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Transcript: Reading Ayn Rand Between the Lines, Part I

By Roger E. Bissell

January 11, 2024

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Date of recording:  November 15, 2023, The Savvy Street Show

Host: Vinay Kolhatkar. Guest: Roger Bissell

 

Editor’s Note:        The Savvy Street Show podcast transcripts may get edited for removal of repetitions, pause terms, and for clarity. References are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Hello and good evening. Welcome to a new episode of The Savvy Street Show. We’ve had a long hiatus but we’ll make it worthwhile. I’ve got Roger Bissell, musician, writer, and philosopher, again on the show and the topic for today is “Reading Ayn Rand Between the Lines.” So the thesis is—if you read Rand, just one essay or just take the words as they are; a lot of people misread Rand doing that—we want to dig in and take her entire corpus as a whole and find things in Rand that a conventional read sometimes doesn’t find. Okay, so my first question to Roger is: Can Ayn Rand’s ethics be defined as primarily an egoistic ethic?

 

Roger Bissell

I would say that egoism is not the central characteristic of Rand’s ethics. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at the title of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, A New Concept of Egoism.

Well, I’m glad we’re talking about ethics. We could certainly go into almost any of the branches of her philosophy, but ethics is of very central interest and importance for people because they want to know: How should I live my life? And so, in defining her ethics, you have to look for what is the central fundamental feature of it. What is its essential or fundamental characteristic? And I would say that egoism is not the central characteristic of Rand’s ethics. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at the title of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, A New Concept of Egoism. It sounds or it looks to anyone reading it like, “Oh boy, this is going to be a book about how I can be selfish and be an egoist, and that’s how I should live my life.” That is really misleading, and she points that out very quickly in the introduction. Egoism versus altruism is not the central issue of ethics, even though it’s highly important. You can get a lot of good debate going on what should be the proper orientation in your life. But as she said, the proper or the basic issue is not who benefits, self or others, but instead: How are you going to make the best life out of your own life, the one and only precious life that you have? It turns out that there are a lot of things that you have to do and some of them involve other people, but none of them involve exploiting other people or letting other people exploit you, in the sense of treating each other not as persons with dignity and importance, but instead just like little cells in a hive or in a collective. The whole idea is values of people, and what are you going to need to do in order to make your life the best it can be. One of the frequently misunderstood lines from that introduction is about how you should always be the beneficiary of everything you do. Well, okay. It says nothing about what form that benefit should take. It can be a spiritual value. It can be pleasure and enjoyment of what you have done for yourself or for somebody else. And it doesn’t say that only you must be the beneficiary of what you do. So there’s an awful lot of room for misinterpretation there by people who are reading too carelessly. And why would people read carelessly? Well, some people are just antagonistic to the whole philosophy, and so they are inclined to not be generous or observe the virtue of charity in reading somebody they disagree with. They are looking for things that they can hang it on or smear it. But other people maybe saw the title of the book and said, “Boy, oh boy, I’ve been told all my life that it’s sinful or evil to be selfish and here’s a book that’s saying it’s great, it’s a virtue,” then go for it. And so, somebody might read that sentence that I quoted and think, “Wow, I should be the only beneficiary of the things I do.” No, that’s not what it says, except when you say you must always be the beneficiary, some people make the illogical translation that, “Oh, you should be the always and only beneficiary of what you do,” and that’s simply not true. It’s a different kind of selfishness and egoism than most people are brought up thinking about.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Yeah, that seems to be a huge problem. I mean someone could donate everything they have or half their savings to a dear friend, and Rand would say that action is selfish if it’s voluntary and if that friend represents that kind of value to you. So what would have been a better subtitle or a better heading for this ethic that she propounds?

