 David Kelly, currently Executive Director of the Institute for Objectivist Studies. Mr. Kelly has taught Philosophy at Varsal College and Brandeis University. Also a writer, he has written books and among them, The Evidence of the Census, a Treatise in Episteme Law. How do you say that word? Epistemology. All right. And the Art of Reasoning, a widely used logic textbook. In addition, he has written and lectured extensively on issues in philosophy, politics, and public policy. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. David Kelly. Thank you. I'm going to try turning on the mic now and tell me if I can then be heard. Is that... Can I be heard in the back? All right. Is it too much? Okay. Well, my subject is Ayn Rand's contribution to liberty, the rebirth of liberty. To the movement that we refer to as libertarianism or classical liberalism, I actually prefer to call it individualism, a term that was used widely used earlier in the century and I think better indicates our fundamental opposition to socialism. I'm a philosopher and most of what I have to say will be about her philosophical contribution, but let me start with a few sociological comments. Ayn Rand's books have sold over 20 million copies. In the United States, a very large percentage of the reading public has read at least one of her novels and her name is widely recognized. Recently, some enterprising reporter found that Clarence Thomas, who has been nominated to our Supreme Court, kept a large number of books in his garage. I should say, by the way, in our country, when a reporter engages in trespass and violates the privacy of someone he's covering that he's called enterprising. Among the books thought worthy of mention in Clarence Thomas's garage, along with those by Alexander Pope and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is Ayn Rand's novel, The Fountainhead. So she's extremely well known. I must say that familiarity does not always breed respect. Her works are often vilified, her ideas have been mislined, distorted, and yet hundreds of thousands of people continue to buy her books every year. And I have to believe that her individualistic message is striking some kind of chord in people and I believe nurturing the kinds of values that make a free society possible. That's speaking of the public at large. Within the individualist movement itself, however, I don't have to guess. Many of the philosophers, economists, journalists, and pro-freedom politicians that I meet tell me that their commitment to economic freedom came originally from reading Ayn Rand. When libertarians are polled about the authors who had the greatest influence on them, Ayn Rand's name always heads the list. Her influence has been acknowledged by Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board, Charles Murray, whose book Losing Ground helped completely reformulate the welfare argument in the United States. Ed Crane, who's made the Cato Institute in Washington one of the major policy voices in our country and by many other notable people. So I would say that of all the writers and thinkers who have contributed to the resurgence of individualism over the last, say, three decades, Ayn Rand clearly belongs at the top of the list, along with Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, perhaps Friedrich Hayek. Of course, I'm speaking of the United States. I know that she is much less familiar to people in Europe and elsewhere and that, for example, Hayek's influence is much greater. But in any case, it's striking that she is the only non-economist in this group. Her influence clearly was a result of her philosophical views and also her ability as an artist to embody those views in literature. So in the rest of my comments this morning, I want to examine her intellectual contribution to individualism. The core ideas and values of her philosophy that have made it such a powerful force for individual liberty. I know that many of you are familiar with her work already and in that respect I hope what I can do is maybe pick out what I see as the essential points. For those of you who aren't familiar, perhaps this will serve as an introduction. Let's begin by going back to the early 1940s. The Western democracies in those years were engaged in a world war against fascist totalitarianism. But they were allied with communist totalitarianism, the Soviet Union. Western countries domestically were moving to increase the power of their own governments, introducing new welfare and social insurance programs, new regulations on economic activity. Intellectuals were very sympathetic to socialism and most of them regarded the free market as a relic of 19th century liberalism. That was a setting in which two books appeared. Einran's novel The Fountainhead, published in 1943 and F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, published a year later. Both of these were works of tremendous courage. In opposing the collectivism of the intellectual and cultural establishment, Hayek risked an international reputation as an economist. Rand, who was then relatively unknown, risked all her hopes of making a living as a writer. Both books were sensations at the time and have since become classics. Both were written in defense of individualism. But we can see one of Rand's distinctive contributions by comparing her defense with Hayek's. Hayek noted that the spirit of individualism, which began in the Renaissance and the individual freedom that accompanied it, unleashed creative energies in art and science, technology and industrial production. But individualism, he assures the reader, has no necessary connection with egotism or selfishness. In that regard, Hayek went along with the conventional morality that identifies virtue with altruism and self-sacrifice. Einran challenged that morality. She portrayed the creative genius in the character of the architect Howard Rourke as a man who not only acts by the first-hand judgment of his own mind, but acts for his own purposes, whose primary end is his own life and happiness. No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, said Rourke in his famous trial speech, for his brothers rejected the gift that he offered. His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man's spirit, however, is his self. The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated, a first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a prime mover. The creator served nothing and no one he lived for himself. Rand is saying, in other words, that a necessary element of individualism is egoism, the principle that one should hold oneself as the highest value and act for one's own self-interest. I believe her defense of egoism was her most important contribution to the cause of liberty. It's not enough to show, as Hayek and others have done, that a collectivist society, a society in which all live for all, will not work. It's not enough to show that economic freedom will bring greater efficiency and abundance. All this is true, but the economic argument has to be grounded in a moral defense of the individual's right to pursue his own good. Every revolution in human affairs has been driven in large part by a spirit of moral idealism. The reason socialist ideas spread so rapidly during the 19th and early 20th centuries was that they appealed to the idea that it is noble to live for others. Karl Marx attacked the principle of individual rights, for example, as an expression of egoism. This is from one of his early essays. None of the supposed rights of man, he wrote, go beyond the egoistic man, that is, an individual separated from his community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interests, and acting in accordance with his private caprice. To oppose socialism, it's this idea expressed by Marx and many others that we have to oppose. In her later novel Atlas Shrugged and in her philosophical essays, Rand developed