because goodness Goodness is hard. Goodness means sacrifice. Goodness is being Self-less and you can't be happy if you're self-less You know, so this person probably pursued their own interests their own and that's not good. We know that's immoral So it's the conception of morality is of being self-less that leads us to believe that good is associated with suffering And therefore if you're good, you're not going to have fun Right, you're not going to be happy. You're not going to do you're not going to attract the best people um, it's it's the devil the devil Is selfish he's he's pursuing his own values his own interests. He's out there doing what he wants to do He's having fun. Um, so it's always in portrayals and arts the devil is always the joyous happy Gold lucky kind of guy and the people of virtue that he's trying to seduce a miserable suffering And and and and not enjoying life because that's the conception of morality. The christianity has taught taught us Is there some This is so there's not the the there does not appear to be bright lines to me because there seems to be some element of truth there that if you just purely, you know animalistically pursue your own ends like uh, like we're saying earlier I'm just gonna You know I have every sexual encounter drink every drink steal whatever occurs to me that that is self-destructive obviously There has to be some self-constraint or discipline Well, absolutely. So the self self-constraint and discipline is Your self-interest Properly understood right that's extreme right. What is really good for me? Oh, I really love my wife I'd like to have a long-term relationship with her, you know It's easy then the the the the sexy girl at the ball is no longer appealing Once you bring in the context of I care about my values, right? I care about what's good for me, right? Uh, and therefore I'm not gonna be seduced by the momentary I am going to think long term, but what what what um Contemporary morale and again contemporary morality look most people are mixed most people Take bits and pieces of different moral codes and they must not together. You can't really live By a morality that says be self-less. It's it's it's too destructive but if you think about if you think about um What people consider as moral ideal? It's somebody like a mother Teresa everybody admires mother Teresa Why because she gave up a middle-class livelihood. She gave up a middle-class family She gave up what could have been money and wealth and she went to the worst place in the world to help the worst The off people in the world wise a little bit Didn't even make them successful. That wasn't her purpose. Just just not die, right and she was miserable She was miserable. You can read her diaries. That's what makes her noble That's what makes it great the fact that she was willing to suffer everything for what They believe is a noble cause but And when you see somebody like a successful businessman, you know, and it's hard to use a contemporary figure but that's just for fun use alone musk just because he's such a colorful character, right and he's, um You know, it seems to be having fun. He seems to be enjoying himself He's incredibly productive. He's obviously brilliant. He's doing amazing things and people love to hate him because He can be moral if he's doing, you know, he's having kids with all kinds of women and and you know, he's populating the world all by himself but he's doing it kind of without The perception of guilt. He doesn't he doesn't seem to feel guilty about all this He seems to be really pursuing At some to some extent he's flawed but to some extent he's self-interest And people love to hate that because what the hell who's he? Yeah, I'm curious here How closely the rejection of reason is related to The concept of time preference in austrian economics I don't know how familiar you are with that but basically Of course, you know And it's definitely related Because because time preference um First of all Acknowledging that you have type preference, right? Acknowledging the importance of time preference is is an active reason, right? It's it's reality It's identifying something in reality, you know, you and And your ability to defer to the future, right and to recognize though that if i'm deferring from the future I expect a big of reward Right because I have to discount it backwards So I expect a bigger reward in the future than I'm going to get just from from doing and this is the whole point about The sexy girl at the bar in the marriage, right? that's You could think of it in terms of time preference, right? Yes from an immediacy perspective right now I'd have more fun with the girl at the bar But if I discount the value of my relationship with my wife over the next 20 30 years At almost any discount rate. That's not, you know, uh infinite um It's the value I get from that is much greater to me right now than the thing Then this uh, so if you have the so discount the acknowledgement of the fact that there's a discounting going on And there's a time preference going on is is is part of what it means to think Into the future and to plan Yeah, that's okay. So that makes a lot of sense the Seeing the sexy girl at the bar through the lens Through the larger temporal scope of your whole life Exactly kind of puts her and you know stacks her up Uh apples to apples so to speak so you can see how little value there is relative to the you know ongoing relationship with your wife perfectly to present Yeah, would it be proper to say this then that uh, perhaps rand is advocating Rather than being selfless towards others. We should try to be selfless towards our future selves I mean is that kind of this No, the opposite We want our future selves to have to enjoy all the fruits Of what we're doing now. That's what i'm saying is selfless towards your future self So i'm gonna do things now that will benefit my future self. I'm gonna work out. I'm gonna read I'm gonna eat healthy. These aren't my immediate things that I want to do necessarily but they compound And if I'm taking that larger view then maybe yeah, but it There's a