 

Roger Bissell

There aren’t really good, catchy words that roll right off of your tongue for what the essence of the Objectivist ethics is. I mean, “selfishness,” that just comes right out. Egoism–okay, that’s fine. But if you say something like what Aristotle held, which I think is very similar to Rand—your life, your best, fullest life as a rational being—how do you encapsulate that? Well, Aristotle talked about living well as eudaimonism. And who knows what that means or uses that word, except people who like philosophy? Most people know “selfishness” really well, but do they know “eudaimonism”? No. How about “rational self-interest”? Well, you’re getting a little closer, but if you say, “the virtue of rational self-interest,” then people say, “Well, that’s an awful lot to chew.” So I don’t have a handy title that would have been better. It’s a great title for marketing and to get people to buy the book. But if they’re paying attention, they find out that it means something quite a bit different. It doesn’t just mean trampling on your victims or being Nietzsche or somebody else, you know, just taking what you want and leaving people bleeding in the side of the road.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Nietzsche, you’re referring obviously there, just for the benefit of the viewers, to the German philosopher who occasionally was followed by the Nazis, unfortunately. [Roger: Yeah.] I think perhaps you could say it’s “self-actualization.” [Roger: Sure.] Self-actualization as a rational being could be the real end game of these ethics. [Roger: Yup.]

 

Roger Bissell

There are other titles that people have come up with, like a couple of friends of mine, they call their ethics “individualistic perfectionism.” [Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen, The Perfectionist Turn: From Metaethics to Metanorms (Edinburgh University Press, 2016.] And they’re not the only ones who have used that term. Somebody even in an essay that I saw online a few days ago referred to Nietzsche’s ethics as “individualistic perfectionism,” as an aesthetic .view of ethics. [Simon Robertson, “The Scope Problem—Nietzsche, the Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-Aesthetic,” pp. 81-110, in Nietzsche, Naturalism, & Normativity, ed. Janaway and Robertson (Oxford University Press, 2012).] And I thought, wow, now what could that possibly mean? And then I thought, well, in aesthetics, we’re studying art and we’re studying making something, making a beautiful or good, worthy object for yourself and people to enjoy and maybe get some deep meaning and insight from. And I thought, well, if you’re making your life be the best it can be, you’re really fashioning something. You’re not just going around and taking benefits or giving benefits. You’re building a good life. It’s almost like you’re a living statue, a three-dimensional living, breathing, moving, acting, and being-happy, hopefully, work of art. And you’re building yourself every day. So you’re like a living creation instead of one that is, okay, the statue is done and that’s how it’s going to be. No, you remake yourself or keep adding to your spirit and your values every day.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

That aligns with what Maslow called back in the 60s, I think, in humanistic psychology, “self-actualization.” And that term is spot on, and it’s not as yet prone to package deals and smearing.

That aligns with what Maslow called back in the 60s, I think, in humanistic psychology, “self-actualization.” [Roger: Oh, yeah.] And that term is spot on, and it’s not as yet prone to package deals and smearing. I mean, a lot of terms are under attack. [Roger: Yup.] This one, as yet, is not. But we use that in as a subtitle in our ethics book, which is “the theory and art of self-actualization.”

 

Roger Bissell

Right. And if you think about it, there’s not only an art to it, like a set of methods and techniques and so on, which in your chapter four, you developed quite a bit of that. But also, if you think of not just the method and technique, but also the product, and it’s an ongoing project and not fixed in time, it’s an art from that standpoint too. When you actualize yourself, you are bringing into reality and continuing to keep in reality and make better and better your own self, your own life, the work of art that you are in charge of. And so, I think…I smile when I read the subtitle to our book. That’s what I’m trying to say.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

All right, yes, I mean, there are instances. Firstly, I guess Rand herself gets away from egoism. She says that’s not the primary issue, as you say. She says that early on in The Virtue of Selfishness, in the first essay. [Roger: Right, right.] But later on, we have a few chapters, don’t we, from Nathaniel Branden on “the divine right of stagnation” and “counterfeit individualism?” Do they add to that non-fiction corpus, if you will, of Rand’s [Roger: Sure.] that suggests this is not primarily about egoism?

 

Roger Bissell

“The Ethics of Emergencies” tells you: When you can help somebody, without sacrifice, who needs help, you should; and if it’s a sacrifice, you shouldn’t!

