Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Well, it is 630, so in the east. We'll go ahead and get started. I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. We're very pleased to have Atlas society senior scholar Stephen Hicks with us for an ask me anything on philosophy. Again, I've got questions from social media. Steven has some questions he's got taken directly, but we want to encourage live questions so you can request to speak, and we'll get to as many of you as possible.
Stephen, thanks so much for doing this.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Always a pleasure, Scott, thanks for hosting.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, just getting to some of the questions we've got. It's been said that for decades in the west we've focused on rights but not responsibilities. This comes from Jeff, does that explain our current predicament?
[00:00:52] Speaker B: I don't think so.
I think this is like a variation on a question we took up a couple of months ago.
The one says rights and responsibilities shouldn't be juxtaposed in any contradictory sense to each other. But this one is trying to say that we've been saying in the west, gimme, gimme, gimme. That's the rights part. I'm entitled to all of this kind of stuff, but not paying attention to responsibility that I have any obligation to do. So I think there is some journalistic truth to that. If we focus on some subgroups in the west, because obviously there are lots of people who are just grifters, they're out to take as much as they can, or others who have a kind of entitlement mentality, and they feel that they don't have to contribute anything or they just deserve to get various things. So to the extent that those are a significant number of people, then there's some journalistic truth to that.
And I think partly this is coming more from a conservative critique perspective. Conservatives are, of course, noted for emphasizing responsibilities and duties and obligations, even to the point of selflessness and sacrifice and so forth. So from their perspective, the entitlement mentality is, of course of offensive, as it is offensive to all reasonable people. But that said, I don't think that the problem is, or at least the core problem is just that we've got too many people saying gimme, gimme, gimme. The more important problem would be people who have enabled a significant number of people to be gimme, gimme, gimme.
And that would be intellectuals who for various reasons want to control people. Either they've got some agenda that they want to force people to follow along, where they see themselves as paternalistic, parental types of people who want to want to control us. So those people, to the extent they are enablers of the gimmie people, I would say those are a more serious problem about how we have gotten to where we gotten to where we are. But the flip side of that just then saying, well, we don't really have any rights, instead all we have is responsibilities.
That is the position that we for the last couple of centuries have been fighting hard against by carving out a space against those who wanted to say we don't have any rights. We are just here to serve in various ways, to sacrifice in various ways. So the healthy position, I think this is the objectivist position and variations, of course, we find in several other friendly philosophies to say that first and foremost, foremost, you are a self responsible agent in all areas of your life, and you should treat other people as self responsible agents in your life or in their lives rather. And part of that then is in a social context, to come up with a doctrine of rights. For me to be self responsible means I need to have freedom space to, to act on my own behalf. And to the extent that I create value in the world, to control that value that I have created, that's my property rights. And so my liberty rights and my property rights and so on are a social expression of my fundamental responsibility. So those two need to be integrated.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Great answer. Well, we have both Atlas Society founder David Kelly and CEO Jennifer Grossman. Very pleased. I think. Doctor Kelly, you requested first go ahead.
[00:05:03] Speaker C: Yeah, Stephen's answer was great. I agree completely. I just would add that.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: The problem.
[00:05:11] Speaker C: Is in the conception of rights.
The traditional, the founder's view and that of the classical liberal tradition was that there are rights, freedom, rights, rights of property, free speech, liberty to choose your actions and believe what you will about religious issues. But that was expanded in the 19th century to include what I call welfare rights, the right to a job, right to an income, housing, food, etcetera. And that's been incorporated into our laws now. And so when people talk about rights, they don't make that distinction.
But the difference is that the classical rights don't just require government to protect against crime and fraud. The welfare rights require government to supply a whole ton of goods to people, which they expect, Social Security benefits and all the rest. And because the government is providing them. I think one sense of the responsibility that people claim that, you know, conservatives and liberals too, communitarians in particular, claim, is people are not taking account of our responsibilities to government.
Do your part. And even if it's, you know, earning a living, it means earning a living on behalf of the. Of the social group. So there, there's just a conceptual distortion under. Underlying a lot of these. This whole point. But thanks, Stephen. That's your answer was.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: Your addition is exactly on point. Thanks.
Great.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Let's go to Jag next. Jag. Thank you.
Did you have a question for Stephen?
[00:07:08] Speaker D: Yes, I do. Well, I actually have a lot of questions from Instagram, from our Instagram takeover, some of which I've already given my take on, but I want to hear yours.
