 event by the INRUN Institute will be the INRUN Global Conference. This is going to take place on the 6th of March. Unfortunately, still we have to do it online, although hopefully soon going to be back in the real world. And the title is How to put a dent in the universe. So the idea is how can you be an aspiring intellectual and how can you pursue an intellectual career? But also how can you persuade people with ideas? How can you communicate ideas and also how to highlight the power of ideas and the impact of ideas? So talking about ideas, we're going to discuss with Yaron, why is it that politics needs to start actually from philosophy, from ethics and morality? We had a friend asking previously, what is the difference between, for example, objectives and libertarianism? And aren't we all for capitalists? So Yaron is going to clarify these things. He's going to clarify these points. So he's going to go for around 25 minutes, maybe half an hour on a slow tempo so that it's good with also with our interpreter. And here we go. I'm going to put by the way the link for the INRUN Global Conference on the chatroom. Yaron, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Thank you, Nicos. Thank you, Emil, for organizing this. It's a real pleasure to be talking to objectivists in Russia. And it would be nicer if I was able to visit you guys, but maybe someday in the future we'll be able to do these events live somewhere in Europe or maybe even in Russia. Although February in Russia doesn't strike me as the best time of year to be visiting. Although yesterday I was in Denver giving a talk and it was zero degrees Fahrenheit. So it felt very Moscow-like or very St. Petersburg-like. So it was definitely, it was definitely cold. All right, Nicos, let me know if there are audio or video problems as we go. I'm in a hotel room, as you can see, in California. I usually try to get an ethernet connection, but the hotel lied about whether they have ethernet connection in the room. So I'm using Wi-Fi and hopefully this will sustain. So the discussion really today is about the link between politics and ethics. And the objective is perspective that ethics is really necessary in order for us to attain any kind of political success. That is, if we are advocates of capitalism, for advocates of freedom, then we have to have a solid foundation in ethics, which is Iron Man's view. So why is this? Where does this notion come from? How do we get to this notion? So I want to start with asking really this question, which I think is probably the most important question in the field of politics. Why freedom? Why is freedom good? And then how much freedom? We live today in mixed economies where we have some freedom, not complete freedom, and life's pretty good. So why are we as objectivists advocating for more? By what standard is freedom a value? And here, I mean freedom as that condition in which individuals can pursue their own values, using their own mind in pursuit of their own values. In that sense, freedom is the absence of coercion, the absence of force, the absence of authority tells you what to think and what to do and where you are threatened with force if you don't obey. So freedom is the freedom to act, to pursue your individual values. Why is that, why is that good? Well, let's consider it from the perspective of altruism. And we just heard, you just heard a very good discussion about altruism and egoism. So let's take that question from the perspective of altruism. If the standard of morality, if the standard of goodness, if the standard of virtue is indeed self-sacrifice, is indeed the well-being of others, is indeed what is good for other people, and if, as many altruistic philosophers would argue, the extent to which one considers one's own well-being in acting in what is perceived to be altruistically for the benefit of other people, to that extent it's not moral. That is, the moral is the self-less. The moral is the denial of self. If that is true, then it's freedom of value. Freedom is about your ability to pursue your values in the way you want to, but why is that a good thing? If the moral code says what you actually shouldn't pursue your values, your values, the values important to you, you should pursue some other agenda that generally relate to others. And, you know, why is it important that you use your judgment? Why is it important that you why is it important that you use your preferences? Why cannot you be guided by a authoritarian or a majority or, you know, the needs of whatever group establishes political power over you? Why is your voice? Why are your opinions? Why are your values? Why are your choices important? If the whole point of your life is to serve others, shouldn't then others determine how you should serve them? Shouldn't others have a voice, an important voice, a determining voice in how you live, in what you do, in the choices and actions you make? Indeed, I would argue that the whole premise of the mixed economy, the whole premise of status, government, is derived from an ethic of altruism. If the purpose, if your purpose as an individual is to serve the proletarian, then a dictatorship of the proletarian makes complete sense. We will then tell you what needs to be done for the sake of the proletarian. And since the proletarian as a group can really be a dictator, we need to appoint a Stalin or a Lenin to channel the knowledge of what's good for the proletarian and therefore drive your behavior. If the well-being of Russia is what is important morally to each one of you, if that is your purpose in life is to serve Mother Russia, then we need somebody to be able to channel what's good for Russia, to be able to let us know and to be able