 where do we start? Well, I mean, I think it's important to note that Ayn Rand talked about a philosophy, talked about Objectivism. As a philosophy for living life on earth. As a philosophy for living. And what does that mean? It means a philosophy that will guide your life, that will provide you with the principles with the ideas. That can enhance your life, enhance your ability to live a good life. And we'll talk about what a good life is and what that means exactly. But she did not write philosophy for the sake of writing philosophy. She did not write philosophy for the sake of, you know, engaging in difficult, interesting ideas for the sake of participating in the debate for the sake of, you know, solving any kind of long lost puzzles. She was interested. She was interested. And what does it mean? In a sense to be a hero, what does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to be, you know, a fully fleshed out, a fully living individual human being? What does it mean to live with a capital L? And she needed that knowledge, one to live herself. But I think to some extent she already had that knowledge for herself implicitly, even if she hadn't exactly spelt it out explicitly. But where she needed to express it explicitly was in her characters, in her novels. And she talks about the fact that in order to portray her goal was to portray the perfect man. And in order to portray the perfect man, she had to know what a perfect man was. And she had to articulate what a perfect man was in writing, in detail, in action, in values. And that really entailed figuring out what all that meant. And when she looked around at other philosophies, when she looked around at other philosophers, when she examined all of their writings, she couldn't find what she was looking for. And she realized that the ideas she in a sense held implicitly, she needed to make explicit, first in order to make her characters come alive, and for to fully flesh out her characters. And then she needed, she wanted to do it, because there was this gap and she wanted to fully understand it and then share that knowledge with the rest of us so that, you know, in a sense, when she discovered that there was no philosophy really that matched her heroes, I think she probably understood, I don't know this really, but she probably understood why there was such a shortage of heroes in the world around her and why the world was going in the awful rotten direction that it seemed to be going. And that the way to change that direction was not political was fundamentally, essentially, long term. It was philosophical. It was to understand, to educate people about what an ideal man, what living really meant and why and what would be involved in embracing life. So her idea, her philosophy is built around a practical need, the practical need of us to understand the world around us, understand ourselves and to live the best life that we can live. And it's based on the knowledge that as human beings we do not have, we do not have the programming necessary, the knowledge necessary to achieve that kind of life. It's not programmed. We do not have the knowledge to survive. It's not programmed. And this is a really, really important observation she makes. It seems simple and straightforward, but given the world in which we live with determinism as rampant and kind of evolutionary behavioral, evolutionary explanations for behavior are all over the place, evolutionary explanations for success as a species all over the place where evolution dominates in terms of an explanation, evolutionary psychology is a whole field that tries to explain everything that is, is in our world and how we live and describes everything about us. It's really important to know that I then rejects all that and indeed there's no evidence for it. Rand recognizes that individuals have free will and that we are born without the knowledge of how to survive. We must acquire that knowledge and much of a philosophy about is about how to do that. What kind of knowledge is worthy of acquiring and how we go about doing them. So we are born, it's not that we're born tabloid or us in a sense that we're born with nothing inside, but we're born without knowledge, the knowledge to survive, the knowledge to feed ourselves, the knowledge to survive in a world with animals that want to kill us, to survive other human beings who would like to take our stuff and attack us. We're not born with those kind of instincts with that kind of survival knowledge built into our DNA as other animals are. Other animals do not have to acquire knowledge in order to learn to survive. They don't have to figure it out. They use their consciousness to observe reality and the programming in a sense does the rest in terms of guiding it to what, guiding them to what they need to do in order to survive. It's built in. Human beings, it's not built in. So we need to acquire knowledge and our survival is not sub-evident because of that. So we are constantly faced with this alternative of life or death. Now every being is faced, every living being, and this is what differentiates life from non-life is life can end. A rock is always a rock. It's not a life, it's just a rock. But a flower will die. And if it doesn't get enough water, it'll die sooner rather than later. So we are faced constantly with this alternative as life or death, survival or not survival, destruction or existence. And because we do not have the tools to automatically know what survival requires as a flower does, you know, a flower not only needs the water but will actually look for the water, I don't know about a flower, it's not only a tree or a plant, you plant it in a soil and its branches go out seeking the water. They don't make the decision to seek the water, they just do so because they're programmed to do it, but they go searching that which will allow them to survive, which will allow them to grow, which will allow them to thrive as a tree, sunlight, water, nutrients that the plant needs, and animals know exactly what and how to do in order to survive, in order to stay alive, in order to not go out of existence. But it doesn't come automatically to us. As human beings we must make an effort to figure it out. It's not automatic. So we face this fundamental alternative, but once we choose to live, and again, even there, we must choose to live. Animals don't choose to live, they just do. So once we choose to live we have to figure out how to live. We have to go and seek those things that promote our life and we need to learn to avoid those things that destroy our lives. And indeed, values, values are those things that we seek. Those things that we, you know, the most general definition of values is that which one acts to gain or keep. It's those things which one seeks for oneself or preserves for oneself. And when it comes to within the context of objectivism, values are those things we act to gain or keep for the purpose of our life, for the purpose of