 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. Hi everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this, what is it, Monday, Monday, the last day in February. Thanks for joining us this evening and looking forward to my discussion today with Peter Schwartz. We'll get to that in a minute. We're going to be talking about his book, The Tuity of Need. We're going to be talking about it as it applies to a variety of current events and of course, the philosophical foundation or the cause of all the current events. I want to remind you, you can ask Peter questions using the Super Chat feature. The Super Chat feature is open. So those of you who are new to the show, there's a feature in YouTube. You just click on the bottom there and you can use the Super Chat to ask questions. Those are the questions I will take. Catherine Mendez is here to make sure we reach a goal for the Super Chat for the day. So she'll be encouraging you to do the Super Chat. I see most of you have now become members, YouTube members of the show. I can see that because your name is green in the chat. Those of you who have not, you can click below. There's a Join button. You can join the Iran Book Show, one of the thousand ways in which you can communicate with me and with the show. So go down there and join. And we have a variety of different books there. We will be introducing videos that are going to be unique just for members and things like that. Don't forget to like the show. If you like it, of course, but don't forget to press the like button before you leave because it helps the algorithm. The algorithm loves the engagement and loves the likes and promotes videos that get a lot of likes. And of course, if you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. Peter, welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. Good. Peter Schwartz is the author of A Tear of Need, A Tear of Need. He is also the author of Is It Farm Policy of Self-Interest? Is that the title? So we'll talk a little bit about farm policy in relation to what's going on in the world today or more broadly, both in the context of Tear of Need and then in the context of that previous book. Peter is the former chairman of the Board of the Einwenn Institute, a regular speaker at Ocon, a senior fellow at the Einwenn Institute. I can't remember all the titles, but... Distinguished fellow, but who? Distinguished fellow, but equivalent. All right. So the book has recently been republished. So tell us a little bit about the thinking behind republishing it and the new title, which I love and have been an advocate for for a long time. So tell us a little bit about the book and the title. Well, the original book was published in 2015, and the publisher was Paltry McMillan, which is now... Oh, God. In this case, my memory is completely going. It'll come to me. They have a new... It's a new... They've been taken over by... I did publish it. Yeah. They did a very good job in promoting it. The original title was In Defense of Selfishness. The book was publicized, got a lot of interviews, but it wasn't selling as well as I thought it would. And over the years, it just basically stopped selling, and they stopped promoting it. And the right to revert it to me, the Einheim Institute indicated interest in publishing a paperback version of it. The original was in hardcover. And I thought that was a good idea. So we agreed we would publish this, and we decided to change the title, which is an interesting decision. I'm not 100% sure of this, but I suspected that the main obstacle to much greater sales for the original book for In Defense of Selfishness was it did not receive any reviews. I should say it almost no reviews. It got a very good review in Forbes by John Tamney. But other than that, virtually no significant media reviewed the book at all. And in my thinking, I'm attributing that, there are many reasons, but one significant reason I think is the title. I don't think that reviewers took the book seriously. I think they see the title In Defense of Selfishness, and they say, well, here's some crackpot, you know, defending Attila the Hun and Bernie Madoff. It's like somebody would publish a book in defense of the pedophiles or in defense of Adolf Hitler. So I think that it just discouraged people from taking the book seriously and giving it a real read and seeing what the book actually said to see that it was genuinely and intellectually legitimate product. So that was one of the reasons behind this thinking of changing the title now. It's called The Tyranny of Need, examining the code of self-sacrifice and the alternative of rational non-predatory self-interest. So I'm hoping it will get reviews and get the publicity it deserves. Absolutely, so I hope so too. So let's jump in because the book presents this alternative of altruism and egoism, which I think a lot of listeners are familiar with, there's always, and there is in the culture, but I think even among people who read Ayn Rand, there continues to be confusion about what altruism actually means, what is at the core of altruism. So what is altruism? You know, why are we so against altruism? There's definitely truth. There's confusion about what altruism means exactly as there is confusion about what selfishness means. Now, the reason I say altruism, I call it The Tyranny of Need is because if you look at it and ask yourself what altruism actually demands of us, it doesn't say be kind to your neighbor, give him some help if his apartment burns down or he's in an accident. What it tells you is that his life is more important than yours. You must subordinate your needs to his. If you want to be moral, the way that's measured, the only way that that's measured is by how willing you are to sacrifice for the sake of someone else. How willing are you to subordinate your needs and place someone else's above it? The heroes, the ideals, the paragons of altruism are people like Mother Teresa or Albert Schweitzer and why? They're praised because they are selfless, because they don't care about their own happiness, their own welfare, their own money, their own needs. They are effacing their existence and instead they live to serve others. They are a servant to anybody in need. That to me is a terribly unjust and destructive way of living. And that is what altruism actually demands of you it demands that you live to serve others. So some people will say, but Mother Teresa wanted to do this. This was in her interest because, I don't know, made her feel good or this was her desire, these were her values. Well, first of all, I don't think that's possible. I think the whole point of altruism is if something benefits you, if you're gonna get pleasure from something, give it up. It's wrong, you'll be motivated by something, by selfishness, which is an immoral premise. Altruism says, if you're doing it for your benefit, that's bad. If you're doing it for someone else's benefit, at your expense, that is it's a sacrifice, then it's good. Now, if Mother Teresa actually got real pleasure out of helping the poor, which is, she didn't. If you read what she wrote, she'll tell you how miserable and depressed and the suffering she went through, which is what altruism demands. It demands that you suffer. But even let's say, hypothetically, if you find someone who takes pleasure in being an altruist, that is not an altruist. Then you're saying, I'm helping my neighbor because it really gives me pleasure. It makes me happy, makes me feel wonderful. Well, that's selfish. So don't try to twist altruism and somehow make it compatible with your benefit. Altruism says the highest virtue is self-sacrifice, which means give up yourself, not enjoy yourself, not benefit yourself, give up yourself sacrifice, simply because you have something that somebody else lacks. That's what altruism demands. And indeed, even on egoists, there would be some people who made a career out of, I don't know, social services or helping other people or doing things like that. It's not an illegitimate career to have if you truly enjoy it and if you truly see value in it. Yes, but it's a contradiction to say at root, you gain pleasure from being an altruist. It's like saying, my happiness consists in giving up my happiness. That's what makes me happy. Now that's absurd. The point of rational self-interest is to hold your life and your happiness as values and to pursue it and to do what is necessary to achieve it as opposed to the idea of altruism which says don't hold your life as the standard of value, don't hold your welfare as a moral good. That's an immoral goal. Give it up, don't be selfish, be selfless. So there's no way to make these two somehow compatible. They are two opposite antithetical philosophies of ethics. So why do people hold on to the idea that altruism is just being nice to people and helping people out? And because that's, you know, most people in the street, if you just ask them what altruism is, that's how they respond. Yeah, they will, they'll tell you that. And that is the veneer that altruism adopts in order to make itself more palatable if it came out explicitly and said, we want you to suffer. We want you to go through the most pain you can so that somebody else somehow benefits from your suffering. If they made it explicit, it'll be very difficult to have very many people following it. So it's a package deal. It's a fuzzy facade, which makes it seem appealing by saying we just want you to be generous and we have goodwill and don't act like Bernie Madoff, don't rob and steal, don't climb over other bodies to gain your values. And that's how altruism. But that obviously is a false picture and people are taken in by this. So they're torn, they have on the one hand, they say, yeah, I can exercise goodwill to my neighbor, I can be friendly, I can be cooperative, yet they will feel a moral obligation to provide for people who have needs simply because they are able to fulfill those needs. They have money, they have more money, someone else has less, they feel guilty if they don't provide for it. And that whole welfare state is based on this premise. The government says, we're gonna take from the haves and give to the have not. So if somebody doesn't have health insurance, your money has to provide. Somebody can't afford his kid's college education or childcare, your funds have to provide it. That's the whole premise of the welfare state. It's based on altruism, it's based on the idea that you don't have a right to your life, to your money that you've earned, it's the people who need it who are entitled to it. Yeah, and even the people who claim to be pro-free markets or claim to be pro-capitalism never challenge that premise. So they make economic arguments about inefficient, the charity would provide, whatever, but they never actually challenged the premise, the altruistic premise of which the welfare state is based. Yes, that's true. And the whole, quote, conservative axis in politics, at least the part that Ditto used to believe in capitalism to some extent, their whole justification was, well, it's altruistic. We can, by pursuing your selfish