to tell us what we shouldn't, shouldn't do. Who are you to decide what's good for Mother Russia? We need some mechanism to truly derive, usually by some mystical way, what is truly good for Mother Russia. Right now the Russian people, at least many of them seem to be quite happy with letting Vladimir Putin channel the well-being of Mother Russia and your job is just to do what you're told. And how can you challenge that? When you are bought into a morality that says that your purpose is to serve others in this case, the state, in this case, Russia, you know, notice altruism is very fungible. You can fill in the other with lots of different things. You can fill it in with the state, you can fill it in with the needy, you can fill it in with God, you can fill it in with anybody. As long as it's not you, the essence is it can be you. That's the essence of altruism. That's the essence of selflessness. But if you think about even the mixed economy, think about how we get a mixed economy. Take the United States. They used to be fairly capitalist and has drifted over the last 100 years, 120 years more and more and more towards greater and greater statism and more and more socialism and fascism, more and more government involvement. You know, certain corruption. Your live stream on YouTube and Facebook shows my face. So although I'm, you know, honored, but you need to change probably your I have it on speaker, but let me let me see if uh uh so you're pinned. So let me see how about that. So supposedly it should it should change now. It should have me pinned. Okay, and thanks so much to the person who mentioned it. Sorry, continue. Yeah, so where was I? Um, so let's let's talk about the United States and how we drifted from relatively capitalist to socialist fascist mixture of a mixed economy where the government, where the state is heavily involved in all the decision. Well, think about how the altruist, how altruism would work in this context. Right. Think about the fact that we could, for example, um, that sometime in the, in the, uh, 1920s or 1930s, the, uh, intellectual leaders of America said to the people, look, there are lots of people here unemployed. They're needy. They don't have food. They don't have jobs. They don't have your quality and standard of living. And it's your moral responsibility to take care of them. It's your duty to take care of them. It's your moral duty to take care of them. Put aside political theory, put aside politics, morality dictates that you should take care of these people. They are suffering and by their suffering, they are claim against you, which is what altruism argues for. And you're not doing it. You're too selfish. You're too self-interested to spend time taking care of these people. So we, the state are going to help you be better morally. We're going to take more of your money. We're going to tax you higher. And we are going to redistribute your wealth to them. And most Americans went, huh, okay, that makes sense. You know, we want to help them. We know it's our moral duty to help them. We're not helping them because we're too busy with our own lives. We know we're shellfish to out of a sense of guilt, out of a sense of responsibility, moral responsibility for these people, raise my taxes and redistribute the wealth. And you see that every decade, more of that and more of that because there's always somebody needy. There's always somebody who's doing not as well as I am. There's always somebody they can trot out and say, look, here's a group that you're not helping and we need to help and we need to raise your taxes even more. And there's no end to it. There's no end to it. There's no level of taxation and redistribution of wealth that eliminates need, that eliminates inequality. Whenever there's inequality, somebody needs what I have. And that becomes a moral claim. And you can't resist that morally. And this is true of the left and the right. It's, there's no, there's never been a right in America over the last 120 years that have shrunk the role of government, that have actually reduced government spending or government redistribution. Hasn't, why? Why can't the right, should I just admit everybody or you guys doing it? Oh, you're doing it. Also your Facebook live is fixed. Now it's on you. Okay. Good. So it's, there's no moral argument against us or take regulation and then I want to switch to egos. Take regulation. Why do we have regulations? Well, because of, of what I think was Keith, Keith, yes, of what Keith described as the package deal. This idea that in people's mind, self interest has two different things, two different elements that are in our view contradictory, but in their view the same. One is a businessman is selfish because he's pursuing profit. He's between production. He's pursuing, pursuing his own interests. But a crook is selfish too. A cheat, a liar, a thief is selfish too. And people have that package deal in the same folder. They have that concept, same concept for both of them. And what that does is it makes them think that businessmen are crooks, businessmen are cheats. So how do we get regulations? We get regulations by again, the intellectuals of the politicians coming to us and saying, look, there's a problem here. There's fraud or whatever. And this is what businessmen do. They commit fraud because they're self interested. What we need to do is for the common good in the public interest, control them, regulate them, make sure that they don't commit the fraud that maybe one or two of them have done. And therefore we get massive regulations because one person committed fraud, but in people's minds, all businessmen fundamentally have the potential to being crooks. In 2002, I was on