 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell and I'm Trevor Burrus. Our guest today is Eamon Butler. He's director and co-founder of the Adam Smith Institute, and he's also the author of many books. His latest is Ayn Rand, An Introduction, published just this week by the Institute for Economic Affairs and Libertarianism.org. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Eamon. Yes, hello. Maybe a good place to start is with Rand's early life, and how did her early life, how did her experiences in Russia and then coming to the US influence her fiction and her philosophy? Oh, profoundly, I think. She was, of course, born in 1905 in St. Petersburg. Which is, of course, in Russia. And this was, of course, just before the Russian Revolution. So when she was just about 10 or 11, she saw the Russian Revolution breaking out, and, of course, it broke out, predominantly starting in St. Petersburg itself. So she came from a Jewish family, and her father ran a pharmacy shop. And when the Revolution broke out, of course, they tried to escape. They went briefly to the Crimea, and because her father's business was nationalized, taken over by the revolutionary government. And then in Crimea, the same happened again. When the Red Army got to Crimea, they took business again. So they returned to St. Petersburg. And, of course, she grew up during those years when the Communists were trying to build a new order. But, of course, it was an absolute disaster. It was shortages and injustices and summary killings and all the rest of it. And people with property and businesses were disinherited. So she saw that as a sort of profound injustice that people who really had no claim at all were taking property and taking the lives of people who were simply trying to fend for themselves, build up a business, improve life for themselves and their families. And she found that terribly unjust. And it really colored the rest of her writings, where she's very strongly in favor of the individual who can build up his or her own business, his or her own life, family, and everything else that's important to people. And they should be able to do that without people coming along and simply taking those things away from you. So, yes, it was a very profound upbringing. And then, of course, from there she went to university and discovered lots of interesting novelists, which again covered her writings like Victor Hugo and so on. But she also discovered Gluckflosfer, Aristotle, and other people who informed her philosophy. And then she went to, she cleverly got a visa to go to America. You had to get a visa to leave Russia then. But she wanted to, she enrolled in a state cinematic institute and got this visa in order to go to America in order to study film. And on that visa eventually she met an actor in Hollywood. She became married and became an American citizen and spent the rest of her life in America. So, an interesting upbringing. And it brought something new to America. This is a way of thinking, the Russian way of writing and so on, which was completely new in America. So, it was quite an important influence in the rest of her life. Was she, her first love, it kind of seemed like it was movies maybe. And then she was writing novels later. And she definitely seemed enthralled by movies. And she was involved with more movie making experiences that a lot of people might realize. Oh, yes, absolutely. In fact, when she came to America, she stayed with some relatives in, I think it was in Chicago. And they actually owned a cinema. So, she spent a long while in the cinema there just going through lots and lots and lots of different films. So, yes, that was very important to her. You see, this was a new medium. I think Rand loved things that were sort of new and obviously some of the other things that were kind of rational. So, when she landed in New York in 1926, it wasn't a very nice day. It was a winter's day. But she was just overwhelmed by the skyline, which to her was just, you know, rational and logical, but also heroic. And that is, I think, what people were trying to produce in the, in movies at the time. And as I say, in Chicago, one of her relatives in the movie theater, and so she indulged that passion, borrowed money off the relative and went to California to try to make her fortune. You know, she had no idea of doing what she was supposed to do under the visa, which is to study American film, then go back. You know, she actually, I think at that stage, she knew that she wanted to live in America rather than this catastrophic and unjust nation that was being built in Russia. And on her second day in Hollywood, she just happened to run into Cecil Biedemill, who was a leading filmmaker, film director. And he hired her first as an extra. And then that's where she met her future husband, Frank O'Connor. And she wrote lots of screenplays for films during that period. So it was very much of, you know, for many, many years, it was really what she did. She was, she was in movies. She was writing screenplays, editing screenplays, tightening up screenplays and that sort of thing. Is that then what led her to make, I mean, the kind of out of the ordinary decision for people who have grand philosophies they want to express, which is to, you know, she wrote novels instead of writing philosophical tracks. I mean, she wrote some of those, but those came later. Like was that, was it just that that was what she loved and fiction was what she thought? Or did she, like, you know, how fiction was the way she knew how to express herself? Or was there