Good afternoon and welcome to another

edition of the Secular Foxhole Podcast.

Today we have a returning guest, one

of our favorites, James Valliant, visiting the

Foxhole to discuss Ayn Rand today.

James, how are you?

I'm quite well.

How are you, sir?

I'm doing very good.

Pleasure to be back with you. Thank you.

It's nice to have you back.

I battled the cold for two weeks,

and I finally about 99% better.

I hope it wasn't Omicron.

We checked all those things out and made sure of that.

But it's my annual what I call crud,

sinus and sore throat kind of thing.

Winter has come. That's right.

Winter has come to spring the second of February.

That's true. Yes.

Ayn Rand's birthday again, today's topic is Ayn Rand.

And James, who was Ayn Rand.

And in my view, why is she

so important to the human race?

Well, Ayn Rand was, of course,

the famous novelist and philosopher.

She was born in Russia in.

But she came to America after witnessing and

enduring the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath.

She was skilled and fortunate enough to

escape the Soviet Union and come to

America, where she became an extremely popular

novelist, playwright, screenwriter in the United States.

And she wasn't just an amazingly

powerful and popular writer of fiction.

She was, in my view, the most important philosopher of

our time as well, ranking with the great philosophers.

And so there's two ways to evaluate her importance.

And I'm going to start with philosophy

because I think that is the most

important philosophy, according to Ayn Rand.

And I agree with her.

Here is the most important topic that there is.

It is an inescapable topic for humanity.

This is one of the reasons why

humans, religion persists and why religion is

so ubiquitous in more primitive cultures is

because people need a comprehensive worldview.

It is not something that we can dispense with.

Our answers to fundamental questions

will shape our psychology.

We'll determine whether or not we're happy.

And since it's so important and formative on the

individual level, it is the single most important factor

in human history, in development of human culture.

In my view, we are still

overcoming the negative impacts of religion.

In my view, Western civilization is still, in

effect, breaking the chains of the Dark Ages.

We can hope.

But I'll tell you, Ayn Rand represents the

most powerful destruction of those chains. True.

That occurred in the last millennia.

She gave great credit to Thomas Aquinas back

in the 1200s and reintroducing Aristotelian logic and

Greek observational science into the Western thought, which

did lead to humanism Renaissance, the Age of

science, the Enlightenment dates, in effect, natural revolution.

But we are still the Industrial

Revolution, the Scientific revolution, my gosh.

But we are still especially in the area of

ethics and therefore in its related areas, all the

normative humanities, for example, politics and so forth.

We're still laboring under ideas and philosophy that

we haven't caught up as she points out

to the extraordinary developments that humanity has made

in the physical Sciences and technology.

And so I think that her importance on a personal

level is that she can autobiographical note about myself.

She was instrumental in making me a happier, more confident

person, in helping to organize my life in a rational

way, to make it a more productive one, to make

my relationships more honest and serious, and to make me

a happier person in general, to get rid of the

remnants of the ideas of previous philosophies and religious ideas

that lingered were lingering in my mind in psychology.

And I think that she has the

capacity to change history, to change history.

If you look at the world that she grew

up and lived in through the 20th century and

the great crisis of that time was totalitarianism.

She lived through the age of Hitler and Stalin

and Mao and the horrific effects of that on

humanity, and she could see that those were the

results of philosophy, the remnants of this ancient primordial

philosophy of altruism and mysticism and collectivism that she

was the most articulate critic of, I think, in

the history of ideas.

And Ayn Rand wrote several important novels that people

declared to be life changing for them personally.

She went on in the 1960s and 1970s to

write a series of nonfiction essays that were anthologized

into important books of philosophy, very popular books of

philosophy, which I think lay the foundation for a

whole new approach to philosophy, a Copernican revolution, only

more radical than Copernicus himself. Yeah.

Again, you touched briefly she grew up in,

if I remember right, the Czarus to Russia,

and then the Bolshevik Revolution came.

So what was her childhood like?

As she reached her teenage years, I

think she knew she had to escape.

So how did that occur?

But what was her childhood like

and how did she get out?

Well, her father was sort of a self

made, which is an extraordinary thing, if you

think about Eastern European's bizarre Russia.

He was sort of a selfmade man altogether.

He actually got a University degree now.

There were quotas in European universities at the time.

There were quotas as to the number

of Jews who could be admitted.

And he could only get a position as

a student at University in the chemistry Department.

And so he became a pharmacist, and

he actually became a very successful and

relatively prominent pharmacist in St.

Petersburg, Russia, the cultural heart of Russia.

And he owned a pharmacy, and the

family lived in apartments above his pharmacy.

It was on one of the main squares in St. Petersburg.

So Ayn Rand grew up in the heart of

the most culturally rich city in Russia, St.

Petersburg.

Nonetheless, she grew up.

They were a family of non observant Jews.