Bill O'Reilly's show, some of you might not remember who Bill O'Reilly was, but he was the most popular talk show host in America at Fox News, a conservative. And in 2002, there were a couple of fraud cases, and O'Reilly wanted every CEO in America fired. This is a conservative. And I asked him why, and he says, because they're all crooks. Why? Because that's their nature. How do you become a CEO? By pursuing self interest, by pursuing what you want, what's good for you. But what's good for you is lying Chinese dealer. That's what they have in their minds. So all regulation comes from a distrust of self interest. So basically, statism is popular. The mixed economy is popular. Authoritarianism, I would argue, is popular. Because people don't see the value of freedom because they don't see the value of individuals pursuing their own values. They don't trust that. They think that leads to lying, cheating, stealing, and they think that leads to not being moral. It leads to, in their mind, abandoning altruism. Altruism necessitates socialism. Altruism necessitates statism. It necessitates a best of mixed economy, and at worst, absolute totalitarianism. That's what altruism demands. And what we have today is a clash between our desires, and mostly it's subjective desires, and you can ask me about libertarians in a minute because this is related to that, subjective desires to do our own thing versus our moral commitment to others. So we want a little bit of freedom, but we also know that we won't do the right thing morally, the altruistic thing, while so we need the state to impose morality on us. And that's what statism is. That's what socialism is. That's what fascism is. It's the state imposing an altruistic morality over people. How do you challenge that? You don't challenge it by playing the altruist game. You don't challenge it by trying to advocate for freedom from an altruistic perspective. You can't. Altruism demands statism. The only way to challenge it is by abandoning altruism and embracing the alternative, which if you were here for the previous session, you just heard explained. That is the perspective of rational egoism, rational self-interest. Why do I want freedom? Well, of course I want freedom because it's my life to live through my judgment based on my values in pursuit of my happiness. That's why I want freedom. I don't care. You can argue economics all day to me. I don't give a shit. Sorry. I shouldn't say that. I care about living my life based on my mind, based on my standard, based on my values, based on my thought. If that turns out to be maximally efficient, economically cool. If it turns out to be not efficient, it doesn't matter. I'm still going to live my life the way I see fit. That's what I, because that's the only moral system for an egoist. An egoist will not accept other people's judgment over his mind. I don't care what Stalin thinks. I don't care what Putin thinks. I don't care what Trump thinks. I don't care what Biden thinks. I want to live my life by my thought, using my reason, because I am capable of it, and that is what virtue requires. That is what ethics requires. That's what my life, my survival, my happiness, my success being a human being requires. The argument for freedom is fundamentally a moral argument. I need to be able to use my mind. I need to be able to pursue my values. Then the question is, how do we create a society which allows individuals to be moral, to be ethical, in pursuit, in other words, to pursue their own life, or to use terminology of the Declaration of Independence to pursue their own happiness? What kind of political system? When we get into large groups, what kind of political system do we need to allow individuals to pursue their own self-interest? Well, what is the only enemy of a mind pursuing values, discovering knowledge? Well, a mind needs to be free of coercion. It needs to be able to explore, to test, to experiment, to fail, to learn. It cannot be constrained by dogma. It cannot be constrained by authority. So if I value my mind, and if I value my life, the enemy of my life and my mind is coercion. It's force. It's authority. So in that sense, there is no non-aggression principle to go to the libertarian question. There is a principle of, the principle is my life. The principle is egoism. Egoism requires non-aggression. I can't live morally if there is coercion. So the non-aggression principle or the idea of non-aggression comes out of morality. It's not a beginning. It's not an axiom. It's not a self-evident truth. It's a truth that relies on ethics. And without a proper ethics, like altruists have no problem aggressing against one another. Hey, you're not helping the poor enough. Let me force you to. Let me make you more moral, and it will make me more moral. Egos, which shudder at a thought like that. So egoism requires that when we live together in a society, we use no force against one another. And the only way to guarantee that is to create a government whose sole responsibility, whose only job is to protect our lives from coercion, fraud, from force, from authority trying to impose itself on us. And we have a concept to capture this idea. This idea of living in a society without coercion. And that is the concept of individual rights. Rights are freedoms of action. Freedom to pursue your values based on your mind, based on your rational thought. Free of coercion, free of force, free of authority. And the only job of government is to protect that right, to protect that freedom. There is nothing else. That is the sole responsibility of government. And that's why, as a social institution, it gets the monopoly over the use of retaliatory force. It is there to exclude force for