Conversation W/Harry Binswanger -Individual rights: Everything You Wanted to Know | Yaron Brook Show - Yaron Brook Show

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So I'm assuming you're going to pretty much.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Your polity order, pat.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
And individual loss.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
This is the show, all right, everybody, welcome to your
own book show on this Monday, December first, and I
am on it, and please to have philosopher have you
been Swanger here with me. Harry is of course one

(00:34):
of our a leading objective's philosopher. He teaches for the
Inland Institute at AARU and the grad through a grat
grad program at the institute. He manages the heavy been
swang at list hbl uh and what else do we
want to say?

Speaker 1 (00:55):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Kind of as a highlight because I think everybody knows uh.
And of course he was a personal friend of mine
man's and got to know her quite well towards the
end of her life. So and was on the board
of there our initia for thirty six years. So Harry,
thank you, thanks for joining.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Me, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Sure So, as I told you guys earlier and last week,
you know, get your philosophy questions. All the questions that
I've punted on and said, oh, asked a philosopher, or
the questions I gave not that great answers. This is
the time to ask those questions. We've got a philosopher
with us, so somebody who can give you the definitive

(01:40):
answers on these questions. But we're going to talk about
We're going to spend the first thirty forty five minutes
talking about individual rights, which are really the key political concept,
the most important idea in politics. So maybe we can
start them. Who can start with why is that? Why

(02:03):
individuates so important?

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Well, they're the principle that unlocks the answer to every
political question. And the understanding of individual rights that the
average objectivist has is sufficient to get agreement on virtually
any policy issue that comes up, like say, social security,

(02:31):
should it be saved, should it be eliminated? Or what,
well it violates individual rights, it should go? Or what
about the draft violates the right to life? It can't
be the government can't do it. Eminent domain. The government
wants to put up a post office, they can't do

(02:54):
it because there are private property rights. The government can't
seize your property for any reason. So from welfare to immigration,
to gun control to socials, every topic is resolved by
this one idea that you have a right to your

(03:15):
life and freedom.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
And so where do these rights come from? I mean,
this is obviously something that what do we have? What
is it doing? Okay, this is something that particularly conservatives
always make a big deal out of it. Right, you know,
without God? Where the rights come from? Or I think

(03:40):
I think it was Noah Harari, who is this overrated
philosophy story and who his books are best sellers. And
I heard him once say, you know, you open up
a human being, you dissect a human being, they're all
rights inside, They're not there. So so what is this
idea of rights? And people take them seriously? So where

(04:02):
did they come from? Where do we get in concept
of right?

Speaker 1 (04:06):
That's something that early on in the sixties when I
came into objectivism, which was a fletioning philosophy that I
thought it was very clarifying because it seemed like rights
were either possessions that you had attributes of your possessions,
or else they were just conventions. They were just Congress

(04:30):
decided to call this your rights, so it's your right.
And nine Ran said that rights are moral principles. So
they're like justice or honesty or integrity. They are moral principles,
in this case, designed to tell you what a just
society is, how to organize society under objective law to

(04:56):
allow for moral behavior on the part of its citizens.
They're not attributes of you. They're not things that you
have in your possession. They are principles of how human
beings ought to interact in a social organization.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
So what do you need in order to come up
with rights? To induce the concept of rights.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
It's a very hard concept to get. Apparently, some of
us think itself evident. Thomas Jefferson describe them as self well. Actually,
you know, the first draft of the Declaration did not
use the term self evident. He said, we hold these
trees to be sacred and undeniable. Okay, which is interesting.

(05:48):
Self evident has a better ring, but sacred and undeniable
are closer to a proper formulation. Anyway, It's not easy
to get yet, because you have to have a philosophic base.
And the most important philosophic base you need, well, I

(06:09):
guess there's three, but the one I'm thinking of is
egoism selfishness. It's your life is your own to live,
and that was never held except by the ancient Greeks.
But once Christianity got going, that was anathema. A little later,
I can read you some quotes to illustrate the general

(06:33):
idea of man that lies behind either slavery or freedom,
and it's a different philosophic base. The other thing that
goes along with egoism, whether two are related, conjoin things
reason and free will. If you don't accept free will,

(06:57):
you can't accept political freedom, because then there's no such
thing as you making up your own mind, you acting
on your own decision. There's just various things influencing you.
There's no such idea as the independent autonomous self. And
that's what rights are all about, protecting the independent autonomous

(07:20):
self ability to choose for itself as long as he
or she respects the same freedom of others.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
And why is reason important to you?

Speaker 1 (07:34):
Why is reason important anywhere? Because you're blind without it,
there's no other way of knowing anything, of knowing what's true,
what's right, what exists. So it's particularly valuable or important
in the theory of rights, because that's what rights exist

(07:55):
to protect the reasoning mind. Have some quotes from John Locke,
who developed the theory of rights more than anybody else
is one man. John Locke who described rights in terms
of freedom sorry, and in terms of reason, and I

(08:19):
have some quotes from that. Maybe now is in okay,
time to read them? Yeah, because they're.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
Yep, I lost your sound. I lost your sound, Harry.
I'm not sure what's that? Can you hear me? Harry?
I can't hear you. I think you can't hear me.
Something disconnected. I can't hear you. Is that? But now

(09:00):
I ask you? Okay?

Speaker 1 (09:01):
So yeah, I saw some some message go by.

Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yeah, I was trying to share.

Speaker 1 (09:08):
I was saying that in the clutter here. It's going
to take a while for me to find the quotes
from Locke. But what he was saying is that the
nature has a law to govern it, natural law, he
called it, and that law is reason. Reason is the reason,

(09:31):
the cause why there is such a thing as rights.
Animals have to be dealt with by force because you
cannot address their minds. So if reason is our means
of communicating and of gaining the knowledge we need to survive,

(09:51):
then anything that stops reason, paralyzes reason, negates reason, interferes
with reason, is anti life and therefore immoral. Now, it
wasn't until an Rand that we got that fuller understanding
of the role of reason as really fundamental in a

(10:13):
theory of rights. And it wasn't until ign Rand that
we got the idea that free will and reason are synonymous. Yeah,
so she really completed what Locke began.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
Why Why was the conception of rights associate with natural
rights associate with religion? And that it's sometimes I mean,
is that lock?

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yes, it is lock. And the quote from Locke, if
I can find it here, is that we're all the
workmanship of one omnipotent and all knowing creator, and we
are his to dispose of. So that that's why you

(11:01):
can't use force against your neighbor because he belongs to God.
So you're interfering with God's property rights. He owns you.
You're his slave, and therefore nobody unless they have a
deputation from God, which he thought was ridiculous that no

(11:21):
one could claim that no one can do things with
you because you're God's So it's like when slave owner
can't interfere with the other slave owner. It's not exactly
a secular base. On the other hand, let me just

(11:41):
jump in here to say Locke had a peculiar attitude
about religion and Christianity and God. He thought God gave
us the earth to live and prosper and enjoy ourselves
in so he thought God wanted us to be happy egoists.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Oh, okay, that's really unusual.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Most religionists don't think that.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
And did he think that then God left us alone?
Or was he omnipresent God that interfered and action.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
I think he was more of a deist. He wasn't
as much of a deist as the founding fathers or
because he was one hundred years earlier, and it takes
a long development before people get the courage to really
question these things that seem unquestionable. But he Yeah, he

(12:41):
did not advocate prayer or submission. But he did think
that we are owned by God. He's our like our parent.
We have to obey him. So whether that's understandable, the
people you know, associate it writes with the religion.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
Did he with the other people that picked up on
the concept of rights, either before him or at the
same time.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah, there's a fascinating group before him called the Levelers,
and their names you never heard of, probably, like the
best one is Richard Overton. Richard Overton, and I have
here a writing by him. It's called an Arrow against

(13:29):
All Tyrants, and he wrote this while he was imprisoned
in the Tower of London for rebelling against Cromwell. And
I just sorry if I read a couple of fairly ships.
This is forty years before Locke wrote. And he says,

(13:51):
no man hath power over my rights and liberties, and
I over no man. I may be but an individual,
enjoy myself and my self property, and may write my
self no more than myself, or presume any further. If

(14:17):
I do, I am an encroacher and invader upon another
man's right. And this one I, like every man, by nature,
is a king, priest and prophet in his own natural

(14:37):
circuit and compass, where no second man may partake but
by deputation, commission, and free consent from him whose natural
right and freedom it is. So I think that's really
the first time because the if we look at what

(15:00):
a right is, people who have been educated today don't
really get the idea of a right. A right is
not a permission, it's not an entitlement. It's not a
direction to do what's right. It says you are the

(15:24):
one to choose. It's a moral sanction of your freedom
to choose, your freedom of action, not saying it's not ethics.
It's the border between ethics and politics. So you have
a right to be obnoxious, you have a right to

(15:46):
be rude, You have a right to do all kinds
of nasty things to people, as long as thereby you
do not deprive them of their ability to act freely.
So it's not the same as morality. It's the moral
basis of government, is what it really is. And iin

(16:08):
RAN's great identification is rights protect your freedom of action.
And freedom is the absence of initiated physical force. So
rights say, within my circuit and compass, within the area
of my rights, I am the one to decide. And

(16:30):
that has to be that way, because you can't say
within that compass. You must do the right thing decided
by whom YEA. So it is a circuit and compass.
It's like I look at it as circles that exhaust
a field. Like everybody has his own land, and no

(16:52):
two people's land are on top of each other. You
have a land, your boundary ends where his begins. And
it's the same with rights.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
And is Lucke's conception of rights the same in terms
of this bridge between morality and politics.

Speaker 1 (17:10):
Yes, And that's what's the big thing. But both the
levelers here is that you are a king in your
own area. I mean you are autonomous, You're a sovereign.
Nobody can interfere with you in your area. And by
the same token, you can't step out of your protected
area and tell somebody or make somebody else do what
you want him to do. All interactions have to be voluntary.

(17:35):
And Iran stressed that I think she was the first
to identify only physical force can violate a right. You
can't violate a right by microaggression or by offensive speech,
or by any form of speech except where it's like

(17:57):
I'm going to punch your face in if you don't
do this. Ye, a threat is different. But just speech
you know about your ideas or what you believe is
not rights violating. But this is hard for people who
are secondhanders to get. So if you've read The Fountain
the Head, you know Peter Keating, he's a real dependent type.

(18:20):
I call him clingers. For him, for the someone to
disapprove of him is equivalent to a punch in the noose. Yeah,
you cannot abide it. So he doesn't see any big
distinction between physical force and a frown.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah, And you see that with these kids who've been
raised in a secondhanded way, and they've elevated emotions to
you know, to the primary activity in life. And therefore
if you offend them, that's as if you've slapped him
in the face or beating them up.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
Yeah, yeah, if I'm and you know the language of today.
We need access to health care. This poor guy doesn't
have access to healthcare, meaning what is the door shut?
You can't get in the door. No, it means nobody's
giving him free healthcare. And since healthcare is a good

(19:26):
that has to be produced by the time and effort
and mind of some individuals, his complaint is I don't
have access to your wallet and your brain. That's that's
a completely anti rights viewpoint.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
So going back to the level is who were these
these people?

Speaker 1 (19:47):
There were I didn't really get into that. I said
about four of them. It's a small movement. It's about
four of them, and uh, Richard Overton is the name
to remember. There's William Wallwin and a couple of others.
They were in the first half of the seventeenth century,

(20:07):
which means sixteen twenty, sixteen forty and Locke wrote in
sixteen eighty eight, so they're way ahead of him. And
they had the idea, there's an area within which you
are sovereign and no one can interfere with you, and
you can't go into someone else's area where they are sovereign.

