https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4k5QLMRhH1E
you obviously regard a focus on the individual as the appropriate medication against this kind of statist, intellectual, luciferian, utopianism. And I think that’s appropriate. But I want to know what your vision of an alternative is and why you adopted that particular vision. Well, I don’t know that I have a vision per se, I’m not a central planner. But what anarchism means to me, and I do 100 percent regard myself as an anarchism, is it is an approach to life. It is an approach to treating people peacefully. It is a recognition that political authority is inherently illegitimate, although sometimes it is powerful. And it is regarding our existence as an amazing opportunity and to live life to its fullest and to realize that to take that away from somebody else is a huge moral outrage. So that is kind of what anarchism means to me. And Rand was asked at one point, she goes, if I had to sum up my worldview or whatever term she used in one word, it would be this, individualism. So yes, that is exactly what it is. Okay, so let me delve into that a little bit. But it’s also just important because, you know, Berkman and Goldman, there’s this boomer idea that more government is left-wing and less government is right-wing, and it puts Goldman and Berkman on the right-wing. It’s just this weird thing because they want Hitler to be a leftist because right-wing is good, Hitler is bad, Hitler is leftist. It’s very important for me to give credit. The fact that the first critics of the Soviet Union with firsthand experience were hardcore, unmitigated lefties. These were Emma Goldman and Berkman were both bloodthirsty, happy to slit throats, but they’re saying we’re doing this in the sake of revolution to kind of bring about a society that works for everyone, not against the workers themselves that we are championing. This is not what we’re for. So they weren’t, you know, kind of this pansy type of lefties. They were, you know, but Emma Goldman gave a talk in Union Square, and she told the audience, she goes, go to the capitalists and ask for work, and if they don’t give you work, ask for bread, and if they don’t give you bread, take bread. So she’s like, you do not have a moral obligation to starve. So they have this contemptuous, why are people starving when there’s millionaires out there was their mindset. So the fact that these people, at great cost to themselves and to their status in this kind of workers’ movement, were so vocal about denouncing what they had seen firsthand and were called puppets of the capitalists. So why do you think that’s important? I mean, you spend a lot of time on Berkman and Goldman. Have I got the first name right? Yes, Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Yeah, right, okay, you spend a lot of time on them, and you do show that they were, as representatives of the autonomous worker, let’s say, they were appalled by what they saw in the Soviet Union. And you seem to be making the case that that’s important because of their stress on individualism or because you also wanted not to fall prey to the delusion that was only the right that was standing against the left. Exactly, I hate this idea that right, good, left, bad, or vice versa. The fight against totalitarianism was a series of dots that are often completely counterintuitive, and I think it’s very important historically when people fight, these individuals who fight against these kind of atrocities, that they give the credit that they are due. So you’re looking at something like attempting to replace the right-wing versus the terrible communist narrative with something more like people who are concerned with the individual. Yes, yeah. Okay, fine, I see, I see. Okay, so now, here’s … I re-read Rand, I ran his books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Yeah. I think this is the third time I read both, and I read them within the last couple of months. Yeah, yeah, so now and then I’m looking for, I don’t know, a romantic read, maybe, that’s somewhat intellectually challenging, and now and then I’ll pick up one of her books, and she’s a curious finger to me, because Ayn Rand had every reason to despise the Soviet Union and was a very good counter-voice to their machinations. But, but, well … And you know, I got introduced to her books, it was quite interesting, so I worked for the Socialists when I was like 14 till I was 16, before I figured out that I didn’t know enough to presume that the way I wanted to arrange the world in a utopian fashion was credible. And I figured that out by the time I was about 17. I thought, well, what do you know? You don’t have a job, I had little jobs, you don’t have a business, you don’t have a family, it’s like, what the hell do you