sense in which if that were true if it was really So hard now to do the right thing then we would never do it because our future self is always in the future And you can always push it out further into the future further into the future and you would never do it You know, so you would never have fun. You would never actually benefit from it. No, the perspective is if you do What is good for your future self? You're also doing good for you right now and ultimately That integration having that knowledge that this is good for me Me as a future not just a present That knowledge is what gives you The self-esteem the pride the you know, you know, you're being ethical and all of that is what contributes to the effect that right now Even though I have to do this horrible workout I'm basically a happy person So i'm a happy person because of this knowledge And and because I know that I will work out So that I can always be healthy right and and knowledge that i'm that kind of person that does this stuff Is so much more important and so much more overwhelming in terms of happiness than the pain of the workout That it's it's absolutely selfish. It's there's no self. There's no iota of selflessness It's exact opposite. I care about myself. That's why I do what I did Hmm I see I see okay. Yeah, so Again, it's taking a holistic view Not a not a narrow view if I just view exercise health Right that i'm suffering now so I could be healthy later but if I take the view of One of the one of my most important values now and in the future is my health And I take my health seriously part of my esteem my self-esteem comes from knowing that I take myself seriously Then it broadens the the the scope and now um, I am I'm being selfish by by exercising. It's not The suffering is not that bad, you know, I get perspective on what it is that I'm doing So rand then let me try to reformulate this phrasing rand is advocating for long view selfishness Rather than short view selfishness something like that Yeah, but she would say short view selfishness is not selfishness Because it's self-destructive Because it's self-destructive. It's contradictory. Got it. So short view selfishness in quotes is equal self-destruction So uh lying stealing cheating to getting the money right now Is destructive not only for my future self My present self as well because of that self-esteem. I know i'm cheating I know i'm not gaining it by the mechanisms of being human and whether I can articulate that or not I know right because of the way the mind is is is built the way our human consciousness is built I know and therefore I am already suffering Right Even though right now I might feel pleasure I'm really deep down suffering because I've emptied my self-esteem. I've I've I've taken that away That makes sense. So the line then between Long view selfishness and short view self-destruction Would be this line of morality right like tell the truth don't steal No violence morality morality is an empirical question, right? So morality is what are the principles? by which you should live to gain this kind of amazing life to gain Uh, this this life of long-term happiness and uh and and success at living So so morality being honest is not a commandment It's something that I learned that when I'm not bad stuff happens So I better be you know, so it's it's good for me to be honest Not only do I experience it, but I understand why I understand that to be successful in life when I had to Here to reality dishonesty is a mechanism by which I donate here to reality So both theoretically and practically I know Why gain the knowledge that these actions are good. Those actions are bad Very good. Okay. So is the principles that help me guide me to that long-term self-interest Okay, that makes sense. I want to ask something This is a little bit of a tangent perhaps and I don't know much about Einran's personal life, but in a lot of the interviews I've seen of her. She's typically smoking cigarettes So I don't personally smoke cigarettes, but I have I do drink alcohol currently I've taken long periods of time off like, you know over a year at a time And I've I've kind of wrestled that within myself It's like I enjoy drinking But I also enjoy not drinking because I you know has all these other benefits All right, your workouts get better. You can read more. You've got more time, etc How You know and something like that that's not lying stealing cheating hurting anyone. How does that decision of like You know if I drink now sure it seems like it's serving my short-term Selfishness There's a point where it becomes self-destructive obviously But you could also say it could serve potentially your long view Selfishness depending on what you're doing when you're drinking, you know, if you're I don't know making business deals or something like that. It could serve your long-term self-interest. So how does Something that's not immoral necessarily like drinking to within certain degrees. How does that fit into this? What is interesting is that It there's going to be a line where something is more Is not more depending on whether it's pro your life and not pro your life and That line can be tricky to figure out, right? So A drinking has all these pluses and and not drinking has all these pluses and these mine and weighing those That's where it's going to depend on On you, right? You're going to have to figure out where that line is. How much can I drink? Or should I drink not drink at all those? I think optional But it's within your context of how you for example respond to alcohol and what you do with your time and and all of that It I can imagine a circumstances where drinking is immoral because I don't know it Your health deteriorates or you're allergic to Or you defect your brain or something. I can imagine the circumstances When non-drinking is immoral, let's say let's say you really enjoy drinking a little bit and Just because I don't know Some authority figure in your life said stop drinking Robert. Don't do it. You stop drinking and you're not enjoying it because you remember, you know That's immoral too. So it's not that