human interaction. For the purpose of, not some social utility, not the common good, not the public interest, although if you properly understand all those terms, you could argue that it serves all those. The reason government exists to protect our rights, the reason government exists at all, is to create an environment in which individuals can be selfish, individuals can be egoists, individuals can think for themselves, individuals can identify and pursue their own selfish values, individuals can pursue their happiness. It's not an accident that we came closest to freedom, real freedom. In the United States, coming out of the Declaration of Independence, the founding of America, and I put aside, and it's hard to put aside, acknowledge, the issue of slavery, but putting that aside, what the founding fathers of America created was the freer society in human history. And it's not an accident, and it's not an accident, because they are the product or the culmination even of the enlightenment. And the enlightenment was not only, not primarily even, a political revolution, because politics is derivative. So the revolution that is the political revolution, the revolution that is the American revolution is both an epistemological and an ethical revolution. Epistemological, because what's the other name of the enlightenment? What do we call the enlightenment? We call it the age of reason. The enlightenment is a period of rediscovery of the efficacy of reason, of reason as man's basic means of survival. As reason is a tool for knowledge, not revelation, not ancient books, but reason, science, observation, thought, and who reasons, individuals reason, and every individual has the capacity to reason. So first you have the capacity to live, you have the capacity to survive, you have the capacity to take care of yourself through use of reason. And secondly, the enlightenment is a period of again rediscovery of the value of the individual, because it is the individual who can reason, because it's the individual who discovers truth, because it's the individual who is conscious and who can think and who can experience happiness. The political, the important political unit is the individual. And again, you can see that in the Declaration of Independence. Declaration of Independence is a moral declaration. It is a declaration about the value of the individual, his life, and the ultimate goal of that life. So you have a right, according to the Declaration of Independence, to your life, which means to make choices and judgments and act in accordance with your evaluations of what's good for you in your life, free again of force and courage. You have a right to liberty, which means you have a right to think and to speak and to write and to argue based on your mind. Nobody can silence you using force. And in the ultimate expression of the egoistic elements within the enlightenment, each one of us has a right, an inalienable right, to pursue our own happiness. A moral right implicit in the statement to pursue our happiness, not the common good, not the public interest, but our own happiness. Those are moral statements. Individual rights are moral ideas. They're ideas about the value of the individual and the morality of him pursuing his own interests. And we will never achieve freedom. We will never return to freedom. We will never reenliven, re-create the Declaration of Independence. Without a moral revolution that Keith and Aaron talked about, it is the moral revolution that is necessary today. A moral revolution that rejects altruism and replaces it with egoism. And therefore what are egoists going to do? Egoists are going to demand freedom. They're going to demand the ability to pursue their values, using their mind, to pursue happiness. So political freedom requires egoism and will never happen and never be sustainable without it. Indeed, what undercut the American revolution, what caused America to drift away from freedom, is altruism. Altruism brought in by philosophers, intellectuals during the 19th century. Altruism is the enemy. And this is why, to answer a question from before, this is why we're not libertarians. Because we view, we don't view politics as primary. We don't view economics as primary. They're important. They need to be fought. But you cannot win those battles unless you're willing, dedicate yourself to fighting and winning the moral battle. Unless we've been about a moral revolution. Thank you. Is that slow enough, Nicos? That was slow enough. I could see the interpreters. It was doing great. So thanks to both of you. Okay, so now we're going to go to the Q&A. So how it's going to work is you raise your hands via the raise hands button. I'm going to read some questions that have come to me in written. And I'm going to read almost to the English question. Emil is going to read. Can we give priority to the Russians in the audience? Sure. Okay. We give priority to the Russians in the audience. So Emil, go ahead. Yeah, so I got a text question from Alexander Borodin, who is the colleague of Michael Casivo. So the question is, is it possible to absorb the reception of the ideas of objectivism in the political program of the Republican Party of the United States? I mean, I think that over the last 40 years, INRAND has had an impact on certain politicians. But it has been relatively a certain politicians within the Republican Party. And I certainly think that Ronald Reagan in 1980 could not have been elected without the changes that INRAND had brought about in American culture, positive changes that made his message appealing to a certain percentage of the American people. Capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s was a dirty word. And I