Transcript: David Harriman on Induction, Objectivism, and the Deep State

 

Date of recording: July 10, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Hosts: Vinay Kolhatkar and Roger Bissell. Guest: David Harriman

 

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

Hello. We are back again on The Savvy Street Show, and as usual we have a special guest. Our topic today is induction as well as the application of induction to the Deep State and conspiracy hypotheses. I’m joined by my usual co-host Roger Bissell, writer, musician, and part -time philosopher. Welcome to the show, Roger.

 

Roger Bissell

Thank you, Vinay. Our guest today is David Harriman.

David has master’s degrees in physics and philosophy. He was the editor of Journals of Ayn Rand and is the author of The Logical Leap, a book that describes the inductive reasoning process that leads from observed facts to generalizations and scientific theories. Harriman has worked as an applied physicist, performing studies for the Air Force ballistic missile office, and he cofounded the Falling Apple Science Institute, a nonprofit that developed an astronomy curriculum based on the inductive discovery process. Harriman has also created a middle school science program for a company of private schools. Welcome to the show, David.

 

David Harriman

Thanks for having me.

 

Roger Bissell

You and Leonard Peikoff and Ayn Rand have all written very interesting and helpful pieces on the need for philosophy by scientists, businessmen, and everyone in general. The primary need is always to provide understanding of what’s true and good and to guide you in living your life; but it’s also needed for countering and avoiding bad ideas, bad philosophies, and unjust attacks. How would you compare the effectiveness of this method that you all use so eloquently of persuading people of the need for philosophy to the way I was persuaded of that need, simply handing a student or a professional a copy of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead and saying, “Read this.”

 

David Harriman

Every philosophy needs a systematic, nonfiction description of it, in full, and that’s not the purpose of a novel.

Well, I think it’s wonderful if people read Atlas Shrugged. It’s a great book, and it’s the best philosophic novel in history; but every philosophy needs a systematic, nonfiction description of it, in full, and that’s not the purpose of a novel. The purpose of a novel is to portray great characters versus villains in a dramatic plot, to inspire, to evoke passionate emotions in the reader; but [to convey] the full understanding of a system of philosophy is beyond the scope of a novel. You need a lot of nonfiction articles and books in order to accomplish that goal, and that’s one of the reasons why Ayn Rand wrote so much nonfiction. Her best student, Leonard Peikoff, actually wrote a nonfiction book that summarizes, in total, her philosophy. That book is absolutely crucial to getting her philosophy out there in the long term and having people really understand it. [Roger holds up his copy of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand]. Yes, exactly.

 

Roger Bissell

I want to follow up just briefly. I do understand and agree with you about the need for a presentation of the philosophy in written form. What I was getting at, if I may make it personal, is, suppose I were to write a speech and present it to a group at a music school, a music college, on the subject of why musicians need philosophy. The idea is so good that you and Leonard and Ayn Rand had, of just presenting to people in a 30-to-45-minute talk, about how important philosophy is for their profession. I wanted to draw out your thoughts on that.

 

David Harriman

Okay, let’s take that example. I’m not really an expert in aesthetics or music—I know what music I like. Does philosophy really apply to music composition in a really important way? And my answer would be, yes. If you look at the types of music, even in popular culture, that we hear today, we can go from rap music that I regard as pretty horrible. It’s repetitive, it’s vulgar, it’s based on a view of the world that is very negative, that portrays a certain philosophy of culture that I reject, but I think [that] it’s clearly in the music. Now, there are other forms of music that portray the opposite. Some of Ayn Rand’s favorite music was classical music, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, which I also really appreciate. But even in pop music, I’ll admit a few things that I like. It’s optional. Other people may not like them. I [also] like some country music. One of my favorites is Lyle Lovett. I like a lot of his music. It portrays a good view of life. It’s very emotional, very real, but values that I respect.

 

Roger Bissell

Okay, you’ve given two really great answers. The question I really should have framed is, what if a whole cadre of speakers were to come up with 20 or 30 tailor-made speeches, like the one you made to scientists or that Leonard made for businessmen? What if you had a cadre who were really marketing philosophy by going out and saying, you need philosophy as a cinematographer, you need philosophy as a biologist, etc.? Is this an interesting and maybe valuable project that a group like ARI or TAS or some group should spend some time and effort on?

