Transcript: A Roundtable Discussion on Flourishing

 

Date of recording: August 15, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Host: Vinay Kolhatkar. Guests: Roger Bissell, Edward Younkins, and Winton Bates.

 

For those who prefer to watch the video, it is here.

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Good evening and welcome back to The Savvy Street Show. We today have a roundtable on flourishing and we have a panel of experts. First up is my regular co-host, who has come back as a guest: Roger Bissell, musician, writer, and philosopher. Roger will introduce our first distinguished guest, and then I’ll introduce the second one. Welcome to the show, Roger.

 

Roger Bissell

Thank you, Vinay. Good to be here. Edward Younkins is professor of accountancy and business at Wheeling University, and that’s in Wheeling, West Virginia. He is the executive director of its Institute for the Study of Capitalism and Morality. He has written a trilogy of books on freedom and flourishing, and they are Capitalism and Commerce, Champions of a Free Society, and Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society (University Press of America, August 2011).

Welcome to the show, Ed.

 

Ed Younkins

Thank you, Roger!  I am really happy to be here.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, our second guest is Winton Bates. Winton Bates is an Australian breakdancer. [Much laughter.] My apologies, economist. His economic policy career gave him good reasons to become a strong advocate of free markets and led to the interest in broader issues related to liberty and human flourishing. Winton is the author of Freedom, Progress and Human Flourishing, published by Hamilton Books in 2021. Welcome to the show, Winton.

 

Winton Bates

Thank you, Vinay. Well, hi, everyone, and thanks for the opportunity to speak about my book.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, the first question actually does relate to the book. Can you briefly describe the gist of your book on flourishing? And after you, we will go to Ed and then Roger.

 

Winton Bates

Liberty provides the context in which individuals can exercise self-direction.

Thank you, Vinay. Here is the four-minute version. As the title suggests, my book is about freedom, progress, and human flourishing. The concept of human flourishing is essential to the book. In the introductory chapter, I draw on the ancient wisdom of Aristotle and some modern writers in discussing the basic goods that a flourishing human could be expected to have. I argue that self-direction is of fundamental importance to human flourishing because our nature as humans gives us the potential to exercise practical wisdom to direct our own flourishing. Wise and well-informed self-direction helps us to stay healthy in mind and body, to have positive relationships with others, to live in harmony with nature, and to do many of the things that we aspire to do. That is where freedom comes into the picture. Liberty provides the context in which individuals can exercise self-direction. It enables individuals to flourish in different ways in accordance with their values, provided they do not interfere with the rights of others.

Progress is the growth of opportunities for human flourishing.

I follow the lead of Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl in viewing natural rights as a “metanormative” principle [i.e., as prior to the normative principles of ethics], establishing the political-legal conditions under which self-directing flourishing can take place. Progress, as I define it, is the growth of opportunities for human flourishing. That is one of the few original ideas in the book. I think it is useful to view progress in that way, because it puts the onus on everyone who has a view about what progress means to show that their view is consistent with widespread growth of opportunities for people to flourish. For example, the onus would be on those who want to argue for redistribution of wealth and argue that that is part of progress to show that that is consistent with widespread growth of opportunities for human flourishing. Technological advances in productivity growth have been of central importance for the massive growth of opportunities for human flourishing over the last 200 years. I’m optimistic about the continuation of progress over the longest term, but I’m not particularly optimistic about the next decade or so. Whatever happens, it is important to keep in mind that national, economic, and social context is only one part of the story of human flourishing. A substantial part of my book is devoted to considering what individuals can do to help themselves irrespective of the national, economic, and social context in which they live. At the individual level, the extent to which each of us can flourish is determined to a large extent by our capacities for wise and well-informed self-direction.

Self-direction poses a challenge for everyone, but each individual has inside knowledge of their own values and aspirations. That makes it unlikely that any government agency could manage any aspect of their lives as well as they can do themselves with the help of family and friends and professional help when they need it. To sum up: people need freedom to flourish.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Ed, a summation of your trilogy …

 

Ed Younkins

I’m just going to focus on the third book, because it’s the one most technically and specifically about flourishing and happiness in a free society. My inquiry in that book doesn’t extend beyond a systematic level. I’m outlining the essentials of a worldview. I’m leaving it to the philosophers and economists to fill in the details and then to critique what I’ve done and to extend it.

Essentially, to survive and flourish, a person, a man, a woman must recognize that nature, as you all know, has its own imperatives, must recognize that there’s a natural law that derives from the nature of man and the world; and we can discover that through reason. That’s one of the things I start with. A world of objective reality exists. There’s a human nature, and man’s nature, as we know, is to be individual, volitionally conscious, rational, and purposeful.

