Read Part 1 here.

What the Right to Freedom of Expression Means and Protects

I’ve now briefly discussed the individualist justification for the right to freedom of speech or freedom of expression.1 Now let’s consider in a bit more detail what the content of this right is, what the right encompasses, and what it does not.

The right to freedom of expression, like all rights, sanctions and protects an individual’s freedom to take certain actions. As the philosopher Ayn Rand formulates the point in a seminal essay, “The concept of a ‘right’ pertains only to action — specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.”2 The right to property, for instance, “is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.”3

No right guarantees a specific outcome. Just as the right to property protects your freedom of action to, for instance, pan for gold on your land and to own any gold you discover, but does not guarantee that you will discover any gold — so the right to the pursuit of happiness protects your freedom of action to try to build a happy life, but doesn’t guarantee that you will succeed. Similarly, the right to freedom of speech “does not mean that others must provide a man with a printing press, a publishing house, a newspaper, a theater or a television studio through which to express his views.”4 It sanctions and protects only a certain form of action: “the freedom to advocate one’s views and to bear the possible consequences, including disagreement with others, opposition, unpopularity and lack of support.”5

For something to be an individual right, it must be co-possible, which means every individual must enjoy the same freedom of action, and no individual can legitimately interfere with the sphere of action protected by another’s right. Your rights entail that other people refrain from trespassing on your rights, just as their similar rights entail that you refrain from trespassing on their rights. But rights do not require that other people perform any particular action: that requires their voluntary, uncoerced consent.

The right to freedom of association, for example, means that you can try to associate with whomever you choose — and that other people can refuse to associate with you and go their separate way. The right to freedom of trade means that you can buy and sell with whomever you choose — and that other people can refuse to buy from you if, say, they think the price you’re asking is too high, or refuse to sell to you if they think the price you’re offering is too low. The same goes for freedom of speech. Important in understanding this right is understanding that “Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to agree, not to listen and not to support one’s own antagonists.”6

It is important to understand, in the context of hate speech laws and other proposed abridgments of the right to freedom of expression, that the exercise by an individual of any of her rights can and often will affect other people in ways they judge both positively and negatively. But neither are grounds to abridge the right — not so long as those other people retain the same rights, that is, the same freedom of action. This means in particular that the fact that one person’s exercise of her rights “harms” (i.e., in some way negatively affects) another person is not sufficient grounds to outlaw the action.

For example, I may paint the front door of my house red, a color my neighbor dislikes, or plant a maple tree in my backyard, a type of tree that unfortunately evokes for my neighbor memories of home and a difficult childhood. But these negatives experienced by my neighbor, though real, don’t give her veto power over the color I paint my front door or the trees I plant in my backyard, not so long as she retains the same freedom of action: She can paint her front door green and plant birch trees in her yard.

Or: I may open a new office building for a thousand employees, and the increased lunchtime foot traffic may help make nearby restaurants more profitable. But though this positive effect on the restaurants is real, it doesn’t entitle me to veto their increased sales unless they share with me a portion of their increased profits. If I wanted to try to take advantage of the increase in foot traffic, I retain the same freedom of action as those restaurant owners: I could open and run my own restaurant.

Or: smartphone manufacturers like Apple may make the cameras on iPhones so good that most people stop buying film or digital cameras, and companies like Canon lose sales. But this negative, though real, does not give Canon veto power over the smartphones Apple can design and sell, not so long as Canon retains the same freedom of action: Like Apple, Canon is free to try to design and sell its own smartphones.

The same goes for the right to freedom of expression. Consider first the commercial realm. If Apple advertises the cameras on its latest iPhones — a form of expression Apple of course regularly engages in — and those advertisements persuade customers to buy an iPhone over a Canon PowerShot camera, Apple’s expression does result in a negative for Canon. But this negative does not give Canon the right to demand that Apple’s advertising be silenced, not so long as Canon retains the same freedom of action: the freedom to advertise its own cameras and try to persuade people to buy them.

Consider now the intellectual and ideological realms. Atheists may persuade people to abandon their religion, and churches may see a drop in attendance. Though a real, negative effect, it does not give priests the right to demand that atheists be censored, not so long as the priests retain the same freedom of action, the freedom to try to persuade people that they should not abandon but embrace religion. Even if the priests are scandalized and upset by the atheists’ views, which they regard as blasphemous, this does not give them the right to demand that atheists be silenced.

Or: a socialist or white nationalist may persuade people of their collectivistic doctrines, and in the process teach people to hate and despise large swaths of other people, be it profit-seeking businessmen in the case of socialism or darker-skinned individuals and immigrants in the case of white nationalism. This may lead to a social atmosphere that is less benevolent, less welcoming, less American, and to demands for the passage of anti-business or anti-immigration laws, which are certainly experienced as real negatives by the individuals being demeaned.7 But in neither case do the opponents of socialism or of white nationalism have the right to demand that socialists or white nationalists be censored, not so long as they possess the same freedom of action: The opponents are free to try to persuade people of the irrationality of socialism and of white nationalism (and I hope they exercise this freedom).

It may surprise you that I list socialism as an irrational doctrine that foments hatred against innocent people, but that is part of the point. Though this is my actual evaluation of socialism, I’m not trying to convince you of the truth of that evaluation.8 Rather, the example illustrates that what constitutes irrational doctrines that foment unjust hatred against whole groups of people is a contentious matter. As in today’s world, historically this has been an issue over which there has been heated disagreement. Catholics have regarded Protestant doctrines in this way, and Protestants likewise have regarded Catholic doctrines in this way, similarly for Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for some Enlightenment thinkers toward Christian doctrines and for some Christians toward Enlightenment doctrines, for abolitionists toward proslavery doctrines and for enslavers toward abolitionist doctrines, for capitalists toward the doctrines of socialism and for socialists toward the doctrines of capitalism. Whose speech should hate speech laws ban — and by what right? These examples from history help showcase, from another angle, the danger of claiming that your neighbors have the right to veto your freedom of expression if they consider what you say irrational, hateful, or demonizing of large groups of people.

As an individual, the only right you possess to oppose expression which you regard as evil is to ignore the speaker and walk away or to engage in counterspeech. To the government we delegate the power to enforce our rights, but it is not within my rights to silence my neighbor, even when I abhor what she is saying, and it’s not within her rights to silence me, even when she abhors what I’m saying. Just as her expression, however objectionable to me, does not interfere with or trespass on my freedom of action, so my expression, however objectionable to her, does not interfere with or trespass on her freedom of action.

What the Right to Freedom of Speech Does Not Protect

If the individual’s right to freedom of expression is indeed a right, then, like all rights, it is absolute: It permits no breaches or exceptions. Many defenders of free speech deny this. They contend that the right to freedom of expression is compatible with some exceptions, such as legal prohibitions against threats, incitements to violence, and harassment. For the legitimacy of hate speech laws in particular, then, the question becomes whether or not they too should be considered allowable exceptions to the right to freedom of expression.

Nadine Strossen, for example, in her book HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, writes approvingly that

government may punish speech when necessary to avert serious harm that cannot be averted through non-censorial measures — notably, law enforcement and counterspeech. Accordingly, government may punish “hate speech” (or speech conveying any other message) when, in context, it directly, demonstrably, and imminently causes certain specific, objectively ascertainable serious harms. The Supreme Court has identified several kinds of situations in which speech satisfies this general emergency standard, specifying particular criteria for each. These criteria are appropriately strict, to circumscribe officials’ opportunity to assert the potential harm as a pretext for suppressing speech merely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or feared.9

She goes on to discuss, among a few others, such emergency exceptions as “True Threats,” “Punishable Incitement,” and “Harassment.”10

But this conceptualization in terms of emergencies and exceptions is misguided. Many types of actions involve, or at least often involve, speech or other forms of expression and communication. This does not mean that all such actions are protected by the right to freedom of expression or that a legal system, in order to prohibit these actions, must carve out exceptions to the right to freedom of expression. Properly understood, threats, incitement, and harassment are not exceptions to the right to freedom of expression; they are actions that fall outside the protection of this right in the first place. Why? Because these acts are, in essence, not acts of expression or communication to a willing audience, which is free to walk away (and engage in counterspeech), but acts of coercion, which seek to override other people’s voluntary choices and consent.

To see this, let’s briefly consider the nature of threats, incitement, and harassment.

Threats

If I walk into a bank and declare, “This is a stick up. Hand over all your cash!” — and the police come to arrest me, it’s absurd for me to protest that the police are interfering with my right to freedom of expression, since, after all, I was just having a conversation with the teller. Why is my protest absurd? Because I have introduced into the situation physical coercion. I have changed my relationship with the bank from the voluntary to the coercive. If, say, I don’t like the interest rate the bank is offering, I’m free to go elsewhere; if the bank considers my initial deposit to be below its minimum threshold for that particular kind of savings account, it can refuse to open an account for me. Each of us is free to walk away if we don’t consent to the particular terms the other is offering. But this is no longer true after my threat. The teller cannot just walk away — not without the worry that I might put a bullet in his back if he does.

It does not matter if I actually have a gun with me or not, or if I do, whether I intend to start shooting if the teller refuses my demand. As long as it is reasonable for the teller to think I might carry out my threat, his decision-making should no longer be seen as fully voluntary but as coerced, as occurring under physical duress. This is why such threats are prohibited by law. The verbal threat that I may resort to physical coercion if I don’t get my way is the introduction of coercion into the relationship. It is my declaration that I will not let the other party walk away, that I will deny them that freedom of action, that is, deny them that right. The police do not have to wait until I start shooting before they arrest me.

The essence of a threat is that it is not an act of persuasion, rational or irrational, in which the other party is free to walk away if they disagree, but an attempt to bypass the need for persuasion. What a court must decide, therefore, is whether an actual threat has been made; if it decides that a threat has been made, there is no legitimate objection that prohibiting the threat violates the right to freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.

Incitement

Perhaps the easiest way to grasp the essential nature of incitement is to see its similarity to plotting a crime, which properly is held to be an illegal activity on the part of the co-conspirators. Like many other forms of criminal activity, plotting a crime involves speech or expression. A crew of four who are planning to rob a bank will be communicating with one another. Which bank are they targeting? What kind of security system does it have? Where will they get the explosives to blast off the safe’s door? Who will drive the getaway car? And how will they split the money afterward? This is what they are discussing. But for the law to treat the plotting of a crime as itself a crime is not an interference with the plotters’ freedom of speech, for the same basic reason as in the case of threats: The plotters are introducing physical coercion into human affairs.

The plotters are not planning to make the bank an offer — “We want to buy all your deposits on hand for a thousand dollars, do you accept?” — an offer the bank is free to refuse. The plotters are planning to physically seize the bank’s deposits without the bank’s consent. In such a situation, the police do not have to wait until the plotters enter the bank, or blow off the safe’s door, or start driving away with the money, before they can arrest the plotters. The attempt to rob the bank begins with the active plotting and becomes criminal at that point for all who are actively involved. Even if the mastermind of the plot plans to stay home and to send only his henchmen to enter the bank and seize the money, all are guilty of a crime.

Incitement can be regarded as hatching a criminal plot in the moment. It is more spontaneous, less considered or deliberative than, say, plotting to rob a bank, but no less criminal. For instance, if a group of people is protesting an election result outside a government building, and someone in the group starts to egg the crowd on, to declare that they will never get justice, that they will lose their country if they don’t do something now, and that maybe they should take the law into their own hands, maybe some government officials need to be hanged, and these words help rile up the crowd, and the crowd storms into the government building, the person who helped rile up the crowd is guilty of incitement, as if he helped plot the crime. In other words, he is part of the action of breaking into the government building, even if he, like the mastermind who plotted a bank robbery, never entered the bank. Of course, the individuals breaking into the government building are also guilty of a crime, like the henchmen who break into the bank, but the point is that so is the inciter, who actively helped launch the action.

And again, the fact that the action of incitement, like the action of plotting, involves speech does not mean that in legally prohibiting it, the government is interfering with freedom of speech or carving out some exception to the right to freedom of speech. Just as plots to initiate the use of physical coercion are not essentially acts of expression, so inciting others to initiate the use of physical coercion is not essentially an act of expression. Both are attempts to coerce others, to bypass their voluntary participation and consent, and their freedom to walk away.

Harassment and Disturbances of the Peace

Like threats and incitement, certain forms of harassment and certain forms of disturbances of the peace are also often categorized as permissible exceptions to the right to freedom of speech, but should not be. If I follow a man or woman through the subway system of New York City, commenting on their appearance and attractiveness, or if every morning I ring the doorbells of all the houses on my street, trying to convince their occupants to convert to Christianity, I’m guilty of harassment. And it is not a legitimate defense for me to say that I’m expressing my views, so my action is protected by the First Amendment. Precisely because I am not allowing the other person to consent to the activity — to decide if they want to listen and engage or not — I cannot claim that my action is part of the freedom of action protected by the right to freedom of expression.

Similarly, if in the backyard of my house, I play my speaker system so loud that it disturbs my neighbors, I am guilty of disturbing the peace. The freedom of action encompassed by my freedom of speech never included the freedom to blare my speaker system outdoors at 110 decibels. Individual rights, as I indicated above, must be co-possible. I have the right to listen to what I want to listen to, but so do my neighbors. That in blaring my speaker system, I’m disturbing the peace really means that I’m depriving my neighbors of their freedom of action to decide what they want and don’t want to listen to. My music is so loud that even if they don’t want to listen to it, the sound nevertheless intrudes upon them. There is no right to trespass on the rights of others, in this case, on their right to freedom of expression. I never had the right to force my neighbors to listen to the music I like, and in prohibiting me from doing so, the government is not carving out an exception to freedom of expression but is rather protecting my neighbor’s right to freedom of expression.

In short, threats, incitements, and verbal harassment and disturbances of the peace are not exceptions to the right to freedom of speech. They are not essentially acts of expression and should not be classified as such. If a legal system prohibits these actions — and when these actions are properly defined and delimited, it should — it is not carving out exceptions to freedom of expression.

