 Welcome to this Bournemouth podcast. In this episode, columnist and serial interviewer Guy Denton talks to Yaron Brooke, an objectivist and the current chairman of the Anne Rand Institute. Guy begins by asking Mr. Brooke, what is objectivism? Objectivism is a philosophy. It's a philosophy discovered by Anne Rand and in the, I'd say in the periods, in the 40s through the 1970s, and she articulated that philosophy. In a series of books, first in novels, Anthem, Fountainhead, by primarily Atlas Shrugged, and then in a series of non-fiction essays, which were then turned into books, books like Capitalism Not Known Ideal and The Virtue of Selfishness and Philosophy, who needs it, and many others. So Anne Rand is the originator of the philosophy. The philosophy is the name, objectivism comes from her. And the basic ideas behind objectivism is, you know, in, in, if you go through all the different areas of philosophy, in metaphysics, it's reality is what it is. A is a, it's on what you wish it to be, it's on what some other consciousness created, it was it is, it's the primacy of existence. And we have a consciousness that identifies reality as it is. And that's kind of their epistemology. Epistemology is the efficacy of reason. Reason is our means of survival. Reason is efficacious. Reason actually gives us information about reality as it is. It's, you know, truth is not discovered through emotion. Truth is not discovered through revelation. Truth is discovered by the use of reason. And then, you know, only individuals can reason. You just kind of like only individuals can, can eat. Only individuals can do whatever bodily function we do as individuals. Only individuals can think and her morality is really centered around the individual. So your life is yours to figure out the values necessary for your survival, for your thriving, for your success. So she is, she's a moral egoist. She called her philosophy her morality, rational egoism or rational selfishness. And the idea is we use our reason in order to discover the values that are necessary for us to thrive as individuals. So what she was against on the one hand altruism, which is the sacrifice of the individual to the, to the group, but also she was against the idea of sacrificing other people to you. That is every individual is an end in himself. Every individual must live by the use of his own mind and pursuit of his own values. And the only political system that respects the idea of an individual mind and individual human being, the pursuit of individual values is capitalism. Capitalism is the system of government that leaves individuals free to pursue their own values, to think for themselves and to act based on their ideas in pursuit of their own happiness. So if happiness is your moral purpose in life, the only political system that actually leaves you free to do that is capitalism because it protects your rights. So she rejected all forms of statism from socialism to the mixed economy, to fascism and everything in between and, and beyond those. And then finally, in an area which is less kind of analyzed and discovered, she considered aesthetics a human requirement art as something that human beings actually need in order to, in order to achieve happiness and to be successful. And she thought that the proper kind of art was romantic art, not the naturalism of just describing life as it is, but life, but art as Aristotle defined it in the sense that it describes as a life could and shouldn't be. And of course, she rejected as a consequence of that much of kind of what's considered modern art, which is not life, not art, not anything really, other than scribbles. So she had a unique position on all of those, particularly as you get into ethics, ethics, politics, aesthetics, but even epistemology is quite unique. But though we explore many of the intricacies of what you just said, in greater detail, how did you personally become an objectivist? I've heard you say that you were on the left in your youth, but why were you personally drawn to this movement rather than a more orthodox strand of conservatism or libertarianism? Well, first I'd say I don't consider objectivism a strand of conservatism. And I don't even consider it a strand of libertarianism. In some ways, libertarianism is a perversion of objectivism. But putting those aside, you know, I was 16, I was like all kids, all the kids I knew who were growing up in Israel during the 1970s. I was a socialist, I was a collectivist, I was a tribalist. They had raised us, trained us, brainwashed us well in Israel to be very much about Jewish collectivism and socialism seemed the appropriate system for that. And a friend recommended that I read Atlas Shrugged. And I read Atlas Shrugged and I like to say I fought it, I argued with it, I debated it, I didn't agree with it. And by the end of the book, I was completely convinced that she was right and I had been wrong. And then it was an issue of going on a path of discovery. Objectivism is a philosophy. It's a philosophy with Curia guidelines in those of ethics, in terms of in terms of epistemology, and ultimately with political consequences. Conservatism is not really a philosophy. It's an approach, it's an attitude towards knowledge. It's not a coherent set of ideas that come together. I never found it attractive. I'm anything but a conservative. I'm a revolutionary. I'm a progressive in that sense, a true progressive, a true liberal, in the original meaning of the words. I believe in liberty. I believe in progress. And if necessary, I believe in revolution, if that's what it takes. So I'm with the founding fathers of America in terms of revolting against the institutions, the conservative institutions of the status quo. But I'm also not a libertarian. I don't believe that anything goes. I don't believe that morality is irrelevant. I think philosophy is what's important. And the political issues have to be consequences of a particular philosophical view. You don't start with a non-aggression principle. The non-aggression principle has to be derived from a particular view of ethics. And I think libertarians default on that and don't do it and start with an axiom that's