In the book, I talk about the goal or function of an individual human being is to perfect himself by fulfilling his potentialities that make him who he is. For me, for you, for everybody, flourishing is a successful state of life; and the way I look at it, happiness is a positive state of consciousness that flows from, or perhaps accompanies, a flourishing life. As the four of us know, rationality … reason, is the foundational means to the end of human flourishing. I also talk, I know you all did too, about practical wisdom, which really I think of as an aspect of rationality, and I believe you all do too, that involves the ability to discern the relevant and important aspects of one’s circumstances, in order to make the most proper response to them.

Natural rights are based on the common attributes of human beings and therefore apply universally to all people and to all actions.

Very important, as Winton pointed out, and you guys do too, natural rights are based on the common attributes of human beings and therefore apply universally to all people and to all actions. As discussed, as Winton pointed out, by Rasmussen and Den Uyl, a metanormative system of negative rights that provides the context of self-directedness is what we’re talking about. The metanormative level, you have to have that first, and then you have the normative level, the individual level of morality after that. So, we need a political and legal order that protects these natural rights. That’s a necessary precondition for individual self-direction and for the possibility, as we know, that human flourishing can take place in a social context.

As I mentioned a while ago, a flourishing life, including the happiness that either follows from or accompanies it, is a person’s ultimate value. So, we have to have values to survive, to flourish, and to be happy. A person must select values, place them in some kind of hierarchy, and then strive to attain them. That involves goals, because human beings are goal-directed. Goals are simply specific forms of values. Values provide a strategic underpinning for one’s goal-setting activities.

In the book, I talk about a number of general goods and virtues that provide structure to this whole process. We have generic goods like knowledge, health, and friendships that need to be integrated in various measures depending on your circumstances. Virtues also need to be incorporated. Virtues are principles of action that promote the flourishing of an individual.

I’m not a philosopher. I am also not exactly an economist. I’m an accounting guy. But Rand, to me, makes a powerful case for the rational pursuit of seven virtues and for consistently practicing them. Rationality, the main one, and then after that honesty, independence, justice, integrity, productiveness, and pride. She saw rationality as the master virtue.

I also talk about the importance of being in a state of flow when one is engaged in meaningful self-controlled and goal-related activities. If you’re in a state of flow or in a focused immersion in some activity, you lack self-consciousness, you’re just doing it, and the merging of awareness and action all take place at once. Also important in my overall model is self-esteem [which  relates to a person’s legitimate attitude of self-affirmation, [a feeling] that you really deserve it. Self-esteem is connected to a sense of agency and control of one’s environment.

I talk about Austrian economics and Objectivism, and I try to make a case that they’re compatible.

Now, as an aside, it isn’t really essential to the flourishing part, but in the book, I talk about Austrian economics and Objectivism, and I try to make a case that they’re compatible. The Austrian economists talk about values being subjective, and Objectivists say they are objective. I say these claims are compatible because they are not claims about the same phenomena. They are complementary and compatible. The Austrians view actions from the perspective of a neutral examiner. In other words, you have goals. Austrian economists will let you know  if your means achieve those goals. They don’t make a value judgment, but importantly, the Objectivist view of moral values, living a good life of flourishing and  happiness, complements that view, because Objectivists are talking about making decisions that help you flourish as a human being, as a moral agent yourself. So again, I think these two areas could work together.

One last thing: personal flourishing requires a life with other people. We need sociality to flourish as a human being. Benefaction (charity)can be viewed as an expression and a specific manifestation of one’s capacity for social cooperation. Charitable actions may be viewed as perfective of a person’s capacity for cooperation and as a particular manifestation of that capacity.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Now on to our book. Roger.

 

Roger Bissell

We wanted to update Aristotle’s ethics by folding in or integrating with it some of the best ideas in science and philosophy that have come along since Ancient Greece.

Vinay and I wrote Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics (Ethics Press International, Oct 2023). [A much less expensive paperback edition should be available shortly.] We wanted to update Aristotle’s ethics by folding in or integrating with it some of the best ideas in science and philosophy that have come along since Ancient Greece. This includes the work of psychologists like Maslow and Frankl, philosophers like Aquinas, Ayn Rand, and some of our own colleagues, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, known as “The Dougs,” and Chris Sciabarra. I don’t have a lot to say about this because I wanted to save going into detail on our view of flourishing, certainly my view, but I should say this about the structure of the book. We wrote the front part of it and the back part of it together. Then in between that, we had two chapters each that we alternated. I gave some history of philosophy. Then Vinay talked about some psychological and neurological issues. Then I went into the nature of human beings—natural law principles, I think, is what Ed and Winton referred to them as. Then Vinay talked about the ethics, actually, like principles of humaneness and meaningfulness and self-actualization. Then we rounded it out by talking about Aristotle’s politics and how it would apply to the present day or how it might be modified for the present day. Vinay, did you want to add anything to what I’ve said?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

No, not particularly at this point in time. Let’s go on to the next question which is about flourishing. Do you in your book define or describe what a flourishing state is and, if so, how? Ed, first.