Her mother gave an official nod to Judaism,

but the parents didn't really push religious parents

were mostly Liberal minded people of the time.

And so she grew up getting a really good education.

Her parents made sure that their daughters she was

the eldest of three girls, got really fine education.

By the time that Ayn Rand was 19, she had gone to

one of the finest girls schools in Russia at the time.

And she had a degree from what was

then because it was after the revolution, the

University of Petrograd changed from St.

Petersburg to Petrograd.

It became Lenning Grad University.

Now, of course, it's changed back to St. Petersburg.

But when she graduated from University at 19

with a degree in history and the pedagogy

of history, she really had an amazing education.

Now, during that period, of course, in 1917, when she

was just twelve years old, she was about to turn

13 when the Bolshevik October Revolution happened and her father

lost her business was stolen from him.

The family initially fled to the Crimea.

When things settled out, they returned, in effect,

to Petrograd, where they nearly starved to death

and expected to officially starve to death.

They could live for a while on accumulated assets, but

his business and their home was stolen from them.

And her mother taught foreign languages,

but they barely scraped by.

And there were times where they nearly starved to death

in Rand knew she had to get out of Russia.

And in 1926, at the age of

21, that's exactly what she did.

She kind of had to lie to the Soviet

officials telling them that, oh, she was just going

there to investigate the American movie industry and bring

back ideas from the latest thing, the latest movies

from Hollywood, and I'll come back and help the

develop Russian cinema business.

So she lied, saying she would come back,

but she got out with that lie.

There were cousins of hers, were living in Chicago, and

she lived with them for a little time in the

summer of 1926, before she came to Hollywood, where she

actually met she came to Hollywood and by September of

1926, actually met Cecilby DeMille himself.

And she became extra on the movie he was

making at the time, King of Kings, the story

of Jesus, the silent version of King of Kings,

where she met her husband, Frank O'Connor.

She tripped him on the bus.

He was an actor on the set, tripped him on the bus,

met him, and he became her husband for the next 50 years.

Right now, her first novel, We the Living, is quote,

as close to an autobiography as I'll ever write.

What did she want to show with that

novel to the people and Blair and James

that you said before about the movies?

It turned into a movie also, so

please add a comment on that also.

And the power of ideas. We the living.

Yeah, We the Living.

There was a party, a going away party that was thrown

for Ayn Rand as she was heading off to America, and

one old gentleman stopped her at the party and this left

obviously a very deep impression on Ayn Rand.

He said, tell them in America, tell them

in America that Russia is a giant Cemetery

and that we're all slowly dying.

And that's exactly what Ayn Rand thought of Russia.

She knew that she wouldn't have the intellectual

or artistic freedom to do the work that

she knew she needed to do.

And she witnessed the misery and starvation,

the typhus and the cholera and the

economic misery, the bread lines. Exactly.

Her family nearly starved to death, as I say.

And so she brought a vivid

personal experience to about totalitarianism.

She became one of the very first

Russians who developed an audience outside of

Russia, being critical of the Communist revolution.

Written in published in the mid 1930s by McMillan,

it had only a modest success in mixed reviews.

And if you look back on that period,

of course, most intellectuals in America were Communists.

Editor of the New York Times Book Review, Granville Heck

said in The New York Times, one cannot be a

proper author without first being a proper Communist.

So the intellectual world was not even

ready to hear anti Communist material in

what Eugene Lions called the Red Decade.

So a lot of the critics would say things like,

too often the Communists wear the black hat and Ms.

Rand account.

But it was a devastating critique of

not just Communism, but of all dictatorship,

philosophically speaking, and enriched by Ayn Rand's

personal experience, deeply influenced.

And you can still see the impact of

Victor Hugo on the style of her writing.

She was still learning English, by the

way, in Russia, she had become fluent

in Russian, of course, and French.

She could read and write German, but English

was sort of a whole new language.

And to become a novelist and to

be able to write a novel.

Now, mind you, the great US American

literary critic HL Menken, admired we the

Living and believed it should be published.

And I think with some help in getting her

having that published, as Martin pointed out, even though

face to some hostile critics and some mixed success,

it was turned into a film. Now get this.

It was turned into a film

in Mussolini's Fascist Italy, right.

They stole it from Ayn Rand.

They didn't tell Rand or the

publisher that they were stealing it.

And so with a huge, big fat Copyright violation.

But the people who made the film were anti fascists.

Alessandrini and the actors and the others who

were working on the film were well known

for being antifascist and anti Mussolini.

And it's funny, they did actually two films

out of the one book, and they used

the book itself rather than some screenplay.

And so it turned into just this beautiful, magnificent film,

by the way, big success until Mussolini realized that it

was anti dictatorship and he had it pulled.

People were lining up around the block to

see the movies, but it was only out

for a short time until the Italian government

pulled it and all the copies were destroyed.