an original thesis in ethics that values arise from the fact that living organisms must initiate their own actions to maintain their own survival in the face of the constant alternative of life or death. Every organism, in effect, she said, must hold its own life as its ultimate value and must pursue that value by acting in accordance with its nature. Unlike other species, man must consciously identify his needs and discover how to satisfy them in the form of principles of action. These principles constitute a moral code and ethics. They require the exercise of certain virtues, such as rationality, integrity, productiveness. The principles apply to all human beings in virtue of the common human nature we share, but the ultimate goal of action is still, in Rand's words, to achieve, maintain, fulfill, and enjoy that ultimate value that ended in itself, which is his own life. Now, of course, it's important to emphasize that in defending the pursuit of self-interest, Rand did not regard interests as subjective in the manner of Hobbes. The interests of the individual are objectively determined by the facts of reality and of our own human nature. Accordingly, our interests are to be discovered by reason, not by whim. This allowed Rand to maintain that there are no essential conflicts of interest among rational people, that it's in our interest to live by production and by peaceful, voluntary exchange with others, not by force or fraud, not by looting, pillaging, or controlling other people. And, of course, this is a vitally important point for the defense of liberty. Opponents of freedom have always argued that the principle of self-interest leads to a Hobbesian war of all against all, which must be curtailed by imposing social controls. Rand's insight was that we need not choose between sacrificing ourselves to others or others to ourselves by showing that a rational life does not require sacrifices in either direction. She provided a solid ethical foundation for individual rights. Let me put this point in a somewhat different way. Social theorists from Adam Smith to Mises and Hayek have shown that when individuals are left free to pursue their own ends, the result is a complex kind of order, such as the price system of a free market. The opposite of a centrally imposed order is not chaos, but a spontaneous order that coordinates the separate actions of millions of individuals. This spontaneous order arises from interactions among people that take place within a system defined by the enforcement of certain rules, such as property rights and contract. Given those rules, in other words, we can show that the result is economic harmony and the coordination of individual interests, not conflict or a war of all against all. But what about the rules themselves? Rand's contribution was at this more fundamental level. She showed that it is in the rational self-interest of individuals to accept and live by those rules. And in this way, her ethics dovetails with and supports the economic case for a free society. So far, I've emphasized Rand's egoism, which is an issue of the ends or goals of human action. But the essential means of human action is reason, and her analysis and defense of reason, I think, is an equally important contribution. In fact, it's the very foundation of her case for individual rights and capitalism. Reason, she says, is a faculty of the individual. No matter how much we learn from others, the act of thought takes place in the individual mind. It must be initiated by each of us by our own volition, directed by our own effort. Each of us is responsible for deciding what is true, what is right, and for acting accordingly. Rational action is independent action, and the social order must therefore leave us free to act on our judgment, free of coercion from others. In her own words, since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man's survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don't. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man's mind. At the economic level, Rand is making the same point here that free market economists make when they argue that centrally planned economies make it impossible for individuals to form and act on their own individual plans. After all, planning is simply the exercise of reason to select one's purposes and to lay out a sequence of action necessary to achieve the purposes. But I think Rand's analysis in defense of reason is of broader significance than this. She defended the absolutism, the efficacy, and indeed the glory of man's reason in every area of life, in art and philosophy, no less than in science, technology, and economic exchange. She took on the philosophers, such as Emmanuel Kant, who sought to limit man's reason or cut it off from reality and developed an entire epistemology to answer them. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that deals with questions about human knowledge. It's my area of specialization, and I believe her theories represent a tremendous breakthrough in this area. But today let me just comment briefly on what I see as their political significance. Rand challenged the traditional dichotomy between mind and body, between the material and the spiritual. Western culture still tends to some extent to view man as a compound of angel and beast. We express our angelic spiritual side in art and culture, and our animal material side in the creation of wealth, the pursuit of wealth. Rand cut through this dichotomy. Production of any kind, she said, of wealth, knowledge, or art comes from the exercise of reason in the service of human life. A businessman who introduces a new technology or opens up a new market is no less creative. He's doing essentially the same thing as a philosopher, an artist, or a scientist. Rand's magnum opus, or novel Atlas Shrugged, is the only novel I know of whose heroes are a businessman. That's a significant fact, a significant cultural fact that people engaged in what is now the central activity of people's lives in western societies have never been celebrated artistically in this way. The political significance of this view is the way it unifies the case for liberty. Traditionally, intellectual and artistic freedom were defended as needs of the individual thinker and creator. They were defended on the basis of the right of self-expression and the need to be free from prior restraint. By contrast, economic freedom was normally defended in terms of economic efficiency and prosperity, that is, in terms of the results of economic freedom for society. But if we recognize that the creation of wealth involves the same individual qualities as the creation of art or knowledge, that is, the same exercise of reason, the same loyalty to one's vision, the same commitment to values, the same struggle against convention and the status quo, then we can see that economic production is also a realm of self-expression and that it requires the protection of individual autonomy for the same reason as art or intellectual inquiry. The final contribution of Rand's that I want to mention is a negative one. It's her scathing criticism of altruism and of the other doctrines that are inimical to liberty. Unlike Hayek and other defenders of freedom, she did not begin by assuring her opponents that their motives were noble. She argued that their motives were as perverse as their policies. In a gripping scene from The Fountainhead, the villain, Ellsworth Tuid, reveals his real goals as an exponent of altruism and socialism, by teaching humility to make men feel small, to stifle their self-respect, by teaching renunciation to kill their aspirations, by teaching that one should live for others, to kill the desire for happiness and thus for independence. Later, in her novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand pushed her analysis of the altruist ethics further, arguing that it sprang from a desire to