ends, excuse me, by pursuing selfish means, you achieve a selfless altruistic ends. Adam Smith was what made that argument. But it's such a cowardly and false presentation because if you took it seriously, it's not possible. Capitalism is based on the idea that there should be private property, private profits, private rights. Alters and says that selfish, there is no private, everything is public, everything is collective. So you have a store, you wanna sell goods to make money, that's a selfish motive. What you should do is sell it for less. What about people who can't afford it? Lower your price, give it away from nothing. Make yourself, impoverish yourself so that somebody else in greater need can benefit. And I'll take it one step further. To me, the really terrible argument that many conservatives make is that, yeah, we believe in a free market and we believe in altruism, but we believe altruism should be voluntary. We don't think the government should force you to be an altruist. So therefore we believe in laissez-faire supposedly. So you should do whatever you want, yet morally we think you should sacrifice and give your money away to the poor. Now, if altruism is correct, you don't own your money and you don't own your life. By what reasoning are you morally entitled to choose whether to give your money away? Altruism says somebody in need is entitled to it. It's like a debt, you have a moral duty to provide for someone else. The money you've earned, you're rich, it's not yours, it's someone else's, someone who has less and needs it. So by what reasoning should you be entitled to say, it's my life and I'm entitled to choose whether to be an altruist or not? It's not your life, a servant does not get to choose. A slave doesn't get to choose whether he wants to obey his master or not. His life isn't his own, it belongs to the master. And similarly, under altruism, your wealth and your life belong to others, not to you. Now, they would make the claim that, they belong to others morally, but not legally, so you would have the choice to make them. But why do you have a choice? By what reasoning do you have a choice? Does a slave have a choice? Choice implies you are an autonomous being. You own your own life, no one can compel you to do anything, it's yours. Altruism says that's ridiculous, it's not yours. You're just a caretaker. You have to give it away to those who really own it. Why should you be entitled to choose how to live your life when you don't own your life? So the alternative to altruism is selfishness or rational self-interest or what do you call it, non-predatory rational self-interest. All right, how does, in what way, I mean, people immediately think, how can you be selfish? That selfishness is narcissism or that selfishness is being callous, selfishness is not caring about other people. To what extent do they really think that or to what extent, again, that is that a veneer and a cover for not taking responsibility? No, I think the misconception about selfishness is worse than the misconceptions about altruism. It's ingrained in the culture. Ask almost anybody, what do you associate with the concept of selfishness? And they'll tell you it's somebody who lies and cheats and steals, does whatever he feels like doing, has no moral constraints, acts in a way that disregards the rights of others. So the epitome, the embodiment of selfishness is Attila the Hun, Jack the Ripper, Bernie Madoff, all these people who reject moral principles, just do whatever they happen to feel like doing, climb over bodies and act to achieve there to fulfill their desire of the moment. That is what most people associate with selfishness. And it's a complete perversion. Selfishness is the exact opposite. People like Bernie Madoff were not, were not acting in their long-term interests. They were acting self-destructive, as you can see when ultimately he was caught and what happened to him. When you disregard moral principles and you say, I'm not gonna be honest, I'm not gonna be just, you are ultimately harming yourself because principles like honesty and justice and integrity have as their purpose to guide you in achieving your long-term values. When you reject those, when you reject moral principles and just act on the whim of the moment, you are not preserving your life, you're leaving yourself open to whatever you happen to stumble upon in reality. The ideal, the proper moral ideal of selfishness, of rational self-interest is that you understand that because your life is conditional, you can do things that hurt you and things that harm you. Not anything you decide to go after is in fact beneficial to you. You can decide to be a drug addict or a serial killer, alcoholic. Obviously those things are harmful to you regardless of what you may think. So there has to be some principle by which you determine what in fact is in my interest. And fundamentally the thing that's in your interest is to think, to engage your mind to look out at reality. That is the way we discover how to grow food, how to build shelters, how to make clothing, how to find vaccines for illnesses that threaten us. All of the things that human life depends on are the product of the rational thinking mind. That is the fundamental act of self-interest. And to the extent that people abandon it, to the extent that they don't want to go by reason, to the extent that they just go by whim, to the extent that you evade facts and evade reality, they are not acting selfishly, they are acting self-destructive. So why is it, why so many people, why is this so hard? Why is it so hard to convince them of this? Because it seems, once you get it, it seems so self-evident. I'm just trying to, we're just doing what's logical and rational and what's in our self-interest and everything else is self-destructive. Why be self-destructive? There's only one life. So what do you think makes this so hard? Well, unfortunately, most people do not sit down and decide independently, well, what should my moral values be? What is really right and wrong? Most people accept pretty much what they're taught from kindergarten on. They're taught it's wrong to be concerned with yourself. Don't pursue your own happiness, your own pleasure. If you want to be moral, think first of somebody else, think first of somebody who has less than you. So this is hammered into them over and over. Fundamentally by the philosophers who set a culture's moral terms and throughout history, at least for the past couple of thousand years since Christianity came on the scene, the dominant ethics endorsed by both religious and secular philosophers alike has been some form of self-sacrifice. The occasional advocates of egoism, even they generally got it wrong. People like Nietzsche is supposedly an egoist, but he too, he thought we have to divide the world into the rulers and the ruled, and if you want to be egoistic, you should indulge your emotions, indulge your whims, you should rule over other people. And again, that is the exact opposite of what I believe in, what the Einstein's philosophy of objectivism endorses. It's not rule other people or be ruled by other people. It's your life isn't, is your own. You have an absolute right to it, a moral right to it, and it's good to live in a society to cooperate with other people, but only if you trade with one another voluntarily to mutual advantage, we're both benefit and you don't sacrifice for others and others don't sacrifice for you. So the answer to your question is unfortunately that we have been bombarded with the idea of that ethics means self-sacrifice. Ethics means altruism and most people just accept it uncritically. And to what extent did these attitudes towards altruism and egoism affect, for example, the way people look at the producers? There's a lot of discussion about billionaires these days. How does morality shape people's attitude towards the wealthiest? Well, to the extent that you really accept altruism, you resent the wealthy because they have something you don't. The, you attack the wealthy, you say every billion dollars they make is taken out of my pocket somehow. They got rich by making me poor. Why don't they give more of it away? The whole, again, the whole political structure, the whole welfare state is based on draining the haves in order to give to the supposed have nots. So anytime there's some issue, we need more money for healthcare, we need more money for childcare, whatever. The answer is, well, the rich are not paying their fair share. We have to tax the rich more. So altruism colors people's attitude toward the rich by generating a resentment towards them because they are taking away from me. Somehow their money earned is achieved by impoverishing me, which is a terrible distortion. And the attitude towards selfishness, I think also colors this because if they think selfishness equals lying, cheating, stealing, and a businessman obviously selfish that making money for themselves, they associate that making money with lying, stealing, and cheating and that just exacerbates it all. Yes, exactly. That's this package deal that people I have unfortunately been deceived into accepting that they're automatically associate selfishness with predatory behavior. And if you look at some dictionaries, for example, they'll define selfish as a concern for your life, for your benefit at the expense of others. This is the, to them an essential part of the definition. So they'll say, yes, there's only two choices. Either you sacrifice yourself to others and help the have nots or you become a predator and sacrifice them to you like a tiller the hunt. Those are the two choices people have been taught and they don't fully recognize. I mean, they partially do, but not fully and not explicitly. They don't recognize the phenomenon of a self-responsible self-respecting, self-created individual. It's someone who achieves his values by his own efforts without taking it from others. What he achieves success, not at the expense of others but by his own mind and his own work. That they don't get that phenomenon. And it seems to me that they, not only is the welfare state the consequence of altruism but so is the regulatory state then. So if we don't trust these guys because they're all corrupt, we need to watch over them. We need to instill somebody who works for the public good to make sure that their self-interest is channeled in productive directions. Yes, altruism leads simultaneously to welfare state and a regulatory state because they're based on the same premise. This metaphysical idea of the idea that altruism has of human nature. Altruism says man is by nature, helpless, dependent. We have to create a system whereby people are saved from their own helplessness, from their own incompetence. And because of that, the corollary is obviously if people need to be told, they need to be given food and shelter and clothing and tuition and healthcare, then they need to be told what to do with whatever they're being given. If you have to feed somebody, then you have to tell, well, here's the things you can eat and here's the things you can't eat. I tell