It was only the director, Alessandrini, who

basically buried it, buried a copy of

the negative that even saved the film.

It later came to Ayn Rand's

attention that it had been made.

There was an international lawsuit after World War

II which got Ayn Rand royalties for the

Copyright theft that they'd engaged in.

But later on, her lawyer had discovered the negative,

and I'm Rand actually supervised the editing process and

the subtitling process of reediting the two films into

a single film, which was rereleased in the 1980s.

I was at the premiere at the Screen Actors Guild

and Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood when it was premiered.

Leonard Peikoff gave introduction to it,

told the history of it.

What a beautiful film.

I highly recommend that anyone interested in Iran's life

or work, check out the film We the Living.

It's a black and white film made in

Italian, but an extremely beautiful film and extremely

faithful to Ayn Rand's original novel.

Right now with her other novels, Excuse

Me, Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, she later

called herself a romantic realist.

What is that genre, and why is it all but unknown?

Well, there are certain literature.

American literature, especially in the last century, has been

characterized by a school that Ayn Rand called naturalism,

and it attempts to provide an image of life

as it is, the way things are.

And, of course, the way things are for most

naturalist writers is pretty darn miserable and horrific.

Some really good writer like John Steinbeck, the writer

of Grapes of Wrath, or a brilliant stylist like

William Faulkner Sound in The Fury, or the great

American playwright Tennessee Williams Streetcar Named Desire.

They're naturalistic, but they all have a very grim

view of the world and humanity, don't they?

Naturalism by doing, einrand identified the real difference

between naturalism and romanticism is a belief in

human free will, that human beings can make

choices, can think, can to some extent take

control of their lives and direct it.

And it's the logical consequences of

people's choices that give any literature

any moral, inspirational point to them.

And so Iran was much more akin to the romantic

writers of the 19th century, whom she very much admired.

Men like Victor Hugo and Fyodor

Dostoevsky, Edmond Rostand, for example.

Authors like that, even the lesser Romantics, she thought,

were much better because they believed in heroes and

villains, they had moral values because they believed that

human beings had free will, that they made choices,

and those choices mattered to their personalities, actions and

the consequences of those actions.

And she wanted to create her own goal in writing

The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, as she said, was to

create characters and stories that would interest her.

And so to her, the goal of her

literature was the fictional presentation of the ideal

man, the ideal human being you see, morally,

psychologically, and from her personal perspective, a man.

Right, right.

The goal of her writing was

this projection of this moral ideal.

And so the hero of The Fountainhead, Howard

Rourke, is unlike any hero you will ever

run across in any other kind of literature.

Because Ayn Rand, in having to do this, realized

that because she was in disagreement with all of

the previous moral philosophy, pleased before most of the

great romantics that she liked from the 19th century,

for example, were Christians, a Christian socialist like you

Go, or a Christian conservative like Dostoevsky.

They were Christians.

So she realized she had to develop a whole

new philosophy, a whole new approach to ideas, simply

in order to project this new ideal.

And so her heroes are unlike any heroes

you will ever confront in other literature.

Yes, exactly.

I'm speaking for myself with a gracious tip of

the hat to The Fountainhead, I think at The

Shrug is the greatest novel written in human history.

I have to agree with you.

Of all the novels that I've ever

read, and I've read some great novels.

It's not just the great French romantics.

Even some of these American

naturalists were great novelists.

And going back, I like Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I like great epic writers from the past, sure.

But there's just no question in my mind.

Atlas Shrugged is the greatest knowledge, the

greatest epic ever composed by human writer

so far in human history.

Yes, it was an inspirational, life changing event for me,

but so was my earlier reading of The Fountain.

But I have to tell you, I fell in

love with Jackie Taggart in a way that I've

never fallen in love with a character in literature.

I know I was a young man, and I

know Ayn Rand's work is sort of flattering to

the ego of young men in certain ways.

But I fell in love with Tag. Me, Taggart.

I identified with her.

I think I identify with her more than

any other character in all of world literature.

I mean, in some ways I identify

with Serena to Bergerac or something.

I was about to mention sir.

No, it was one of my all time favorites. Yeah.

But I still think that I'm more spiritually akin

to Dagny Tagger than I am to any other

character in the whole of Western literature.

Well, I think you can see herself

in Dagny in a lot of ways.

The way she describes the heroines of The

Fountainhead and Alice Rugby are very interesting.

Dominique, she said, is me in a bad mood. That's right.

And Dagney she described in her early notes as

me with any possible flaws removed, entirely removed.

She's going to clean up herself and make herself

idealized as Dagny psychologically, and then convey herself in

more negative, bad mood when the world was getting

to her through the character of Dominique.

But one thing that she always could do

with her female characters is to convince you

of their love their passionate love for the

hero or their passionate love for their values.

