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Transcript: Reading Ayn Rand Between the Lines, Part II

By Roger E. Bissell

January 17, 2024

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Date of recording: December 8, 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

Ayn Rand was adamant that Christians in America are essentially individualists. But how is it then that the Objectivist world became fearful of a Christian theocracy in America?

Good evening, and we are back on The Savvy Street Show for part two of “Reading Ayn Rand Between the Lines.” Now, I’ve got Roger Bissell again today, so I won’t introduce him again, except to say he’s a writer, an essayist, an editor, a philosopher, and a musician as well. Plenty of things up there. And I want to start out with a little apology. We finished up part one with a discussion of Christian theocracy or the danger of it, and I accidentally said way back in “1976,” the danger would have been greater. I meant way back in 1776—well, just a 200-year difference—where the percentage of Christianity in America as well as its intensity would have been much greater than it is now, and yet we didn’t end up in the last 200-odd years with a theocracy. Anyway, what I’m going to do today, before we jump to Roger, is start with a couple of quotes by Ayn Rand, and then we’ll ask a leading question of Roger. So, the first quote—actually, both the quotes are in her essay, “Don’t Let It Go” in Philosophy, Who Needs It—the first one’s on page 211, the next is on page 212. So, here comes the first one: “Europeans do believe in original sin, that is, man’s innate depravity. Americans do not. Americans see man as a value, as clean, free, creative, rational. But the American view of man has not been expressed or upheld in philosophical terms since the time of our first Founding Father, Aristotle.” Interesting. She calls Aristotle the first Founding Father. And the next quote is: “There have never been any masses in America. The poorest American is an individual and subconsciously an individualist.” So it’s clear that Ayn Rand was adamant that Christians in America are essentially individualists. But how is it then that the Objectivist world became fearful of a Christian theocracy in America? Is that fear justified, Roger?

 

Roger Bissell

Rand was very tuned in to the fact that most politicians in particular tend to be very much pragmatists. They kind of bend with the wind.

Well, the last question, the answer to that is no. I think that the fear was that the people who are interested in power were potentially a danger, but most people in America, most religious people in America, are more concerned with working, having friends and families, and not with trying to go around running other people’s lives. It’s only the people in the leadership positions, whether locally or nationally or whatever, in government or in the church hierarchies. And I think Rand was very tuned in to the fact that most politicians in particular tend to be very much pragmatists. They don’t talk too much about principles. They just want to roll up their sleeves and get things done. They kind of bend with the wind. But there were two focal points in the world, she said, that are very tuned into principle, and that is the Catholic Church and the communists in, well, then the Soviet Union. And she talked at Ford Hall Forum in 1967 about an encyclical that the Pope at that time had delivered, and it was about his opposition to capitalism, and that capitalism needed to be harnessed and directed toward alleviating the suffering of mankind, and so that the government should run the economies and do whatever was needed to take care of these problems and not allow free enterprise. She thought this was horrible. She called her piece “Requiem for Man.” So she was very alarmed by it. And she said there are only three places in the world where people really know the basic issue. One was in the Kremlin, one was the Vatican, and one was the Empire State Building. And that was where The Objectivist and Nathaniel Branden Institute had their headquarters back then. And I think that she said only Objectivism understands what these other people are up to. And the question now is: Who is listening to us? Maybe quite a few people are. If you remember when the Atlas Shrugged movies were coming out about 10, 12 years ago, even Sean Hannity on Fox News, who is a Christian conservative, was very enthusiastic about this, and what the book Atlas Shrugged said to him was that our country is dying because the government is destroying or crippling capitalism, the free market, and that we needed to turn things around, and he thought that Rand’s book, her novel, was a very important message that people needed to hear. Rand said, “The Catholic Church has never given up the hope to reestablish the medieval union of church and state with a global state and a global theocracy as its ultimate goal.” Now, that was 1967. Even if the American people weren’t interested in a theocracy, Rand thought that the Catholic Church was. Now, is that still true? Are they still thinking in those terms? I don’t know. Five years later, she wrote that piece that you quoted several minutes ago, and she urged her readers not to join the Conservative Party which, she said, “subordinates reason to faith and substitutes theocracy for capitalism.” So even then, she thought that the conservatives were heavily dominated by religious conservatives who wanted the church to run the government, wanted the church to dictate what the laws would be, and that they should be enforcing morality and not just laws against crimes and fraudulent dealings and so on. I only found one more example and that was in 1985. Peter Schwartz wrote an article where he was criticizing the libertarian movement, and he said that the logic of the New Right—which is, again, the conservatives—leads to theocracy, even if various conservatives would deny this. Well, I think a lot of conservatives would deny it because a lot of conservatives have no interest in theocracy. There are some who do. So, maybe Rand was magnifying the whole magnitude of the problem beyond what it should be. I think that whatever position the Catholic Church was in 55 years ago, which is when she first made that comment at the Ford Hall Forum, I think they’re in a much worse position these days to make any noise about a theocracy than, for instance, the Muslim religion is. The Muslim religion is very vocal about wanting to establish a global caliphate, and they would, if and when they had an opportunity, they would push and push and push. So, now the question is: Is there some chance that the religious fundamentalists in the Muslim world will collaborate with the communists and socialists in order to take down Western culture, to take down America and capitalism, what’s left of it? [Vinay: That’s already happening.] Well, it is happening, and we see it in the headlines, with all the demonstrations that are going on. I think…one thing, if you recall from history, back in World War II, Russia and Germany made a mutual defense pact or non-aggression treaty. And as soon as the war got going pretty well, Hitler turned on Russia and tried to defeat them. And that seems to be a pattern, that the two extreme sides will join together in a quest for domination. And then, once things are rolling along pretty well, they start eating their own, as the phrase goes. And that’s one thing you can always count on is that—these people who want to rule the world—they can’t trust each other, and when they run out of victims, they will turn on each other. But that’s not very comforting to us because we certainly don’t want to be taken over first, and then we won’t even see them duking it out themselves.