So one was, what about the morality of selfishness with regards to parenting?
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Sorry? The morality of selfishness with regard to parenting.
[00:07:37] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: Okay. Do we need to clarify the word selfishness, or is the context that we're talking about the objectivist understanding?
[00:07:46] Speaker D: This particular questioner has asked previous questions about objectivism, so I think he understands that in this context, we're talking about one's rational long term self interest.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:08:01] Speaker D: So not the confusion of just acting in a range of a moment, not thinking about, you know, how your actions affect others.
So, yeah, I had my take, but.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Okay.
Okay, good. So that's a great question. Obviously, the decision about having children or not is a huge one. And it does require one, I think, to become philosophical about one's whole life, about what one plans to achieve or hopes to achieve, career, friends, travel, art and so on. And all of those things, if done well, require a very strong commitment psychologically and in terms of physical resources. And one quickly runs into limitations, issues on time and resources and so on. So I think if one is going to be rational about having children, then one thinks about the value, the potential value of family to you, including your partner, assuming you're going to be co parenting the other person, how important that person is to you, how important that person's specific values with respect to having children are.
And hopefully you've got that sorted out. You're on the same page before you've made long term marriage commitments with that person. But then, more specifically, you're a man or you're a woman, and you're thinking about becoming a father or a mother, and you think about the financial cost, you think about the time cost. And so, so on the other side of that, you try to estimate the value to you of having a child who in some sense is yours. You might be considering adopting also, and that changes things slightly at the beginning, but how much it matters to you to bring another life into the world, to nurture that child, to protect, to provide for, to educate, to be a role model for, and then just to see that child hopefully develop physically and psychologically into an adult human being when much or most of your work on that project is done. So the thing that's hard for most people, particularly when they are young and they've only experienced this from the child's perspective, is to imagine themselves as adults and in the position of being a parent. If they've had decent parents, that helps them do so. If they've had terrible parents, that makes it more difficult. But let me just then speak just slightly autobiographically. Here was I went into my parenting with my eyes open, and I'm really glad that I did. But even so, I did underestimate the sheer, I don't know, joy and wonder and surprise the psychological side of things that comes along with having kind of a young human being in your charge and just kind of marveling in some cases, at the pace of development, certain levels of pride when you see things that you communicated or taught that child become a part of that child's life, often modified in various directions. And there is an interesting thing that I noticed that before I became a parent, I did enjoy gardening to some extent. Maybe it's the hicks in my family and the long line of farming value, but there is a great pleasure in just planting a seed and seeing that seed sprout and then grow and recover from storms and produce flowers or fruit. Just there's something that we respond to in another life form, developing and seeing it grow and eventually flourish. And I think that's akin in a more sophisticated form, to the pleasure we get from seeing baby animals, baby birds, kittens, dogs, baby lions, or whatever species, and the antics that they get up to as infants or as young members of whatever species they are, but then just enjoying seeing them grow into healthy and flourishing animals. And then the pleasure that we can get in being a part of that, if we are enabling, and all of that then multiplied by some factor kicks in when it's a human child that you have created or assumed responsibility for. So that is somewhat impressionistic in response to that. But then I would say if you are an adult and none of that registers with you in a deepen way, and you have other things that when you do your cost benefit calculation that seems strongly to outweigh the potential value of having children, then I think it can also be a perfectly rationally selfish choice not to have children.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Another great answer. Let's go to code of chi next.
Code. Are you able to unmute?
[00:14:00] Speaker E: Yes.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: Hello.
[00:14:04] Speaker F: First of all, I just wanted to say thank you, Stephen Hicks, for the great books you've written. I've read a couple of them and enjoyed them very much.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Thanks for the feedback.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: All right. Yeah, very.
[00:14:15] Speaker F: I admire how clearly you communicate. It's such an unusually high degree. You can articulate exactly what you want to say, and I think that must take a lot of work. So well done.
[00:14:29] Speaker B: Appreciate it.
[00:14:31] Speaker F: So I've got a couple of things I'd like to talk about. Maybe I can just tell you two or three of them, and you can choose which one you prefer to talk about.
So the first one is, what are your thoughts on AI and the distinction between AI and AGI?
