 Sacrifice is supposed to be painful. Sacrifice is supposed to set you backwards. You know, Mother Teresa, who's a saint and they're not, she's a saint. Why? Because she's suffered. Like Bill Gates right now is helping more people than Mother Teresa ever did with his philanthropy. He's not going to be a saint because he's enjoying himself and he's rich. And anybody who is over 25, who is a communist, is an evil person because they are evading obvious truths. Hey everyone, how's it going? It's your boy Vdu Vids in the pub today. And I am with none other than Jeroen Brook. Thank you Jeroen for coming on. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate that. Jeroen is the chair of the board of the Ayn Rand Institute and the host of the Jeroen Brook show. Jeroen Brook, I've been watching your stuff on YouTube. I've read your book on Audible, which is available by the way. And to say that you are someone who promotes the free market would be an understatement. I would say the most purest form of capitalist or free market advocate there is. And that's why I want to speak to you because I myself consider myself a libertarian and I know you've got some issues with that word and maybe we can explore that later on. But you are someone who advocates for the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Yes. How would you describe Ayn Rand's philosophy in a nutshell for those people who may not be familiar with Ayn Rand? Sure. First you have to understand that Ayn Rand was indeed a philosopher. So this is a philosophy. It's not just a political theory or an economic theory. It actually deals with all the basic foundations of all ideas and she has something to say important and new I think to say in every field of philosophy. In metaphysics, Ayn Rand says reality is what it is. Reality is not a function of your consciousness, not a function of what you wish it to be, what you want it to be, but it's also not a function of some other external consciousness. It's not a function of some God who dictates how reality creates miracles. It is what it is and it functions based on the law of causality. A is A to quote Aristotle. Things are what they are. And we as individuals have the tool to know that reality as it is and that tool is human reason. We use our senses to discover, get information about reality. We can integrate that information and we can abstract from it. But all human knowledge is a product of our reason. There is emotions in our tools of cognition and there's no revelation. We don't communicate with some other dimension whether it's in a platonic sense or religious sense. We can't communicate with another dimension and get truth from their truth is here and we can access it. And only individuals can reason. And the whole point of an individual's life is the pursuit of your own happiness, the pursuit of your own success as a human being, to live your life for yourself. So she was an egoist in morality. She believed you shouldn't sacrifice yourself to other people and sacrifice means here giving up a high value for low value, making yourself worse off in the long run. And you shouldn't ask other people to sacrifice for you. You should live for yourself over the long run and the way to live for yourself is to use your tool of cognition, your tool of knowledge. So a couple of things there, the word sacrifice I think this word has been confused many times. So for example if I say I want a better body, I'm going to sacrifice eating a cake and someone will think oh that's a good thing, right? I'm going to sacrifice a bad meal for a good one. But that's a misuse of the term. So clearly what you're really saying is the value of having a great body is greater than the value of the cake and I'm giving it. So you don't give, you know there are lots of examples of this. You know people say oh I sacrifice not going to the movies to stay home with my kids. Really? Your kids are more valuable to you. See once you do that then you abandon the meaning of sacrifice. Sacrifice is supposed to be painful. Sacrifice is supposed to set you backwards. It's not supposed to make you better off. It's not a self-interested thing to do. When you give up the cake it's clearly in your self-interest to give up the cake. So but people conflate the term because they don't want you to know what sacrifice really means. I mean when we use the term sacrificial lamb, who actually in reality wants to be a sacrificial lamb like actually gets slaughtered? Yes and that's at the end. At the end sacrifices are about Jesus on the cross dying for other people's sins. Not for his own. Maybe you deserve today for your own sins for other people's sins. Now that's a sacrifice. Now of course you know he gets resurrected and all that stuff. But the idea of you have to give up something important to you for something less important or for nothing. That is what morality according to the altruists is really about. That's what's noble. For example giving up the cake to build your body. That's not nobody thinks in terms of morality. I do because I say what's moral here is that you're taking care of yourself and that's moral. But conventional morality says that's not morality. Morality