Conclusion

The right to freedom of speech is an absolute. Any individual who values his own pursuit of the true and the good should claim the right to freedom of thought and to freedom of expression. She should never relinquish these rights, never cede to government the power to censor any form of expression, to infringe in any way on the individual’s right to think and speak freely. But in embracing freedom of expression as an absolute, one is not thereby forced to tolerate threats, incitement, harassment, and the like as the supposed price one must pay for a free society, because such acts are not essentially expressive acts. They are acts that introduce physical coercion into human relationships, acts that seek to bypass other people’s voluntary consent and participation, and the legal prohibition of these acts is compatible with, indeed often part of protecting, the right to freedom of expression.

^[1] “Expression” is the better term, encompassing as it does both verbal and nonverbal content, such as that of a symphony or ballet.

^[2] Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights,” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964), 110 (https://courses.aynrand.org/works/mans-rights/).

^[3] Ibid., 110–11.

^[4] Ayn Rand, “Freedom of Speech,” in The Ayn Rand Column, rev. 2nd ed. (New Milford: Second Renaissance Books, 1998), 71.

^[5] Rand, “Man’s Rights,” 114.

^[6] Ayn Rand, “The Fascist New Frontier,” in The Ayn Rand Column, 106.

^[7] If anti-business or anti-immigration laws are actually passed in the United States, I contend that they should often be declared unconstitutional by the courts because the laws abridge the third fundamental right explicitly mentioned in the Declaration and featured prominently in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution: the right to liberty. But that, of course, is an argument for another time.

^[8] But for a bit more on this evaluation of socialism, see the entry on socialism in The Ayn Rand Lexicon (New York: Penguin, 1998), 463–66 (https://courses.aynrand.org/lexicon/socialism/); and Rand’s essay, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 44–62.

^[9] Nadine Strossen, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 59. As the title of her book should make clear, Strossen does not regard hate speech laws as legitimate exceptions to freedom of speech.

^[10] Ibid., 59–68.

In 1947, Ayn Rand published Screen Guide for Americans. Her analysis of how collectivist ideas can penetrate American art and culture remains as relevant today as when she published it seventy-nine years ago. Rand wrote the original twelve-page guide while she was working as a contract screenwriter in Hollywood. At the time, she was actively engaged in efforts to oppose communist influence in the motion-picture industry. The guide was, in part, a response to those Americans (and especially American filmmakers) who believed that ideological and philosophical issues were irrelevant to their work.

Rand believed that because the defenders of Americanism had abdicated the realm of ideas, that this vacuum was filled by collectivist intellectuals. They did not necessarily spread their ideas onscreen through explicit political slogans, but built-in moral assumptions, such as portraying the pursuit of wealth as evil.

In this discussion, Elan Journo and Brandon Lisi explore the historical circumstances that led Rand to write the essay, the deeper philosophical ideas behind her analysis, and the significance of ARI Press’s new authoritative edition. They also discuss Michael Berliner’s new afterword and the archival materials that illuminate Rand’s work in Hollywood, including additional documents now available through the Ayn Rand Archives.

Topics include:

• What’s new in ARI Press’s authoritative edition of Screen Guide for Americans

• Why Ayn Rand wrote Screen Guide for Americans in 1947

• Communist influence in 1940s Hollywood

• How propaganda can influence a culture without explicit political slogans

• How to access additional archival materials related to the “Screen Guide” online

Resources:

• Ayn Rand, Screen Guide for Americans

• Archival Supplement: Screen Guide for Americans archival supplement

Recorded on August 25, 2026.

A previous version of this article stated that Screen Guide for Americans was published in 1946 and was seven pages long. The correct year is 1947, and the original pamphlet was 12 pages long. The seven-page count referred to a condensed version published in Plain Talk magazine. We regret these errors and apologize for the oversight.

Thumbnail image: Bettmann via Getty Images

9/11 was one of the most consequential events of the 21st century. Yet twenty-five years later, the attacks and their aftermath are still widely misunderstood. In two consecutive talks at our student conference in Austin, Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo analyzed America’s failures before and after 9/11, drawing on more than two decades of work on the subject. They show how the self-abasing morality of altruism shaped American policy, leading the US to betray its ideals, appease its enemies, sacrifice its soldiers, and lose its wars. This double lecture is a must-watch for anyone who cares about America and wants to make it secure.

Among the topics covered are:

• How 9/11 was experienced and perceived in the immediate aftermath

• The religious, modernity-hating motivation behind 9/11

• America’s emboldening of Islamists in the decades before 9/11

• America’s abject, craven response to the Danish cartoons of Muhammad

• The intellectual rot 9/11 exposed and Objectivism’s potential to change it

• How American altruism crippled its troops’ ability to fight

• How America refused to recognize or defeat its enemies

• The devastating consequences of our altruistic approach to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars

• Q&A

Resources:

• Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo, Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: What Went Wrong After 9/11.

The livestream was recorded on September 11, 2026 at the Ayn Rand Con event for students in Austin, Texas.

Free Speech Absolutism (Part 1)

With the exception of the United States, hate speech laws prevail throughout the Westernized world. In my native country, Canada, for example, “Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, willfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of (a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or (b) an offence punishable on summary conviction.”1 Canadian law puts special emphasis on denial of the Holocaust: “Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, willfully promotes antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust (a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or (b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.”2

As these sections of Canadian law should make clear, what is being legally prohibited is speech. The government has the power to censor the expression of certain ideas or viewpoints. In the United States, by virtue of the First Amendment, hate speech laws such as these would (or at least should) be declared unconstitutional. “Congress shall make no law,” the First Amendment reads in part, “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”3 No matter how irrational or abhorrent the content of a person’s speech, no law means no law.

The US Constitution, in other words, deprives the government of the power to censor; it treats the right to freedom of speech as absolute, permitting no legal abridgement, no carving out of exceptions. This, I will argue, is the correct approach to freedom of speech. Or at least if the fundamentally new form of government that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution brought into existence is the correct form of government, which I believe it is, then freedom of speech should be regarded as an individual, absolute, inviolable right.

The New, American Form of Government

The radicalism of the American Revolution consists in rooting proper government, not in the theories of collectivism but of individualism. Previous forms of government regarded the individual as subordinate to the state and its goals or ends. The individual was a subject, the quasi property or possession of the nation as a whole and its representatives or spokesmen, be it the king or the pope or the aristocracy or the majority, who were responsible for upholding the collective will. On this conception of government, a collective good — the glory of our nation, the propagation of our religion, the advancement of the public interest — transcends the interests and life of the individual. The individual is subordinate to this collectivist goal, a mere means to an end.

In principle, though certainly not in full practice given the continuation of slavery, the Declaration and Constitution broke with this long-standing view. The individual was no longer viewed as subordinate to some higher goal or end embodied by the state. The individual was the end, the state the means. That the individual has a right to the pursuit of her own happiness, a moral right to live her own life, preexists government.4 Government, properly, is created solely to secure and protect these rights: a proper government protects the freedom of every individual to pursue her own happiness. On this new conception of government, we as individuals are no longer subjects but citizens. As citizens, we are not subordinate to government; government is subordinate to each of us. As the Declaration famously states these points,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.5

Thus, representative, constitutionally limited government came into existence. The government is the representative of the individual: each individual delegates to government the power to secure and protect her rights, her legitimate freedom of action. That is the only enforcement power she can delegate to government. And that delegation establishes the only legitimate function of government: to secure and protect the rights of each and every individual within its jurisdiction, including, as the First Amendment makes clear, the right to freedom of speech.

Freedom of Speech under Collectivist Forms of Government

Under collectivist forms of government, the ruling authorities have the power to censor the speech of individuals in order to further the specific collectivist goal that the state is thought to embody or secure. If, for instance, the glory of our nation or the propagation of our religion is thought best served by silencing a particular individual, the authorities lawfully can silence that individual. The Church’s censoring of Galileo by the charge of heresy to prevent him from expounding the heliocentric theory of the solar system is an important historical case in point, one with which the creators of America’s new form of government were certainly familiar.6

Today, we can see this same collectivist approach in Canadian hate speech laws. At first glance, Canada seems to recognize the individual’s absolute right to freedom of expression in terms similar to those of the First Amendment. Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and religion; (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; (c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and (d) freedom of association.”7

But in reality, these supposed guarantees of the individual’s freedom of thought and expression are not held by right. They are held by permission of the government, as the enforcer of a collectivist goal, in this case, the public interest. Section 1 of the Charter states that “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”8 In terms of freedom of thought and expression, this means that so long as the individual exercises his thought and expression in a way that the government deems to be in the public interest, the government permits the individual to do so. But if he exercises his thought and expression in a way that is deemed to harm the public interest, the government can censor him. This is precisely what the Canadian hate speech laws do: they outlaw the expression of certain content when expression of that content is deemed incompatible with the so-called public interest.9

Just as the Canadian government can censor speech, it can permit speech with the very same content when it deems that speech to be in the public interest. A valid defense against the charge of hate speech, as mentioned in an earlier endnote, is to show that one’s “statements were relevant to any subject of public interest [emphasis mine], the discussion of which was for the public benefit [emphasis mine], and if on reasonable grounds he believed them to be true.”

In Canada, as in other countries with hate speech laws, freedom of speech is not an absolute; it is not an individual right, but a permission granted by the state in the name of a collectivist goal, a permission that can be and sometimes is rescinded in the name of that collectivist goal.

Freedom of Speech under the New American Form of Government

The US approach is fundamentally different because it is individualistic, not collectivistic. Neither the Declaration nor the US Constitution charges the government with the task of advancing the public interest when the “public interest” is conceived to, at least sometimes, transcend the interests and rights of specific individuals. The task of the government is to secure the rights of each and every individual, not to abridge any individual’s rights in the name of some collectivist goal or cause. And in the American approach, the rights to freedom of thought and speech are regarded as integral to the rights listed in the Declaration: the individual’s rights to life and the pursuit of happiness. Why?

To live my own life and pursue my own happiness, I have to possess the freedom to chart and then travel my own course, to figure out for myself what is true and good and to then follow through on my convictions in action, all the while recognizing and respecting the same freedom of action of every other individual in my society. The authors of the Declaration and Constitution understood that the pursuit of happiness is a difficult endeavor, requiring careful thought and much effort on the part of each individual, but it’s possible to a rational being who is left free to function as a rational being.

To figure out what I think is true and what I think is good requires that I’m free to examine any and every idea, argument, viewpoint, fact, potential lead, and alleged piece of evidence that to me seems relevant, and to express, listen, discuss, argue, and debate with whomever I judge it valuable to do so. The quest for the true and the good is difficult, and no doubt I’ll make false starts and go down wrong alleys. In discussing with others, I’ll find some of what they think and say helpful and illuminating, and some wrongheaded, irrational, even evil. But these are precisely the judgments I must make for myself if I’m to grasp the true and the good.

To cede to government the power to curtail the freedom of thought and expression, to allow government to declare some viewpoints heretical or inimical to the public interest, and so to declare certain books or ideas or arguments off limits to me, on penalty of fines or imprisonment or death, is to abandon my quest for the true and the good. Instead, government officials will decide for me what counts as viewpoints worth entertaining, arguments worth considering, or leads worth investigating — and I’ll content myself with sifting through their blinkered view of reality. To accept such a predicament is to relinquish control of my life and happiness. How can I decide if Galileo’s heliocentric theory or someone’s denial of the Holocaust is well-reasoned or not, rational or perverse, without being able to read their books or listen to their claims?

It does not matter if the government censors viewpoints that are in fact true, like Galileo’s, or false and abhorrent, like the denial of the Holocaust. If I cannot consider any and all viewpoints and arguments that I judge might have some bearing on the truth — even if I later come to think, as will often be the case, that some of these viewpoints are false and even corrupt — I cannot genuinely make up my mind. Instead, someone is trying to make up my mind for me.

To put the same point another way: if I don’t yet know that denial of the Holocaust is false and perverse, I cannot permit government to declare that viewpoint off limits to me, to prevent me from even considering it; if I know that denial of the Holocaust is false and perverse, it’s only because I was free to consider the matter.

This, in short, is the case for freedom of thought and expression on an individualist approach. If government is not the master but the servant of the individual, then it cannot possess the power to censor. As an individual, I don’t have the right to tell other individuals what they can or cannot think or say or listen to, and so could not delegate enforcement of this right to government. And likewise, no other individual has the right to tell me what I can or cannot think or say or listen to, and so could not delegate enforcement of this right to government. In the individualist as against the collectivist approach, government does not have the power to censor any individual. As the First Amendment declares, freedom of speech is an absolute: a proper government must make no law abridging it.

For 17 somber minutes, on a cloudless summer morning, it was imaginable that an airliner crashing into the north tower of the World Trade Center could be an accident. But it was unimaginable when a second plane slammed into the south tower, and then a third, into the Pentagon. I recall news anchors on live broadcasts straining for words to describe the carnage, the horror, the devastation. We heard the phrase an “act of war.” The next morning’s New York Times roared, in a banner headline, “U.S. ATTACKED.”

But who had attacked us? The initial answer: the “Bin Laden organization,” or al-Qaeda. This was not fully wrong; the hijackers were al-Qaeda members. They were terrorists, we were told, and they had managed to terrify. This prevailing view of the enemy as a band of terrorists, however, was profoundly wrong. Disastrously wrong.

Who had attacked us? In the aftermath of 9/11, the intellectual and political leadership of the United States failed to understand the enemy. We at ARI demonstrated that America faced an ideological movement, Islamic totalitarianism; that al-Qaeda was one prominent faction of many; and that central to this movement were Islamist regimes that provided inspiration and funding, chiefly Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The wholesale failure to grasp this reality cannot be explained by ignorance. For some, particularly in the George W. Bush administration, it was active self-deception, a desire not to see; for others, it was an inability to believe that anyone could truly be ideologically driven.

Who had attacked us? The deliberate severing of 9/11 from its animating ideology was so acute, that I remember a time when people spoke of the attacks as akin to natural disasters, rather than the vicious deeds of human beings choosing to act on ideas they believed.