this story often and I have it in the book where, which kind of illustrates this idea. In New York City, they have a shelter, a food, what is it called? A, God, not a food shelter. A soup kitchen. A kitchen, food kitchen, there's a word for it. A soup kitchen. Soup kitchen. Thank you. They have a soup kitchen in the bowery for all these poor homeless people that come by to get meals every day. And somebody made a donation to the soup kitchen, a generous donation, gave a whole bunch of fried chicken which supposedly people would regard as a treat. And the caretakers of the soup kitchen threw it away. Why? Because it contained trans fat, which is really not that healthy for you. So you've got supposed to these people who are starving on the streets, guy gives them all these chicken which can feed them for God knows how many days and they throw it out because no, we know what's best for them. They don't understand that it's bad for them to eat the fried chicken. This is the altruistic premise is that you are helpless and you have to be taken care of by your fellow man. And the political implementation of that is you have to be taken care of by the state. The state has to tell you what is best for you. We cannot rely on you. We have to do it for you by force. So we've got all of these agencies, you know, the FTC and the SEC and the FCC. All of these are based on the idea that we're going to tell people what is good for them because they can't figure it out for themselves. Yeah, so one of the most explicit ways in which this idea of the tyranny of need comes up is are you familiar with this intersectionality? Yeah, a little bit, yeah. In this cultural thing where you get a score based on how needy you are supposedly and, you know, you have a hierarchy of need where, you know, you get added scores. But it seems like the left is obsessed with this idea of need and it's so much of both a cultural and an economic, cultural and economic agenda is driven by this idea of who is the neediest. Yes, and need, let's be clear on what need means according to altruism. When altruism says you have more money than your neighbor, you have to help him out. Well, what about your needs? Why are your neighbor's needs take precedence over yours? There's no way to measure the extent of the need because there's only one definition that altruism has of need and that is need is something that requires someone else's sacrifice to fulfill. So if you're able to help yourself, you're an ambitious person, you work hard, you put yourself through college, you have part-time job, you give up partying, you give up all these going to movies and so forth, you dedicate yourself to some goal and you succeed, you become whatever a professional doctor, lawyer, engineer, whatever, you have not been fulfilling your needs. You've been selfish, you've been just achieving your own happiness. That's not a need that altruism cares about. Altruism cares about a need that you can't fulfill for yourself, the need that you've abdicated self-responsibility and you say, I don't have money for X, somebody else has to provide it for me, then you have a need suddenly. Then altruism comes in and the welfare state comes in and says, we will provide for you. So, and need, the more the need is, which means the more sacrifice required to fulfill it, the more urgent it becomes and the more the state acts in order to fulfill it. The, according to altruism, remember, it's not just love thy neighbor, it's love thy enemy. Love people who hate you, love people who want to harm you. The greater the sacrifice on your part, the greater is the demand that altruism makes on you. The greater altruism says you must do it because it means so much suffering for you. And if you talk about things like this intersectionality, you talk about the, one of the things that really strikes me as so terribly unjust is what's happening now in athletics, where you have transgender athletes competing in sports, where you have a transgender woman, used to be a male, became a woman, competing in women's sports, in women's swimming, women's gymnastics, women's fencing, and they obviously have a clear physical advantage. It's the whole purpose behind creating separate athletic forums for men and women in the first place, yet that is ignored. What about the needs of all the athletes who spent years and years perfecting their skills, trying to become champions, becoming a 10th of a second better? What about their needs, which are being crushed by somebody who has clear physical advantages that they're not entitled to in that competition but because they're transgender, they're allowed to compete and it's their needs that are paramount. Why are the needs of this transgender athlete more important than the needs of all those other athletes who've worked all their lives to achieve what is now being taken away from them? And it's because it requires a greater sacrifice on their part to give up the goal that they deserve in favor of giving it to someone who does not deserve it. That's what altruism says, give up sacrifice earned for the unearned, sacrifice the rational to the irrational. That is the essence of altruism. So in our political, in the political world right now, are there any particular issues that you see out there where you can see altruism being the dominant force in shaping the debate in the discussion? Yeah, several things. One in particular is the whole diversity movement, particularly when it comes to race where it used to be, it started with this idea of affirmative action where we're going to eliminate or reduce the impact that merit and qualifications have on you're getting a job or you're getting admitted to college. Instead, we're going to go by your right hand we're going to go by your race or your gender and say, you supposedly have been oppressed, you need this job more than somebody else, he may be more qualified, but if you are the correct race or gender, you aren't then entitled to it. And it's mushroomed, it's grown so much worse than it started as affirmative action. Now, book publishers make sure that they have a certain quota of minority authors. Hollywood now is giving Oscars to movies only that comply with diversity guidelines and have a certain number of minority actors or costume designers or editors or whatever. So the whole idea, this collective idea of race based on the altruist idea that they need it and therefore their needs have to take precedence over whatever somebody else might deserve. This has infected our culture, it's infected in education, in business, in art, and it's really, it's terribly unjust. So that's one example, I could give you others. Why do you think the right has such a hard time fighting this? Oh, well, the right is not less altruistic than the left. The left is, in a way, the left is in one respect more consistently altruistic, but in another respect, less so. The left, particularly when it comes to economic issues, is very much in favor of a mushrooming welfare state. It wants the government to intervene in the economy. It doesn't want capitalism to go on unrestricted. It wants to make sure that the needy are provided for, so we have minimum wage laws, we have hiring laws, et cetera. The conservatives or the right used to be conservatives used to resist this encroachment on the free market. The right has basically disappeared now because of Trump, which is a different discussion, maybe for another show, or maybe everyone's sick of it. I think I am. I am too. They used to at least pay lip service to the free market, but they resorted to altruism in more intellectual issues so that they're in favor of censorship. They're against allowing sexually explicit material to be sold. They don't want to allow people the right to decide to themselves whether to buy it. They don't want to have prostitution legalized. They don't want drugs legalized. So this is the regulatory premise of altruism. They're telling people, we know what's best for you in the same way that the left says, we know what's best for you. Economically, the right says, we know what's best for you intellectually. So altruism is a force on both ends of the spectrum, at least when there used to be two ends of the spectrum. The way to fight it, you have to reject the philosophy of altruism and that most people are so unwilling to do that. It's not as though they have no means of reading about what it would entail. I mean, Ayn Rand sells hundreds of thousands of copies a year of her work. No one is more explicit and detailed in their arguments than she is. They can read and see, do you agree with why altruism is such a vicious philosophy? And do you agree that there's a moral alternative, the one that will liberate you and allow you to not only live your life for yourself, but to live it guilt-free, to live it with moral pride. So they're able to do that, but they're not independent enough to take that stand because it will place them in opposition to their neighbors and their teachers and their pastors. So it's a very tough road we have here. Yeah, I mean, it goes back to that question of why is this so hard? It is so ingrained, altruism is so ingrained in the culture. And people have this ability to compartmentalize because they can live lives that are somewhat self-interested, at least in certain aspects of their lives. And then they're still dedicated to altruism when it comes to politics or things like that. Yes, but that's inevitable because it's not possible for someone to consistently practice altruism. So what happens is people accept intellectually, they accept the premise of altruism, they regard Mother Teresa as the moral ideal and they don't live up to it. They know they're not gonna live up to it, but they're chained, they feel guilty. They Bill Gates, for example, who created this tremendous company which changed people's lives. Of course, the world made their lives better, made their lives easier. He doesn't get moral credit for that. What people praise him for is the philanthropy he engaged in after he had built his corporation and left it. Now, so that means that even people who do achieve a certain measure of self-interest and they don't live their lives like Mother Teresa, they live normal lives and they have professions and they have nice houses and they have nice cars and they try to make money. They still feel guilty at the very least. They do not take moral pride in their achievements and they're susceptible to every claim that comes down the pike for their energies and their time and their money in order to help those in need. And the easiest victimizers, the most prevalent victimizers of this philosophy is the welfare state because people accept the idea, yeah, I have to be taxed to help the poor. I have to be taxed to help the homeless. I have to be taxed to help the uninsured. And they don't say, you know, I earned this money. I earned it honestly. I didn't take it from somebody else. It's my money. Why should the government have a right to take it from me simply because someone has less of it than I do? They are unwilling to say that and therefore they remain serfs