some other motive behind that? Some, you know, thinking that fiction was maybe a better way to get these ideas across? Yes. It's one of these things where people say, well, you know, did she write novels in order to express her philosophy? And what she actually said was that, no, no, I had to develop the philosophy in order to write my novels. And that novel writing was what she wanted to do. I mean, she finished her first novel in 1934 or so. I mean, she was not even in her 30s. But and which was, and that was a sort of brutal portrayal of life in the new Soviet Union. And it was very much at odds with what Americans and Westerns at the time thought the Soviet Union was all about. And they saw it as a sort of heroic, even the middle class intellectual sort, as a kind of, you know, wonderful experiment kind of thing. But she having lived through it knew that it was an absolute disaster. So she wrote this, what we would call in America or the UK where I live, we would call this a philosophical novel. And it's unusual in America. It's unusual in Britain. It's unusual in the West. But it's very commonplace in Russia that you have this novel which somehow sort of expresses a philosophy and the philosophy informs the characters and all the rest of it. So and then she followed that up with another novel just two years later. So yes, writing fiction, I think was very much what she was good at and wanted to do. And I think the although she said, you know, the sort of philosophy came out of that, I think it's, I'm not sure quite how closely they're related. And she was good at novel. And I think that the philosophy sort of was came later and it was added on later. And she thought about it later. And sadly, I mean, she died really before she could complete a lot of the thinking and write a real treatise that explained her philosophy in philosophical terms. So we've got the books to go on, but not a great deal of other things. One of the distinctive things about Objectivists, Randians is it's a fairly today in her, it's a fairly total philosophy. I've had, there's some of the rifts between different factions of Objectivists and also Libertarians and Objectivists often hinge upon the fact of not accepting the whole thing soup to nuts. So let's get into some of the soup to nuts, so to speak, and that it includes a metaphysics and an epistemology and a morality and a politics. So what did Rand view as metaphysics as the ultimate nature of reality, so to speak? Well, it's interesting just as an aside, I mean, you talked about the sort of rifts between Rand and within Rand's circle. And those were in fact, when I was at university and just sort of starting to read these things, it's one of the things that put me off. And I didn't come back to it until many, many years later because it just seemed so factional and so personal and people were either in or they were out and you had to take the whole thing. And if you didn't take the whole thing, then you were somehow heretical and you couldn't be talk to at all. So there was that sort of sectarianism about it, which I found deeply unattractive. But I can see why because to her, as you rightly say, this whole thing is a comprehensive unit. Her metaphysics, what is the nature of the universe? Well, to her, it's objective reality. That's it. There's an objective world out there. How do we know about that universe of epistemology? Well, we can only know about it by reason, by applying a reason to what we see. And then from that, she goes on to the principles by which we should live. You should live according in a way which is true to that reality. And to her, that means the principles of self interest. And then that brings her on to politics, where again, it's sort of self interest in social organization, which means capitalism. And she also bolts on romanticism in art. But those are the main things, objective reality, reason, self interest, capitalism, everything hangs together. And this is actually, I think what makes Rand's ideas so attractive, particularly I think to the young, because they're looking for an answer to everything. And she kind of gives you an answer to everything. This is all joined up. The world works in this way. We have to live by these principles in order to be at one with the world. When it comes to metaphysics that reality exists, or there is such thing as objective reality, I mean, we know about philosophers, whether it's like Bishop Barkley or people who said that, you know, could idealism might be a thing. But that doesn't seem, you know, terribly unique. I think most philosophers would say that something called reality exists. Was there something distinctive about the way that she made this claim? I don't know that it was distinct. It's a very, it's quite an old idea. I say it goes back to Aristotle and so on, some of the Greek philosophers. So they, yes, you're right. Realism, as it's called in philosophical circles, is quite, has quite a long standing. I think that the reason that it was interesting is because sort of the empirical philosophy was ruling the roots then. You had people like F. A. Hayek and so on who were steeped really in the Scottish empirical school, which is that we don't actually know the world. All we can do is make guesses about it. And we try those guesses. And if they work, then we do more of them. And if they don't work, then we do less of them. And that's how we find out about the world. And people like Karl Popper, the Austrian philosopher of science, again, saying that's how science works. It's a web of guesses. And we don't know what