Who had attacked us? For the last twenty-five years, in op-eds, essays, blog posts, TV interviews, on radio, in lectures, at college talks, in podcasts, in books — in every channel, venue and forum open to us — my ARI colleagues and I consistently stressed the fundamental need to understand that enemy, we explained its essentially ideological nature, at length, and what was necessary to defeat it.

Today, as our nation marks a quarter century since 9/11, we reprint an in-depth essay from New Ideal, “Jihadists: Understanding the Enemy,” that illuminates a question that so many, for so long, have deliberately clouded and evaded.

* * *

This essay appears in the newly released ARU Press book Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: What Went Wrong After 9/11. The book, now in its third expanded edition, features ARI analysis spanning the last 25 years.

Finally, my colleague Onkar Ghate and I will be speaking today about the meaning of 9/11 at an ARI conference in Austin, Texas, and I invite you to join the livestream.

— Elan Journo

Jihadists: Understanding the Nature of the Enemy

Originally published April 16, 2018

At the peak of its strength, the Islamic State (or ISIS)1 not only controlled a large swath of territory — an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom — it also proved itself a formidable global menace. It instigated, directed, and inspired attacks from Brussels to San Bernardino, London to Orlando, Paris to Istanbul, Manchester to Barcelona. Now that ISIS has been practically routed from the territory it had once controlled in Iraq and Syria,2 the natural question is: Will this mean a reduced threat of further attacks?

Perhaps yes, in the near term; but beyond that, no, and we have every reason to expect the problem to persist.

Why? The reason is not just that the Islamic State might linger on, rebuild, or morph and re-emerge in the shape of a new, more deadly faction. That’s entirely imaginable. The Islamic State itself began life around 2003 as a member of the Al Qaeda network, later breaking away and eclipsing its former partner in brutality, territorial conquest, and global reach.

Nor is the problem just that future attacks might look different. Al Qaeda made its mark with the intricate September 11 plot to hijack four passenger jets simultaneously and ram them into buildings. But the Islamic State has recruited people to carry out simpler, often unsophisticated, mass murders using knives, guns, and vehicles to mow down their victims.

The reason that we can expect future attacks is that there’s far more to the problem than these attacks; more than the Islamic State; more than Al Qaeda. In some vague way, many of us sense that. While people often talk loosely about the “terrorist” threat, it doesn’t take much to see that terrorism is a tactic — a means, not an end. And it is a tactic commonly deployed by various groups and organizations (think of the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatists of ETA, or the Ku Klux Klan), so it’s nowhere near a uniquely distinguishing feature of the problem.

What, then, is this cause? Who is the enemy? We should be able to answer these vital questions. Any rational attempt to deal with this threat must begin with a clear conception of the enemy’s nature and goals. That’s a necessary condition of defining an effective plan for ending the menace. The point holds true in every conflict. Can you imagine America achieving victory in World War II if we had viewed the enemy as “Kamikaze” attacks — the tactic of deploying fighter pilots on suicide missions — rather than imperialist Japan? And yet today, nearly seventeen years since 9/11, we have nothing like clarity on the nature of this enemy.

Notice the semantic breakdancing around the issue of what to call the attackers. For example, after the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush launched a “Global War on Terrorism,” referring to our enemy variously as “terrorists,” “haters,” “evil doers,” and “hijackers” of a noble religion. The Bush administration tried out the term “Islamofascism,” but quickly dropped it. Barack Obama’s team whipsawed between the overly narrow — “Al Qaeda”; then “ISIS” — and the hopelessly broad, favoring the worse than meaningless term “violent extremists.” Donald Trump has at times talked of “Radical Islamic terrorism,” suggesting some ideological features of the menace, though the administration’s own view is less than coherent on that point.

What all this betrays is much more than semantic confusion. It reveals an underlying conceptual failure: a major part of the problem is that we haven’t properly defined the problem. We see some of the enemy’s features, if dimly; we fixate on non-essential or derivative aspects; we play down, ignore, or evade others that are fundamental to it.

That leads to a failure to understand the nature of the enemy. It’s a misconception to view the problem as hinging primarily on the most salient faction — whether that’s Al Qaeda, or ISIS, or a successor group — or on its preferred tactics. To view the problem so narrowly is to miss what’s essential to this enemy, why it predates Al Qaeda and has persisted long after Osama bin Laden’s death, why it will outlast the routing of ISIS, what animates it fundamentally — and, thus, what’s needed to end it.

We urgently need a clear understanding of the enemy, what ideas animate it, and why. Such clarity is an indispensable condition for combating it effectively, a point confirmed by the failures of American Mideast policy over the last two decades. Let us then step back, take a wider perspective, and bring into focus the nature of this foe.

Confronting difficult questions

What’s the point of all the slaughter? What’s the enemy’s end goal? The path to reaching the answers we need is crowded with difficult issues — difficult to untangle, but also difficult emotionally. For example, the killers call themselves jihadists (holy warriors) fighting for the supremacy of Allah’s law on earth. While it may be an uncomfortable thought, we must still confront the question: is religion — specifically Islam — the animating force behind the self-identified jihadists?

For many people, particularly our political and intellectual leaders, the answer is a vehement no. The killers, we hear, have nothing to do with any faith, let alone the Muslim faith. We hear that they distort that religion, which is a religion of peace. But is it true that the killers have nothing to do with the religion of Islam? It’s quite obvious that many, many Muslims repudiate the self-styled jihadists, and that they themselves are peaceful, productive individuals. But does it follow that the agenda of such jihadist groups as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State bears no connection to the religion’s commonly recognized teachings?

To ask this question is to risk being accused of prejudice toward Muslims. The worry here is that such a question is meant to imply that the problem is somehow all Muslims. That worry stems from a profound distortion and an actual issue in our culture.

There is real prejudice toward Muslims, often manifesting in the United States as xenophobia. Sometimes it manifests as a kind of racism that considers Muslims — whether from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Indonesia — as interchangeably non-white and somehow constituting a race. There’s no place for racism, xenophobia, or prejudice in any civilized society.

The distortion is that some people blur together race — which is unchosen — and a religious outlook — which is a chosen set of beliefs. Such blurring leads some to feel an unwarranted, collective hostility toward all Muslims. (Partly reacting to that distortion, other people adopt an uncritically positive view of the religion, regarding any analysis of it and of its followers as taboo.) To make sense of the jihadists, however, we must keep the issues of racial identity and religious/ideological outlook sharply differentiated.

Then there’s another line of thinking that tells us that what really animates jihadists is something non-religious. This view holds that, although these self-styled jihadists quote holy texts and pledge their faith to Allah, fundamentally there are other factors that drive them, notably political or economic grievances. For example, observe that jihadist recruitment videos and talking points hammer on American Mideast policy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What are we to make of such seemingly non-religious factors?

The answers here are not obvious, but they are attainable.

What I intend to convince you of is that the enemy constitutes an ideological movement rooted in Islam. Let me stress key elements of that claim.

It is an ideological movement: it’s a religious outlook, based on ideas and teachings of Islam, which the followers of the movement choose to embrace. It’s not about anyone’s race, nor is it fundamentally animated by material (political or economic) factors.

It’s crucial to see that it is an ideological movement: despite murderous enmity, sectarian rifts, splintering, and infighting among its constituent regimes, groups, and factions, what unites them — and defines the movement — is their common end. It is the aim of creating a totalitarian society under similar interpretations of Islamic religious law.

It’s an ideological movement deeply rooted in Islam

Let’s start by looking at the evidence of what the jihadists themselves believe and act on. Read the notes left behind by the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, a four-page document with minute guidance on how to prepare for martyrdom. Listen to the courtroom testimony of the man who slaughtered Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, proudly admitting his crime in the name of Allah. Notice how the Charlie Hebdo attackers — like so many others — screamed “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great!), adding that they were avenging the Prophet Mohammad. Or recall how the shooter at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, described himself as a soldier of Allah, pledging his allegiance to the Islamic State. To these examples we can add many more. The commonality is that they see themselves as fighting in the name of Islam.

These holy warriors have been instructed, inspired, and guided by the intellectual leaders of their movement. Prominent among these intellectual leaders are Abu al-Ala al Mawdudi (1903–1979), Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989). Many differences separate these three. Mawdudi and Qutb came out of the Sunni sect of Islam; Khomeini, from the Shiite sect. Their arguments are colored by their local political context and concerns. Mawdudi was an Indo-Pakistani thinker, Qutb helped shape the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and Khomeini became the founder and first “Supreme Leader” of Iran’s theocracy. Despite these and other differences, several fundamental themes unite them.

First, they see the world around them, and especially the political system, as pervaded with corruption and impiety. Unbelief and godlessness abound across the face of the earth. Islamic religious law, or sharia, no longer governs men’s thought and action. Wherever you look, according to Qutb, people’s ideas, habits, traditions, culture, art, and laws reflect an ignorance of Allah’s will.3

Second, they believe that Islamic law, or sharia, must be universal, shaping every facet of society, politics, and the individual’s life. Qutb argued that it was necessary to ensure “that the obedience of all people be for God alone,” everywhere.4 The faithful must establish an Islamic dominion, under divine authority, with the ultimate goal of carrying their faith “throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.”5

Third, they hold that it is time for the righteous to solve these problems — the world’s deviation from the true path — by imposing religious law as an all-encompassing, total political-social system. In the words of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that gave rise to Al Qaeda, Hamas, and many other factions, “Islam is the solution.”6 In Khomeini’s political vision, realized in the Iranian regime, it is a cleric — one deeply knowledgeable about (religious) law and justice — who must hold ultimate power within society.7 While Qutb and Mawdudi had their own views of how to structure government, they agreed with Khomeini on the basic solution to the impiety pervading the world: a sharia regime enveloping the totality of human life and society, where religion and the state are one. It is a political system wherein every individual must submit to Allah’s will. A fitting description for this vision is Islamic totalitarianism.

Qutb, Mawdudi, and Khomeini also share the belief that jihad is a means for bringing about a truly just world. The term “jihad” is seen as having two meanings — referring both to personal struggle and to a holy war.8 But what Qutb, Mawdudi, Khomeini, and kindred thinkers call for — and lionize — is the waging of war to expand the dominion of Islam. The Iranian regime was both an embodiment of that totalitarian vision and a self-declared leader in exporting its revolutionary doctrine beyond its own borders. Indeed, the Iranian regime has been not only a galvanizing force for the Islamist movement globally, but also a major leader of it.9

It is this political-ideological vision that underlies the jihadist bombings, massacres, and random-seeming violence. The ultimate point of the attacks and killing is to punish unbelievers, compel us to submit in obedience to Allah’s law, and enforce sharia law, everywhere. That desire for world domination sounds fanciful and unachievable, but what matters here is that it animates the enemy.

Here’s how the Islamic State explained their outlook. Because the statement is particularly clear and emphatic, it’s worth quoting at length:

We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah — whether you realize it or not — by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son, you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices. It is for this reason that we were commanded to openly declare our hatred for you and our enmity towards you. “There has already been for you an excellent example in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people, ‘Indeed, we are disassociated from you and from whatever you worship other than Allah. We have rejected you, and there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone’” (Al-Mumtahanah 4). Furthermore, just as your disbelief is the primary reason we hate you, your disbelief is the primary reason we fight you, as we have been commanded to fight the disbelievers until they submit to the authority of Islam, either by becoming Muslims, or by paying jizyah — for those afforded this option — and living in humiliation under the rule of the Muslims. Thus, even if you were to stop fighting us, your best-case scenario in a state of war would be that we would suspend our attacks against you — if we deemed it necessary — in order to focus on the closer and more immediate threats, before eventually resuming our campaigns against you. Apart from the option of a temporary truce, this is the only likely scenario that would bring you fleeting respite from our attacks. So in the end, you cannot bring an indefinite halt to our war against you. At most, you could only delay it temporarily. “And fight them until there is no fitnah [paganism] and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah” (Al-Baqarah 193).10

When judged by their words and deeds, what motivates the jihadists is their interpretation of Islam.

Nothing to do with Islam?

Nonetheless, many people insist that these killers have nothing to do with the religion of Islam.

Part of what gives that notion some plausibility is that within the global community of more than one billion Muslims, there are indeed differences on how to understand the Koran and the sayings and deeds attributed to Mohammad. There are rival sects within Islam, and there are also multiple schools of thought on the body of laws known as sharia. But does the outlook of jihadists have nothing to do with Islam?

That’s the strong claim we hear in many of the post-9/11 speeches of George W. Bush (here, here, and here, to give just three examples). Bush went so far as to describe them as “traitors to their own faith.” The view has persisted. In 2014, after the Islamic State slaughtered an American citizen, President Barack Obama stated that the group’s “actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith.”

The claim that some interpretation of Islam (or another religion) is a departure from, a perversion, or a “hijacking” of the one true faith relies on a dubious assumption. It counts on the assumption that religious dogma — by definition lacking objective, empirical foundation — lends itself to one definitive interpretation. Conflicting and warring sects may each hold that view, but from the vantage point of the outsider, we see that there is no way to answer which is the true version of, say, Christianity or Islam.

To evaluate whether the Islamist movement is deeply rooted in Islam’s teachings and ideas, we need to approach the issue differently. We need to look at whether the movement’s views, agenda, and actions constitute an intelligible interpretation of Islamic books and historic doctrines. Put another way, the question to ask is whether the views and injunctions that jihadists take away from their reading of Islamic texts mesh with the religion’s commonly recognized teachings — or fly in the face of those religious teachings by denying, for instance, mankind’s fundamental duty of submission to religious authority.

The answer we find is that what the leaders of the Islamist movement call for connects to commonly recognized teachings of Islam. Let’s compare three key features of the outlook of Islamic totalitarians with commonly identified teachings of the religion of Islam. Take the Islamist demand for (1) submission to Allah’s law; (2) the universal scope of sharia law; and (3) expanding the dominion of Islam. For an account of Islam’s teachings, let’s consult John L. Esposito’s college textbook, Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford University Press, 3rd ed.). Esposito is a noted scholar of Islam at Georgetown University, and his book is a sympathetic account of the religion.