is how you take care of other people. Morality is sacrificing your body to take care of other people. Why are you spending so much time working out when you could be helping those people over there who are starving and dying? That's true morality. That's what makes you noble. That's what makes you a saint. So you go back to what you said earlier. You said human reason. This is how we find out what is the truth and what we should base our life towards. Every individual should be egoist. So I'm going to do what's best for me. Yes. Would you recognize that not everyone can reason properly or have the tools to reason? I think maybe they're not trained. Maybe they were living in a society where certain values are higher than other values, for example. So can we really rely upon individuals to figure out for themselves what is in their self-interest? Because we say it's self-interest. So the question is this. Is everybody capable of reasoning? And my view is absolutely yes. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are. We have the brain too. That's what makes us human. What makes us human, according to Aristotle, we're the rational animal. So we have the capability to reason. And then it's incumbent upon you as an individual to break the chains that society puts you in, to get educated. Now it's true that today our educational system is so bad that we're not teaching kids to think for themselves. We're not teaching kids to reason. And surely in certain countries or in certain eras when, let's say, the church or religion was dominant, it was very hard for people to reason because in a sense they were brainwashed. And they were physical. The Jesuits used to say, give me a child by the age of five, they're mine. I brainwashed them completely. And there's a sense in which that is true. So yes, in very oppressive cultures, you could argue that it's hard to blame the people of North Korea for not living their lives based on rationality because they can't, right? They'd be killed if they did. Most of us today, luckily, but certainly in the West, live in relatively free countries. Education system is bad, but it's not so bad as it cripples your mind in a way that you cannot. It's incumbent upon an individual to discover their own capability to reason, to take care of themselves, to discover their values, to break ties with the irrational, to break ties with the past when it's a bad past, to break ties with society when society is bad, to break ties with politics when the politics is bad, and to build an independent life for themselves to the extent that the world around us makes it possible. So key to Iran's philosophy is objectivism. Objectivism is the name of a philosophy. Is the name? Yes. But if I'm going to decide what's best for me, then surely that's subjective. What's good for me may not be good for you. Subjectivism is a very dangerous word. Ultimately, I think a tricky word, right? What is subjective actually? It means whatever I feel like, whatever, you know, what is that? What is it reflected? Now, it's certainly individual. Your values are yours. Subjective implies that whatever values you choose, it's fine, and I'm saying no. Taste of preference, kind of. Well, it's taste of preference or emotion or, you know, I want to be a Christian today. I want to be a Jew tomorrow. I want to, I want to, I want to, you know, steal something. Yeah, it's good for me. And I'm, I say no. First, there are certain principles, moral principles, that are good for everybody. Qua human beings. Human beings have a particular nature. So think of you as a biological being, right? Clearly, certain foods are good for you, and certain foods are not. That's why you're giving up the cake to build the body, because you've identified scientifically. Sugar is probably not consistent with me being healthy and being, let's assume that's true. There is a science. I'm saying the same is true of life. To live, you must do certain things. All human beings must do these things. Certain things are bad for you, certain things are good for you. How you apply them to you specifically is going to be individual, not subjective, but individual. You will choose a different career than me. But we both probably identify, the career is important. And we both identify that we better take our career seriously if we want to be successful in life. Taking your career seriously, for example, is a universal value. It is a value that's required for a successful human life, and is objective in that sense. And Iron Man has three cardinal values, you know, values that I think every human being is necessary. Reason. If you don't use reason, if you don't use your mind, you're going to screw up your life. It doesn't matter where, when you're going to screw up your life. So reason is universal. All human beings have a capacity. And people who live in societies where they're not allowed to use their reason, their lives are screwed up. It's a main reason their lives are screwed up. Reason. Purpose. You have to have a purpose in life. You have to have a goal. You have to know what you want. You have to integrate your life around what you want. Most of us integrate our life around