not really an axiom. And nobody agrees with it. So you can't convince anybody. I also very much opposed to things like anarchy, which I think are destructive and ultimately lead to worse forms of status and then we even have today. So I think that if you understand epistemology and ethics properly, then you realize that government is a necessary good. Now the right form of gum. And it's a challenge and it's difficult and it's complicated and it's never been done right in terms of establishing the right form of government. But that doesn't mean you give up on that venture. It doesn't mean you give up on trying to form the right form of government. But libertarians kind of giving that up and what they want is just, not all of them, but many of them want is just the subjective appeasement of their wishes, of their desires, of their emotions. And I'm not focused, you know, desires and emotions are nice, but they're not, you don't build a political system around desires and emotions. You build it around the human mind. I'm interested in the point you raised about anarchy there. What do you make of anarcho-capitalism as a philosophical movement as it was promulgated by people like Rothbard? Do you think that the idea of the stateless society driven by property rights markets that some libertarians in America would very much like to become reality still is simply implausible or more fundamentally undesirable in some way? It's fundamentally undesirable because they, but it's a mythology. It's pretense. It's a rationalistic construction that cannot exist, metaphysically cannot exist. Let's start with anarcho-capitalism. You can't have those contradictions in terms. Anarchism is the negation of capitalism. Anarchism is the negation of property rights. Property rights need an enforcement mechanism. You have to be able to enforce property rights. And that enforcement mechanism is government. You know, if everybody is trying to enforce their own property rights, then ultimately there's no mechanism by which we obituate disputes. The mechanism that they present are private courts and private armies. Defaults to civil war, defaults to, because you've given different entities the ability to define property rights in different ways over the same territory, over the same property. How do they obituate the dispute? They can go to court, but why bother? If I have a bigger weapon than you, why would I go to court? I'll just take you over and impose my view on you. So it is a system that devolves into a Hobbesian, everybody against everybody, all men against all men, and it revolves into violence. So capitalism requires, in order for capitalism to exist, what is required is the elimination of coercion from human interaction. And coercive action, whether it's private or whether it's by government needs to be eliminated. Now, there's no way to eliminate private coercion without establishing a monopoly over the use of retaliatory force. And that monopoly is government. And if they don't like the word government, call it something else. I don't care, but you need an institution, a human institution that actually excludes, whose whole job is to make sure that people don't use force against one another. And if you don't do that, if you leave it so-called to competition, there is no competition, because when force is allowed in a sense, and now it's competed over, then the guy with the bigger gun wins, just like the guy with the best product wins, right? In a marketplace, the way to solve problems is to out-compete your opponent. And if force is what we're competing about, then the way for me to out-compete my opponent is to have more force, to have better weapons, bigger weapons, and to impose my will, you cannot have a marketplace, a functioning marketplace. You cannot have the idea of property rights enforced without an institution that eliminates the use of force. And that is called government. So I think it's a fantasy, but really what it is, is it's a consequence of a philosophical subject. Who is somebody else to decide when use of force should be, is legitimate. If you deny objectivity, if you deny objective law, if you deny objective truth, then it's all about my emotion, my feelings. And I want to be able to protect my property rights away. I want to protect it when I want to protect it. And I want to be able to determine when you're violating my property rights, to help with some objective court system, to help with some means of objectivity. We don't have a marketplace in science. Science is not competitive in the sense of, in the same way as product. There's a different type of way in which we resolve scientific disputes, primarily by through proof, through showing you in reality that it's true. And that is the way in which science develops. We have a separate institution for science, you know, a lab at a university that is not necessarily guided, that research is not necessarily guided by the same principles as, I don't know, competition for a smartphone. And the same is true of law. Law is a science. To define property rights correctly is not an issue of competition. It's an issue of proof. It's an issue of figuring out. It's an issue of experts figuring out. And the institution designed in order to do that is government. And unfortunately, we've never structured a government good enough. The experiment has always been flawed. But okay, that isn't a sign that we should give up. That's a sign that we need to continue to refine our ability and improve our ability to design good government. And to have good government, Einwand argued, you have to have a good philosophy. You have to have the right principles. And until we convince the world of our principles, this don't point to much in talking about government. The first thing is to get the principles right. On that note, what are some of the issues currently facing American society that concern or accuse the most as an objectivist? Well, everything, I mean, you know, everything in the political world in America today is falling apart and an absolute unmitigated disaster, both left and right. So there's nothing good going on in the political world right now. I mean, my long-term real