Transcript: “Has Objectivism Lost Its Mojo?”

 

Date of recording: July 24, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Host: Marco den Ouden. Guests: Vinay Kolhatkar and Roger Bissell.

 

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].

 

Marco den Ouden

Good evening. My name is Marco den Ouden, and I am your host today on The Savvy Street Show. Your regular co-hosts are actually my guests tonight. Vinay Kolhatkar is the founder of the public intellectual e-zine, The Savvy Street, and a novelist, freelance journalist, writer, and editor, and Roger Bissell is a musician, philosopher, writer, and editor. This dynamic duo recently published Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics: Toward a New Art and Science of Self-Actualization.

Both are long-time fans of the works of Ayn Rand and her philosophy (Objectivism), but both believe that Objectivism is an unfinished work. Their recent book is part of their effort to modernize not just Aristotle’s ethics but Objectivism’s as well. Tonight, we will discuss their critique of Objectivism and see how these (Objectivist) ideas can be improved upon.

1969 was the heyday of the New Left, the anti-Vietnam War movement, hippies, the drug culture, and all that sort of stuff.

Let me start by telling you my own connection to Ayn Rand and Objectivism. It goes back to 1969, when I was a commerce student at McGill University. This was the heyday of the New Left, the anti-Vietnam War movement, hippies, the drug culture, and all that sort of stuff. A friend of mine recommended reading Atlas Shrugged but, in fact, the first book of hers that I read that summer was Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. As a commerce student on a campus rife with anti-capitalist activism, Rand’s anthology was a breath of fresh air, and it just blew me away. Over the next few years, I read everything she ever wrote. I joined an Objectivist study group, and I subscribed to her magazine. Living in Montreal at the time, I twice made the pilgrimage down to Boston to hear her speak. True to Rand’s suggestions, I never called myself an Objectivist; I called myself a student of Objectivism. Over the years, particularly since 2000, I found myself questioning some aspects of Objectivism and its offshoot, libertarianism. But tonight I’m taking a neutral stance and will moderate a critical discussion on Objectivism, asking relevant questions as they arise.

First, let me get some short opening statements from both of our guests. Vinay, can we start with you?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Marco, thank you for having us. Firstly, I think I heard you say that libertarianism is kind of an offshoot of Objectivism and let me say that it absolutely isn’t. The charge from Rand that they steal her politics or from ARI that it’s plagiarizing the politics is completely wrong. Libertarianism is essentially based on classical liberalism. “Libertarianism” is a new word coined in the United States because the word “liberalism” was stolen [by the Left], while in Australia and in Europe it remains as is, where liberal means classical liberal, and those ideas go all the way back to the Age of Reason, [to] John Locke particularly, and also to the Declaration of Independence.

Libertarianism is essentially based on classical liberalism.

In my journey, I would say there were four phases. I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 14 and it took me a month to read it. [It was a phase of] tremendous awe and excitement. A couple of years later, at 16 years and I think 10 months, I was due to enter university, and it created a huge negative problem for me because there was an enormous social pressure, growing up in India at the time, from parents and society to do either engineering or medicine. I eventually chose engineering, but one of the problems I had from age 14 to 16 was the way Ayn Rand glorified the physical sciences, even though she never was herself a scientist or an engineer. Kira is an engineer and John Galt is an inventor [Rearden and d’Anconia are all in the physical sciences]. Funnily enough, I used to think that these are sort of boring subjects, and I was more interested in the humanities where I ended up much later [but] after much grief, after finishing the engineering degree. I don’t blame Rand, but it was the inadvertent effect of reading Atlas Shrugged too early and getting concretes, not as an abstraction. But I thought something must be wrong with me because all these wonderful people love the physical sciences and engineering.

In my second phase I was just concentrating on my career.

In my third phase, which started in 2009, I really began to look at Objectivism in earnest.

About four or five years ago [the fourth phase], I started reading some back issues of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and there was one by Eric Mack. I had long suspected that Ayn Rand “shuffles” in that essay [“The Objectivist Ethics,” chapter 1, The Virtue of Selfishness] between man qua man and life or just man, and [between] survival and flourishing as well, survival and happiness [rather]. I found all the answers there, and I began to think more and more that there are errors in Objectivism that deserve to be fixed. I found a very able co-author in Roger Bissell, and we ended up writing Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics (MAE), which, as you said, is also modernizing Objectivism.

 

Marco den Ouden

I should note here that Rand didn’t just glorify engineers. One of the key people in her book is Hugh Akston, who’s a philosopher, and I think in many ways she regarded Hugh as being more important than someone like Robert Stadler, who was an actual scientist [Stadler’s a villain]. So, I think you followed the right path there, and we’re today actually following Hugh Akston. Roger, let’s hear your opening statement.

 

Roger Bissell

Thanks Marco. Another very important person in Atlas Shrugged, a hero, was Richard Halley, the composer. Because I’m a musician, the name Halley jumped out at me because the earliest band I remember from when I was a little kid was Bill Haley and the Comets. You mentioned that you consider yourself a student of Objectivism, and I guess I would call myself a lifelong learner, so I’m a student of whatever I can get my hands on, right? I do consider myself a post-Randian Objectivist. In other words, she’s not around anymore, so like a person might be a post-Kantian idealist, well, I’m a post-Randian Objectivist. I’m not going to put that in the title of anything that I write. Instead, it will be in the acknowledgements that this is my orientation. So, it’s not going to be “authorized,” or anything like that.