 

David Harriman

Yes, although I don’t think the basic answers would be so much different. It’s not like you would have to give like a separate lecture on this is, in essence, how philosophy applies to geology, this is how philosophy applies to this aspect of this other science. It applies in roughly the same way to a whole spectrum of sciences. For example, I treat physical science in my book, The Logical Leap. I deal with physics and chemistry. Now, if I were to write epilogues to that book on, let’s say, the theory of plate tectonics in geology or evolution in biology, the basic principles would be exactly the same. So, I actually think that would be useful for somebody who really knew geology or biology to present the inductive proofs of those theories the way that I presented Newtonian mechanics and atomic theory. That would be very useful, but I don’t think the basic principles would change.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay. While we’re on Objectivism, David, do you believe that there are any errors in Objectivism that need to be corrected? And if the answer is yes, does ARI’s policy of closing Objectivism get in the way of doing that?

 

David Harriman

Okay, there are actually two questions there, so let me answer them one at a time. I don’t think there are fundamental errors in Rand’s philosophy. I agree with her essentials. I think that sometimes people get confused between basic issues in philosophy versus other things that Rand said that they disagree with. Issues of sexual psychology—that’s not part of philosophy. Issues of exactly what president to vote for in a particular election—that is not a fundamental principle of individual rights. I think people have to distinguish between agreement or disagreement on basic philosophic issues versus agreement or disagreement on issues that are really outside the scope of fundamental philosophy. I’ll give an exaggerated example. Ayn Rand’s favorite color was blue-green. Okay, somebody says, “Well, my favorite color isn’t blue-green, so I disagree with Ayn Rand.” We have to distinguish what is philosophy from what isn’t philosophy.

Now, in regard to this whole issue of “closed” versus “open” Objectivism: I don’t know whether all of your listeners are on the inside circles of this dispute that’s been going on for 30 years, but I’ll comment. The first step toward getting clear on this is, let’s forget about the whole name, “Objectivism.” Rand named her philosophy, but the vast majority of philosophers in history have not done that. So, let’s get rid of the term “Objectivism” and just talk about Rand’s philosophy. Now, imagine two scholars that disagree about Rand’s philosophy. There are two forms of disagreement that you can have. One is simply a disagreement of interpretation. In other words, both scholars are trying to understand what Rand said, what her view was on a particular issue; so, they can disagree about that. That’s happened throughout history. All those scholars have some disagreements in the interpretation of Plato, Aristotle, or Kant; and those disagreements can be perfectly rational. Both sides can make persuasive arguments. So, that’s fine within limits, and I’ll comment on what I think the limits are. But that’s a disagreement over interpretation.

Can he legitimately call that Rand’s philosophy? He’s taking her idea, rejecting it, replacing it with his own idea.

Now, the second kind of disagreement is, given a philosopher’s view on a particular issue, is it right or wrong? Okay, so two scholars battle it out on that issue. “Well, I think she was right.” “I think she was wrong.” If, let’s say, the scholar who thinks that she was wrong has a better idea, he wants to say, “Well, she’s wrong on this issue. Here’s what’s really true on that issue.” Now, that’s fine, but can he legitimately call that Rand’s philosophy? He’s taking her idea, rejecting it, replacing it with his own idea. Now, what he should do is take credit for his own idea. He thinks he’s rejected something false and substituted something true. He should be proud to take credit for that. He shouldn’t want to call it Rand’s philosophy. That would be inaccurate and unjust to her. You don’t want to put words in her mouth that weren’t her words. That kind of so-called correction I reject. So, this whole debate between open and closed Objectivism—if “open” means that people are free to change Rand’s philosophy and still call it Rand’s philosophy, then I reject that; but if all “open” means is there’s room for disagreement about interpretation, then of course, that’s always been true with every philosopher.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I think in the original 1990 paper, David Kelley said we would still call it “Objectivism,” but you would have a notation that they weren’t Ayn Rand’s words, but a Harriman or a Bissell improvement. It’s Objectivism that would be open. It would still be called “Objectivism,” like “Marxism.” It would just be a growing field.

 

David Harriman

Oh, I guess, in a loose sense, it’s been interpreted that way in intellectual history, in the sense that people talk about Kantianism, and sometimes it doesn’t just refer to Kant. It refers to some philosophers that were strongly influenced by Kant. For instance, Fichte (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottlieb_Fichte) changed a couple of Kant’s ideas which were actually essential to his philosophy, but he was still called a Kantian.