Dominique loves architecture, and that explains why she regards

Howard works work as sacred, which explains why she

acts the way she does or getting tagged Taggart

the way she loves her railroad, or the way

she loves John Golf or Francisco or Hang.

The way they value is a reflection

of Iran's passionate love of this Earth. Really?

Now, again, we touched on it a moment

ago, but she had to create her own

philosophic system, and that system is again, in

my personal view, an epoch creating philosophy.

Talking about, let's have a second Renaissance.

What is the significance of this for her ideas?

If they ever gain a foothold in America

or in the world, what do you see?

The world looking like?

Yeah, me too.

The liberation of the human mind, the veneration of

reason and its capacity to improve human life on

Earth, the freedom to liberate the human mind, to

let it do so, were it not for government

interventions, were it not for government attempts very often

to help people, at least that's their excuse.

What they end up doing is shackling the

mind and inhibiting creativity, which is all that

coercive government regulation can really end up doing.

Ayn Rand demonstrates that it is

the creative, independent mind that is

the Fountainhead for all human progress.

And she demonstrates further that the

primary social condition for the operation

of the creative mind is freedom. Freedom.

The freedom to disagree, the freedom to buck

the trend, to go against the current all

real creative thinkers, philosophers, scientists, artists, think of

Galileo, think of Beethoven or Victor Hugo.

They all have these same struggles.

If they weren't being burnt at the stake

for their innovative ideas, they were being denounced.

Man was meant to fly denounced and imprisoned.

Yeah, exactly.

And look at the fate of artists in the

Soviet Union, for example, which surely would have been

on Ram States in some gulag or psychiatric hospital.

So, coming to America and looking at the

spectacular success of comparative freedom in the west,

she drew the inductive conclusion that freedom, the

liberation of the human mind, was the key

to human prosperity and progress.

And when that's understood in a principled fashion,

the future would be a future of unlimited

possibilities, endless discoveries of the mind both in

science and in the humanities, and understanding of

humans themselves, and a consequent revolution in both

culture and technology.

More than that, guilt free love of life on Earth,

the end of all of this Christian misery, of being

slaves to one another and the lowest among us.

No, no, no.

Iran was opposed to the idea of unearned guilt,

opposed to the idea of people having to sacrifice

their happiness for the Socalled greater good.

Just a religious concept of mystical concept in our

view, because the common good is no different than

the good of each and every individual.

And so what would the world look like?

The world would be a world in which we

would respect one another's rational selfinterest, a world in

which we would share our values enthusiastically, a world

in which people in an uninhibited, guilt free way,

would be enjoying and pursuing their long term happiness.

So barely scratched.

All I can do is the most vague ways

tell you that comparative paradise to anything that humans

have known is waiting for the world.

Should it embrace the basic ideas of owning

Rand now, actually, I'll throw this in even

though it's not related to Ms. Rand.

One of the positive effects of this covet

debacle led by government interference is the collapse

of the government education and the burgeoning home

school movement or private school movement.

Lots of parents have pulled their kids out of

public schools over the last two years, haven't they?

Yes. Amazing.

And to me, that's getting very critical out there

and getting very critical of the whole system.

The seed for the second Renaissance right there. Yeah.

Well, I absolutely think that's true.

I think people are growing skeptical of the

value of a University education and the humanities.

I think they can see it in

the technical areas, science and engineering.

I think it's still Aristotelian based somewhat.

There is some rationality there.

But when it comes to philosophy and history and

economics and psychology, just garbage, people come out with

degrees that they may not be able to use

at all or that have absolutely corrupted any correct

understanding and prevented them from seeing the truth.

So I got an undergraduate degree in philosophy

only because I knew I was going to

go on to be an attorney, for example.

But if that characterized my education, but that is to

say a University education in the 20th century in philosophy,

I would be one messed up individual with probably no

marketable job skills except at Harvard or Yale.

Even if you go to Harvard, Yale,

some of those people are complaining.

Some of those people who want the government

to cancel because the government gives these guaranteed

loans, these low interest loans to students, even

if they don't qualify for scholarships, their politicians

want to cancel all those College debt.

But the fact is they undertook all that College debt.

Now they have what is even from the

prestigious private universities become a useless degree.

We're recording this for release on her birthday

February 2 next month, and I generally celebrate

her birthday with some quiet reflection.

Maybe I'll pick up actually, what I like to

do is I'll grab her nonfiction work for The

New Intellectual, and I'll peek that I'll peek into

the excerpts from the novels and just get reinspired.

Yeah.

Can I ask what you normally do?

If anything, that's a good one, because the book

for the New Intellectual was her first book.

Collecting sort of excerpts included a big

nonfiction essay Intellectual, which had a powerful

effect on me, helped shape the course

of my life and my career decisions.

It's that big an influence on me.

