 I want to start with a question that somebody's asked on Facebook and he's been kind of hounding me by email and other places, say, Oh, when are you going to answer this? When are you going to answer this? So, so, and I'll be delaying and delaying because other stuff, other stuff has been more relevant. So I'm going to do this. So this is a, this is a quote from Jordan Peterson. So this is a quote from Jordan Peterson about his view of Atlas Shrugged as literature, you know, as, as, as a novel. And so I'm going to redo the whole quote. And then I want to comment on it because I think the quote is very illustrative of, of something interesting, something interesting about Jordan Peterson, something, and something interesting about Ayn Rand and really the deep difference between the way Ayn Rand approaches, approaches, issues approaches, literature approaches, heroism, the deep difference between how she approaches the world and, and the way Jordan Peterson approaches it. So I think, I think it's going to be interesting to go over this, this quote and talk about it. So, and of course, the super chat is open. I'll, I'll accumulate the questions and site here so that I will, I will try to answer them as the evening, as the show today progresses. We'll see how long in the evening we will actually go. All right. Let's do, let's do, so this is Jordan Peterson talking about Atlas Shrugged. He says Atlas Shrugged is not great literature because Rand doesn't place the struggle between good and evil inside her characters. It's always between characters. And that's a mistake because like even your most radical left wing revolutionary is not a radical left wing revolutionary, right? So you have to show the struggle within more. And I don't think she does a very good job of that. Her noble people are too noble. And the ignoble people are too ignoble, ignoble. And it divides the world too much into good guys and bad guys. Now that's comforting. And there is an archetypal element to it too. But it is not sufficiently differentiated enough or sophisticated enough. So I mean, I hear that commentary on Atlas Shrugged and Iron Rand generally quite often her characters are too cardboard. But fundamentally, there's not enough conflict within the characters. And I think this really goes to the essence of both what Jordan Peterson with Iron Rand consider the struggle between good and evil. What they consider in what they consider the fundamental way in which people achieve good. The whole view of life. And then I think the whole view of literature and what an internal struggle looks like. Now, for reference here, let's remember the goal of Iron Rand's writing. What is Iron Rand writing in order to do? I mean, her goal, if her writing, she says, is the portrayal of the ideal man. So first one has to take that into consideration. She is trying to portray the ideal, trying to portray the perfect, the moral, the good. And you've got characters in her books in Atlas Shrugged and the Fontanet, who really don't change throughout the novel, who are in a sense perfect, who are the ideal man and that they are, you know, one is more, has achieved the ideal fully, obviously, John Galt. And another is on the path there, but changes, but changes relatively little. What changes really is an understanding of the world more than anything else. John Galt in the novel already gets the world. He understands it. He has a philosophical solution. He understands the philosophy of killing the world. He understands it. Rock in the Fontanet needs to learn that, but as a character in terms of his character traits, in terms of his moral character, he has already achieved the ideal man, the status of an ideal man. So those characters in the novels, it is true. I don't think this is, this should be a criticism, but it is true that those characters do not have a struggle. They're not struggling. But what is interesting is that there are characters in Iron Man's novels that are struggling. They're struggling between good and evil. Their struggle is whether they will attain this ideal man's status, whether they will strive towards being ideal or not or given to evil. And we'll talk about what evil is for Iron Man or given to evil and never be the ideal. I mean characters like Reardon in Atlas Shrug, to some extent Dominique, but I think it's more obvious than Reardon. Sorry, to some extent Dagny, but it's more obvious Reardon. Dominique in the Fontanet, Weynand in the Fontanet, Stadler in Atlas Shrug. These are characters that have the ideal, the potential to be ideal, the potential to be moral, good, perfect human beings, but they are struggling. Reardon and Dominique ultimately, ultimately resolve that struggle by embracing morality fully. Weynand and Stadler fail in that struggle and ultimately, ultimately particularly Stadler, embrace evil fully. Weynand in a sense gives up on trying to achieve them all. So you've got these struggles within significant characters. I mean, John Guld doesn't appear much in Atlas Shrug. Atlas Shrug is really a novel about Dagny and to some extent Reardon. Reardon appears in the novel far more than John Guld does, but you've got a struggle within Reardon. But what is Reardon's struggle? What is the struggle of good versus evil, if you will, within Reardon? For Reardon, what is the essence of evil? The essence of evil is evasion, evading the facts. Reardon is not so much tempted by evasion. Reardon is confused. He is mistaken. He's got false premises and he's