Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, for sure. So beyond this idea that Milton Friedman takes a while to come to his justification of capitalism, whereas Ayn Rand has it from the start. She really focuses on the core quality of rationalism and rationality. Rationality is the defining feature of human beings, and so she works from there, whereas Milton Friedman eventually converges on this idea of freedom. So, that’s one part of it. The other is their intellectual styles are really, really different. Their interpersonal styles are really different. So, Friedman has big ideas, big principles that guide him, but he’s also deeply empirical. He spends most of his career doing historical research, economic research, pulling data from how people actually make economic decisions, and live in the world, and using them to test and refine his theories. Where Rand, to some degree, we could say she’s empirical and that she lives through the Russian Revolution, and takes a very big lesson from that, but her style of thinking is really first principles, an axiomatic approach going from the basic idea of rationality, and then playing it out in different spheres. So, those are just very different intellectual approaches, and then they lead in some ways to really different ways of thinking about how you get things done in the world. Ayn Rand is a purist. She wants to start with the pure belief. She doesn’t want it to be diluted. One of her favorite sayings was, “It’s earlier than you think.” In other words, we’re still moving towards a place where we can really hold and express these ideals purely. Friedman, although he didn’t use this terminology, he was much more half a loaf guy like, “I’ll take what I can get, and then I’ll try to move to where I really want to be.” But he is able to compromise, especially when he moves from being an economist into being more of a political thinker. So, that’s a really different intellectual style, and then it also plays out in their lives, and that Ayn Rand is incredibly schismatic. I mean, she wants her friends to believe what she believes and support what she supports. She’s willing to break a relationship if it doesn’t match. Milton Friedman, he also does tend to have friends who agree with him, yet he’s always willing to debate his opponents, and he’s willing to do so with a smile on his face. He’s a happy warrior, and he actually will win a lot of debates simply by his emotional affect and his cheerfulness and his confidence, where Rand will lose debates because she gets so angry in the face of disagreement. So, they have a lot of similarities and a lot of differences, and it’s been really fascinating to dive deep into both of them. I just re-listened to Ayn Rand’s, I think, last lecture, or at least it’s called that, and just the confrontational nature of how she answers questions or how she addresses critics and so on. There is a kind of charisma to that. So, I think both of them are very effective at winning over a popular support, but in very different styles. It seems like Ayn Rand is very cranky, but I mean, is the most charismatic, cranky person I think I’ve ever listened to. I mean, people talked about her, meeting her, and coming to believe in her ideas in a similar way as they did with Marxism, and that suddenly everything made sense, and that when they came to believe in objectivism, they felt they had this engine for understanding the entire world. Now after a while for most people, that then became confining, but that certainty. Friedman had some of that as well. He clothed it differently. He clothed it in happiness where Rand closed it, as you said, in crankiness or anger. I mean, there’s also an arc to Rand. She gets angrier and angrier and crankier and crankier over the course of her life. What I enjoyed about my research is I was able to get into this early moment when she was different and a little more open, and then I watched her close and her harden over time.…

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