the world is like, but we have a guess. And we test those guesses. We do experiments and see whether they stand up. And if they don't, then we abandon them and make another guess. And Rand is sort of coming from it the other way around and saying, no, no, there is an objective world there. We can sort of understand it by using our reason to clarify how it works and what it's all about. So is it something which is out there that through applying your mind, you can work out what the reality is, like working out a mathematical proof? Or is it something you don't know what it is and you just have to stick your finger in it and see whether it hurts? What reason does she give or have for thinking that human reason is capable of that? So I mean, we can, we could say like, a dog, a dog's mind, we as higher beings than a dog and look at a dog and say that there are lots of things about the world that that dog not only can't figure out, but can't figure out that it can't figure out. It can't even be aware that it can't figure them out because its brain just lacks the capacity to understand the nature of reality. And so we're certainly, you know, smarter than a dog, but is there a reason to believe that we, our brains are so powerful, like that they're just kind of as good as it can get and that they're capable of understanding everything. And because that to me, that seems like a very large claim that I'm not sure how you would even set out to prove. Yes. Well, I think that's actually a very telling criticism because I mean, if you look, I mentioned F.A. Hayek, if you look at his view on epistemology, how we get to knowledge about the universe, he says our minds don't sort of above reality. We can't cover above reality looking down to see what it is. Our minds have actually been created by this universe because we've evolved as complicated social beings. And as part of that, we have a mind which works in particular ways and it works in particular ways because it manages to deal with the universe fairly well. And therefore we're sort of part of this world which we're trying to understand and therefore it's inevitably we can't separate ourselves from it and say, well, there's an objective reality out there and we can somehow detect that. So I think that's actually quite a telling criticism and I don't know that she overcomes it. I mean, again, one of her failings is that she doesn't, if you like, debate with other philosophers very much. She tends to like a few philosophers and everybody else, she kind of dismisses as how these people are just wrong and they've taken things on the long term rather than sort of going through their arguments and trying to meet them. So I think that's actually a very telling proposition. What she says is, of course, okay, we are human beings, right? We may have our limitations. The question for us is how do we human beings make our world our way in whatever it is that's out there? And she says the only way that we can do that is to apply our reason to the best of our ability. We might not always get it right and we don't get it right and we have to abandon things that are proved to be mistaken but only by using our reason where we get anything close to understanding what the world is like and therefore how we should live within it. Before we move on to her moral philosophy, since we're on metaphysics and epistemology, I want to ask you about something that I've heard Randians and Objectivists say quite often, which is A equals A. There's a particular, even there's a sort of notorious, at least for me, Linda Peacoff interview on Bill O'Reilly about 15 years ago during the outset of the Iraq War, I believe, and they're talking about bombing Iran, I think, and O'Reilly asked them some questions and what if this happened and Peacoff's answer is well, what if A didn't equal A? And I've heard this in responses. It's a very strange way of addressing a criticism. What if A didn't equal A? Why is that something that Randians commonly say? Let me just go through this. There are sort of basic axioms she says. First, we know that things exist. Our brains make us aware that there's a world out there. We don't necessarily know the exact nature how they behave, but we know they're there. So to her, she says, existence exists. Secondly, we're aware that things exist. We perceive them. So there must be something out there because we can't be conscious of nothing. We have to be conscious of something. So we know that there's something out there. And third, to be something, she says, implies that that thing has an identity. It has a collection of qualities that distinguish it as a particular thing and not something else. So a tree has a tree has particular characters that you and I don't have. A tree has roots that go into the ground and so on, and we don't. It has leaves and we don't. It has a whole variety of characteristics which other things don't have. So that brings her back to it. It goes back to Aristotle. The idea that existence is identity. That something is what it is. It can't be anything else. And that is what she calls the law of identity. I'm very skeptical of this line of reasoning myself. I think that this is about words rather than things and it's about how we try to identify things and quite often we get it wrong. Is there something that is specific out there? It's got certain irreducible qualities and somehow we get to know that. Or do we just have to make a guess and often there are deep boundaries. What's the difference between a stool and a chair? Well, a chair has a back but squeezing the