I think the American people don’t want theocracy.

So, I think the American people don’t want theocracy.  There are issues where their religious views come into play, and we can talk about that, about the Supreme Court and so on. But generally speaking, they just want to have prosperity and freedom, and they’re not totally consistent because they will take their COVID relief checks, they will take their Obamacare, et cetera. But I think that she was right about the average, ordinary people in the country, that they were individualists. They are not looking to dominate or take over other countries or even to take over their neighbors, you know, they just want to get along and live and let live.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, you mentioned the Supreme Court decision, and I’ll come to that shortly. But in terms of eating their own, that’s kind of happened already, as well. In the late 70s, Ayatollah Khomeini got to power in Iran, and he was helped by Marxists in and outside of Iran. And then when he came to power, he executed a lot of the Marxists, and those he didn’t execute he imprisoned. And those lessons of history are forgotten. But back on the Christian theocracy in America. You know, very recently the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Is that kind of the only, or the only dangerous illustration of many more things to come, or is that a one-off of the danger of a so-called Christian theocracy?

 

Roger Bissell

Well, if you look in the context of Roe v. Wade, the Court claimed to have found no right to abortion, which of course is not [listed] in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. But the Ninth Amendment does say that anything that’s not spelled out in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, if it really is a genuine right, then the fact that it was not listed is not meant to disqualify it—or to “disparage” it, was the wording. So, there have been attempts, like in Griswold versus Connecticut in regard to birth control a few years prior to that, to come up with a right to privacy, which would keep the government from interfering with birth control. And I think some of the reasoning that went into Roe v. Wade—I haven’t read it recently, but the idea is that there is this right, that maybe the government would have an interest to regulate things at various points of pregnancy, but that there should be this right. And I always thought that what Roe v Wade, the Court, said about the third trimester signaled to me that the state had an interest in regulating pregnancy for the wellbeing of the unborn child. Regulating the second trimester for the safety and health of the pregnant woman. And so, under that reasoning, I thought there should have been all kinds of laws passed that would very much limit how much late-term abortion there was, and it should only be to save the life of the mother—and otherwise, you know, just an abortion of convenience. In the last trimester, the baby is able to be born, so they should use a Cesarean operation and not just do those ghastly procedures. So, that’s the context. Now, when the case came before the Court—last year, I think it was, 2022—they looked at the fact that the country is so divided on it, and they decided that this was something—since it was not spelled out, and there was no such right that was enumerated, that they would instead turn it over to the States, and that… according to the Tenth Amendment. And so, that is where we are now. You can actually shop for what package of liberties and tyrannies you are most willing to live with, because that’s basically how it’s been before this SCOTUS ruling and how it is now. For instance, if you like low taxes and are willing to put up with abortion restrictions, there’s a state for you called Florida. If you are willing to put up with high taxes in order to have low abortion restrictions, then there is a state for you called New York. And of course, I don’t mean just those two. But that’s the idea. It’s more or less a blue state, red state division. And the red states have lower taxes predominantly, and the blue states have higher taxes, and vice versa on abortion. So, name your poison, you know. Which are you willing to put up with in order to have what you prefer?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I believe you can cross the border. I mean, you know, taxes are every day of the year. Hopefully, abortions are not. Maybe once or twice in a whole lifetime, you could cross into a blue state, get a procedure done, come back, and live in the red  low tax state.