As long as that’s understood—that you’re calling yourself a Randian, for example—but what you mean by that, and you should make that explicit, is that you have been strongly influenced by Rand. I think in honesty and fairness, you should make it clear where you differ from Rand, too.

 

Roger Bissell

Absolutely. In fact, when you mentioned Kantian or Randian, I thought immediately of “Aristotelian.” I remember that at the end of one of the [1976] lectures that Peikoff gave on the philosophy, Rand was taking part in the Q&A, and they were asking about Aquinas. She said, “In that sense, we are all Aristotelians.” As you said, in a loose historical sense, you agree with certain basics, like there is a real world and we’re able to know it, and the principles of living well can be discovered, and science . . . you can discover it. So, that’s not a controversy. Maybe the idea of how do we perceive? Is it naive realism where we just gaze out, and it just comes in, and there’s no process, or is there a process? You could have two Aristotelians who are duking it out and saying, “Aristotle said this,” and the other one says, “Well, I think he was wrong, I think it was this.” In issues like that, you would be dealing with a body of philosophy that was essentially Aristotle’s creation; yet there could be a lot of growth and analysis and, I think, correction. If he had a wrong view that was found later to have a different scientific basis, then it could still be part of Aristotelian philosophy, and you wouldn’t have to just go off in a corner and talk to yourself and say, “Well, I think I’m right, even though those Aristotelians don’t think I am.”

 

David Harriman

Well, no, I’m not saying go off in a corner by yourself. Let’s take the relationship between Aristotle and Rand. She described herself as Aristotelian in a very broad sense, accepting certain basic fundamentals. But she explicitly disagreed, for example, with his theory of concepts. She disagreed with his foundation for ethical virtue. In some sense, she agreed with it, but in terms of putting it on an objective basis, she said things that he never said. She would have made it clear that on those issues: No, I’m not Aristotelian. These are my views, Aristotle never said them. I’m following a path that he pointed to, but I’m putting out my own philosophy.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

That might have been [worked] if there was a Randianism, because all these other philosophers, Kant and Aristotle, didn’t have a proper noun attached to their philosophy. A Randian might be [someone] influenced by Rand, and Randianism would contain a lot more than Objectivism, because the ones influenced by Rand don’t have to agree with every word she said, or even with every word that’s been accepted into official Objectivism.

 

David Harriman

Right. Objectivism became this thing that people almost considered independent of Rand, and that created a lot of confusion. There’s just Rand’s philosophy, and then if people want to say, “Well, I accept these parts of it, I don’t accept that, that’s fine,” as long as you’re honest and explicit.

 

Roger Bissell

Agreed. I think one of the problems I have with it is that when you have that kind of name attached to it, there are gatekeepers, and, I’m just wondering, are there always going to be gatekeepers? Is there going to be a permanent ban on this open-closed thing, or is there a time when it will just kind of wither away and it’ll become more like discussions in the Aristotelian community or in the Kantian community?

 

David Harriman

That’s dogmatism. If one person stands up and says, “I’m the interpreter of Ayn Rand, what anybody else says doesn’t matter.”

I really don’t like the term “gatekeepers.” I do think if you take that seriously, then yes, that’s dogmatism. If one person stands up and says, “I’m the interpreter of Ayn Rand, what anybody else says doesn’t matter, I’m giving you the absolute infallible truth, and nobody’s allowed to argue with it,” that’s ridiculous. So, let’s get rid of the idea of gatekeepers. Every person has to decide for themselves what did Rand really say? What is her philosophy? And come to their best understanding of it. In doing that, one thing to take into consideration is, who should I read and who do I think has the best understanding of Rand’s philosophy? Given the fact that there are different commentators, and she didn’t write up a complete, systematic treatise on her philosophy, we do have to rely on some commentators, and we have to make judgments about how good those commentators are. But that doesn’t mean we should call them “gatekeepers.” I wouldn’t want to do that.

 

Roger Bissell

Well, I’m not referring so much to people who have a dogmatic attitude as I am to people in the formal structure of an organization who don’t welcome in certain disagreement, like, “Your opinions are not welcome here,” that kind of thing. I have run into that and it’s unpleasant and discouraging. I would simply say, just for the record, I did not run into that personally with the Ayn Rand Institute for the simple reason that I’ve never really been engaged with them except in going to hear several talks and I didn’t have to sign anything to get permission to come in. But it is a fact that there are people who don’t let dissenting views in, and that is difficult when you can’t have a reasonable discussion.