escape the necessity of rational thought and to control those who did choose to think and achieve. The traditional ethics of renunciation, self-sacrifice and obedience to authority, she argued, is not the expression of idealism but of envy. And she noted that even though socialism presented itself as a child of the Enlightenment and an opponent of religion, it was in fact a secularized diversion of the old religious outlook. And in this respect, Ein Rand gave us a new picture, I think, of the ideological landscape. Of course, I should emphasize here that when she attacks altruism, it isn't kindness or generosity. It's the principle that the needs of others take preference over one's own needs, that they represent an unchosen claim on one's time, effort and energy. At the time she was writing her major works, it was chiefly the conservatives who stood for capitalism. I'm talking now about the 40s, the 1950s. The conservatives defended the primacy of the individual largely on religious grounds and defended free enterprise, at least in the United States, largely on the basis of tradition, our tradition of free enterprise. They never challenged the claim of socialists and welfare state liberals to the mantle of reason, Rand did. She offered a moral and political philosophy that emphasized the efficacy and the absolutism of man's reason and established the link between reason and freedom. In doing so, I think she not only gave capitalism a solid intellectual basis, she made it appealing to men of the mind, to scientists, engineers, doctors, students, to people of any profession who value reason, people with intellectual initiative, people who were willing to question authority and tradition. When I was a student myself in college, the radical thing to be was a far left socialist. That's what all the independent minded, the intellectual types were doing. That had the air of rebellion and romance about it. Now, the opposite is really true. The students who have the greatest intellectual initiative and drive and independence are almost always leaning toward or interested in free market ideas, partly because their professors are all socialists. But I think Rand has had something to do with this and she certainly appeals to that spirit. So as a summary statement about Rand's contribution to the cause of liberty, and here forgive me if I paint with a very broad brush, I would say that she integrated the elements of individualism into a coherent ethical system. What are these elements? Well, let me just end. Here's my broad brush. Aristotle gave us the principle of metaphysical individualism. It's the idea that individual entities are the primary existence, the units of reality. As applied to man, this means that the individual is basic. Society is not an organism or super entity, but an association of individuals. It's worth noting here that virtually every collectivist movement has taken out after Aristotle in one form or another as an enemy. The Austrian economists drew at the implication of this principle for markets. Methodological individualism is the principle that economic phenomena arise from acts of exchange among individuals. John Locke and other thinkers of the Enlightenment gave us the principle of political individualism. The principle that individuals have rights in virtue of their natures, not in virtue of government decrees, and accordingly that government is the servant of the people, not their master. So these were the strands of individualism that Rand inherited. She integrated them with two new strands of her own, which I've tried to summarize. First, ethical individualism. The principle that it's right for an individual to hold his own life as an ultimate value and to act in pursuit of his own happiness. And cognitive individualism. The principle that reason is a faculty of the individual who must therefore be free to act on his own independent judgment. And I think this individualist framework, this tightly integrated moral political framework, is indispensable to the future of freedom. Thank you. I didn't end up needing all the time that I was allotted, so we have a little more than the customary amount of time for questions. I hope there are some questions. Yes. It's a problem thought, I think, is that we should act according to a nature. But the problem is good as a concept of nature, because no man can be more natural than any other, I think. And if there are things that are unnatural, you can't do anything that is unnatural. Because that will lead to a very strange position of nature. I mean, the only valid way to get into the concept of a human nature is, I think, the way that you did. I mean, generalize. To say what is common between every human being. That is to get into the nature of the things, because how do I act unnaturally? I am a result of nature, but can I act unnaturally? And if you say that you should act according to nature, you don't say anything normal to it. Okay, that's a penetrating question. How is it possible for man to act other than according to his nature? I mean, nature is a set of, if we understand it as a set of capacities for action, then obviously you can't act in any way, except in a way that expresses some capacity or other. If you were to do something to act, not in accordance with your nature, would mean doing something that you can't do, and of course you can't do that. But the claim here is not that we should act in accordance with our nature in that sense. It is that our nature sets certain constraints on the ways in which it is possible to achieve certain goals. That is, the role of nature here is in relationship to the achievement of a goal of survival and happiness. And what I'm Rand is saying, therefore, is that the principle is not act according to your nature, but act for your life, and in doing so you must take account of your nature. Certain things will achieve, your long-range survival and flourishing happiness, certain things won't. Now, in regard to Hume, let me just say, you know, you contrasted Hume with Rand on this point, but the principle here is that you cited that Hume followed, namely observe what is common to human beings, is of course the only way in which you can identify nature, saying that X, Y, or Z is an aspect of human nature can only be based on inductive reasoning from observation. There's no a priori way of deducing man's nature from some, in a truth or arbitrary postulate. However, I do want to point out that the kind of observation pertinent to human beings is a little different from the kind of observation and induction that's pertinent to, say, rocks or inanimate objects in general, because human beings have volition. And therefore, when we observe what human beings do and try to generalize from that as to what their nature is, what their capacities and needs are, we have to, at some point we have to ask, are people doing this because they have to, because it's a real constraint set by their nature on what it's possible for them to do, or are they doing it because they've chosen it on the basis of principles that they've accepted and perhaps not questioned on the basis of cultural premises and so forth. And so, for example, if you looked around just in western societies, you would observe people doing things that are quite common and yet are not, they are cultural rather than part of our basic human equipment. They stem from the cultural premises, which can be altered, can be changed. So when Rand talks about human nature, she's talking about basically the biological givens and psychological givens, the things that are not subject to our choice and can't be altered. Yes. We were talking yesterday about how people hear that people would lean toward a collectivist way of governing themselves or being more often than they would choose individual liberty. Is there a reason for that? Oh yes, I think there is. Why do people lean toward