 

Roger Bissell

Sure. Right. But one of the objections to that is similar to the objection of requiring identifications at voting booths. It’s almost silly saying, well, oh gee, you know, it’s so inconvenient to require them to go to another state, you know, to do it. Really? It’s just like requiring, well, oh, this is trying to restrict minorities from voting by requiring them to get an ID. You cannot buy liquor without an ID. So come on, you know, this is ridiculous. So, I agree with you. Unless they close down the state borders or put guards there to inspect for pregnant women who are acting suspiciously, I don’t see why they couldn’t do that, and it would be no major problem. It would be more of an inconvenience than anything.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, I think we’re basically saying there is no danger, at least in the United States, of a Christian theocracy and probably in any [part] of the West outside of the Vatican itself. Whatever ambitions the Vatican has, it doesn’t seem to matter too much right now.

 

Roger Bissell

Yeah. And one more thing on the abortion issue, until we get a Constitutional amendment, which would require not only the Congress to say, okay, here you go, but also 38 states have to ratify it, and that’s not going to happen, to totally repeal abortion.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

That’s comforting to know because some of the new presidential candidates have been making that sort of noise.

 

Roger Bissell

Yeah, but what can they do? The presidential candidates can’t do anything.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Exactly. They can’t make 38 states ratify it.

 

Roger Bissell

I mean, they can get out their pen and sign a proclamation, and so what, you know?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Back then Nathaniel Branden said, this is a movement of young souls, most of her fan base is young. I fear now that most of Ayn Rand’s fan base is old and getting older.

Yeah, it’s a vote-grabbing campaign statement, and that’s all. Okay, now let’s turn back to the past. And reading Ayn Rand between the lines clearly shows that she’s not a Nietzschean. I mean Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who influenced her in her early stages, but she clearly had disdain for him in her mature stage. But the problem is, if you lead Objectivism with the whole selfishness, anti-altruism thing, it sounds Nietzschean. And I wonder whether that’s been the cause of Objectivism not taking off. Those people who got involved with Objectivism in the 60s and 70s, most of them I reckon are still Objectivists, except that they are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Could that be the reason that we are accidentally, or not accidentally, so much as unwittingly leading with a Nietzschean kind of marketing? Is that the reason why the Objectivist movement isn’t growing?

 

Roger Bissell

You paid a pretty penny even back then to go to them, and now they’re expensive. And yet, now, in the various groups in the Objectivist movement, they are offering scholarships to young readers.