know? Really. Right, so, okay, anyways, the person who gave me Ayn Rand’s books was this woman, Sandy Knobley. She was the mother of one of Alberta’s recent premiers, a socialist premier, and she was the wife of the only elected socialist official in Alberta when I grew up. And I asked her why she gave me Solzhenitsyn and Huxley and Orwell, like she was an educated woman, and she gave me Ayn Rand’s books, which I read when I was like 13, and you know, I found them compelling. Yeah. They’re romantic adventures, fundamentally, with an intellectual bent, and I like the anti-collective ethos that was embedded in them, and then I’ve read them, like I said, a couple of times since then. So, here’s the problem I have, and you can help me sort this out. Like, I certainly agree with you that a society that isn’t predicated on something like recognition of the intrinsic and superordinate worth of the individual is doomed to catastrophe. Right? But then, but here’s the rub as far as I’m concerned, and this is what I really had a problem with, especially this time when I went through Rand’s books. It’s like, her, Goff, John Goff, for example, and Francisco D’Ancona, and who’s the architect? Howard Roark. Roark, right, her heroic capitalists, essentially. They’re not precisely heroic capitalists, they’re heroic individualists who compete in the free market. OK, and that’s fine, and you can see the libertarian side of that, and I’m also a free market advocate, and partly because I think that distributed decision-making is a much better computational model than centralized planning. Obviously. It’s not obvious. Well, yeah, it should be, but it should be. It’s not obvious to utopian, Luciferian intellects, but it’s obvious even if you just think about it from a computational perspective. I’ll just say the smartest person is ignorant of 99.99% of knowledge. Exactly, that’s exactly it. It’s precisely why you want to distribute it. OK, so that’s partly what I want to go into. So now the Randian heroes identify themselves as fervent individualists, and you stop me as soon as I get any of this wrong, or in some way you don’t disagree with, they’re pursuing their own selfish ethos. Yes. OK, so that’s the rub to me, because I’m going to think about this psychologically and neurophysiologically, just to make it complicated. OK, so the first question would be, well, what exactly do you mean by the individual and the self? OK, so when a child develops, let’s say, when a child first emerges into the world, they’re essentially a system of somewhat disconnected primary instinctual subpersonalities. Right? And so with the nascent possibility of a uniting ego, identity, personality, something like a continued continuity of memory across time, but that has to emerge. Now, it seems to emerge as a consequence of neurophysiological development and experiential maturation. And so the child comes equipped into the world, say, with a sucking reflex, because its mouth and tongue are very wired up. So that’s where the child is most conscious. That’s why kids, when they can, put everything in their mouth, because they can feel it and investigate it, far before they have control over their eyes or their arms, because their arms sort of float around. So what happens is they’re born as a set of somewhat independent systems, and then the independent systems, partly under the influence of social demand, integrate themselves. Right. Now, so, and then, like, by the time a child is two, that child is still mostly disintegrated emotional systems. And so if you watch a two-year-old, and I use two for a specific reason, what you see is that they cycle through basic motivational states. So a child is often, like a child whose demand-oriented motivational states are satiated will play, right, and play and explore. But then they get tired and they’ll cry, or they’ll get hungry and they’ll cry, or they’ll get angry and they’ll have a tantrum, or they’re burst into tears. Well, I said they’ll cry, or they’ll get anxious, right? And so they’re cycling through these primary motivational states. Now, we understand that to some degree, neurophysiologically, because the older the brain system, the more likely it is to be operative in infancy, right? So like the rage system or the system that mediates anxiety or the system that mediates pain, those come into being pretty early. But it’s hard for them to get integrated. Okay, now, here’s the problem. And I don’t know how to distinguish individualism from hedonism, and I don’t know how to distinguish hedonism from possession by one of these lower-order motivational states. So when Rand says we should be able to pursue our own selfish needs, she’s kind of taking a classic… She doesn’t say selfish needs, she says self-interest. Okay, okay, so fine. Okay, okay, so that… Well, no, I would