 

Ed Younkins

That’s perfect because I’m a lot shorter on this question. Personal flourishing, human flourishing, self-actualization (that kind of anticipates another question coming up), and (moral)well-being are used by me interchangeably. I kind of equivocate on that. But to me, flourishing involves the rational use of one’s individual human potentialities, including talents, abilities, and virtues in the pursuit of a person’s freely and rationally chosen values and goals. It’s not an abstraction. It’s highly personal, agent relative, we could say, by nature. It consists of the fulfillment of a man’s human nature and unique potentialities. It’s concerned with choices and actions that deal with the particular and the contingent. One person’s self-actualization is not the same as another’s. What is called for in terms of concrete actions, such as choice of career, education, friends, home, and so on, varies from person to person. Personal flourishing becomes an actuality when one uses his practical reason to consider his unique needs, circumstances, capacities, and so on to determine which concrete instantiations of human values, virtues, and goods will comprise his well-being.

The idea of flourishing is inclusive and can encompass a wide variety of constitutive ends such as knowledge, development of character traits, productive work, religious pursuits, community building, charitable activities, allegiance to persons and causes, self-efficacy, material well-being, pleasurable sensations, and so on. And that brings me to a conclusion of how I basically describe flourishing.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you. Roger?

 

Roger Bissell

In the broader sense, flourishing is not just surviving, but living well. This sounds probably a lot like what Ed said when he started out: actualizing one’s human potentialities and one’s individual talents and skills and knowledge in the service of one’s deepest human needs.

The problem, though, is that about 30 years ago, there was a big debate over survival versus flourishing, which was often discussed kind of narrowly as being focused on one’s own personal context of merely living versus living well. About 25 years ago, give or take, it occurred to me that what Aristotle and Aquinas had said about this could be very helpful. They identified three key factors in all successful life: nutrition, growth, and generativity. Nutrition and growth were essentially inside yourself, while generativity was something that was outside yourself. Sometimes they just focused on reproduction like having children and so on, or like a tree would have fruit and the like, but as we know, humans do a lot more than that. Sometimes they don’t have children. They certainly don’t have apples and pears hanging from their arms. [Laughter.] Anyway, I called this “the Aristotelian tripod,” and I thought I had really come up with a cool idea. As Ed knows, I had this on my website for a while, and then I thought that I want to write about this, so I had better detach it so that when people go to my website they don’t see a link to this weird-sounding article, “The Aristotelian Tripod.” But Ed did a search on Google and found it anyway, because it was still posted, just not linked from my website. So, good for you, Ed, you’re very intrepid, a good searcher, hunter-gatherer!

I later realized that there was also a time element, legacy, that one leaves behind after one’s career is over or after one’s life, and you will be preparing your legacy as you have your sense of mortality and of the future and what you’re going to leave behind to children or colleagues or students or the world, etc. So, we’ve got a genetic legacy, which is children and close relatives, and we’ve got non-genetic legacy, which is: Did you grow a good garden? Did you build a skyscraper? Did you write a novel or a symphony? Did you produce learned students as a teacher, etcetera? All these are ways of not just generating and creating things but leaving something behind.

These [four] fit nicely within the personal and the social levels of Chris Sciabarra’s model. He had a three-level model. He had the personal, which I took to be surviving and thriving—in other words, nutrition and growth. Then on the social level, there was the generativity and the legacy. Then, if you’re going to live the fullest life and flourish in the broadest sense, not just thriving and generating and all that, you also have to act within certain institutions such as the economy and the political structure (which we call the “polity” in our book). All of this material I discuss in chapter four of the book. So in a broader sense, flourishing includes growth, thriving, generativity, legacy, economy, and polity. So I guess I gave two answers to what we mean by flourishing. It’s [just] the thriving or [it’s] all of the above.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

[Flourishing is] a default state of serenity punctuated by self-inflicted or unexpected pleasures and undergirded by resilience.