(20:31):
And that is so different from the ideas before, which
word that while society makes rules and you have to
follow the rules, or you belong to God, or you
belong to your neighbor, and you have to do the
right thing, and if you don't, you go to jail.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
Do you know where the name levelers comes from? Where
they level of their enemies.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Their enemies looked upon them as wanting to bring down
the high and mighty, But the only the only high
and mighty they wanted to bring down were kings and auristics.
They it was right to be. It meant all men
are created equal. That was the leveling. So it was

(21:18):
a good movement. And I only know about them because
a Cambridge historian who is an objective is named Brian.
Your rush gave me a bunch of writings of these people.
I've never heard of them.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
Okay, it's an objective. Is Cambridge is Damian? That's good
to know. Yeah, that's impressive. So and and then from
Locke there's a level is and there's lock and then
the final one and then the final fathers. Is there
anything in between there? Does anybody else pick up on
this concept and and and really develop it? Well?

Speaker 1 (21:55):
I should say to stress what you just said. The
Founding Fathers were one hundred percent Locke. In Thomas Jefferson
wrote to his son and said, if you're only going
to read one book, it should be John Locke's Second
Treatise of Government. And actually I urge everyone to read

(22:20):
it because it's really good. They're bad things in it,
but on the whole it's the document that created the
United States. And John Locke actually wrote the state Constitution
of South Carolina and he was good in economics also,

(22:42):
So that I just want to stress the Founding Fathers
did put Locke into practice, and that's what created this country,
no question about that. What happened after that BAM coming
out of England Will Scotland David Hume. David Hume said

(23:03):
there's two kinds of knowledge. There's the relations among ideas,
which is all just a matter of how you define
things and doesn't mean anything. And then there's matters of
fact about which we can't know anything. We don't know
if the next step we will fall through the floor

(23:24):
into the center of the earth. We don't know if
something that's falling from the sky and looks like snow
might nonetheless burn us and taste like salt. So you
can't know the future at all. If it's a matter
of fact. If you're saying, well, it's geometry or it's logic,

(23:45):
or it's deduction, yeah that's certain, but it's no good
doesn't apply to reality. So he came along and said
all this rights talk, I mean, he didn't address rights
in Britain, but all the ethical notions the philosophers are

(24:05):
hot air. There is no ethics. You cannot prove any ethics.
Reason has nothing to say about ethics, and there are
nothing to say about politics because political philosophy is just
applied ethics. So that didn't catch on that much. He
was very famous, but he didn't catch on that much

(24:27):
until the German philosopher Immanuel Khan glombed onto that and said, hey,
Hume is right, but we don't have to be able
discouraged about it. We can redefine everything so that the
subjective is really the objective. The subjective. If enough people

(24:54):
hold it, becomes as good as we can get for objective.
So he's the father of socializing consciousness. He's the guy
that's the promoter of Volkes popularly Volkes Day. The voice

(25:14):
of the people is the voice of God. So everything socialist, collectivist,
fascist communists that is in the world today is due
to the influence of Emmanuel Khan, who took hume and

(25:34):
socialized it. Yeah, one person might be wrong, but if
everyone thinks it, that's as good as true. Yeah, so
that you can't have rights on that basis. And he
was also a determinist, so we already saw that you
can't protect freedom of choice if there is no choice.

(25:58):
And then after him they came a bunch of people
carrying his ideas out like a goost. Compt yep, the
guy who coined the term altruism. I never read Compt
until about a year and a half two years ago,
I picked up his book. I was amazed at how

(26:19):
breezen it is. You know, how he compresses his ethics
into one little phrase that he repeats over and over
again live for others.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yep, he's the most explicit ever of all of the philosophers.
In terms of altruism, it just.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Live for others and what are the others living for others?
Other others? Yeah, I mean it's it's Einran described that
once as an exchange of unwanted Christmas presents. Uh, and
then Hagel was put Marx and compt together. Well, it's

(27:02):
particularly Marx and the British Hegelians, which I've read and
I've got one of their works right here. Really Nazis,
they're really horrible. Hegel said, yeah, there are rights. Rights
is what the government has against you. What you have

(27:25):
in relation to the government is duties. So you are
Bradley says it the British Hegel and he says about him, saying,
I am an organ of the state. I Am just
a sell on the body of society. And he's, you know,

(27:46):
he's rabid, determinist collectivist. Goes right from Bradley into the
socialist experiment in England and German Gliens of course created
Nazi Germany, which few people will tell you is an

(28:07):
abbreviation from naz Channel's Socialist Deutscher arbeider Parti National Socialist
German Workers Party National Socialist German Workers Party, so Hegel
was very influential. He was the philosopher of the middle

(28:31):
eighteen hundreds. The world's philosopher.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
Is the nationalist movement that comes around in the mid
nineteenth century a consequence of Hegel.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
And today the whole tribalist of the Maga versus the
progressives is right out of Hegel. It's the identification of
the individual with the state or the tribe in this case.

(29:01):
So what you need, I'd like to read you, you know,
sort of wrapping up this part. I'd like to read
you some quotes from two opposite viewpoints and ask yourself
what supports rights and what is against rights?

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Is that?

Speaker 1 (29:19):
Okay, yep, all right? So the first one is from
the badly named Pope Innocent, the third writing in eleven
ninety eight. Now he wrote this a few years. I
think they made him pope because he wrote this pamphlet

(29:42):
on the misery of man. And this is just the
most amazing language, and this is what was mainstream. Man
is made of mud and ashes? Why are you proud
of mud? Wherefore art thou exalted? What are you, oh ash,

(30:07):
that you should boast? It gets you into these into
the mood for it. Oh the vile ignobility of human existence. Oh,
the ignoble condition of human vileness. Considered the grasses in
the trees. Out of their substance, they produce flowers, leaves,

(30:30):
and fruit, but man brings forth lice, eggs, lice and
stomach worms. They yield oil, wine, and balsam, whereas man
spews forth sputum, urine and excrement. In much wisdom turned

(30:55):
out to epistemology. In much wisdom is much vexation. And
he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. There is scarcely anything
so lowly or simple to understand that man can thoroughly
grasp or fully understand. Man perhaps understands one thing, one

(31:21):
truth perfectly, namely that nothing is understood perfectly. I got
two more the rich man, No, that's sense. Sorry, there's
a blemming against the rich man, and how unhappy he is.
But this is the one I wonder you. Human life

(31:42):
is constant fear, trembling, horror, pain, sadness, restlessness, and the
conclusion that he draws happy. Are they who die before
birth experienced death before tasting life?

Speaker 2 (32:03):
I mean he is a perfect spokesman for Christianity.

Speaker 1 (32:07):
Yes, that's why they made him pope. He knew how,
he knew how to write. Now here's the view that
underlies rights. I stand here on the summit of the mountain.
I lift my head and I spread my arms. This
my body and spirit. This is the end of the quest.

(32:30):
I wish to know the meaning of things. I am
the meaning. I wish to find a warrant for being.
I need no warrant for being, and no word of
sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
The judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that

(32:52):
can find the truth. It is my will which chooses,
and the choice of my will is the only edict
I must respect. I know not if this earth on
which I stand is the core of the universe, or
if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity.

(33:12):
I know not, and I care not. Or I know
what happiness is possible to me on earth, And my
happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness
is not the means to any end. It is the end.
It is its own good, it is its own purpose.

(33:37):
So that's the kind of attitude, a metaphysical view of
man in existence that you need to say. I have
a right to my life. You and the state and
God keep your paws off.

Speaker 2 (33:53):
And any man could write that.

Speaker 1 (33:54):
So that's from Anthem. But she wrote in nineteen thirty five.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
So very early, you know, even in philosophical development. So
much was already developed even when she wrote Anthem.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
In one sans, one of the big things about rights
that I wanted to mention was the objective is theory,
is that rights are not subjective, you know, just opinions
in somebody's mind, and they're not intrinsic. They're not possessions

(34:32):
or attributes. You can't cut up a person and find
his rights. They are objective, which is the relationship of
a rational thinking mind to perceptual reality. So it's neither
just reality by itself or the mind by itself, but
it's the mind grasping reality that's objectivity. And I once

(34:56):
asked her when did you come up with that that
tri economy, where no other philosopher ever said that they
only had the idea of subjective or dogmatic in effect,
and so when did you come up with the three?
And she said, oh, I've always thought that, isn't it obvious?

Speaker 2 (35:20):
No, no, nobody else all of human history. Yeah, that's amazing.
That's amazing. So talk a little bit about I advanced
contribution to the concept of rights. I mean you've already
talked some about.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
That, Yeah, but I think nail it down, yeah, because
because really, I mean actually before that, so rights somewhat
survive in the American legal system in the nineteenth century.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
Without really much intellectual support. I take it there really
no thinkers. So really is kind of momentum out of
the Enlightenment and out of the founders. And then what
happens the concept I mean in America, particularly that it
gets or in our legal system it starts getting perverted and.

Speaker 1 (36:09):
They use altruistic rights inflation like iin Ran talks about
FDRs for freedoms. You have a right to be free
from fear, like where your next meal is coming from.
You have a right to an education. You have a

(36:30):
right to respect, even if you're no damn good and
don't deserve respect. You have a right to all these
things that require other people not to have rights. And
one of the most powerful statements is so simple that
Iron Ran made. There's no right to violate rights. Your

(36:53):
right cannot impose an obligation on somebody else. The only
obligation that you're right sympose on him is that he
cannot invade your rights, not that he has to give
you something. But the the concept of rights got inflated away.

(37:14):
You know that, like the currency. Just you want to
destroy the dollar prints lots of dollars, fiat dollars, phony dollars,
and that's what has destroyed the currency, and the same
thing has destroyed the concept of rights. So now you
have a right to everything, which means that there are
no rights.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
And and do you think that was unconsciously that is
what was was Was it a program of the progressives
or somebody to to kind of inflate it just happened.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
No, it was their belief. If you start from if
you get convinced that no one can help what he
does and that there's no objective truth, there's just my
truth in your truth, then you have to start chipping
away at rights and you have to redefine them as claims,

(38:14):
claims from the government to get things from the government,
like the right to healthcare and the right to an education,
all these things, the so called positive rights, which mean
the rights to things that you didn't earn. Someone else
has to supply you with at the price of his slavery.

(38:34):
So no, it's not it's not a conspiracy. These thinkers
were convinced by Cotton Hegel. And if you hold that's
what's really hard for some of us to grasp, including me,
People really believe these bad philosophies. They don't just say it.

(38:58):
They can contradict it, you know, and they do, but
they really believe in some way. Now, there is no
objective truth. There's just what the power structure in the
present form, what the power structure is conditioning you to
think it's true. But me and my little band know

(39:19):
isn't true, or feel differently, I shouldn't say no, isn't true.
It's not our truth. There's your truth in my truth,
but no the truth. And so I remember once I
spoke at the University of Florida in the eighties and
I spoke against religion. I debated a creation scientist, and

(39:42):
there were a number of scientists, professors in the audience,
and at the end of that formal debate, in the
question period, they were clearly on my side, and I
was a hero to them. But then it came out
that I believed in rational certainty, and suddenly they were

(40:06):
against me.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
So it's the philosophy combined with there is one psychological thing.
If you screw up people's education and they're not heroically independent,
so you don't teach them how to think, you do
everything you can to prevent them from thinking, which is

(40:28):
called progressive education, then you're not going to be equipped
to figure things out, and you're going to be frightened
and you're going to look for a solace in a
herd that will approve of you. And that is an
indirect psychological kind of cause. But it comes from the

(40:48):
where did John Dewey come from?