I’d like to actually shift the focus a little bit here, because I do get your point, and I agree essentially with what you’ve said. Rand was such a good storyteller, and I loved her novels. That’s how I got involved in her philosophy. Somebody, maybe it was Leonard Peikoff, described her as the “greatest retail salesman” of philosophy. What a great thing to be, to draw people into being interested in philosophy, just by sheer eloquence and ability to frame all those ideas in an enticing way. That’s great. Now, sometimes there are words and phrases that are almost like red flags, though, and that can actually discourage some people. There’s been a lot of criticism about terms like “capitalism,” which in the early days was used as kind of a put down by the Marxist people—and also the term “selfishness.” You have to admit for sheer getting attention, [Rand was like] the proverbial professor who gets in the middle of the lecture hall and says, “SEX!” and then he says, “Now that I’ve got your attention, I want to talk to you about nuclear physics.” So, what do you think about the wisdom of trying to draw people into philosophy by using terms that are taken by a lot of people to be loaded terms?

 

David Harriman

Ayn Rand never backed down from a fight.

I like it, and I’ll tell you why. Ayn Rand never backed down from a fight. Let’s take the word “selfishness.” The major issue in morality throughout history has been this conflict between: Can you live for yourself and pursue your own happiness—or does morality really consist of sacrificing for others who, of course, then have to sacrifice for others, who then have to sacrifice for others, till everybody’s equally miserable? Do you have the right to really pursue your own happiness, your life—or are you necessarily enslaved to this group that you have to sacrifice for? That has really been the essence of the issue since the beginning of time. Ayn Rand wanted to tackle that issue head-on. When people use the word [in the sense of], “Oh, he’s selfish,” I admit that it can be ambiguous. Sometimes it can mean he’s self-centered, all wrapped up in himself in a sense that [he’s] not reality-oriented; sometimes people use the word in that way. But often they’re using the word [in the sense of], “Fundamentally, is he trying to benefit himself?” And Ayn Rand was saying, “Yes, and he should.” That’s why she put that title on her book on morality, The Virtue of Selfishness. Now, she could have said The Virtue of Rational Self-Interest. [Roger makes an exaggerated yawn gesture.] Exactly! Good response! That’s boring. It’s accurate but hit him over the head with it. I completely agree with her.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Moving on to the current issues of the day: last time you were here, David, we spoke about the Deep State, the administrative state that is the aggregate of all bureaucracies that exist at any given time, or the top bureaucrats in all the alphabet agencies: CIA, NASA, FBI . . . there’s a hundred of them. And in my definition of a Deep State, we added media and academe. Today I’m going to add crony science to that. If this Deep State is homogeneous philosophically, it creates all sorts of problems. I want to ask you specifically about the Ayn Rand Institute. They don’t ever mention it, yet they implicitly do accept the idea of a Deep State, and I’ll tell you why. When it comes to the climate alarm, to a man or to a person, ARI is right behind the idea that the climate alarm is completely false, and there is zero to negligible effect from human activity on global warming, the [establishment] solutions don’t work, etc. [Yet] we see all the alphabet agencies including NASA and all the others we mentioned, and [the ones we] didn’t mention, all united along with the mainstream media that it is almost a proven fact, like the theory of evolution or the law of gravity.

Yet, when it came to the mRNA vaccines, I believe they [ARI] conflated reason and science because obviously the mRNA vaccines are at the forefront of science and anything [that’s] “science” must be good. Is that what you think happened? Because on that front, they were only listening to the government shills, only presenting the government shill at OCON [the ARI annual conference] and forgetting the fact which they had implicitly accepted, that the governments and bureaucrats are fully capable of lying to us.

 

David Harriman

I think the Ayn Rand Institute is very inconsistent on lots of issues. I agree with them on the essence of their climate change view. I think their view of vaccines was ridiculous. I think when the government tells us to follow the science, what they’re really telling us to do is follow the government science. In other words, follow the science of government-funded scientists, and we have told them what to say, in essence. A lot of that government science changes. It even changes from year to year. In the case of COVID, they came out and said, “Well, these vaccines have been adequately tested for safety and efficacy, and everything is perfect.” Okay, two or three years later, they’re forced to admit they weren’t really tested for safety or efficacy, and in fact they have pretty bad side effects. The NIH itself had to publish a paper on that. The NIH, government science, tells you one thing. Two years later they tell you something different. So, which government science are you supposed to follow? What people have to realize is, scientists disagree about lots of things. So, when they tell you to follow the science, which science, whose science? The government would like you to follow the science of the United Nations or the science of their agencies. There are lots of good scientists out there with excellent credentials that are not funded by the government, and in many cases they disagree with what the government is telling you about science. So, which one do you follow? A thinking person has to make up their mind, but just not believing what the government tells you, doesn’t mean you’re not following the science.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

