 Let's start with the basic definitions. What is an anti-concept and a package deal? What's the difference between the two? Is every package deal an anti-concept? And is there any anti-concept package deal? Then why do we have two concepts? Yeah, Rand herself never quite discusses the relation between these two terms, both of which she introduced in different articles. She used one term and another one's the other. I have a kind of view as how they fit together, which I'll explain. So a package deal is a conflation of unlike things. So any two things are gonna be similar in some respect. If you wanna be as superficial as you like, nothing's totally unrelated to anything else. So you could always find some similarity between things. And what you do to make a package deal is you group by an unimportant, non-essential superficial similarity in a way that puts things together that don't belong together in a package that cuts across a more important essential difference and therefore obscures the difference. And the analogy that I mean, the term package deal comes from, you go to a store and you buy a toaster and you get a blender with it. And the toaster and the blender don't have anything to do with one another, but it's a deal you can buy, they come together. I don't want to have some banking. You're too young to remember this, but in the 1970s, you used to get a toaster and a checking account. In the 80s, which I do remember, I didn't have a bank account yet, but there were these ads that you would get a football phone if you opened a checking account. You know why? It's interesting why that happened. Why would they give you a toaster if you opened a checking account? I have no idea. Because in the 70s, there was a regulation, just as an aside, there was a regulation that made it impossible for banks to pay you interest on your checking account. So they couldn't pay you interest and inflation was very high. So they, but and yet they wanted you to come deposit your money, but you won't get to deposit your money at zero when there's inflation outsize. They had to give you something to entice you in a sense, interest, but they couldn't call it interest. So they came up with all kinds of gimmicks to get you to open an account because the government wouldn't allow the market to actually work the way it was supposed to. Anyway, just... Those are literal package deals in the sense of at a, you know, one thing you buy and you get with another. And then figuratively, a package deal for a concept is a concept that groups together unlike things based on superficial similarities in ways that obscures essential ones. Another way to think of it, it's a conflation of things that don't belong together. So anti-concept is a more literal term than package deal. You might think of it as the more literal or technical name, but I think Rand defines an anti-concept as a kind of illegitimate and cognitively unusable term that obliterates valid concepts. And I don't think they're all exactly package deals. So Doody, for example, she gives us an anti-concept. I don't think it's exactly a package deal. There are a few others. I think what I think of as setting apart an anti-concept is that it's part of an effort of getting rid of or blasting out of existence or out of the minds of the people who are using it, some conceptual apparatus that they need to understand the world. And it's part of a broad, and often it'll be package deals that do this, but there's something dishonest. There's an attempt to undercut your thinking in an anti-concept. And Rand talked more generally about anti-ideology. There are sets of ideas that are promulgated as a means to undercutting or destroying the principles we need to think clearly about something. She was particularly concerned about John S. Kennedy doing this. And in particular, she thought he was trying to obliterate the distinction between individualism and collectivism or capitalism and socialism in a lot of the kind of pragmatist rhetoric he had. And anti-concepts are part of this. They're concepts that are designed to undermine other concepts. So goes through how duty is an anti-concept. Yeah, so there's an article on this, Causality vs. Duty, by Iron Man, which is in the book, Philosophy Who Needs It. And it's probably on AI's webpage. It's one that they would have made a priority of accepting. So you have this concept duty, and the reason why I say it's quite a package deal is it's one that Iron Man doesn't think that we really need the concept duty in the first place. But it's trying to give you a perspective on moral obligations. But it's thinking of them as things that you have to do just because you have to do them for no actual reason and with no that supersede your own interests and values. And the right way, Rand, thinks to think about moral obligation and about morality generally is it's something you have to do in order to achieve a value. And if the thing seems onerous and you don't wanna do it, you think back to, well, what value am I trying to achieve by this? Will it really help me achieve this value? Or will it not? Is the value really that important or not? And so you're in a position to think causally about the value of the action and whether you should do it or not. But if you just hold this as this action has to be done no matter what come hell or high water, what's the reason? Well, there are no reasons it supersedes your reason. It undercuts the whole field of reasoning about what to do. So it undercuts morality and causality. And she talks a lot about the psychological implications of this concept that you become in fact, a disciple of duty rather than a disciple of causality. You're unable to think clearly and hierarchically about your values. And actually I think it's a really good, maybe this is a better thing to return to later, but a lot of what's happening in the diversity and calls for diversity and anti-racism and so forth in business are examples of this because there are really good reasons to care about certain kinds of diversity and certainly to want to be anti, not want to be racist. I want to be opposed to racist racism and say your business hiring practices in how you market and so forth. But