Oh, absolutely. And if you remember in The Fountainhead, Toohey was talking about all these—I think of them as weirdos—all of these people that he had picked out of obscurity and by force of his own reputation and standing, he was able to make them into what we would today call “superstars.” And he says [to Keating], Peter, you know, you look at these people and you think of them as being individualists. They’re not individualists. Heh-heh. And I think Branden even quoted that passage in his chapter on “counterfeit individualism.” It’s very instructive. I mean, both in her fiction writing and in these essays. What’s the hardest part about her philosophy is not whether she’s right or wrong, but that in order to put it all together, to see how close she is to really nailing it, you have to go here and there. It’s not written like a thesis. It’s not written like Spinoza would have done it or like Euclid applied to ethics. It’s very…she is a visionary philosopher. [Vinay: Yeah.] She’s not an academic A, B, C, D, E, F, G philosopher. And when she argues for selfishness, she argues in the last half of that first chapter about selfishness, rational selfishness. It’s a necessary condition of your making the best life you can, but it’s a condition, it’s the means to…And again, rational selfishness includes doing things for others when it’s appropriate. “The Ethics of Emergencies” tells you: When you can help somebody, without sacrifice, who needs help, you should; and if it’s a sacrifice, you shouldn’t!

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Are Objectivists barking up the wrong tree by saying everything boils down to altruism versus selfishness? Shouldn’t they rather be saying everything boils down to individualism versus collectivism, because those words as understood in popular usage as well as in the dictionary are close to the meanings we want for them?

To me, it’s like a devotion to a true self that you’re crafting internally, a soul that you’re crafting, like Aristotle would have said. [Roger: Right. Right.] And that true self could well be…you imagine yourself to be a very generous, compassionate individual. You’ve got to take the actions that befit [Roger: Right.] that vision of yourself that you want to practice and portray consistently. And the action therefore from a Rand standpoint is a selfish action; but not today, the rest of the world wouldn’t see it that way. Which leads me to this whole debate about altruism versus selfishness, which is ever prevalent in Objectivist circles; and outside of those circles, it seems to be absent. As a prelude to that question, I’m going to just read out a few definitions. First is from Merriam-Webster, The American English Dictionary, which says altruism is “an unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others.” So with the word “or,” it’s simply: any regard for the welfare of others is altruism. But selfishness is “a concern for one’s own welfare or advantage at the expense of or in disregard of others.” So you actually got Attila the Hun there. [Roger chuckles.] The Collins Dictionary is similar. If you say someone is selfish, you mean that he or she cares only about himself or herself and not about other people. And altruism is simply very mildly defined as “an unselfish concern for other people’s happiness and welfare.” I’ve looked at Oxford, The Modern Oxford Dictionary, I’ve looked at Cambridge. They’re all very similar. [Roger: Right. Right.] So…are Objectivists barking up the wrong tree by saying everything boils down to altruism versus selfishness? Shouldn’t they rather be saying everything boils down to individualism versus collectivism, because those words as understood in popular usage as well as in the dictionary are close to the meanings we want for them?

 

Roger Bissell

The short answer is the latter, yes.

The short answer is the latter, yes. You were talking just a moment ago, a couple of minutes ago, about soul, crafting your soul, soulcraft. About 40 years ago, George Will, who is no Objectivist, no libertarian, he’s some sort of neo- or non-neo conservative writer, columnist, etc. He wrote a book or column about statecraft as soulcraft. And in other words, that the government’s function, part of its function should be to make us good people. And anybody with an ounce of individualism and independence and integrity and pride, self-worth, whatever you want to call it, cringes when they hear something like that. They say, keep your statist hands off of my soul, if you don’t mind. Your job is to defend our individual rights and to catch people who aggress or defraud us and throw them in jail or get restitution or something. But…soul craft is your individual project of your life. It’s like, the old saying was “mind your own business.” Well, craft your own soul. And when we’re parents, we’ve got little ones that are dependent upon us, and we’re trying to help them become the individuals that they potentially are without making them into little clones or molding them to be just like us. Some people can’t keep their hands off of their children’s souls, and they really do just like George Will would like to have the government do [to adults]. They want to make their children be good people. I think it’s…you help them to become good people, not make them. You can’t make anybody be good anyway. You can just punish them, and then they decide, well, I just will try not to get caught. You know [Vinay: Yeah.], that’s what people end up doing sometimes. But this whole notion of individualism as…rational individualism involves soulcraft and taking responsibility for crafting your own life, your own mind and values, which is how I think of my soul, as my mind and my values. So I’m glad you mentioned that because that to me, yes, individualism rather than collectivism, in earlier years, that’s how Rand presented the issue of ethics. It was all about, well, “rugged individualism,” except you don’t have to go live in the woods. You just be an independent, responsible, rational person and just have integrity and so on, and that’ll be just fine.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Yeah, I find, for instance, you know, Rand expressly…there was an audio of Rand you can find her own words. And she used the Auguste Comte definition of altruism, which is very much about—closer to, rather—using yourself as a self-sacrificial animal as a virtue. And that was a real problem, of course, but that’s not a definition that you can even find in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Roger: No.] or even in academe [Roger: No.], and certainly not in common usage as we just saw [Roger: No.]. Whereas, let me recite here what individualism means in Webster. [Roger: Sure.] And it’s the conception that “all values, rights, and duties originate in individuals” and two, “a theory maintaining the political and economic independence of the individual and stressing individual initiative, action and interest.” I can’t find anything to disagree with on that one, nor can I find any inconsistency with what Rand or we or someone else mean by individualism. [Roger: No.] And collectivism is “an emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity” and “a political theory advocating collective control.” Well, there you go. That’s again exactly what we want to talk about.