Second is, what do you think about the concept of memes? And is it a valid concept, and if so, what's the relationship between memes and the mind, perhaps with the distinction of, like, the conscious mind and the subconscious? And what's the relationship between imagination and reason? And just to comment on the last one, when reading Ayn Rand's books, I never really got a sense of any sort of positive thoughts about the subconscious, except when I was reading her book, the Romantic Manifesto and the art of fiction, and perhaps non fiction as well. But I don't remember that, but one or both of those books there, she talks about the kind of almost like a. There's a process of handing things back and forth between the conscious mind, the unconscious mind. And I hope, please choose which one you like. And if you want me to ask any sort of offer any more further comments to clarify the direction, let me know.
[00:15:44] Speaker B: All right. That's a very interesting network of questions in philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and just straight psychology as well. Let me take the third one in the series, imagination. Say just a few words about that.
I've not written anything specifically on imagination, and my.
To the extent I thought about that, my. My thinking is that imagination is part of the faculty of reason.
So I don't initially conceptualize it as that we have the rational side of our consciousness, and then we have an imaginative side, but rather, I see the imagination as one of the kinds of functions our reasoning can do. So the way I would start it is to start empiricistically and say we have sensory input from the environment that gets integrated more or less automatically into perceptual level awareness of the environment.
And then much of that goes into our memory.
And we then start to engage in conceptual processes where we are contrasting and comparing what's been presented to us perceptually. And we perform some differentiations and some integrations, and we form concepts, and we then put those together into propositions, and then into narratives and theories and so on. So all of that is the rational building up side of the equation. And I don't see imagination as something separate, but as part of that process. So one of the things we can do is take percepts, perhaps some take a memory of a percept, and we can break that down, attend to certain elements of it, and ignore certain other elements of it in our consciousness. And then having kind of separated out some of those elements, we can do additive functions, adding this to that. And so we can start mixing and matching different perceptual elements in our minds. We can do the same thing at the conceptual level, taking words and concepts that we have built up, and then again doing a mixing and matching of those, trying out. What would happen if I put these words together or those words together, and then more sophisticatedly, what would happen if I took these sentences and integrated them into a little narrative? And along the way, in doing so, we have abstract propositions, or more abstract concepts. We're constantly shuttling back and forth, or up and down levels of abstraction. So we have an abstract proposition that we've put together. We will then seek a perceptual instantiation of that. So I see the imagination then as an aspect of what we are doing when we are functioning rationally. But again, it comes in degree. Sometimes we are not concretizing. We are viewing things in more abstracted symbol, symbolic form. And other times we are sticking more closely to the perceptual level of not abstracting very much. But even there, we can engage our memories of perceptual elements and mix and match them in various ways. And again, I think that is partly, that is a function of the imagination and a part of our rational consciousness. Alright, so that's just to start.
Kick it back to you, Scott.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you. Next, we want to go to River. River. Thanks for your patience.
[00:20:12] Speaker E: Yeah, thank you guys. So I just wanted to ask both Mister Hicks and the folks at the Atlas Society this. So what are your thoughts about Mister Hans Hermann Hopper and his critique of liberal democracy, which, as he sees it, incentivizes this sort of freeloader entitlement mentality, big government, further dependence on state, on state institutions and at the expense of the individual, and like paradoxically, generally quite authoritarian tensions. And where he instead proposes a alternative system of monarchy to defend liberty and private property rights from the state and these freeloaders. So, yeah, what are your thoughts on that Hopkin critique of liberal democracy? If you guys are at all familiar with it.
[00:20:59] Speaker B: Let me say, I've not ever read anything by hopping. I know, seen his name on social media, and some, some people I've read who mentioned him, but I don't have a worked out view. So I have to just say I'm agnostic on that. So let me ask you just to maybe abstracting from Hopi, in particular, what you were saying in the middle, maybe in your own words, what is the core of the critique of liberal democracy that's at issue here?
[00:21:31] Speaker E: So, as I understand it, Harper's critique of liberal democracy centers on his belief that it inherently leads to democratic socialism and the erosion of property rights. So Harper then argues that liberal democracy.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Jump in on that. So what is it about liberal democracy that necessarily causes it to go to democratic socialism?
[00:21:58] Speaker E: Yeah. So he argues that by prioritizing majority rule, it inevitably undermines individual freedoms and economic stability. So. And he contrasts this with monarchy, which he favors because he believes it ensures a longer term perspective in governance. And so monarchs, as hereditary rulers, have invested.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Okay, so the critique then, of liberal democracy really focuses on the democracy part of it, and then the democracy part of it is taken to mean majority rule. And then the claim is that the majority will vote for more socialistic policies. So you'll get to democratic socialism. Is that fair? Yeah.