the it so what morality demands Is it you think about it? Morality demands that you weigh the options Morality demands that you figure it out based on some kind of real criteria the criteria of your life That you don't just give into the emotion that you don't just do whatever happens to there's a drink on the table So you drink it that you think about it that you figure it out You're going to make mistakes Sometimes you'll drink when you shouldn't and you know won't drink when you should But overall your morality is judged based on whether you think about it whether you use reason To evaluate the choice in the case of cigarettes Um in the 1960s she did not believe the emerging science That uh cigarettes were causing cancer. She just didn't buy it. She thought it was you know again kind of the government Government distorting this is the problem when government gets involved in science. It's hard to understand to know When her doctor I think is the early 70s told her That the cigarettes were gonna kill her she went cold turkey. She stopped immediately Wow, I didn't she understood unequivocally that it was a life of death issue It was easy for him Wow That's a quick cold turkey. That's impressive. Yeah, the same thing able to land a peacock. He you know the student He stopped at some point because he understood that it was a life of death issue so um again, you can be mistaken You can oh cigarettes. They don't do too much harm and I enjoy them and so on and then suddenly you discover Wait a minute. They're doing harm. All right. I have to take action and Yeah, I think we've gotten soft. I mean The fact is that a lot of people used to Stop smoking cold turkey and then at some point It became acceptable that it you were what is it addicted to it and million excuses why you couldn't go to cold turkey and I think it's it the culture got soft more than anything But my grandfather went cold turkey stopped smoking and I knew a lot of people who did I never started so I don't know what it felt like. Yeah, unfortunately never started either. My mother did go cold turkey as well And I think she was pretty much successful. She may have relapsed once or twice, but she she is successful now Okay, I want to ask you you threw out a term there earlier. I'm just now connecting that this Morality is the weighing of options and you're trying to choose the one that is pro life Right, that's kind of the the the general aim of the objectivist ethics That term made me think of abortion, which was recently Yeah, a very hot topic in national discourse Do you know of rand's views on abortion and how that fits into Objectivist ethics and if you want to skip this topic we can but I just thought I would ask This is what causes This is what causes me every single time a bunch of unsubscribers I know and had a very strong view on abortion And and she'd argue it fit completely into a theory. She was very pro abortion And she phrased it as pro abortion not just as pro choice or pro this and she viewed The pro abortion view as a pro life view Because the emphasis she was on the life of the mother the emphasis was on the life of the woman and Forcing a woman to carry the term from her perspective Or as a way of infringing on the rights of the mother and as a way of Limiting the scope of the mother's life telling them she she had to be a mother when when she had the option not to be So rand suddenly thought it was a no-brainer to allow abortions in the first Certainly in the first try a trimester maybe in the first two trimesters But she and and she thought it would should be legal until until birth But morally she certainly thought it should be okay First and second trimester When there was no real conscious being there And it boils down to how you define human life, right? A lot of things are alive, but we don't give them political rights. We don't protect them Her view is that human life human life is something that chooses and acts And and gains the idea of of of individual rights You have to be an individual for that and and and and and both is the Individuating process both is when you become an individual so that political rights the right to life Liberty and the pursuit of happiness only apply once you're born. You're not a You're you're alive, but you don't have rights until you're born Makes sense. That's pretty consistent. I think with Rothbard's views as well that He uses stronger language. Actually. I think he called the fetus a parasite on the mother's body and the mother can Is free to you know cleanse herself of the parasite whenever she wants Yep, yeah, obviously that that language is not conducive probably for a lot of productive dialogue, but No, the point's well taken that I like that birth is the process of individual individuation Um You know, it's it's a perceptually visible different human being versus while it's in the mother You know if life if human life is a process of Self-directed self-generating action Self-directed self-generating action as long as the fetus is inside the woman It is not self-directing and it's not self-generating anything it is All its life processes are the results of the mother's choices the mother Is doing the mother's being alive It's only when it comes out is now is it self-generating and self You know, it's it's it's actually a separate individual human Being and a live human being that's acting for its own benefit now. It can't get it a lot because that's Biology to allow babies to it's still dependent on the mother, but it's not attached to the mother It's not it's not it doesn't have a cable attaching it to it Which is it's a big difference. Yeah, so once that cord is cut it starts that process of at least To a limited extent self-directing and self-generating its own action Absolutely and it and it does the process of maturity is going fully into that right by the time you're an adult presumably you're Hopefully self-directing Well, the choice hopefully by that point you have chosen to make yourself into a human being of That's that's fully in control of their own life. Hmm interesting okay, I'll read a Another couple of