1. Submission

“Despite the rich diversity in Islamic practice,” writes Esposito, “the Five Pillars of Islam remain the core and common denominator, the five essential and obligatory practices all Muslims accept and follow.”11 From Esposito’s discussion of the Five Pillars, we can observe that the sum of these supreme duties is to effect and demonstrate the believer’s complete submission to authority.

The first pillar is the call upon a Muslim (“one who surrenders”) to proclaim: “There is no god but the God [Allah] and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” With this acknowledgement, writes Esposito, “a person professes his or her faith and becomes a Muslim.”12

The second pillar is to reaffirm this commitment through prayer, five times a day.

The third pillar is the obligation of alms-giving (zakat): “All adult Muslims who are able to do so are obliged to pay a wealth tax annually”; Esposito goes on to explain: “This is not regarded as charity since it is not really voluntary but instead owed, by those who have received their wealth as a trust from God’s bounty, to the poor. The Quran (9:60) and Islamic law stipulate that alms are to be used to support the poor, orphans, and widows, to free slaves and debtors, and to assist in the spread of Islam.”13

The fourth pillar is the annual fast of Ramadan, when Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, and sex, from dawn to dusk, for a month.

The fifth pillar is the duty to make a pilgrimage (the Hajj) to Mecca, incumbent on males.14

What do these obligations add up to? We can see that to practice his religion, the believer is duty bound to bow continually before Allah; reaffirm his submission five times a day; cross oceans and continents in pilgrimage to demonstrate unwavering faith; sacrifice worldly values and efface personal desires in the name of devotion to the supernatural master.

All of this hinges on a belief grounded only on faith. To have faith means to believe without evidence (and despite counter-evidence), to suspend one’s own perception and rational judgment. The faithful individual is required to put the dictates of religious authority above his or her own grasp of facts. He must learn that he is not a sovereign individual; Allah alone is sovereign, and man must bow to religious authority. What this moral code offers is guidance on how one can achieve the ideal of becoming a servant of Allah.

Islam demands the individual’s submission to religious authority. Fundamentally, leaders of the Islamist movement also call for mankind to submit to religious authority. Listen, for example, to Sayyid Qutb:

The theoretical foundation of Islam, in every period of history, has been to witness “La ilaha illa Allah” — “There is no deity except God” — which means to bear witness that the only true deity is God, that He is the Sustainer, that He is the Ruler of the universe, and that He is the Real Sovereign; to believe in Him in one’s heart, to worship Him Alone, and to put into practice His laws. Without this complete acceptance of ‘‘La ilaha illa Allah,” which differentiates the one who says he is a Muslim from a non-Muslim, there cannot be any practical significance to this utterance, nor will it have any weight according to Islamic law.

Theoretically, to establish it means that people should devote their entire lives in submission to God, should not decide any affair on their own, but must refer to God’s injunctions concerning it and follow them. We know of God’s guidance through only one source, that is, through the Messenger of God — peace be on him. Thus, in the second part of the Islamic creed, we bear witness “Wa ashhadu anna Muhammadar Rasul Allah” — “And I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”15

If the Five Pillars form the core of Islam, is not Qutb’s one intelligible interpretation of their meaning and application?

2. Universality of Sharia

Islam provides a body of laws, or sharia, derived mainly from the Koran and interpretations of sayings and deeds attributed to Mohammad.16 Esposito explains:

Law in Islam is both universal and egalitarian. The Sharia is believed to be God’s law for the entire Islamic community, indeed for all humankind. In the final analysis, God is the sovereign ruler of the world, head of the human community, and its sole legislator. As a result, Islamic law is as much a system of ethics as it is law, for it is concerned with what a Muslim ought to do or ought not to do. All acts are ethically categorized as: (1) obligatory; (2) recommended; (3) indifferent or permissible; (4) reprehensible but not forbidden; or (5) forbidden. To break the law is a transgression against both society and God, a crime and a sin; the guilty are subject to punishment in this life and the next. The idealism of the law can be seen in the fact that ethical categories such as recommended and reprehensible were not subject to civil penalties. Islamic law is also egalitarian; it transcends regional, family, tribal, and ethnic boundaries. It does not recognize social class or caste differences. All Muslims, Arab and non-Arab, rich and poor, black and white, caliph and craftsman, male and female, are bound by Islamic law as members of a single, transnational community or brotherhood of believers.

The belief that Islamic law was a comprehensive social blueprint was reflected in the organization and content of law.17

Notice in Esposito’s description how morality and political life are united (the breaking of religious law is both a sin and a crime).

The Islamists agree that Islam’s embrace must be universal, and that the Koran answers the needs of mankind. For example, Qutb notes that “The distinctive feature of a Muslim community is this: that in all its affairs it is based on worship of God alone.”18 Islamists argue that Muslims and their rulers have strayed from the requirements of piety by adopting man-made laws, which are morally corrupting, instead of recognizing that sovereignty belongs only to Allah.

For the Islamist movement, the universality of Islam means that it must encompass all of a believer’s existence but also the existence of non-believers. It must span all of Allah’s creations. Mawdudi, for example, argued that a sharia regime cannot be limited in its scope: “Its approach is universal and all-embracing. Its sphere of activity is coexistent with the whole of human life.”19 Qutb echoes that theme: Islam, he writes, “addresses itself to the whole of mankind, and its sphere of work is the whole earth. God is the sustainer not merely of the Arabs, nor is His providence limited to those who believe in the faith of Islam. God is the Sustainer of the whole world.”20

3. Expanding the dominion of Allah’s law

The call to fight unbelievers in order to expand Islam’s earthly dominion flows out of Koranic statements, and it is reflected in the example of the Prophet Mohammad, whose actions are widely seen as embodying the true path. For example, the Koran (9:29) states: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, [even if they are] of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”21

And in practice, during the last nine years of his life, Mohammad is “recorded as having participated in at least twenty-seven campaigns and deputized some fifty-nine others — an average of no fewer than nine campaigns annually.”22 Islam’s vast empire grew under the shadow of the sword. Mohammad’s successors marched on.

Fighting unbelievers in order to expand Islam’s earthly dominion is precisely what Islamic totalitarians seek to do. That’s what the Islamic State sought to do, a point evident in the lengthy passage I quoted earlier. Long before the Islamic State eclipsed Al Qaeda, and before both were household names, the Islamist movement’s standard-bearer was, and largely remains, the Iranian regime.

“The Iranian revolution,” declared Ayatollah Khomeini, “is not exclusively that of Iran, because Islam does not belong to any particular people. . . . We will export our revolution throughout the world because it is an Islamic revolution. The struggle will continue until the calls ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.”23

Islamists demand total submission to sharia, they believe sharia’s scope to be universal, and their widest aim is to enforce religious tyranny, everywhere. Does that fundamental end, and the idea of fighting to achieve it, fly in the face of Islamic teaching? No. Does the Islamist movement’s interpretation intelligibly flow out of Islam? Yes.

The Islamists constitute an ideological movement deeply rooted in Islam. We should believe jihadists, then, when they tell us that they are Muslims. But while all jihadists are Muslims, it’s plainly false that all Muslims are jihadists. Rather, the Islamist movement is a subset within the community of people who profess the religion of Islam. Clearly, even though all Muslims are expected to accept the Koran, only some — the jihadists — hold and practice their interpretation of Islam as a totalitarian ideological-political cause.

To put this point into even sharper focus, let’s consider two contrasting views which I brought up earlier in this essay. Each in its own way pushes back on the idea that Islamic ideas are fundamental to the nature and aim of this movement. One blurs ideas and race; the other plays down or negates the role of religious ideas and tells us to look to material factors, such as political or economic issues, as fundamental. Let’s take each of these in turn.

It’s not about heredity; it is a chosen religious-political worldview

It’s true and important that many, many jihadists were born into families and communities that are Muslim. That fact, however, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of becoming a follower of the Islamist movement. It’s not about genetic lineage (an unchosen group membership); it’s about what is being taught and a recruit’s chosen embrace of a religious-political worldview.

You can see that from the cases of individuals who’ve chosen to join — and from some who reject — the movement. For example, Maajid Nawaz was born in the UK to a Pakistani family. Not particularly religious when he encountered the Islamist movement, he became deeply involved in it and worked for some years as a recruiter for the cause. But he eventually turned his back on the movement and renounced it.24

By contrast, John Walker Lindh was raised in Maryland and in Marin County, California; his father is Catholic and his mother, a follower of Buddhism. Having converted to Islam, he went on to read Islamist materials, and made his way to Afghanistan before 9/11, where he trained at an Al Qaeda camp and took up arms alongside the Taliban.

The Islamic State trumpeted the fact that it attracted converts from Christianity who emigrated to live and fight under its black flag. In the July 2016 issue of its magazine Dabiq, for example, the Islamic State featured one former Christian from Trinidad, another from Finland.

Yet many people today fail to understand that the Islamist movement is an ideological phenomenon — that its followers are fundamentally driven by a set of religious ideas about life, the world, and the good.

No one is born a follower of any religion or ideological cause — whether Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Marxism. These are belief systems that an individual must come to adopt. An individual may well do so passively, conforming with the flow of the people and culture around them; but it remains the case that they can choose to question that ideological outlook and reject it.

Observe an important implication of this point, which relates to the widespread lack of understanding about the Islamist movement.

Clearly it’s essential that we analyze, discuss, criticize and morally judge this ideological movement, just as we must every ideological movement, secular or supernatural. In doing so, we’re evaluating a set of ideas and the people who choose to embrace them. That’s in sharp contrast with racial, tribal, or xenophobic condemnations of groups of people, which is obviously wrong.

If we recognize this critical distinction, then we should reject the increasingly prevalent idea of “Islamophobia.” This deliberately confusing term seeks to shut down critical analysis of the Islamist movement and its ideas by smearing such discussion as inherently prejudiced against Muslims, or worse.

No one seeking to combat prejudice toward Muslims can honestly believe that that problem can be solved by silencing discussion of the Islamist movement and entrenching the cultural ignorance already besetting this issue.

Fundamentally, it’s religious ideas, not political or economic factors, that animate the Islamist movement

Let’s turn now to a contrasting view that would seem to loosen, if not fully sever, the fundamental causal link between jihadists and their religious worldview. The Islamists quote holy texts, but (on this line of thinking) their ideological outlook is not what ultimately motivates them. Instead, we should look to material factors, such as political or economic issues, as fundamental drivers of the movement.25

What makes this perspective plausible? Consider two salient points: (1) Some followers are poor, and the Islamist ideologues themselves invoke political grievances in their manifestos and in recruitment propaganda. (2) Some followers of the movement seemingly lack deep knowledge of religious ideas.

Certainly, some jihadists, in some parts of the world, come from desperate poverty. Note, however, that many other people around the world face similar, if not worse, circumstances, but few of them become holy warriors. You can also find eager jihadists who are well-educated, raised in middle-class homes in some of the world’s freest, most-advanced countries.26

Islamist tracts, recruitment materials, and propaganda videos do invoke various political grievances. For example, bin Laden’s infamous 1996 “Declaration of Jihad” against America decried the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. It also emphasized the issue of “Palestine,”27 which has been all over various jihadist propaganda, for years.28 Islamists have leveraged these claims (along with various others) to recruit for their jihad.

But when we take a closer look, it becomes clear that such grievances are effective precisely because of a fundamental religious narrative that frames them. In that story there is a cosmic struggle for a “just” world, one subservient to religious dogma. The crux of that is the striving of the faithful (Islamists) against the unbelievers (impious Muslims, apostates, infidels, atheists; particularly in the West). Within that framework, a great many issues and conflicts can actuate new recruits, who see themselves as part of a global Muslim community (or, “umma”).

Here are some emotional-ideological “buttons” that the Islamists have pushed in order to galvanize, recruit, and draw people into the movement. The fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, during the 1980s, attracted a significant influx of foreign holy warriors (Osama bin Laden among them). The Bosnia conflict, during the 1990s, was another trigger, because Muslims were targeted.29 In his memoir Maajid Nawaz recounts how seeing videos of Muslims being slaughtered in the Bosnia conflict inflamed him. The victims were all strangers to him, but they belonged to a global Muslim community, and Nawaz felt impelled to fight for the redemption of his co-religionists.30 The bond of collective religious solidarity was that strong. During the mid-2010s, the rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria proved an even more powerful magnet for international jihadists; one of its themes was the sectarian hostility toward non-Sunnis.

The common factor here is the specifically Islamist narrative that frames the worldview of recruits, manipulating their emotions. They are primed to feel a powerful solidarity with co-religionists throughout the world and to regard anything short of an all-encompassing Islamist regime as a metaphysical injustice that they must fight to rectify.

For example, in the case of the “Palestine” issue, the basic concern of Islamists is not any political grievance about Israeli borders, land-use policy, or alleged oppression of particular individuals.31 They demand not freedom and prosperity for Palestinians (or anyone else), but submission: Islamists seek to enslave the world — including Palestine — under Allah’s laws. Only conquering Israel and raising the flag of Islamic totalitarianism over Palestine and Jerusalem could satisfy them.32

The same applies to their framing of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The removal of American troops from the region would not pacify the Islamists, nor the cessation of American military strikes in Muslim lands, nor the halting of American backing for some of the region’s dictators. U.S Mideast policy is riddled with serious problems (which I’ve written about at length), but there’s no version of American policy in the region, and no genuine problems we might rectify, that Islamists would regard as unproblematic. Their basic objection is that we’re unbelievers, everything we do is an affront, and, in the end, it is they who should dominate, everywhere, in the name of religious totalitarianism.

Consider how the Islamic State explained this point in its magazine Dabiq. Among the reasons for hating and fighting to overthrow the West’s secular, liberal societies, the article lists American foreign policy, but stresses how that is a derivative factor.

What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. No doubt, we would stop fighting you then as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who enter into a covenant with us, but we would not stop hating you.