 

Roger Bissell

Yeah, when you said about being kind, I think you just mentioned that video about being kind and the whole confusion between altruism and benevolence, I guess, benevolence is sometimes talked about, well, isn’t benevolence a virtue? And we could have a whole hour on that. But what I wanted to say was that, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, you have to sometimes go from place to place piecing together what’s going on, in Rand’s ethics. And I think she was bootstrapping. I think that they had a really good first start with Galt’s speech. And then Nathaniel Branden extracted that material and put it into certain chapters in his original lectures in 1958. And then Rand started writing essays and so did Nathaniel and they threw them out almost like popcorn. And sometimes these essays grew out of questions that they were asked in the lectures. And if you look in The Virtue of Selfishness, you’ll see that…I’ll find it for you here. Or for me, anyway.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay…a bit like a jigsaw, isn’t it? There are pieces, all the pieces are there, they just haven’t been put together in a single picture.

 

Roger Bissell

And we know what Rand said about somebody who would drive by a person lying in the ditch or a hurt dog in the ditch. She referred to them as “psychopaths.”

Exactly. Now “Collectivized Ethics” is number 10 in the book, and it was written, published, I should say, January 1963. Now the third essay, “The Ethics of Emergencies,” was February 1963. “Collectivized ethics,” January 1963. Okay, yes, that was earlier than “The Ethics of Emergencies.” It was the month earlier, [but in the book], it’s number 10 instead of number three. Now listen to this. Once Barbara Branden was asked by a student, what will happen to the poor in an Objectivist society? She answered, if you want to help them, you will not be stopped. Heh. There’s a lot more to the issue than simply that particular comment. But the comment, if you just took away that as a bullet point for the answer, it’s that, oh, well, who cares? But if you want to, well, we’re not going to stop you. It’s a free country, right? It sounds like, well, we could care less about the poor. and you do what you want to do. That’s fine. We won’t bother you. Heh. And then one month later, but very early in the book, [Vinay: Yeah!] she talks about the ethics of emergencies and not once, but maybe four or five times, she uses the word “ought.” Now, I’m not a professional ethical philosopher, but when I hear the word “ought” coming out of a philosopher’s mouth, they are speaking ethics. They are stating an ethical principle or an application of an ethical principle. So she said, if it’s not a sacrifice and somebody needs your help and you can do something to help them, then you ought to do so. Now, does that mean, well, you can if you want to? No, “ought” means you ought to. Now, does it mean that there should be a law? And I think you and I have talked about this recently, and on a Seinfeld episode, almost at the end of the series, there was this Good Samaritan law passed in Massachusetts, and so they decided to use that in their one of their episodes, and somebody was needing help of some kind. I don’t know whether they were mugged or whatever, but the main characters just kind of sidled off and didn’t help. And then they were arrested for violating the Good Samaritan law. Now, see, they ought to ethically—because it wouldn’t have involved a sacrifice—they ought to have helped the person, at least called the police or said, “Can I do something to help you? Do you need help?” But instead, they callously walked off. And we know what Rand said about somebody who would drive by a person lying in the ditch or a hurt dog in the ditch. She referred to them as “psychopaths.” Heh. Now, I wouldn’t ever go that far. , but she did on the second page of “The Ethics of Emergencies,” she said, if you would do this, you’re a psychopath. Now, I know she loved cats. I didn’t know she had that much love for dogs, but apparently she did. So…