back to only a small back, is that still a chair or does it then become a stool? It just depends on how we choose to think about these things and how we find it convenient and refer to them. It's not necessarily something which is kind of out there and objective. So that's the criticism that people would make that argument. Moving into her morality so we have the three basic questions of philosophy. What is there? How do we know about it and what do you do about it? Metaphysics, epistemology and morals. So where did she go after saying there's reality? We have awareness of it and we can use reason. What does that mean for what you should do about things? About your life? Yes, well moral values and actions are extremely important to human beings according to Rand because uniquely among living things we have the ability to choose how we behave, how we treat others and the virtues and ideals to which we aspire. So if we're going to make good moral choices we need to make another choice which is to think objectively. That is to use our reason and focus it on establishing what she says is the true nature of things without evading, without drifting and without getting confused. And when she boils that down she says well what is the ends to which people should live and the answer is life. That's our highest value, that's what we're aiming for. By what principle should we act in order to achieve that end of life? Well the answer is use our reason use your brain and who should we focus our actions at improving? Whose life are we talking about here? Who should profit from your actions? And the answer is yourself not anybody else. Her view is that in order to be consistent with this real world we should be pursuing life. We should be using reason to work out how to achieve life and the person that we're doing this for is basically ourselves not probably. One thing that I often find puzzling about this aspect of Rand's moral theory and I know that this is an issue that there's some debate on among Indian scholars is this life as the standard of value because she has she's a very robust and expansive moral theory that says there are certain kinds of things you ought to do and there are certain ways that you ought to behave and it's wrong to behave in other ways but it's not entirely clear to me how that stuff can be derived just from the notion of life or survival. So I mean to put it you know the very obvious counter example would be there have been billions and billions of people who have lived very long lives and I didn't know about or didn't follow Rand's moral rules. And so it's not the relationship between following the rules of objectivism and living because clearly there are non-objectivists who still live. So is there something more to just is this not just a mere survival standard is there something more like a baked in to put in Aristotelian terms like a flourishing or a eudaimonia or like a life that is the right kind of life? Well she says you should live according to your rational self-interest and then the important thing there is rational. She doesn't advocate that people should just dissolve into hedonism and drink alcohol and smoke cigars and acting ways that are irresponsible. She says you need to work out what is right for you in the long term and your ultimate value might be life but there are things that you have to do in order to achieve that in the long term and your long-term happiness which is another important factor for her depends upon doing the right things if you like the rational things rather than just doing whatever comes into your head and so it would be nice to do this today why don't I just do this and get myself completely blind drunk or get myself onto heroin and have a nice day because in the long term that is damaging for you and it will achieve the opposite of what you want to achieve but I think you are you've got it quite right that this the life standard is a difficult one because most moral decisions that we make aren't matters of life and death it may be that you could say well we really ought to be honest because if we weren't honest then in the long run we would never get on together and we would not be able to do anything and we would die because we couldn't cooperate or not at all that may be true but in a particular instance I've taken something from my young son because I think it's bad for him do I and he asks where it is what do I do, do I say it's lost or do I say I've taken it from you well you lie I mean parents do and in many cases you have to lie now is that good or is it bad is it pro-life or anti-life well it's very difficult to say that there's a little thing like that telling a 50 or some really for his own best interest it's difficult to say something like that is a matter of life and death but this is Rand's ultimate standard when she says selfishness she has a book called the virtue of selfishness collection of essays and a lot of people take that and read a bunch into it and say that that means you will do anything whatsoever to preserve your life like I don't know George Costanza on Seinfeld or something not even care about anyone else but what does she mean by selfishness in her we kind of got into a little bit but in her specific definition of that term well what she means is pursuing your own values now your values are not necessarily simply your own life and welfare it may be as she said herself when her husband died I have lost my greatest value so there are other things other people are important to you principles are important to you the fact that the world