What’s equally if not more important to understand is that we fight you, not simply to punish and deter you, but to bring you true freedom in this life and salvation in the Hereafter, freedom from being enslaved to your whims and desires as well as those of your clergy and legislatures, and salvation by worshiping your Creator alone and following His messenger.33

What, then, are we to make of the fact that some followers of the Islamist movement appear to lack substantive knowledge of religious doctrine? One anecdote that’s taken to illustrate the point: before setting out for the battlefront in Syria, two British would-be jihadists ordered copies of Islam For Dummies and The Koran for Dummies.

Leaving anecdotes to one side, researchers have found that recruits certainly have varied profiles. Peter Neumann and his colleagues at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College, London, found that recruits bound for the Islamic State fell into three broad categories: “defenders” who were devout and seeking to protect co-religionists; “seekers” attracted to the jihadist counterculture, which met their “need for identity, community, power and a feeling of masculinity”; and “hangers-on” who join because the leader of their social circle decided to.34

Should we be surprised if some, many, or most of the tens of thousands of recruits who flocked to join the Islamic State were drawn by the desire for a pseudo self-esteem as heroes for the cause, a source of religiously endorsed self-worth and identity? Should we be surprised that for some the appeal lies in the opportunity to live out a video-game fantasy where they actually get to murder people? None of that should be surprising; it makes sense that such abhorrent specimens of humanity would gravitate to a movement seeking domination.

More broadly, it’s a feature of ideological movements that they tend to attract people of varying levels of understanding, from the ardently committed to those whose understanding of the cause is shallow. Was every last warrior for communism a theoretician, or deeply versed in Marxism, or qualified to interpret the sacred theory of dialectical materialism? Clearly, no. What defines the Islamist movement is its over-arching ideological-political end.

Why it matters that we grasp the enemy’s ideological character

If we are to develop anything like a sensible policy response to the Islamist threat, we need to begin by conceptualizing it as an ideological movement. This has at least two major implications.

First, we need to take a wide-angle perspective. There are many Islamist groups, factions, organizations, regimes. Among them, there are differences over doctrine, sect, tactics, even strategic priorities. And they fight among themselves, a lot, and brutally. For example, Saudi Arabia is hostile to the Islamic State, and both revile Iran. They jockey over who is more pious, and who will dominate where. Yet what unites all of them — along with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas, Boko Haram, and still others — is their common ideological goal.

Second, a crucial feature of this movement is that particular regimes — notably Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and above all, Iran — are central to it.35 The Iranian regime has been the movement’s spearhead, galvanizing the Islamist cause.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a foundational group in the movement, started in Egypt in the 1920s, but accomplished little. What supercharged the jihadist cause was the 1979 Iranian revolution. That shockwave brought to power in Tehran an Islamic totalitarian regime determined to export its ideological revolution. Iran was such an inspiration because it made the Islamist cause seem achievable. Iran armed, trained, and funded Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It has backed insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, in its own way, the Saudi regime has nourished the Islamist cause. The Saudis invested millions of dollars setting up religious schools, distributing books, and proselytizing across the globe for its preferred strain of Islamic totalitarianism. Saudi money funds various jihadist groups, including the Taliban.

And the Gulf states, for their part, have bankrolled their favored jihadist factions. Qatar, for example, is a backer of Hamas.36

Absent the inspiration and material backing of these regimes; absent the galvanizing spectacle of real-life, functioning Islamist regimes such as in Iran and elsewhere; the jihadist cause would have amounted to little more than a bunch of seething pamphleteers and ineffectual revolutionaries. Such regimes make the ideal actuating the jihadists appear righteous, potent, practical.

With that understanding, we can define a policy response that directs the full range of our diplomatic and military resources toward eliminating these regimes. Without that understanding? Take a look at the confused mess that has been our Mideast policy for upwards of two decades.

Prior to September 11, American policy was prone to a fragmented, myopic outlook. The 9/11 attacks came as a surprise, but they should not have. Islamists had tried to bring down the Twin Towers before, in 1993, using a truck bomb. Nor was that the only jihadist attack prior to 9/11; in my book Winning the Unwinnable War, I describe how the road to 9/11 was punctuated by an escalating sequence of violent attacks. Our policymakers and leaders viewed the threat as a series of crises, to be dealt with in the moment, without wider, ideological context. There were many dots, and we recognized each as a problem, but we failed to connect those many dots to see the bigger picture: the common ideas animating the Islamist movement.

Earlier, I pointed out how George W. Bush continually insisted that jihadists were motivated by something other than religious ideas. Bush’s perspective denied the common denominator uniting the Islamist movement. This was a factor in his evasion of the fundamental centrality of Iran and Saudi Arabia to the movement. Despite some of Bush’s rhetoric about going after those who harbor and support the “terrorists,” recall that Iran and Saudi Arabia were not merely omitted from the “Global War on Terrorism”; Saudi Arabia was affirmed a loyal ally, and, eventually, Bush sought to engage Iran in diplomatic negotiations. After scattering the jihadists in Afghanistan, the focal point of Bush’s response became Iraq — a regime that had little to do with the Islamist cause.37

The Obama administration, vowing to avoid Bush’s failures, reverted to a kind of hyper narrow conception of the threat (our enemy is Al Qaeda! no, it’s ISIS!). This conception was drained of ideological substance; a person becomes a “violent extremist,” we were told, mainly because of political grievances and economic privation.38 By playing down the role of ideas, by viewing the problem as consisting of many disparate groups, factions, regimes, rather than a movement united by an ideological outlook, Obama’s policy saw no contradiction in seeking to combat “terrorists” while also engaging leading regimes within the movement, chiefly Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The Trump administration has no coherent view of the problem. Trump has at times used the term “Radical Islamic terrorism,” but he has also implied that the problem is in some sense all Muslims (for example, recall the openness to creating a Muslim registry). Furthermore, he’s put great emphasis on the fact that certain attackers were “outsiders” — that they did not share his (or, in his view, “our”) Anglo-Saxon identity (notice Trump’s repeated emphasis on the fact that some attackers were immigrants or the American-born children of immigrants).39 This blurring of ideas and racial identity obscures the crucial fact that we’re dealing with an ideological movement, one that individuals must come to embrace by choice (rather than belong to through heredity). Among other things, this means that those who adopt and advance this ideology can — and must — be evaluated morally. But notice that, like his predecessors, Trump is not only willing to (re)negotiate with Iran, but is also friendly with Saudi Arabia.

From these sketches of how we’ve approached the problem, you see that by putting out of focus the nature and goals of the Islamists, we end up with inconsistent, short-term, immoral, and, in the end, ineffectual policy. And it is our persistent failure to confront Islamic totalitarianism that helps explain the durable appeal of this cause. That’s reflected not only in the masses who flocked to live under the Islamic State, but also in the ability of that group and of Al Qaeda to actuate independent, so-called lone-wolf jihadists to carry out attacks on their own initiative. Central to that phenomenon is the appeal of furthering a cause that the jihadists continue to see as viable.

For many years now, our approach to the problem has been deeply flawed. We had no clear idea of the nature of the problem, and we persuaded ourselves of explanations that were worse than superficial, fixating on non-essential features.

But it’s well within our capability to end this menace. Any sensible response to the jihadist threat requires that we confront not only the salient factions but also, and especially, the regimes at its forefront.

To formulate a workable plan for achieving that goal, we must start by grasping clearly the nature of our enemy.

After the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy released its entry on capitalism, critics online slammed it for apparent Marxist bias. However, if there is a scandal here, it is not merely that one entry is lopsided; it is that contemporary academic philosophers are willfully blind to the real-world phenomenon of capitalism, seeing it only through the unquestioned lens of the altruistic morality.

In this episode of the Ayn Rand Institute podcast, Robertas Bakula, Ben Bayer, and Onkar Ghate discuss the entry’s Marxist leaning, Ayn Rand’s absence from the entry, and more broadly the failure of academic philosophy to understand the subject. They argue that Ayn Rand’s view of capitalism should have played a more prominent role in the entry, and how Rand succeeded in defining “capitalism” while the entry does not bother trying. They conclude that the entry should give more serious attention not only to Rand, but also Locke, Smith, and economic scholarship more broadly.

Topics include:

• The Stanford Encyclopedia’s cultural impact

• Marxist dominance in academic philosophy

• Academic philosophy’s economic ignorance

• The failure to define capitalism

• Ayn Rand vs. intellectuals

• Ayn Rand’s definition of capitalism

• How to reform the SEP entry

Resources:

• Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

• Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

• Ayn Rand, “ For the New Intellectual” in For the New Intellectual

• The Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on “Capitalism”

This episode was recorded on August 24, 2026.

Image credit: Getty AI via Getty Images

Marc Andreessen, a legendary venture capitalist, helped shape some of the defining companies of the last two decades — Airbnb, Coinbase, Facebook, Skype — and has assumed the role of thought-leader. When Andreessen speaks about what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur, people listen closely and emulate.

So, naturally, his comments on David Senra’s podcast trashing “introspection” blew up online, with Elon Musk and many others applauding. Andreessen sees “introspection” as a problem, a genuine blocker to success, because it leads us to “feel guilty” and “dwell on the past,” stagnating unproductively in fear and doubt.

For accomplished entrepreneurs like Andreesen and Musk, it seems, constant action is an imperative and “introspection” just slows them down. But do we really have to choose between stagnation induced by introspection and a life of achievement without self-knowledge?

Those who think we face this choice misunderstand introspection. In fact, it is crucial for an action-oriented and productive life to understand oneself deeply.

Introspection is the “examination of one’s own thoughts and emotions.”1 It means identifying what one knows or doesn’t, what evidence one has, what assumptions one is making, etc. It also means identifying one’s emotions and their causes, allowing one to evaluate one’s motives for action. It’s a demanding task that can easily err and must be consistently practiced. Thus, it’s a much broader and more important phenomenon than Andreessen suggests.

Andreesen makes two serious errors in characterizing introspection.

First, the idea that introspection means “dwelling on the past” falsely equates introspection with rumination, i.e., obsessing over distressing thoughts. Rumination is problematic: for instance, one might obsessively dwell on having turned down a promising job at a startup because of fear of failure. In such a case, one might repeatedly think to oneself, “I wish I had chosen differently” or “I gave into failure at that moment.” But such rumination is unhealthy introspection, since it involves dwelling on one’s mistake without a clear purpose. To properly address this mistake, healthy, purposeful introspection is needed, that is, asking if and why one acted from fear, to what extent one’s fear was justified, given what one knew at the time, and so on, in order to improve one’s choices and character going forward.

Second, introspection doesn’t mean “feeling guilty” and not doing anything about it. Some introspection generates guilt one should feel, as in the above example, if one irrationally gave into fear. Here, accepting responsibility for giving into fear helps correct the mistake that generated earned guilt, allowing one to move forward in a productive career — perhaps by seeking ambitious opportunities in the future despite feeling some trepidation at doing so. In such cases, this introspective work is not done at once but requires an ongoing process of identification and revision. If one defaults on that work, one will likely continue to act from fear and miss great opportunities.

However, guilt can be “unearned,” if it results from doing no wrong. For instance, suppose that one feels guilt for pursuing a career as an engineer when one’s parents expected one to pursue medicine. In this case, it’s crucial to examine and revise the premises that generate the unearned guilt. For example, one might identify the false premise that “one should meet one’s parents’ expectations, no matter what,” or identify that one has always had an irrational fear of disappointing one’s parents. Correcting the false premise and overcoming the fear clears the way to take proper pride in one’s career, which is crucial to sustaining it. The introspective work involved here is also crucial for a healthy relationship to one’s parents, one not dictated by fear or guilt. Such work can take years to execute correctly — and many default on this task.

By characterizing introspection as obsessively dwelling on feelings of guilt, there is a danger that what Andreesen wants is to exempt entrepreneurs from judging the morality of their own actions. But no one is exempt from this responsibility. Elon Musk should think about the truth and effect of some of what he posts online. Andreesen should think about his role in the DOJ’s persecution of Microsoft in the 2000s. To do so, and to change course and make amends when necessary, is not to pointlessly dwell on the past.

And when one looks at the careers of great entrepreneurs, one characteristic that stands out is their willingness to constantly question themselves and their ideas, at least in business.

Successful entrepreneurs need to know their purpose. For example, consider Jeff Bezos’s “regret-minimization framework,” in which he projects himself at 80 and reflects on what he would like to have done with his life.2 Bezos employed this framework early on, when he needed to identify whether working at an established hedge fund in New York was more meaningful to him than pursuing a new vision as an entrepreneur. Was his dream of entrepreneurship just a fantasy or something he could really carry out? Did he have the right temperament to deal with the massive uncertainty in entrepreneurship? Could he really be happy staying in the hedge fund world? Answering these questions required identifying his motivations, what he knew, considering what he cared most deeply about, and projecting what kind of person he wanted to become. Ultimately, this introspective work led him to refocus his life to transforming the online customer shopping experience, and channel all his efforts to that one goal.

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio practices what he calls “pain + reflection.” When painful mistakes happen, Dalio uses that pain as an opportunity for active reflection, to understand what happened and how to learn from it.3 For instance, Dalio reflected deeply when he nearly ruined himself in the early 1980s, operating on the flawed assumption that Mexican banks would default on U.S. loans. Instead of simply dwelling in shame or self-doubt, he worked to identify his flawed assumptions and better identify the state of his own knowledge. He realized that although he was right that too much money had been lent to Mexican banks, he was not in a position to predict that the outcome would be the banks defaulting on those loans. Thus, he changed his approach, carefully self-monitoring what he was actually certain of and what he wasn’t — an approach that’s impossible without introspection. His career was forever changed: He credits his masterful awareness of uncertainty in markets over time for much of his success as an investor.4

Few would consider Sam Walton (discussed in the aforementioned podcast) to be an exemplar of introspection. But if introspection is an ongoing and active self-awareness of one’s thoughts and motivations, Walton did it intensively in developing Walmart’s philosophy. He spent years studying what allowed other discount-style supermarkets to succeed or fail, and concluded that a company can lower markup while earning more with increasing volume.5 To reach this conclusion, Walton had to constantly consider whether his assumptions were warranted or not, by asking questions such as: Do I really know whether investing in distribution systems is unimportant? Do I have evidence that stores can only succeed in big cities? Am I sure that high margins are necessary for high profits? None of the answers are obvious or easy to apply. But without this introspective questioning, merely observing market conditions or taking on conventional assumptions would not have led to Walton’s distinctive approach.