Actually, in our book we did define flourishing as a mental state as well. The mental state definition that I came up with was “a default state of serenity punctuated by self-inflicted or unexpected pleasures.” The word self-inflicted is often used [to mean] self-inflicted in harm, but Winton deliberately decides to walk around Lake Macquarie to self-inflict that kind of pleasure. You have fun doing it. Or you listen to music or you play music like Roger. Those pleasures can be of recreation such as wine, music, laughter, food, camaraderie, as well as those arising from practicing your competencies. So, for instance, if you are very good at golf and you go on the golf course, that’s a kind of a self-inflicted pleasure. And “undergirded” (the last part of the definition) “by resilience.” That’s how we kind of describe a flourishing state. You can get a great mental state by taking drugs, but that worsens your default state. So, when you come back from the pleasure, if you are flourishing, you must come back to a default state of everything’s fine, fine with the world … a default state of serenity.

 

Winton Bates

I agree with everything that everyone else has said. I think my definition would be consistent with that. I took about three or four pages before I came to that definition in the book. But my definition of flourishing combines definitions by Neera Badhwar and Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl. Human flourishing is the exercise of practical wisdom with integrity in the pursuit and achievement of happiness in an objectively worthwhile life.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you, Winton. Now, going to the practical side [of things]. If we were asked for advice by an otherwise physically healthy teenager who feels melancholic frequently, what would it be, and would our advice change if it was an adult? Roger first.

 

Roger Bissell

Thanks Vinay. Assuming that this frequent melancholy is psychological—in other words, it’s value issues, frustrations, that kind of thing, and not some sort of physically-based depression—I would say to this teenager, young man or young lady, figure out what you really, really want to do and find a way to make it happen. Of course, there’s a lot to be unpacked there, but that is the essence of what I would tell them. And you (the young person) might not know right away, but keep looking, keep seeking, searching. The best place I’ve seen this laid out in a practical way, a nice program actually, are various books that have been written by Brian Tracy on values clarification, goal setting, going after what you really want in life, figuring out what you really want in life. As Vinay says in chapter five of our book, a person needs a central meaning and purpose in their life, a mission, he calls it, and I’m on board with that. As Ayn Rand had Dagny Taggart realize in Atlas Shrugged, you need to internalize the message, “Don’t let it go.” If you have a central meaning and purpose to your life, and it seems like, I don’t know how I’m going to achieve this, but I really want it, then figure it out, and don’t give up on it. This is the same advice I would give to a teenager, to an adult, even to a “seasoned citizen” like myself. We can’t all become world famous painters in our eighties like Grandma Moses, but I don’t think we should shut off our minds and our ambition in either our twenties or our forties or our sixties.

Figure out what you really, really want to do and find a way to make it happen.

I do have a little more practical advice, which goes along with this. If you really crank up a mission and you’re really working hard at it, and it doesn’t completely make your blues go away, then maybe there’s just something else missing in your life. It may not be career purpose or whatever. It may be something else, like maybe your health or maybe your social life, that part of the pie. I like pie diagrams. I think they’re really great for visualizing. It may be you are feeling a lack of personal connection or loneliness, in which case you should try to find a way to reach out and form some new friendships. My advice on that is not to be too exclusionary on what philosophy or politics or religion they have. In my own life, I have people across the map or across several maps, I should say. There are lots of other people out there who may be lonely too and would be happy to be your friend if you took the initiative to seek them out. That’s especially important, I would say again, for older people. One of the key elements in aging well is social connection, not being isolated. A sense of isolation is really tough to deal with if you feel cut off or alienated. Even for a brief time, it’s kind of hard to handle. Some of my older relatives have gone through that and I try to visit them and reach out. Having a worthwhile goal or purpose in life, as Winton said, is very, very important, but also having that social connection. We’re not just rational-purposive beings; we’re also social beings. I think that needs to be always kept clear, that we’re doing something good for ourselves in regard to our relationships to other people and not just drifting and letting those things be neglected. Be proactive about that, like you are for your career.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I don’t have a lot to add. One of the illustrations we had for a teenager was Greta Thunberg, and while we don’t like what she’s doing, she was extremely depressed when she turned to this whole green agenda, and that made her enormously enthusiastic [about life], and her depression went away. We do ask that you check your mission objectively as well, which she hasn’t done, because there could be a day of reckoning and an epiphany that you’ve been doing the wrong thing the last 40, 50 years, and that could lead to future problems. But if you check that, that’s the number one thing, mission. We also ask that you be humane at all times, or try to be humane at all times, across the four orders of humaneness—and self-actualize, which we then define as pursuing your mission and working on your faculties. We have identified seven human faculties to be improved, and we can never become absolutely perfect at all seven.

Over to you, Winton. What’s your advice?