But I guess you want a little bit of a personal history. In 1966, I was a senior in high school and my high school music teacher gave me this little newsletter with an essay by Nathaniel Brandon called “Benevolence versus Altruism.” I didn’t get much from it. I was just a band geek, and I loved math. Then she gave me Atlas Shrugged, and that was definitely a conversion experience. I quickly read all of her other novels and essays, and I think it had one very immediate effect on me that took about a year to unfold. As I was getting ready for college, was it going to be math or music? So, I just waited to see what the colleges would come up with for scholarship offers. As it turned out, I was getting scholarship offers for math, but not for music, and I thought, well, maybe that’s my destiny. I know it sounds kind of passive, but I ended up going to a college as a math major. Then about halfway through my freshman year, the jazz band director said, hey, they’re starting a music degree program the next year. (They didn’t have one. They just had bands and choruses.) And would I be interested? I said, yes, so I switched to a double major in math and music, and then in my third year I dropped math down to a minor and I never looked back. I do love math, but it was getting just a little bit hairy and abstract for me.

During college, I had a lot of questions about Objectivism that are still mostly unanswered.

During college, I had a lot of questions about Objectivism that are still mostly unanswered, free will and mind body problem, the theory of knowledge, ethics and politics, aesthetics, especially aesthetics, because of being a musician, and I’ve been writing about them since graduate school, really. If people are interested in what I’ve written on these questions to date, they can look on my website, RogerBissell.com. There are also back issues of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (I’ve done a lot of pieces for that), Reason Papers (which has a website with all their archives), and The Savvy Street web site. Also, I’ve got two philosophy books on Amazon, and there are three books from the past five years: The Dialectics of Liberty, which I co-edited and wrote in, the book Defending Liberty for which I wrote the lead essay (you can get that through the Mises Institute), and the book that I co-wrote with Vinay last year, Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics. So, I’ve been really happy about getting to do these things in the last few years, and I’m just really fired up and anxious to do more.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Great. Before we can go ahead, I just needed to clarify that there’s a demonstration effect of fiction, and Akston and Halley are backbenchers. Also, I used to think science is boring, and I thought, well, wait a minute, if Francisco and Dagny find it so exciting, why shouldn’t I? That was my conflict. Anyway, over to you, Marco.

 

Roger Bissell

I didn’t tie the loose end on what I was saying [about how Atlas Shrugged affected me]: Dagny’s mantra was “Don’t let it go.” She said that when she took a break from the railroad and went up to the cabin, she just kept hearing this thought: “Don’t let it go.” And I really wanted to be in music, and I just thought that somehow I’ll find a way to get back to it. Then it worked out. So, I had my own “Don’t let it go” experience. That was a lesson to me. If you really, really want something, find a way to make it happen.

 

Marco den Ouden

I had referred to libertarianism as an offshoot of Objectivism, and he disagreed with that.

Before I continue, I just want to go back to something that Vinay mentioned here. I had referred to libertarianism as an offshoot of Objectivism, and he disagreed with that. I can see his point, but I think it’s because I came across Objectivism and Ayn Rand first that I followed a lot of the general thrust of the Objectivist movement that libertarianism was a cheap copycat of Objectivism and an offshoot. I bought right into that, and I think maybe my comment reflected that. It still lingers in the back of my mind to a certain extent, and I think the idea certainly continues in today’s Objectivism movement that libertarianism is a poor copy of Objectivism.

But I want to get to our next question. Roger, you’ve got such a long history with Objectivism, also as a contributor to The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Did Objectivism ever have a mojo? And what do we mean by a mojo, having a mojo, and did they lose it? And can Objectivism regain it? So, let’s go to Roger first for his thoughts on that.

 

Roger Bissell

Mojo is momentum, a feeling of dynamic, forward progress, of building, developing, growing, a sense of excitement that the best is yet to come.

Sure. Mojo is momentum, a feeling of dynamic, forward progress, of building, developing, growing, a sense of excitement that the best is yet to come and it’s just getting better and better. I think this was the reality of Objectivism probably for about 10 years. In the early 1960s, that was the heyday [of Objectivist mojo]. After Atlas Shrugged came out in 1957, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden convinced Rand to really go public, making more personal appearances, and outreach. She started talking on campuses and at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston, and she had a weekly radio program. She also had a monthly newsletter and books on ethics, politics, and epistemology. Things were really rolling along. I attribute that partly to the [initiative of the] Brandens, but then it abruptly ended in 1968 when Rand had a permanent parting of ways with the Brandens.