fear in America is the risk of authoritarianism. I think that's the direction the country's heading. That's what the country ultimately will want. And it's both on the left and on the right. The riots in American towns and cities right now, the racial tensions that exist in America today, are a recipe for a strong man to step in and say, I'm going to bring law and order, and I can fix this, but we need more control in order to do that. So just give me control for a little bit, and I'll fix the situation. I mean, that is right for an authoritarian. And again, it could be an authoritarian that comes from the left or from the right, or as I believe will ultimately happen, somebody who manages to create a fusion of both left and right. I mean, my horror authoritarian of the future is an evangelical who's also an environmentalist. So that's somebody who combines the religious fervor of the right with the environmentalism of the left, you know, climate change, apocalypse of the left, and combine those two into an authoritarian position. But who knows how it'll actually come to be. Authoritarianism is a real risk. I think the country has moved towards authoritarianism slowly over the last hundred years. The presidency is more and more powerful. Generally, government is bigger, more involved, more involved in our daily lives, more involved in every aspect of our lives, more than ever, and that only grows and it never shrinks. And then with both Obama and now Trump, we've seen more and more disregard for the original form of government of the United States, processes of government, checks and balances of government, more and more dictates from the executive and the legislature defaulting on its responsibility. We're also seeing just a disregard for individual rights, for the Constitution, for the very foundation of the country. So all of those. But if you break it down, I'm worried about the riots, I'm worried about the economy. I think we're heading towards an economic disaster, as I think the UK is for prolonged and Europe, the rest of Europe for prolonged, very low if any economic growth. I think, you know, somehow there's no way to pay back all the debt that is being created right now by Western governments, and even by China. And the way that that will be resolved is by ever increasing, in a sense ever increasing debt, which is a big pyramid scheme, which can only be solved then through inflation, which we're already seeing in terms of government printing money, which leads to massive malinvestment and mis-location of capital, which leads to very slow economic growth, which leads to economic problems, which leads again to the increased probability of a strong man rising up to solve all of our problems. So I see a lot of economic problems for Europe and the United States and China and Japan over the next decade, as the four consequences of COVID play out. So there's very little positive going on in the US or in the West generally politically right now. On a less depressing, more philosophical note, our faith and objectiveism in any way compatible, would it be possible, for instance, to be a dais or to believe in a higher power or an afterlife, or just something greater than the material, while still adhering to objective precepts and principles? Well, first, I would separate out religion or mysticism, generally, from everything just being material. We don't know that everything's material or not. Suddenly, there is a human consciousness. Consciousness cannot be boiled down to just material. It is created something new, exactly the physical biological explanation for it. I don't have it, nobody has, but objectiveism is not materialism. Even though I will say that religion and objectiveism are incompatible, a belief in an afterlife or in a god or in some kind of consciousness that is above and beyond human consciousness that is guiding things that is there's just zero evidence for and we believe in evidence. So it's not that we negate religion, we are pro-reason. Reason is what negates religion. That is, as long as religion relies on faith, and faith is, by definition, the negation of reason, at least in a certain part of life. Objectiveism rejects religion, rejects all forms of mysticism. Lots of secular people are absolutely unmitigated mystics because they don't accept science and reason as their means of knowledge. They accept some other mechanism. Ultimately, I think all religion and all mysticism boils down to subjective emotion. Ultimately, nobody has revelations. You decide which book you want to listen to and how do you decide? Either based on training, because that's the book you were born with. If you're Jewish, you go by the Jewish book. If you're Catholic, you go by a Catholic book. Protestant, you go by the Protestant book. Very few people actually use, actually evaluate all the religions and choose one. They go by what they tradition has dictated. And they subjectively choose a book and they subjectively follow that book. There's nothing there. So yeah, I don't think you can be consistent with objectivism. And hold that in some portion of your life, you're going to adhere to faith. Certainly, you can accept certain premises within objectivism and reject others, but then you can't be consistently within that philosophy. So they would consistently be an objectivist. Yes, you have to reject all forms of faith. What do you make of the argument commonly employed by conservatives originally employed by Bill Buckley and Whitaker chambers during their Theodermen Ram, that without God, without a greater purpose to serve, objectivism, freedom essentially can only lead to a sort of corrosive libertinism or an unfeeling system of materialism, which is not viable for a society? Well, I think they were, I mean, particularly Buckley and Whitaker chambers, I think they were both dishonest and unthinking because I think that's absurd, right? I think it's exact opposite. Once you have a higher purpose, which somebody else dictates, not you by definition, because it's a higher purpose, then that's authoritarianism. Whether it's a higher purpose of God and God is the authority, or whether the higher purpose is the state and the