Well, it’s a factor. It’s a factor. I don’t think it’s the major issue. We could do a whole podcast on this. I think that one of the things that we all thought in the early days was that this was something that was going to encourage a lot of individual growth and basically people seeking to be as rational and productive and conscientious in their careers as they could, and that it was going to be a new golden age of philosophy and economic productivity and social harmony. And it didn’t happen. And you wonder why. And I think that if you start out with a philosophy of individualism and energy and openness and development, and then at some point you clamp down and say, well, the philosophy is done, and all we can do now is talk about what was written in the past, and we can try to explain to people who don’t understand what they’re reading, and we can chew on it and say, oh, I understand it better now, and charge a lot of money for people to come to conferences. You know, in the sixties and seventies, the conferences were not free. The conferences and the lecture courses, they were…, young students, and they’re also giving out free novels if English teachers will hold essay writing…processes. [Vinay: Contests.] Yeah. And so, there’s a lot of money going into…to try to entice the young people to get on board and…and you wonder, okay, is that where we’ve come to? In the old days, we were hungry for this stuff, and we didn’t need people shoveling money at us to say, hey, come on and give us a chance. We thought, hey, this is just what I need. I’ll pay. Where do I sign the check? Who do I give the check to? So, I think that there’s something entirely amiss with the whole complexion, the whole attitude of the movement. I think it’s become less individualistic. I think it’s become less oriented toward helping promote the individual rational person wanting to make a better life, and instead it’s, you know, how can we keep this philosophy, which shall not be added to at all. It stopped growing in 1982. You cannot make improvements to it. How dare you? It’s stagnation. It’s just like in Atlas Shrugged when the bad guys were getting together at the top of that skyscraper and having their meeting on what to do next to try to throttle the economy, and they said, “we’ve got to make those bastards stand still,” you know, and how dare they put all this pressure on us to think some more? “We’ve thought enough.” And I’m thinking, man, who does that sound like? That sounds like various people I’ve run into in the Objectivist movement. And I know a lot of good Objectivists who are just as dismayed and appalled at that attitude as I am. So I’m not saying that everybody’s rotten. I’m saying that there is this strain, this attitude. And if you have that attitude of stagnation, or of, you know, just go ahead and be a good little soldier and carry the word…and if you’re going to come up with ideas, then go off somewhere else, you know, We don’t want your ideas because we don’t want you claiming that they’re part of the philosophy. So, that alienates people. Anybody with an ounce of self-esteem and self-respect is going to shrink away from people like that. And I swear to you, I have met them, I have known them personally, and that’s all I’m going to say.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Is there somewhere “between the lines” you can get it in the novels or the nonfiction and figure out what is it about this hierarchy of values that was meant?

Okay, sad, I do trust you. Okay, and here we are on the last question of the day. This is a hard one, I can tell you. I should say it’s been a hard one for me. Maybe it’s not so hard for others. This is where, reading Rand between the lines, I thought, didn’t make it very clear. She says in a number of places, never sacrifice a higher value for a lower value. In particular, in “The Ethics of Emergencies,” that quote appears, and I think it appears elsewhere also, or that sentiment appears elsewhere. Now, I used to think of that hierarchy like a ladder of values, you know. Number one, whatever, my career. Number two, my spouse. Number three, my immediate family. Number four, number five, number six, my health. Something like that. And it’s still not very pragmatic or practical. And I remember you mentioned, no, it’s like a flow chart. where the ultimate value is life, happiness being the other side of the coin of life, and everything else is a means to an end. And therefore, you know, career, spouse, friendships, love, romance, children are all a means to the full life. And that’s how the hierarchy works, or should work, like a flow chart. But even then, you know, despite the emphasis on whether it’s an upright ladder or a sideways flowchart, you know, either way I don’t know of any Objectivist who’s written down a hierarchy, either in a flowchart or a ladder. I don’t believe even Ayn Rand did that, because we would have seen the flowchart. It might have inspired other people to do that, whether it was a ladder or a flowchart. And I just don’t believe anyone’s done that. Or have they? Have we misread what we mean by “hierarchy of values”? Is there somewhere “between the lines” you can get it in the novels or the nonfiction and figure out what is it about this hierarchy of values that was meant?