After that, the movement, from my own experience, seemed like a pale reflection of itself, even though they kept trying to extend the success by renting out recorded lectures by Leonard Peikoff, as well as lectures by Joan and Allan Blumenthal, who did lectures on music, which were quite good. There was another split in 1990 when David Kelley was ejected from the Ayn Rand Institute. They just didn’t agree with his views and didn’t want to tolerate them. He wanted to open Objectivism to changes, he said Rand and the rest of them were too moralizing and judgmental, and he also had some sympathy toward Barbara Branden’s book, The Passion of Ayn Rand. This whole pattern continued over the years. Some of the brightest minds were tossed out, and we can name quite a few of them. To me, that’s one of the two main reasons that Objectivism lost its momentum and never really fully got it back. Personalities and social control became more important than the philosophy. And because of all that turmoil and chaos, even though there were millions of dollars of financial support over the decades, I don’t think the level and quality—there was a considerable quantity of lectures, especially by Leonard Peikoff—but the quality of the creative and productive thought from the 1960s never really came back.

The philosophy [as construed by the leaders] became more important than the truth.

The other major reason is that control of the purity of the philosophy became more important than exploration and development in philosophy and correcting its errors. In other words, the philosophy [as construed by the leaders] became more important than the truth. Personalities and social control became more important than the philosophy. So, sitting on top of everything is control. I won’t say the dreaded P word [power], but control. This became official in 1990 when Kelley was kicked out and Leonard Peikoff imposed this doctrine of Closed Objectivism. From then on—actually, from Rand’s death in 1982—nothing new, no matter how obviously correct it was and consistent with Objectivism, was part of Objectivism. For any self-respecting, creative intellectual, that’s got to be insulting, demotivating, and I think it hobbled and stagnated the progress of the philosophy. So, there’s the other part of the answer to your mojo question, the momentum. You can’t get a head of steam built up if somebody’s holding down the lid. So, I think that going forward, the future is going to be dim unless and until the movement realizes that what it should be doing is not merely to preserve the truths that Ayn Rand did discover, but to challenge the parts of her philosophy that have errors and to allow those who are able and good thinkers to fill the gaps in her philosophy.

 

Marco den Ouden

Vinay, what’s your take on this?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I never experienced a mojo even in my third phase, in my career. In Australia, I tried to distribute some of Rand’s paperbacks, like The Voice of Reason, and engage with people. But I actually found nobody who had even read anything beyond The Fountainhead. Then when my third phase was entering the internet [and social media] era, I found a lot of Objectivists. But most of the Facebook groups that feature Ayn Rand or Objectivism have members below 5,000 [in number]. Even Yaron Brook estimated a total population of Objectivists around the entire world as being [only] between 5,000 and 10,000, in his foreword to the Leonard Peikoff DIM Hypothesis book about 10 years or 15 years ago. So, I think there is no mojo. There are about 5,000 people.

But driven by the hatred of Trump, a lot of Objectivists will not leave that door open to say, well, maybe there was [an inside job].

Libertarianism has also struggled. And part of the reason the Objectivists are currently losing even more is that I believe there is a lot of Rand mimicry going on in the major establishment. Take, for instance, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Most of us haven’t jumped to the conclusion that it was an inside job, but we are leaving that door open. We’re looking at the evidence about how slack the security can be. But driven by the hatred of Trump, a lot of Objectivists will not leave that door open to say, well, maybe there was. They don’t buy the existence of a Deep State. But when it comes to the climate alarm, they’re vociferous that the alarm is absolutely false. And the only way it can continue is the entire Deep State—the entire administrative state, which is by definition all the bureaucracies, plus [for the Deep State] the media, plus academia—all sing the same song. That’s why the false climate alarm exists.

When we had the lockdowns and the mRNA vaccines, there was an incredible amount of evidence about the leak being from a lab, the lab being funded by the U.S. government. Why should the lab even exist? There were lots of prophylactics and cures that were proven. They were just not internet talk. There were journal papers, not on Ivermectin, but on NAC, very early, in late 2020, early 2021, and on Methylene Blue, and the media was damping it down. But the establishment just went along with whatever the mainstream media was saying. That’s conflating reason and science. Just because a vaccine is science doesn’t mean it’s absolutely reasonable, and they’ve lost subscribers out of that, so there are some institutional difficulties, because of which, I think they are primarily brand marketing organizations, rather than [standing] for the discovery of philosophical truths. So, I’m pessimistic about the mojo.

 

Marco den Ouden

I just want to get one thing clear, though. I know our focus is on Objectivism and Ayn Rand, but did libertarianism as such ever have a mojo? And was it ever anything like the Objectivist movement’s mojo? I’m thinking that, if we look at Rand and separate her from the movement, from the Nathaniel Branden Institute and the active movement to promote her philosophy, her books still sell in the millions, and Atlas Shrugged sells about 300,000 copies a year. I don’t think there’s any other libertarian book or libertarian-oriented book that can even close to match the sales of Atlas Shrugged. So, maybe if you look at Rand as separate from the movement, Rand still has a lot of mojo if she’s selling 300,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged a year.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Absolutely, that’s the answer to the question. I was going to bring that up later, that Rand will continue to sell. I’m not pessimistic about Rand’s prospects and the estate getting money from the sales. But you look at the percentage of those who are reading Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead converting to Objectivism, it’s very, very low indeed.