 

Winton Bates

I think my advice is very similar to that suggested by Roger and yourself. If a person tells me that they feel melancholic frequently, I’d be suggesting that they may need some professional help. I’d be more specific about the kind of professional help that they should seek if the previous discussion indicated that they no longer get any pleasure out of the things that once gave them pleasure. In that instance, I would suggest a psychologist with training in acceptance and commitment therapy. That’s a therapy developed by Stephen Hayes, ACT. They might have to wait for a while to see a trained professional. In the meantime, I’d suggest that they read this book. [Shows book cover to camera.] It’s an easy-to-read book by Russ Harris, and it’s entitled The Happiness Trap. Now, that book was suggested to me by a clinical psychologist friend over a decade ago, who tried to persuade me that my idea of happiness needed to have more depth to it. I had the smiley face view of happiness, the frame of mind type view, which is quite valid, but I needed to go into more depth. Now, the happiness trap is about trying to find happiness by avoiding or trying to get rid of negative feelings. That’s a trap, because the harder we try to rid [ourselves] of these feelings, the more negative feelings we tend to create. So, a young person might get into a happiness trap by attempting to use social media to lift their spirits whenever they feel sad or lonely. An older person might get into a happiness trap by getting into the habit of trying to wipe the slate clean after a hard day at the office by using alcohol or drugs. ACT encourages people to identify and endorse the values that will help them to cope with these unpleasant thoughts and unpleasant feelings, and to set sensible goals and to act purposefully in pursuit of them.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Ed, do you wish to add to that?

 

Ed Younkins

I would pretty much agree with what all three of you were saying, but just to add a little bit, I’d probably start off with asking the teenager how often, how long they’re feeling melancholy, what might be the circumstances. Then maybe I would say, well, when’s the last time you felt happy? What makes you happy? Get them to talk about, try to switch them over to thinking about, their lives, as Winton was saying, about positively going in that direction. Only one thing I’ll add, along with what the three of you said: If it is an adult, I would perhaps delve a little more into meaning, purpose in their lives, being that an adult is more in the pursuit of flourishing. That is about it. I think you guys did a great job in outlining this.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

We’re moving on to self-actualization and whether we distinguish between flourishing and self-actualization. And which one is more fundamental?

We particularly and strongly distinguish between self-actualization and happiness. Which is more fundamental is self-actualization.

I’ll start with my answer to that. Yes, we do distinguish between those two, and we particularly and strongly distinguish between self-actualization and happiness. Which is more fundamental is self-actualization. That’s part of having the mission, improving those [seven] faculties, and being humane. We see that activity as self-actualization. In the process of self-actualizing, happiness is like an exhaust or an epiphenomenon. It just simply happens. If it doesn’t happen, so be it. It will happen now and then, and maybe you won’t feel so blue every day, but you might feel blue or frustrated occasionally, because you are dealing with society, you are dealing with uncertain outcomes. We quote a number of philosophers from Bertrand Russell to John Stuart Mill to dramatist George Bernard Shaw who all made the same observation. If you’re committed to something, stay committed. Do not pursue happiness as its own goal. I could say the same thing about flourishing. You can’t pursue flourishing. It’s just got to happen on the side as you pursue what can be objectively pursued.

Winton, over to you.

 

Winton Bates

I think there’s a definitional issue involved. I view flourishing as being the encompassing thing, eudaimonia, flourishing is what it’s all about. That’s our purpose in life. Flourishing for an individual involves self-actualization. So that’s a means, I’d say, to flourishing. I’ve been using the term self-actualization when discussing Abraham Maslow’s theory for obvious reasons. Maslow uses the term specifically to refer to the process of realization of potential. That’s all I’ve got to say on that one.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, thank you. Ed.

 

Ed Younkins

Yes, as I said earlier, I do not distinguish between flourishing and self-actualization. For the last 30, 35 years, or so, I’ve talked about personal flourishing, human flourishing, self-actualization, moral well-being, and I treat them as the same. So, I’m a little bit different from Winton. That’s about it for me.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Roger, would you like to add anything?

 

Roger Bissell

In my own writing in our book, I treat the terms as basically equivalent. The only distinction I make is kind of a grammatical one, which I’ll mention or explain in a moment.

David Norton wrote an amazing book about 50 years ago called Personal Destinies, and he talked all about this issue. Late in the book, he talked about two aspects of eudaimonia or happiness or flourishing. He said that one was a state of being, like, what point have you reached? What condition are you in? The other one was the emotional or psychological feeling that accompanies that state of being. I think Rand talks about that, too. She talks about happiness as the state of having achieved your values, but it’s also a state of non-contradictory joy. So, she talks about it as a condition and as a feeling, and they’re really together.