trying to figure it out. He's trying to figure out what's true. The conflict within Reardon and ultimately within Dominique, the conflict between Reardon and Dominique is it appears that reality does not conform with some of my beliefs. Am I going to go with my beliefs or am I going to stick with reality, stick with logic, stick with reason? And it takes them a while to figure it out. First to see that there is, that reality is not conforming with their beliefs. Whether it's Reardon's relationship with his wife, Reardon's relationship with other people, the people that leech off of him, Reardon's relationship with sex, which is a huge part of his inner conflict. He's mistaken about his attitude towards sex and he has to learn that it's wrong. And then once he identifies that it's wrong, he has to embrace and acknowledge and integrate a new perspective on sex and on morality and on his own life and on other people. And that is the nature of the struggle within Reardon. And the same at the end, the same essentially is with Dominique. She has a wrong view of the world, the wrong view of the importance of other people, the wrong view of the power of other people over your own life and she has to learn and she struggles just as Reardon struggles throughout the novel. I mean one of the most powerful moments in Atlas Shrug, scenes in Atlas Shrug, is after Reardon and Dagny have sex for the first time, Reardon's explosion of a little speech about what they just did and the nature of what they just did and the conflict within him about what they just did. And it's a psychological conflict, but it's a conflict that fundamentally is a consequence of an error, an error of knowledge. Now, Weynand and Stadler have basically the same kind of conflicts. A conflict between reality and between reality, between the facts, between logic, between reason and between their ideas, their desires, their emotions. They, and they give up on reason. They give up on reality. And Stadler in particular spends the novel rationalizing for his immoral behavior, trying to justify it, trying to justify his immoral behavior. The standard is gold. And what you see is some people being able to resolve the inner conflict that they have in order to achieve gold like status and others give up on that conflict, resort and succumb to evil. And evil again for Inran is evasion. And Stadler, that's exactly what he's doing. His rationalizations are all a cover up of his evasion. So for Rand, there is inner conflict, but the inner conflict is a conflict between reality and mistaken beliefs that the heroes hold. And some of the heroes or the good heroes overcome. And the bad ones do not. They succumb to the bad beliefs. They reject reason. They reject reality. Now, for Jordan Peterson, good and evil are not, don't have the same status as they do with Inran. In a sense, evil for Rand is the absence, the absence of reality, the absence of reason, the absence of facing the facts as they are. Evil fundamentally for Inran is evasion, evading reality, evading the truth, evading the facts. Evil for Inran is not an act of force in reality. It's not something that's struggling with the good. It's not like the angel and the devil battling it out. But for Jordan Peterson, that's exactly what evil represents. Evil represents not just Jordan. I mean, this is true in Christianity. This is true in much of mythology of the past. It's true in all kinds of ancient religions. But there is a role for the devil. The devil is an active participant in reality. He is there to drive you towards evil, towards doing evil things. And that devil psychologically, according to Peterson, is in every single one of us. I mean, he talks a lot, if you listen to his lectures, he talks a lot about the fact that all of us, all of us are potential malices, all of us. It put in the right circumstances would commit the most horrific acts. All of us must constantly suppress, must constantly overcome this tendency to be murderous, rape, pillage, murder, lying, cheating, stealing. They're all in us. They're all waiting to come out. And we must actively hold them back. And the struggle of good and evil is not a struggle for self-improvement and a struggle for reason and a struggle to identify what's true and what's not. It is literally a struggle not to commit murder. It's a struggle not to be a monster. The monster is looking within every one of us. Think about Dostoevsky. And this is, this is what Jordan Peterson would say to great literature. And I agree with him. It is great literature, but it is a very, very, very different. It's a very different view, psychological view of man. It's a very, very, very different view of the struggle within our soul. Again, it is this struggle between a devil and an angel fighting within us rather than our attempt to, in a sense, correspond or find the truth in reality and adhere to that truth, adhere to that truth. So yes, we are never considered rape, pillage, and murder. I could never conceive of a man like Reardon doing that. Psychologically, it doesn't make any sense for Reardon to have a little devil on his shoulder wanting to do horrible things. But that, I think to Jordan, is superficial. And partially this comes from where Jordan Peterson is, right? Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist. And I think many of his clients are really struggle with really horrible circumstances and horrible, you know, wants, if you will, desires, passions. And they have, just like, you know, Freud told us, I mean, we all want to sleep with our mothers, we all want to rape, pillage, murder, and we have to suppress them. And yeah, many of the people, the disturbed people that I think Peterson sees, and to some extent from introspection, he sees it in himself, have those desires. But that's not the world. That's not, certainly not the world of healthy human beings. I don't think most of you have those urges that you need to suppress constantly. I don't think most of us, I can only, I guess I can only speak to myself. I don't see myself ever committing atrocities that Jordan Peterson talks about or being tempted by them. So the kind of struggle between good and evil that Peterson imagines. I think partially because of his experience as a psychologist, partially because of his sense of life, which is very, very dark, partially because of his metaphysical belief in a sense that there is an evil force in the universe. And indeed, Peterson believes, counter to iron, that the essential thing out there is suffering, is suffering. The essential characteristic, the essential nature of human life is suffering. Therefore, the essential activity is to overcome suffering because, and indeed he says, happiness is just something that happens to you. And happiness is, happiness is what? Happiness is accidental. It doesn't happen because you pursue a particular course in life. And life generally is suffering. So his whole view of the world, his whole view of life, his whole view of morality, his whole view of moral conflict, moral conflict, is completely and utterly different than Iron Man's. And to require that great literature be like his expectation, that great literature can only reflect his particular view of moral conflict, is wrong and bizarre. It doesn't make, and I think in this case, atrociously wrong because Iron Man, I think is great literature. And her characters do struggle. And the struggle is fascinating and interesting, particularly if you read it a second or third time, particularly characters like Greta and Dominique, the good characters. But even the struggle, the Weynand, and the struggle that Stadler go through, even the struggle of Stadler is not quite as elaborated on as Weynand's, but the Weynand struggle within the Fontanet are truly fascinating and truly interesting. But you're not going to see it if you see good and evil as these malevolent forces, or evil is a malevolent force in the universe that one has to constantly overcome and constantly fight against. So Jordan unfortunately is missing out on much of what is interesting about Iron Man. And I think the fact that he, he doesn't get the philosophy, the fact that he is objecting to the philosophy, and that psychologically he is rejecting Iron Man's whole thesis of, you know, moral perfection of the ability to achieve happiness through one's own actions and through morality, makes it impossible for him to understand Atlas Shrugged and to understand what Iron Man is doing with the characters in Atlas Shrugged. You've written that the concept, that the concept of God is morally evil, why? I didn't say it's morally evil, not in those words. I said it's false. False. I said it's a fantasy, it doesn't exist. I would say religion can be very dangerous psychologically in regard to the working of a man's mind. Faith is dangerous because a man who permits himself to exempt some aspect of reality from reason and to believe in a God even though he knows he has no reason to believe in a God, there is no evidence of a God's existence, that is the danger psychologically that man is not going to be rational or will have a terrible conflict. It's wrong in that way. However, let me say I certainly recognize anyone's right to have any religion they want to. Their legal right. Morally or philosophically that's a different issue. For many people religions are a way of explaining the mysteries of life, the unknown things. Do you recognize no mysteries? I don't believe that a lack of knowledge is a license to start inventing fantasies. Man certainly is not omniscient and I believe you should stay within that which he knows, act on his knowledge and constantly try to expand his knowledge. It's not necessary to be omniscient. I don't think there are mysteries, it's a wrong term. There are a great many things which man doesn't know and that's what the progress of science's knowledge is for, to learn more and more but not to invent an explanation for what you do not know. Mr. Rand, you're an atheist. Were you always an atheist? Did you grow up with religious training at all? No, I had practically no religious training. My parents were formerly had a religion but fortunately didn't impose on me in any serious way and I was about 13 when I decided I'm an atheist and that was that. Was there anything that brought you to this? No, just simply thinking on the subject and my main reason was that it is wrong to believe anything for which there is no evidence and also the fact that I resent religious morality which tells man that he's an inferior being. He's not. He is not. As far as he knows he's the highest creation in civilization or the highest being and the idea of accepting on face some ineffable being who is superior to you in every way even though you cannot aspire to that perfection that is just a formula for psychological inferiority complex for self-abasement and I saw no reason for men to accept it. That's the earliest 13. I still think so but I know it much more clearly now.