state is the authority or the higher purpose is the race and the fewer is the authority or the higher purpose is a class and the the authoritarian is the authority, a higher purpose always leads to authority. And because that's the whole point of a higher purpose. And indeed, every authoritarian in history has not no, no, not a single authoritarian in history has said, follow your own values, use your own mind to judge what is true and what is not. And morality is the achievement of your personal happiness, exact opposite. Every dictator in human history has said, here's a higher purpose. And you must adhere to this higher purpose. And here's how you do it. And if you don't, I will force you to. So and that goes back to the Catholic Church, it goes back to every religion in history goes back to the Jewish religion in the Old Testament, just try not to be not, you know, to worship a golden calf and see what happens to you usually get slaughtered, right? That's a higher purpose, right? The higher purpose of believing in one God versus believing in multiple God. So a higher purpose always leads to coercion, always leads to force, always leads to authoritarianism. And certainly, Buckley and Ritika chambers were educated enough to know that, right? So so there's a certain element of dishonesty. The other aspect of it is that that I ran was not a materialist and not in the sense that they mean it not. And again, they knew this because Whitaker Chamber of course comes from came from a true materialist background, right? He was a Marxist. So he knew what materialism was and I ran was not a materialist. I ran, you know, recognized the fact that there was something called the human consciousness, the human spirit, in that sense, that doesn't mean there's something beyond you, it just means that you embody a certain thing that is your consciousness, it is your spirit, and which is important. She talks a lot about happiness, she talks about the importance of art, she talks about the importance of the experience of art, the emotional experience of art, she talks about love, she talks about what love is and how it plays in. So this idea that I ran was some kind of cold materialist, you know, equivalent to Marx that just waves their hand to some Utopia is just wrong. And of course, Whitaker Chamber's review of Atlas Shrug was the most dishonest, the most offensive, the most negative review of anybody's reviews. So the conservatives, and I think guided by Bill Buckley, clearly determined to kick out of the conservative movement to the extent that there was one, they clearly wanted who influenced out, they wanted it to be a movement that was guided by religion, and she was an obstacle to that, she had a lot of influence, people reading Atlas Shrug, and they purposefully, in my view, wrote an article, wrote a review of the book to try to say, if you like Atlas Shrug, you're not part of our movement. And you're not part of this club. What's ironic about the whole thing is when Ayn Rand died, Buckley wrote this article basically saying with her dice of philosophy, she is nothing, she is gone, she will be not remembered. And I am willing to put my entire wealth on the table to argue that Ayn Rand will be remembered long after Buckley is, her influence will be profoundly greater than William F. Buckley's influence. I mean, barely anybody young remembers William F. Buckley even today. His books are nowhere near as well read as Ayn Rand's books. Atlas Shrug sells many, many more copies than all of Buckley's books combined. And, you know, she is an artist, her books stand on their own in terms of art, but also she is a profound philosopher, agree or disagree with her, her ideas will be debated well into the future, whereas Buckley was not an original thinker. I mean, that's, he was a conservative. So he wanted to consider what existed. He wasn't about new, he wasn't about difference and he was a, he was a pretentious pompous, you know, commentator who, who I think inhibited the ability of the conservative movement actually to develop and to manifest itself into something interesting and valuable, which I think it could have, there was a, there was an opportunity there where it could have been influenced by people like, like von Mises and others on economics could have taken a much more stringent free market perspective. It could have really embraced the kind of goldwater thinking, which was far better, I think, than many of them, but it didn't. It evolved into what is today in America called nationalist conservatives. It evolved into the religious rights in America. It has evolved into statism. And, you know, I think the conservative movement in the US is now broken completely. If you look at conservatism, the infighting going on right now within the conservatives, and it was inevitable. I mean, this fusion that Buckley tried to create was never really possible, right? Was never really sustainable. And now you're getting the libertarian conservatives versus the religious conservatives versus the nationalist conservatives, all kind of fighting among each other. We'll see who benefits from that. I think the nationalists are going to win this out, unfortunately. Unfortunately indeed. But again, perhaps on a less depressing note, it's been very interesting to hear you define the philosophy in quite overtly Aristotelian terms. And I was curious, in speaking of morality, do you believe that ethical values are objective and universal? And if so, how can they be discerned in the Aristotelian or Thomas's way, perhaps on the basis of how they contribute to human flourishing or in a completely different fashion? No, I think that is the basic approach. It has to be in a sense an empirical approach, but based on first principles. And I think they're objective. That is, I think that if you evaluate human history, if you look at individuals, if you look at human nature, and this is kind of the first principle approach, there are certain things that lead to human flourishing and there are certain things that retract from human flourishing or lead to human happiness and retract from human happiness. And so the first principle is, one is individual human life