collective solutions? And in fact, I think this is one of the real powers of Ayn Rand's analysis of altruism. And she saw altruism as part of a whole package of doctrines, including collectivism, mind-body dichotomy, and others. And it's quite a detailed analysis, I won't go into it all, but the essence of it is, she said, look, human beings, unlike other animals, don't function automatically in pursuit of their lives. In particular, they don't automatically exercise their basic capacity, which is reason. Reason is voluntary. You have to choose to think, and there are reasons why people find this threatening. It takes effort. It involves risk. Unlike the senses, reason is not automatically in contact with reality. As we develop chains of abstractions and long inferences, our conclusions can drift away from the world and we can make mistakes. And so there's always the risk of acting on your own judgment. And finally, when we act on our own judgment, we are acting not with others. We have isolation, aloneness about the act of relying on your own mind. And for all these reasons, the effort required, the risk involved, and the solitude of individual thought. People are threatened by it and look for some other way of functioning. They look for some way of functioning that is automatic, that involves no risk on their part. That doesn't take effort or that doesn't make them alone. So people are drawn toward doctrines, dogmas, rituals, acting on emotions. And all of these, and in regard to the last point, which is most relevant politically, the fear of aloneness, tribal principles. That is, things that can be regarded as ideas uniting a social group and held in the form of tradition, custom mores. And this breeds a tribal outlook, a sense of oneself as essentially a part of a group. And once you have that, then people are naturally drawn toward all the doctrines of group functioning rather than individual functioning. The idea of acting for others, the idea of a leader who will lead one, and so on and so forth. And we'll make it hard for people to appreciate and understand the force of individual rights and the need for individual rights. Of course, I'm speaking ethically and in terms of the psychological motives. I think that was your question. The doctrines that have been introduced by philosophers to rationalize all this, of course, are enormously complex. And so there's an enormous intellectual apparatus out there to justify state intervention, which I'm sure has innocently convinced some people. But I imagine that these psychological motives are stronger. Did the follow up? Yeah. What's in it for somebody to risk taking an individualist approach when all their lives they've been raised with another attitude? Well, there's a long answer and a short answer to that. The long answer would be to sit down with such an individual and say, here's your life. The way you've been functioning, do you think that that really gives you the greatest certainty and security of pursuing your life and happiness? What if the group doctrines are wrong? Don't you need to be able to act independently, not just in the spheres you're accustomed to, but in other ones as well? And so on and so forth. It's not easy. But ultimately what you try to get to, as I would try to get to if I were actually trying to persuade someone would be the short answer. To try to communicate the sense that it's your life. You've only got this one life. Make it your own. There's a certain, I don't know, there's a feeling of exhilaration about setting off on one's own and relying only on oneself. Experiencing oneself as the source and fountain head of one's actions that I think is the real emotional underpinning of liberty. And all you can do is try to communicate it. I think it's important to try to communicate it to children as early as possible. Chris. Do you think it fair to say that in her entirely justified attempt to reassert or emphasise the reality of free will, volition, human rationality, that I around tend to perhaps a little too far that way and ignore some aspects of our nature as biological entities, as evolved creatures and to neglect what one might call some of the socio-biological programming. I'm not endorsing all the socio-biology in this but some of the things that these theoreticians argue about and some of the things in fact which ordinary people observe in their everyday life in regard to our sexual natures, our emotional natures and so on. And in a sense you ignore some of the aspects, the constraints of real nature of our natures. It may be that she did give somewhat short shrift to factors that are not chosen but are of importance for our motivation and our ways of acting. I'm certainly not a supporter of socio-biology and I think many of their arguments are really fallacious and they're certainly not supportive. But there are a range of constraints and here I think we're dealing with qualifications to her basic principle and I'm not sure there are even qualifications that she would have argued with. Psychologically certainly there are phenomena such as defense mechanisms, repression and so forth that operate outside our control or can be controlled only by very indirect and long range means of the kind of psychotherapists he is which limit the power to choose and act in accordance with what we think is best. There are biochemical constraints. I mean I think it's absolutely clear now that biochemistry has a lot to do with mood and therefore with some kinds of depression and deletion and that feeling depressed is not always a result of having bad premises or having had a bad day. And I think there probably are socio-biological constraints of one kind or another. For example one of the key principles is that whatever of Rand's theory of volition is that the content of our beliefs and therefore of our values and our emotions cannot come from anything innate. The emotional mechanisms and the cognitive mechanisms of course those are innate. But the content what things we will accept as true or as good these are subject to our choice and our evaluation and change. However there are certain questions at the margin here for example if you observe the way parents behave toward their newborn children and the experiences that they report. I can't report records as I have no children. I know almost no one who whatever he or she might have felt beforehand about the prospect of having children didn't feel a kind of an immediate attachment and tendency to regard this little being as a center of your life to some extent. And of course evolutionarily you can see why this would be a good thing for nature to instill in any parent. At least any parent that has to raise it it's a young over a long period of time. So now there are exceptions as we all have heard parents who don't feel this way. But it's probably there probably are things like that that are again not subject to our direct control. Not the things that we feel and believe not because we have certain premises that we voluntarily adopted but because of what nature has so to speak implanted in our breasts. I just think that there these are on the margins or the borderlines of mental functioning or special cases. Linda and then David. You occurred to me while you were answering the question behind me about why people are more collectivist solutions. That perhaps a way of conceptualizing that the answer to that to a non-philosophical audience would be to say that just as in the marketplace people look for easier ways to do things. That is a plus. So in the ideological marketplace of ideas it's going to speak. It is initially superficially attractive to have one's life handled for one. Sort of like Doug's pleasure machine that he was talking about last hour. It would be initially sort of intriguing and satisfying one's laziness to be hooked up to it for a couple of hours after which you would then see that