career, right? A career that we want to do. Career or family, for most people. Well, you know, nobody really integrates their life around family. Maybe some women do, particularly more traditional families. But the fact is that family requires a sudden effort, usually from parents during 18 years when the kids are growing up. But you can't sustain a whole life around family, right? You can't sustain it from beginning to end. At the very least, you need a good hobby on the side in order to keep your interest and your intellect and your reason going. And I think most people who say, I care most about their family, when you ask them, well, do you spend more time with your family? Or do you spend more time at work? You somebody discover that their preference based on how much time they spend is for work and not for family. So reason, purpose, and a third one is self-esteem. You have to have the sense that you belong in this planet. Your happiness is dependent on it. And you have to seek that out. You have to seek out self-esteem. And self-esteem comes from the achievement of values, the achievement of success, rational success. So those are the values that I think are universal. And then the question is, how do you get those values? I was just going to ask, the first one reason, that's pretty, I mean, self-explanatory, but purpose, meaning, all these types of words, they can get a bit fuzzy sometimes for some people. And this is where you see the Jordan Peterson of the world coming in. And they step in and they amaze people and root people with it. And this is why Jordan Peterson is so successful. And one of the reasons he's so successful, he's successful for many reasons. One of them is people have a need for meaning. I prefer the word purpose, but people have a need for purpose. And he provides them with guidance on how to get one. Now, I don't think his guidance is always good. I don't think his guidance is always the right guidance, because I think he's got some philosophical errors in his system. But the need for meaning and purpose is unquestionable. All of us have it. And that's why religion is so successful. It's why Jordan Peterson is so successful. It's why people are so influenced when they read Ayn Rand. It's not the detail. It's this idea, first and foremost, she provides you with guidance towards a purpose. And look, none of them are contradictory. You need to use reason in order to discover your purpose. And you need to use reason in order to attain your purpose. But you need a purpose. Life is too many things going on. You need something to integrate it all. You need a direction to your life. You are a communicator. You love communication and you integrate. You've got a podcast. You've got a company maybe. You work for other people. But it's all integrated around this one thing. You love communication. That's the thing you do. And you can shift purposes over time. It doesn't have to be one for your whole life. But you need an integrating. And self-esteem is we need in order to be successful in life. Everything is dependent on this idea. In order to survive and succeed at living, we need to feel like we belong in this life. We need to feel like this is our home. And that comes from this sense of confidence and sense of, yeah, this earth is mine. This is good. I can handle this world. I can be successful here. And of course, to actually achieve this, you need virtues that are actions that lead to those values. And I, in the end, identify seven. You know, other philosophers might identify six, nine. The point is, the focus here is, what does it take to be successful in life? What does it take to survive, to thrive, to flourish, and ultimately to be happy in life as a particular biological entity, right? Recognizing that we have an identity, just like everything else in reality. Like you don't go to a cheetah and say, you know, whether you eat or not is subjective. Today, you're going to eat plants. Well, for cheetah, each plant, they die. It's objective. They have to eat animals. And they have to eat animals they can catch in the way they catch them is through speed, right? Human beings, you can't say, oh, you can do whatever you want and you'll be happy. No, there's a certain path to happiness. And that, and you can't even say, you can do whatever you like and survive. Human beings can't survive even 100,000 years ago without reason. They just, I mean, I don't know about you, but I do not have the gene for hunting, right? Nobody does. Yeah. How do we hunt? So if you put a human being and a sabertooth tiger, one on one, who wins? Game over. Game over, right? But the fact is the last sabertooth tiger I saw was in a museum. Yeah. And look that, I don't know, eight billion human beings. How do we win that battle? Because we build weapons. We figure out strategy. We figured out how to beat the sabertooth tiger. If you ask a human being to hunt a bison, I mean, how am I going to hunt a bison? It's like this massive thing. We build traps. We have weapons. We strategize. We work in teams. All of those things require reason. They require ingenuity. So the very active survival for human being requires certain principles. And you cannot