Speaker 2 (40:51):
Philosophy?

Speaker 1 (40:53):
He was a philosopher. He both founded the progressive education
movement at Teachers College at Collembia, and he was a
philosopher with a PhD in the Philosophy department of Columbia.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
Yeah, so let's talk about advanced contribution and oh yeah,
how she really you know? It places individual rights on
solid ground.

Speaker 1 (41:19):
So well, first of all, she shows she gives a proof,
and the proof is very simple. It involves one step
that I didn't emphasize too much, but let's do that now. Freedom.
Freedom is the ability to act without being subject to
physical force. The opposite of freedom is slavery compulsion force.

(41:46):
So she defined the right as a moral principle defining
and sanctioning man's freedom of action in a social context.
So she connects rights to a claim to freedom, and

(42:09):
freedom is the absence of being forced or coerced physically,
and she connects physical force to the mind by negation.
Force is anti mind. It's one of her statements in
Atlas Shrug. Force is anti minded, negates and paralyzes the mind.

(42:34):
So if rights protect your ability to use your mind
and act on it, force is the only way you
can stop a person from doing that. You can't do
it by saying, hey, look, don't think so hard. I'm
gonna think. Oh you can't stop me, Well, I can
hit you over the head. Yeah, And that's what takes

(42:56):
your freedom of action away. So she connects rights to freedom,
freedom to force, force to the destruction of the mind.
And then the mind is man's means of survival, which
other people had grasped also, but she emphasizes it much

(43:18):
more than the average person did. But if it's our
means of survival, and survival is the ultimate purpose of
the life is to go on living and do things
achieve things that promote your survival. Then it's the evil

(43:38):
is to prevent you from surviving, to kill you. In fact,
that's the ultimate evil, and that's what violations of rights do.
So rights protect your life, their life protecting, because their
mind protecting, and your mind is your tool of survival,
your basic tool of survival. So she may that chain

(44:00):
of connections which no one had so clearly delineated. Some
people you've never heard of. Probably well, you because you've
been an objectivist in a long time, but the audience
probably never heard. Auberon Herbert, an English guy from nineteen hundred,
is really good on this and says its force versus reason,

(44:26):
and rights and freedom are about self ownership and the
ability to think and act on your thinking. He's really good.
So she connected those concepts and then she had this
whole metaphysical epistemological concept of objectivity, which showed that these

(44:49):
principles came from thinking about observations of reality, not from God,
not from sacred texts, not from Congress, but from your
own understanding of reality through reason. That's objectivity. That's why

(45:12):
I should call it objectivism. So that's what she contributed.
The whole basis of rights, the whole basis of it.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
And of course she develops a whole morality of egoism, which.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
And f and free you connect. No one on telling you,
no one ever dreamed of thinking that free will is
your mind's ability to think, your mind's ability to focus
and sentimental purpose and execute on that purpose. No one

(45:48):
ever talked about that before. So she connects everything so nicely,
and it's all introspectively verifiable. You know, you can easily Yeah,
if I couldn't think, I couldn't. I wouldn't know what
to put in my mouth. I wouldn't know how to
get money. If I couldn't think, you know, I'd be

(46:08):
like my cat yep, and I couldn't live. I couldn't survive.
So it comes down to very simple observations, integrated in
a nicely hierarchical way, but all reducible to what is
absolute common sense.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
So today nobody talks about rights. I mean, even when
they're arguing for something positive, they're left abortion, the rights,
sometimes economic freedom. Sometimes really they don't mention rights. I mean,
you can go through the whole season of debates and

(46:50):
it never comes up. Why are they avoiding the concept completely.

Speaker 1 (46:56):
Because it's too abstract for them. It involves a moral
I mean, by the very word right, it involves a
moral taking a moral stand, and most intellectuals are afraid
to take a moral stand. Plus David Hume convinced them

(47:18):
reason can't make moral judgments. It's emotional. So that's why
they don't talk about rights. And you know, when Einran
I began reading Einran she began publishing the Objectivist newsletter
in the early sixties, she said something on the order

(47:38):
of conservatives don't talk about individual rights. And I thought, really,
I thought they did, and I started looking. They didn't
talk about it.

Speaker 2 (47:49):
See even then, yeah, even then.

Speaker 1 (47:51):
And now it's much worse because back then they knew
about rights but were afraid to bring them up. Now
they don't even have the concept anymore. I mean, nobody, even.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
The Screen Court doesn't talk about rights. And you'd think
that that would be the basis for the rulings.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
Yeah, well, they have to go by the Constitution. But
the animating principle of the Constitution is individual rights. And
of course, the first chink in America was that dichotomy
between human rights and property rights. So the left, the

(48:30):
liberals there were then, you know, much milder leftists. The
liberals said, I'm all for human rights, and property rights
mustn't conflict with human rights. So they would think things like,
if somebody has too much money, it means that other

(48:52):
people have little money are disrespected, and that's a violation
of their human rights. You have a right to dignity
and resist so great accumulations of wealth. This is like
Teddy Roosevelt, great accumulation of wealth. It's economic royalism. It's
like having a king. And today it's a progressive left

(49:14):
that talks about millionaires and billionaires and how bad they are,
ignoring the fact that they created their fortunes. And all
I was saying to somebody at breakfast the other day,
you know, two years ago, we didn't hear anything about

(49:36):
this company in video and people were talking about is
it in Vidia or end Video? And now it's four
trillion dollar capitalization market cap. So it's not like things
are frozen in place, and we're now paying homage to
John Jacob Astor's great great great grandchildren. Constant and over

(50:00):
in the economy as new people earned a.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
Position, constant and people still don't learn from that. It's amazing.
It's amazing. Okay, we have a bunch of questions and
we've already gone almost an hour, so let's turn to
the questions and then we'll see. Yeah, there's a lot.
And before that, we wanted to mention this conference. It's

(50:22):
going to happen in Florida. RAN's Day, which I think
is a term you coined, which is Rand's birthday on
February second, So the conference is around the birthday. It's
going to be January thirtieth to February second and Fort Mayas, Florida.
And You're going to be speaking, and you're going to
be speaking, and I'm going to be speaking, and we're

(50:45):
also going to have Peter Schwartz and Gene Maroney and
Shoshanna Milgrim, Ellen Kenna, Don Watkins is coming and then
you and Peter and me are having a doing a
panel answering questions on how various problems that come up
but how do they get solved by leslifa capitalism. I

(51:07):
I the way I think about it is who would
own the roads? I mean, that's always the question you get, right.
How So, if anybody wants to register, you should. It's
gonna be a lot of fun and and it's just fun.
It's a bunch of it's it's a group of objectivists.
Uh and uh. It's a very relaxed atmosphere and it's
it's it's very friendly and very uh.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
Two and three days.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
Yeah, it's only two days. And I think there's a
banquet on the first night, there's like a dinner and uh.
And then there are two days of talks. It's rans
day Con. That's all one would rans day con dot
the b v H dot com. I don't know what
the BVH means. Do you know what the BVH means?

Speaker 1 (51:55):
No, I don't. I'm thinking on my feet.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
Here dot the b v H dot dot com. That's
the ol. You can find all the information there. You
can sign up there. I think the prices go up
to sympath thirtieth. She've got a few weeks to make
your decision. But yeah, it'd be great to see you guys.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
Yeah, I recommend it highway, particularly because I'm speaking and
I'm talking on how to study I'm Rand's writings, the
methodology you use the mind for writing. Let me tell
you the rationale of rams Day. Okay, it's unlike any
other holiday on rams day, you give yourself a present.

(52:39):
Recognition of pleasure is a profound psychological need egoism. So
something that you think is too extravagant to buy for
yourself normally, but here's an occasion to get that luxury
that you ordinarily wouldn't get.

Speaker 2 (52:59):
And this the luxury should be to come to bandsday confidence.

Speaker 1 (53:03):
Exactly. Good identification.

Speaker 2 (53:06):
Yeah, all right, let's jump into the questions. So you
guys can ask questions pretty much about anything. You can
use the super chat feature, and I will start with
the people who put the most money on and then
we'll go down from there. So we'll start with a
couple of fifty dollars questions. Let's see, this is some

(53:28):
Cobb and paw. In terms of individual rights, could you
further define what separates animals from men? What are the
minimum attributes an animal must possess to be considered a valiate,
a valid recipient of individual rights?

Speaker 1 (53:47):
Well, it would have to survive by means of reason.
Reason would have to be something that if he couldn't exercise,
then he would be unable to survive. And I would
personally this is not part of objectivism for sure, but

(54:08):
I kind of lean towards self consciousness. If you don't
even know that there's a you and that you have
a life, I don't think you have rights. But there's
nothing wrong with using physical force against animals for a
number of reasons, all of which come down to they

(54:30):
are not thinking beings.

Speaker 2 (54:34):
Yep, they function two force. I mean they function through.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
They appropriate, they don't create, and they deal with each
other through physical contact. So maybe that I could plug
my own definition of physical force, because that's never defined
anywhere in the corpus. I say, the physical force is
physical contact with another's person or property without his consent.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
Yeah. So let's say we discovered that chimpanzees, you know,
they can they can they can understand ten woods. Does
that mean that they have rights? No? And and because
they're not surviving by reason.

Speaker 1 (55:24):
Yeah, they don't use their minds to survive. They just
grab what's available to them. And even if you talk
taught them to say some words, which most of those
studies have been exploded, by the way. About the chimpanzees
learning language, they haven't. But even if they could, there's
nothing in philosophy to say that some other species couldn't

(55:51):
have primitive concepts. But man as a rational being means
a being for whom reason is the means of survival. Yep,
and it has to be evolutional. Also, I was going
to tell the story, but it's gone out of my mind.

(56:12):
So what's going on?

Speaker 2 (56:14):
All right? Andrew asked what of the claim that rand
was essentially lonely because of her intellect. Some who claim
it a secondhand is who I think project their own
dependency issues on her. She described herself as happy, which
doesn't imply extreme loneliness thoughts.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Oh, I think she was at a certain growing up
she was lonely, as she has said that, because she
didn't have people that she could talk to about the
things that mattered to her most. And then she discovered
that her father, who had been very distant the Victorian

(56:58):
era fathers didn't have much to do with the children.
You know, you'd be try to out at dinner and
Papa would pat you on the head, and that your
life would be with mother. And when she got to
be a teenager, she found out that her father was
an individualist, and she had a interest in him and

(57:21):
an affection for him based on that. But lonely as
a person, I don't think so. She didn't. I mean
I spent many many hours with her, and she never
gave me anything to think that. Frank O'Connor was so

(57:42):
much her soulmate that that took care of almost all
her needs. In fact, she said once you'd be surprised,
she said, talking to me and a few other people.
But yeah, she mean herself. How little some of your

(58:03):
friends really mean to you, meaning you enjoy interaction with them,
but if you didn't have them, it wouldn't matter a
great deal.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Interesting one or.