Rand talks about happiness as the state of having achieved your values, but it’s also a state of non-contradictory joy.

Okay, I did say something about the grammar of it, and all of it has to do with the same phenomenon. A living organism is functioning very well, sustaining its life and developing its powers and abilities and pursuing its goals. If we unpack this a bit, we can see that flourishing refers to an ongoing process of living well, and that process is being carried out by an individual creature. So the self, as in self-actualization, is implicit in the term “flourishing.” On the other hand, the term “self-actualization” refers to the end result of the process, and an individual self being in the state of having lived well, implies a process that has been carried out. So if we use the term self-actualizing, then we are talking about the very same ongoing process as flourishing. We don’t have a similar term for the end result. It would be an awful sounding term like “flourishization.” [Laughter] I think I had that when I went to the dentist last week and I got some flourishization for my teeth. [Vinay: That’s a more complicated term than eudaimonia.] I know, it sounds like you’re speaking with a mouth full of marbles.

Another concept we could use in talking about both the process and the result is self-perfection. You are self-perfecting, self-actualizing, flourishing, whether you’re striving for it or you have achieved it. It’s like you’re on a trip. There’s the process or the journey, and then there’s the destination, the end result—and they’re both covered by the same term. So when you have T I O N on the end, you have to ask yourself, am I talking about a process of self-actualization or the result of self-actualization? But again, that’s just grammar, really. The whole thing has to do with functioning well, developing your powers and abilities.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, I’m going to jump to the next question and combine it with something else. All four of us are either in the United States or Australia, and neither country is in a great state right now, with all sorts of things that we don’t approve of, happening around us, the cancellations, the excess debt, the cost of living going up, and particularly on the psychological side for young people or also older people. I was going to mention that ignorance can be bliss sometimes, like Greta Thunberg is not aware that this climate emergency, climate alarmism, is a scam or a fraud or at least not scientifically valid, and that [ignorance] helps her. Unfortunately, all four of us are well aware of a raft of things that make us outcasts in the woke-Marxist culture. So, first up, Winton, is it possible now to stick to our real beliefs and still flourish in Australia?

 

Winton Bates

I’ll start with the more general question of whether it is possible for people to flourish in the US and Australia. In my view, it is still possible, although of course people could flourish to a greater extent if they had more economic freedom and more liberty in general. The US and Australia still offer much better opportunities for human flourishing than most other countries. Large numbers of people from other countries want to migrate to the US and Australia for economic reasons and social reasons, to leave war-torn countries. I think that attests to the fact that there are relatively more opportunities available in Australia and the US than in other countries, still.

Okay, the second part was, is it possible to stick to your beliefs and succeed commercially in the US and Australia? Well, I think commercial success is still largely about selling a product that other people want to buy. However, we’ve got government distortions in the economy affecting what other people are willing to buy. For example, someone’s selling a service commercially, and then the government comes in and decides to offer a service free of charge or changes regulations in a way that makes it unprofitable. This is essentially happening in the green technology area in Australia, and I guess the other areas as well. I’m interested in what other people have to say about that question.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, Ed?

 

Ed Younkins

I’m going to focus on the part about succeeding commercially, especially with respect to entrepreneurs. There are a lot of obstacles for entrepreneurs. The government, of course, that’s the greatest enemy of an entrepreneur. Regulation, paperwork, taxes, high interest rates, occupational licensing—you get the idea. Essentially though, a successful entrepreneur has the right attitude, knows that knowledge and opportunities are there if you work at it long enough, hard enough. The opportunities are constantly changing. They’re highly local, highly individualized. The wealth creator, if really focused and dedicated to this, can experience luck and serendipity, but doesn’t rely on those things. Profits and losses are not totally the result of random processes. People choose their projects. So, use your rationality, use your reason. Observe, ask questions. Look for patterns. Make novel connections people haven’t seen before. Imagine possibilities. Project the future.

You can still succeed, I think, in the United States or Australia.

For a motivated person, their actions are motivated from within. An inspired individual may seek to attain his or her goals and values to better conditions of his life, to accomplish something, the legacy thing that Roger was talking about. And I’ll end with this last little bit. You can still succeed, I think, in the United States or Australia. A successful person tends to be a person of ability, of course, but one who pursues his or her goals relentlessly in the face of obstacles and opposition, setbacks, and failures. To be a self-driven doer, one must expend both mental and physical effort, persist in the face of adversity, confront the unknown, face challenges, learn from failure, but have confidence in your capacity to deal with the world. And to take rational steps in pursuing your goals. I’ll end with this. The successful entrepreneur tends to be, there’s a lot of adjectives here, but this is true: visionary, confident, independent, action-oriented, passionate, confident, and virtuous, important part there, who uses reason to focus his enthusiasm in his efforts to attain his goals. Yes, I do think it’s still possible.