evade those principles. And to an extent that you do, you die. Okay. So this is slow death, but you die. So this is one of the last questions on this, on this other subject. Do you think, I mean, the same way we look at Communists and say, this is utopia, you have this unbelievable trust that the government will provide you with everything and everything will peace and hunky dory. Do you think the same way it's utopian for iron ran, to think everyone, if they only acted with reason, or if we were to create society, and then overnight, if everyone acts with reason, everyone's going to be better off and birds will be chirping. Birds will be chirping. That's true. But I don't think everybody's better off. I think there's always going to be a certain percentage of the population, very small, I think, tiny, that are going to be worse off. The wife beating drunk is bad off in this society and probably worse off in capitalism, because now he might be getting NHS and he might get a little bit of welfare and capitalism. Nobody will have anything to do with him. You'll probably just die for it. So, you know, no. Iron Man's system says, if you take care of yourself, if you engage your reason, if you act rationally, you will have a successful life, you know, barring accidents, barring, you know, hitting lightning and everything like that. But generally you are. But there's nothing utopian about it, and this is a huge difference with communism. Iron Man's ideas are derived from and consistent with human nature. She doesn't say, this is what I want human beings to be like. I want human beings to be, I don't know, to be a being that doesn't care about himself. Well, you can't survive if you don't care about yourself. She says, no, I want you to care about yourself and I want you to think about what it really means to care about yourself. And to care about yourself means to use your mind and to think about how to produce and how to create and how to take care of your world. So her philosophy is the first philosophy, in my view, that is consistent with human nature. It is consistent with what is truly required for survival. So Christianity and most moral codes. There's morality and there's practicality. And the two do not match up. You can either be moral or you can be practical. You can either make money or you can be moral. You can't do both. I mean, really. Well, I mean, many Christian preachers in America... Well, they pretend, right? Because they love making money so much that they distort their Christianity to fit that. But really, you know, Mother Teresa, who's a saint and they're not, who was a saint, you know, she was poor and she suffered and she struggled. She made other people suffer. And she was unhappy and she made other people suffer. Well, she tried to help. The claim is she tried to help people, as she did or not, is an open question. And she's the saint. Why? Because she suffered if she had made millions. If she was driving Rolls Royce while helping other people. And she wouldn't... Like Bill Gates right now is helping more people than Mother Teresa ever did with his philanthropy. He's not going to be a saint because he's enjoying himself and he's rich. So practical and moral are separate. With objectivism, the practical is the moral. And the moral is the practical. Why? Because the way morality was derived inductively from experience. So Rand says she could have never developed a morality 300 years ago. It had to be in the 20th century. Because she had to see the industrial revolution. She had to see people apply their reason to the problem of human survival on a massive scale. If you go back to Aristotle, to a large extent for Aristotle, reason is interesting. It's a mind game. It's something you do. But it's an end in itself. The industrial revolution proves that science, thinking, reason, on end to human flourishing, on end to the material problems of the human beings engage in. And when we apply our minds, we can create anything. We can create this abundance with which we live. And you need proof of that in reality. So objectivism is derived from reality. It's derived inductively from the facts of reality. And it's consistent with what works in reality. And if there was a virtue and somebody could show me that that virtue, it didn't work in reality. It actually led you to be miserable, pathetic, to die ultimately. And I'd say then it's not a virtue that we made a mistake when you crossed that offer and have a different virtue. Okay. Can someone be an effectivist and disagree with Ironland? Or is she the standard? Well, it depends what you mean by disagree with Ironland. So objectivism is her philosophy. It's what she wrote down philosophically. And if you disagree with her philosophy, you can disagree with application, you disagree with her particular issue. But if you disagree with her on the philosophy, then no, you're not an objectivist. But why do you care? Why do I care? Why does anybody care? My view is you don't need to be an objectivist. I'm not here to convince anybody to be an objectivist. I want you to convince you of the truth. If it turns out Ironland was wrong, then let's change the stuff. But then it's not