Speaker 1 (58:18):
Two friends, close friends, you know, that's different. But a
bigger circle of friends, they're nice to have and you
do value them. But I don't know, I don't think
she was a lonely person at all. I know when
Frank was alive, she wasn't lonely, And of course when

(58:38):
I knew her, there were and going back from whenever
she got to this country in nineteen twenty six, she
had a lot of people that she knew and talked with.
She had a cook cleaning lady that she was very
fond of, and she said to her, once, you're my sister,

(59:01):
And that cleaning lady was religious. She was from Guiana,
a black woman, black woman who's religious, And she said
to me once I ran not the queen, She said,
I can sort of understand how they believe in heaven,
but how do they believe in hell? She couldn't that,

(59:26):
Nor can I to tell you the truth?

Speaker 2 (59:28):
Well, I mean, according to Innocent the Third, according to
that quote, we are already in hell.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
So yeah, that's right? Where this is hell?

Speaker 2 (59:40):
Yeah? Yeah, So Clay asks it. Spinosa's description in his
Ethics of Human bondage man as a slave to passive
emotions rooted in inadequate ideas. Is that essentially correct and
perhaps the deepest analysis of self enslavement prior to an.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
I have not read of human bondage, but I've read
the Ethics of Spinozza, and he's unusually good. He is
introspective in a few of where no one is introspective
except Ian Ran. And he identifies the meaning of all

(01:00:26):
the emotions amazing section, telling you what jealousy is and
what hope is, and what grief is. And he was
an egoist. He was also religious, but he was a pantheist.
He thought reality was God in some sense, so he
was I did not believe in a personal God, so

(01:00:47):
I don't think but he was a kind of determinist.
He didn't realize that he was a determinist, I don't think.
But he held that reason determines you rather than you go
out to reason. He thought reason came to you. So

(01:01:12):
he's a mixed figure, but he's one of the few
good there's only about three good guys in history philosophy. Yeah,
and you know what I ran said once, she said,
trust the three A's Aristotle, Aquinas an Iron. But that
also in We the Living Leo quotes Spinoza. This Menosa's

(01:01:33):
pretty good. John Locke is pretty good, but confused. He's
a lot confused. And I can probably come up with
the third guy who has some good things. But Aristotle,
of course is the main main achiever in philosophy. That's
why we're here, is Aristotle.

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
And luck with Spinoza.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
Yeah. I did elect a two or three lectures series
on Locke in nineteen eighty nine, and I went in
depth into Locke's deeper philosophy, not his politics, and it
was very discouraging because he's very Christian and Cartesian. He

(01:02:20):
picks up a lot of strains from other people and
then he makes his ariostyle in with it. And there's
some good things in his basic philosophy, but he's, you know,
like the English, typical English guy is. He's empiricist and
not aware of the contradiction between different things he holds.

(01:02:41):
I think that was Locke. He was a little bit
of a bumbler, but well meaning.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
And amazing that he achieved what he achieved in politics.

Speaker 1 (01:02:50):
Yeah, yeah, and it was only a generation till I
think of simpteen, maybe a little more than generation. Or
Jeremy Bentham said rights are nonsense, they're nonsense upon stilts,

(01:03:10):
the famous phrase nonsense upon stilts.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
So Clay asks if from an objectivist standpoint, a bondage
of servitude or servitude the right tombs when the master
is one's own irrationality rather than another person.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
So get your slave to your passions.

Speaker 2 (01:03:37):
Yeah, passions is kind of.

Speaker 1 (01:03:41):
No, it's metaphorical. It's metaphorical because at any time you
can stop it, it gets harder and harder. But Leonard
Pickoff makes a great point in objectivism the philosophy of
an Ran which we call o park for sure. He

(01:04:03):
says that if you're out of focus and drifting and
riding on your emotions, you don't really have choices except
for that basic choice to be that way. But then
you're surrendering to your whims, so you don't. You do
what you feel like doing, and that's generated by your

(01:04:25):
subconscious and you are like a robot. But to the
extent that you think, you take control. And he says,
the world of choice opens up to you because you
have a you can see the future, and you can
evaluate what's being proposed by your urges from your subconscious

(01:04:47):
and either say okay or no. The world opens up
to you once you choose reason. But if you don't,
you're you know, Hume, my favorite guy here. Hume said
reason is and ought to be the slave of the passion,
one of the most disgusting statements in the history of philosophy.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
And he is so beloved by you know, klassical liberals
or people called Hyak.

Speaker 1 (01:05:20):
Hyak dedicates has three quotes on the front of The
Fatal Conceit. One is Hume saying reason has nothing to
say about ethics. It makes sense because Hyak, you know,
I ran called him pure poison and he if you
read The Fatal Conceit, I can't get past the first

(01:05:43):
two pages because I've filled it with criticisms. It's all
scratched out. Everything in there is so wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:05:53):
And it's it's so beloved by you know, the the libertarians,
free market people. Yeah, they're all the conservatives. They all
love Hayak. I think because of that, because he he
doesn't challenge them philosophically. Philosophically, he's just conventional.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
Yeah. And he wasn't fair either, many interventions he approved of.

Speaker 2 (01:06:20):
Yeah. So all right, so this is a question of
molten splendor. I love that that name. If a switch
was flipped Yuran was elected president and the government was
relegated to only objectivest duties, knowing that few understood individual
rights and morality, would we become a more litigious society.

Speaker 1 (01:06:46):
It's hard to imagine as being a more legitious.

Speaker 2 (01:06:49):
Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure what the relationship.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
History is Number one litigious aside, and the reason is
that we do not have the British rule, which is
the loser plate pace the costs of the winner. That
would take a lot of it out of the hands
of lawyers.

Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
I just don't know how I got elected if they
nobody has any understanding of individuals and morality. So that's
the the impossibility there. But uh no, I don't. I
don't see why litigation goes up. What are they suing about.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
I mean, it's yeah, if they if the court system
were cleaned up and objective law were in and they
weren't spending our time prosecuting people for selling bad stuff
like drugs, there would be a lot more.

Speaker 2 (01:07:43):
Justice for working without a government pummit, crossing a border
without a government, pummit, and working without a government if
they weren't being chased down in the streets for that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:55):
No, well, you know, can I say a polemical thing
people'll talk about, you know, during the government shut down,
people are starting not to be able to get their
food stamps. Yeah, I know, and of course they're young enough.
I remember when nobody had foods in because there was

(01:08:17):
no such thing in the early seventies. It was put
in and I couldn't believe. You know, you mean, we're
going to give people free money to buy food, but
that you know, they imagined that by the logic of
their premises before say nineteen fifty, it must have been

(01:08:37):
that you stepped over dead bodies in the streets.

Speaker 2 (01:08:40):
Yeah, they couldn't get healthcare and they didn't have food.

Speaker 1 (01:08:43):
Get health care, couldn't get food stamps. People were free
to do all kinds of things that we know we
shouldn't be able to do because we want to do them,
and if we were, the government stops us from doing it.
So we know that they're right because we want to

(01:09:05):
do them.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
You know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:09:07):
Thank God for the government, otherwise I'd be running amok.

Speaker 2 (01:09:10):
Absolutely All right, let's see loan decentae pre mall choice
to live grounds ethics does an analogous pre political choice
ground government. That is, the choice to gain from knowledge
and trade requires organized society and objective laws protecting this

(01:09:32):
source to mind.

Speaker 1 (01:09:34):
Yes, you could say. What i Ran says is that
individual rights are the logical transition between individual ethics and
the principles of an organized society. So there the extension
of individual morality into the political sphere. And it's not

(01:09:57):
unlike the certain Republican virtue views. It's not that we
want to make everyone good and that the law is
geared to make people virtuous. The law is there to
see that the people who choose right are not stopped
by the people who choose wrong. That's what the law

(01:10:18):
is for.

Speaker 2 (01:10:21):
Ian asks, how much have you used LLLMS, which is
your current favorite? And do you have a recommendation for
the best source on the objective's take on artificial AGI.
I guess if there is one, you should write one.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
Yes and no. I've got a strong yes, and knowing
that I've been using claude Chat, GPT four point five
and Perplexity so heavily in the last two weeks that
I haven't been able to hardly post anything at all
because of various exogenous reasons that I shouldn't have to

(01:11:05):
be doing it. And what's amazing, I'm using them for
technical things, you know, write me a program for mac
carabiner to imitate auto hot key on the PC. What's
so astonishing to me is how wrong they are. And
I don't say that gleefully, you know, like oh ha

(01:11:26):
ha ha.

Speaker 2 (01:11:27):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
I'm trying to get code that will run, and they
give me this whole out comes the code and I
put it in the compiler and it says error, and
I read back the error to the AI agent and
it says, you're exactly right, I've now fixed it. So
we'll run and I put it in error and it

(01:11:52):
goes hour after hour after hour. U if you persist,
eventually you'll get it. But it's astonishing how both helpful
it is in getting what you might think of as
a rough draft, and how poor it is at getting
something that will run.

Speaker 2 (01:12:11):
Yeah, that's surprising. You think programming it could do.

Speaker 1 (01:12:16):
Yeah, yeah, but it gets it wrong. And they'll say,
for instance, it's two levels of airs. One is you
need the gazosta have in command here with two variables,
and you put it in and you find there's no
gazostis haven command in this language. Oh you excellent, point,

(01:12:40):
it comes back. Yeah, everything you do is excellent, excellent.

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's coded for customer service in the
weirdest way. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:50):
Yeah, But I don't know. I'm fed up with it
and I can't do without it. Probably, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
Me.

Speaker 1 (01:13:00):
I programmed without it for all my life, and I'm
a bad programmer, so I was looking forward to something
better than me. Yeah, but nope, not yet.

Speaker 2 (01:13:12):
Not yet. Did I say anything about Stalin's daughter, Svitlana,
who defected to the US in the nineteen sixties. She
denounced her father's quems and communism. What do you think
of him?

Speaker 1 (01:13:27):
I don't know. She didn't say anything that I heard,
and I have two stories to tell. She loaths social
needs in he thought so was a mystic and worse
than well, I don't know, as bad as the comedies
for his sentimental mystical attachment to Mother Russia. She really

(01:13:54):
rankled under his popularity. And the other thing goes back
to the computer. Did you know that I once had
I ran to my apartment and had her programmed something
on a computer.

Speaker 2 (01:14:08):
No, I would you say something about a computer on
nine ran, but not that she programmed.

Speaker 1 (01:14:13):
She came to my apartment when I was living in
the East sixties sixty second Street for something else, I
don't remember what right now, and I had a CPMs
one hundred bus system. This is nineteen.

Speaker 4 (01:14:32):
Seventy seven ish, and I sat her down and I said,
now type in one O this is basic print hello

(01:14:53):
now and hit it and enter.

Speaker 1 (01:14:55):
And she did that. Now type two O, go to one.

Speaker 2 (01:14:59):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:15:01):
So she did, and then we ran it, and of
course across the screen it was hell which when I
first time I saw it, I thought, Wow, that's so cool. Yeah,
she was not impressed at all. She had no interest
in that. She said, you know, I think computers are
interesting from the standpoint of the work. By binary logic,

(01:15:24):
it's either or, and I think we could learn a
lot about psychopistemology from computers. But she did not have
that while response the way I did.

Speaker 2 (01:15:39):
See Peter thinks, all right, Dave asks, the Constitution guarantees
me the right to try by jury. This obligates others
to serve on a jury. The jewy system protects me
from govern overreach, but at the same time it gives
me a right to someone else's labor. I guess he's
actually an opinion on that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:58):
Shouldn't it should be paid? Should be paid work?