 

Roger Bissell

Is it possible to flourish in the U S or Australia today? I’m going to kind of step back a ways. I liked all of what you two guys have said already. It’s a lot of practical and character-oriented concerns, and I think of those issues. My answer is, it’s possible to flourish, but it’s by no means guaranteed, but then welcome to human life, right? Some people do flourish, though rarely in the current setup, without some kind of government involvement, I’ll say assistance or favors or whatever. It’s really hard to find a niche to work in. You have to be very unusual. Very few people with our specific beliefs have risen to the top and become multimillionaires, let alone the billionaires who are extremely popular in sports or entertainment or the literary world. We could say, how many Objectivists are really sitting on top of the world, like Taylor Swift, for instance, or like Elon Musk?

I would distinguish also—and I appreciate all of Ed’s comments about commercial success, that the issue—to me, to flourish, if we can broaden our thoughts about it, all you have to do is self-actualize and become the best that you can be in whatever area you are working, given the circumstances. It’s very context-driven or context-relevant, and it’s all on a continuum. It’s not an all or nothing thing. If you can’t self-actualize or flourish at all, then you’re going to wither and die, so we’re leaving that aside. But even if you’re thwarted to quite an extent by government restrictions, or you’re in a culture that’s wilting away or rotting and it doesn’t appreciate what you do, you can still find a way to create and produce what you most want to. You’ll have to adapt to the conditions and scale your ambition to what’s possible given the culture, the market, the level of government interference. But you don’t have to be Howard Roark or Dagny Taggart in order to flourish. You just have to be like them in your character. You have to be rational, productive, morally ambitious. In other words, you have to want to be better and better. You have to have a deep sense of purpose and mission, and you have to have a humane relationship to yourself and others. Don’t beat up on others and don’t beat up on yourself. Don’t cheat others or lie to others. Don’t lie to yourself. If you have these character traits and psychological traits, you will flourish regardless of your level of market success and financial wealth and fame. And that, in my opinion, is what life should be all about.

There are people throughout history that have had more or less happy lives without being philosophers and with only flawed guidelines that they’ve gotten from their family or their church or their community.

Now, I do know that there are some people who just don’t have the very deep level of abstract philosophical knowledge about life in the world that the four of us have. I mean, we’re on the pinnacle, right? (I’m trying to keep a sense of humor. I’m not mocking us. I think we’re all fine fellows, okay?) There are people throughout history that have had more or less happy lives without being philosophers and with only flawed guidelines that they’ve gotten from their family or their church or their community. But even a fully rational philosophy, worked out and systematized, doesn’t guarantee bliss, and a less rational philosophy is no guarantee that you’re going to be miserable. Most people’s lives and levels of bliss or pleasure or serene enjoyment are mixed, either because their philosophies are mixed or their practice of their philosophy is mixed. Hank and Dagny, back to my two favorite characters in Atlas Shrugged, had some bliss together for a while (at least we can imagine), despite gaps in their ethical knowledge. They were both hampered and they were both compromised to the extent they didn’t fully understand the issues they were fighting against in the culture, the philosophical and psychological issues, and they had not yet uncovered all the false ideas that they had accepted and internalized. So, it’s ironic and sad that they both eventually did get this full understanding of life and morality, but only Dagny got to graduate to this higher level of bliss, while Hank presumably was left in the cold because of that high male to female ratio in Galt’s Gulch, right? I mean, what’s a guy to do, you know?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

What Roger is saying reminds me of one other Ayn Rand quote which isn’t about the pyramid of ability but the pyramid of resilience. I think she doesn’t call it resilience, but moral endurance. You have to have an enormous amount of moral endurance if you’re trapped in a mission that is looked down upon by society as it is at the moment. So, if your mission was to create great music, the music that you like and if you create it and the cancel culture doesn’t get to you because of your lyrics, you might become enormously successful and at least make a living at music or a lot more. But if you are in one of these intellectual spheres like climate change, like a scientist who’s a geologist or a public intellectual who’s getting cancelled everywhere, then we have a lot more trouble.

if you are in one of these intellectual spheres like climate change, like a scientist who’s a geologist or a public intellectual who’s getting cancelled everywhere, then we have a lot more trouble.