[00:22:43] Speaker E: Like the short term.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: My response to that would be that what the majority votes for, there's nothing necessitarian about that. What the majority is going to vote for is going to depend on what the prevailing values are in a society.
And so if socialist positions are prevailing, then, yeah, they'll vote for that. If more liberal positions are prevailing, they will vote for that. So I would say there's no necessity here, but rather a matter of cultural education, and whoever's doing the best job of making arguments and marketing them will prevail in a democratic system.
[00:23:31] Speaker E: Thank you. Thank you.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: Great. Jack, did you have another question?
[00:23:38] Speaker E: If not, yeah, I'd like to hear your. Your opinion on it. Atlas?
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I just. I'm not speaking for Atlas, but I've not read hoppy either. I've heard a lot of people, I know that he's thought to be the kind of intellectual godfather of more the Ancap side, but. Stephen, a somewhat related question.
Roger via Twitter, isn't woke ism the end result of unchecked liberalism?
[00:24:14] Speaker B: I've heard this claim made, but I've never heard it kind of articulated in any kind of sophisticated fashion. And on the face of it, it sounds like a bizarre question to me because I don't know what it is in liberalism, at least in classical liberalism, the idea that we take individuals seriously, that we think people are rationally self governing in their own lives, they are serious about a commitment to free speech rights and property rights and liberty rights, that somehow that's going to come out in wokeism. Because when we consider what woke ism is, it seems not at all to take the individual seriously. It's more about group identity politics. They don't seem at all interested in free speech, but rather cancel culture and all of that. And most of them are generally on the left politically. So they are in favor of the strong government on behalf of whatever particular policies they are.
[00:25:26] Speaker A: So big l liberal.
[00:25:29] Speaker B: I don't know what the big l liberal is like.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: You know, a modern democrat is called a liberal.
[00:25:36] Speaker B: All right, so then what you would need to do is then say somehow classical liberalism has to turn into modern welfare state liberalism. And then if you get modern welfare state liberalism, you're going to somehow get to woke ism.
Now once you've gotten to modern big government welfare state so called liberalism, then I think, yeah, there's more of an argument that can be made there because that kind of set of policies is going to undermine people's self responsibility. So they're going to seek refuge in groups for their, for protection, for self identity and so on. Uh, it's going to encourage various kinds of paternalism. It's going to encourage people to say, well, if government is doing all of these things, it might as well do these other things as well. So if the claim is that modern welfare state leads to woke ism, yeah, I'm going to be more sympathetic to that argument. But that's not liberalism as I, as I understand it.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: That's fair. We'll get back to Coden river. But I do want to give Michael a chance since he's just up here. We encourage others as well. Michael, go ahead.
[00:26:58] Speaker G: Hey, thanks for letting me speak. It was just the question of talking about woke ism as being an outgrowth of liberalism.
I don't mean it as an evasion, but you have to define your terms. Woke ism is an ambiguous term and the term liberalism has warped, mutated, congealed, all these.
For the question to be valid, we need more specific terms.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: I agree entirely.
Yes, for sure. You're exactly right.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: Great. Thanks for that feedback. Jag.
[00:27:40] Speaker D: Yeah, Stephen, I had another question here. Again, it's one that I've already answered, but would love to get your take. And that is, what does objectivism have to say about or what would Ayn Rand possibly think about relaxation and a work life balance? And I was intrigued, especially when I heard of your, the enjoyment in your hobby of gardening, how that kind of fits in with productive achievement as man's noblest activity.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Yeah, that's another good question.
I think life is the bigger concept, and the way to think of it is not in terms of there's life, and then work is something else, or you have life and leisure is something else. I think life is the biggest concept, and what one needs to do is see it as constituted by a series of values. And if you really push me, I would say everything is work in the, in the, in the. In the broadest philosophical sense. That is to say that everything takes effort on one's behalf or, and by one in order to achieve the values that constitute one's life. But the kind of values that one is pursuing are, are varied so more narrowly. We talk about work in a work for producing material values to support everything else that you're going to do. And in a division of labor context, we then sometimes specify that even further. To say, I'm going to work for money in order to get those material values that are going to support the rest of things that I'm, that I'm doing.