excerpts here. I'm going to start on page 22 Rand writes It means one's acceptance of the responsibility of forming one's own judgments and of living By the work of one's own mind, which is the virtue of independence It means that one must never sacrifice one's convictions to the opinions or wishes of others Which is the virtue of integrity That one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner, which is the virtue of honesty That one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved neither in matter nor in spirit Which is the virtue of justice She goes on to write productive work does not mean the unfocused performance of the motions of some job It means the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career In any line of rational endeavor great or modest on any level of ability It is not the degree of man's ability nor the scale of his work that is ethically relevant here But the fullest and most purposeful use of his mind Finally, uh bottom of 23 she writes the basic social principle of the objective as ethics is that life Is that just as life is an end in itself? So every living human being is an end in himself Not the means to the ends or the welfare of others And therefore that man must live for his own sake neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose Um, okay A few questions here one this okay, I'm I'm going back to the virtue of Integrity and she says it means that one must never sacrifice one's convictions to the opinions or wishes of others That seems to be extremely difficult right to at least some extent. We're all persuaded by one another We all as you said earlier I love the term self programming because that seems to be the unique human capability But we're also at least subtly or subliminally being programmed by those who we spend our time with right What shows we watch what books we read there's this There's definitely an influence. So how do we balance like personal integrity without being just Obstinent and immovable all right. We have to be open to influence to some extent Yeah, so the the challenge is not Not to be influenced but to control What is influencing us and to choose? What to be so you could flop down in front of the tv and just flip the channels and just hit on whatever or you could You know, you you you know the kind of shows you like you do a little bit of research You say, okay the three shows i'm interested in here's some i'm gonna and and you might read reviews That might be part of the influence and you might read a reviewer and he says oh, this is a great show And then you watch it and it sucks Then you write him off and you don't use that reviewer anymore. So it's a process of being discriminating about who you allow to influence you Who you allow And the influence needs to be Conscious it needs to be I understand what i'm doing right now is I haven't had time to look at all the new Netflix shows So i'm gonna ask Robert what he thinks and and so i'm not doing it unconsciously I'm doing consciously Awareness and it's not contradicting my values So if Robert says you should you should watch this show but I watched the episode yesterday and I hated it I'm not gonna say well if Robert says then I better watch then i'm gonna override the fact that I hate it I'm gonna watch it anyway People do that though, right people do believable things So a man of integrity has certain values and they stick with those values That doesn't mean he can't discover that a value is wrong Or that a value is misplaced or That if he listens to joe He could he could gain a new value that joe has knowledge that that he doesn't have So it doesn't mean you're closed off from the world around you. It means that whatever influence it has You are in control of It right you're in control of how much of an influence you're in control of your own actions and you'll only act Based on your values and based on what you actually know That's helpful. Um Okay, I want to ask so this last point she makes that To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose now Pursuant to our discussion today. I think I get a better understanding of what she means, right? This is your your long term happiness as a human being you're thriving you're flourishing This doesn't mean go and drink and do all the things for today and you know to hell with tomorrow Um, but I just wanted to ask you about this because um, you know, I'm a big fan of jordan peterson's work He makes this argument that Happiness is like an emergent property of a well-ordered life So he thinks people should more focus on responsibility, you know cleaner room and all this Uh rather than than focusing on happiness and I could say that and maybe this is a prior misinterpretation on my own part, but In years past when I would aim at happiness. I think I ended up much more in that kind of, um Short what did we call it short view self-destruction to some extent? I just I don't know I had maybe I had a misunderstanding with happiness meant and then when I pointed life at responsibility instead Really tried to just take on as much responsibility as I could things got a lot better So i'm wondering is this another one of those terms that perhaps rand is Using slightly differently because in her view of long view happiness, there would be some responsibility Built into that to some extent Sure, I mean in the self-constraint and self-discipline we described earlier Yeah, but that's that's all part of the virtues, right? That's all part of morality So what I meant is saying here is if you want to be happy if happiness is the ultimate moral purpose Then don't think about happiness think about morality That is morality properly understood Will guide you to happiness will guide you to success so Find the values that are important to you Find the values that bring meaning to your life and and uh an achievement to your life Their achievement will make you happy. That's what it means to be happy. It's achieve those kind of values And then live the kind of life that will make you happy, but it's not like Oh, wait, I need what am I doing today to make myself happy? It's