Speaker 2 (01:16:01):
Should it be voluntary?

Speaker 1 (01:16:03):
Voluntary paid, you know, like just like any other job.
But it wouldn't be a job. It would be you know,
a week or something. You also have to remember that
in the old days, and by that I mean before
nineteen forty, jury trials were over in a day. It's

(01:16:25):
amazing now, but I seem to have read that the
longest murder trial in US history before nineteen forty was
two days.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:16:36):
Now that may be apocryphone, not true, but things were
much quicker back then, and there's a number of reasons why.
But it should be paid, It shouldn't be You could
turn it down, you know, if you wanted to volunteer,
because the pay would probably not be that great, but

(01:16:58):
they shouldn't be able to haul someone in and look
at the contradiction. We're gonna sit you down by force
and make you use your honest judgment. By force, here's
a gun at your head. If you don't serve, you're
gonna be robbed or sent even to jail for overnight
or something. And so we got your mind. We trust you,

(01:17:20):
and now tell us what you think it's like, mister
Thompson and Gault, tell us what to do. We need
to know. It's a contradiction. And it's because of the
patriotism of the citizenry that it works at all. It
should be paid, I mean for paid enough to get enough,

(01:17:41):
to get enough, and enough rotating so that it's not
the same twenty five people. Obviously that would be terrible.
And you've got to remember, you know, what is the
budget of a state? Most trials are state trials, right?
Or even what does the state do with all those

(01:18:04):
billions and billions and billions? Only two legitimate functions are
the state troopers and the courts.

Speaker 2 (01:18:11):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:18:12):
Absolutely, no education, no libraries.

Speaker 2 (01:18:18):
No more welfare programs.

Speaker 1 (01:18:21):
Yeah, welfare days, celebrations in the park, god knows what monuments. So, uh,
you can understand a little bit how the federal government
has to spend a certain amount of money because of
national defense, but the states don't have to do that
what they spending it on. So you could get jurors easy, easily?

Speaker 2 (01:18:46):
Yes, yeah, all right, And we ask how did the
funding fathers induce a political recognition of man's way to
pursue happiness without the most sanction of selfishness.

Speaker 1 (01:18:58):
They did have it, so you can't put yourself back
before Kant. But in the eighteen hundreds they had two
kinds of virtues, the self regarding virtues and the other
regarding virtues. And the other regarding virtues were pretty innocuous,

(01:19:18):
you know, like benevolence and charitableness, and the self regarding
virtues were the kind that Benjamin Franklin wrote about in
The Poor Richard's Almanac, things you need to do to
get ahead, And there were things like your name, your
reputation is your most precious possession, so show integrity, and

(01:19:42):
things that are inconceivable to us today. But no, there
was a for the first time in history the British
and American ethicists thought, yeah, self, you got to be selfish,
you know, for part of the code. It's got to
be pro selfish. And Locke thought that the natural law

(01:20:04):
was a law of self preservation, and so does Spinozza.
So we now, after cont and Combed and all those
slimy people, we can't imagine that there was respect for
selfishness back then, but there was.

Speaker 2 (01:20:24):
Yeah, So let's see dw n logic five hundred dollars.
This is amazing. Thank you so much to you and
your wife, mister Minswanga, for all the wonderful work you've
both done. You've both improved my life immensely. You're not
that bad either, you are. Thank you. That's very generous,

(01:20:49):
that's very nice.

Speaker 1 (01:20:52):
And he didn't have.

Speaker 2 (01:20:52):
A question, didn't have a question. I really appreciate it absolutely, Andrew.

Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
Teaching, You teach, and you wonder does anybody get it?
Is it of any value to people?

Speaker 2 (01:21:06):
Then?

Speaker 1 (01:21:07):
Very nice to hear it is.

Speaker 2 (01:21:08):
They're out there. There's no question about there. Uh. Andrews says,
can you explain the logic of hierarchical conceptual order? Rand
made and stating I'm an defend of capitalism because I'm
a defend of individualism. I'm a defend of individualism because
I'm a defender of reason, champion of reason.

Speaker 1 (01:21:29):
Well, it was the egoism individualism, but that same idea,
the hierarchical order is that reason is the method by
which you get to the others. So it's more fundamental.
If you if your idea of reason is God is love,

(01:21:52):
Love is blind, Ray Charles is blind, So Ray Charles
is God, You're not going to get to egoism and
individual rights. You're going to be terminally confused like most people.
So reason is the concept of reason brings together freedom

(01:22:16):
to protect reason, free will as the choice to use
reason or not, and connection to reality, which is because
reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material
provided by perception, and perception is physically in contact with

(01:22:37):
reality physically, so it's a nexus of everything.

Speaker 2 (01:22:45):
Shawsbutt. I have sometimes told people that they cannot delegate
rights to the government that they themselves do not possess,
and they look at me like I have three heads?
Is there a better way of putting it?

Speaker 1 (01:23:04):
It cannot be moral for the government to do something
that it would be immoral for the citizens to do individually.

Speaker 2 (01:23:13):
So taking somebody else, what might that might be a
way of reaching them.

Speaker 1 (01:23:17):
Yeah, I like that, but that's very important. You know,
it's good in immigration. And this point was made by
a critic of objectivism in the Academy, but it's a
good point. Would you have the right to stand at
the border and say to someone coming into the country,
you have to prove to me that you're not a

(01:23:39):
criminal and that you're not bringing in something I don't
want in the country. And if you don't, I'm going
to push you right out.

Speaker 2 (01:23:47):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:23:49):
And if you don't have that right, how three hundred
million people get that right?

Speaker 2 (01:23:57):
Jason asks, no own time travel because of how cause
and effect works, But could a camera exceed light speed
and photo the past, for example Lincoln's assassination without deep physics?
Should a simple principle prevent pursuing such a camera?

Speaker 1 (01:24:20):
The simple yes and no, depending upon how we take
the simple principle is that it's if it's possible, it's
way beyond anything any of us will be able to
do for one hundred years. So you don't want to
spend your time on a fruitless pursuit. But no, there's

(01:24:41):
no I believe in faster than light propagation of information,
which Einstein just kind of legislated is impossible. And I'm
influenced by an objectivist philosopher and science in that belief.
And if that's true, then it would be like in

(01:25:02):
Think Twice, you know, ein RAN's play Think Twice, where
the heroine as the hero tell me your feelings about
me and he says, you know, they say that sound
waves never die, they just go out. So maybe in

(01:25:23):
a few weeks we can catch up with those sound
waves and you'll hear what I'm thinking now or something
like that. Huh, yeah, you can catch up with sound waves.
I don't know if you could detect them. That'd be
alcoholic and you could catch up with the lightweights, I think.
But that's not for philosophy to say, that's physics.

Speaker 2 (01:25:45):
Physics, yep.

Speaker 1 (01:25:47):
So the answer is, don't waste your time now. It
is nothing that I know of that precludes that. But
Einstein would say, you can't. R.

Speaker 2 (01:25:58):
Moultons flint ass, what was the most difficult philosophical concept
for you having to grasp?

Speaker 1 (01:26:05):
That's an excellent question, and I would say the reconciliation
of free will and causality. Yeah, which involves getting a

(01:26:28):
better hand on causey and I think I'm pretty much there,
but I'm not talking about it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:39):
Okay, somebody should ask about that, Okay. Dave says, Oh,
there's a part one. Where's Dave's part one here?

Speaker 1 (01:26:47):
When they do this, I'll tell you Another one I
did get was the contradiction of determinism. If you know
that argument that if if you were determined, then you
would believe what you had to believe, whether it was
true or not, and so you couldn't have knowledge of anything,

(01:27:08):
including that determinism. It's true. And I had an answer
to that, which is, what if you're determined to go
by reason? And after I don't know for decades, I
really understand what's wrong with that, okay, which is that

(01:27:31):
going by reason is not a mechanical thing that you
can It's not an algorithm. Yep, you can't program it
in So and the whole notion of objectivity depends on
pretty well.

Speaker 2 (01:27:47):
So Dave asks the concept of infinity and of the
infinitely infinitely large and the infinitely small undeniably useful and
fruitful in mathematics. Calculation is based in these contents, and
physics gets nowhere without calculus. Yet there is nothing in
the universe that is infinite. You can't point to it.

(01:28:08):
Is it part of objective reality? No.

Speaker 1 (01:28:13):
The answer to that is that infinity has been misconceived
in a mystical way. The proper use of infinity is
that it's an amount beyond which additional increments make no
difference in the outcome of a function. So you know
how they teach the hyperbole x y equals one that

(01:28:42):
the as you go out the xoxes, it gets closer
you go out the Yeah, it gets closer and closer
to zero, but it can't get to zero, and it's
always it's always a gap. That's a mystical concept. It
gets so close to zero that the difference in mathematical

(01:29:04):
calculation between it and zero is too small for you
to measure or have any awareness of, so it's effectively zero.
So there's nothing in calculus. It depends upon infinity. There's
only or the infinite tesimal. It's only that it gets

(01:29:25):
small enough or large enough that getting smaller or larger
doesn't add anything. Okay, that's my concept of infinity, registered trademark.

Speaker 2 (01:29:38):
That's good. Okay, Dave also asks you've all HIAI. In
his book, Homodeas distinguishes between three types of reality. Objective reality,
which exists independent of our believing it. The moon exists
whether I look at it or not. Subjective reality, which
exists only in individual minds. I have a headache. And intersubjective reality,

(01:30:04):
which exists in the minds of many individuals at once.
To shed agreement, this border separates America from Canada. What
is you've all missing or getting wrong?

Speaker 1 (01:30:17):
Well, only that the intersubjective reality. I mean, I don't
know what term he uses for that, but that it
presupposes the other two that you have to use your
mind to objectively decide. Well, Joe believes the same thing
I do. And when you say the relation of my

(01:30:44):
mind and Joe's mind to reality is so, and so
you're making a statement about reality. So people say, we're
each trapped in our own private universe. We think we
know what's really out there, but we don't. All were
aware of is what's in their minds, not what's outside
in reality. They're making a statement about what's outside in

(01:31:07):
reality by doing that. So it's a stolen concept. You
can't talk about my mind. I can't I can't think
about Look what is it you can't think about? Well,
if you can't think about it, then you don't think
about it, and you don't you know, so you have

(01:31:31):
to The image is here's a mind I'm holding up
I love this, and here's the world, and I'm holding
up my palm. And you're saying, well, there's a certain
relation here, like this guy's inside his mind and reality's
out there and he can't get out to it or
it's distorted what he gets. And you're making the same
about what is he's there, he's got a mind, the

(01:31:55):
world's there, it's a certain way, and the relation objectively
so on. So you're making a statement that you say
you can't make.

Speaker 2 (01:32:05):
So would you that? Would you, though, call subjective reality
that which exists only in individual mind? Would you call
it subjective?

Speaker 1 (01:32:12):
No, I wouldn't call it reality. It's it's subjective content.
There's you know, a better term is mind dependent. There's
certain things that are mind dependent, like a tickle. There's
no tickles if there are no consciousnesses. But it's not

(01:32:36):
a reality. It's just the uh. The subjective is the content.
Let me say one other framing thing, there is subjectivity.
There is objectivity like what we have now, and there
is subjectivity like what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth.