if you hold it as there's this duty, thou shalt be anti-racist, thou shalt have diversity. And you're not thinking about like, well, how does this fit in with my other corporate goals and my hierarchy and how does it advance other goals? And therefore in what situations should I make what kind of hiring decision? You come up with a situation where like you're faced between two candidates and you have all kinds of reasons to prefer one to the other, but it's like this commandment coming from heaven that you have to have 7.3% Hispanic employees and therefore you can't hire this guy. So that's an example of it's this kind of duty-centric rather than causal-centric approach to morality. So somebody asked if anti-concept's always bad. Yes, it's a name for something bad and package deals likewise. These are names, package deals are named for a kind of fallacy, forming a concept improperly that groups things together that don't belong together and therefore creates confusion rather than clarity. And anti-concept is a name for any number of conceptual fallacies when they're performed dishonestly in an attempt to, or when they're put across dishonestly, you might honestly hold one, but it came from a place of trying to destroy valid concepts, trying to destroy the tools we need to think clearly about the world. So what was some package deals, what's an example of a package deal that Ayn Rand gave in when she talked about package deals? One major one is extremism. And she wrote about this in connection with Barry Goldwater. Yeah, so extremism is puts together what? You don't think there should be a UN, you're in favor of getting rid of income taxes, you're a racist, you think Eisenhower's a closet communist. It's all these positions that have nothing really to do with one another. There were people who held all of them at the time, but it's an attempt to put together marginal fringe and crazy views together with views that might not be that popular, but are rational, whether even if they are not true, they're reason thoughtful. And on the grounds that they're not common, they're not popular, they're outside of the mainstream. And therefore to disparage them. And in particular, this was being done in the Republican Party at the time, in the Republican primary, in an attempt to favor the moderate as opposed to Goldwater. And Rockefeller in particular is opposed to Goldwater. And Ram was very opposed to that. And we saw that then in the election. And we can talk more about what was going on in that election, and we wanna talk about right and left and how they're related to package deals. There's a lot of interesting history there that presages some of what's going on now. But the wrong way to think about it is it's extreme. Or think about like Trump. Is Trump more extreme, a right-winger or a conservative or something than George W. Bush? Well, what does that mean? I mean, there are a million dimensions along which you can measure different politicians. On different ones, they fall in different places. What are we saying if we're measuring them as far as how extreme they are? Maybe they're more likely to attract animosity of the mainstream or of the left or of this. But that's not a criteria on which to evaluate someone. But so I struggle with this a little bit because I'm often tempted to, or put it this way, there is a dimension in which you could do that, right? So you could say Trump is more of a collectivist than Bush. He's more extreme in terms of his collectivism. And on the left, the same thing. You could say some of the people behind Black Lives Matter are more extreme than the, I don't know, even the new left of the 1960s on certain dimensions, right? And I struggle to find another word to reflect that, right? We don't, I don't like to use radical because radical means much more, it's much more about fundamental and a bit much more about principle. And that's not the case necessarily with these groups, right? So is there a legitimate way to use the term extreme? And what would it require if you used it? I think extreme has to modify a particular adjective, or a particular thing, and then that thing has to not be a pathokeal. So if you say like, Ayn Rand is extremely anti-communist and pro-capitalist. She's an extremist about that, or she's, then it's just the word extreme. And then you can debate about whether that's a good thing. We think it's a good thing to be extremely pro-capitalism and anti-communism. What you, and likewise with the various leftists, you could say, or with Trump, you could say like Trump and the BLM movement leaders are extremely collectivist as opposed to, I don't know. As opposed to saying the extreme left, the problem is, which we'll get to in a minute, that left is too much of a package deal. Yeah, and there are two problems. One that left doesn't name an ideology really, it names a faction. So what would be to be an extreme leftist would be like extremely committed to that faction or something, but it does, it purports as a term for ideas that you hold and you don't. And if you name the idea, it shouldn't be an insult to call someone extreme of that idea if it's true. Like if you ask Stalin, you know, are you extremely a communist? He'd say damn straight. And likewise, if you asked Ayn Rand, are you a capitalist extremely? She'd say, you know, damn straight, right? It's an extreme environmentalist would be okay or an extreme egalitarian would be okay. Exactly. And likewise, an extreme positive thing, an extreme defender of reason. So what you wanna do is get rid of the idea that all these things go, there's such a thing as an extremist who's someone who takes things all the way and that's bad. Because it's not bad to take things all the way. It's good if they're the right things and it's bad if they're the wrong things. And then when it's bad, it's bad because the things that you're taking all the way are wrong. So before we get to more application of this, somebody's asking, are concepts of imagination anti-concepts? No, well, even by a concept of imagination. So a concept of something you've imagined like teleporter in Star Trek, that's a concept for a fictional item. If someone actually invents one, then it will be a