not how it works. Happiness is indeed in a sense an emergent property See, I think I think I think I mean I've heard Jordan Peterson say different things about happiness That uh where he doesn't even see it as an emergent property. He says it's more of a Accident some people are happy some people will never be happy and I think that is very harmful and a mistake You should want to be happy You should strive to be happy But the way you strive to be happy is by being moral by being a good person by taking on responsibility by challenging yourself By achieving I mean rand says the three cardinal values in the previous section you read reason purpose self-esteem If you are guided by if if you take those values seriously if you achieve reason purposes of esteem the reward the result The emergent property if you will is happiness So note that happiness is not the value By value Value is that which one acts to gain a keeper value is what you want to get But I want to get in a sense Is I'm not setting a happiness. That's my value. No my value is reason purpose and self-esteem. Those are the cardinal value consequence of that Is happiness All right, that makes sense. So then moral morality and perhaps more generally moral codes Are then valuable as pathways to happiness, right? These are Most small codes are not right and most small codes don't present themselves as such. So for example, a christian moral code would say That some christian moral codes you get the different interpretations, right? But some christian moral codes would say the purpose of morality is to connect you with god And you're not going to be happy in this life. Maybe like mother Teresa was never happy in this life Maybe in the next life, maybe, you know, but even then Some thinkers say no happiness is too selfish or motivation It's the connection with god or you know other other Like a chantean morality would say the purpose of morality is to fulfill your duty Happiness has nothing to do with it Objectivism, I in man says the purpose of morality is to give you the tools to achieve happiness That's a purpose Right the the and that's why she says the moral purpose of your life. That is the purpose of your morality is your happiness Right, that's what it will achieve if you follow it okay, so That's unique to a selfish morality a self-interested morality. Most moralities are not self-interested Most moralities tell you to be self-less Not to be self-interested. So that makes sense to me, but I would Push back and say that at least and I'm just choosing Christianity here because it's the one I'm most familiar with There are some aspects of it that align with what she's saying here, right like One of the things christ told As people like do not tell lies do not do what you hate love thy neighbor, you know things like this seem to be I don't know my name Right is love thy neighbor really? Well, let's do that one out. Let's just stay with do not tell lies do not do what you hate I mean these look you have to have every every morality has to have some elements which are Truthful and connected to reality because otherwise it would fail right and they've been a lot of morals proposed that have failed Because they propose things that are ridiculous So yes, of course, there's truth in christianity. It can be all wrong You know, I think most of it is but it can be all wrong because otherwise it would have not From evolutionary perspective survived So I think there's elements of truth in there's elements that encourage human survival and facilitate human survival in every system of ideas What rand is trying to do is boil it down to its essence and purify it get rid of all the crap And and and just focus on the things that are essential for human survivors things that are essential For human success without the baggage And I think what christianity has is a lot of baggage on top of a few things that yeah Kind of an agreement notice though The christianity's focus on don't lie Is on don't lie that is it's in your relationship with other people Whereas objectivism's focus on honesty is Don't lie to yourself That's the most important thing in honesty and in objectivist ethics is A commitment to the facts a commitment to reality And then as a part of that don't lie to other people But in a sense that's secondary the the primary is Commit yourself to reason commit yourself to facts commit yourself to reality Don't Don't deceive yourself is the biggest sin is self-deception One the Most difficult to avoid obviously You know there again my conversation with revakie He makes this point that from a neuro physiological standpoint the same machinery that allows us to adapt Also opens us up perennially to self-deception And so there's you know We have that ability animals can't self-deceive Yeah, well we can think we're it's almost like We have to Again this imaginary player right? We have to try things on we have to try things out And inevitably that ends up us going down some wrong paths self-deceiving learning our lessons and then coming back and doing it again so If you're a self programmer You're gonna make errors in the program If nature programs you if you're completely programmed from the bad. That's it. You're programmed. There are no errors, right? But self programming by implication means that there's going to be things you don't know things you Make mistakes and they can cause damage. They can cause harm. So we're not We have to be so alert As we program ourselves To get it right In a ways that animals don't have they don't have that self knowledge. They don't have that self reflection And most people don't reflect and most people don't think and most people don't and therefore they can really screw it up, right? so I think I'm gonna ask you anyways. I think I might know the answer but I want to ask so does this mean to the extent that Christianity or any religion or wisdom tradition has these truths Embedded in it, right? Do not tell lies. Do not do what you hate for instance To that extent does religion Wisdom traditions, etc. They have utility to that extent, right that they've given people