 

Roger Bissell

Movies sell a lot better than lectures, and novels sell a lot better than non-fiction books. I mean, that’s just the nature of the beast. People love stories. They may, if they’re really nerdy, love lessons, but most people really prefer to get their lessons and their inspiration from drama. It’s just the way we are. That’s the way most people are wired, I think.

 

Marco den Ouden

I know from personal experience—this is just a little anecdote—when my daughter was in high school, in grade 11 or 12, she had a very progressive teacher. And I looked over some of the materials that she brought home, and I thought a lot of it was really quite left-wing-tinged. So, I sent a letter to her teacher saying that I objected to the way that she was handling the course, that it was slanted and unbalanced. I said that “capitalism” is not a dirty word and that I strongly recommend balancing out with some other views, and I recommended reading Atlas Shrugged. Now, I never heard from the teacher back on that, but a few years later, after my daughter graduated high school, that teacher contacted me and asked me to speak to her class about Objectivism and libertarianism. As it turns out, she had taken my advice and actually read Atlas Shrugged, and she said it changed her life. She said it inspired her to get her master’s degree. She had not had that ambition before. So, Atlas Shrugged really is a life-changing book, even for people who are avowedly on the left wing of politics.

 

Roger Bissell

Wow!

 

Marco den Ouden

Anyway, I guess we’d better go on to our next question. You’ve both written and spoken about the banishment of the Brandens and attacks on natural allies like libertarians. One might say that Objectivism lost its mojo when it excommunicated Nathaniel Branden. This policy of excommunication and attacks continued after the Brandens were forced out. What’s been the impact of that? I think you’ve discussed this to some extent already, but Vinay, just comment a bit more on how this process has continued.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Well, to my knowledge, it has absolutely continued after 1990. Roger mentioned the big split with David Kelley over open vs. closed Objectivism. A very, very fine economist, George Reisman, who was very much in the Randian, Misesian tradition, anti-Rothbard’s anarchic position, was excommunicated for, I believe, petty reasons. David Harriman left for some reason, and prior to or just after Harriman, John McCaskey, who was on the board of ARI, wrote a three-star review of Harriman’s book, and he was purged. What happens with these purges is that it creates a climate of fear. I worked in organizations like that in my corporate career, and the thing that suffers the most when you have that kind of fear is creativity. That’s the biggest negative.

If central banking exists, automatically what happens is there is no free market because you’re bastardizing interest rates.

The other thing I find is, in the mimicry of Ayn Rand, that the establishment must avoid any association with libertarians. Ron Paul was an outstanding candidate. He had a better grasp of individual rights, in my opinion, than any other political candidate ever. But the Ayn Rand Institute, I believe, was dismissive of Ron Paul. They said, “Oh, but he doesn’t even understand banking.” Now, there is a big debate going on between fractional reserve banking (FRB) and the so-called free banking school. In my opinion, FRB is not fraudulent. But there are valid issues within that. And when the free banking school says maturity transformation in banking is banking, I think that is an absurd statement. But anyway, there is a debate, so even if Ron Paul was wrong about banking, they should have endorsed him. Even through the primaries, he was often coaching others in the Constitution. The other thing I find is that George Selgin, an economist, has appeared on Ayn Rand Institute [auspices], and he’s not a pure free market person, in the sense that he hasn’t been anti-central banking. If central banking exists, automatically what happens is there is no free market because you’re bastardizing interest rates. Euphemistically, it’s called “monetary policy,” by the way. And there is a lender of last resort facility with the Fed, which is there with every central bank, and therefore all banks are effectively subsidized. A far better proponent of this [free market] view is the Austrian School of Economics and Mises Institute. But any association and alliance with them must be avoided because they’re libertarians. So, I think this kind of purging and acting on Rand’s worst personality traits unfortunately is still ongoing.

 

Roger Bissell

The banishing and purging took place a lot before Rand’s death, too. One of the main examples is Murray Rothbard, who was a prominent libertarian thinker. He gave Atlas Shrugged maybe the most generous, laudatory review it ever got. She broke off with him supposedly because he would not divorce his Christian wife. This was around maybe 1958, 1960, somewhere in there, in the really early days. Then there was John Hospers, with whom she had an intellectual correspondence for a year or two. He was a university professor, philosopher, journal editor. He also published a college text called Introduction to Philosophical Analysis. The second or third edition included and favorably discussed two major chunks of Rand’s views about ethics and concepts. And he opened his journal, The Personalist, to numerous Objectivist-oriented writers. She broke off with him because he supposedly embarrassed her in front of some academics when she presented her theory of aesthetics. A third example, again of someone who was in the early days trying to associate with the Objectivist movement. was Tibor Machan, a longtime friend of mine. He was a Hungarian immigrant who went on to become a university professor and an extremely prolific writer. He was one of the founders of the Reason Foundation and he wrote well over a dozen books. He was the editor of Reason Papers, which had a similar open policy for Objectivist-oriented writers. He championed both libertarianism and Objectivism for all of his active career, but he was given the boot. And there was the “stay away,” because he asked too many annoying questions after Objectivist lectures.