Just that essay for the New Intellectual I

think we discussed before the faith and force

between faith and force, and for the New

Intellectual to avoid Rand's early nonfiction essays after

publishing Atlas Shrugged, those two had formative impact

on my thinking about everything and even my

interests, intellectually and my career direction.

So, yeah, and that book is I highly recommend

the book because it's got Ein Rand, the most

philosophical excerpts from her novels, with a living Anthem

Fountainhead atmosphere and really an excellent place for people

who want to know Einran's ideas, a good place

for them to start.

It's in that book that she named her philosophy

in a Public way Objectivism for the first time.

But her other books, The Virtue of Selfishness,

which came shortly thereafter, a revolution in ethics.

Yes, I'm Rand was controversial because, of course,

she advocated selfishness, and by that she didn't

mean what most people mean when you concretize

what selfishness means in specific concrete actions.

For most people, they mean criminals and

drug addicts and thieves and people who

are on a course of self destruction.

I was a prosecutor for many years, and people,

some of my more conservative colleagues would say, oh,

yeah, look at all those selfish people in jail.

And I would always make the point, well, even if we

didn't manage to put them in jail, we're looking at some

of the most self destructive people in our society.

These people are not developing productive skills.

These people, whether or not we catch them

or not, these people are, in effect, ruining

themselves, their characters and their own psychologists.

Some of them are destroying

themselves with drugs and alcohol.

The folks in that jail, whether they were

in jail or not, would be among the

most self destructive human beings in our country.

They were always taken aback by that.

But what I ran meant by selfishness was your long

term actual self interest, something that very few people even

take the time to identify, much less consider in a

principled way as Ian Randy and putting it on that

ground, making human life the objective needs of human life

is the standard of moral values.

As she did, she was able to provide us

with an objective grounding for ethics for the first

time, giving us a real motive to be good,

that is to say, our long term self interest.

When I contemplate being dishonest.

No, not all lies are dishonest.

If you were hiding Jews from the Nazis, of

course I ran to say, go ahead and lie,

but the reason why I'm honest with people is

the same reason why I'm honest with myself.

And if I try to gain a value by

lying to somebody, it feels like I would be

standing on concrete into railroad tracks with a locomotive

headed at me at 100 miles an hour.

I regard being ethical as the

most selfish thing I can do.

And Ayn Rand, therefore had a

radically different perspective on selfishness.

But because she was an egoist figures from

both the left and the right and everywhere

in between as selfish, because in their minds,

selfishness is associated with the ideas of philosophers

like Thomas Hobbes or Friedrich Nietzsche, and very

much disagreed with their approaches and their assumptions

about what selfishness implied and entailed.

And that's another reason why her

philosophy is such a revolution.

And in this respect, she could give a moral defense

to capitalism, to the free market that no one had

ever done before, until, unless we can defend a person's

right to live for his or her own sake, defend

the profit motive on an ethical basis, capitalism will always

be struggling uphill against the Socialists and collectivists who claim

to be working for the common good.

But as I say, I'm Rand saw

no conflict of interest between rational individuals.

So long as I respect your rights and we get

on peacefully, so long as reason is what we put

first among our values, Einran saw no reason for there

to be any conflict or any real conflict of interest

between rational people in a free society.

So in other words, being an egoist doesn't mean walking

past drowning children with your nose stuck up in it.

Oh, quite the opposite.

You know something?

My love for humanity in general is simply an

emanation from my love of my own life.

I assume that the value I place on

my life, it's not true of everyone.

Some people are monsters and suicidal whether they

know it or not, but I assume I

give the benefit of the doubt to humanity.

I assume that they love their life like I do.

I assume that they too appreciate this.

So therefore I'm going to respect their selfishness.

I can only gain from their selfishness, and it is

in my self interest to help other people when appropriate.

It's not an atomistic individualism that Iran

advocated, but one which acknowledges the huge

potential value that other people can be.

I mean, I'm much better off in society than on a

desert island in some ways, but I'd rather be as Iran

points out, I'd rather be on a desert island alone than

be a slave or in some Nazi concentration camp.

Yeah, go ahead, Mark.

Yeah, it will do as an ending, maybe to get you

back again, James, because this could be a follow up.

We could go on and on for hours.

I think we'll wrap up, but I will give you

some things that you could ponder on and give you,

like the cliffhanger version and we'll come back.

Is your book High Range Critics? Yeah.

And also that you talk about this egotist

and the development of Rans view about Nietzsche

and others that have written about that, and

also the anecdote about the businessman that approached

Random wanted to change her philosophy.

These are like hard things.

But if you could give it like a teaser to

the listeners, and then you will come back soon again.

Okay.

Well, Frederick Nietzsche was a big influence on

Ayn Rand early on in her life.

As a teenager, she was

already developing ideas about egoism.

I think a cousin of hers came up to

her and said, AHA, I've discovered a German philosopher

who beat you to all your ideas. She said, oh, really?