there are some problems of living that way. And in a way of the stage that we are going through society now, particularly in what could be conceptualized as realizing that there isn't a pleasure machine that handles your life for you that it really is yours to make. Yeah, I think that's true and it's an important distinction to make. You might put it this way by analogy. Compare the cases. Compare two people. One of whom wants to reduce the friction in a machine to a tenth or a hundredth or a millionth of what it has been to make it operate more efficiently so that the friction factor is .0001. Compare that person with a one who wants to reduce it to zero period and build a perpetual motion machine. And the first person is an engineer. The second one is a crank. And that's even though in one sense it's a minor quantitative difference. It's a huge qualitative difference also in the sphere of human and moral action. There's a difference between wanting to get something for less, which is rational and normal, and wanting to get something for nothing, which is also unfortunately normal, but only in the sense that it is a normal trap or fall into which people fall. And that's why there are get rich quick schemes all over the place. Those I think most people know what's wrong with them. Anyone who's thought about it knows that getting rich quick is there's something wrong with those schemes. Wealth takes effort. What people don't realize is that the schemes for getting happy quick or getting smart quick are equally fallacious. Those two take effort. Ultimately there's no escape from it. David. The question has not to say that the brand's doctrines could be, especially in the hands of enthusiastic followers, eliding into a kind of rationalism, which is then easily conformable to socialist and other sorts of leftist criticism of ordinary valuable life. Is there not a danger of seeming to justify the automatic content of the use of gadgets, especially good gadgets rather than bad ones, and of institutions, especially good institutions rather than bad institutions. The example I have in mind to make it a little more concrete is a person I have a great respect for is called George Cannon, George Cannon, who was a great intellectual for a piece of defending Britain, to get a speech. I'm sorry, because he dated the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, and organised a journal for him called The Anti-Japrodite, he made it to where he wanted to become foreign minister. But he writes marvelously, and there are passages where he defines what the rationalist critics, the modernised, who think they have a new way of saving the world, criticises prejudices as Britain's traditional principles, and is happy to defend our good habits against the nearly rationalising criticism of the French intellectuals. Is there a way of being able, rather than having doctrines about the words, of being able to defend, establish good things, that's kind of the truth that I don't understand. Okay, that's another question to which I really should give a long answer, and I'll try not to make it too long. It really points to, I think, a division or tension within the classical liberal tradition between what you might call the rationalist general, generally. And I would say, in this respect, Rand is in the tradition of Locke and Jefferson, on the one hand, and the more conservative tradition, the spontaneous order tradition of Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment, F.A. Hayek in our own time, that were very mistrustful of reason and wanted to see spontaneous order not only at the economic level, in terms of prices, but at the cultural level, and to view habits and mores and customs traditions as also forms a spontaneous order that ought not to be tampered with or undercut by reason. I, in this divide, I do side with Rand, but I'm also, I feel that there is the danger you speak of. Certainly, in the sociology of the objectiveist movement, the form of rationalism that you're talking about has existed, and it's been very destructive. People have felt that they've mastered an intellectual system from which they can deduce what's good and bad without looking too much at reality once they've got the basic principles and engage in a great deal of moral condemnation of ordinary people who don't follow the system. Now, I think that has never led to the kind of Jacobin impulse to terrorism or to try to exert control over other people because the outcome of this rationalist system is individual rights, and what it tends to breed more is kind of isolationism. These people are bad, we just won't have anything to do with them, which, as unfortunate as it is, is a lot safer than these people are bad, we'll fix them. However, I think objectiveism need not even run that risk, although it properly understood. But here I'm aware that I'm departing a little bit anyway from the spirit of Rand and certainly from the spirit of some of her other exponents and followers. I think the fact, there is something to be said for the claim that if a custom has developed, it must be serving some purpose, and one ought not to attack it until you know what that purpose is and the way in which it is serving it. However, I think you can't stop there. I think you can identify the purposes. I'm not as skeptical about the power of reason to understand, at the cultural level, to understand what has given rise to a given type of spontaneous order and to criticize it. I think criticism is necessary, and it goes all the way down. And here I really differ from Hayek, that there is an objective basis for values and value judgments and therefore for the whole political realm and that we can evaluate all customs by a standard of reason. But I think what I accept really would be a cautionary note. Do it carefully and do it empirically. That is, make sure that every abstract conclusion you're using is fully grounded in observations and that you have looked at the subject from every side. Rand herself, I should note, had a doctrine that philosophical ideas move culture and politics. That is, a society's culture and politics are basically driven by the fundamental philosophical premises that it accepts. Now, if you think about it, an essential part of this view of history, this philosophical view of history, an essential premise of it is that ordinary people do not reason out their whole political and ethical philosophies for themselves, they take it from their cultural surroundings. And so implicit in her view of history is, at least has to be if you spell it out, an appreciation for the role of custom and tradition. Because these are the vehicles by which people embody the philosophical ideas that are animating the society they live in. But a critic and a social reformer does, on her view, have the power, the cognitive resources to get to the bottom of that and to bring those things to criticism. Jason. Would you mind to comment on why Iron Rand is like libertarians? For instance, she called them the hippies of the right. Right. She endorsed Nixon and Ford in the presidential elections, not the libertarian party candidate. I can follow that. You don't have plans if you don't want to. No, I'd be happy to answer it. Taking my life from my hands before I'll do it again. The question is why Iron Rand held such a dim view of libertarians, which she expressed in part by calling them hippies of the right. What I would make here is two points, really. One, philosophically and culturally, when she was writing these things in the late 60s and early 70s, a great many libertarians were trying to make common cause with the new left. They were very much attracted to a whole set of values that she thought, and I think she was right, were anti-reason. They were hedonistic and or subjectivist, and it was simply that liberty came in kind of at the bottom saying, you should be free to do your