There is no escape from the need to introspect. Without introspection, one consigns oneself to a life of ignorance, leaving one’s inner self a mystery. Imagine a Jeff Bezos who never asked himself what he truly wanted, a Ray Dalio who never asked himself what premise led him to his crucial error, or a Sam Walton who never questioned his (or others’) assumptions. Identifying your own knowledge and purposes, analyzing your emotions, and integrating them appropriately with action is crucial not just in business but across life. It’s through introspection that one learns from mistakes, focuses on achieving one’s deepest purposes, and builds character with integrity.

September 11, 2001 — and America’s response to it — shaped the 21st century. Confidence in America’s ability to win wars cracked, trust in leadership and experts went down, and, in response, populism, nihilism, and conspiracism raised their ugly heads. From day one, the Ayn Rand Institute’s experts grasped the meaning of the attacks and the significance of a proper response. They called for war with Iran and opposed Bush’s altruistic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their advice was not followed, but their predictions held.

In this special livestream marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Yaron Brook, Elan Journo, and Onkar Ghate — the Institute’s three leading experts on the attacks — trace what went wrong in its lead-up and aftermath, and how Ayn Rand’s philosophy let them foresee what most people still struggle to understand.

Among the topics covered are:

• The events and evasions that led up to 9/11.

• How shocking 9/11 was, given the atmosphere in the 1990s.

• The corrupt failure of intellectuals to warn of and explain 9/11.

• How both the government and academia whitewashed religion and Islam.

• Why and how ARI commented on 9/11 and its aftermath.

• How Objectivism helped ARI’s experts to predict America’s failures.

• The disgraceful Western response to the Danish cartoons of Muhammad.

• The rise of populism and nihilism as a result of 9/11.

Resources recommended in the episode:

• Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo, Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: What Went Wrong After 9/11.

Livestream recorded on September 2, 2026.

Since September 11, 2001, the Ayn Rand Institute has commented extensively (via articles, books, interviews, lectures, and podcasts) on why the 9/11 attacks happened, how America should have responded, and why — 25 years and three wars later — the United States still fails to confront Islamic totalitarianism.

ARI’s analysis of 9/11 and its aftermath has proven tragically accurate. To mark 25 years since the attacks, we are pleased to announce the publication of the third, expanded edition of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism, which includes short essays on October 7 and the war in Iran, and we invite you to join us for two special events.

• On September 2, 2026, we will host a live broadcast of the Ayn Rand Institute podcast on the meaning and impact of 9/11 with Yaron Brook, Elan Journo, and Onkar Ghate, the Institute’s three leading experts on these issues.

• On September 11, 2026, we will livestream lectures on 9/11 by Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo from our U.S. student conference in Austin.

To watch these livestreams — and to receive a free digital copy of the new third edition of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism — please register here.

Below you’ll find the preface to the book’s new edition.

Preface to the Third Edition of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: What Went Wrong After 9/11

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban walked into Kabul. While American military planes evacuated from Hamid Karzai International Airport, frantic Afghans ran along the tarmac, clinging desperately to the fuselage and landing gear; as one of the aircraft left the ground, some fell to their deaths. After twenty years of war, trillions of dollars, and thousands of lives, America had let the jihadists return to power, triumphant.

The self-delusion in Washington reached a new nadir. The world’s superpower had failed to defeat a vastly weaker enemy, but President Joe Biden described the humiliating American withdrawal as an “extraordinary success.” Apologists told us that the Taliban, which had hosted the 9/11 planners, had “moderated,” even as they re-imposed religious control and the subjugation of women.

The Afghanistan retreat, echoing the Fall of Saigon in 1975, was another ignominious effect of the fundamental problem subverting American foreign policy. This book exposes that problem: the influence of irrational philosophic ideas, which led to the persistent evasion of the enemy’s nature and the lack of moral clarity America needs to act assertively in its self-defense.

The intellectual-moral weakness of America, and of other free societies, encourages the Islamist movement. At its peak, the Islamic State established a “caliphate,” in parts of Syria and Iraq, that attracted thousands of zealous recruits from North America and Europe. From its stronghold, the Islamic State directly and indirectly inspired attacks in Paris, Orlando, and Manchester. Even after its collapse, jihadists attempted to carry out murderous attacks: the Salman Rushdie stabbing in Chautauqua, New York (2022), the plot targeting Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna, Austria (2024), and the deadly shooting spree at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia (2025).

But the most significant jihadist attack since this book’s last edition was the air, sea, and land assault from the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip into southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Palestinians loyal to Hamas massacred some 1,200 people in a single day and seized 251 more as hostages. The killers gleefully filmed themselves committing atrocities.

The reaction to October 7 in the United States, Canada, and Europe was itself revealing. During a livestream podcast on October 7, one of us (Elan) predicted that the world’s immediate sympathy would give way to accusations of Israeli war crimes, once the conflict stalemated or otherwise resolved. That prediction was partly wrong; the sympathy lasted not weeks but mere hours.

By the next morning, a statement co-signed by some thirty student groups at Harvard University had gone viral. These students held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Mass rallies soon clogged the streets of major cities and world capitals. Student protests brought universities to a standstill. Demonstrators shut down roads and bridges.

Hamas called its invasion the al Aqsa Flood. Another morally obscene deluge poured into the streets of major cities and the campuses of elite universities in the West, where activists blamed the Israeli victims and whitewashed their Palestinian murderers.

The October 7 backlash affirmed the wider theme of this book: the fundamental role of philosophic ideas in shaping culture (and thus foreign policy). The widespread unwillingness to face Hamas’s Islamist nature has to be understood in the context of two decades of intellectuals and politicians evading that religious ideology and enforcing a taboo on any discussion of it. This evasion was a signature policy of George W. Bush, who insisted that the 9/11 killers had “hijacked” Islam, that it was a religion of “peace.” A second, deeper contributing factor: the anti-freedom, anti-capitalist, anti-individualist ideas that universities have been inculcating for generations. (Here, one positive sign that we wrote about was the decision of prominent donors to withdraw their funding from universities in protest. See Part 7.)

The third major development since the last edition is enormously consequential, but also (at the time of writing) unresolved. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel went to war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

For reasons identified in Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s essay “End States Who Sponsor Terrorism” and in our writings that follow, we regard an American war with Iran as a retaliatory act: a war of self-defense, decades overdue.

Predictably, however, this war has been fought without a clear objective. The proclaimed goals kept changing. A partial list:

• eliminate “imminent threats” from Iran and prevent it from gaining nuclear weapons (February 28, 2026);

• “destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy, no nukes” (Hegseth; March 2, 2026);

• “unconditional surrender” (Trump; March 6, 2026) to be determined not by the facts, but Trump’s say so;

• victory had occurred already in Trump’s view (March 7, 2026), so “We don’t need people [i.e., NATO allies] that join Wars after we’ve already won”;

• degrade Iran’s missile and nuclear capability, which Trump insisted after a 2025 bombing had been “obliterated”; on March 14, 2026, Trump stated that “We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s military capability” even as the regime continued fighting back;

• “regime change” was a goal that Trump took credit for, with the killing of key Iranian leaders, but also claimed wasn’t the goal (April 21, 2026);

• a diplomatic bargain to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon (2025; throughout Feb–May 2026) for which Trump was willing to negotiate with the Iranians, granting the regime what the Obama deal had likewise conceded: an undeserved moral legitimacy.

The administration failed to provide a coherent justification for the war and refused to seek congressional approval for it, violating the rule of law. As the president told one audience on March 25, 2026, “I won’t use the word ‘war’ because they say, if you use the word ‘war,’ that’s maybe not a good thing to do,” adding: “They don’t like the word ‘war,’ because you’re supposed to get approval, so I’ll use the word ‘military operation,’ which is really what it is.” Bothered by unfavorable media coverage of the war, Trump’s FCC chairman threatened to revoke the licenses of TV networks, violating the First Amendment.

Early on, Trump told the New York Times, “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario” for Iran. This was a reference to the forcible U.S. removal of Nicholas Maduro from power, leaving his cowed subordinates to govern under American oversight. Whereas Venezuela is run by thugs and gangsters, Iran is an ideologically driven regime. Failing to recognize that reality has been a central flaw in the Iran war.

The war’s conclusion remains to be seen. Clearly, the elimination of key leaders and the significant degradation of Iranian military capabilities are worthy accomplishments. By the April ceasefire, however, the regime had (predictably) seized the Straits of Hormuz to strangle the flow of cargo ships carrying oil. One major risk is that the war ends in a stalemate, which given our military superiority, would mean an American defeat. For the Iranian regime, surviving this war is a kind of victory.

Moreover, permitting Iran to exact tolls on ships in the Straits of Hormuz means affording it a new revenue source to fund its militant agenda. And a diplomatic agreement fixated on nuclear weapons capability — which appears to be an aim of the Trump administration — would be a regression to the Obama-era evasion of the regime’s Islamist nature, its sponsorship of jihadists, and its manifold other forms of aggression.

Unless Iran’s ideological goal is shown to be a lost cause, unless it and other Islamists are demoralized, unless they lose all hope of realizing their nihilistic agenda, we can expect the Iranian regime (and other jihadists) to seek to resume their holy war. That was one lesson of Israel’s disastrous “mowing the grass” policy in Gaza. A degraded but undefeated Hamas rebuilt and resumed the fight on October 7.

We published the first edition of this book in 2016, and the second, in 2021 during the Afghanistan withdrawal. Now, a quarter-century on from the 9/11 attacks, we issue a third. Our philosophic analysis has been proven correct, and we believe it needs to be heard.

Here briefly is the argument: The fundamental obstacle to defeating Islamic totalitarianism is not a deficit of military capability. The problem is philosophic. The prevailing moral idea of self-sacrifice has negated American self-confidence, and it has crippled the ability of our leaders and intellectuals to conceptualize the enemy and to define and pursue our self-interest. Irrational philosophic ideas have subverted the world’s greatest military force.

But we remain convinced that ending the Islamist menace is achievable — if the United States adopts, understands, and consistently acts on rational moral ideals.

***

Added to this edition are seven short essays on: the Afghanistan retreat; the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Iran; the October 7 attacks and their aftermath; and the Iran war’s early phase. Also added as an afterword is an interview about ARI’s response to 9/11, why it was so important for the Institute to engage on this issue, and how our distinctive analysis is informed by the philosophy of Objectivism. Removed from this edition are lists of resources that can be found online.

To keep up with ARI’s ongoing intellectual work — podcasts, essays, books, and more — subscribe to email updates from our journal, New Ideal.

***

Finally, we wish to thank ARI’s donors for their support of the philosophic ideals that we hold in common, and for making possible our work on this crucial issue. We are grateful for their dedication to the Institute’s mission of advancing Objectivism. Special thanks to Jay Snider, for generous funding through his family foundations, and to Larry Berkelhammer, for his encouragement and generous support of our research and writing.

Elan Journo
Onkar Ghate
June 2, 2026

In this episode of the Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Robertas Bakula and Onkar Ghate discuss the political platform, moral goals, and philosophical motivations driving the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Topics include:

• Radical goals of the DSA

• DSA versus past communism

• Lack of intellectual argument

• Miseducation versus willful ignorance

• Fantasy world of socialism

• Ayn Rand on producer hatred

• Hypocrisy or true goals

• Foreign policy and authoritarian regimes

Resources:

• Ayn Rand’s title essay in For the New Intellectual

This episode was recorded on August 25, 2026.

Ayn Rand’s handwritten material is not easy to read. Much of it is in cursive, a writing style that fewer and fewer people learn how to read. Even for those who can read cursive, her unique penmanship can still be a challenge, as many pages of material in her personal papers were notes or drafts never intended to be legible to anyone other than herself. Therefore, just putting the scans of these pages online would not achieve the Ayn Rand Archives’ goal of making this material globally accessible.

For that, we needed to add something: typed transcripts.

Transcripts, typed copies of the handwritten words on the page, truly unlock Ayn Rand’s archival materials. Our goal is to make these transcripts as accurate as possible to Rand’s original words.

Transcription notation

While there are some limitations on this in any given typed format, our current transcription platform allows us to get very close to the originals using various formatting conventions.

The following examples are taken from this page (shown above), this page, and this page, all part of Rand’s planning material for her first novel, We the Living.

Broadly, we have attempted to match what we see on the handwritten page in the typed version. This includes line and paragraph breaks, check marks or other symbols, a certain amount of left indentation, underlines, and deletions or strikethroughs.

Deletions

For readability, these last are always represented as strikethroughs in the transcript, even if Rand used heavier markings:

Insertions

These later additions made by Rand are presented as smaller, superscripted text in the transcripts:

Uncertain Words

When the handwriting is unclear but a reasonable guess is possible, the platform presents the word in brackets, with both the word and brackets italicized.

Regularization

In some cases, Rand either misspelled a word or name or used a less common spelling of something. These words are regularized in the transcript, meaning that the correct or common spelling is given. These are presented in italicized text with a dashed underline. Hovering over these words reveals the original spelling or phrasing as it appeared in Rand’s handwriting, which allows for improved reading and searching while still providing an accurate representation of the original.

Other regularization used throughout all transcripts (which is not formatted):

• Rand used a version of the plus sign (+) for an “and” symbol; the transcripts regularize this to the ampersand (&) symbol in order to be more machine-readable.

• Quotation marks are in the standard American English convention, with both opening and closing quotation marks appearing at the top of the word (“abc” or ‘abc’); Rand herself switched to this convention later in her life, but in much of her early writing (as seen above) she used the European convention of a lower opening quotation mark that appeared at the bottom of the word.

Nonstandard elements

Some elements of the handwritten text cannot easily be reproduced through formatting within this platform, or are otherwise best handled via transcriber notes, short, written descriptions of something on the original page. These are given as italicized comments within regular brackets:

Searchability

One of the biggest benefits of these transcripts is that they are full-text searchable. Anyone can read through the complete text of this archival material, but that is not necessary to find material of interest. Keyword searches, with or without a wild card (*), are possible.