And so she read Thus Begsarathustra, and she was

favorably impressed by his poetry and some of his

expressions of the heroic sense of life.

But as she studied his ideas further, read

The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil,

stuff like that, she realized that he was

a defender of subjectivism, irrationalism determinism.

He had a view of emotions that was

instinctive, the blue, the blood, not cognition.

I'm granted, our emotions were the result

of our evaluations and so forth.

She was also thought that he was

equivocal on the issue of force.

She thought that an egoist would neither want

to rule nor permit himself to be ruled.

He would neither sacrifice others to

himself nor sacrifice himself to others.

And so she made this very

important clarification, in my view, explicitly

indicating where Nietzsche had gone wrong.

He discovered this rather early on, still writing, Mind

you, in her first philosophical notes in 1934.

She's still in her 20s.

She is coming out against Nietzsche's view of emotions,

his view of determinism, his view of subjectivism.

She thinks, we don't need a

genealogy or history of ethics.

We need only a logical system of ethics.

She was clearly coming down on Aristotle side.

She was clearly coming down on the side of

voluntary interaction between people, as opposed to some Ubermens,

like you say, stepping over dead bodies.

Let me jump in here really quick.

In her published journals, at least speaking for

myself, I could see her growth from Nietzsche

to Objectivist, if you will, right?

As I say, even in her 20s, she

rejected the basic, the most fundamental philosophical ideas.

In his system, jar subjectivism, radical subjectivism

determinism, radical determinism, and a certain approach

to emotions, an attack on principled ethics,

logical ethics beyond good and evil.

We need the transvaluation of values.

But he didn't provide a positive system of values.

So in my book, The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics, the

way I put it is Nietzsche was a philosophical bulldozer.

Heinrand was an architect.

She built a system of principled ethics based.

I mean, one of the big problems with the new atheists,

in my view, is that they don't have a good answer

to the religious people to say where the ethics come from.

Ayn Rand has the answer, another

important revolution that Iron provides.

But she still admired Nietzsche to the point that she

was going to include a quote from Frederick Nietzsche.

The Noble Soul has referenced for itself.

The introduction is the dedication to the Fountainhead.

But even by that point, she had

grown so disenchanted with Nietzsche, she excluded

even putting that quote there.

She just mentioned it in the introduction she

wrote to the 25th anniversary edition in 1968.

Now, my book, The Passion of Ayn Rand's critics,

former associates of Iron Rand, who had, in my

view, terribly exploited her financially, lied to her.

They came out with biographies shortly after Iran's

death when Iran could not respond to them.

And that struck me as somewhat unfair.

And so around the turn of the 21st century, around

2000 2001, I published a series of critiques of Barbara

Brandon's biography, Anne Leonard Picoff and the Estate of Iron

Ran contacted me, and I wasn't the one who contacted

them even to let them know I'd done this. But Dr.

Pecoff liked what I had written and offered me

Iran's personal notes on the break she had with

the Brandon and asked if I could use them.

I went and looked at those notes and found that they

very much in fact, they provided a lot more information than

I ever thought was there to critique the brand and what

they'd left out and what they'd lied about.

And so in 2005, I published

The Passion of Iran's Critics.

It's very distressing to me that so many of

Iran's critics are focused on ad hominem personal issues.

And every single time I cannot think of

a major personal attack on her that is

even accurate, actually accurate, as if attacking her

personally could refute her philosophy, which it cannot.

Of course, that's just ad hominem.

But more than that, as if we should simply

dismiss her because, you see, she's this rotten, selfish

psychopath and all of that is lies.

But that whole personal attack has its roots in

the Brandons and their biographies, and I had hoped

to give Ain Rand side of that dispute.

The fact is that the brand, and as I say, lied not

only to Iran for many years, but lied to the public about

their break with Iron Rand in I had to bring all that

to the attention, I think, of people so that they could understand

the credibility and bias issues of the brand.

And apart from several factual issues,

they get wrong about Iron Random.

James, this has been great, but I want to do

a couple of things for our audience who may not

be as philosophically knowledgeable as the three of us.

Can you just give a quick

definition of subjectivism and determinism? Okay.

The idea of subjectivism is

that we cannot know reality.

Some subjectivist say, oh, yeah,

sure, there's a reality.

We can never transcend our own perspective on it.

All we have is our angle, our perspective,

and our biases, and our attempt to escape

that is always going to be impossible.

And that's what Frederick Nietzsche believed.

Friedrich Nietzsche was not a solipsist, someone who believes

that only his consciousness exists and that everyone else

is just really an image of his consciousness.

But he was a Subjectivist.

He believed that each of us had our

own wholly unique little worlds of perspective.

Therefore, that objective truth is illusory as

such, particularly in philosophical and moral matters.

But subjectivism is the belief that your consciousness,

in effect, is all that you can know.

You can't know reality.