All three of these examples happened before 1965, well before the Brandens were ousted.

All three of these examples happened before 1965, well before the Brandens were ousted. This kind of loss, a brain drain of really prolific and energetic thinkers is, is a terrible blow to a movement. Sometimes you just don’t want to admit it. You just want to go on and “get thee hence,” you know. A couple more examples are Edith Efron, who wrote in The Objectivist, also for TV Guide, and she was into analyzing television news bias—and her brother, the neurophysiologist Robert Efron, who wrote some really good things about physiology and consciousness that were also in The Objectivist. They were lost around the time of the Branden split. As Vinay points out, there are many, many examples, decade after decade, over and over, of this hemorrhage of good thinkers.

As far as the attack specifically on libertarianism by the Objectivists, Vinay is correct, there’s been this, “Rand said it, therefore it must be true, so I have to appear Objectivist and virtuous by saying it, too.” I think it’s unjustified, very foolish. There is this syndrome in Objectivism that Rand herself started, I think of it as kind of a derangement, that is like looking through the wrong end of the telescope and making small differences look huge and unacceptable. Rothbard, Hospers, and Machan are examples. She also angrily denounced and rejected Ronald Reagan. I remember that in 1975 he came to Nashville and spoke at Vanderbilt University. He said, “I am a libertarian.” I thought, “Oh, really? I thought you are a Republican.” Anyway, Rand denounced him and rejected him because he would not separate himself from the pro-life movement unequivocally. He’s the one who gave by far the best speech supporting Barry Goldwater in 1964, who Rand was supporting for president. Of all times, and I’ll conclude with this, of all times in Western civilization, this is not the time to burn bridges to potential allies in the fight because things are almost “all-hands-on-deck.” If you’re pulling up the drawbridge and saying, no, you can’t come in, well, “divided, we fall,” right? That’s the way I look at it.

 

Marco den Ouden

One person you didn’t mention is a very early influence on Rand, who had a tremendous influence and who she later severed ways with was Isabel Patterson, the author of The God of the Machine. That might have been the first casualty in the war.

Another aspect of this, the way this whole thing went with these purges, and there’s a correct way of thinking and there’s a not orthodox way that’s verboten, is her influence on people within the movement like Leonard Peikoff. Anne Heller tells a telling story that Rand’s favorite composer was Rachmaninoff, and she was into Romanticist music. Tchaikovsky was okay and Chopin was okay. But one day she spoke out against Brahms, and Peikoff, who was a big Brahms fan, hastily went and got rid of all his Brahms recordings.

 

Roger Bissell

Oh, no!

 

Marco den Ouden

Anne Heller tells that story in her biography of Rand. So, not only did the movement purge people, but it had a chilling effect on the people that stayed in the movement, [such] that they toed the line. So that’s a negative effect as well. But let’s continue.

When you speak of the errors in Objectivism, are you talking about fundamentals, about Objectivism’s basic premises? Or are you talking about faulty reasoning from some of those premises? Or are you perhaps talking about incompleteness? Maybe there’s room for amendment and expansion of the Objectivist corpus. Roger, can you comment on that?

 

Roger Bissell

Way back, decades ago, there was a list of “Basic Principles of Objectivism,” and I could look at that and say, oh yeah, I agree with all those. And I still do. So if that’s the checklist, yeah, I’m in. I agree with the axioms. I agree with capitalism and reason and purpose and self-esteem and concepts and logic and Aristotle’s laws of logic.

One of them is a gap that led to an error, and one is an error that led to a gap.

I have a couple of examples. One of them is a gap that led to an error, and one is an error that led to a gap. I’ll give you the first one. Rand had some wonderful, fruitful insights and there were some gaps in her ideas that the insights could be used to help fill. For how we form concepts, she had this idea of unit perspective. If you see things as units that are members of a group of similar things, then that’s how you can form concepts. I think it’s profoundly important. To me, it’s the master key for understanding logic, not just concepts, but also, propositions, arguments and theories, the whole thing. If this insight of hers were properly applied, a reasonably intelligent follower of hers who was interested in concept theory could easily fill in this gap of how we form propositions. Instead, to this very day, all we have from the official movement is Harry Binswanger’s book, How We Know, in which he has a chapter on propositions. I get the shivers and I shudder when I think about it, because it’s awful. He completely abandons Rand’s insight about the unit perspective and the file folder metaphor for how we hold our concepts. The only antidote to this, other than consigning it to the flames—don’t do that, just keep it over there!—is my book What’s in Your File Folder? If somebody wants another way of understanding all this, read chapter 1 of my book. So, it started out with a gap—Objectivism doesn’t have a theory of propositions—then to fill it, Harry Binswanger came up with this hugely erroneous chapter.

I just think it’s okay to love Ayn Rand and Objectivism, but you should love facts and truth more. Otherwise you’re in a cult.