living, for the purpose of our existence, for the purpose of our thriving, for the purpose of successfully being alive. And that's the beginning of that's ethics. Ethics is figuring out what those values are, and what the virtues, what the actions we must take in order to preserve, in order to achieve the values that are necessary for our existence. But in every step, it's not given. It's not automatic. It must be activated. It must be engaged. We must make an effort. We must choose to think about what will preserve our life, what will further our lives, and how to attain it. So ethics is studying the principles involved here. Rand defines ethics as a code of values to guide man's choice and actions, the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of man's life. So the important, the things that really make a difference, the things that those values that shape those choices, those actions that are going to shape your life. Ethics deals with those choices, the code of values to guide man's choices and actions, which choices and actions, the choices and actions that determine the purpose and course of your life. Just silence somebody, because not productive on topics like this to have just, okay, so, you know, why is this important? Why do we need this? Well, because we don't have it automatic, but also because life's complicated. There's a lot of choices. There's a lot of options. There are a lot of values one could pursue. There's a lot of things one could do with one's time. There's a lot of ways one can live or not live, and most people never codify for themselves a system of ethics. Most people never actually think through these questions and come up with a list of values and virtues and live by it and use it as a tool to live. And then they kind of stuck. They're stuck in this world in which they do what they're told or what they're taught by others without examining it, without thinking through, without inspecting it, without making sure that it's right or and or because usually it's a combination of these. They land up doing what works in the moment because that's the easiest. That doesn't require long term thinking. And most of the time we don't have time to do the long term thinking. What do we call that when we don't think long term, when we don't use principles, in this case, moral principles to guide what we do. But what we use is just, you know, just calculations in the moment of what seems to work here and now. What is that? What is that called? I'm not sure if, you know, I can get away with this lie right now, but I'm going to catch me. They didn't catch me last time. I'll just lie right now. I'll just cut this corner or cut that corner. And why is lying bad anyway? Because my mother told me, because the priest said so. I don't know if I believe in God and if there's no God. Why shouldn't I cheat? There's no heaven. There's no hell. Well, it's called, I mean, and I think most people identify this as pragmatism. It's pragmatic. It gets me the results. I have the short term aims. I do the short term things and it gets me that short term result. It's guided often by whim. It's guided by what you call, you know, some people call intuition, which is just another name for whim in many cases. Not always, but in many cases. It's pragmatism. And for most people, that's how they live because, again, life is complicated and going through the whole question of, okay, if I lie, what are the consequences? Who potentially could catch me? Is this going to necessitate other lies? If I get caught, what are the consequences? What does it do to my consciousness if I start lying and if I lie regularly? What is, I mean, there's a lot to think about on every single one of these decisions versus, for example, a principle. Lying is bad for me. I figured that out. I've solved that problem. I know that, you know, in these contexts, lying is always bad. I don't have to think about it. I just don't lie. I know the answer. And I'm not dramatic about it because I keep going back and reaffirming the principle by integrating into the rest of my knowledge and making sure that, yes, it's true. So most of the world out there, certainly in business, certainly in business, most of the world out there is seduced by pragmatism. They don't want to buy into kind of the conventional or the kind of stringent view of sacrifice, of sacrifice to others, of ethics, and they don't have any other guidance of how to live their life. So I'll just wing it. I'll just wing it. I'll just solve problems on the fly. I'll figure it out as we go along. So pragmatism is a real issue out there in the culture, particularly in business. I mean, a pragmatic businessman doesn't think about the long term. They don't have time. It's too complicated. Maybe on some issues they think long term, but on most, and to think about the consequences of every action he takes, too overwhelming, too hard. So he makes decisions without those considerations. He shifts the blame for his mistakes. He downplays the extent of problems, covers them up, tries to cover them up altogether. And when the problems show up later, there's more cover up so there's no blaming to somebody else. And ultimately, you know, they might lose their job or their company might fail. But by then it's hard to attribute it to a decision that was made months or years or even decades sometimes earlier. You know, a businessman in principle is focused on producing values. He's, for example, concerned about his reputation. You know, if he runs his company well, he's going to build a good reputation as good manager, and over time he'll be able to raise more capital. He'll be able to increase the company's value, his own value, his own compensation. He'll have pride in what he's achieved. When he makes a bad decision, he owns up to it. As soon as he recognizes a mistake, he takes remedial steps to restore the company's performance. He fixes it. He deals with issues on a principled level based on his and the company's long-term interests. The long-term is built into his perspective. And you can see that failed companies, even companies that commit fraud and they get into real trouble are companies that are typically not run by crooks. It's not that the company is run by a CEO who sets out to steal from shareholders. Almost always there are consequences of pragmatism, of little lies, of little, you know, deceptions, of just not being willing to step forward and recognize a mistake or to accept a mistake. Little evasions, little, well not little, but short-term thinking. I'll give you an example. I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember WorldCom. There was a series of big fraud cases in the early 2000s among a whole set of companies. There was a lot of these companies where kind of fraud was committed. And when you actually examined what the fraud was, it wasn't the case that a CEO sat down, let's say like, like, like, like, Bernie Madoff and said, how do I fraud my customers? How