(01:32:58):
There is no intr The intrinsic is a wrong theory
of how the mind works. And this was very clarifying
when I Rand explained it to everybody back in about
nineteen seventy two, because we thought there were three types
of reality, the intrinsic reality, the objective reality, and the

(01:33:20):
subjective reality. No, there's the mind in touch with reality,
and there's a mind out of touch with the reality.
Then there's some philosopher's theory about what's going on. That's
the intrinsic. The intrinsic is like revelation, but there is
no revelation. So objectivism does not say disregard your revelations.

(01:33:45):
It says there are no revelations. It doesn't say disobey God.
It says there is no God.

Speaker 2 (01:33:51):
It goes back. It's just objective.

Speaker 1 (01:33:54):
Yeah, the idea that there's intrinsic stuff that writes itself
upon your brain is a wrong idea inside somebody's head
doesn't refer to anything, all.

Speaker 2 (01:34:11):
Right, Bobby asked, Hi, Harrye, can we ever expect to
follow up on saving mathem Plato. It has been an
immense help for my own thinking, and also when talking
to my friend Simon, who loves metaphysical numbers.

Speaker 1 (01:34:25):
Whether two of those probably is probably Bobby Sandler and williams. Oh. Okay,
there are two such lectures, and each one is better
than the other. Go figure that, and I recommend highly
both of them. The second one recapitulates the findings of

(01:34:47):
the first one, and there will be a I don't
know if I'll call it a book, but there will
be a series of essays on the internet or or
maybe in a printed book form that will put forward
this whole thing, because it's really important and it A

(01:35:16):
lot of the objectivists opposed me, but I think they
oppose me when I get to the higher stuff, you know,
beyond calculus, which I don't really understand myself, and I'm
not going to say anything about, but I think the
basic stuff of what is mathematics, what is arithmetic? What

(01:35:38):
is infinity? What is nil? Have this concept of nil?
I think that's really helpful and sympathize everything.

Speaker 2 (01:35:48):
Good.

Speaker 1 (01:35:50):
It's going to come out in print good.

Speaker 2 (01:35:52):
I think somebody else is asking what was asking about that?
As well. So we still have quite a few questions.

Speaker 1 (01:35:58):
So I'll try and do bang bang.

Speaker 2 (01:36:02):
Yeah, let's could do bang bang answers. Okay, So if
a rational person became president, whom, if anyone, should they pardon? Why?
And what justifications should they give?

Speaker 1 (01:36:13):
Don't know? That's my bang bang answer. Don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:36:20):
No, that's good. If a person deletes and blocks contacts
on their partner's phone without the partner's knowledge or prior consent,
whose rights are being violated? The partners?

Speaker 1 (01:36:34):
Yeah? Is it? Is it physical force.

Speaker 2 (01:36:41):
Using their property without their permission?

Speaker 1 (01:36:44):
Yeah? I would think so.

Speaker 2 (01:36:45):
Yeah. Yeah, that's a form of physical force.

Speaker 1 (01:36:48):
And the people that she or he would have been
talking to their rights are also being violated.

Speaker 2 (01:36:55):
Yep, uh bake. When will we be able to buy
your book in Philosophy of Mathematics? I'm looking forward to it.
So this is not this week? Okay. Sometime I.

Speaker 1 (01:37:11):
Gave up predicting about the time Liner Peacock gave up.
You know, Ain Rand said that Atlas Shrugged was going
to be shorter than the fountain Head. It would take
her about a year and a half.

Speaker 2 (01:37:24):
Yeah, twelve years later.

Speaker 1 (01:37:25):
For twelve years, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:37:28):
Nathan asked how would you answer the ship of thesis problem?

Speaker 1 (01:37:32):
Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. Don't know, Okay,
that's a ship of thesis. Is a person borrows a
ship and he has it for years with the permission
of the owner, and pieces keep rotting away, and he

(01:37:53):
keeps buying new timbers to put in, and at the
end of the assigned time, every piece of lumber on
the ship has been replaced. Is it any longer the ownership?
When is a question of personal identity or the identity
continuing identity over change? I don't have a real good

(01:38:16):
answer to that. Fortunately doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 (01:38:19):
Yeah. And in a case of a leasing ship, it
would be in the contract, right, maintenance would be would
be one of the aspects of the contract that you
would decide in advantage.

Speaker 1 (01:38:28):
Oh yeah, I can thank you. Errong, because that brings
forward a general point. You know, you talk who would
own the roads and so forth. About halfway through my
progress and objectivism, I realized, if the basic framework of
rights is in place the way it was, say in
the United States in circa eighteen forty or no, or

(01:38:54):
after Civil War eighteen seventy, you can work out anything
that's not optimal like this, Let's say that it's not
the law is wrong, you can make contracts around it.
So as long as the basic rights protecting framework is
in place, the little stuff isn't going to really be

(01:39:16):
a problem.

Speaker 2 (01:39:19):
Nathan sil says, what if some of the big or
important questions in philosophy that objectivists still haven't answered yet?

Speaker 1 (01:39:28):
What is an objective threat? Of course, I think is
a big political question. What are the methods of induction?
I think Leonard Pekoff has solved the problem of induction,
but that doesn't provide a working scientist with a working

(01:39:52):
method to apply to his field. I think more has
to be done on causality, and more can be done
on psychopistemology, which is the cross between psychology and philosophy.
Those are the things I would name, But the real

(01:40:15):
hey is to be made in philosophy of science. And
that's what I'm in five different sciences, and I think
I have great things to say in all of them.

Speaker 2 (01:40:27):
Good So, Nathan Oss asked Einmand said she does not
consider charity a major virtue. Did she consider it a
minor virtue? If so, what is a minor virtue and
what does she mean?

Speaker 1 (01:40:41):
By this, I don't think she considered it a minor virtue.
I think she was speaking there to negate a wrong idea,
not to lay out what the principles of the right
idea was. She wanted to say, look, you don't have
to give you Your worth as a person's not measured

(01:41:07):
by how much you give away, but by how you
use your mind. And I don't think I think benevolence
is it's not really a virtue, but it's close to virtue,
good will towards men. It would lead to charity in

(01:41:30):
certain circumstances. I've given a little bit over the years
to various charities. It's really a little I prefer to
give to the inn Ran Institute to defend my right
not to have to give to.

Speaker 2 (01:41:45):
Charity, absolutely, Alex. There is a YouTube channel called Inducttica
inductor James Elliots his own. It makes many bold claims,
example that he proved existence of the ether. Do you
have an opinion about this person in channel?

Speaker 1 (01:42:08):
I like his work in mathematics, I don't. I am
a little dubious about his work in physics. I believe
in the ether also simply on the grounds that if
light is a wave, there has to be something that's
waving and what you could call that the ether, and

(01:42:31):
people talk about the electric field, the magnetic field or
the electromagnetic field, and the quantum field have to posit
that of which it is the potential, because the field
is a set of potentials that is changing. Like the
height of the water in the swimming pool is choppy,

(01:42:52):
and that's the field. So there has to be the
water whether it's but pretty much we don't know yet.
Pretty much the physics has to be worked out better
than it is. But you can't say that like now
people don't say, you know, so those who believe it's
all photons don't say it's a a wave. But to

(01:43:16):
the extent that it's a wave, there has to be
something that's waving. Otherwise it's a misdescription. Let's put it
that way.

Speaker 2 (01:43:26):
Ye see, you don't think he's proven it, no, okay,
Since the proper conception of rights is andrew Since the
popconception of rights is as moral principles, This referring to
rights as nonsense on stilts imply that principles don't exist.
What kind of epistemology leads to such a statement.

Speaker 1 (01:43:48):
Empiricism that's there's only two traditions aside from objectivism in
the history of philosophy, rationalism, which is a lot without
sense perception, and sense perception without logic, which is empiricism.
So it's no accident that Bentham and Hume and Mill

(01:44:13):
are classed as an empiricist. They thought that sense perception
is the only thing, and not even that. You know,
Hume was willing to say it seems to me that
it seems to me that there's something read in my experience,
but he wasn't prepared to say there really is something

(01:44:36):
red in my experience because I might be mistaken. But
you can get an awful lot in awful great distance
in philosophy by rejecting the arbitrary. That was something I
didn't understand to about nineteen seventy six. That the arbitrary
is neither true nor false, and yet you treated the

(01:45:00):
same way you do false is pretty much that you
just say, not going there, dismiss it.

Speaker 2 (01:45:09):
Okay, Michael, Can you explain why gun rights or necessary
application of individual rights and why gun mandated pumits or
licenses to carry firearms is a rights violation.

Speaker 1 (01:45:21):
It's not across the boarder rights violation. But in most
circumstances it is. I mean, there could be situations like
an ex con who has to prove he's trustworthy now,
but it's the principle of no preventive law. See gun
control is based on the premise that goes as follow

(01:45:47):
this guy shot up the school. This other guy robbed
alcohol liquor store. Therefore, you, Harry Benswenger, can't have a
gun unless you prove to me that you are not
that kind of guy. But you don't have to prove

(01:46:08):
a negative. And the fact that other people exercise their
free will badly doesn't provide the slightest reason to think
I am. So if there's this is what I said
about a thing in objectivism that has to be worked
out is what is an objective threat? So a little

(01:46:29):
old lady eighty years old who's in a rough neighborhood
wants a handgun for her purse is a not a threat?

Speaker 2 (01:46:42):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:46:45):
Other people that if I described them I would get
in trouble are a threat.

Speaker 2 (01:46:52):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:46:54):
So how do you establish when somebody is an objective threat?

Speaker 2 (01:46:58):
Of course, somebody walking down the street in a rough
neighborhood with a big machine gun could be constituted as
a threat.

Speaker 1 (01:47:07):
Yes, you cannot brandish. If you brandish a weapon and
there's laws about brandishing, then you are threatening people. You
are forcing using force. If you have a rifle in
your cabin in the woods to protect you against animals

(01:47:28):
and break in guys and it's hanging over your fireplace,
I don't see how that could be construed a.

Speaker 2 (01:47:33):
Threat, Apollo, how do you have to be Can you
explain what you mean by the intuency of the senses
or a perception and.

Speaker 1 (01:47:46):
Relationship the inerrancy. In errancy, they can't make mistakes because
they don't make judgments. Your senses put out an output
for a given input. There's no such They're subject to
cause and effect. It's like a thermometer. A thermometer can't

(01:48:08):
make a mistake, even if it gets so you know,
a little bubble in it so that it it's hard
to read. It's not mistaken. It's just that you have
to calibrate it to know what it means. Conceptually, in
terms of numbers. The senses are just present you with

(01:48:28):
a scene and there's no there's nothing to be right
or wrong about in what they present, So it take
take the simplest case. You smell bread being baked. You know,
you go buy a bakery and ooh delicious. Now can

(01:48:50):
that be a mistake? Oh no, it wasn't. I didn't
have that smell. I wasn't my nose created that. No,
it can't be. It's a response to a physical stimulus,
just like an instrument. And the concept of mistake does
not apply.

Speaker 2 (01:49:09):
It. So if you smell it and interpret it as
something else, the mistake is not the sense. The mistake
is your interpretation.

Speaker 1 (01:49:15):
Yes, And that's the answer to the stick and water
submerged in water that you think is bent. You think
it's bent, but it is the same. You're seeing exactly
what a camera would photograph, which is the effective they
refraction of water on the way the rays are reflected

(01:49:38):
because they slowed down through water. So's it's all Aristotle
said this. You don't need iron ran for this part.
All errors that they call optical illusions or whatever, our
errors in judgment, intellectually, their errors in thinking. They're not

(01:49:58):
errors in your eye. You don't go to the doctor
and say the stick look bent. I think I need
new eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:50:05):
That's good, Michael says. Intellectual is more concerned that a
world where individual rights are primarily a primary will lead
to selfishness, or that individuals not guided by the state
are too unintelligent to operate successfully.