Or as Kant, an arch subjectivist, said,

we can never know things in themselves.

Or earlier subjectivist would say, reality is inaccessible to

our consciousness, and all we have are the effects

of reality at best on our consciousness.

Now, determinism is a belief that everything is,

in effect, predetermined, that everything has already been

set by atoms of the physical world, which

are, in effect, playing out with each other

in a billiard ball fashion, that's the scientific

version, Spinoza, was a logical determinist.

He thought that logic itself implied that human beings had

no choice, you see, and that whatever choice we think

is, we all know that thinking takes effort.

We all experience from the inside making choices,

and those choices seem to make a difference. Right.

So determinism is the denial that human beings have any

kind of free will and that it's all predetermined.

Ian Rand had a very specific view of free will.

She didn't think it was magic.

She didn't think it was limitless in its power.

It was very specific, and it had a specific role.

And we could bring control to our lives to

a certain degree through the use of thinking.

And look at how humans can do that.

Look at the range of human creativity.

We can play golf on the moon.

We can compose, we split atoms, right.

We genetically alter molecules to

create new life species.

Our power over the world is astonishing, but because of

our creative ability to think, and that's what Iran identified

as our free will, our ability to think or not.

And to that extent, we can change the

world and bring control to our lives.

So she actively argued against determinism, whether

of the religious or scientific variety. One more thing.

I want to give you a quote of hers, and

then you can expand on that for a little bit.

Quote, the alleged shortcut to knowledge, which is

faith, is only a shortcut, destroying the mind. Unquote.

That's a gem, isn't it?

It's a gem.

Ainrand believed.

So this is a technical point in philosophy,

but Iran was really the first philosopher to

come to grips with the fact that consciousness

possesses a specific identity and nature.

Previous philosophers had thought, and

I include Aristotle in this.

Who is the philosopher that had the

biggest influence of all on iron?

She regarded herself, in effect,

as in the Aristotelian tradition.

And even Aristotle said that if

consciousness were anything in particular, that

that would be a distorting element.

And that really did get modern

philosophy off to a bad start.

Based on Lock, I believed in this causal

theory of knowledge, this veil of perception.

All we know is the effects of reality on

our senses in mind, not reality in itself.

Iran rejected all of that.

It climaxed with cons.

Of course, we said we can't

ever know things in themselves.

All we know are the

categories of our own consciousness.

Space and time are just the way

we have of looking at the world.

It's not nothing about the world itself.

Logic, logic itself is only a feature.

It wouldn't be nice if it was an

automatic feature of you and my oh, boy.

God said that it was built in.

We have to be logical only, right?

Iran rejected all of that.

She said, all of that is, in effect, arguing that

we are blind because we have eyes, deaf, because we

have ears, diluted because we have a mind.

But it's not only a reputation of any of

the serious arguments of the skeptics, it's also a

reputation, the identity of consciousness, of the mystic.

The mystic is person who rejects reason for on

behalf of some other non rational means of knowing.

But of course, the senses connect me with reality.

Logic keeps me connected to reality.

I know how those work.

Those have a causal mechanism to keep me in

contact with reality and to connect me with reality.

Whereas mysticism, what do they have?

They have Crystal balls, tea leaves, horoscopes,

mystic, revelation, ancient texts, you name it.

There are these pseudo abracadabra, pseudo

methods of knowing Ouija boards.

It goes on and on and on, right.

And these are all pseudo means,

non causal means of knowledge.

And mysticism, religion always amounts to that.

It's not a shortcut to knowledge.

It actually shortcircuits knowledge by

evading the method required.

If an idea pops into my head

like ghost or God or unicorn.

It doesn't oblige reality to

contain those things, does it?

I've got to connect the idea in my

head to reality by a process of logical

demonstration that reduces it to the evidence of

observation, HAPS into respect for the nature of

consciousness and the causal identity that consciousness is

the process that consciousness has to go through.

You're not even having a proper how. So?

Iran rejected both radical skepticism and

radical mysticism on this same basis.

It violates the primary requirement of consciousness, which

must have an identity in order to operate.

It's not the disqualifying feature of

consciousness, it's the means of consciousness.

But it is the indispensable means of consciousness that

can have no shortcut and no short circuit.

How did she answer the critics, then, that said,

well, if you're just logical, you mean deny emotions?

Oh, quite the opposite.

Ayn Rand was a passionate person.

She didn't think that there had to be

a conflict at all between reason and emotion,

insofar as people do run it.

And there's a reasonably common phenomenon where

people believe one thing, but their emotions

are leading them in another direction.

Well, Ian Rand says that's ultimately a

conflict between your ideas, a subconscious idea.

You may not have recognized that you came

to maybe in childhood, maybe subconsciously, but in

effect, it's an evaluation you reached at some

point that informed your emotions.

Now, heinrand was way ahead of the curve on this.