The other example is an error that led to a gap. Again, interestingly, Rand and Harry Binswanger are involved in it. On the second page of “Art and cognition,” Rand makes what I think is a gross logical error. I just re-read Leonard Peikoff’s essay “Fact and Value” essay today, and he says, if there’s any error in a philosophy, then the whole philosophy is out. No, it’s not that bad! It can be fixed. But they say, no, it can’t. Well, Rand says architecture is a form of art, and art by definition is the re-creation of reality, but architecture does not re-create reality. That is a contradiction. At least one of those three claims can’t be true. And yet, warts and all, that’s part of official Objectivism, and we’re supposed to take it in as though Aristotle’s law of contradiction doesn’t apply to aesthetics. So, there’s the error. It can’t be corrected because it’s official Objectivism, and how dare you! But it gets worse. Binswanger deleted architecture from The Ayn Rand Lexicon. She wrote a whole book on architecture but it’s not [mentioned] in the Lexicon. She devoted a paragraph or two in her aesthetics book about architecture [and that’s not referenced in the Lexicon either]. So, is that the way to fix errors, just throw them down the memory hole? No. This is an endemic thing. They won’t even acknowledge there are errors, let alone allow them to be fixed. Instead they cover them up, or they do a bunch of verbal tap dancing that would make Fred Astaire blush if he saw it. I just think it’s not tolerable. It’s treasonous to Ayn Rand by their own standards that they apply to us, but not to themselves. They say, don’t you dare try to fix the mistake. Well, Binswanger fixed the mistake by throwing it out, keeping it out of the book where it rightfully belonged. Even though it was a mistake, it should have been in there.

I’ll let that suffice. I just think it’s okay to love Ayn Rand and Objectivism, but you should love facts and truth more. Otherwise you’re in a cult, right? You’re not an independent individual. You’re not in a vibrant, healthy intellectual movement. There are a lot of breakthrough ideas that could be absorbed into Objectivism, if they would just open the doors a little bit. But instead, those ideas are either going to wither and die away or they’re going to go somewhere else. That’s what happens when you’re too insulated.

 

Marco den Ouden

Vinay, can you add to that?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Rand’s theory of sexuality and sexual attraction was at the very least grossly incomplete, if not wrong. It’s what primarily caused the Rand-Branden split.

Briefly, just a few instances of what’s wrong. Rand’s theory of sexuality has not perhaps made it into Objectivism. But Rand’s theory of sexuality and sexual attraction was at the very least grossly incomplete, if not wrong. It’s what primarily caused the Rand-Branden split, and we go into how it did so in our book, Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics.

Secondly, if you apply Rand’s definitions of “value” and “virtue,” by those definitions, Adolf Hitler was virtuous when he was conquering Poland and attacking Hungary and killing Jews and all the rest of it.

If you apply Rand’s definitions of “value” and “virtue,” by those definitions, Adolf Hitler was virtuous when he was killing Jews.

Rand wrote a book titled The Virtue of Selfishness, and she took the definition of “selfishness” from the American Collegiate Dictionary of 1956. Now, even in that dictionary, it may or may not have been the only connotation, but clearly, the kind of brute that tramples over others has always been a strong connotation of the word “selfish.” Even in the dictionaries, certainly, the mainstream ones today: all of them are more likely to categorize, at number one, Attila the Hun, one of her favorite villains, as selfish. Then there’s the word “altruism,” which is consonant for many minds with kindness or compassion or living with other people. She’s taken “altruism” to mean self-sacrifice, which it [sometimes] partially does, and a French philosopher Comte used that definition. She’s attacking Comte. But that was 60 years ago. Today when Objectivists talk to people, they’re not heard. It’s like they’re not talking in English. And that to me is one of the major drawbacks.

We spoke about the errors in the Objectivist ethics. Rand makes implicit claims. She claims that she has solved Hume’s Paradox, and it is absolutely untrue. She leads a lot of Objectivists to believe that she has discovered certain laws of nature. She has discovered the one and only true ethics, and that again is absolutely untrue. She actually uses Immanuel Kant’s universalization principle. She uses his phrase, “man is an end in himself,” without attribution. In fact, the universalization principle was also used by John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government. She uses some of the concepts Isabel Patterson writes in The God of the Machine, without attribution as well. So, the whole thing needs to relooked at, especially the ethics.

As far as the establishment is concerned, I thought The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS)—I got to it very late—was a magnificent history of [Randian] ideas for 20 years, and not a single person from the bigger establishment, the ARI, ever contributed an essay in JARS, nor did they ever come in there to defend Rand. That’s a very sorry state of affairs. which goes back to: “Are we just doing a marketing of Ayn Rand or are we after philosophical truth?” and I think the former is the answer. So, I think these problems—you’ve just seen a sprinkling from Roger and me—I don’t think they can be fixed when you are basically closed to new ideas.

 

Marco den Ouden

I like to say that in defense of Rand, she actually explicitly said at some point, and I don’t remember the exact location where she said this, something to the effect that she doesn’t want people to blindly follow her philosophy. She wants them to intellectually agree with her philosophy, to study it, to understand it, and say, yes, this is right. But there was this climate of fear, this climate of intimidation, that sort of stifled that. Was that the fault of Rand or was that the fault of her followers? Branden admits that he helped create this climate of fear to a certain extent. Is this another contradiction within Rand that she had said, I want you to understand this by rational means, not by intimidation, but she violated this idea?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Yes. I think Rand probably did create a climate of fear within her group, but then it unfortunately didn’t have to be [followed]. Her worst personality traits do not have to be mimicked, but they have been. So, it’s both.