objectivism. And that's what she wanted. She didn't want objectivism to become whatever we thought the truth was in the future. She said, look, objectivism I created, since I won't be there in the future to evaluate whether I agree with you or not on what is right or what is wrong. I want this to be called objectivism. If you agree with the call yourself an objectivist, if you don't say you're influenced by Ironland, you agree with a lot of Ironland, you built on Ironland's work and you're this new thing, but don't call yourself an objectivist unless you agree with her on the philosophy. Now you can disagree with her on psychology, you can disagree with her on certain applications to politics or other things. But my point is I don't encourage people to call themselves objectivists. Call yourself a truth seeker. Go find the truth. And I don't, before I become somebody's friend, I don't interview them to decide whether they're objectivists. Are you an objectivist or not? Take a test. Do you care about the truth? That is very important to me. So would you be friends with a communist if they said never? Never. I mean communism is sheer evil and anybody who is over 25 who is a communist is an evil person because they are evading obvious truths. Okay, but the same way they themselves might be seeking the truth and at this moment in their life they think communism is the truth. After over 100 million people have died. It wasn't real communism. There is no such thing. At some point every regime that has ever tried this idea, every regime that has approached trying this idea, every regime that has affiliated with this idea has led to nothing but death and destruction. If you are evading that, if you are pretending that doesn't exist, you are doing what I am doing and consider the essence of evil, which is evading the facts of reality. You're not a truth seeker. You are, you've got a theory and now you're gonna distort reality to fit your theory. But there's nobody on the planet Earth today over the age of, you know, let's be generous, 30 who claims to be a communist, who is an honest person. Nobody. That's a big claim. Okay, so. Oh no, I think it's one of the easiest. I mean, would you say the same thing? If I said, if somebody came to you and said, I'm a Nazi, I'm seeking the truth, I'm experimenting, I'm figuring it out. Everybody would be horrified. Why? What's the difference? Communist killed more people than Nazis. He says no, Hitler didn't practice it right. It wasn't real Nazis. It wasn't real Nazis and we didn't really kill that many Jews and it's all, it's really, you're fudging the numbers and stuff. You would consider that person dishonest and evil. Why do communists get a pass? Now, you know, if you want, I can tell you why communists get a pass. But communists get a pass, they shouldn't. They are Nazis. There is, there is absolutely zero. Economic Nazis, you say. They're Nazis in every respect. There is no difference from a moral perspective between a Nazi and a communist. If you claim to be a communist, I will treat you as if you just claimed to be a Nazi. You deserve exactly the same treat. That is very interesting. Now, would you be friends with a Muslim Christian Jew? Because their ideologies arguably have cause a lot of damage as well. So would you be friends with... I mean, it depends on how seriously they took their religion. So if they were serious Muslims, serious Christians, serious Jews. No. Feminist? Well, again, it depends what you mean by feminist and how seriously you took it. Feminist life. No, I couldn't be friends with a Christian. Fair enough. I mean, what would be the basis? I believe friendship is one of the most important things in life. I'm not friends with a lot of people. You know, and my friends, I have to share values. And if there's no overlap of values, if there's nothing we really share, then you know, what would be the point? Now, if somebody was a moderate leftist, if somebody was a moderate Christian, a moderate Jew, a moderate Muslim, yes, I could imagine being friends with them. Flexibility. But even then, the friendship would be compartmentalized over certain things because clearly by being moderate in all those things, they are compromise. But maybe the Nazi, the communist, whoever, if they became your friend, being exposed to yourself and the way you live and everything, they might... My purpose in life is not to convert Nazis and communists. No, your purpose might not be that, but just them spending time with them. Why would I even spend time with them? You know, my life, every second of my life is precious. I'll never get it back again. I'll never have another moment. So let's say, for example... So if communist is watching this video, good, then maybe I'll convert him. But I'm not going to go out of my way to find him. And if he comes to me, I'm not going to make any effort to convert him. I'm going to tell him his philosophy is the equivalent of the Nazi philosophy. It's evil. It's unthinkable. And how can he live with himself? Well, I appreciate that because I wonder why communists get such a free pass. When they're in death toll, fast, well... Well, you can ask me and I'll tell you. Okay.