to the welfare altruistic system. What extended altruism encourage your envy? How's envy and altruism connected? I know you talk about this towards the end of the book. Yeah. If you think about what real hardcore envy is, and we've seen people who not just wish they had as much money as their neighbor, wish they had as big a house as their neighbor, but take some secret pleasure in their neighbor's misfortune. Neighbor's got a big house and suddenly he faces some reversals and can't afford his mortgage and has to be evicted. They take pleasure in that. Or at work, it's not that they admire some worker who seems to have more abilities than they do, but they resent the guy who's a better, more competent worker. And if he does something wrong or he happens to get fired, they take the secret envious pleasure in it. So that is at root what altruism, excuse me, that is what altruism encourages. Altruism does not ultimately want you to sacrifice because that actually will help others. Because if it does, then they're being selfish. Why should they value getting money from you but you shouldn't value keeping the money for yourself? What altruism values is the sacrifice itself. Give it away, be willing to suffer for the sake of someone else. Whether it actually helps someone else or not is irrelevant to the real hardcore altruism. What's relevant is that you have given it away, you have suffered, you have accepted the idea that you are a servant to someone else. That's what matters to altruism. So we talked a little bit about how altruism affects the domestic policy. There's a lot of fond policy in the news today with what's going on in Ukraine and Russia. So let's talk a little bit about that. I know people are interested in that. I think a lot of people think that Putin is self-interested. Why isn't he? Yeah, so when you ask, what does it mean to say you want to achieve a nation's self-interest? You're promoting the national interest. What actually is in a nation's interest? And to answer that, you first have to determine, well, what is in an individual's interest? Because there's no such thing as the interest of some grouping of people that transcends or contradicts the interests of the people who make that up. If you ask what is in a society's genuine interest, that means what is in the interest of the individuals who make up that society? And then as a sum, you can say there's a certain interest that society has in doing X. And if you think, as we've talked about individually, an individual's self-interest consists in using his mind to live his life, in using his mind to see reality, not evade to be honest and productive and self-respecting and to be responsible for his own life and his own happiness. That is what's in his interest. Now, if you extend that politically, there's one thing and one thing only that is required politically in order for this each individual to be able to pursue his self-interest and that is freedom. He's got to be free from force. He's got to be free from coercion so that whatever he chooses and whatever he judges to be in his interest as a goal to pursue, he'd be allowed to go after it. A nation's interest consists in protecting and preserving the freedom of its citizens. That is what a nation's self-interest consists. So now you ask, what about a dictatorship? Doesn't a dictatorship also pursue its self-interest? And the answer is no, it doesn't pursue its self-interest any more than Bernie Madoff or Attila Lohan pursues his individual self-interest. In a dictatorship, the armies, the military in a dictatorship have the purpose of keeping the people in thrall, of keeping them in sleep. As against the military in a free country which has no function at all unless the people's freedom is threatened, then it comes in and repels the aggression and their freedom return to their state of freedom. In a dictatorship, that freedom is gone. In a dictatorship, the dictator is the perpetual aggressor against the rights of all the citizens of that country. And the military and all the forces of government serve as a betters. They serve as the means of enforcing the dictator's aggression. So any act taken by a dictator is taken at the expense of his citizens freedom. The way to genuinely achieve the self-interest of the people in a dictatorship is to get rid of the dictator. Get rid of him, get rid of the oppression, leave people then free to live their own lives. Putin is a killer. Putin is a brute. He has no concept and no concern for the rights or the interests of his individual citizens. He wants power. He wants to control whatever he's able to control. He wants to use force to whatever extent he can, both within his country and wherever possible, outside his country, as he's done often and now it's Ukraine. Tomorrow, who knows what it'll be, some other NATO country. Anything that Putin does is self-destructive. It's destructive of the interests and the rights of his people and anything done to oppose Putin, to negate Putin, to reduce his aggression is to that extent, serving the interests of his people. Are you surprised at the extent of the negative response to Putin after the invasion of Ukraine? I kind of am. I'm kind of pleasantly surprised that virtually everyone has condemned him, let's say, except for some of the Trump people, but virtually everyone has condemned him. And it's a pleasant surprise. I'm not optimistic about the outcome. I'm not optimistic about Ukraine's future. I think unfortunately, it looks as though Russia will take over and change the government of Ukraine, which is all they want. They want a public government there so that Putin can control. And I think he'll do that. And then maybe most of the Russian forces will leave and they'll have a few months of diplomatic negotiation and the West will slap him on the wrist and say, okay, I hope you've learned your lesson. Hope you won't do this again. So I'm not optimistic. And maybe I'm a little bit cynical. I'm not optimistic about what will happen. Diplomacy is not the way to deal with people like Putin. Absolutely. What do you think is the reason why they're responding relatively positively in the culture in which we live? Well, I think a lot of it is because Ukraine is the underdog here. There's no semblance of any justification that Putin is offering for his military invasion. So you've got this big bear praying on this poor, helpless country. Now, people are sympathetic to the Ukraine. They're also the left, which in the past used to be sympathetic to Russia, to the Soviet Union. Now it's ostracized Russia in no small part because Trump embraced or praised Russia and Putin. So the left has a lot of reasons to be against Russia. So Russia has no friends, virtually no friends. And it's good that people are actually expressing moral outrage which is to me the primary of primary importance. And they're helping Ukraine, they're sending arms. I don't think that they're sending the amount of arms that they could to Ukraine. I think Ukraine could be much better armed if the West were willing to do it. And I think it should be willing to do it. But nonetheless, they're doing things and it's a pleasant reaction, a little bit surprising. Yeah, I mean, it's a little late to be supplying arms in the middle of this. It's hard for them to get there. You can't train anybody on them. You know, this should have been done in the months leading up to this, now it's a little... Yeah, that's the whole, that's the Achilles heel of Western international politics is that there's this supernatural faith in diplomacy. We have to engage in diplomacy, force is the last resort. So let's keep talking. And then when finally Putin ignores it all and invades, there's, okay, well, maybe it's too late to send a lot of arms, let's do something. So this idea that we can negotiate with aggressors is what undermines the West and what has led the West, including particularly the United States to act so self-destructively in foreign policy for the last 50 years. And what do you think, how does altruism connect to that? What is diplomacy and altruism? How they connected? I'm sure they are. Well, altruism says don't assert your values. Don't think you're right. Have sympathy for the other guy. Meet him halfway. Don't insist on having your own way. How do you know you're right and he's wrong? Don't be so sure. All of this is the, foundation of the diplomacy that the West engages in all the time in dealing with aggression. If you wanted to deal properly with aggression and aggression means something that actually physically threatens you, something that threatens you and your freedom, the freedom of the people in your country. Force is not a last resort. Force is often the first resort if there's a genuine threat. It may be too late to use force if you wait till it's a last resort. When Europe was dealing with Hitler in the 1930s, they kept trying to engage in diplomacy, trying to appease them. Well, let's offer him Czechoslovakia and then maybe he'll be satisfied and we'll all be happy. And they learned too late that force is the only way to deal with a tyrant like Hitler. Eventually the West was able to defeat him but it cost many, many lives and a lot of destruction because they were on the premise of altruism that there's always a middle ground. Don't be self-assertive. You don't know whether you can't be sure that you're right. So we have to accommodate everyone. We have to, there are no friends and enemies. We have to somehow compromise. And if we do, we'll come to some mutually beneficial agreement and that does not work. I mean, one of the interviews Iron Man was asked about an alternative terminology for selfishness and she used self-esteem. So if selfishness is self-esteem, then if you're not being selfish, you lack self-esteem and that's exactly what the West lacks. It has no self-esteem when it approaches font policy. Yes, altruism means give up the self. Yes. Give up self-esteem, give up self-respect, give up any value. That's a value to you. That means giving up part of yourself. And that's why once altruism achieves its full goal, there's a zero. There's nothing left of you. Altruism ends when everybody has been drained for the sake of everybody else. So you wrote a lot about the Cold War and US font policy at the time in the Soviet Union and nuclear weapons. How do you see that arc now with Russia? It seems like we're returning to a lot of the premises of the Cold War. How do you see that having evolved in the world of US font policy? Well, I think that starting basically from the end of World War II, the United States has been engaged in a number of military conflicts, none of which it emerged victorious from. It does not know how to engage in a war for the purpose of victory. Now, sometimes we've engaged in conflicts that we shouldn't have been involved in in the first place. That is, we've engaged in conflicts where there was no demonstrable threat to the United States. So for example, Vietnam, I think was an example of that. We were fighting communism, which it's a good thing to fight communism, but not with military American troops in a