 

Roger Bissell

Wow. There’s another podcast. Hahahahaha. I don’t have it worked out. I do think there’s something to both of those. I’ll skip the flowchart idea and just look at the ladder idea. You know, even in personal relationships, as you illustrated just a minute ago, there are closer relationships and further relationships. But how do you juggle between a sibling who needs your help desperately and the sibling who you haven’t seen for three years and this is your best opportunity to see them? How do you decide that? I guess you go with the emergency, I suppose, And then that’s just in one domain. I call it a domain, the personal relationships. Then there are things like continued learning, like gaining knowledge, or there’s, like you’re enhancing your skills, and so on and so on. And there’s the typical example as, well, you’re studying for an exam, and your friends want you to go out and see a movie or go out and party, and you are really drained and tired and sick of studying, but you really want to get a good grade. So, how do you choose in that? Those are cross-domain questions, and what do you do? I read an interesting article where it said that there are 10 universal values that go across all cultures, and that there are ways for a person to look at those 10 and rank them against each other, then come out with a priority. [Shalom H. Schwartz, “An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values,” in Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, volume 2, issue 1, 2012.] So, you have these very general values like achievement, like benevolence, like security, like self-directedness or free will, and you rate them against each other, and then you end up with the big revelation. You say, oh, I like achievement the best. Or, oh, I like security the best. And then, you kind of know a little bit better what [are] your core values or your generic values. But we’re not talking about chocolate or vanilla ice cream here, you know. We’re talking about your most general aspirations in life, feeding into your happiness and your wellbeing. So, I think that would be an interesting exercise. I’ll probably do that pretty soon. I mean, better late than never, you know.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, we’ll leave it for another day. But you know, we’ve faced, all of us have faced that situation often enough, and in fact, in television series and all that is dramatized almost every time. There’s a female cop, she has a small child at home, she has a husband at home sometimes, and she might even say, well, I value my marriage above my career, but every time there’s a crisis at work, the career takes precedence, and here she is coming home very late, missing out on time with a little child. You know, those decisions are not easy. If you have a challenging job, you’ve got to, you know, stay back at work and finish whatever is urgent. And if it happens too often, yeah, it does affect your family life, but you’ve got to choose, and we all choose pragmatically.

 

Roger Bissell

Think of Dagny in Atlas Shrugged toward the latter part of the novel. She just had to get away because things were falling apart.

Think of Dagny in Atlas Shrugged toward the latter part of the novel. She just had to get away because things were falling apart, and she was frustrated. She was a highly dynamic, productive person, a real problem solver, very rational. And yet she had reached her limit. So, she just went off to the woods, went off to the cabin. And so the value conflict was wanting to solve the problem of the business to keep it afloat or her serenity, because the problem of the work was so frustrating that she basically burned out, and she needed to recharge and get her serenity back. And yet, she’d only been in the cabin for a few days when she couldn’t help herself. She started working, just to do something that had a forward motion to it, and she was repairing the sidewalk, going up to the cabin or something like that. So, I guess once she had recharged, she realized that the whole idea of her career is her mission in life. It was her central focus. And she couldn’t let it go. She couldn’t let go. And I would just say to everybody, if you know what your central, core mission in life is, find out a way to do it. Even if you have to take a step back and figure out another pathway, figure out how you can get what you most want out of life.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Right. Yeah, it’s something we mentioned in a different analogy which was neither a flow chart nor a ladder. We mentioned in our recent book Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics like a solar system analogy. The sun, make that your mission, the sun, and everything else in your life—even the psychologist Abraham Maslow said the same thing—has to revolve literally like planets revolving around the sun, they revolve around it. So you can’t have a spouse that simply doesn’t appreciate your principal career goal. And frankly, you’ve got to get your children, if you have any, to appreciate who you are fundamentally. And you know, only in that sense can the system behave in equilibrium. At the same time, whatever is pressing takes precedence. So if your child has a birthday, yes, you are a parent, and that is the one day you won’t sit back too far at work. You can go home on time to celebrate the birthday. And that’s how we all solve it. Anyway, that was another very, very good session. And we’re coming to a close. But what I wanted readers to do is to tune in with their questions and comments. At this stage, we are not planning “Reading Rand Between the Lines,” part three, But…never say never. There could be part three. If you send us more challenging questions that we could tackle, we would very well do a part three. [Roger: And then on to part 4!] Oh well, that could be, but I’m sure we’ve got other topics. [Roger: Oh yeah.] So, thank you to Roger Bissell for joining us and giving us his wisdom, accumulated experience in Objectivism of what, 40, 50 years or something like that. [Roger: A while.] A long while. All right, this is Roger and Vinay from The Savvy Street Show saying goodnight and good luck. Bye for now.

 

 

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