 

Marco den Ouden

Okay, Vinay let’s go on to how Objectivism is marketed. How is it marketed today and what was your opinion of that?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

If you market Objectivism as a closed system, then it’s really only a marketing exercise.

I think firstly that there is a problem unless you open Objectivism into a much wider universe—the Age of Reason thinkers, and you study Aristotle, you study some of the back issues of JARS, and you study a variety of other thinkers: John Locke, Isabel Paterson, and so on—unless and until you do that, if you market Objectivism as a closed system, then it’s really only a marketing exercise. I’ve heard that some of the establishment ideas are only to market it to intellectual leaders who can then change the culture. To that extent, they’ve invited some well-known figures like Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager. But these guys didn’t get to where they are based on an Objectivist philosophy or even a strong affiliation with Rand, so I think that’s destined to fail especially when you get Peterson to talk at the conference and then later on criticize him. I’m fine with criticizing Peterson. I think he does have plenty of flaws.

So, I’m unfortunately pessimistic about the way it’s structured now. I don’t think you can market it well at all.

 

Marco den Ouden

Roger, can you add to that?

 

Roger Bissell

Atlas Shrugged came out in 1957. They all had high hopes in Rand’s inner circle that it was going to change the world.

I can give a little historical perspective and then look in on how things are now. Atlas Shrugged came out in 1957. They all had high hopes in Rand’s inner circle that it was going to change the world. Then apparently no academics stepped forward to say, yes, this is good, true, and beautiful, so she fell into despair. The Brandens said, well, you know what, the best audience [for your revolutionary ideas] is not the older intellectuals, but the wave of the future, the young people, the high school and the college age and young professionals. Many of the people my age back in that time, the best and the brightest, especially independent scholars, were sympathetic to Objectivism and yet weren’t completely in the main groups. A lot of us were college kids. We didn’t have a lot of spare cash. We laid down our money for newsletters and books and lecture courses, and it meant something to us. It was an investment. I think it paid off for the movement. It certainly paid off for us because it was exciting and it helped us grow intellectually, but I don’t know that the official Objectivist groups still understand what was unleashed back then, and they still haven’t figured out how to mutually advantage themselves and us.

Now I really don’t like what I’m seeing. The outreach to both the young and the older intellectuals has really gone off the rails. Vinay has pointed out about Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager and so on. but it looks kind of hollow and kind of transparent, and I don’t see how much good is going to come of it. I don’t think it’s bad. just that they’re putting a lot more currency in it than is really there. The worst thing I see is what they’re doing with the young people. They seem to think it’s a good idea to shovel free books and free internet material and scholarships to conferences to young people who may not even be sure it’s something they want and who have practically no skin in the game because they’re not asked to make an investment in the process. It’s just, show up and we’ll get you in free. I don’t think that’s going to produce much. I mean, there may be a rare exception, but if young people aren’t asked to put some money down for the insight and the information they’re getting, I don’t know if they’re going to take it seriously. I do think this is a problem with the broader culture, but for Objectivism, these marketing attempts seem to be falling into that error instead of putting a price tag on the ideas to really show that they have a value. So, I join Vinay in thinking that I don’t see a lot of reason to be optimistic about the marketing directions that have been used so far.

 

Marco den Ouden

Okay, let’s go to our last question here. There have been 65 years of official Objectivism without the hoped-for success. Now, I think you and I might disagree on this. I think Objectivism has been more successful than we tend to think that it has been, because we expected to conquer the world and everybody turned into an Objectivist. But is that a realistic hope that we’re going to see a mass conversion and mass movement and everything like that? Is it even a philosophy that can lend itself to a mass movement? Do you think Objectivism can ever achieve this sort of success that we’re looking for? Or do we need an alternative that can achieve this? Roger, what’s your thoughts on that?

 

Roger Bissell

I look at Objectivism now the same way I did 60 years ago: as a possible vehicle for getting people from where we are today to a freer, saner, more rational, and happier world. I’m looking at the vehicle and I’m remembering that back then I thought it was like a wonderful engine of progress and development and insight and so on. Then I think about the heroes in Atlas Shrugged and I think, okay, where are they? That was my belief, that Objectivism was going to nurture and help to create these wonderful heroes. I mean, you guys are heroes. You’re terrific people. And I have a lot of friends that I think highly of. But we’re doing good things despite the fact that we’re not really part of the official engine that’s being taken care of by these people that you would think would keep it in good running order. They would fix it, they would get new tires, they’d have it serviced and keep it in good shape so that it’s getting better and better. But instead they have frozen it and now they’re just chewing the ideas.

I feel kind of sad and kind of pessimistic, even while I’m enjoying my life because of Objectivism.