think capitalism was resurrected by INRAND and to some extent Milton Friedman. And Ronald Reagan could have never won, I don't think, without their effort, primarily Rand's effort. Think about the millions of people who read out the shrug and it changed their spirit, even if it didn't change their philosophy. And I think to some extent that is true within the Republican Party, that is the certain people whose spirit is influenced by INRAND, even though they do not understand who ideas at all to exaggerate. You can see this in somebody like Ted Cruz, who talks about INRAND a lot, quotes INRAND a lot. But I would consider him an enemy of INRAND, even though on certain issues he seems to be sympathetic. Many Republicans use INRAND more as an attack on the left than as a positive promotion of good ideas. And with Trump, I would say that the right has completely abandoned any semblance of INRAND. That is, Trump is the anti-INRAND. Trump is one of INRAND's villains in every respect. And both as a political agenda, personal agenda, moral agenda, the entire agenda of the Republican Party has shifted in the last five years, dramatically away from even the small impact INRAND had on it in the past. So I'd say during the Reagan era, going into the 2000s, there was an influence of INRAND on the Republican Party, I think that has gotten smaller and not bigger over time. And that is one of the great tragedies of the 21st century. Okay, thank you. So, Sveta Slav is going to ask the next question, and I'm going to unmute you. Yeah, so the question basically is like the previous one, like the one that was before that. So what is the relation between objectivism and libertarianism? And are there the common things and are there what is actually different between them? So part of the problem is that I don't know what libertarianism is. That is, I think there's almost nothing in common between objectivists and anarchists. I consider anarchy to be a destructive ideology, an ideology that ultimately leads to bloodshed and to chaos, anarchy to a logical extent means chaos, and to disintegration of society. So I think there's very little and where an egoist, where a selfish person cannot actually live successfully. I would rather live in a mixed economy than live on an anarchist society. So, to the extent that libertarianism is anarchy, then there's nothing or very little in common with objectivism. To the extent that libertarianism is a respect and a promotion of free markets of capitalism, of getting rid of government intervention in the economy, getting rid of, as many libertarian economists or free market economists out there advocate for. To the extent that it's that, then I think that there's common ground. There is common goals, obviously to eliminate state intervention in our economy, to reduce the welfare states, to reduce regulations, to restrict and limit government as much as possible. But I don't think, I don't think libertarianism can be successful. I don't think libertarianism can be successful, unless objectivism is successful. That is, I don't think the free market agenda can win, as I said in my talk, unless objectivism wins on the moral agenda. So I think libertarians are spinning ceaselessly and spinning the wheels without achieving anything, unless they're willing to engage with morality. So while I appreciate all the economists and all the political scientists and theorists among the free market crowd, the libertarian crowd that are not anarchists or focus primarily their attention on economic freedom, I appreciate them. I think they add value and they help me make my arguments better. And unless ultimately they're willing to at least concede that ethics is important, they will not be successful. So I think libertarians are dependent on objectivists to be successful. The libertarians are not anarchists. So I work a lot with libertarian economists. I work with people who are free market, who are free market oriented. I often cite them. I often do panels with them. I speak at a lot of libertarian gatherings and in events. But most of my focus when I speak at those kind of events is to try to convince them that morality is important, that objectivism is what will actually change the world, not just talking about economics and politics. I don't know. I hope hopefully that answers the question, but you can do a follow up if not. Yeah, that was the answer to the question. And just one comment in Russian for the Russian audience, because I noticed that the talk is no longer interpreted in Russian. So Okay, so that's the interpretation room. Yes, but there is no no one speaking in the interpret interpretation room here. Where Maria does because I can see her speaking. Oh, because I couldn't hear here. Okay, okay, maybe there's a technical problem, but that's okay. I hope everyone can hear you for a while. Okay, if you tell you what, if someone asks a question in Russian, you translate the question to Yaron, otherwise we can go to the Q&A without interpretation. It's not the end of the world. So there is one last hand raised. I would just ask this person. Okay, then I have a couple of written questions. Okay, thank you for your lecture. It was very interesting. I want to ask a question about your idea of moral revolution, because in terms of politics, because you said that politics is not the first thing. The first thing is ethics, but politics. But how do you see, how do you see this way of political situation in USA in terms of objectivism, because from what I can see, the two-party system is very wrong because from the one hand we have one type of altruism is conservative religious. And from the other, on the other hand, we have leftism. So in this case, objectivism