is working in some particular way is important to you and people will spend a lot of time and energy and efforts in trying to well convince people of political philosophies or clean up the planet or tell people they shouldn't throw a letter and all sorts of things like that because these are very high values to them and in many cases the welfare of other people and I think that one of the prisms I would make and is that she tends to draw human beings as rather individualists whereas we have grown up as a social species and the welfare of other people is actually very important to us so it's important how other people live and how we get on with other people and their happiness and life is important to us well if that's important to you that's what you should actually be focusing on so it's your values that you should focus on not necessarily your own life because if you lose your greatest value you may conclude that your life now has no meaning so in many cases suicide for example is perfectly rational according on the rent thank you so it's your individual values that count so on the flip side of that she has a specific definition of altruism too which she views as an evil in the way she defines it but as you pointed out it doesn't mean just caring about people which it's okay to care about people if it's your values it means something else yes that's right her worry about altruism she has many worries about altruism but she thinks it's she thinks it's an evil actually she thinks that the prevailing morality and you get this in religion and many other forms of reality they urge us to live for the benefit of others rather than ourselves they praise self sacrifice and they they say that self serving things that benefit you are immoral and that means she says that the standard of morality then is not the value of the action itself but the identity of who benefits and according to that serving others is good serving yourself is bad and she says on that criteria there's really nothing to choose between business people they're both evil because they're both self interested and she thinks that that's just of course completely wrong there is a big difference between gangsters and business people gangsters exploit other people through violence and force and business people enrich other people through voluntary exchange there's no moral equivalence at all and she says you shouldn't confuse altruism with kindness, goodwill and other others we can all do that it's core demand is self sacrifice which means self denial so that if you like makes morality everybody's enemy to be moral you have to do what's bad for you and she says that's no way to live and it's certainly not consistent with the way we're created and the way the world works how do we get from that to then you said so like the problem with gangsters is that they exploit other people for their their own ends but how is that wrong within this system as it's set out because if I'm morally obligated to do what's of value to me there may be instances where I could say steal something from Trevor because then it will enable me to do something that fulfills my principles or my values more so why should I why should I respect rights in this system especially when respecting rights in a given instance would be harmful to me yeah she draws the line of force it's the use of force which she thinks is one of the greatest evils that we can get along very well by mutual cooperation and just simply getting along with each other when you start to use force then there's no end to it and that way lies tyranny being brought up in the early Soviet Union that's not the place that she wants to be she sees a world which is morally superior in that it's not founded on force that's why she is so pro-capitalism because there's no force involved it's entirely voluntary you don't trade with people it's up to you so what she's against is people being told that they have to make a sacrifice to others and certainly being forced to make a sacrifice to others so that to her I think is the greatest evil it's the use of force and there's no once you start on that road there's no limit this defensive capitalism that comes from her and objectivists it has a little bit of a different flavor that we put together the pieces here from metaphists to epistemology reasoned self-interest but what we get from capitalism here is less hey capitalism is good because it helps the poor the best or it because it makes goods cheaper instrumental consequentialist creates wealth it's something much more like capitalism is good because it is the moral truth of a human flourishing life and creating value and pursuing your own ends in like a heroic fashion is what makes it good which is why sometimes randians get mad when you use instrumental or consequentialist justifications capitalism would they get mad at us a lot well I think both should be applauded quite frankly and any defensive capitalism is good these days to rand if you want a rational economic system economics is really the science of applying social principles to production if you want a rational economic system it's got to be rooted in the nature of the world the nature of ourselves and to be moral it's got to respect our basic rights and it's certainly got to avoid force and the only system that does that according to rand is laissez-faire capitalism capitalism without government intervention because only capitalism respects people's property rights and that makes it the only model system it's also the only model capitalism to her is a social system because