concept for a now-invented item. And of course, every new invention starts as some idea that the thing doesn't exist yet. So those are perfectly valid concepts. What would be an invalid concept or an anti-concept if it's done to displace a valid concept is the items that would fall under the concept don't belong together. And then it would be an anti-concept if they're trying to displace an actual concept. So like, for example, if someone said, you could never really get anywhere because to get anywhere, it would have to be like in a teleporter where you go there directly without going through the intervening places. So therefore, when you drive in a car, you don't get any place. Then that would be using the concept of teleporter and transportation as an anti-concept. And now that's ridiculous, people don't do that. But people do do that, for example, in epistemology. You can never really know anything because to know something would be to know it in the way God knows it, where you know everything about it and there is no features or limitations or vagueness or confusion or facts about how you know it and in what detail you know it. To know something truly would be to know it the way God would, God being a concept of the imagination. And no one knows anything like that. Therefore, there's no knowledge. So that would be a way to use a concept of the imagination as make an anti-concept of it. But just having a fictional character or a new idea for a type of device, that's not an anti-concept. So in terms of package deals, sometimes there would say, sometimes the underlying proper concept is worth saving and sometimes it's not. I mean, selfishness is obviously a good example of that. It's the way it's used in the culture as a package deal, right? But it is a concept that is worth saving, the proper understanding of selfishness. So first, tell us why selfishness is a package deal, the way it's used in the culture and then why are some concepts worth saving and others not? Yeah, so selfishness is a package deal as it's generally used because it combines types of people and types of acting that don't belong together. So if you say don't be selfish, people are too selfish, selfishness is something better. Or even you say it's something good, but you have in mind by selfish, Steve Jobs creating Apple, the example that Ben Shapiro's using with you about some guy thoughtlessly throws away his marriage to chase some vapid person he meets at a bar. And Hitler was selfish because he tried to evade Poland, he wanted it for himself. And Bernie Madoff was selfish and so too is a person who rejects and arranged marriage their parents want for her and goes to, I and her say Ali is selfish. All of these people are selfish. Why? Cause they did something for themselves. Well these types of action have nothing in common with one another and every action, there's some element of self in, your own view, your own motive of some sort. So these actions have nothing in common that all action doesn't have. And so this is why it's a package deal. And then it's, and how does it function? Well it functions in our thinking and in our lives by taking things that are obviously wrong and degraded like the Bernie Madoff case, the case of somebody thoughtlessly running after some woman he's just mad and leaving the family whom he loves. He takes those kind of cases, the thief, the thoughtless philanderer, et cetera and then tries to get us to understand what Bill Gates did, what I and her say Ali did, what we should all be doing with her lives on analogy to that. After all, you should have not pursued what you wanted to do in the moment by going to bed with this woman you hardly know and taking cocaine and stealing money from other people's bank account. And so likewise you should not do what you want to do by starting Microsoft or Apple or whatever or making a lot of money. So that's how it's a package deal. And you might say because it's a package deal we should just throw out the concept and not speak of selfish anymore. But here it's not an accident that there's a package deal around this concept. If you use another concept, self-actualization or self-realization or rational self-interest, you would get the same issues all coming up. Isn't it in your rational self-interest to maximize pleasure? And the woman at the bar is pretty or whatever. And the word would just take on this other meaning too. So at some point you have to take a stand and fight for some term. And it doesn't have to be selfish, but I think as an issue of cultural, where you can make an impact culturally, it's valuable to use that one. But in general, is there a valid concept here that this package deal is distorting, perverting, stopping people from seeing displacing? If there is a valid concept there, whether it has that name for it or another name for it, you wanna fight to retain the concept. And there's always some optionality about what name to use. And if you look at a lot of the anti-concepts, I'm gonna talk about, there was a valid concept there. And in some cases she wanted to use it and in some cases she didn't. So learning on memory as applied to in behaviorism where you treat like magnets as having memory and something. You don't take it as a metaphor, but you think our memory is like a magnet's memory. We're not gonna get rid of the concept memory, but we're gonna push back against using it this way. And likewise I think with selfish, with, I mean there are others. So you wanna think about, did this concept just, in general if a word is new and it's just popped up, I think there's a better reason to just mistrust it and not use it at all if it's older than there's more. What we need today, what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broads. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes, that should be at least a hundred. I think at least a hundred of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but at least the people who are liking it, I wanna see a thumbs up, there you go. Start liking it, I wanna see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego, it's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. 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