doesn't, politically, doesn't have a lot of, a lot of perspectives. So how do you see in political way to achieve this moral revolution politically and in this case, in this way? Yeah, so I don't think you can achieve a moral revolution politically, because a moral revolution politically is a top-down revolution. It means that somebody at the top, some political leader, in a sense imposes egoism on the people. That's a contradiction in terms, and I don't think it's possible. I think it goes the other way around. I think people who claim that politics is downstream from culture are absolutely right. The fundamental is culture, and culture, to give it an objective spin, is downstream from philosophy. It's downstream from ideas. It's downstream from ethics. It's even downstream from art, from aesthetics. So politics is the last thing to fall. It's the last thing to change. The focus needs to be to change the culture, which means to take this new philosophy of objectivism and infiltrate the culture with it. And I encourage artists, good artists, not propaganda artists, not like the communist artists or the Nazi artists. I'm talking about good romantic artists. Good artists, I'm looking for good scientists, for good educational, good educators, good philosophers, good thinkers, good entrepreneurs to go out there into the culture and not only do good work, but articulate a case for a new morality, articulate a case for a new way of looking at the world through their art, through their education, and through their just speaking and success and everything they could do around them. What we need to do is what every other non-authoritarian political movement has done, which is not start at the top and impose, which means politics, but start at the cultural level and build up. And even in the United States, if you look at how successful the left has been, it's been successful because it didn't start with politics. It's been successful because it focused on the culture, starting in the 1870s with a progressive movement and dominating the educational system and going into universities and getting chairs in universities and then dominating the field of aesthetics and dominating every other field slowly and systematically. So that today, even the right, what you call the religious right, they're leftists when it comes to economics. There is no non-leftist economic political party in the United States and there are almost none in Europe. Now imagine the United States had a multi-party system like, I know Emil is in the Netherlands, like the Netherlands have. And imagine you started an objectiveist political party in the Netherlands. How many votes would it get? Seven? Emil and maybe six other people, right? Emil's not a citizen, so he couldn't vote. But you know, you'd get seven votes, 10 votes, 100 votes, a thousand votes, so insignificant that it would be meaningless. And what would this political party do? Let's say magically, it got enough votes and it got one seat in the parliament in the Netherlands. What would it do? It would vote no on everything because not a single law brought in front of parliament in the Netherlands, I'm guessing, is worth voting for. It's true in Congress. I wouldn't vote for a single law. It would be the party of no, no, no, no. The only way it could win, longer term, is by educating the party, sorry, educating the population about what? About ethics, about philosophy, and ultimately about the consequential necessity for political freedom. So it's true that even political activism is only worthwhile at this point in our history to the extent that it leads to educational activities. So if you want to go into politics in the United States, pick one of the two parties, go in there and advocate for egoism, advocate for freedom, advocate for individualism, advocate for the fact that individuals have reason and try to educate. And you can start a third party to do that. You can go into the Democrats or Republicans to try to do that. I think, I don't think it's the most effective way to change the culture, but if people are interested in politics, they should go in and try to do it. It's, it's, I think, and I ran said this a long time ago, but I think it's still true. It's still way too early to be involved in politics. Politics is the last thing to fall after we have already changed the culture. Remember, politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from philosophy. Okay, we've got the philosophy now, now we need to inject it into the culture. And then maybe in 10 years, maybe 20 years, maybe 40 years, maybe 50 years, I don't know when. There'll be enough of us that we can start a political party and replace the Republicans or replace the Democrats and take over, you know, and establish political power. But that is a long time from now. And I know if you're young, you want change now. Tough. Reality doesn't care about your wishes. It's about facts. And the fact is the world's not ready for you. It's not ready for me. And, and, and we've got a lot of work, a lot of work, hard work, philosophical work, cultural work, educational work to do before we can succeed politically. Okay, so can I clarify? So you're saying that as long as there is no, like the population doesn't have this idea culturally of the small revolution until this people should be not, aren't involved in politics, not voting just to have educational work, but not political. Yeah, I mean, I'm not against voting. I think voting for the less of two evils to slow things down. What you want to do politically is to buy time. If somebody is passionate about politics and wants to go and get involved in politics, they have to decide are they going into politics a to