own thing. And so these people advocated freedom, individual rights, rather than communes or collectiveized societies the way some of the other new lefters were doing. But they were. I mean, the description hippies of the right was not well-chosen in that respect. It was meant to pick up on exactly that connection. Now, that's, at least in the United States, I don't believe that is anywhere near as widespread a phenomenon as it used to be, partly because the new left has pretty much disappeared, so there's no one to make common cause with anymore. The other point is really a political, a point of political strategy. She held that because of the idea that ideas have to be changed before we can expect changes in politics, she held that it was, first of all, premature to engage in the activity of a political party trying to get candidates elected. And she thought that, just strategically, it was better to have, since the Republicans, since the only question was whether in the U.S. there would be a Republican or a Democratic office holder, and it was normally better to have a Republican. Don't do anything to split the vote, vote Republican. But she also felt that if you, see the problem with the, excuse me, stepped off the cliff in the other direction. The problem that she saw with the Libertarian Party was it's, not just that it was the purely strategic one, it was claiming to be ideologically consistent, unlike the Republicans. But she said, no, you can't have an ideology that's just politics. If you're going to be ideologically consistent, you have to have the ethics and the epistemology, the whole theory of human beings, human nature. Politics doesn't stand on its own. It's a consequence of underlying views about values, human nature and man's mind. So if you're going to be ideologically consistent, you've got to be objectivist, that is far as she thought. And of course the Libertarian Party wasn't. It cut off the consistency at the level of politics. And so I think in her view, what it offered was the worst of both worlds. It wasn't ideologically consistent in the true sense, and it had no chance of gaining power. Yes? First I want to do more epistemology. The problem of how we see reality, the reality could only be seen as objectively, and therefore you can't take out some sort of objective knowledge of reality where you can have intersubjective knowledge about, very intersubjective knowledge about reality. We have social convention about how people have how we see reality. The second problem is the problem of induction. As you said, what do you do when the black swing arrives? What do you do then? You say you use induction to attain knowledge about reality, but when the induction is required, when you run the black swing, why is it possible to run? And the third question, if reality is in another way than the objectivity or all that you use to see it now, why shouldn't I behave like the agriest or behave as free or behave like the team if there was constitution in another way, that the purpose of my life wasn't to be an ego, but was another purpose of my life. Why shouldn't I be that way? Okay. Just to summarize the question, first why you asserted that reality is not knowable as objective, that what we take as reality is partly constituted by convention. Secondly, the problem of induction, and third, the problem of why you couldn't have an egoistic and libertarian moral political outlook on the basis of this kind of view, this kind of epistemology. As for the conventionalism, all of these are meaty questions and I'm a little reluctant to present what I'm going to say as a total answer since I've written a whole book that tries to address many of them. But on the issue of conventionalism, all I would say is, let me give you just a quick answer, that I don't think you can consistently assert that. You were asserting that as true, as something that I ought to believe as well as you, because it's right. But in asserting that, you are claiming that something at least is objectively true. Moreover, when you say that this view or that is consistent with social convention, society is something that exists outside your mind and you are presupposing that you have some means of identifying what society is and what its conventions are. So again, you're taking society at least as objective. And if society, why not tables and chairs? Tables and chairs at least are actually easier to see and identify. Now, that is the, in a sense, quick and dirty answer to the point. There are problems about the ways, about defending objectivity. And I think we need a very sophisticated view of what objectivity is in order to understand the contribution that the mind makes to our knowledge as well as the contribution the reality makes. And in my book, The Evidence of the Sense, as a pre-example, I try to lay out what I see as Ayn Rand's essential insight on that point. But the contributions that our mind makes, the fact that knowledge is to some extent selective, its aspects of it are determined by the ways in which our cognitive faculties operate. These are not hindrances to objectivity. They are means of discovering what is objectively real and true. But to repeat my main point here, if you abandon the concept of objective reality and of truth, then you abandon the ability even to claim that point, even to assert that point. So I think that would be my basic response there. On induction, this is one of the epistemological issues that has divided in the contemporary exponents of the two traditions I mentioned, the rationalist or pro-reason tradition and the more skeptical spontaneous-ordered tradition, largely because of the influence of Popper, I think, in contemporary circles, and his critique of induction. But here I just have to be very quick. I think the humian problem is not really a problem. It arises from a set of epistemological assumptions that Hume made about how we observe regularities in nature. His view was that the only knowledge we get from our senses is knowledge of individual events, changes of individual sensory qualities. And it's true that if you look at it that way, you cannot ever generalize a pattern and be sure that that pattern will hold in the future. But on my view, and this is the objective's view, the perceptual basis is the awareness of entities existing in a spatial world and includes the awareness of them as having identities. And from this, we can see, not by induction, but by simply extracting what is implicit in our perceptual awareness, we can see that the law of identity is true, that things have natures, and we can see that actions are always actions of an entity. There are no free-floating actions. There are events, some flux made up of events. When something happens, it's things acting. And you put those two ideas together and you see that things have to act in accordance with their natures. That there's a basic law of causality that says a thing acts in accordance with this nature. It is constrained in what it can do by what it is. And that principle underlies the validity of induction. It's true that induction is always contextual. It's subject to discovery of new phenomena, like the black swan. But we, as our knowledge develops and expands, we can increasingly minimize those things by coming to understand not just that things of type A always have property B, but we come to understand why they have property B. The reason we were subject to the black swan, kind of example, is that no one had any idea why swans had to be white. And lo and behold, it turned out they didn't. That is, there was no nothing essential in the DNA structure that makes something a swan that requires that it be white. Let me turn to the last point you made. Why couldn't we defend freedom and individualism on subjective historical grounds? I think the danger there is that, sure, if you held that account of epistemology, you