say she moves between those two, because there are… She never says needs, I’m positive. She attacks that word all the time. Okay, right, right, fair enough. Okay, okay, so I’ll back off on the needs side. That was the old chosen, she makes absolutely bloody sure. Well, wait a second. She says, your needs are not a blank check on my needs. I know, but does she say simultaneously that I have no right to pursue my needs? She doesn’t use that word. She says you pursue your self-interest to the best of your abilities. Okay, but she also uses the word selfish. Yes, okay, so fine. In a very unistimatic way. Right, okay, right, absolutely, absolutely. I would just want to make sure that we’re proceeding on grounds that we both regard as appropriate. So the liberal types, the Scottish liberals, believe that if people were encouraged to pursue their self-interest, that that would produce a self-regulating system. Now, Rand seems to accept that as a proposition, yes? Yes. So if people are freely able to pursue their self-interest, then a system of free exchange will emerge out of that that has the appropriate qualities of governance. Yes, she says this explicitly on Donahue. She was asking, saying that if people pursue their own self-interest, there wouldn’t be any oppression, there wouldn’t be war, there wouldn’t be any Hitler, should they be less? Yeah, well, look, when I’m negotiating with someone for a business deal, let’s say, or when I’m trying to formulate a strategy that enables me to work happily together with someone over the long run, I’m hoping that they’ll be thrilled with the deal. Like, I’m not trying to win. I think, well, I would like to set you up in a situation so that you could pursue our mutual goals completely of your own accord. Then I don’t even have to watch you, right? Because you’re doing things for whatever reasons you have. But this is the thing, this is what I don’t quite understand, is that that self-interest, okay, so it seems to me that for that self-interest to work, then it has to be a self-interest that’s commensurate with the structure that would emerge if everyone was pursuing their self-interest simultaneously. You see what I mean? Not everyone. Well, okay, okay, okay. So let’s say you and I make an arrangement, and it’s a long-term arrangement, and at one point you decide that it’s in your self-interest to violate that agreement, because you can garner an intense short-term gain as a consequence. But there’s a long-term cost. Okay, that’s fine. Because I’ve grown in this relationship, and also there’s a long-term cost in terms of myself. Okay, what’s the cost? The cost is I’m no longer a person of integrity. I’m not a man of my word. So Rand says there’s two Rand quotes, where she goes, first of all, she says that man is a being of self-made soul, and she also says in The Fountainhead, which is that hard work of the architect, that a building has integrity just like a man and just as seldom. So … Right, so you’re seeing her self-interest as something nested inside a larger-scale conceptualization of integrity. Yes. And then, okay … So in fact, the whole point of The Fountainhead is she’s contrasting these two types of selfishness. The first is Peter Keating, who is this basic striver social climber who has no internal self at all, no values other than what he sees around him. In fact, the working title of The Fountainhead was Secondhand Lives, because Rand was working in Hollywood, and she asked the woman who she was working with, this pin-drop moment where she’s like, I’m looking in the face of the devil, where the woman goes, I’ll tell you what I want. If someone has a cloth coat, I want a fur coat. If you have one car, I want two. If your house is 500 square feet, I want a thousand-square-foot house. And Rand is like, oh my … She’s like, this is evil. Someone who has no self and whose values are strictly a function of comparison of those around her. Right, but okay, but why is … Hold on. As opposed to Howard Roark, who is selfish in the sense that he pursues his own goals and values in accordance with his moral code. And I think those are the two definitions of selfishness. I know that you’re definitely selfish. Fine, fine. So let’s tell … Certainly Keating is portrayed in Rand as nothing but a … But he’s the kind of social climber who will do anything to gain comparative status in his profession. But he will never be able to tell you why he wants the status. What is he going to do with it? It’s kind of just in and of itself good, but he has no values. Okay, so that’s the thing that’s interesting to me, because I don’t think that it’s appropriate to presume that the mere search for social status is not self-interest. Now, I know you’re making a more sophisticated argument than that, but I want to elaborate it completely.