it respects people's rights and their values and their right to have their own values but a capitalist society still value art or science or literature above material goods it doesn't make you focus only on money people decide their own priorities but in terms of production that's the rational way and I think you are right I think that her defence of capitalism is intriguing because it was so fresh and new and that she certainly argued that nobody had to sacrifice anything under capitalism and she saw that production itself was a virtue because it was creative and in her novels it's the applause of business people because they create something of value that doesn't go on trees you have to create it and capitalism is very good at creating effective efficient producers and it encourages and the freedom that is around capitalism encourages people to use their minds and apply their minds to problems so she's very much in favour of capitalism as the only model system but also I think she does say that it actually produces the goods there is a bit of attention you're right and people have debated this you're right but she actually if you look at her writings I think that she says both firstly it's a model system but secondly looking at her writings and articles in particular on say Britain sorry on America and Russia she's saying well the capitalism system is better it's producing more it's doing better with people people are richer so she is looking at the results as well as looking at the philosophy of it it seems like there might be a tension here between her her moral prohibitions on force and coercion once you allow those in you're on your way to tyranny and her rejection of anarchism because we spend a lot of time on free thoughts talking about the justifications for and the nature of the state and the state is effectively I mean by definition is a group of people who have been empowered to or entitled to use force and coercion against other people and so the anarchist would say if you're opposed to those things then you have to be opposed to the state she was pretty strongly not an anarchist so how did she how did she rectify that is that a tension and if it is how did she rectify it yes it's well you're right she was very critical of anarchism and famously split from Murray Rothbard to the great thinker on anarcho-capitalism she rejected the idea that we don't need government at all because she thought that that would expose us to predation by criminals and her view was we can't be rational we can't think we can't create we can't produce if we are living in fear that other people are going to steal our things or assault us and take our property or our lives so we can't live as rational human beings if we are living in fear having to carry arms with us having to fortify our homes and to form gangs for our own protection having a state of some sort she believed sent out a signal that there's no point in initiating force because force will be returned and to her the sole purpose of the state was to to make sure that using force wasn't worthwhile because the state had more force and it would flatten you if you tried it so yes I think this is it is very difficult because again many people have argued that well once you start saying well we need a state then the argument is well where does that stop we've seen in the past countries like the United States for example started with a fairly small government with very specific aims and now it does just about everything frankly and lots and lots and lots of things it shouldn't do and which can't be justified under its founding principles so I think that is a bit of a problem in range she called herself a radical for capitalism rather than an anarchist simply because she thought that anarchism just precluded having a state entirely and that you couldn't live without something which would protect you of course Murray Rathbard would say no that's no problem at all people just get together and they hire people to protect them just as they hire people to unblock their drains or fix their electricity if you look at her books as you mentioned ahead and that was shrugged the heroes are makers they're people making things for some reason trains are really big deal and that was shrugged and there are architects and there are people who are takers who are parasites who want to take what they produce this leads to a criticism especially in these sort of fraught inequality times we're talking about inequality a lot that that for therefore it implies that the distribution of wealth that results from a capitalist system is morally justified that the people who have a lot of money at the top deserve it because they're titans of industry and they're making things and their heroic beings and the people who don't deserve it because they're not heroic beings beings and this is something you hear from Robert Reich I think recently this is exactly what Mitt Romney's world view is and what Paul Ryan's world view is there are makers and there are takers is that a fair criticism or description of the implications of her views I think it's a fair description yes I think that I mean Nozick puts it Nozick philosopher puts it quite well he says take a basketball star or something and people want to see this person play so they they pay a few dollars and they go to the stadium and they watch the game and they are each a few dollars poorer and the basketball star is many thousands of dollars richer but nobody has acted in an unjust way nobody's been forced to do anything so even if they started equal in terms