do I cheat them? How do I take their money? And I'm not exactly, if that's how Bernie Madoff, even with Bernie Madoff, that happened. Usually what happened was, you know, a company like WorldCom was doing really well, the stock was high, they reported better earnings every quarter, they were doing fantastically well. And then they had a bad quarter. And you could just report the bad quarter and stock price would have gone down and people would have questioned their performance and challenged them in terms of what they were doing, but they probably would have done fine. But what happened when they had a bad quarter was the CEO might have looked at that and said, look, you know, why report this? It's a headache. I'll have to explain it to shareholders, people will harass me. I mean, it's just a little thing. It's no big deal. And I know, I know the next quarter will be better. The things will recover. And next quarter, when things are better, we'll report slightly less than the increase so that if you add the two quarters up, it's the same. So we'll do what some people call income smoothing. And there's even, yeah, expressions for this to make the evasion seem scientific, consistent with accounting practices. Anyway, you do this. And the next quarter, the following quarter is even worse. But now you're kind of locked in. You don't want to report two, you don't want to report this quarter's loss. And then you're going to have to report last quarter's loss. And then they're going to catch you about last quarter's loss. So what do you do? Well, you do it again. You lie a little bit believing that when things get better, I'll fix it. When things get better, we'll smooth it all out and nobody will care. And of course, things are worse. And in the end, you land up in jail. That's pragmatism. Little lies, not big ones. There's a famous case of a trader in Singapore who bought down one of the oldest banks, financial institutions in the United Kingdom. And how did he bring it back? He had trading authority and he was trading options on the Nikkei, which is the index of the stock market in Japan. And he had taken a big loss, a kind of loss that would result in a demotion. And he didn't want a demotion. He didn't want a demotion. So he doubled up thinking, I'll make it all back and nobody will know. And he lost again. Now he lost enough to lose his job and he really didn't want to lose his job. So he doubled up again and lost again. And now he was probably going to jail. So he doubled up one more time and lost and that's guaranteed that he went to jail in Singapore. Not a pleasant experience, I promise you, but the loss by that point was so large that it brought down one of the oldest financial institutions in the United Kingdom. But those kind of little decisions, pragmatic, short term, unprincipled, not thinking about the wider context is what brings people down. The lies that a husband tells a wife or a wife tells a husband that build over time will ultimately lead to a divorce. Little deceptions will ultimately lead you out of a company. And when you add those up in terms of the effect that has on your life, ultimately they lead to the destruction of your own life. We need principles. We need some kind of guidance to tell us how to deal with the complexity of the world. How to deal with everything that we encounter. Because again, we don't have the scope or the time to think about the principles involved, the scope of human psychology and the scope of history to know exactly what works and what doesn't. What's right and what's wrong, what sustains human life and what doesn't, what's achievable, what's good and what's not. It's an achievement to figure those things out, particularly in terms of principles. And it's why we need ethics. Ethics are the broadest sense of principles that guide our life. And then we can apply those principles, those ethical principles to different areas in our life, you know, how to run a business, how to deal with employees or how to make business decisions. And we can think about principles of marriage, how to have a good healthy relationship with a person you're going to live with for a long, long time. How to maybe have a relationship with kids or whatever. You can apply, you have a broad set of principles that apply to life, and then you take that and build principles that apply those abstract principles, the particular issues that you're going to face. More principles enable us to choose the right course of action. It takes into account real life choices that you have. And it tells us the consequences to expect given the choices we might make. It organizes all that information, all the different possibilities, all the different branches of the tree of decision making that we could make. It organizes that into simple, well, and maybe not so simple, but into rules, into principles that we can then follow. Again, now follow blindly, understand, integrate, proved ourselves that they're true, that they work, that they're efficacious. And then follow. If you don't have more principles telling you what is right or wrong, what is essential to judging any given situation, how do you know what to do? How do you know what not to do? How do you know how to live? Alright, so that's the role of ethics. The role of ethics is to provide us with principles on how to live, on what right and wrong is. In other words, what we should and what we shouldn't do. Now, Objectivism is a specific set of principles that guide this. What's interesting, I always find interesting is if you look at alternative model systems, usually they just provide you with a set of very abstract commandments, or sometimes very concrete commandments, but just commandments. This is what you should do. This is what you shouldn't do. Very rarely do they provide you with general principles. And when they do, it's something like live for the sake of others. Think about their well-being, take care of them, be selfless. That's altruism. But most ethical theories, most ethical theories we find are altruistic. Altruism is the other ism. There's no science. There's no thinking. There's no induction. There's no learning from experience or learning from reality or learning from what works because what is the standard for what works? They don't have a standard. The standard is the well-being of, I don't know, society, God, something. But what does that even mean? What is the meaning of the well-being of society? What is the meaning of the well-being of God? Who knows that? How do you know that? Objectivism is anchored in reality, in human life, in human survival. So the standard is clear. The standard for figuring out what the principle should be is life. It's living. What we need today, what I call the 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, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broads. Alright, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. 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