educate people and that might be a good way. Maybe it's a good platform to help educate people or be to slow the process down. That could be an okay reason to go into politics. But remember, most people are going to politics to slow things down, tend to be corrupted by the system. I don't know anybody who has successfully gone into politics to slow things down and are stuck to it and has not been corrupted by power. Power is very seductive and very corrupting. So I'm not saying don't get into politics. I'm saying think about what you aim is at politics. You're not going to change the world through politics, but you can contribute to changing the culture through politics, or you can contribute to slowing the deterioration down through politics. Don't expect the world to change because of your activities in politics. Does that make sense? Yeah. It's a very interesting way of thinking because it's very rare to hear this kind of thinking because other people just say about I think the problem with libertarians is that they are very political. Yes, I agree. And I'm random. Objectives are more of philosophy and moral and ethics. So yeah, that's why objectivism is better. Right, people have 10. I agree completely. So let's take a couple of more written questions. So I have one on democracy and whether it's incompatible with liberty. So Yaron, I think he already kind of addressed it, but he can come back to that. Here's a question which is related to my field in the university, which is very popular among academia. So if it sounds weird to you, it's mainstream in academia. So the argument is that if there are many poor people, there is crime. Therefore, if you want a safe life, then we need to make sure that poorer people have their needs met. So giving up a bit of your income will be better for you because then society will be safer. What's your comment, Yaron? Well, this is not just an academic issue and I don't think it actually originates in academia. This is the stance of most rich people. Most rich people support and I hear this all the time. I hear it all the time. A very successful rich people basically say, look, capitalism is great. I get it. In theory, it's wonderful, but they're going to come after me. There's going to be a revolution and they're going to come after me because of inequality, because of poor people. And I need to pay more taxes. I need to help redistribute wealth as an act of self-defense because if I don't, they're going to kill me. And they literally are serious about this. They'll be a revolution if we don't pay them off. So there's so many things wrong with this. But first, empirically, this is just nonsense. It's just not true. So empirically, the poor have never risen up and overthrown the government in a free society. America, up until even through the 1930s, even through today, with all the inequality. There's no literal uprising, although you could argue maybe Trump's presidency was the beginning of that. But there's no violence in the streets to go after rich people and kill them because of inequality in America. There was no revolution in Hong Kong. There's never been a revolution in Hong Kong, even though inequality is very severe there, even though there are a lot of poor there. And indeed, I don't think crime is very high in Hong Kong. Crime is not very high in Hong Kong, in spite of the fact that there are a lot of poor people in Hong Kong. It's a very unequal place. So I don't think that's it. That is, empirically, there's just no justification for it. Now, it's true. The poor did rise up in France and chop off the heads of the aristocrats. But that's because there was no freedom. There was no sense that the poor could rise up by their own effort and achieve success. And in capitalist countries, in countries that approach capitalism, the poor have the sense that they can achieve and they don't resent the wealthy. It's only in modern times, I'd say the last 20, 30 years that the poor in America have started to resent wealth. It never used to be like this. They wanted wealth. They wanted to work hard so that they could one day achieve wealth. And I think the welfare state has inculcated this envy and this resentment more than anything else. So no, I think it works the other way around. The more money you give, the more they expect, the more they demand, the more likely it is that your head is going to be in the chopping block. So if you're rich and you're afraid, what you want is capitalism and freedom. And again, philosophically, this is a perspective of a malevolent view of man, a view, I think a view that the poor, sometimes necessarily immoral or bad or wrong. I don't think that in a free society, crime is necessarily high. If laws are clear and objective and are enforced properly, I don't think I think crime would be lower because opportunities would be higher. So no, I think the whole premise from an economic, from a philosophical, from a moral perspective, from a view of mankind is all wrong. And I could do a whole lecture on that. Thank you. Camille, is there any other question in Russian addressed to you? No, I don't have any. Right. So I'll make my outro and I'll leave Emile to say the last word. So first of all, a huge thank you to the Iron Run Institute because it supports this event. It brought its speakers. If you want to see more of Yaron, more of the Iron Run Institute's intellectuals, I put the link on the chat about the Iron Runs Conference Global on the 6th of March about the power of ideas and how intellectuals change the world. We've got a raised hand, Emile. Do you want to take it? We've got a raised hand? Yes, we do have a hand. All right, Emile, take that. Just because it's a Russian, I'm