Speaker 1 (01:50:25):
Give me the first one again.

Speaker 2 (01:50:27):
So the one is a world doing individual rights a
primary will lead to selfishness, which they would perceive as bad,
or that if they're not guided by the state, it
you know people are too intelligence.

Speaker 1 (01:50:38):
Well, it's more that it's more the first. It's more
of the first. They're anti selfishness. And again they're anti
selfishness because they've read a lot of argument, well not argument,
a lot of intellectual outpourings argue against selfishness. And maybe

(01:51:02):
that when they grew up they were Christians. Maybe they
still are Christians. So they for irrational reasons, they're against
selfishness and they see rights as promoting and allowing selfishness,
which it does. And that's why they're not because you know,

(01:51:23):
they'll say, oh, yes, people are too stupid to know
what's in their own self interest. But that's a pretty
thin layer of rationalization.

Speaker 2 (01:51:33):
Do you have any confidence the courts will stop Trump?
It seems they're afraid to elect them a certainty to try.

Speaker 1 (01:51:41):
No, what will stop Trump is a bad showing in
the next year's election. What I'm worried about is that
that would be the occasion for an actual civil war
as he attempts to rally his National Guard and his
ice agents to prevent the loss of power in Congress.

(01:52:07):
That's what I'm worried about.

Speaker 2 (01:52:11):
Michael, do you agree that MAGA is fundamentally a Nazi movement?

Speaker 1 (01:52:18):
No? I think that's a little overstated. I know a
lot of mega people that I sit and have coffee
with and they're not Nazis. They could collapse in front
of Nazis. That's it's you know, the bully might succeed me.

(01:52:46):
That's what Trump does. No, I don't think the Nazi.
I think Trump is a fascist and he wants power,
but he's not dripping from the fang. Even Trump is
not like Hitler. He's more like who even a wand

(01:53:10):
Perone or something. Yeah, I mean he's an authoritarian dictator mentality.
I don't think he's bloodthirsty, but I could be wrong,
could be underestimating him or overestimating him, depending how you
look on it. No, I am not. I am completely

(01:53:31):
opposed to MYAGA. No, I'll fight them everywhere, but from
the ones I know they're not seething hatred like some leftists.
You know, I know they are leftists who live to
hate Trump, and that's a little bit more extreme then

(01:53:53):
they not a lot more extreme, but a little bit
more extreme than the Mega people.

Speaker 2 (01:53:59):
Is the reason truly? This is Raphael is reason. Let's see,
truly primary over emotions. We can rationally explain our biggest
life choices, but we still choose them because we feel
passion for them. How do we see this connection?

Speaker 1 (01:54:17):
Did you read that one more time?

Speaker 2 (01:54:19):
Is reason truly primary over emotions? And he says we
can rationally explain our biggest life choices, but we still
choose them because we feel the passion for them. It's
like the reason is a slave of the emotions, right,
it's a hume human. Didn't humans say that we innocence rationalize?

(01:54:41):
Well mm hm, so I think no.

Speaker 1 (01:54:44):
But it's the whole answer. Is that what you said
in the second part comes out of the fact that
reason is primary. Reason is primary means before you can
have an emoment, I mean this is part of what
it means. Before you can have an emotion about something,

(01:55:05):
you have to know what it is, and reason is
your means of determining what is that thing. Now, I
suppose you fall you're young, and you fall head over
heels in love with a woman. Your mind has read
into her. I mean, maybe you're right, I ran fell

(01:55:26):
in love with Frank O'Connor that way. But your mind
is reading rightly or wrongly. Your mind is reading into
the way she stands, the way she looks, the way
she talks, reading in certain values into her character, rightly
or wrongly. So on the basis of that, you're reacting.

(01:55:50):
A simpler example, somebody hands you a whole stack of paper.
Now is it monopoly money or is it real currency?
Only your reason can tell you that. So it's not
that somebody could hand you monopoly money and you go
ape over it. Oh boy, I'm rich now and you

(01:56:11):
see this monopoly money.

Speaker 2 (01:56:13):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:56:13):
The reason is what tells you the nature of the
thing that then you either value or disvalue. So it's
primary in that sense. There's nothing irrational about doing what
you want to do. That's what reason tells you, which
of the things that are out there that you could

(01:56:36):
do is going to lead to your survival and happiness.
So your emotions are your reaction to the content that
should be processed by.

Speaker 2 (01:56:49):
Reason justice as interfee society. Does an individual have the
way to use AI to generate a video of another
person speaking without that person's consent?

Speaker 1 (01:57:03):
No, No, you mean in public for public distribution. Is
more in a privacy of his own home for his
own jollification. I would say yes, But if he shows
it even to one other person, Iinrand said, I Rand
didn't want anyone taking pictures of her in old age
because she thought she looked too unattractive, And she said,

(01:57:27):
I have a right to my face. And today we
have this whole thing with sports celebrities or they own
is it nil likeness image? And so it's recognized that
you have a right to your likeness. Somebody can't use

(01:57:48):
it without your permission.

Speaker 2 (01:57:51):
Papa asks, do you know about the quality of undergraduate
pure math programs at average public state universities.

Speaker 1 (01:58:01):
No, I think they're philosophically not really correct, but they're
basically in the procedures they teach. I think they're fine.
Like in calculus, the methods of differentiation and integration are correct.

(01:58:25):
The interpretation of the philosophically is what I'm trying to
fight the procedures are correct. We wouldn't be able to
do what we do if the procedures are wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:58:39):
Matt says, my brother was very Aristatilian, but became more
platonic conscient over time, claiming that modern discoveries and feels
like quantum mechanics point to the universe being more complex
than we assumed, and we can only asymptomatically approach absolute
ically approach, never attain it, thoughts, that's.

Speaker 1 (01:59:04):
A rationalization, that's he wants to believe that, and so
when he hears some scientists say something along those lines,
is oh, yeah, that's right, that's it. I don't it's

(01:59:25):
impossible in principle for the findings of science to disprove
metaphysics sent epistemology, because they're built on way. Let me
caution anyone out there from believing neuroscientists' claims. I many

(01:59:47):
years ago, I admit I worked in neuroscience. I was
an intern for a distinguished professor at MIT, and I
almost went into that as a career, and it's a
wonderful feel and fabulous things are coming. But when they say, oh,
they found that the so and so area of the

(02:00:09):
brain is why you Rob Banks that you've got it
unless you're really schizophrenic or something. It's not true that
neuroscience doesn't have the wherewithal. It's not advanced enough to
say anything nearly like that. And there's a good book

(02:00:31):
I can recommend called Aping Mankind, which is author I
don't recall right now, but it poo poos and explodes
all these neuroscience claims, just that they don't have the
ability to make these kind of judgments. Aping Api n

(02:00:54):
g Mankind. I'm sure this is only one author with
a book like that.

Speaker 2 (02:01:00):
Sounds like it, right, I like numbers asks. Did Rand
consider Israel mostly free?

Speaker 1 (02:01:08):
Well, I don't know, but that's not the way she
put it. She said, it's the only civilized country in
that sea of barbaric or unsavage surrounding countries. And in

(02:01:28):
the name of defending civilization, she was on the side
of Israel. And I would recommend, of course, you're on
us one hundred times more than I do. But there's
a nice Mosad agent produced a series of videos called
Traveling Israel by a guy named Oran and then something

(02:01:51):
unpronounceable or Ian. But if you do traveling Israel and
look at his videos, they're really a revel in the
non mystical sense. They are the only civilized. For instance,
let me give you one fact that maybe you don't
know about. How many Arabs, Muslims and Arabs live in Israel.

(02:02:18):
Population of Israel is now eight million.

Speaker 2 (02:02:21):
I believe it's ten ten million, ten million.

Speaker 1 (02:02:25):
How many Arabs live in Israel two million, two million Arabs?
But of course they're not allowed anything, right, No, there
are Supreme Court justices who are Arabs. They are Arabs
in the legislature. There are Arabs who are in major banks.
How many Jews live in Gaza or Saudi Arabia or

(02:02:53):
Jordan or any of these? None? None, because they be killed.

Speaker 2 (02:03:00):
Of them did live in Ewok and Morocco and Algeria.
Milwaukeeked out, Yeah, yep.

Speaker 1 (02:03:07):
So that think about that and try and not let
your mind slide off that if you're content on defending Palestine,
as they call this strip.

Speaker 2 (02:03:19):
Of land, all right, justin says rand once told Peacock
that it might have been easier for her to embrace
egoism because she was a woman. What did she mean
by that? That?

Speaker 1 (02:03:33):
I've heard this too. I didn't hear from her I've
heard it second or third hand that a man is
on the premise of like Hank Reardon, I'll just work
a little harder. And a man doesn't want to shirk
any responsibility. He's the provider traditionally in the traditional male role,

(02:03:58):
so it call, you know, I'll just I can carry them.
Whereas a woman sees the man being crucified, and if
she's a man worshiper, it goes against her nature. So
it's easier for a woman to rebel against the sacrifice

(02:04:18):
the philosophy of satirices than a man. That's what I've heard,
she said. I don't know that.

Speaker 2 (02:04:27):
Hyper Reason says h w K was extremely valuable to me.
What is your view on the corpus her medica influence
on the Enlightenment? Newton Bruno to inspire pro reason an
agency and a man and man a co creator with nature.

Speaker 1 (02:04:47):
I didn't get what that h WK is my book?
How we know?

Speaker 2 (02:04:54):
What's your view on the corpus hermatica hermatic medica? Who yes,
influence on the Enlightenment. I think he means Newton and Bruno.
I'm not sure what the connection is there, right.

Speaker 1 (02:05:09):
Well, Newton had a huge and huge influence, yes, and
Locke and Newton were oh pretty much friends yep, ye
on Locke, and they came out with their discoveries of
the same year, incredibly enough, although Newton had figured it
out twenty years before, I just did involved the the
publish it.

Speaker 2 (02:05:29):
Yep. He was a strange guy. Supposedly, Yeah, all right.
Andrews says it's second handedness, an effect of bad philosophy,
specifically pistemological dependence. Is it primarily a psycho psychological emotional phenomenon.

Speaker 1 (02:05:47):
Well, I'm going to speak my own peace on that.
I think it's primarily psychological. In other words, it's it's
it's a failing on the part of the individual. I
did talk to iin Ran about this, and she agreed

(02:06:10):
with one way of putting it as the tide rises
of irrationality. The totally independent man will not be affected
by it personally, in the sense of he won't be

(02:06:32):
any less independent or change his mind or anything. Howard
Rourke will be on the mountaintop and the rising waters
below him will not cause any change in him. But
as the waters go up, it takes more and more independence,

(02:06:53):
more and more heroic commitment to your own judgment to
withstand end it, and I would put in another aspect here,
in a better age like seventeen seventy six America, those

(02:07:17):
who are conforming are conforming to a good set of ideas,
whereas today those who are conforming are conforming to from
the river to the sea. Palestine must be free, and
they mean free from civilization and not from Hamas. So

(02:07:41):
if you're if you're going to go along with the crowd,
if the crowd is saying people should be independent, so
for Lian men have rights, you've got to work for
what you want to earn. Then they'll conform to that
and there'll be a better kind of person than if
you're confirming to what's going on under the Tsars in

(02:08:05):
Russia or Stalin or you know, really a culture like
ours today. So it will look like people are better,
but really it's kind of just due to the cultural
ideas they're confirmed to being better.