could adopt what's called subjective egoism. That is, I will act for whatever I desire. I will define my interest in terms of my desires and preferences and act accordingly. The problem is understanding why I should respect the rights of other people or expect them to respect mine. That, I think, requires some objective constraint in the form of an understanding of what is and is not in our interests, emerging from facts about human nature. If you adopt the subjectivist position, you may want freedom, but many other people either would like to dominate you. That's their desire and what you have to say against them, except a fight. Or many people desire security, equality, that is, I mean, envy is a very important human emotion. And many people would gladly give up freedom if they consulted only their emotions, would gladly give up and have given up large bodies of freedom, large areas of their freedom in their lives for the sake of pulling down other people of whom they were envious. Many people like living in a society that is run by custom, where people don't stand above the herd and don't do things independently. Again, I don't know, every culture is a little different, but in America, just go to a town meeting where someone is proposing something new and you'll see an example of this. So I think that on a subjectivist basis, you simply don't have the intellectual resources for opposing the various things that are inimical to liberty. Okay. Thank you very much. I want to extend a little bit on the question of Jason. I believe with you that it's a question of strategy how you convey freedom to other people. We have in this convention some talks with people from Eastern Europe. I think we must start talking to them on the political level and they should try to change and I think it wouldn't help much to go through Romania or start having a discussion on metaphysics. So I think it's, you could say, well, you should start on the metaphysical level, take the model and then come to the right political situation, but the other way around could be done as well and could be even more practical. Look what's happening now. Okay, the question is how can we, it's really a point of strategy. Maybe we shouldn't start with the philosophy, maybe we should start from the philosophy and work up. As on most questions about changing the course of anything as complex as society, I think there's almost everything you say is true. That is almost every position on the subject is true. It's really a matter of winnowing out what's most important, what's essential and so forth. Over the last, it's been made dramatically obvious over the last two years that in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, people have turned against totalitarian states and they haven't done it because they all read the Fountainhead or Alashrug or Red Aristotle. They've had the direct evidence of their senses about what the nature of life in such a society is. That's clearly true. However, it is good. I don't think you will be able to get very far by purely economic political arguments. You will get some distance. One problem is simply an ignorance of how markets work and to the extent that that can be overcome and it can be shown how markets coordinate human actions. I do believe that that's important. But I also believe, I've actually talked with people in Eastern Europe who are trying to, who founded organized free liberal, classical liberal organizations or engaged in political activism of one form or another. What they've said is that the big problem they face is getting people to want to be free. Getting them to accept the idea of self-reliance, choosing their own lives, choosing their work, their careers, and overcoming what has been a very pervasive, at least in some cases, a very pervasive kind of envy of those who stand out and are individualistic. Those are moral problems and until those things are addressed I really don't think there will be a great deal of progress in the positive direction beyond what I hope will be an enduring commitment to the future. One small addition is that you talked about the influence of iron rind on the way to freedom and you gave it on a philosophical level. Could you say something or is it impossible to measure something like that? Is there any visible influence of the philosophy of objectiveism to the custom of freedom, what's happening in Eastern Europe or what's happening in the world? So far as I know her works are not well known at all in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. I mean, I've heard this over and over again. In fact, in preparation for coming to this conference and another one where I'll be talking about iron rind, the Exxon-Promas conference, I prepared a list of her works along with what languages they've been translated into and I was disappointed with fewer languages than I thought. At least so far as I can tell from her agent but I assume he knows and none of them are Eastern European languages. So it's really, I think, in the United States where she has had a large influence and outside only among people who are very knowledgeable about the classical liberal movement broadly speaking. In the U.S. I think there's no question. She's the leading, as I was saying, I think she's the author who had more to do than anyone else with getting people involved and even people who aren't activists talk to almost any entrepreneur in the United States and that person has read Atlas Shrugged or one of the novels and if he hasn't you can almost be sure he will love it when he does. Okay. We said Jim, trying to go with people having that chance. What is it that you think about a lot of objectivists that makes them so, react so strongly negative and intolerant to people they have disagreement with such as yourself? Why? This, let me, I really should put this question off till tomorrow because that pertains to the topic. Let me just say quickly because there is an element that pertains to the libertarians. As with many strong-minded thinkers who were highly original Inrand felt very protective about her ideas and regarded herself as having done something new and great and important and as a result thought people should respect what she had done. That, so far I think is a valid feeling but I think it's been perverted by many of her followers into and this is what happens typically with intellectual movements has been perverted into a feeling that there is a canonical doctrine and anyone who knows it but has departed from it is an apostate and the notion of apostasy I believe is what drives a highly emotional vitriolic response to people and that's one of the reasons that I would have to say that is an element in the some of the things objectivists have said about libertarians because in the United States libertarians all know objectivism and so they're not innocent of the truth and if they're not acting on it they're apostates. This is as old as religion. David. They are dreadful problems in Europe and we are in a group that we need to do something more concrete and practical rather than talk to them. If you think to me that the practice particularly is not involved at all because she was an artist as well as a thinker and it seems to me that that intermediate about linking to the subject and thinking with practice was born most of the animals of socialism are so far real. The more you look at the 19th century history and the way free society began to be underlined then the more evident it is the novels which were the crucial mass media and rather the mass which was the score were the picking of these but it goes right across most countries and I think it's very important that intellectuals get involved in creating works of that sort as much as possible. Here, here, I agree absolutely I think any one of the most powerful things that could be done is to get works like her Iran's novels either