And that's fine, as long as we're nothing than separating out working for money from, say, the rest of one's life. So often behind that separating out comes an already dysfunctional understanding about working for money. In many cases, people end up doing jobs that they don't like doing. They see it as an imposition on their life, something they have to do. And that then, psychologically, I think, sets up for some from not only not pursuing the values in your life, but also a distorted understanding of the relation of your work to the rest of your life. But to come back directly then to the point of leisure, I think it is partly driven by the fact that we are physiological beings and we have mind body integration. So even if we are doing work that's not overtly physical labor, like farmers in the field, or miners or lumberjacks, we do get tired. And when we are tired, but not quite ready for sleep, we may not be able to function at the level to be pursuing our top values in life, but we still want to engage in value pursuit activities. And so I think here there are places for having values in one life or value pursuits in one life, things that one enjoys doing that add value to your life, but they're not your top values.
Say your top value might be pursuing your career as a scientist or as a poet or a farmer or whatever. And then typically we call those leisure activities. And I think it's important that one's leisure activities be ones that are adding value to your life and engaging you to whatever level of performance one still has energy for. So it could be gardening or watching movies, all of which are providing psychological values with relatively minimal physical input. So I think leisure is an important part of life, and it does need to be chosen mindfully and to whatever level one has energy available for it. It should still be something that engages whatever level of energy one has fully while one is engaged in it. So that's a start.
[00:32:27] Speaker D: Yeah, I took a little bit of a narrower view on it. This whole work life balance.
Everyone who works at the Atlas Society knows my ultimate pet peeve is saying, TGIF. Thank God it's Friday. And so if you have a job where that you're just counting down the minutes to the weekend and you're not in any way looking forward to your work, your productive activity, you know, if you, no matter what the work is, if you can't find some sense of efficacy or purpose or fulfillment, then, you know, it might be time to go back and take some r and r at your personal gulch and rethink your priorities. You know, at the same time, I think with work, of course, Ayn Rand rejected self sacrifice in all its forms. So, you know, on one hand, Howard Rourke wasn't punching the clock at 05:00 p.m. but on the other hand, if you find yourself like Dagny Taggart, working 24/7 yet at every turn your efforts are frustrated. You know, at that point you might need to reconsider whether you are in the right job for you.
[00:33:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I think all of that's well said. I like to focus on the phrase thank God it's Friday. And I agree that most people, when they use that, is how it comes out. And one really wants to have a job or a career in which, thank God it's Monday, is important to you that you actually are looking forward to Monday. If we take the standard work week, you're going to be able to go back to work and you find it engaging and looking forward to it. So if your focus is the opposite of that and you're dreading Monday, and then all week, you just can't wait until it's Friday when you don't have to work anymore, then yes, one does need seriously to rethink and refocus one's life at the same time, I do think it's healthy to say that whatever one's career is, that's not the only thing you want to do in one's life. And I think it could be healthy to have a career where for five days a week, you're going to work hard at your career and make a go of it and enjoy that. But yes, having put those five days in, you're ready for some rest and relaxation, for a different focus. And so you feel some measure of relief. The analogy might be, you know, if you're a professional athlete, you enjoy, say, running, watching the Olympic trials recently, so you know, you're running the five K race and you really enjoy running, and you love the competing, but nonetheless, at the end of the five K race, after you've really run hard, you see the finish line ahead of you, to feel something on the order of, thank God the race is almost over. And I can. I can relax a little bit. So. So that's also, I think, a healthy possibility.
[00:35:53] Speaker A: Fair distinction. Let's go to code of chi again, and then river and then Doctor Kelly again.
Code, are you there?
Yeah.
[00:36:07] Speaker F: Thank you.
Just wanted to make two comments, kind of weave them together, which is the idea that you need to define your terms. Just to comment that with wokeism, it's really like a mutating creature, and it's like its ancestor form would have been communism and post modernism, and a bunch of stuff mixed together. And one of its cloaking features is to make it difficult to define and to destroy the meanings of words.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: Absolutely right. Well said. I think also for the more strategic woke people, as you say, it's obscuring the term, it's obscuring their targets, and it also is kind of a strategic opportunism. So it's not that they have a worked out roadmap of here are the. The three or four cultural fronts and specific issues that we are going to take over the world in terms of as rather looking for weaknesses and whatever the issue might be, when it raises and we spot an opportunity, then we go in on all of that, that issue, and then three months later it might be another issue, and it might be that we're contradicting the things we said nine months ago or two years ago, and all of that is as part of the strategy.
[00:37:37] Speaker A: Great.