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Well, she’s celebrating life, whether it’s a dog or a cat. [Roger: Yep. Yes.]  If it doesn’t represent a danger to you,  how much trouble is it for you to make a phone call, at least, even if you don’t stop and help. [Roger: Right, right. It’s integrity to the value of life.] Yeah, the essential start of benevolence. And then if it so happens that the dog’s dangerous, you can walk away, that’s kind of different. [Roger: Right, right.] Which brings me to another issue where I think Objectivist intellectuals are potentially barking up the wrong tree. One was this, [Both laugh.] we just discussed whether we ought to really be barking about individualism versus collectivism all the time instead of altruism versus selfishness. The other sort of terror that is being forecast by Objectivists, or certain Objectivists should I say, is that there is a danger of a Christian theocracy in the United States. And you know, I don’t see any signs of it—well, I don’t live there. Do you see any signs of it? [Roger chuckles.] I mean, the First Amendment protects the freedom of religion to start with. And I think you once mentioned in 1976 [1776], there were a lot more Christians in number, in percentage numbers in the United States than there are today. I think today we are closer to 50 to 56 percent, whereas in those days, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was over 90 percent. And then you also had the intensity of Christianity in those days was a lot more. And 150 years after that is the period that certain economists and brands say with the Christian domination, cultural domination of the nation is the closest we came to a true laissez-faire society. So it doesn’t look like there is any of that kind of totalitarian theocratic danger in Christianity. The way it is clearly so in Islam because Islam writes that into its code. And outside of the Vatican, I don’t see anywhere in the West where there could be a Christian theocracy in the next, whatever, 20, 30, 50 years.

 

Roger Bissell

Theophobia. It’s fear of those who believe in God.

No, no, except the new Speaker of the House of Representatives is obviously a theocratic warmonger. But other than that, I don’t see it…Heh-heh. I’m just joking, but that’s what he’s being called. Yeah, I wanted to make a little parallel here, which…just so we’re not talking about one of the red button, the hot button issues for Objectivists. Instead, let’s talk about homophobia or transphobia. You know, whenever somebody’s accused of being one of those things, they’re being accused of almost being deranged by the thought that maybe the gay people are going to take over somehow or subvert us, or the trans people are going to subvert our culture and everything. And I know that…every time I hear Objectivists talk about this, and this started way back with Rand in the 60s, or the 70s at least, she was really down on certain policies of religious people. We don’t have to get into all the details, but we’ve been hearing more and more, especially in Peikoff’s DIM, the DIM Hypothesis book from about 10, 15 years ago about how, oh, this is a real danger, and we hear about how the right wingers, the religious conservatives are this grave threat to liberty. And I’m really not seeing that, but I came up with a term anyway, which I’ve been trying out, and nobody has objected to it, and nobody’s commented really, but I think it’s kind of cool: Theophobia. Theophobia. It’s fear of those who believe in God, I guess, or so. “Theist phobia,” I suppose, would be more accurate. But it’s almost like the boogeyman. It’s like, are you afraid? What are you afraid of that you think might take over our country if we aren’t on eternal vigilance and refusing to have anything to do with it, certainly? And yet, we know that Leonard Peikoff has a Christian girlfriend, and so…Maybe he’s entitled, you know, because he’s retired. He’s not an active Objectivist anymore. He’s a retired Objectivist philosopher. So, there you go. He’s 90, and live in peace, Leonard.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Well, let him be happy. If he’s happy with her, all the best to him. [Roger: Oh, absolutely.] Okay, all right. I think that’s all the time we have got today. And there will be another session of “Reading Ayn Rand Between the Lines,” part two. Thank you for tuning in, and a big thank you to Roger Bissell. Okay, well, bye for now, everyone, and we will be back.

 
 

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