in written or in video form or works that celebrate individualism independence and other values of that kind get them to these people because they really that's the form in which most people hold their ideals you know I think the story of the movie when it first came out the fascist thought it was just a movie against communism and then there were going to the movie at a certain moment they discovered it was against fascism as well and then the whole thing was forbidden Yes, that's a very good example Linda I have two questions but if I'm taking too much time I'll understand if you want to I have to ask my moderator here I have five minutes First question is I appreciate it but the problem with Iran's concept of the nature of man in light of the observed historical fact that force is also use of force is also clearly part of man's nature and the second on a later question is I remember someone showed me the earliest newsletter from your institute and I was intrigued by a very good mention of the project you're engaged in on artificial intelligence and Iran's use of concepts so at some point in two days you have some time to say something about that The second one really is for tomorrow on the first one though the use of force again it's absolutely true that throughout human history people have made war on a regular sustained basis both literal war between groups and also coercive controls within groups of each other you have to ask whether however that is that means it's part of human nature or part of a value system that most cultures have accepted now the argument for the first alternative that it's part of human nature is observation of the other primates in all of which cases we see that these are territorial animals who are engaged in dominance have dominant structures and males are highly aggressive and human beings are primates therefore you see the conclusion I actually think that there is probably some grain of truth in that too as in some other aspects of sociobiology it probably has some bearing on differences between human males and females but I also think that for humans culture weighs much more importantly than any such tribes even if you admit that we have drives as a result of our evolutionary past drives toward territoriality and control those things for example won't even begin to explain why people want to censor the ideas of other people primates don't engage in censorship they don't have those kinds of ideas you have these kinds of things are at at the very least even sociobiologists would have to say that what our biological nature gives us is a very basic framework that somehow still continues to influence our culture but if you deny the role of culture you are just denying something that's so obvious that we can hardly continue the argument so I would say that in this case whatever even granting the premise that we do have or that males have aggressive instincts the whole purpose of education and the training of reason and the development of culture is to control those things to make us live as fully humans now I think I actually don't accept the premise about innate instincts of that kind but I really don't think it tells against the possibility of freedom and I also think that the ideologies and the cultural premises that have long supported collectivism use of force and so forth really have nothing to do with those instincts they have to do with certain to the attachment to a collective existence that frees one from some of the requirements of reason as I was explaining before so the question is really on a sociological level as much as it's going to a very personal basis the observed impulse or response from anger to hit has seems to be part of human nature over the centuries in light of that it seems to me that Rand's basing a good chunk of her ideas on the idea that reason is man's survival tool and that this is what our essential nature is is the creature of reason it seems to me to leave something out and relegate without explaining why in a way that I see clearly now I guess why one does not also take if what the philosophy is based on is the nature of man why are we not taking into account that part of man's nature was observably seemed to be anger and hit the very basic use of force well I think on Rand did observe that the emotional the emotions that we feel in the sense of the kinds of emotions the categories of emotions and their nature such as that anger is a response to something perceived as a as a threat that is innate her point was solely that for human beings the content of those emotions come from the way in which feeling such an emotion depends on having looked at something in a certain way and interpreted as a threat and our interpretations unlike those of lower animals who feel the same emotions our interpretations are based on our conceptual faculty and therefore are amenable to reason and can be changed but of course in the that's a long range process in the actual operation at a given moment of emotion yes it's presumably we feel the same thing that other species do are very similar in rage is includes the impulse to strike well because knowing that they are interpretations are fallible we we form the quite reasonable policy of thinking before we strike and hopefully that we also follow through a philosophy that tells us that individual rights are important and that therefore you shouldn't strike even when you are angry reason is by far the most important the matter of duty of thought will win a war against the matter of the state okay and the fighting is a confinement process so the man who uses reason to don't have to fight well will always win so that's a much, much, much superior yes it's when I something I'm hearing the same I agree with her she and I share background in in legal work and on course we've seen the frown and it's hard for us to adjust that to rational thinking and combine the truth for me what I see in here is that it's a matter of choices proceed choices not ask for choices available perceive choices in reacting to hostility, aggression and the nuclear bomb in a stick addressing that issue before I'm saying somebody who is very clever and uses it is very skillful with reason you may find that they can anticipate this nuclear bomb and a verdict that if a person sees reason as a choice and does so quickly and skillfully when they are threatened instead of proceeding the best action to be data violence they may say I know a way to manipulate this person into doing what I want him to do which is to not aggress and I think somebody who reacts violently many times feels, perceives that the only choice they have or desire of the choices that are available is that to act on violence to react to be physical and I think I see that as being many times I've heard that it's being instinctive perhaps it is maybe again rewards and semantics you're calling an instinctive when it is actually a catalog well you described it earlier in fact at the beginning of your remarks as as a complex calculation which I think it clearly is but automatic let's put a second but there is a procedure even though they're reacting I think there is a thought process that goes on there is a reaction which is where it's attached to some sort of thought even though it's a base thought and I think the barrier is to act not perhaps to self-defense but to always act aggressively I think it's not well I actually I take what you're saying in a sense a way of supporting my basic point which is the capacity the fact that our rational capacity freezes from the immediate domination of such urges although not all people choose to exercise that I think it's an additional choice however at this point I think we're getting into some fairly detailed psychological matters where I don't want to suggest that things are simpler than they are okay we are out of time so I'll have to call it a day for now