Searches can be conducted within a particular set of Ayn Rand’s papers, such as just within her We the Living material:

But they can also be conducted on all the publicly available archival materials within our transcription platform:

Within the search results, users can look at “Works” (whole documents) that contain the search keyword, or they can look at individual pages which contain the keyword:

This search will become more powerful as we continue to release more of Rand’s archival material. Thanks to the power of these digital tools, this resource is not limited to a particular physical location of the Archives, but rather is accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

We are deeply grateful to our volunteer transcribers, whose efforts have made this entire project possible.

For any questions about the archival material available through this platform, or for more information about how to become a volunteer transcriber, please contact archives@aynrand.org.

In this episode of the Ayn Rand Institute podcast, Onkar Ghate and Tristan de Liège discuss Zohran Mamdani’s record $323 million culture budget for NYC aimed at supporting the arts, and why government attempts to fund artistic endeavors are unjust and ineffective in creating thriving conditions for artists.

Topics include:

• The Culture Budget’s Purpose

• The “Affordability Crisis”

• The Disdain for the Market

• The Effects of Subsidizing Art

• The Alternative to Subsidies

Resources:

• Ayn Rand, “What is Capitalism” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

• Ayn Rand, “To Dream the Non-Commercial Dream” in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

This episode was recorded on August 5, 2026.

Image credit: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images News / via Getty Images

Since Zohran Mamdani’s shocking election to mayor of New York, candidates supported by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have recently enjoyed significant victories. More generally, socialism is experiencing a resurgence, especially among younger voters. Why, after the horrors of 20th-century socialism in the Soviet Union, China, Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere, do people still support socialism?

In a recent, widely seen episode of the Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Ben Bayer and I propose an answer that is contrary to many popular explanations. We observe that young socialists driving this resurgence are morally confident and determined in their vision, and this is no accident: From their perspective, morality is on their side. We suggest that a culture-wide commitment to the morality of altruism — according to which one has a duty to sacrifice to those in need —has led directly to a re-energized socialist movement.

Young people have heard all their lives that the needs of society outweigh the needs of individuals, and that we have a duty to serve others. What better way to make the individual subservient to society than to dismantle a system based on private property and profit? What better way to serve the needs of others than to expropriate the wealth of the successful to fund public housing, public grocery stores, and endless other social programs?

They’ve also heard all their lives that democracy is good and just — in essence, that if a majority votes on a policy, that makes it right. What could be more democratic than the democratic control of the economy that democratic socialism offers? If we can vote on whether we have more welfare or more progressive taxation, why not vote on whether private corporations can exist at all?

As to the history of socialism, these socialists don’t care — they will always believe their approach will be the one that “really works.” This helps show that the morality of altruism is a religious commitment: No one has ever rationally demonstrated why a human being should sacrifice values for others.

Thus, only a rejection of its faith-based moral foundation can defeat socialism. It is merely the consistent political implementation of altruism. As we have argued in previous podcasts, the only response that can succeed is one that rejects both altruism and unlimited majority rule (the true meaning of democracy) as evil and incompatible with human flourishing.

Watch the podcast here:

Image credit: Selcuk Acar / Anadolu via Getty Images

Raphael’s painting “The School of Athens” portrays the great thinkers of Ancient Greece. Appropriately, the central figures dominating the scene are Plato and Aristotle. They are shown walking toward the viewer, engaged in earnest discussion. Raphael was able to convey the essential difference between these philosophic titans by means of the gestures they make: Plato crooks a finger toward the heavens, but Aristotle’s hand is stretched out, palm down, as if to bless the earth.

Whether or not Raphael understood it consciously, that is the root of the opposition between the two men and between the two world-views they represent: the mysticism of some “higher” dimension versus the commitment to life on this earth.

Since Copernicus and Galileo, it has become clear that Plato’s upthrust finger points only at the cold emptiness of outer space. Now that men have walked on the moon and laid bare the structure of the atom, mysticism has lost its credibility in the physical realm. But mysticism still haunts the realm of values. That realm has been fenced off as a special epistemological preserve which reason may not enter. Mysticism has distorted the very concepts used to make value-judgments. Many people who reject the metaphysics of the supernatural are yet victimized by the residual mysticism that infects their evaluative concepts. One concept particularly in need of philosophical disinfection is “perfection.”

We hear from all sides that perfection is an “impossible dream,” an ideal which always exceeds our grasp, and by doing so lures us on to ever greater achievements. In sanctimonious terms, Bertrand Russell pleads, “Let us admit that . . . the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realized in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain.’’1 Religionists and atheists, liberals and conservatives, whim-worshippers and duty-worshippers — they all agree that “Nothing is perfect in this world.”

It is all perfect nonsense.

And it is dangerous nonsense. The idea that perfection is unattainable amounts to an assault on all values, on values as such. “Perfection,” as the mystics use that term, makes self-esteem impossible.

What is “perfection” supposed to mean? The Random House College Dictionary gives as one of its definitions of “perfect”: “excellent or complete beyond practical or theoretical improvement.”2 This definition represents pure mysticism: if only the unimprovable is perfect, then perfection would require omniscience — i.e., the beatific state of already knowing everything about everything, with no further improvements left to be discovered. What earthly purpose could justify using such an other-worldly standard of perfection?

The mystical version of perfection means that improvement retroactively debases that which was improved. This idea takes progress, which is actually the path from achievement to achievement, and converts it into a treadmill on which man moves from flaw to flaw, in a hopeless quest for the perfection that lies at infinity.

The dictionary is not to blame. It has reported accurately the legacy of mysticism that has become embedded in the term’s usage. Mysticism is so engrained in the concept that for many people the actual meaning of “perfect” is: supernaturally good. “Transcendence” is listed as a synonym for “perfection” in a standard thesaurus.3 On this view, to be is to be imperfect.

The philosopher who is primarily responsible for the mystical version of “perfection” is Plato. The essence of Plato’s philosophy is the positing of another, non-perceivable reality, a realm of static perfection, the world of ‘‘Forms.’’

“Platonic Forms are conceived as timeless and non-spatial objects, immutable entities set over against the changing world of sensible [i.e., sensorily perceivable] things. . . . Each [Form] is a perfect original, of which sensible things are imperfect copies.”4

Plato insisted that the perfection of an ideal, a Form, has nothing at all to do with the possibility of its attainment in this world. In the Republic, Plato asks us to imagine a painting of “the ideally beautiful man.” The perfection of his beauty, Plato holds, would not be diminished even if one were “not able to prove that it is actually possible for such a man to exist.”5 But if the painting depicts something that is contradictory to man’s nature, how can it be a representation of an ideal man? What is non-human human beauty?

Plato downgraded this world, but did not strip it of all value. That step awaited the advent of Christianity. In Christian doctrine, perfection was conceived as that which pertained to a higher reality of infinite goodness; man and this world were condemned as intrinsically evil. Accordingly, to say any man or human phenomenon can be perfect is to blaspheme God.

Historian W. T. Jones observes, “The orthodox determination to exalt God led inevitably to the conclusion that man is worthless, for to allow any value or significance to humanity was to derogate by just that amount from the majesty, perfection, and supreme value of God.”6

The practical result? “Since the perfection of the Deity gave the Christian an absolutely exalted ideal to aim at, the Christian always felt a sense of failure: No matter how good he was, he was not as good as he ought to be.”7

This is a correct description of the doctrine’s effect, but it is radically understated. To see the full effect on man’s self-estimate of Christianity’s impossible standards, one should consult the kind of pronouncements that came from the Church when it held absolute power and was free to bare its soul. Here, for instance, is a brief excerpt from On the Contempt of This World, written in the year 1198 A.D. by Pope Innocent III:

Man has been conceived in the desire of the flesh, in the heat of sensual lust, in the foul stench of wantonness. . . . he is destined to become the fuel of the everlasting, eternally painfull hellfire; the food of voracious, consuming worms. . . . reflecting upon the heavenly bodies he will become aware of his utter baseness. . . . Why are you proud, O mud? Wherefore art thou exalted? What are you, O ash, that you should boast?8

That naked hatred for man is the spiritual ancestor and undiluted version of today’s hayseed homily, “Nobody’s perfect in this world.”

After this sort of history, one may well question the basic validity of the term “perfection.” But the mystical-supernatural associations are not inextricably tied to the term (as they are to “saint,” for example). Is there any rational need for such a concept? Yes, provided one recognizes that “perfection” is a normative, not a metaphysical, concept.

Metaphysically, a thing is neither perfect nor imperfect — it simply is whatever it is. Apart from the goals, purposes, and values of a living being, there is no basis to rank things as “better” or “worse,” much less as “perfect” or “imperfect.” “Perfection” assumes an answer to the questions “Perfect—for what? By what standard?”

The actual meaning of “perfection” is: flawlessly complete satisfaction of a standard of value.

In its rational meaning, the concept of perfection denotes not the unimprovable but the best possible in a given context. If one has achieved a goal to the fullest extent possible in a given context, then the achievement is perfect, in the rational sense of that term. Subsequent improvements based on a wider range of knowledge or higher level of ability will not invalidate that achievement or subtract from its value: it remains perfect by the standards of the earlier context. Just as new knowledge cannot invalidate old knowledge, new achievements do not invalidate the old. Just as, in epistemology, certainty is contextual, so in the realm of values, perfection is contextual. Man can judge and act only within the context of the knowledge that is available to him. No standard can demand the impossible of reality or of man.

Further, one may distinguish between one’s personal standards of perfection and the standards defining the best possible to man as such. This is not subjectivism: one’s standard of perfectly achieving a given goal must be consistent with the facts of one’s own particular abilities, interests, knowledge, and hierarchy of values. For instance, the standard of perfect writing for a student in a fourth-grade English class is obviously not the same as that for a professional author. The contextual nature of such standards does not make perfection any the less objective or praiseworthy.

The one area in which the same standard of perfection applies to all men is morality.

In regard to moral values, the “imperfect” is not that which falls slightly short of the ideal, but that which betrays it altogether by instituting an immoral premise. It would be grossly misleading, for instance, to describe a man who tells the truth most of the time, but lies occasionally, as “imperfectly honest.” Such a man is simply dishonest.

In this sense, “moral perfection” is a redundancy. Moral principles do not admit of compromise. Either what is right is one’s supreme guide, or it is not. There is no such thing as an “almost supreme” principle — this phrase merely indicates that some other factor is supreme, and the principle enters, if at all, only as a secondary, dispensable consideration.

The term “perfection” as applied to morality serves the same purpose as the term “laissez-faire” when applied to capitalism. There is no other version of capitalism; if it is not laissez-faire capitalism, it is not capitalism. Likewise, if a choice is not morally perfect, it is not moral. But both terms are valuable for precisely their stress on the need for consistency. “Laissez-faire capitalism” means: the principle of capitalism (individual rights) carried through without exception to every political issue. “Moral perfection” means the principle of morality (the commitment to reason) carried through without exception to every choice one confronts. Since the need for this type of consistency is not self-evident, since it is only implicit in the nature of morality, the idea of’ “moral perfection” is profoundly valuable.

The concept of ‘‘perfection’’ is based on the need for precision and consistency in a value context. Eliminating this concept would act as an invitation for every form of the approximate, the uncompleted, the sloppy, and the subjective. This would be dangerous in any culture, but in an age like ours, when the educational system actively encourages sloppiness of thought and expression, when Pragmatist trial-and-error groping is considered “scientific” but adherence to principles is called “dogmatic,” when people do not pursue excellence but are “into” things (“I’m into acting”), the concept must not be abandoned to the mystics.

Rational perfection is determined by reference to a rational standard of value. The mystical idea of an unattainable perfection means that fantasy supplies the standard by which facts are to be held accountable. It means that the arbitrary contents of consciousness are that to which reality should (but stubbornly does not) yield. The philosophical term for this inversion is the primacy of consciousness.9

But “the primacy of consciousness” is almost too dignified a term here. To capture the perverse silliness of the use of impossible standards, imagine a man who designs an airplane, finds that it cannot get off the ground, and responds by blaming gravity for being too strong. In an ideal world, he muses, his airplane would fly — but the actual world is imperfect.

There is no difference in basic principle between such a man and those who hold equally impossible standards regarding man’s mind — such as the idea that to be perfect, one would have to be able to solve any problem immediately, never make an error of knowledge, never experience an out-of-context emotion, never feel fear or doubt, and always know just what to do in every situation. In all these cases, one is demanding the impossible of man. The fault lies not in man, but in the demand.

It would be a grave error to conclude from this that one has to settle for a second-best goal or lower one’s standards. That attitude represents a failure fully to reject the wrong standard — i.e., fully to accept reality. It means that one still regards the impossible as desirable, though not practical. The truth is that the impossible is, if anything, beneath the possible. It is not just that one should not “dream the impossible dream”: if it is truly impossible, it is not a dream but a nightmare.

The truly good is not a scaled-down, budget version of the fantasy good. One does not reach the truth by starting with fantasy, then making adjustments as a concession to “realism.” A rational man starts from reality — from what exists (actually and potentially) — and never casts a longing glance at the unreal.

The choice in regard to perfection is not: the hopeless quest for the unattainable or the abandonment of all ideals. The alternative is not the impossible dream versus cynical resignation. These irrational dilemmas are a manifestation of the wider false alternative that is ripping our culture apart: mysticism versus skepticism (or: intrinsicism versus subjectivism).

One side asserts that perfection is to be judged by the standards of the supernatural and concludes that perfection can be attained only in Heaven, not in this world. The other side agrees that perfection is to be judged by the standards of the supernatural but holds that Heaven is (probably) a myth and concludes that perfection cannot be attained anywhere. Both sides hold that without God man is doomed to failure, cognitively and morally; both hold that man qua man is an ignorant sinner.

It does no good to reject the mystics’ metaphysics while retaining their epistemology and ethics, i.e., to cling to other-worldly standards without the other world.