is what matters. Morality is about my life. Morality is about your life. My need to survive and to thrive. Your need to survive and to thrive. And then the second question is, and this is an important empirical question, but it's a foundational question. What leads to human thriving? What leads to human survival? Can we objectively show that there's something in particular that enhances human survival, never mind thriving? And if you look at the species over the last hundred thousand years, there's one attribute that we have that defines who we are and defines our capacity to change the world around us to make it livable for us. Because in nature, as an animal equal to all other animals, we're pretty pathetic. We're slow, we're weak, we have no claws, we have no fangs. I mean, you put yourself in front of a sabertooth tiger and you lose, right? But the sabertooth tag is in a museum and you're here, you know, with communicating thousands of miles away by video conference in the comfort of our homes with air conditioning here and even in the UK, probably some air conditioning. And we're thriving as a species, there are billions of us. We live all over the world in every climate possible. How is any of that achievable? How did we beat the sabertooth tiger? How did we hunt down the bison? How did we create? Well, it's only one thing and that is the use of our mind. Reason is what defines us as a species and reason is what allows us to survive as individuals. Without thinking, we cannot survive. Now, it's true, not everybody thinks, but those of us who drift on other people are drifting on other people's thinking. I didn't come up with the iPhone, but I benefited from the fact that, you know, Steve Jobs did. And I use my thinking to create something else, which then provides me with the income to be able to benefit from Steve Jobs's thinking. But at the end of the day, the way human beings survive, the way people thrive, the way people live as a human being and even the way people can experience spiritual values is through the use of and create spiritual values. It's through the use of reason. You cannot write a symphony without being a thinker. It's not just that it just emotes out. It's a process and it's a process based at the end of the day on human reason. So reason is man's basic means of survival and reason is the foundation of any ethics. So the idea that reason is at the base of human survival is not, it shouldn't be controversial. And that's an objective fact. So as an objective fact, now the issue is, so for Ayn Rand, if you had to boil ethics down to one idea, it's think. Think for yourself. So if you think about Ayn Rand's developing virtues, actions that lead to values, moral actions that lead to values, then her virtues are rationality, think, and all its implications. Independent, think for yourself. Honesty, don't allow falsehoods into your thinking because you're corrupting your thinking. Justice, think about the value of other people to your life and treat them accordingly. But it's think. Are they good? Are they bad? Evaluate, judge. So justice is about judging who is good and who is bad and treating them accordingly. Productiveness. You've got to create the material needs that your life requires. Your body requires for food, but also your spirit requires for everything else. Think and act, produce. Production is thinking in action. And take all this seriously. Act based on what you think, integrity. And finally, take morality seriously. Aristotle called pride the queen of the virtues. And it's true. Pride is the idea of taking morality seriously. It's living the best life you can live for yourself. Every one of those can be objectively shown to contribute to human life, to contribute to survival and to thriving as an individual human being. So it's an inductive truth. It's a truth that comes from the evidence of reality. And in that sense, it follows the rest of the Tilling tradition. I just think that she was more rigorous. She had 2000 years on Aristotle of human experience, of history, of an industrial evolution, of the enlightenment, of all the negatives of Christianity and the negatives of altruism and other philosophies. And I think she improves on the Aristotelian model. But the essential idea of the standard is individual happiness, individual flourishing and thriving. And the means, reason, is very similar to Aristotelian Aristotle. I've heard you speak very derisively in the past about Emmanuel Kamp. And I am no Kamp Geneva, but I'm curious as to why you oppose Kamp in broad terms, perhaps, because that could open a very, take us down a very dense philosophical path, I'm sure. Yes. And I'm not a philosopher, so I better do it in broad terms, because I probably cannot hold my own on the details that the philosophers within Objectivism. Look, I mean, Kamp does two things that are antagonistic to Objectivism, but to human life in my view, antagonistic to all human life and to human progress. He divorces human reason from reality. And I don't know how you overcome that, right? If reason is not a guide, is not an identification of reality, then what's the use of it? And what benefit does it provide? And whose reason is true? And how do we tell? And how do we figure out what's right and what's wrong? And what's true and what's false? Isn't this just opening up completely to subjectivism? Which I think opens everything up to what his real argument was, to religion. Because at the end of the day, I mean, he says this, right? His philosophy is there to save religion from the Enlightenment. He's there to ultimately save Christianity. And that's his goal. And to do that, he has to show that reason is impotent. So he doesn't actually say reason is impotent, because then he wouldn't have been taken seriously. He disguises the idea of reason as an impotent with a bunch of philosophical gobbledygook. I mean, very sophisticated argument that are very difficult to comprehend, right? I mean, if you read Kant, man, it's the hardest thing you'll ever read. And long sentences, very convoluted, very difficult to understand, very difficult to figure out. But at the end of the day, the aim of all of it is to tell