I want to cite a few quick examples. One was, of course, Greta Thunberg, where ignorance is bliss. But now take the other extreme, the brightest of the brightest … the best. It’s not one of the four of us, it’s Aristotle. Aristotle was in exile for part of his life. Take John Locke. He was also in exile or hiding away in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s house for part of his life. Spinoza was in house arrest. Galileo was arrested.

Last but not least, I’m going to take the example of Murray Rothbard. When Hoppe found him, I think it was in the 70s, 80s, and very early 90s only, because he passed away early, he was teaching at a polytechnic, and he didn’t even have an office of his own. He was on a desk along with other assistants, and Hoppe was shocked. It was only later on in his life Rothbard got a bit of a pay raise with University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and he had his own office. But would we say Rothbard flourished? Absolutely. He stuck to his guns. He stuck to what he believed in, and we don’t necessarily agree with everything he said, but that was a life to me like Howard Roark in a literal sense.

We have just enough time for one last quick question with quick answers. We’ve all got this theory on flourishing. Our Aristotle book got placed in both psychology and philosophy. We start with Ed. Where does all this theory sit?

 

Ed Younkins

Human flourishing, the way I see it, ought to be the overall aim of education.

I could tell you. Human flourishing, the way I see it, ought to be the overall aim of education. Human flourishing is gaining some respect there, but it rightly gains popularity as the overarching ideal of education. I mean, think about it. It has implications for education and the upbringing of children. Teachers and parents need to know what constitutes a flourishing life, what contributes to it and what does not, and communicate that to the kids. They’re expected to act in a way that enables the children to lead a flourishing life in the future. I am going to end up with this. It is not much, but it’s true: human flourishing and education are intertwined. They’re mutually reinforcing. Education enables flourishing, and the more you flourish, the more you want to be educated. I call it a “spiral” of flourishing and education. Education enables flourishing. In turn, flourishing enhances education, and you keep going. So I think we ought to build the schools around the concept of flourishing.

 

Roger Bissell

Theoretical versus applied flourishing—I would agree with Ed, the most crucial area for applied flourishing, to be offered in bookstores and in schools, is education—obviously in schools. But also, for employer-employee relations, family relations, husband-wife relations. All of this needs to be drilled into counselors, and there need to be popular books available for—well, there are, but they don’t say here’s a book on flourishing to help make your marriage better. But maybe they should.

Now, for theory, I think that what Vinay said was exactly right on. I think philosophy and psychology are where the topic of flourishing belongs. If I were saying, I want to find out what Aristotle said about flourishing, I would go to the philosophy section probably—or Frankl or Maslow, then psychology. I would qualify this in two ways. The philosophy should be “a philosophy for living on earth.” That was Rand’s phrase for living well as a rational being, treating oneself and others insofar as possible as an end in themselves and not merely a means to someone else’s ends. And secondly, it should be a biologically based psychology that’s keyed to human needs and faculties, human psychological needs and faculties, aimed at actualizing oneself and achieving happiness. Our book had some specific tips and guidance, mostly thanks to Vinay’s diligent work in chapter five, but also chapter six. But it really pointed to a follow-up self-help book that would more specifically give the kind of personal and social advice that Ed was offering in regard to entrepreneurial flourishing or commercial success. We haven’t yet decided whether it’s going to be another joint project, but we agree that there is a need for such a book.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you, Roger. I second that, I think theory does belong to both psychology and philosophy. The problem we encounter is that the psychologists who have come up with a lot of useful empirical data don’t theorize from the data enough, and they certainly don’t look at other aspects of philosophy. Sometimes philosophers theorize like armchair philosophers, and they don’t look at the empirical data. So, there needs to be a fusion there. I frankly feel that a year of philosophy should be compulsory for those doing a psychology degree and vice versa. But I really love what Ed said. As a practical matter, it should be taught in schools at a fairly young age because that’s the time you can really set your path. Then even the parents might realize, oh well, wait a minute, I should have done this course 30 years ago. I didn’t, but you know, I’m enjoying this homework now.

Over to you, Winton.

 

Winton Bates

The faculty of humanities and social sciences perhaps could be renamed the Faculty of Human Flourishing.

I just had two thoughts on this. One, I had a look at the Library of Congress classification and, of course, it doesn’t support the study of human flourishing as an integrated body of thought. Maybe it should, or maybe we need library classifications that do that. The other thought I had was that if you have a faculty of humanities and social sciences in the university, perhaps that could be renamed the Faculty of Human Flourishing, which would put a focus at least on what they’re meant to be all about.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you, I really loved all the end answers, and thank you all for being here. To the readers and the viewers, we ask that you tune in to [this show to] become savvy and keep tuning in to stay savvy. That’s all for tonight. Good night and good luck.