of their income all wealth they haven't finished equal but if nobody's acted unjustly how can that result in distribution be unjust itself and so I think the focus is really more on those heroes themselves you know her heroes are individualists they live by their own creative talent so they produce things which of course benefit all of us they exist for nobody else but themselves they don't ask other people to exist for them their rebels they don't conform to social norms but they stand by their own vision and they understand they have a version of truth in their minds they understand it and they build their vision and their values their vision on those values and on that truth of facts and reason and not on the false authority of others so their creative minds and that means they're discovering new things they're discovering new knowledge they innovate and therefore they drive progress and that consequently benefits all humanity and you can't do that of course you can't force people to do that creativity depends upon being free to act and think and this is why she's so strong on capitalism as a moral system it leads you free to think free to act and then yes you pursue your own values and you you benefit accordingly of course it may be I've known a lot of very rich people and indeed they're so rich they can't actually they don't have time to spend what it is they've made so what do they do the answer is that they set up charitable foundations or they do other things in order to use that money and to promote causes which thereby promote their own values Bill Gates thinks it's important to wipe out malaria in the developing world he gives his fortune to causes like that and in so doing benefits a lot of people in the developing world what do you think is the biggest it depends on which side it's coming from of course but the biggest misconception of Rand there's a ton of them she's kind of operates as a figure that you can sort of put everyone like I said Paul Ryan and everyone who believes in capitalism for many people on the left are just unrepentant randians who want the poor to die but if all these kind of misconceptions are out there what do you think is the most pernicious one yes I think it's that that life is all about selfishness that the language is unfortunate we don't really have anything which is a simple word that expresses what she's trying to get at what she's trying to get at is we should look for ourselves now we're complicated creatures and yes we do actually value what others think and what others do and so on and we value some people more than we value others but we should live for those values and in doing that we will actually create a better world we'll create a better human society because we will be encouraging the things that we ought to encourage and we'll be discouraging the things which should be discouraged and her objection to traditional morality which says it's all about self sacrifice you can help other people and think of them first no that simply encourages people to take advantage of other people it encourages them to make themselves worse off you know as they can get the benefits of being self and get other people to shower them with money or the government to shower them with money so we want to encourage people to be independent, strong-minded but at the same time good citizens and that is actually her idea of selfishness but because the word has traditionally meant something different people think it's all devil take behind most capitalism and law no regard for other people it's not that at all we live in a rather different world from the one Ein Rand lived in when she wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas shrugged so what value I mean you just published a book about the ideas of Ein Rand what value do you think she still has today and what do you think her legacy is well I think that on many levels I think probably that there's a sort of philosophical level and then there are more practical levels and certainly on the philosophical level the fact that she worked out a way to integrate so many different parts of philosophy I think is quite interesting and new and radically different and she brought brings new ideas on life on personal morality, on politics and economics all based she says on reason using your mind now that's actually a very powerful idea that it's not about what you happen to like it's about what works what you can work out about the world it's an objective morality rather than just one that you just choose because it sounds good or you can't cross it in a book and that's to her the virtue of selfishness and the same in politics and economics as well but these are political systems that are founded on rational principles and I think another thing I would say that that she's is remembered for is really her robustness that she believes all this so strongly and that there's no grey in I'm Rand you either use your reason or you're revolting against reason and then you're all over the place she's an absolutist only in the sense of she's absolute about reality and that causes her views to be seen more like a religion sometimes than a philosophy but at the same time it's very robust when it comes to arguing these things and so often we argue about markets and the choice and competition and all these things and people on the other side say oh well yeah that's just your view but no she's able to root it in something to say no this is actually all part of a single system and it's a rational system it's very difficult for people to argue against them