In recent decades, the cognitive behavioral school

of psychology has largely taken over the

therapeutic world and to a large extent,

even made inroads in the academic world.

And so Ayn Rand was decades ahead of her time.

She was one of the pioneers

of the cognitive view of psychology.

And so to Ayn ran thinking, sure, there may be

issues that you can never overcome, even with dedicated psychotherapy

and that you just have to live with.

But she said, man is a being, a self made soul.

We can shape our own characters, personality, our

own emotions through the values that we inculcate

in ourselves, that we really integrate into our

thinking and that we act on.

And that pretty soon that becomes who

we are, that becomes our emotional reaction.

And boy, I can confirm this

from my own personal experience.

My own values, as I've learned them, as they

have sophisticated over the years, have had a direct

impact on my native automatic emotional reactions to things,

so that there's less and less conflict in my

consciousness between my emotions and my logic.

No, a properly functioning consciousness

has them in harmony.

Has them in harmony.

One objective is writer.

Put it this way, think clearly so you

can feel deeply and feel deeply so you

can think clearly to the Objectivist.

There is no built in

conflict between reason and emotion.

Reason is our tool of knowing.

Emotions are our tool for both enjoying

life and helping me understand my values.

Who was that author, if I may ask?

Nevada.

Okay to give credit where credit is due, I guess.

All right.

Well, I was going to say his first three books,

I think were probably written when he was with Ms. Rand.

That's why I called him an objective, is because

that's back when he was still an Objectivist psychology

of self esteem and who is iron.

And even most of the material you'll find in

the psychology of romantic love was material he had

developed when he was with Iron Rant.

He went off the deep end.

He went off the deep end, in my view.

His later work becomes less and

less important, in my view.

And some of it is actually darn right, as

I say, his memoir about Aang Ran, his life

with Iran Rand, and some of his psychology implications

about what Ayn Rand was saying.

We're just outright misleading.

It was Aaron Rand telling him

not to be a rationalist repressor.

And then he writes, break free.

I had to stop being a rationalist oppressor,

which is what Iran was making me do.

No, if you read her notes, she was telling him

she was diagnosing in him the need to be himself

and stop trying to martyr yourself to try and be

in a quote, your view of an Objectivist hero.

That's what she was telling him.

But I did have to.

That's such a beautiful quote, though.

Even though it's raining, I

don't dismiss everything from Brandon.

Again, I stand by.

I think his first three books

are well worth trying to find.

But after those, it's garbage. Yeah.

Anyway, James Martin, do you have anything to add?

Oh, I didn't get to the Texas oil man store.

Martin mentioned that earlier, and that

popped back in my head.

Iran was a woman of enormous integrity,

and she was like Howard work.

She wouldn't give an inch on her ideas.

She would state them plainly forthrightly,

even if it offended the audience.

They were scandalized sometimes by her

defenses of aviation or selfishness or

radical complete free market capitalism.

She didn't care.

She was going to defend the truth as she saw it.

And there was one after Atlas Shrugged came out,

I guess there was a multimillionaire Texas oilman, a

conservative, apparently a Republican, who said, Ms.

Ryan, I'll give you up to a

million dollars to help spread your ideas.

If only you add a religious element

or make them friendly to religion.

Or don't be so hostile to Mystics and religion.

She, of course, threw the offer

into the waste paper basket.

As the way Leonard Peacock describes it, what good would that

money do me if I had to compromise my ideas?

It would undermine everything that I stand

for all of my life's work.

I may as well just rip up every copy of Atlas Shrugged.

I wouldn't do that.

And so for Ayn Rand, there was no

any more than there was a reason.

Emotion, dichotomy.

There was no theory, practice dichotomy.

It would have been the height of impracticality for her

to have compromised on a significant point, even if someone

was going to give her a million dollars to help

spread the rest of her ideas and work.

Martin, anything else for you? No. All right.

Looking forward to commemorate

and celebrate Rand's Day.

Yes, Gran's Day, RAN's birthday.

It's a wonderful holiday because it's the holiday

where we should do something for ourselves.

It's the holiday where we should.

Iran was asked whether indulgence and pleasure, but

I think Playboy Magazine 64 interviewing her.

Should we indulge her?

She doesn't regard pleasure as an indulgence. No.

If you are being rational and principled,

then it is a human need.

Do something nice for yourself.

Do something important for yourself.

On RAN's Day, Rand would have really

liked that way of celebrating her birthday.

And on that note, we've been talking

to James Valiant, author of The Passion

of Iron Ranch Critics and Creating Christ.

All the Romans invented Christianity.

I think that is correct. Yes.

And we wanted to talk about Ayn Rand today

to publish this on her birthday next month.

James, once again, thanks for

Manning the foxhole with us.

Oh, always my pleasure.

You guys always happy to come

back you guys are great, James. And you will be back.