discriminating. Okay, so the question is, the idea of altruism is still prospering in the world, in the moral world. So why do you think that is happening and why is that? I mean, is it because people lack the certain kind of authority that would cause them to think otherwise? Or I mean, why is that happening that in this modern technologically and philosophically developed world, the idea of altruism is still in place? Well, I don't think we're very philosophically developed. I think we're philosophically primitive. I think we're philosophically pre-Greek, pre-Polito and Aristotle, philosophically. So I think we're primitive philosophically. And I think that's the origins. Basically, the altruists of all types, left, right, center, dominate the educational establishments. And when you raise people on altruism, it's like in the mother's milk, when the parents advocate for it, when the teachers advocate for it, when the priests advocate for it. I mean, to me, it's stunning. And I don't want to offend anybody on the call. But to me, it's truly stunning that in the 21st century, people still believe in God. I mean, that to me is just bizarre. I mean, I figured that one out, not to, again, not to insult anybody. I figured that one out when I was six years old, and I think the people here are much smarter than me. So we still haven't developed culturally enough to figure out that we can stand on our own two feet, that we have a mind, that we can understand the world, that we can live free of this mythology, which is what God is, mythologies. We haven't graduated from mythologies. We haven't grown up as a species. We're still children. And we need to grow up in a sense of, let go of daddy and mommy, God and whatever the, whatever that means, of God, and then figure out a proper moral code for living as an individual on earth. And Ayn Rand has done the work for us. So it should be much easier. And it's not easy work to do. So, you know, people think what Ayn Rand did was simple. Ayn Rand, in my view, is a once in a millennium genius. She overturned 2000 years plus of philosophy. She did really, really groundbreaking philosophical works that might not be in the academic language, but much more importantly, they're in the language of truth. They're in the language of understandable to human beings. She and she provides us for the first time in human history with a morality to overturn altruism with. So we've never had the tools before. So it's time now to grow up. It's time now to take Ayn Rand's idea seriously. It's time now to abandon this childish libertarian obsession with politics and economics and to embrace these philosophical ideas and to change the culture and to educate our kids and to educate young people and to bring these ideas into the culture in every dimension and every way possible. We can win because the question is right. Altruism is bankrupt. Stateism is bankrupt. Socialism is bankrupt. It should be easy for us to win. I think the only thing preventing us from winning is they're not enough of us fighting. Too many of us distracted by nonsense instead of focusing on the real challenges and the real challenges are in embracing a philosophy of individualism, which is a morality of ecosystem. Great. Thank you, Aron. So I was almost done with my outro. So I was saying I was encouraging people to support the Ayn Rand Institute because obviously it's doing a good work. And as Aron said, it's a barrel of ideas. And this is how you win it. So I put the link in the comments. So as I already said, many thanks to the speaker. Many thanks to our interpreters. It did a great job. It wasn't easy. So I think as an act of justice, the last words should be by Emil. He contacted us months ago. And we've been trying hard to put this together. So he's very passionate about objectives, having an impact in Russia. So Emil, thanks for your hard work. The last words are yours. Thank you. Thank you, Nikos. And first of all, I want to say something in English, because I want to thank personally you, Arno, Yaron, Keith, and Aron. I mean, without you, this wouldn't actually happen. And yeah, I was contacting you for months. I mean, several months ago. But still, I'm so glad that we finally managed to organize this whole thing, managed to, even though with some cons, we managed to make this all up. This is so wonderful. Thank you. And I hope we will continue doing something like this in the future. Next time in real person, maybe Moscow, who knows? Moscow. Well, if you go, yeah, come to St. Petersburg, not Moscow. I agree. Not to Putin. Okay, so now we'll switch to Russian. Again, thank you, Arno, for supporting this. I'm Ryan Rand, from the US. Today, at the conference, there are people from four time zones. And I hope, of course, that this will be our last event of this kind. In addition, I would like to say a little bit that we, the I-Rand Objectivism Society in Russia, will organize such integrations, such events. In addition, I plan to transfer courses that are available on the site of the Institute of I-Rand. There is a special section of the campus called. I would very much like to transfer these courses to Russian, so support us, in particular, materially. Subscribe to us in Vkontakte. Subscribe to the I-Rand Facebook page. I sent a few links. There will be a conference in Prague, as I understand. So be sure to come to us. Well, follow our news, because I think there will be a lot of transfers soon, a lot of new materials, because the purpose of this whole conference was to show the Russian-speaking audience that the philosophy of I-Rand Objectivism is not only in beautiful words, in beautiful quotes from the artistic literature of I-Rand, but also the goal was to show