We just have another data point on the larger conspiracy hypothesis which we have discussed in the past, and that is that right now I heard a fourth person fell ill to bird flu in America. The first three cases are very mild, and yet it has been reported that the Department of Health has just given away $175 million of taxpayer money to Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine. Does that boost another conspiracy hypothesis?

 

David Harriman

There’s very little difference between Moderna and the government. They’re basically part of the same entity.

Well, definitely. There’s very little difference between Moderna and the government. They’re basically part of the same entity. If Moderna wants $175 million and they’ve noticed a couple of cases of [bird] flu in the country, then they’re going to get their $175 million. The fact is that that money was given to them to develop another one of these mRNA vaccines for supposedly protecting humans against this virus. Now, this virus is a problem for cows. It’s not a problem for humans. The only people that have caught this—and as you say, there’s been four in the whole country—those four people have worked with cows. In all of Texas, there’s been one case, and there’s lots of cows in Texas. So, one cowboy got a case of this flu, and we’re spending $175 million of our money to supposedly handle this epidemic. So, no, the only reason Moderna gets that kind of money is because . . . it’s a whole system. They bribe politicians. The politicians get payoffs. Bill Gates is one of the major early funders of Moderna, and he was also one of the leading early proponents of these mRNA vaccines which, you can argue, aren’t even vaccines, and I think are very dangerous. They change your biochemistry in ways that haven’t been fully studied yet. One reason for distrust is the fact that one of the leading originators of them [mRNA vaccines] has come out and said he is strongly in favor of depopulation. He would really like it if a couple of billion people on earth died. I wouldn’t go to that guy for health advice, put it that way.

 

Roger Bissell

I have a question about the problem of induction. About 50 years ago, one interviewer asked Ayn Rand if there were still things that needed to be worked on in her philosophy. She said yes, the theory of how generalizations are made and how they’re a valid form of knowledge. I know that both you and Leonard Peikoff have done quite a bit of work on this in lectures and your book. If you could just summarize for us the work that you have done, how you regard your work as an advance on how the problem was viewed. Has the problem been put to rest, or is it still out there, causing confusion, and people are just basically making errors because they don’t understand how their general knowledge can be correct and valid?

 

David Harriman

I think this problem has existed since the beginning of philosophy, and philosophers throughout history have struggled with it. The idea is, how do we form concepts? Ayn Rand had a whole theory of concept formation, which I agree with. But then, how do we relate them in a generalization or even more broadly in a whole scientific theory and come to the conclusion that, yes, this has been proven? This is absolute knowledge. This is something we know. Almost everyone in history has denied that we can really do that. Skepticism in the modern era has been the standard viewpoint. You can see it even in the way that scientific method is described in all the books. While we come up with a hypothesis, we’re not really going to describe exactly where it comes from, and then we deduce some things from it. Then we do some experiments or observations, and if they work out according to the predictions, then we say our hypothesis was confirmed. Now, if you ask them, does that mean it’s true? They say, no, there could be plenty of other hypotheses that could lead to the same prediction, so we never know whether anything’s true. That’s one of the things that I’m trying to solve in my book. I present a different view of scientific method, and I try to explain how we really can prove generalizations and theories. I think that’s crucial.

I pointed out in my book that scientists have made huge mistakes throughout history.

I pointed out in my book that scientists have made huge mistakes throughout history. One type of mistake is denying a theory that really has already been proven. That happened with atomic theory, for example. Another kind of mistake is being too slow to accept a theory when there’s overwhelming evidence for it, or being too fast to accept a theory where there isn’t much evidence for it. You can go either way, but either way, science suffers. Scientists need good, clear criteria for deciding, do I know this or don’t I? That was a major goal of my book.