these stories People internalize them and then people, you know, I know a lot of really good people that are christian people Right and they follow a christian ethos and they are happy. They live productive lives and they don't tell lies and all of these things so I don't want to I guess my question is can they be happy? I'm not sure so they can be to some extent I'm not sure they can be fully happy, but but yes, look religion Rand called religion for example a primitive form of philosophy The fact is that human beings need explanations They need to understand the world around them So the Greeks come up with philosophy The jews and the christians come up with religion the muslims come up with religion, but there are all ways Where we're struggling to explain the world around us and explain who human beings are and those explanations that are Have no resemblance to reality a complete failure is going to crash and burn very quickly So there has to be some element of truth and they have to be they have to have some utility in a sense particularly from historical perspective Like I don't think you could come up with christianity under Muhammad when Muhammad was alive Because one of the things about christianity is it's a it's a it's a religion of the underdog Right, it's a it's a religion of their press if you think about how christianity evolved it evolved In a minority it evolved under the thumb of the romans it evolved With with humility and islam Evolved from strength Islam evolved right from the beginning was the ruling ideology right from the beginning It had political power it had so so islam has a completely different attitude to politics Christianity has to seize on to seize it to god unto god. Why? Because if you didn't do that Caesar was going to crush you right you were gone so you better But Muhammad was the king Muhammad was the equivalent of a king so Politics and religion are united completely right so a lot of the The ways in which these religions evolved were consequence of what was going on at the time and what allowed the religion to survive and to thrive christianity Spread among the weakened society the press the people who felt like they were being Particularly in the early days right and then augustine had to reconceive of christianity to allow it to be Powerful and to allow for invade, you know Force conversions and things like that that that the later womans did Islam didn't Islam from the beginning force conversions were cool right they were good because they had power They were strong and Judaism it depends on the phase. Judaism arose out of strength and then was weak and so religions are Are systems of thought to allow people to survive under the circumstances in which they exist And give them some kind of explanation about the world, but then all of them need to be judged based on reason And the good stuff if you will captain the bad stuff thrown away got it so Religion is somewhat of a proto philosophy perhaps And it's that makes sense because in the east right we make this distinction in the west religion versus philosophy But in the east there's no difference really like Taoism and Hinduism They're they're all bound up. So yeah in a sense. There was no Greece in the east, right? So And as a consequence philosophy never arose in a pure form and then there was no monotheism in the in the east so there was no Uh, there were no jews in the east to spread a monotheistic religion. So they grew up with many gods So they had no real philosophers and they had no real monotheistic religion So they got a mishmash of both and but but you have to have something and every civilization anyway Even the most primitive hunter-gatherers have some system of belief to explain the world around right that that all makes a lot of sense to me So by the same argument then though and I know you got to wrap up here. So we'll close it up You couldn't necessarily I don't think get to objectivism then without christianity Because christianity led to the process Protestant reformation which led to the industrial revolution which led to You know giving someone like I ran to the leisure time to even formulate something like objectivism so The question is what would have happened without christianity. So you could make the argument Um, I could make the argument. It would be fun, right to have an alternative history where there's no christianity Where roam is not is not undermined by christianity because I think christianity undermines wrong And where maybe we get an industrial revolution a thousand years earlier Um, I would say christianity probably delayed the industrial revolution didn't support it The renaissance was a renaissance of greek thought A renaissance of greek art. So what allowed for reformation and and really an enlightenment Was the renaissance and the renaissance is greece. So I would argue that as long as we have greece we have the seeds of capitalism industrial revolution and all of that And christianity delays because it's anti Greece it delays the impact of greece, but that you know, that's that's a whole Fun to speculate, right? We can't yeah, we could never know obviously No, but it's an interesting it's an interesting debate, right? And certainly once you have Aristotle You have most of what you need to have everything that we have today gotcha. So last question I think I may have asked you a version of this before though If rand is proposing something that you know up ends or what did you say distills down to the essence of what we need In an ethical moral framework Isn't this kind of the up ultimate uphill battle though because she's like hey all that christianity stuff that runs the world You billions of people disregard all that just focus on this writing here. I mean it seems damn near impossible It seems damn near impossible. That's my job though Is the damn near impossible And you know, so yes, it's very it's very difficult the flip side of that is We have reason and happiness and outside That's pretty powerful. Hmm Great place to put a button on it Mr. Brooke, thank you so much. This is a lot of fun. Always fun. Thanks