[00:37:38] Speaker F: Yes. And I think the thing that I realized recently is like using a concept from David Deutsch of like an enemy of civilization, that an enemy of civilization wants to harm the civilization, and therefore they attack it root and branch. So it's a simplifying sort of thought to go. If it hurts the functioning of the society, they will attack it and then they will, you know, just this next thought on top of that would be they will mask it somehow so that you don't notice that they're doing it.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: Yes, that's right.
[00:38:10] Speaker F: They'll call it compassion.
[00:38:11] Speaker B: And at the high theory level, all of that was worked out quite explicitly in the 1960 by the first generation post modernists. And the, I guess at that point it'd be the second generation critical theorists. So we are seeing mutating forms of that and more applied forms in the last half century.
[00:38:37] Speaker A: Great, let's go to river for a quick follow up, then we'll go back to Doctor Kelly and Michael.
[00:38:44] Speaker E: All right, thank you guys. Well, first off, I just wanted to say I'm really liking everything being said here so far in the space about defending liberty and private rights against the workers and the new egalitarians.
Anyways, my specific question is, do you, Mister Hicks, think John Rawls was a liberal? Like, are Rawlsians, by your estimation, liberals, given their sort of proto woke, left adjacent status? And do you identify yourself as a liberal? Or rather what sort of liberal would you identify as?
[00:39:14] Speaker B: Yeah, good question. On Rawls in particular, he's been a giant on the political philosophy landscape for what would it be, 53 years now?
Theory of justice was published in 1971. Now I would say that Rawls is liberal, but not on the issues that he's most famous for. He was on lots of issues about free speech and other elements of civil society coming out of the liberal tradition. But he's most noted, particularly in a theory of justice, on focusing on economically related issues. And there, I don't think he is fundamentally a liberal. And so the two things I would highlight here are, first, the individualism. Part of liberalism, classically conceived, is that one is an individual, and you take one's individuality and being self responsibility for one's individuality as fundamental, and then you are a free agent to go forth and focusing on the economic issues, make your own way in the world. And what Rawls does right from the beginning is deny that as the proper starting point, one should not see oneself as an individual, as the individual that you are, but rather see oneself as an abstracted individual. And all of your uniqueness and particularity is set aside. So you are, this is the, the being behind the veil of ignorance device. You're to abstract away from your particular individuality to be some sort of abstracted human being. He also then denies that you have a right from the beginning to whatever powers and agencies and assets that come with being the individual that you are, and says that we should treat all of those assets as kind of collectively belonging to society.
And the question is then, from the behind the veil of ignorance perspective, how we as a society, are going to decide the rules by which those assets, now considered a collective set of assets, are going to be distributed in the society.
And that is already, to my way of thinking, a huge backing away from liberalism, classically conceived. And that's the sort of thing that does put him squarely in going back to the earlier question, in not quite welfare state ism, but something closely adjacent to welfare state ism. There's also then the third important element is the justification that Rawls offers for you being able to keep whatever it is that you have produced on the classically liberal position coming out of lock. If you have added value in some way that you have a, you know, by mixing your labor with whatever, then you have by right the, the title to or ownership or a property right to the value that you have created.
But what Rawls does is wants to say that you do not have that right automatically. Instead, you have a right to the value that you have created. If. And then he adds a condition, and it's a social condition. If it can be shown that you're having a title to or a property right in, the value that you have created has benefited other people, and then more specifically, has benefited the least well off people in society. So there, you know, in objectivist language, our use of the concept of altruism, what Rawls is doing is saying that youre right to exist. That is to say, to have the use of some of the values, even that you have created depends on your first serving others and serving especially the least well off. So I see those as three and possibly four significant departures from classically liberal thinking into kind of modern welfare state or I modern, not quite egalitarian, because he does allow for differences in distribution.
But departures from liberalism, as I think the term consistently should be, should be used.
The second part of your question, I do think of myself philosophically as a liberal. I think liberty is a deep concept going down all the way. Metaphysically, I am a free agent to morally, I'm responsible for freely initiating my life and my thinking and my actions to socially. I should be free to associate and dissociate with whom I want. And then politically, I should have freedom rights, if one understands the word liberal. To be talking about all of those concepts and propositions philosophically, then, yes, I am a liberal.
[00:45:26] Speaker A: All right, thank you for that, Doctor Kelly, thank you for waiting.
[00:45:33] Speaker C: I'm going to move on.
Can you hear me?