us reason is not your senses. And your reason, your mind is not telling you what's really out there in existence. Now that opens up the whole to, well, then if it doesn't, then how do I know what's right, what's wrong, what's true, what's false, what existence really is. And if it's just guided by the structures of my brain, or what, if my brain is structured differently than yours, and the white people have brains differently structured than black people, and the women have brains differently structured than men, you know, is there a female truth, and a male truth, and a black truth, and a white truth? And you can see how the, and by the way, Marx, if you go to Marx, is there a Paulitarian truth and a bourgeoisie truth? If you go to Hitler, is there an Aryan truth and a Jewish truth? And it evolves from there. And I think at the end of the day, Marx is a product of Kant. And I think, you know, the ideology that drives ultimately to Hitler is a product of Kant. It's all a product and the postmodernist ultimately a product of Kant, because once you get rid of reason, which I think is what he ultimately does, anything is possible, right, anything is possible, including contradictions, which is what Hegel celebrates, right, you know, and how Hegel is, is influenced by Kant as well. And that's, so that's an epistemological point. But then there's the ethical point. And the ethical point is, again, he's trying to save Christianity from the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is starting to recognize the value of the individual, and starting to recognize the value of human happiness. After all, you know, in the political manifestation of the Enlightenment, which is the Declaration of Independence in the US, you have a right, an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Now, that's selfish. That's individualistic. My happiness, not your happiness. My, my right is to pursue my happiness, right. And that is not tenable to Christianity and not tenable for Kant. So he comes up with a morality, again, that hides it all, because he, you know, he hides his true motivation, because he talks about individuals and importance of individuals. So he comes across as a pseudo individualist. But at the end of the day, what are you supposed to do? What is morality about? What it's about following categorical imperatives? Commandments? Because where do the categorical imperatives come from? You know, they're just there. You just, but how come we disagree about them? Well, then somebody has to provide them for us. God maybe, or maybe Marx, or maybe Hitler, maybe somebody else, but somebody has to provide us with what's good and what's evil. What should I, what should I do? And what shouldn't I do? And then he says, once you know what good is, you just have to do it. It's duty. It's duty bound. And you should never think about the benefit you receive from doing it. You should do it for this because it's a categorical imperative. You have no choice. That's what you should do. That's what morality means. So he sets it up so that my own interests are opposed. If they are opposed to the categorical imperative, I must put aside my own interests. If something will lead to my happiness, I should be suspicious of it because then I'm introducing a new motivation, which is not a categorical imperative, my happiness. And I should put that aside in order to follow the duty. Now, any kind of duty ethics is a dangerous thing, is a dangerous thing. And again, it can be corrupted and can be taken over and can be, can be used in a variety of different things. So in a variety of different ways. But at the end, what is he trying to save? He's trying to save Christianity and all duty ethics is a commandment's ethics, right? Thou shalt not fill in the bank, right? And that is not ethics. Ethics is about choices. Ethics is about free will. And ethics should be about the pursuit of your own values, the pursuit of your own happiness. So whether something causes me happiness or not is a prime consideration, ethical consideration, in whether I do something or not. Now I need to understand why it causes me happiness because you don't want to justify any subjective thing. But if it rationally, if it logically, if it makes sense that it causes me happiness, not in some deviant way, then that is the essence of ethics, rational values. And he negates that, he completely eradicates that. So he and both in ethics and in epistemology is the enemy of anything objectivist. I have to raise an ethical question, but I'm sure is commonly put to you by many, both on the right and on the left. Namely, what moral obligations is any, in your view, do we owe within society to, not only the poor, but to those who, for whatever reason, simply cannot fully exercise reason and take care of themselves? Well, it really depends on what you mean by obligation, right? Are you born with an obligation to help them? No. You have no obligation inherent in you being human. If you're wealthy and you're taking care of yourself and you've taken care of your kids and you've basically got the material values that you need in order to pursue your happiness and you're going to opera and you're doing well in life, then it's part of just living in a benevolent world and being a benevolent person that you don't want human suffering to exist and to the extent that you can help out, to the extent that you can help another human being, I think people would be happy, egoistic, rationally selfish people would be happy to help that human being. Not out of a sense of duty, not out of a sense of obligation, but out of a sense of recognition of the value of human life, the recognition that all human life is of value and that human suffering is sad. It's just not a nice thing and that if it doesn't cause you any suffering, if it doesn't cause you the inability to live a good life, then why not help them? The problem is that once you make it an obligation, and this is what we see in the welfare state today, it's an obligation, so when is enough enough? Because there's always human suffering. I mean, a lot of leftists point this out today and they're right. You could take a little bit of what you