country thousands of miles away that has no bearing on our interests. We lost that war. We basically lost the Korean War earlier than that. And all of these skirmishes and more than skirmishes that we've engaged in Lebanon, Somalia, all of those were the embarrassing losses because of altruism. They were all predicated on this refusal to assert America's self-interest. That is, once we determine objectively that there is a threat to our interests and the threat to our interests means only one thing. It means a threat to the freedom of Americans, not to the freedom of some country across the globe. That's not our concern necessarily, but if it threatens us, then we have to act decisively without restraint to repel that threat. So the clearest example of a failure on our part, that is the most recent example and the clearest is Afghanistan. Because here you had, you had 9-11, which was certainly an attack on the United States, certainly was created. It created a future threat to our freedom. We were therefore entitled to whatever is necessary to repel that threat. Now, I think we should have even before 9-11 gone after the main enemy, which I think is Iran, but leaving that aside, you had al-Qaeda orchestrating this assault on the United States on 9-11, yet al-Qaeda, which was sheltered and financed and supported and protected by the Taliban government in Afghanistan. So we decided, let's remove the Taliban government and get rid of them and get rid of al-Qaeda, which is a perfectly legitimate goal and which should have been achieved quickly in a matter of weeks or months. We went there, we actually deposed the Taliban government, but that's it. We let them escape, they went into Pakistan. We didn't pursue them because after all, Pakistan has rights. Who are we to say we have the right to go after the killers of American people? So we kind of did a half-assed project of trying to fight in Afghanistan. And ultimately, we were unwilling to do the following. We should have simply said, we're overthrown the Taliban government, we're getting rid of all of the members of that government. We're destroying al-Qaeda and we're issuing the following statement. Whichever government replaces the Taliban government, if it does anything to abet any future enemies of the United States, al-Qaeda or otherwise, we will come in and engage in bombing your cities again. That's what we had to do. Then we could leave. We could probably leave. I don't know if we would have to have some presence there or not to ensure that the government did not get taken over by corrupt forces, I mean, like the Taliban, I don't know. But we certainly should have issued that ultimatum. And then we would have achieved the protection of America's freedom. Instead, we have the really the perverse al-Qaeda of being there for 20 years, thousands of people of Americans killed, billions of dollars spent for what? For zero, zero, because it's exactly now the same as it was 20 years ago. The Taliban government is in power, they're controlling the country, they're gonna protect al-Qaeda. We are exactly as vulnerable now as we were 20 years ago. So this whole adventure was senseless. Why was it senseless? Because of altruism, because we weren't allowed, we didn't have the moral fortitude, the moral self-assuredness to say we have rights, they're being threatened. We are entitled to remove that by whatever force is necessary, period. We don't have to worry about casualties by civilians. We'll try to minimize them to whatever extent possible, but whatever casualties occur are the responsibility of the aggressor. They're 100% the responsibility of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And we're going to do whatever is needed to eliminate that threat. We didn't do that because we said, well, there's always a compromise, we don't wanna seem self-assertive, we don't wanna seem selfish, we don't wanna seem like a bully. That is all altruism and we will never, be able to protect the United States if we keep embracing altruism in our foreign policy. And part of that was also these poor Afghans, we now have to pour billions and trillions of dollars into them, try to build up their economy, bring democracy to Afghanistan because they are needy. And it goes back to the issue of need. We can't actually assert ourselves because they're the virtuous, they're the ones who need stuff. We're supposed to sacrifice. Yes, we felt guilty and many of the armed forces there in Afghanistan became social workers. They rebuilt the soccer fields and they're supposed to be armed with weapons to protect us against killers and instead they're building soccer fields for them. Or they were just sacrificed, their lives were just sacrificed for the cause of whatever. Altruism pervades everything. It's a terrible thing, people need to understand the tremendous negative influence, the destructive influence that altruism has across the board. So we've got a bunch of questions. So let's turn to the super chat questions. Okay, Dave says, the purpose of altruism is to create inversions under normal circumstances, someone like Putin would be in a jail and instead he's running the place. Yeah, altruism is a perversion, that's true. Altruism elevates the least worthy and crushes the worthy because that's what altruism means. It means sacrifice the better for the worse, sacrifice the good for the bad, sacrifice, as I said, the rational to the irrational. So it brings out the worst in people. Now, you could argue that Putin is different from Mother Teresa, but the point is they're both proponents of altruism. They both think people need to sacrifice. Putin says the Russian people have to sacrifice for his goal of creating this new prestigious state and rebuilding the Russian or Soviet empire. People have to be sacrificed. They have to be suppressed. They have to be put in jail, they have to be killed. Now they are arresting people who speak out against his invasion. Altruism says sacrifice, if you establish an obscure enough goal and assert some need, any means are justifiable in order to achieve it. And Putin's goal is the glory of Russia. Therefore, everybody is sacrificeable, Russians and Ukrainians alike. And what's interesting is I think Putin looks about as miserable as Mother Teresa was. They both have that same miserable. But most politicians do, most politicians look like, they look like the Marvel character. Well, I mean, just to make anybody, any dictator has to live every minute under terror because why wouldn't he wonder, is this guy gonna try to assassinate me? He surrounded himself with brutes. These are not capitalist loving people who are advocates of freedom, who are in his government. They're all crooks, they're all criminals. So why wouldn't he worry every minute? Is this guy gonna say, is this the guy who's poisoning my food? So he has to be living in constant anxiety. So Liam, thank you. That's very generous of you. A little disagreement. He says, no one attacks selfishness because they think it's a defense of Attila and Bernie Madoff. They think selfishness is narcissism, a society of selfish individuals is one of callousness and no empathy, not the selfish people and necessarily violent and predatory. But what does no concern for others mean? Let's say it's true that selfishness is associated with emotionalism. So let's say the typical playboy type, the hedonist. People would regard him as selfish and you could say, well, the hedonist is harming only himself, not others. But don't people condemn the rich for not paying their fair share? Don't they say Bill Gates is being selfish because he doesn't pay enough taxes? Warren Buffett is selfish, he doesn't pay enough taxes. What does that mean? It means that the money that Bill Gates or Warren Buffett has earned is coming at the expense of all those people in society who have less than he does and who should receive more of it, they're entitled to it, if only the government would take more taxes away from these selfish people. The term selfishness is applied to anybody who achieves something wrongly, who achieves it by whim, achieves it by force because they ultimately think you do get at the expense of others, even the hedonist, the playboy, he's got money. Why isn't he sharing his money? Why is he spending it on himself? He's too, quote, narcissistic. So it always comes down to selfishness means you care more about yourself than about others. You're not willing to sacrifice yourself for the sake of others. Adam asks, since you're interested in issues of nuclear deterrence, what guarantees did Ukraine get in trade for giving up all their nuclear weapons? Or did they give up their nukes just to be perceived as good? Yeah, that was a terrible tragedy in retrospect, certainly. The Ukraine had, I don't know how many thousands of nuclear missiles and when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Ukraine was, quote, persuaded to not be, not to give up the nuclear weapons, but to give them to Russia. It's not giving it up. It's not like they destroyed them or gave them to the United States. They gave them to Russia. So Russia became better armed because of the diplomatic efforts largely of the United States. Now, if that's not altruism, I don't know what is. And I think the U.S. at the time told Ukraine, don't worry, we'll protect you. But, you know, how can you rely on that, unfortunately? Liam asks, do you think most people today have never experienced happiness so they have no concept of what they're missing? No, I don't think that's true. I think people experience degrees of happiness. Maybe most people haven't experienced ultimate happiness, but I think most people have experienced it to one degree or another. They know what it is, and they're happy to be happy. They just feel guilty about it when they think they have more and someone else has less. You know, I should, can I make this, drive this? So I have a quote from one guy in my book. This guy's name is Zelkowinski. He was a real estate magnate, multimillionaire, decided at one point later in life, he wasn't being an altruist and he decided to give away almost all his money. His family was very upset, his wife was upset. He decided, give away his money, that's not enough. He decided, what else can I do? I'm gonna give away my kidney. I have two kidneys after I'm gonna give one away. Some stranger just out of altruistic self-sacrifice. And his wife pleaded with him not to do it. He wasn't a well man. He might get sick and need his other kidney. His kids might need a kidney donation. Who knows, he said, no, I'll give it away. And even then he wasn't satisfied. He said, you know, I have other organs. I have a heart and a liver. It could make many people live. I could give life. I'm only one person. If I give away all my organs, I could help 10 people live. And here's, let me quote a statement from you. Because this really, he took it seriously. Not many people do, but this is what the road leads to. He said, quote, no one should have a vacation home until everyone has a place to live. No one should have a second car until everyone has one. And no one should have two