Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, it’s always sad, and it always makes me wonder about the private, secret conversations between partners because they might not show up in the record, but they probably influence the person more than almost anything else, those quiet little conversations. If we can switch our path to another great mind of the 20th century, Ayn Rand, we talked about some of the similarities here, about them being fighters for freedom and fighters for capitalism. What is Ayn Rand’s philosophy? If you can give a big 10 summary of objectivism? Yeah, so she called it objectivism. She used to do this thing, “I can stand on one foot and say it.” It goes something like, “Epistemology, reason, ethics, selfishness, politics, capitalism.” That was how she summarized it. So what she did, there’s a couple of things she did with objectivism. First of all, she says the key defining element of humanity is rationalism, the rational faculty. That’s what defines what humanity is. Therefore, there is an objective reality that we can access a know with our reason. That’s the objective epistemology. And the one social and economic system that lets rationality flower and is based upon rationality is capitalism. And then rationality only works in her view as an individual capacity and that rationality teaches that what you should do is pursue your interests. And so she ends up calling that selfishness. Now, it’s tricky because selfishness has so many strong and negative connotations, and she meant I think something closer to self-actualization, because she really tried to create this idea and express the idea that to be truly selfish did not mean trampling on others. It meant just being motivated by your own internal measures and metrics. And so in her fiction, she tries to show this by showing the false selfishness of some of Peter Keating, who’s an architect who steps over everybody to advance his career. And she says, “That’s not true selfishness because true selfishness would recognize it’s false to take others’ work and pass it off as your own.” Now, the other big piece of objectivism is a very approach that’s really inspired and related to Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of revaluing values or a genealogy of morals. And so she says, ” What’s happened here is Western culture has converged on this idea of altruism as good. Being selfless and altruistic is good. And this has led us to communism and has led us to devalue the individual in favor of the collective. So what we need is a new moral code which elevates selfishness, which elevates the individual, and which takes all the things that we have been told are bad and actually says their values.” This is what she’s trying to do with objectivism. I mean, it is about as ambitious of an intellectual project as there can be, and that’s what really draws people in. Yet at the same time, she’s flying in the face of the way human morals and ethics and societies have evolved, and she’s not able to single-handedly recreate them the way she wants them to be. Yeah, I mean, she’s not doing herself any favors by taking on the words and trying to rebrand them completely writing the virtue of selfishness. It’s like, can we just call it a self-actualization?…

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