have right now, no matter how much you have and send it to Africa and you will save a little boy's life or a little girl's life. You selfish bastard. You're not doing that, right? You could and it wouldn't cost you that much, but if you do that, what about the next kid and the next kid and the next kid? And when does it stop being your obligation? When is it not your duty anymore? When you're on the verge of starvation? When you're equal to their suffering, then it's okay for you to stop sending that money? That's the whole morality of guilt, the whole morality of duty and obligation, the whole morality that puts other people suffering as a moral claim against you. That's what Iran's rejecting. When you're taking care of yourself and you're in a good position, how much you choose to help other people? How much you choose to provide for the well-being of those who cannot take care of themselves or those who fall into bad luck, all that? That is an option that you have and depending on your values and depending on your life and depending on what's going on in your life at that moment, it's completely up to you not as a duty, but as a choice to help those out and she believes that we would help them out because we value human life. I mean, people will stop at the site of the road to help out an injured dog, take time out of their life to take the dog in and take them to the vet. Not everybody, right? I might not. Don't like dogs that much, right? But somebody might, right? If we're willing to take care of our pets and animals that way, of course we'd be willing to take care of human beings and help them. But again, not as this moral obligation that has no end to it. Notice that we don't care anymore about absolute poverty. We don't have absolute poverty in the West anymore. Now we care about relative poverty and you know, there's always going to be relative poverty unless you live in an egalitarian society and then we're all poor, right? Absolutely. So there's no, who are we helping out here today, right? Because there's no end to it. There's always somebody who has less than you. And therefore, this bad obligation goes on forever. Somebody truly can't. Somebody really can't take care of themselves. I think every audience I go to, I ask, how many of you would be willing to help those people who clearly wouldn't be able to take care of themselves in this audience? How many people would be willing to put a little bit of money and take care of them? And it's probably well less than one percent of the population that that is true. Every hand in the room goes up. All right, what do I need a welfare state for that? What do I need this big moral obligation? And remember, the standard is always your life, not the life of the needy. You might want to help them, but they are not the standard. Your life is the standard. I have one final complicated question, and then we can end on something like that. Namely, I've been encouraged to ask you how in philosophical terms, objectivists approach for question of love, both romantic love and familial love. Well, I mean, love is one of the highest values that one has. It is a profound experience. It is an experience that is, you know, one of the most important experiences that one can have in life. Certainly romantic love is such an experience. It is a profoundly selfish experience. It is a profoundly, it's about how another person makes you feel about you. So, I think our understanding of love is corrupted today, again, by Christianity, by this notion of selfless love, by this notion of unconditional love, neither of which can exist in a true love. Love is about how I feel about you because of how you make me feel, right? That's the essence of it. Imagine going up to your bride the night before you're about to get married and saying, look, I'm doing this for selfless reasons completely. This is an utter, this is a complete sacrifice for me. She would slap you in the face and walk away. I mean, what should you tell the love of your life? You say, I love you because the way you make me feel, you make me feel better about myself. You project, you are an expression of my highest values. You, you know, you make me a significantly better person. More life, significantly more enjoyable for me. Love is about how, you know, it's deeply selfish in the, in the real deep sense of what that means. And it's a response to values. So it's not, love is not blind. It might be blind to you because you don't understand yourself. It might be blind to you because you don't recognize your values. But emotions should generally not be blind. You should work on understanding your emotions. If, if, if your love is truly blind, then you'll probably be married more than once, right? This is why divorce rates are so high. This is why, you know, people fall. I didn't love so quickly because it was blind. You, you didn't understand it. It's understanding is a good thing, not a bad thing. Familiar love, I think is the, is the same. It's not exactly the same thing because familiar love, love of a child or a child of a parent is different because of a child, it's really difficult to understand that love, you know, because you've made a choice to create a life. And your love for that life, at least initially, is a love of, in a sense, the choice that you made and this creature that you bought into the world and the joy that, that baby brings to you. And evolution makes them really, really cute because they're incredible work. So they, they have to, there has to be compensation for that. But it's, it's, it's really, I don't think it's self-evident that people love their children. And this is why I think it's really important that people before they have children think about whether they can love their children and maybe hang around some babies for a while and see what's involved and what kind of work is involved to make sure that they like it, that it's a value to them, that it's something worth pursuing. But, you know, I think, I think that if you do it right and, and if you think about it, and if you have the kids for the right reason, you know, some people have kids to keep the marriage together. Some people have kids