kidneys until everyone has one. That's what altruism demands of us. And it's, of course, an endless progression because even if everybody had a car, they still would complain about you having two cars. So it's- Bigger car. How about, you can't have a bigger car, you got a smaller car. Yep. Let's see. Liam asks, they claimed implementing a mixed economy would shackle the selfish producers and help the common man. But in reality, was there real motivation to lock wealth at the top, that is to benefit the people at the top. Everything advocated for by altruists is an inversion. I'm not clear on why you think this would, this is done to benefit the people at the top. Why would that be a motivation? In a sense that the cronies want more regulation because it prevents competition. Right? Well, that's true. When you have a mixed economy, then you're going to get people calling from out of the rocks, from under the rocks, and trying to exploit the system and trying to get the government to give them special favors and special advantages. That's definitely true. But then the answer is not more altruism, the answer is get rid of altruism. Altruism is what justifies the controls on businessmen. It's what justifies shackling people and regulating them in order to help quote the common man, unquote. If you leave them alone, let the free market operate and let everyone rise or fall according to his own abilities. But I don't think the motive of regulation is to enshrine the people at the top. It happens because they take advantage of the premise behind the regulatory state. But then I don't think that was the motive. The motive was to shackle the people. Yeah, I mean, that's an argument that some conservatives and many libertarians make about, it's all driven by economic incentives. They're Marxists in that sense. It's all driven by economics and the whole welfare state and the regulatory state are really driven by philosophy or ethics and by economic incentives and economic motivations. Yeah, it's the same people. This is like the public choice school. This is the idea that everyone is acting for his own interests so that people argue. There's no such thing as altruism. Even Mother Teresa was acting selfishly because she did what she wanted to do. Well, doing what you wanna do is not equivalent to acting in your self-interest. It's not equivalent to holding your life as your proper moral standard. Doing whatever you feel like. Everybody does whatever he feels like as long as he's not, doesn't have a gun to his head. But that doesn't mean everybody is there for selfish. Some people are selfish and some people are not. Michael, what makes me relatively optimistic is that altruism only goes so deep. Once nations become rich, once corporations become rich, the masses will only impoverish themselves to a point. That's why communism never took hold in a single enlightened nation. That's a very nice optimistic attitude. I don't think it's true. I don't think it's true that you can rely on people accepting altruism only up to a certain point. Why? If you're willing to accept being forced to pay for your neighbor's healthcare or your neighbor's mortgage because he has less than you do and you're altruistic, you're going to be systematically impoverished. You're going to get to a point where there's nothing left. Now you can argue, well, people will still wanna live. So if it gets to the point where they're actually gonna die under altruism, they're gonna rebel. But they're gonna rebel, but they're not going to rebel philosophically. Maybe they'll rebel just blindly and throw off their masters and then be ready and write for their next masters who will have a new name. So they overthrow communism and they accept fascism, let's say. So they have the different rulers, but the same philosophy, the same idea that the individual has to sacrifice for the state. So I think even if people do rebel when they get past the breaking point and they can't take it anymore, that does not mean that they replace the philosophy of their rulers, the philosophy of altruism, they replace it with selfishness. They won't, unless they're intellectually armed. That's what we need to give them. Chris says, my mother was refugee from Cambodia. Wondering how this discussion relates to the whole tragedy of the Khmer Rouge. Oh, well, the tragedy there is the same as any totalitarian state that were really terrible happened in Cambodia, happened in China, happened in Russia. The state comes in and says the individual has to be sacrificed for the collective. We're going to enforce the sacrifices. We're going to nationalize the industries. We're going to collectivize the farms. We're going to create a quote new man so that everybody will act selflessly for the sake of the quote common good, for the sake of the state. That's what they come in and that's what they did in Cambodia. They try to eliminate anybody with some value, anybody with an education, with a job, with a skill. They want you to reduce everybody to non-entities. So millions were killed. And but that happens under, unfortunately, that's what happens under totalitarian dictatorships, which is the ultimate resting place of altruism. Altruism has to lead if it's continued. If it's not rejected, altruism has to lead politically to totalitarianism because that's the full embodiment of the sacrifice of the individual sacrificing to the collective. So Michael asks, are these criminal justice reforms that are letting a lot of people out of prisons, motivated by altruism or nihilism on an attempt to further enhance individual rights and due process? Oh, please. It's the first. It's done out of altruism. It's done because we've got these people who are put on trial, accused of crimes, and supposedly don't have enough money for bail. So we have to sympathize with them. We have to say, well, we can't keep them in jail just because they're accused of committing a crime and they have no money for bail. What about their needs? And of course, we ignore the needs of all the innocent people in society that they then can victimize once they're let out of jail. That doesn't matter. Those aren't needs. Those are selfish concerns those people have. We wanna care about needs and needs means the needs of people who are criminals or accused criminals and can't take care of themselves. We have to do it regardless of how much it happens to harm innocent people. It's strictly altruism. So what do you think the relationship is between altruism and nihilism? Well, I haven't thought much about that. Except to this extent. Altruism, remember, means elevating sacrifices of virtue. And as I said, the goal of altruism, and when I say altruism, I mean the real, the hardcore theorists, the pushers of altruism, not the more innocent users of altruism. So the theorists and the people like Comte who originated the term and really advocated for it, they understand that the goal of altruism is sacrifice, not for some supposed benefit it confers on others. That's irrelevant. It's sacrifice for its own sake. It means sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, which means destruction for the sake of destruction. It's, if there's some value that you have, give it away, give it up, renounce it. That's an end in itself. So that is very close to nihilism. There's more to be said about it, but I haven't thought further about it. Let's see. Oh, I put the link, the Amazon link for the book in the description of the video. I've also put it here in the chat. So make sure it's on Amazon. It's on Kindle and on paperback. Any plans to do an audio book? I'm hoping that the Institute might do that. They're gonna think about that. They wanna try to get this first phase going. You might tell people though, that if they're interested in more material by me, I have a lot of talks and other writings that can go to my website, which is peterschwartz.com. Peterschwartz.com, you can also follow Peter on Twitter at peterschwartz, I think. Something like that. Something like that. So just look, Peter Schwartz. Oh, I'll tell you what it is. I have to look that up. I'll tell you in one second what it is. It is on Twitter, it's at P. Schwartz IDS. IDS? At P. Schwartz IDS. That was in defensive selfishness, the original title. And on Facebook, it's the slash Peter Schwartz IDS. Peter Schwartz IDS. So follow Peter, both on Twitter and on Facebook. Oh, we got still a lot of questions. Okay, Dave, do you think New York City will collapse? Have you left? You mean it will collapse because I've left? That would be, that would be. No, I left New York City in 1990. 1990, moved to Connecticut. Now we're living in Florida. So I was very disenchanted with New York at the time. It was a very unpleasant place to live in. It's come back since then. It's very hard to predict the fate of a city, a specific city based on philosophy. It's so many variables as to what influence the philosophy has and what, how people apply it. You can generally predict history by saying if the trend continues and people do not repudiate altruism in favor of egoism, rational egoism, then eventually society will collapse. But you can't put any kind of timetable on it. And you certainly can't pinpoint a particular city. So I like New York City. I wish it well. Answer is about New York City's future. I don't know. Are the intellectual activists, your articles on intellectual activists available anyway? Yes, they're available actually. All the back issues are available at the Ayn Rand Institute's e-store. You have that link somewhere, right? Off the top of your head. Oh, the top of my head, no. Yes. But there is an e-store. Just look, Ayn Rand Institute e-store. It's, I think it's changed its name now. I don't think it's even an e-store anymore. Oh, really? That's news to me. Nobody tells me these things. Oh, nobody tells me anything. I'm supposed to know. Okay, so the URL is e-store.Ayn Rand.org. e-store.Ayn Rand.org. Yeah, and just search for the intellectual activists once you get there. Yeah, and you'll find it there. Good. Michael, I ask, will the internet break the university stronghold on the intellect? Oh, I've heard that said. I very much doubt that because it's not as though on the one hand, the universities are a hotbed of unreason and altruism. And on the other hand, the internet is a hotbed of reason and egoism and individualism. So, you know, they're both hotbeds of the same thing. Will it undercut the influence of the universities? I don't know. You need education. You need a format for education. So Twitter and Facebook will not replace the universities. That's certain. People need to learn basic ideas and they usually learn it from high school and college. Now you can take courses on the internet. So it's true that it's possible that if it grew enough, you could have an establishment of online universities replacing on campus universities. So it would just be a different form of university. That's possible. But really the crucial issue is what they're teaching, not the form in which the structure takes place. So our goal has to be let's promote, let's promulgate the ideas of reason