[00:45:38] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:45:39] Speaker C: Okay, great Scott. I'm going to let you move on because my questions have passed and I see a lot of hands up and I'd much rather listen to them. This is a great conversation, so thanks.
[00:45:52] Speaker A: Great. We'll go to Michael next.
Michael.
[00:45:57] Speaker G: Hey there.
Not a question. I hope you'll forgive a somewhat snarky comment, but the earlier question you answered, Professor Hicks, about those that look forward to Friday, or thank God it's Friday.
I couldn't help think that there's the even deeper hell part of my religious terminology there. But there's even the deeper hell that throughout the work week, there's the person that looks forward to Friday, and then over the course of the weekend, they switch it around and be like, oh, thank God, it's Monday. I'm away from my family.
Such an imbalanced individual is living in a terrible hell, and I wish them the best and find a way to pull their lives together.
[00:46:49] Speaker B: Anyway, what you're saying is there are people in their overall life, things that could or should be their two top values, their careers and their families. They're dysfunctional in both of them. So precisely. So neither the work week nor the family weekend is providing value to.
That really would be hell.
[00:47:15] Speaker G: The one anecdote.
[00:47:26] Speaker A: Oh, Michael, I don't know if you. Well, I have another question here, Steven.
Brian asks, why do academic philosophers, by and large, fail to actually engage objectivist arguments in a meaningful way?
Why does the very suggestion that they engage her work seriously evoke Snickers as if doing so is beneath them?
[00:47:55] Speaker B: Yes, journalistically, I think that's an accurate description. There's a significant number of academics who do not do that, who understand Rand and do a good job of articulating her. But you're right, there's a significant number of people who don't do that. I think there's a number of things that I would throw out there. One is the political that it's no secret that for the last hundred years or so, the academics have been, by and large, left leaning, particularly in the humanities, where if Rand is first going to be engaged, it's going to be in the humanities. So to the extent that they are political animals, they're not interested in engaging with someone who is a capitalist, much less kind of a gung ho romantic capitalist of the Ayn Rand objectivist sort, I would say even among. A closely related point is that there is, in the 20th century now into the 21st century, more professionalization of the academy. So there are higher hurdles in place for anyone who is not an academic to be taken seriously. Inside the academic world, such people are written off just as popularizers and so on. So the fact that Rand was not an academic puts her not necessarily beyond the tail, but as outside of initially serious discussion. Now, put those two points together. Rand was pro capitalism and not an academic. But if you look at pro capitalists who were academics in the 20th century, so people like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and so on, these are all people who, who other academic or whom rather other academics would have to recognize as academics. But nonetheless, there was serious hostility toward both of them by other academics. So those were two people who clearly overcame the hurdle of not being non academics. They were academics, but the political animals among the academy did not want it all to take them, to take them seriously. I think another factor is that much of the academic world, even if you set aside the politics and the academic credentialism that's there, the 20th century academics in the humanities were characterized largely by an anti romantic sense of life. If you think of the major novelist one's supposed to read, if you are a literate person, James Joyce and William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams and Eugene Ionesco, and a lot of it is about depression and sexual dysfunction and alcoholism and people who ultimately commit suicide.
Nothing much happens and so forth. And the sense of life, of what it takes, means to be a serious person in the humanities, dwelling on the meaning of life, that's your psychological space. So for someone like Rand in her novels, to come along and present a heroic life as adventure, romantic conception of what life could be, that's just rubbing salt in their wounds. It just seems like an alien person. She can't possibly be serious, she can't possibly be deep. And so they're just not going to want to engage with her works. So I think those are probably the biggest factors. I think there are some others that worth discussing, but I think they are further, further down the list. I'll stop there for now.
[00:52:28] Speaker A: Okay, good start. John v. On postmodernism. How can a failed philosophical system be so virulent a force that has permeated every facet of society?
[00:52:43] Speaker B: Yes, good question.
The second part, I don't know that it has penetrated or permeated. Permeate is a strong concept. Every facet of society. I would say it's had some impact on every facet of society. With some aspects of our society, I think significant ones are still quite healthy. And while one can find some postmodern inroads, they're not yet serious. In those sectors of sectors of societies, we're still largely an enlightenment culture, healthy, modernist, pro reason, pro individuals, pro progress, values going on. Nonetheless, I think the spirit of the question to say, to be that, however that may be post modernism, is a failed philosophy. I think that's true, but nonetheless, it has ensconced itself in some important sectors of society, and in some of those sectors, it's. It's the dominant form of thinking about the world, jaded, cynical, adversarial, sometimes even destructive for its own, for its own sake, and marked by deep emotional pessimism and a willingness to just burn things down and revel in the, revel in the destruction. And how is this possible?