out of, because they, they, the grandparents want them, right? Some people have kids because, because they're conservatives and that's what you do. And some people have kids because they want to grow, make the state strong and have lots of kids for the state or whatever. Okay. Or because there's a welfare check that's going to arrive if you, an extra welfare check if you have kids, all kinds of motivations for having kids. But the only good motivation to have a kid is, is that you want to take on this challenge, that it's going to be fun and it's going to be enjoyable. And you've, you've made yourself as conscious as you can of what the challenge is going to involve and you're willing to take this on. And hopefully part of that challenge leads you to love the child. It's not guaranteed, unfortunately, but, but it should, right? If you do it right and if you have the right approach, you will love the child. But then they grow up and they could turn into a monster and then you might stop loving them. There's no guarantees again, because they have free will. So your children are not going to turn out the way you want them to, because they get to choose, not you. So you can only do so much and then you might stop loving them. A child towards the parents is different, right? Because a parent who takes on the obligation to have a child now owes them whether they love the child or not. They owe them 18 years. They owe them to sustain self-sufficiency. Once a child is self-sufficient, you don't, as a parent, you don't owe them anything unless you choose to. But you owe them by contract, in a sense, from birth till self-sufficiency. You're responsible for taking care of them. That's a contract you made when you had the baby. A child doesn't owe its parents anything, really, because he didn't choose to come into the world. A child should love his parents to the extent that the parents have contributed to their lives. Not all children love their parents. Not all children should love their parents. Some parents are damn right, horrible, and are not worthy of love. The abuse of parents, they're just awful parents out there. They're awful situations and it's completely legitimate and rational for a child not to love his parents. Hopefully, if your parents were loving, if your parents did a good job, if your parents were, you know, then you do love your parents and you care for them and you want to take care of them later and you want to treat them well. But there's no commandment. Treat your mother and father well. That's in the commandments, but it shouldn't be. There's no moral commandment. It's only if they deserve it. So here's justice. Bad parents don't deserve being treated well. Good parents do. So it's an issue of justice for the child when he's an adult and hopefully that justice is a product of love. So that's my view of love. Again, I think the love is deeper and more profound the more the other person represents an elevated example of your values. They're projecting back your values to you. Finally, outside of the iron rands, what are some of your favorite books and what books have had the perhaps the most profound influence on your worldview? Well, suddenly, you know, I'm a finance guy, so I mean, I consider myself an economist to some extent. So a lot of the economists primarily Mises and the Austrian school, Mises and Manga, and some of the others who had a profound influence on my thinking about economics. I mean, Iron Ranch shaped my views on economics in the philosophical sense, but in terms of the nitty gritty, Mises is I think the biggest hero. And then, you know, I love history. I love reading about the world and so on. And there's a I don't know that there's any particular books that have shaped my view, but I but I try to read widely and read extensively. And I think I think people should I mean, beyond watching YouTube videos, which I think is good, particularly if you're watching mine, but you should be out there reading and reading widely and extensively. And then, of course, I love art, I love aesthetics. And while, you know, the philosophical approach to art was shaped by Iron Man, maybe the actual experience of art, you know, you have to experiment. So whether it's reading, or whether it's watching movies, or whether it's listening to music, or whether it's going to museums, I embrace all of that and encourage people to do it. I don't think you've really lived unless you start really experiencing what art has to offer and good art, not the junk that is mostly produced today. I mean, good art, you know, that luckily for all of us, we come out of a, we are still part of a culture that has a long history and tradition of fantastic art, that you might not enjoy every aspect of it, but has massive values to benefit you. So all of that, I think the world around us is incredibly rich. And it saddens me that I think people don't experience its full richness, you know, they listen to rap, which I think is barely in music. You know, they listen to what they grew up on in music, they don't experiment outside of that, they don't go back to previous centuries and look at what is done. They think breaking bad is the height of all storytelling, and how many kids today read Hugo, even Dostoevsky, which is very dark, but at least great literature, because it's a duty because it's old or whatever, you know, and they don't go to museums because when they go to museums, they can't differentiate between the piles of garbage in the trash can and the stuff that's up on the walls. So they have abandoned museums and what they should like in it, I mean one of my favorite examples is London, right, you can go to the Tate Museum, and to me at least it wants to make me throw up, but if you go to Tate Britain, it's an amazing experience because that's where all the old stuff is, but it's where the good stuff is. So, you know, you've got to be, you've got to discriminate. If you think art is Tate modern, then you're missing out on what art has to offer you. So, yeah, so I try to consume a lot of different stuff. Thank you very much for your time, Dr. Britt. This has truly been fascinating. Thank you for indulging me. My pleasure, guy.