and egoism and individualism and individual rights. Then whether it's on the internet or in the classrooms will prevail. Yeah, I mean, the one good thing about the internet is we have a voice on the internet, which we don't have on universities. Colleen, thank you. That's very generous. Really appreciate the support. Let's see. Ali asks, what do you think about the Iraq war? A lot of things. Yeah. Now, first of all, let me say what I disagree with. I disagree with most of the objections to the Iraq war. We had every right to go into Iraq and overthrow Hussain. He was a dictator. He had threatened the United States before. We went to war with him before, years earlier over Kuwait. So we have a right to overthrow a dictator if we decide it's in our interest. I don't think it was. I think it's marginal. It's certainly unjustifiable considering its neighbor is Iran, which is the source of Islamic totalitarianism, which is the main enemy, the physical threat we face today. So to argue that we were invading Iraq and leaving Iran alone is really bizarre. So in that respect, I think we shouldn't have gone in, but certainly two things. As I said, we had a right to go in. And secondly, if we do choose to go in, we have to win the war. That's another example of a half-assed war that we chose to get into, had no idea of how to emerge victorious from, accepted altruism, felt sympathetic to them, engaged in compromise and diplomacy, with the end result being that now Iraq is pretty much a satellite of Iran. That was the result of our efforts in overthrowing Kusay. So Michael asked, Peter, how did you discover Iran? Did you start out as a leftist? Did your lefty New York Jewish family end up disowning you when they found out that you started advocating selfishness and capitalism for a living? No, no, no. I grew up in New York. I grew up, actually, I grew up religious. So I wasn't, to the extent that you could classify my politics, it was liberalism. I was pretty much in favor, wasn't an outright socialist, I wasn't a leftist, but I was sympathetic to liberalism at the time. But I was religious. So if my family was going to disown me, it was because of my leaving religion. Not because of that, but they haven't disowned me. They didn't disown me. So what was the rest of the question? How did you discover Iran? Oh, how did I discover Iran? Just by chance, really, when I was about 17 or so, 16, 17, a neighbor, a friend of the family just happened to mention Atlas Shrugged and said something good about it. And I was in a bookstore and happened to come across it and decided to read it. So it was completely fortuitous. I'm indebted to this guy no longer alive. You would never have thought that he would have any sympathy for objectivism, but he made me stumble upon it. And I'm grateful to him for that. And then I went on to read the rest of Iran. Michael says, why don't thugs like Putin introspect a little and realize initiating force and enslaving populations only makes you live in constant paranoia and misery? Well, why don't non-thugs introspect and realize that altruism is ruining their lives? People need to choose to think. It's not just introspection that's an issue. They need to think of what does being happy require? What is a successful life entail? How do they achieve the goals? What's the role of the mind? What's the relationship between reason and emotion? All kinds of things people need to think about, all of which are entailed in the question what philosophy of life should I adopt? They don't. These killers like Putin, you could say are more distant from reality than the irrationally, you know, ivory tower philosophers, but I don't know if you could make a strong compelling case one way or the other. The point is, you're right, they do, they refuse to think, they refuse to exercise their mind because their way of life depends upon choosing to evade upon choosing to be dishonest and suspend their rational faculty. That is what leads to all of their ills, whether they're a Putin or a philosopher, a manual conch, whatever, suspending their rational faculty is what underlies all of their problems. Jeff, he asks, to what degree do you think altruism is attractive because it allows people to avoid having to determine their own values? So it's Lee. To some extent, yeah, I put it a little differently. It allows people not to take responsibility for their lives, it allows people to say whatever I am, it's not my fault. If I'm a failure at something, if I'm not happy, it's somebody else's fault and you can see across the culture, this philosophy of victimization is prevalent, people are taught, if something is wrong with your life, if you're poor, if you don't have a job, whatever, somebody's at fault. It's somebody else, it's the way society is structured. You have to restructure society, you have to make it fair. It's because the rich aren't paying their fair share. That's why you don't have a job, that's why you're miserable. So yes, people adopt altruism because it's a way of evading self-responsibility. That is the responsibility for living your life, which as you say, includes choosing and pursuing your values. Steven asks, any plans for a book on package deals? Yes, actually, yes. I'm considering it, yeah, well, I won't even tell you the title, I have a tentative title, but we'll leave you in suspense. I'm modestly planning, I wouldn't say I've got definite plans, but I have a lot of notes on it. I have a lot of thoughts on it. So once I'm finished with, still, I'm still trying to promote this book, The Attorney of Me. Did you hold it up to the camera, by the way? I only have the old version. Do you have the new one? I do, if I could get it. I can't see it, but now take it back, back, back, up. There we go, there you go. Yes, we can see it now. Turning to me, okay. Yeah, so we're working with a publicity agency. So I'm getting a number of interviews and I'm trying to get book reviews for it. So once all that has settled down, I will seriously consider writing that book. Feel free to, in six months, ask that question again, somehow, get it. Good. You can go to my website and put it there. I don't know if you can, if you can. Okay, so yeah, and I put the link to the, the link again is in the description below the video. It's also in the chat here, put it up a number of times. So go to Amazon, it's $6 on the Kindle and it's available also in paperback. Okay, let's see. Ed says, I finished too many of need today. I really enjoyed it. Now I will begin my study of it. Excellent, Ed, thank you. All right, Cook says, this is for Peter. Thank you for all of your amazing work over the years. My question for you is, what is the difference between you and Adam Smith? Actually, I think you answered that early on. Adam Smith tries to justify capitalism on altruistic grounds. Now, when I say altruism, this is not what he regarded as altruism. He thought altruism means benevolence. And if you function in a capitalist system, you open a store, you try to make money as much profit as you can, you do it by selling goods that other people value and that benefit their lives. So he sought as the moral justification for owning a store and making profit, the justification was you're making other people happy. And that's a mistake. You don't need to justify your opening the store. You don't need to justify pursuing your values by reference to the fact that you're helping other people. Now, it's true you are any person who creates any legitimate rational value is going to benefit others. As long as you're not on a desert island, you're dealing with other people, you're trading with them, you're hiring them or you work for them, you patronize their stores, you buy bread from them, you buy shoes. So all of that is an exchange of values, but that's not the justification. It's crucial to remember you are your own justification. You have a moral right to your life, not to live it in service to other people. Ed asks, I don't think there is a way to get people to see selfishness the way we do. We need to use the words rational self-interest in its place. Well, it's okay when I do that normally, when you're talking or even writing, you don't just use the words selfishness without elaboration. So in my book, in the subtitle, it's the alternative of rational, non-predatory self-interest. So it's true. You need to have a context for explaining what you mean because people have a wrong view of it, but that you still, you retain the word selfishness because that's the core of what you mean. You are defending selfishness. You're just explaining that what you mean by selfishness is not some distorted version of a predator, but somebody who lives by moral principles and is honest and productive. So that's fine. You can say rational self-interest, just like you say less a fair capitalism instead of just capitalism. Or any time, if you use their words that have a wrong meaning in our culture, which you're obligated to explain immediately upon using it like pragmatism, you say, I'm against pragmatism. Well, that doesn't, people will think, well, then you're some ivory tower floating abstraction guy. You don't believe in practicality. So you have to say it by pragmatic. I don't mean practical or use the term environmentalism. I'm against environmentalism. You don't say, well, you have to explain. I'm not against dirty water and dirty air, et cetera. So there are a number of words that need explanation, but you're still retaining the word. I'm retaining environmentalism as the philosophy that I am against. I'm retaining pragmatism as a certain method and a certain epistemology that I am against. And selfishness I'm retaining as a certain form of ethics that I am in favor. So Ed asks, people haven't been taught how to reason until that happens, objectivism will have a difficult time. How can that be fixed? Yeah, that's a good question because really our educational system is what teaches people the ideas, the right and wrong ideas that they adopt throughout life. And sadly, today's educational system not just teaches them the wrong ideas, but corrupts their whole method of thinking. They're not taught to use their mind properly. They're not taught what thinking is. Most people don't even know the difference between thinking and feeling. And it's true, the solution lies in the education system. It lies to a large extent in getting rid of government control over education and getting rid of public education having private, but that's not the whole solution. You still need a proper philosophy of education even if it were entirely private. So yes, education is the key to getting people to use their minds properly. And by the way, the Institute is doing that. The Institute is doing a lot to try to infiltrate, it's not the right word, to try to influence the whole process of education in terms of reaching teachers, in terms of reaching students while they're in school, whole number of things. Yes, that is crucial. Michael asked if Hitler was an altruist, why was he so attracted to Nietzsche and hierarchies? Whether Hitler himself was an altruist is not the real question. Hitler