If it serves your own individual life, wonderful, because that’s what we’re here for, to have a good individual life. However, as far as changing the world is concerned, I don’t know. It has to get us to act together first. And if it gets its act together, then I think it has a chance. But if it doesn’t, then I think the energy is going to either dissipate or it’s going to go somewhere else. We need energetic and intellectually honest leaders who play fair and keep an open mind. And that’s why it’s so great to work with people like Chris Sciabarra that I worked with for over 20 years and with Vinay for the last several years and [with both of you in] doing these podcasts. These are all a way to allow new voices. We’ve done a lot of interviews, new ideas, meeting with people, working with them. I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I hadn’t gotten into Objectivism in the first place. So, good things happen. I haven’t given up on Objectivism as a powerful set of ideas, a source of inspiration and friendship, but I just don’t know if it’s going to become the effective vehicle toward the rational, libertarian, humane society that we would like to live in. I just don’t know. And that’s why I feel kind of sad and kind of pessimistic, even while I’m enjoying my life because of Objectivism.

 

Marco den Ouden

Vinay, can you add to that?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Very recently, I believe the Ayn Rand Institute has started happiness workshops, because the CEO said he discovered a lot of Objectivists are not happy. That’s very much been my anecdotal experience [also]. Now, for a philosophy that purports to have happiness as the final goal and gives you all the formulae, it isn’t working, at least not on the bare threads that are presented in some small books. Objectivists often compare some sort of parasitism and say you’ll never be happy if you’re a bank robber or a predator or a parasite, and that’s true. We say that too in MAE, because there is an internal conflict. But sometimes a lack of knowledge, ignorance, is bliss, and some incredibly evil people, according to the standards of Objectivism or libertarianism, have become happy and they have lived very long. Alan Greenspan is 98 and still going, and he’s had a magnificent career in a conventional sense. Barack Obama always smiles ear to ear. Al Gore is tremendously successful and a billionaire. These guys look incredibly happy relative to most of the people who are purists, and that’s because of the world we live in. And the world we live in is not Soviet Russia, in which case even Rand says, Kira is going to die, and Leo is going to die spiritually. She showcases Howard Roark in a novel. Howard Roark succeeds in remaining very serene and becoming incredibly happy. Today, if Howard Roark walked out of an architectural school in his final year, he wouldn’t have the certificate to say he is an architect, and even if you wanted to commission him, you won’t be able to due to some regulations because he’s not a qualified architect.

But even in that movement I see a gap, not just the factionalism between the Beltway libertarians, Reason and Cato, versus the Mises Institute, the real libertarians.

So there is, I believe, a decisive need for a whole new movement. I’ve currently called it “natural rights humanism,” because we also need to get rid of gatekeepers, purges, and bring in our close allies from the libertarian world, which you mentioned. They, too, haven’t succeeded. Javier Milei is president of Argentina, but he’s not president because all of a sudden lots of Argentinians became libertarian. It’s a reaction, and the reaction can go towards a Hitler or a Milei. Thankfully in Argentina, they got a Milei. Let’s see whether he succeeds. So, that movement has had some success.

But even in that movement I see a gap, not just the factionalism between the Beltway libertarians, Reason and Cato, versus the Mises Institute, the real libertarians. But when Jeffrey Tucker introduced his concept of “brutalism,” he got a lot of flak for it, because libertarianism is essentially only a political philosophy based on the non-aggression axiom. Even libertarians agree, though, that we need a complete philosophy, but just not at the government level, only at the personal level. So, I’m hopeful that maybe some academics and some other public intellectuals will get on board with this concept of “natural rights humanism.”

 

Roger Bissell

I was just pointing to you [on screen] as “somebody.” That somebody is you, my friend. We talked about this recently. I think “scientific natural rights humanism” is the mantle that I would proudly wear.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, let’s make it scientific natural rights humanism, because there is a scientific humanism, but there isn’t a humanism based on natural rights. In fact, if it isn’t based on natural rights, to me it’s not humane to start with. Sartre claims that Existentialism is a humanism, but it isn’t. So, let’s hope we can either change Objectivism, which I think is very unlikely, or introduce a new movement which will really infuse and encourage scholars and creators and have no gatekeepers. There is a body of literature that would come in, if it has also got a new journal, and so on.

 

Roger Bissell

It’d be nice to have one word of three or four syllables to name our philosophy, wouldn’t it? Like, Sci-Nat-Ri-Hum, or something?

 

Marco den Ouden

I really think that the word “liberalism” belongs to libertarians and Objectivists. It’s being usurped by the left and it’s time to reclaim it.

I’m attached to the old-fashioned idea of liberalism in its classical sense. I really think that the word “liberalism” belongs to libertarians and Objectivists. It’s being usurped by the left and it’s time to reclaim it. But that’s my view. Do you have a last comment?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I agree with “classical liberalism.” If you can reclaim it. It pretty much also embraces natural rights, embraces a scientific epistemology, and a scientific metaphysics.

 

Roger Bissell

My only final comment is: Onward and upward!

 

Marco den Ouden

Onward and upward! On that cheery note, I would like to thank our guests, Roger and Vinay, for their valuable insights into this conflict. And I’d like to thank our guests, our audience, for joining in with us and listening to this discussion. And on that note, I’ll say good night and good luck.