Now, you ask, is there anything else to say on the subject? And my answer is, yes, plenty. My book deals with induction as it applies to physical science, so I don’t even talk about induction in philosophy or induction in psychology. There’s a lot to say. This is a vast subject, and the more people write about it, the clearer it’s going to get. I’ll give myself one plug. If people are interested in working on this topic, I would advise them to read my book before they dive into writing their own book on induction.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I remember Rand used to tie all knowledge to perceptual data, and one difficulty we have is when it comes to our knowledge of things that happened hundreds of years ago, let alone thousands of years ago, [is that] we have obviously no sense data, and we have no experimental data either. This wasn’t a problem until about the 90s, when the neo-Marxists started revising history. Revisionism is now rampant in [the field of] history. How do we now save real history from all these revisionists, given that we have no way to say, come in the lab and I’ll prove to you that iron melts at so-and-so degrees Centigrade.

 

David Harriman

Well, I mean, first, the broad philosophic point, which is induction does deal with the past, the future, and in principle, these things can’t be observed directly. That’s true of physical science. It’s true of history. In that sense, there’s no difference. Physicists predict things all the time about how an asteroid is going to move out there in space when they’ve never seen that asteroid before. How can they do that? Well, it’s because we do have this vast knowledge base that is based on perception, and we can validly infer from it. I think the same thing is true of history and going back in time. Now, if someone were to tell me, there’s really no significant difference between the cultures of ancient Greece and ancient Egypt, well, we do have a lot of perceptual evidence: all the artwork, some of the writings that have come down to us. There’s nothing in Egypt like the plays of Sophocles or the statues from ancient Greece. So, we do have evidence from the past. If we didn’t, then we would have gaps in our knowledge of history. If there was a century where, for whatever reason, we didn’t have any writings or artwork or whatever from that century, we would have to say, well, we’re not sure what happened there, but we can say it wasn’t good because people weren’t producing anything.

In terms of revisionism, you’re right, and I experienced this in my philosophy education. There are philosophers now who are really busy rewriting interpretations of Descartes and Hume and so on to the point where it’s almost unintelligible. A normal person with a working brain reading Hume knows that he’s a skeptic. A person reading Descartes knows that Descartes had this view that we don’t perceive directly a world of entities around us, that it was images in our minds. These ideas are perfectly clear from reading the philosophers. But there are philosophers today that completely deny that [and] are rewriting those books, essentially. So, there’s a lot of that going on. It’s creating a lot of confusion. I think to some extent it forces people to go back to primary texts and do a lot of their own thinking and not rely on these commentators very much. In my understanding of [the] history of science, I had to do a lot of that. I went back to original sources because I found that, in most cases, the scholars, the commentators, just couldn’t be trusted.

 

Roger Bissell

Very good. I had a really technical question to ask you, but I think I should be kind to our viewers and to you. I have a more fun question I’d like to toss in, which comes out of what you said several minutes ago. You said there’s a problem that sometimes thinkers or scientists or people in general are too slow or too hesitant to accept something that has a lot of evidence in support of it. The thing that came to mind was the theory of evolution. For various reasons, people in the religious community . . . some of them, are very averse to that idea. But I also understand that Ayn Rand was not as wholeheartedly enthusiastic about Darwin’s theory as some people think that she should have been, and I wondered what do you know about this? And secondly, what is your opinion about Darwin’s theory?

 

David Harriman

Okay. number one, I regard the theory of evolution as proven. so it passes all the tests of criteria of proof that I present in my book. I’ve read a lot about it. I’ve done a lot of study. I think it has to be integrated with the whole theory of plate tectonics in geology. You can’t even prove evolution just with biology. You have to integrate it with geology. You even have to integrate it with nuclear physics, because that’s the way we date things, by nuclear decay. That’s how we know the whole timeline of the history of life on earth. The amount of evidence you need in order to prove the theory of evolution really is pretty staggering. All the biology we know, the geology, the nuclear physics dating techniques, it all has to come together. The timeline of life on earth that we’ve been able to trace out now goes back about 540 million years, and we know all the basic steps now. It would be very easy for one of these evolution deniers to disprove the theory. All they have to do is find a monkey skeleton that’s 300 million years old because that would contradict the whole theory. There are literally millions of possible observations that could contradict evolution and force you to throw it out. Nobody has found a single one of those data points. So, yes, it is such a fantastic integration of so much evidence, I regard it as completely proven.

Now, in terms of Ayn Rand, I can’t even remember exactly what she said, but she said very little about the whole issue. She didn’t know any of the science that I just talked about, so I regard her statement as being equivalent to, “I don’t know anything about that. I’m not going to give an opinion because I don’t know anything about it.”