Well, I think part of it is going to be philosophical.
I think for that we would have to just recognize that two generations ago, philosophy and the high intellectual parts of the academic world were in a very skeptical place, where in both the anglo american analytic traditions, they'd reach various dead ends, and continental traditions, they had already long reached dead ends and were wallowing in it for a generation or two. And that kind of provided a vacuum. And in part it was accidental what was going to come along and fill that vacuum. But the postmoderns did fill that intellectual vacuum and started being recognized as the sexy, cutting edge and attracted a significant number of people to what they were doing there. So, and there was no real serious answers to them by the serious intellectuals for some decades. So they were able to multiply themselves in the high academic spaces. I think the politics is important. I think western liberal capitalism, democratic republicanism kind of was resting on it, on its laurels.
After World War two, I think we fought, or the Nazis fought the fascists and had beaten them. We pulled ourselves out of the depression. So I think that while we were saying, let's take it easy and enjoy life for a while, some of the totalitarian types were repackaging themselves and restrategizing themselves while we were living the good life.
And I think a lot of that also is true of the more recent generation after it seemed like we were going to win the cold war in the 1980s, going on into the 1990s, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down, and I think for a while then also those of us who were broadly liberal, democratic, republican, free market types that said, okay, so we've won. Basically, everybody's going to come on board and we're all going to go off into a bright, shiny future. We don't have to worry about the fascists and the totalitarians and so on. They failed. Everybody knows that we've wondez and we kind of rested on our laurels and were off trying to live the good life for a while.
But again, the far left and the totalitarian types, not all of them on the left, were busy rethinking and restrategizing, and then they just came back out in ugly form. So I think some working out of all of that would have to be part of the full explanation.
I think a part of it, though, also is going to be that we've culturally not fully worked out a defense of reason and individualism and rational self interest and a moral defense of capitalism. Those things. I think we have a lot of that at our disposal, but it's still not fully worked out, and it certainly has not been well marketed by the objectivist movement and our fellow travelers.
So our successes have been modest, but I think we need something much more robust if we're going to overcome what the question rightly points out is that it's some pretty nasty stuff that has been perceived as kind of the progressive and sexy and the cutting edge, no matter how dark it is.
[00:58:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good assessment. There is much more to be done.
We are coming up on the end here. River, I don't know if we'll be able to properly do justice to another question, but here's a real quick one from Martin. What's your take on the human attraction to dystopianism? Maybe that includes Rand.
[00:58:53] Speaker B: Hmm.
I think the attraction of dystopianism is not of one piece. I think there's a few different psychologies that are at work. I think one is if one is profoundly pessimistic or dark of vision than in dystopian portrayals. One responds aesthetically to that because it affirms in a deep way what you think and feel to be true of the world and its future. I think a less strong version of that is that there is an attraction of dystopianism in the sense of, as human beings, cognitively, we want to build the best life we can for ourselves. But part of proper doing that is thinking about worst case scenarios and working through what those could be and having contingency plans in place for doing for what your one is going to do when worst case scenarios are right. So it's partly a cognitively healthy thing to do, to spend some time in the negative spaces and that I think then, is to say what art in part does is it works out various possibilities.
And I think it's good even for optimistic and healthy people to spend some time with movies that are exploring the negative possibilities, making them perceptually real, so that you're in that world for a couple of hours and you think about the possibilities and what it would be like and what one would need to do in order to try to defend off. So in that way, it's kind of a reaffirmation by denial, or it's reducing things to the negative. And you're aware of what you can possibly lose or what the problems could be, and they are made visually and emotionally, emotionally real to you so that you are then redoubled in not only in your intellectual efforts, but in your emotional efforts to make sure that those don't actually happen.
[01:01:13] Speaker A: Wow. Well, very strong answers tonight. I look forward to listening back on the replay just to do some, you know, re chewing. But thank you, Steven, to all of you for joining us today. If you enjoyed this or any of our other materials, please consider making a tax deductible donation at atlas society.org dot. We'll be back with a different scholar each week in July. Thank you.
[01:01:40] Speaker B: All right. Thanks for hosting, Scott. Thanks for good questions, everyone. Bye for now.