acted in a way that an altruist would. Hitler achieved his goals, he achieved influence, he persuaded people because he appealed to their altruist premises. That is, he told them, stop thinking of yourself, think of the greater glory of the Fatherland. You are nothing, the state is everything. Don't do what you think is right, do what the collective thinks, do what the Fuhrer tells you to do. So they had people who, his underlings would say, if the Fuhrer says two plus two equals five, that's what it is. And that's what altruism says. Now remember, when altruism tells you to sacrifice, it's not just your material wealth that you're supposed to give up, it's everything, including your intellectual values, your spiritual values, give up your mind. Don't have confidence that you know what's right when the state tells you otherwise, when the collective has needs, defer to that. So that's what Hitler did. Hitler said, I'm going to create a greater good for the Fatherland. And every individual has to be thrown into the concentration, into the gas chambers if it's necessary to achieve it because the individual life is nothing, the collective is everything, that's altruism. And let me elaborate on one thing. That's why I said, if it doesn't matter whether Hitler was a devout altruist or not, whether Hitler secretly wanted to be Mother Teresa, it doesn't matter. He achieved what he did because he was able to use altruism to get people to obey him. That's what matters. Philip asked, what options exist for those of us trying to boycott DEI, that's diversity, inclusion, diversity, equity, inclusion, it seems the organized opposition is mainly Christians and conservatives who think abortion and immigration are also woke. So who can we align with? How do we fight these things? How do we fight the left? Well, that's a question you can ask on a number of issues. How do we fight the left on indefensive capitalism when the putative defenders of capitalism are these conservative religionists? And you can do that in a whole range of issues. The very important thing is this, do not align with a movement or an organization that you know is fundamentally opposed to you. So if you have a religious organization that chooses to oppose some regulation because it's counter to the Bible and the Bible wants people to be free of regulation, it's a mistake to align with them because you're, I may be giving a talk about this at OConn by the way, because by accepting their position on some concrete, in effect on some derivative, you're implicitly endorsing the fundamental that underlies that concrete derivative. So unfortunately, it's true. I sympathize with your plight because there are many issues where it seems that the only ally is someone you fundamentally disagree with. That's sad, but that's unfortunately the state of the culture. Now that's not true across the board. There are organizations I think that you can ally with on certain issues, on the issue of diversity. I don't know. I don't know what organizations there are, but do not ally yourself with an organization that is known to stand consistently for some irrational premise. If you find some organization that has mixed ideas, like conservatives generally, not hardcore religionists, you might wanna do that, but do not endorse an openly irrational fundamental in the hope of rescuing some narrow derivative. So this is a free trade wants to know what the painting is behind you. Oh, oh gee, I'm gonna have to, I keep forgetting the title of it. It's a really nice painting. Can you see the whole painting? Yeah, I can see most of it. I'm sorry? Most of it. Let's see, should I? You pan a little bit. There you go. We can see the, yeah. If we're on long enough, I'm gonna ask my wife to remind me of the title. Okay. Give me a two minute warning before we finish. Okay, sounds good. Michael asked, did you vote for Biden over Trump? Yes. Michael also asked, how come altruism didn't cost us a victory in World War II? Well, because the culture keeps getting worse. It's not as though, it's a binary choice. Either you're an egoist and you're alive or you're an altruist and you're dead. The culture of altruism, the philosophy of altruism, seeps into a culture by degrees. And particularly in the United States, we have or have had a strong barrier to its complete takeover, which was the sense of life that still existed in this country based on its founding, which was very much individualist. You know, this don't tread on me, this idea of the individual's right to his own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. All of that rests implicitly on egoism and is a far cry from altruism. So it comes by degrees. And the point is as time goes on, if there is not a rejection of altruism and an embrace of egoism, then it will keep getting worse. So at the time of World War II, it was better. The culture was better. The philosophy was better. It was altruistic, but not as entirely altruistic as it became later. And we're not as altruistic now as I think we'll be in 20 years, again, if trends continue. So it's not an all or nothing calculation. All right, we've got three more questions. Michael asks, how could a corrupt and viciously inefficient system like the Soviet Union produce so many nuclear weapons that put the first man into space? Most of the Soviet's nuclear technology was stolen from the United States. This is what they're good at. They're good at ivory. They're good at stealth. It's amazing how easily the Soviets infiltrated government agencies and was able to steal documents and so forth. So a lot of that came from theft, which is not hard to explain. What was the other half of the question? Oh, get man on the moon? How did they get a man on the moon? I don't know. I don't know. Well, again, a lot of the technology was stolen. It's the same, I think it's the same idea. They didn't get a man on the moon. They got the man in space. First man in space. Used a lot of German scientists that they had in the war. After during the war. Also, Ali asked, how can a soldier fight in a war without altruistic values? How can we fight a war without collectivism? Why would a soldier fight if they're not an altruist? Why would a selfish soldier fight? Well, that's a funny thing. If somebody put a gun to your head, would you try to resist him? You're not an altruist, presumably. Why would you resist? Why wouldn't you give in to his needs? Well, because you aren't an altruist and you say, yes, this is my life and I'm gonna try to protect it. If a country is actually threatened, such as, let's go back to World War II. Pearl Harbor was bombed. Japan declared war on us. Germany, shortly thereafter declared war on us. So you have countries that are aiming to destroy you. Why wouldn't you want to fight to protect yourself? But the point is, there has to be a demonstrable threat. You're not going to go to war in order to protect Somalia. You're going to war to protect yourself, your family, the people who value you. If your country is genuinely being threatened by attack and your freedom is therefore at risk, you prefer to live free, even if it means risking your life in order to defend you. It's not hard to understand that. Shouldn't be. Jason says that Peel of Altruism is available, that Peel of Altruism is available in the Czech language. That's something, something. I work with... I gave a talk titled The Peel of Altruism. Is that what you're talking about? He's talking about your talk. He worked with Jiri Kinkor to translate in 2006. And it's available in the Czech language at einran.cz. So that is the website of the Czech Objectivist group there. Now, if you want to hear something really interesting, again, the original version of the book in defensive selfishness, when it came out, my agent was able to get two foreign translations. I think one was Finnish and the other was Russian. Not only that, but now, five years later, or six years later, the contract came up and the Russians renewed it. So they paid another royalty in order to be the only country in the world to have the right to a foreign language of in defensive selfishness. Shows you the state of the world. Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is in a big country like Russia, there is a significant group of people who are seeking alternatives, who want something better and publishers are willing to cater to that. It's similar to the fact that, you know, was it three years ago? Equal is unfair, one of the few countries that translated equal is unfair was China. A Beijing publisher, it's still in print in China, so. It's an amazing world. It is very strange. All right, last question from Frank. Why do some young people become altruistic in dating and decide not to seek a lover? Also, is it altruistic if you join an arranged marriage? I don't get the first half of the question. They're altruistic and don't seek a lover? Yeah. I don't quite get that. I'm sorry. Yeah, neither do I. What was the second half was? Is arranged marriages, is that altruistic? I think if you accept an arranged marriage, which people do maybe to please their parents, that would be altruistic. If you accept it because you think your plight is hopeless and you can't find somebody, I don't know if that's altruistic, that's just unjustified pessimism. Not everything is altruistic. All the bad things, almost all the bad things are altruistic, but not every bad thing is altruistic. It's an integrated, everything's integrated, so everything's bad. Yes, I could make a case for you. I'm sure you could make the case. Why is that necessary? I'm gonna find out, could you wait one second while I find out the name of the person? Yes, I'm gonna do my spiel here. All right, everybody, don't forget to like the show before you leave. Give it a thumbs up. You know how to do that and it's important for the algorithms. Don't forget to share. And of course, if you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. And if you're not a supporter yet on a monthly basis for the show, please become so by going to runbookshow.com slash support Patreon or subscribe star and do it there. And thank you for all the super chat. Okay. Here, okay, you've got the name. Your name is LaVirginie by Enfield. Oh, but Enfield. Enfield, a finished painter. Yes, he's finished. Interesting. Yes. Interesting. Okay. It's a very nice painter. Yeah, it really is. Thank you, Peter. Really appreciate this. Okay, thank you. I had fun. Hope you did. I'm glad I did, absolutely. And thanks everybody for being here. Okay, bye the book. Bye the book. Make comments on Amazon if you want. Oh, that's another thing. That's right. So review the book on Amazon. I mean, just don't just give it a star rating, put a sentence there. Every comment makes a difference. Some more comments there are, again, the algorithms. Everything today is about the algorithms. So we've got to get better at feeding the algorithms, healthy food. And this is comments, likes, things like that are healthy food. Thank you. Thanks, Peter. Thanks everybody. I'll see you guys all tomorrow, same time, same place. Bye everybody. Bye Peter. Bye bye.