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

She did caveat it that way, saying “I’m not a student of biology, but…” and then there was a statement.

 

David Harriman

Yes, it’s a complex theory, but again, it’s been proven. So, it’s not controversial in my view.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Now let’s take our pressing problem from last time, which is the Deep State or some nature of it, if you will, exists. And I have an approach; it’s a foundational approach given the absence of explicit data from the mainstream media [and] the government. They’re all colluding, all the alphabet agencies, singing the same song, all the time. I basically say people [whether] they’re scientists, whether they are high-level bureaucrats or politicians, are fond of four things: power, prestige, fame, and fortune. Most of us are fond of at least two or three of those four things as well; it’s just to what extent we’ll go to get those. So, when you get a lot of science being funded by government, you will get the results that the funder wants, and that starts to turn people a little bit. There are people I’ve met who know that the government lied to them about the efficacy of other prophylactics [such as hydroxychloroquine or vitamins C and D], for instance, or about the mRNA vaccines, but weren’t on board with the fact that the climate alarm is unreal—and vice versa, like we mentioned, the ARI followers.

Do you think that’s a good approach, to start with human motivation, to convince people that all that’s in front of you is not true?

 

David Harriman

It’s not exactly the way I come at it because I think you’re giving them too much credit in regard to saying that their motivations are so innocent. You know, they want money. There’s some of them that do. But if you look at Ayn Rand’s novels, was Ellsworth Toohey’s motivation really money? No. If you look at Shakespeare’s plays, the villains, were they really after something as clean and innocent as money?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I said, “power, prestige, fame, and fortune.”

 

David Harriman

Yes, but to some extent it’s destruction, too. I think they get a kick out of destroying something. [Roger: Smashing.] It’s like George Soros. He runs the Open Society Foundation. He has come out and said the happiest year of his life was when he was rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps. Now, did that make him money? No, not really. He just liked it, and he’s still the same way today. Why does he fund Antifa and enjoy seeing buildings burned down and police officers killed? He likes it. I don’t go straight to the motive part because I think motives are different for different people in the Deep State. But the existence of the Deep State, I think, is obvious. And we’ve seen things like the independence of the FBI and the Department of Justice from, for instance, the current political administration. Those agencies were completely corrupt and against Trump, even when Trump was president. They have their own agenda, and to a large extent, it’s completely apart from any elected officials. A lot of these agencies that have tremendous power in the United States are not really run by any elected officials. The pressure on the EPA, the environmentalists that are pushing those policies, to a large extent, [is] not really [from] elected politicians. There are people with money that are paying off bureaucrats. I mean, it’s easy to buy a bureaucrat, right? I mean, these people make $100,000 a year, and they can shut down a huge business that’s worth a billion dollars. They have that much power. It’s pretty easy for them to pass the things that they want to pass and get the money they want to get.

The whole system is so corrupt. Take the president that we have right now, Biden. Is he in charge of anything? I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s in charge of dressing himself in the morning. Every executive order he signs is given to him by somebody else. His speeches on teleprompter are written by somebody else. Everything he says and does, he’s told to say and do. Now, the question becomes who’s telling him, and I don’t think it’s one person. I think it’s a committee of some kind, Gates and Soros and Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum and maybe Larry Fink and BlackRock. All these guys swing huge political power, and I think people are overlooking that. So many leaders in different countries have been placed as leaders in those countries by these kind of forces. The world’s being run by people who, to a large extent, operate behind the scenes, and I think people need to wake up to that.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you. We are just over an hour [now]. Is there anything brief about the November election, Biden, induction, anything you want to add at the end before we conclude?

 

David Harriman

Yes, everybody out there: vote for Trump, because the Left is hell bent on destroying the United States, in my judgment. It doesn’t matter whether people think that Trump’s political-economic views are perfect. The one thing that I think is absolutely clear is that he is pro-American and willing to go right up against the Deep State and fight them, and he’s the only one willing to do that. I think he either wins or the United States is in a lot of trouble. So, I’m wearing this T-shirt [displays his “Trump, Take America Back, 2024” T-shirt].

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you. Any last words from…

 

Roger Bissell

I have no further comment. Just thanks very much, David. It was a pleasure.

 

David Harriman

Yes, thanks for having me on. I enjoyed it.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you. To those viewers who have been tuning in, keep tuning in to The Savvy Street Show, and that’s how you’ll become savvy and stay savvy.