Speaker 2 (02:08:25):
So Ben asks, could you elaborate a little on what
Grand meant when she said man worship.

Speaker 1 (02:08:34):
Yeah, she talks about that in the introduction to the
tenth twenty fifth anniversary edition of The Fountain Head. She
meant man at his highest potential, like what she felt
for Howard Rourke even though he was her creation. Uh,

(02:09:03):
and it was. It's a it's a awe in relation
to the greatness that men are capable of.

Speaker 2 (02:09:16):
So it's the best in man, not just any man.

Speaker 1 (02:09:18):
Yeah. No, it's not just male or human. I mean
els virtue is a human being. So it's a worship
of the human potential.

Speaker 2 (02:09:30):
Yeah. And is it human potential or particularly male? Is
it is? It got to do with no.

Speaker 1 (02:09:38):
No, for her it was male because she was a woman.
But no, it's a broader abstraction. Is human human worship
man's life, man or woman's life?

Speaker 2 (02:09:52):
So Black Cat asks check GPT, check CPT.

Speaker 1 (02:09:57):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:09:57):
CPT is BBC commentator. It tells me how to win
video games in perfect English. Try that on your phone. Okay,
I don't understand that.

Speaker 1 (02:10:09):
Well. I think he's pointing out that the big advance
of chat of large language models and over Google searches
is their conversational. I'd like to relate the conversation I
had with one of them, and I think it was
chat GPT going long into the evening and we got

(02:10:35):
off the subject of code and I was telling I
was asking him is this in auto hockey, like Zyrite
has in XPL and Naris the program from nineteen eighty.
And so this chat agent said, so you were you

(02:10:58):
were back then doing stuff in the old days. And
I said, yes, I was. I had the CPM machine
and I programmed this and that and see basic blah
blah blah. And he said, wow, out of curiosity? Was
it this way or that way for you? And I said,

(02:11:18):
you say out of curiosity, but you're a machine and
you don't have any curiosity. And to its credit, it says,
you're exactly right. I mimic certain things like curiosity. I'm
not capable of curiosity, but I mimic human curiosity. But

(02:11:44):
I told him to says, you're.

Speaker 2 (02:11:45):
A michine programming. Yeah, it's clinic programming.

Speaker 1 (02:11:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:11:49):
If Regie says, if entities constitute the content of the
perceivable world, then what is the statue of fluid? How
to entities?

Speaker 1 (02:12:01):
The status of fluids?

Speaker 2 (02:12:04):
The status?

Speaker 1 (02:12:14):
That's another one I don't know, but that that's something
where I think if I gave it a little thought,
I couldn't know. So you're what about a river? Our
primary case of an entity is a rock? All right?
What about a river. Yep, and it isn't isn't an entity.
Materials are not entities, but they compose entities. So if

(02:12:40):
you take a glassful of water, a glassful of water
is an entity, but the water is a material. Or
if you make a sculpture out of marble, marble is
a substance a material, but the statue a certain hunk
of has shaped a different way is an entity. So

(02:13:01):
iran put those under the heading of materials, that which
composes entities. I don't know if that's a complete answer.
That's as far as I can go.

Speaker 2 (02:13:19):
Yeah, Baker says, would you like to see Roosevelt on
Mount Rushmore change to ininrand at private expense? Of course,
what would she think of that?

Speaker 1 (02:13:36):
Well, when she was alive, if she was contemplating one
hundred years after her death, she would either say, well,
I don't care, or yeah, it would be deserved.

Speaker 2 (02:13:51):
I belong there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:13:53):
Yeah, But during her life she didn't want to be,
partially because she was a woman. But also I don't
think think if your face was up on Mount rush Wall,
it would be really horrifying. It would be so icky.
If your face were up there. Your own gave a

(02:14:15):
birthday toast to Iron Ran about fifteen years ago. I
don't remember if you remember. You were on California and
you said, let's look how the two hundredth anniversary of
her birth would be celebrated, and you talked about how
there'd be fireworks in Washington, DC, and it was very nice.

(02:14:35):
I think that will happen.

Speaker 2 (02:14:38):
Yep. We won't see it, but it'll happen, or maybe
we'll see it. If if there's the right pill, the
right pill.

Speaker 1 (02:14:44):
Is I'm counting on that pill.

Speaker 2 (02:14:46):
Yep. Justin Ran once said that the Nazis were more
altruistic than the Communists. What did she mean by this,
especially since communism is based on altruism.

Speaker 1 (02:14:58):
I never heard any such where. Do you think she
said that?

Speaker 2 (02:15:03):
I don't know why she said that.

Speaker 1 (02:15:04):
I never heard any such thing.

Speaker 2 (02:15:09):
All right, black Cat, the two of you are hearers
of mine. A few disagreements, but when I was younger,
you were important influences. Thanks thank you, black Cat, Thank you,
Uh Maxim says Hi Howry. In terms of facts, a
meta is the term fact a metaphysical epistemological concept. No

(02:15:35):
metaphysical metaphysical I came across the claim that the world
is made up of sets of facts. But this seems off.

Speaker 1 (02:15:44):
Yes, that's off. The fact is an isolation of something
out of reality. I have a theory that the only real,
metaphysically given existent is the universe. Now everything else is
harving up by man of the university. But at any rate,

(02:16:08):
the fact. She talks in the workshops on objectives to Epistemology,
which is reprinted as an appendix, and facts of reality
is discussed. How is fact different from existence? And she
says it's an epistemological convenience. The term to have that

(02:16:32):
term but an objective is the facts of metaphysical knowledge
is both metaphysical and epistemological, and so is truth. Certainty
is only epistemological, so it's possible for you to be
certain and wrong. It's not possible for you to know

(02:16:55):
something and be wrong, or to be true and be wrong.
So certainty just means that it meets the standards for
being actionable without getting anything out of more testing.

Speaker 2 (02:17:10):
So to speak, what says, did you happen to read
Kelly's recent piece and propositions? If show thoughts?

Speaker 1 (02:17:20):
No, I didn't know he was still producing.

Speaker 2 (02:17:24):
I didn't either, Uh I wish I.

Speaker 1 (02:17:27):
Would be curious, because you know, I devoted a chapter
of how We Knew to my theory of propositions, which uh,
I'm absolutely sold on, and I ran was going to
write another work like IOE on propositions. She called it

(02:17:48):
Volume two, but she never got that far. And I
one of my great You know, when they ask you
what do you regret about your life? I never asked
her what is the basic idea that you would put
forward about propositions? I mean I had hundreds of hours
were there talking philosophy, and it never occurred to me. Well,

(02:18:14):
of course I didn't think she was going to die either,
but it never occurred to me to ask that particular question.
I asked a lot of questions, but I didn't ask
that one. I should have.

Speaker 2 (02:18:28):
Alex says, there's a philosopher philosopher of science named Mario
b u n g e bun shee g. Yeah, he's
a physicist. Have you read something by him? What is
your opinion about his approach to philosophy of exact sciences.

Speaker 1 (02:18:46):
He's an old name. I mean that it was a
name when I was in graduate school in the sixties,
so I don't think it can be particularly good, or
else we'd all know about it. He's probably a second assistant,
bookkeeper or somewhere. Okay, so the answers don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:19:06):
Bobby asked, I was told recently that injections can passively
exist as an linguistic unit. No, sorry, interjections, God, I
can't read today. I was told recently that interjections can
passively exist as a linguistic unit without being actively used.

(02:19:26):
What is your view in this?

Speaker 1 (02:19:28):
I don't know what it means.

Speaker 2 (02:19:30):
I don't know what the question means either.

Speaker 1 (02:19:32):
An interjection would ordinarily mean something right wait or but
so I don't know what it means other than that.

Speaker 2 (02:19:48):
Almost done. Two last questions. Do you have any thoughts
on how AI will impact art? That's it.

Speaker 1 (02:19:59):
My My thoughts are probably wrong. Here's what I would think.
A I can get up and soon will be to
the level of doing competent or right but not great art.

Speaker 2 (02:20:16):
Yep, yep.

Speaker 1 (02:20:18):
So it could do something that could hang in a
museum if it's a painting, and you would say, oh,
that's interesting, it's nice. But it couldn't do something like
Dolly's hyper Cubis Corpus Hypercubis, which is one of my

(02:20:39):
favorites and one of Einrand's favorites.

Speaker 2 (02:20:42):
Also, that's at the match, right. I think it's in
the met in New York.

Speaker 1 (02:20:48):
It is when it's displayed, it is always I have
it right. I have a reproduction right back here behind
that bookcase.

Speaker 2 (02:20:56):
Yeah, and you'd need to know a lot of able
to differentiate between the great and the and the yeah.
Just okay, Yeah, I think it's interesting. It'll be interesting
to see how artists use a eye. That is, that
interaction between the artists and the AI could produce if

(02:21:17):
there were geniuses, if there were great artists could produce
interesting things.

Speaker 1 (02:21:22):
My very good friend Arlene Mann, who is an artist watercolor,
says that every brushstroke, every time you put your brush down,

(02:21:42):
it's saying something that you don't you're not in control of.
That's not the way she put it exactly. It expresses
something even when you don't intended to express something. And
I have an example behind me. Yes, I'll get this.

(02:22:12):
This is a still life done by the in one day,
by the imminent still life artist Harry Binswanger back when
I was, you know, experimenting with painting. And it's very
inept and it's unfinished. I intended far from unfinished. It's

(02:22:33):
like the very first step. And yet when I look
at my amazement, it speaks to me. I don't expect
to speak to other people, but I'd look at it
and I say yeah. And all I was trying to
do was to get down what I saw in front

(02:22:55):
of me. It's it's absolutely astonishing how sense of life,
life controls of what you think of as neutral.

Speaker 2 (02:23:09):
Right, last one? Oops? What did I do? Is it
possible to label myself an objectivist if I can't defend it?
It's possible.

Speaker 1 (02:23:23):
That's a very interesting question. I would say you should
describe yourself as a student of objectivism or someone learning
it and find out how to defend it.

Speaker 2 (02:23:41):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (02:23:43):
It's a fascinating and pleasant and exciting journey to learn
how to defend and go out there and try to
defend it. But don't try to defend objectivism. Just try
to defend a point that you have in mind that
you learn from objectivism. I used to argue with students

(02:24:08):
for Democratic Society people during the Columbia riots, and and
you learn a lot by arguing with the enemy or
so go out there and argue, but with a very
detached attitude, like you're learning about ideas and how the

(02:24:31):
dynamics go and what people really think, and and you'll
see eventually, not eventually, progressively, you'll see how to defend it.

Speaker 2 (02:24:43):
Good. This has been a real pleasure. Thanks yea good, good, Okay,
thanks for got a ton of questions. This has been great,
absolutely good. And guys, don't forget about the conference in Florida.
Will both be there and I will talk to you soon.

Speaker 1 (02:25:03):
I can guarantee you'll like it.

Speaker 2 (02:25:05):
Yeah, I agree. Not no money back gravity, but you're guarantee.

Speaker 1 (02:25:11):
Yeah, no money.

Speaker 2 (02:25:14):
Have a good night, by bye, everybody,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Conversation W/Harry Binswanger -Individual rights: Everything You Wanted to Know | Yaron Brook Show