The truth is that proper, this-worldly standards are more demanding than standards which cannot be met — more demanding intellectually. Defining and applying rational standards takes a careful process of independent thought, while the mystical “standards” turn out to be simple-minded substitutes for mental effort: vague images, canned slogans, and floating abstractions. (The desire to escape mental effort is one reason why many people would rather demand the impossible of themselves than accept rational standards.)

The claim that perfection is impossible attempts to blame reality for the problems resulting from the cavalier misuse of concepts — from invalid definitions, equivocations, and “stolen concepts.” Consider three areas in which perfection is commonly believed to be unattainable.

1. Morality. The anti-perfection doctrine is most deeply entrenched and most disastrous in regard to morality. The impossibility of moral perfection is taken as a self-evident truth. But what is morality? Morality is “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions.”10 Morality exists to evaluate the choices confronting man; the concept of “choice” logically precedes and delimits the scope of all moral concepts — including the concept of “moral perfection.” To speak of an impossible moral perfection is to violate this hierarchy of concepts, thus “stealing” the concept of “moral perfection” and engaging in self-contradiction. For if moral perfection is not merely rare but impossible, then man is saddled with some degree of unavoidable evil — i.e., an evil choice that he cannot stop himself from making — i.e., an unchosen choice.

Religionists often argue that to be morally perfect man would have to be metaphysically incapable of evil. Since man has free will, since he is free to choose between good and evil, he cannot attain moral perfection, they hold. This argument carries the “stolen concept” to its ultimate extreme: the factor that makes morality possible — free will — is held to be a violation of morality. The truth is that a being lacking the choice between good and evil would not be morally perfect, but amoral — i.e., outside the province of morality altogether.

In logic, the standard of morality must restrict moral evaluation to the issues over which man has volitional control. The Objectivist standard of morality, man’s survival qua man, recognizes this fact.

“Man’s survival qua man” means the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan-in all those aspects of existence which are open to his choice.11 (emphasis added)

The major cause of the near-universal belief that moral perfection is impossible lies in the specific version of morality that, since Kant, has monopolized the field: the code of self-sacrifice. The idea of a nonsacrificial morality is now treated as if it were a contradiction in terms. Philosophers today will tell you that principles to guide man in achieving his rational self-interest are by definition non-moral; such principles are matters of “prudence,” not of morality, they announce.

On the premise that morality equals self-sacrifice, it is easy to see why “moral perfection is impossible” is on everyone’s lips. The code of self-sacrifice is a code of self-destruction. To live is to violate the code. On this point, readers of Atlas Shrugged need no elaboration.

On a rational moral code, moral perfection is not merely possible, it is an absolute necessity. Since morality proceeds from the fundamental alternative man confronts — life or death — morality has first claim on a man’s choices, and nothing can justify the subordination of morality to any other consideration.

Discard that unlimited license to evil which consists of claiming that man is imperfect. By what standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept the fact that in the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. But perfection is not to be gauged by mystic commandments to practice the impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not open to your choice. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality . . .12

A “breached rationality,” or what Ayn Rand has called the “mixed economy of reason and emotion,” means the complete subordination of reason to emotion. Whenever a man elects to side with his emotions against his reason, his premise is, ‘‘I’ll go by reason — as long as my emotions permit it.” He establishes his feelings as the final authority that sets the domain in which his mind may operate. Unless he rejects that premise, reverses the priority, and commits himself to perfect rationality, the sphere in which he feels it is “safe” to be rational will constantly shrink, as his irrational feelings flex their muscles.

The literal mixed economy attempts to find a compromise between the opposite principles of freedom and force, but cannot succeed. The same is true of the moral “mixed economy” which seeks to find a compromise between the good and the evil, rather than to attain moral perfection.

2. Politics. Political freedom is a prime target of the anti-perfectionists. Man cannot be perfectly free, they maintain, because he is not omnipotent. His freedom of action is restrained by the limitations of his own capacities and by the laws of nature; his freedom to have what he wants is restricted by the fact that nature does not shower him with goods and that he must work in order to obtain values.

Moreover, they continue, man’s freedom from other men cannot be perfect because each man’s freedom conflicts with that of others. If I am to be free to do whatever I wish, then what becomes of your freedom when our desires conflict? What if, for instance, you and I both want the same job and only one of us can have it? What if I want to have your car, your money, your house? What if I want to enslave you? In all these cases of conflicting desires, they argue, at least one of us has to yield, surrendering thereby some or all of his freedom.

On the premise that perfect freedom is impossible, there is no difference in principle between capitalism and statism. Capitalists and statists are seen as differing merely over where they would draw the line between too few and too many restrictions on freedom. In fact, political “conservatives” argue in this manner that capitalism is the safe, moderate middle of the road between totalitarian dictatorship and the impossible dream of perfect freedom.

Sound inspiring? Ready to mount the barricades to defend “reasonable” restrictions on your freedom? Want to launch a crusade to preserve a “moderate” degree of enslavement?

This offensive nonsense results from accepting the irrational standard underlying the attack on perfect freedom. “Perfect freedom” is assumed to mean: the complete absence of obstacles to the fulfillment of one’s desires.

The irrationality of this standard lies in the fact that it subordinates reason to emotion. Desires are not irreducible primaries. They are the product of man’s value premises — premises which may be rational or irrational, consonant with or contradictory to the facts of reality. The fulfillment of a desire cannot be evaluated out of context; whim cannot serve as the basis for any political concept. When one evades that fact, the result is a definition by non-essentials, leading to exactly the sort of equivocations and confusions that characterize the anti-perfectionists’ stand on freedom.

The concept of political freedom does not pertain to man’s relationship to nature but to man’s relationship to man. The “obstacles” whose presence or absence the concept evaluates are man-made obstacles. The laws of nature are not “obstacles” to human action — but they are viewed as such by the irrationalist who takes his desires as the given, and only then turns to reality to see what it will “permit.”

(The word “freedom” can of course be used in a metaphorical or analogous sense to talk of freedom from pain, disease, etc., but then the word denotes a different concept. It is nothing but plain equivocation to switch from that concept to the political one, as the anti-perfection argument does.)

The actual obstacle whose absence is denoted by the concept of freedom — the thing a free man is free from — is coercive interference by other men. And the means by which coercion operates is physical force; only physical force can compel a man to act against his own judgment.

The issue of political freedom is not a primary. The alternative of freedom versus coercion arises only after one has arrived at the principle that man has a right to his life. On that foundation, one can proceed to identify the conditions which are necessary to implement man’s right to his life, including the fact that man must be free to act on his own judgment.

Since man survives by producing values, not by expropriating them, the notion of a “freedom” to rob, enslave, and murder is precluded at the outset. The idea that laws protecting individual rights restrict the “freedom” to commit criminal acts inverts the necessary hierarchical order and turns “freedom” into a “stolen concept.”

The best answer to the idea that absolute, perfect freedom is impossible was given almost 35 years ago by Ayn Rand: “Within the sphere of your own rights, your freedom is absolute.”13

3. Epistemology. Although the concept of “perfection” is primarily normative, assuming a standard of value, the term also has a wider usage. The dictionary gives the following additional meaning of “perfect”: “conforming absolutely to the description or definition of the type: a perfect sphere; a perfect gentleman.”14

The same anti-perfectionism crops up here. In fact, the alleged impossibility of a perfect sphere is a philosophical chestnut trotted out in every introductory philosophy course.

The argument is that no matter how nearly perfect a sphere seems to be, some deviation from perfect roundness will always be present. If an apparently perfect sphere, such as a (new) billiard ball, is examined under a powerful microscope, flaws will be observed. And ultimately, the billiard ball is composed of molecules that are in constant vibratory motion (due to heat energy). Thus the billiard ball’s shape, far from being perfectly spherical, is constantly undergoing very tiny changes. Conclusion: the mathematically perfect sphere is an “idealization” that is never realized in the physical world.

By extending this line of argument and applying it to tables, organisms, etc., philosophers can “prove” that all concepts apply only imperfectly to reality, that nothing conforms absolutely to any concept’s definition, that what we think of as “knowledge” is merely approximations built on approximations, and that no one has the right to demand precision, absolutes, or say “it is” about anything in this world.

The fallacy here is context-switching. What one sees under a microscope is not relevant to the concept of “sphere,” which is formed to denote precisely the sort of shape possessed by billiard balls. A billiard ball is a perfect sphere, by a rational, contextual standard. A “perfect sphere” means a sphere that is flawless in the context of man’s form of perception.

To a sub-amoeba living on the molecular level (if such an organism existed), a billiard ball would be a galaxy — an astronomically large, pulsating collection of entities. But what does that have to do with man? Man’s concept of “sphere” refers to a human scale, the scale on which man grasps and deals with reality.

All concepts, including the farthest reaches of mathematical abstraction, are derived from the perceptual level of man’s awareness, and all standards of perfection must be consistent with this fact. To borrow a passage from Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,

It is here that Protagoras’ old dictum may be given a new meaning, the opposite of the one he intended: “Man is the measure of all things.” Man is the measure, epistemologically — not metaphysically. In regard to human knowledge, man has to be the measure, since he has to bring all things into the realm of the humanly knowable.15

* * *

The alleged impossibility of attaining perfection is invoked when an idea or standard conflicts with reality. We are expected to swallow the contradiction rather than to correct the idea or standard. In this regard, “You cannot have perfection” functions in the same manner as such familiar catchphrases as “That may be good in theory, but it’s bad in practice,” “Nothing is black or white,” and “There are no simple answers.” In each case the underlying message is: theories, principles, and standards cannot be applied to the problems of “real life.” The “realistic” man, we are told, recognizes that reason is only an approximate or partial guide; to be “practical” we must not insist on consistency, which is merely “the hobgoblin of little minds.”

In this way, the demonstration that an idea conflicts with reality — which ought to count as that idea’s refutation — is treated as a sign of the inadequacy of reason.

As an unattainable perfection undercuts reason in epistemology, so it undercuts virtue in ethics. For the conscientious man, the acceptance of an impossible standard of moral perfection sets his best trait, his idealism, against himself. The more he strives to be good, the more guilt he experiences from his inevitable failure to achieve the impossible. His own pride, his moral ambitiousness, becomes his worst enemy. But for the man who is indifferent to moral values, the impossible standard carries no such penalty. In fact, the set-up serves as an excuse for such a man’s indulgence in actual evil. He comes to have a vested interest in the doctrine that perfection is unattainable. He is eager to hear that there is no difference in principle between himself and the greatest hero: both are held guilty, the difference being only one of degree. The impossible standard ensures that every hero will turn out to have feet of clay, for the standard equates human flesh with clay, i.e., it damns man for being man. The impossible standard protects the evil man from condemnation: it guarantees that there will be no one without sin to cast the first stone.

Men would rebel if they were told that the good must surrender to the evil, that the good has no rights by virtue of the fact that it is the good, while any demand made by the evil must be honored because it is the evil. But tell them instead that no one can be perfectly moral and they leap to agree, thereby instituting the same inversion of morality quietly and by degrees. For,

When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels — and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.16

As proof of the accuracy of this analysis, just recall the last thirty-five years of America’s foreign policy.

This brings us to the political motive for the anti-perfection attitude. By infecting man with unavoidable guilt, the mystics and collectivists aim to deprive man of the moral certainty required to assert his rights.

Do you recall the scene in which Lillian Rearden attempts to prevent Hank Rearden from defending himself at his trial?

I think you should remember that it’s not for you to make a stand on any sort of principle. . . . I think you should abandon the illusion of your own perfection, which you know full well to be an illusion. . . . The day of the hero is past. . . . Human beings are no longer expected to be saints nor to be punished for their sins. Nobody is right or wrong, we’re all in it together, we’re all human — and the human is the imperfect.17

And do you recall Ayn Rand’s analysis of the motive behind the collectivist ideal enunciated in the papal encyclical, “Populorum Progressio”?

It is not intended to be accepted and practiced; it is intended to be accepted and broken. . . . Men who accept as an ideal an irrational goal which they cannot achieve, never lift their heads thereafter — and never discover that their bowed heads were the only goal to be achieved.18

It was not always thus. There was a time in which unbowed heroes, armed with an inviolate confidence in the perfect justice of their cause, declared their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ‘‘And for the support of this declaration,” they wrote, “we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

It is precisely the sanctity of a man’s honor, with the self-assertiveness it makes possible, that the anti-perfectionists seek to destroy. Such honor is impossible to an imperfect being. But not, as the Founding Fathers proved, to man.

In this episode of the Ayn Rand Institute podcast, Itamar Feldman interviewed Mike Mazza about his new book of essays, Freedom to Launch, which explains how deregulation of the space industry enabled today’s space renaissance and what the government’s role in space should be going forward.

Among the topics covered are:

• Why Freedom to Launch was written

• The space industry’s current state

• Space law and property rights

• Private vs. Commercial space industry

• The government’s historic role in space

• What’s next for the space industry?

• Should NASA exist?

Resources recommended in the episode:

• Mike Mazza, Freedom to Launch

• Ayn Rand, “The Property Status of the Airwaves,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Sam Weaver interviews Onkar Ghate about the American system of checks and balances and the rise of a religious mentality in America, topics discussed in his OCON 2026 talk “America at 250: Politics, Religion, Morality.”

Topics Include:

• What checks and balances are

• Erosion since the founding

• Rise of religious mentality

Resources:

• “America at 250: Politics, Religion, Morality” by Onkar Ghate

This episode was recorded on July 30, 2026.

Offering Animal Farm as a response to socialism is tragically self-defeating. Orwell was a self-proclaimed socialist and Animal Farm is not an anti-socialist or even an anti-communist novel. It is anti-Stalinist — but its critique of Stalin’s regime is actually pro-socialist. Here’s why — and where those looking for a genuinely anti-socialist novel should look instead.

Animal Farm’s pro-socialist message

Animal Farm portrays animals who overthrow Jones, the owner of their farm (who is widely taken to represent the monarchy of Tsar Nicholas II) and establish a new society in which “All animals are equal.” Importantly, Orwell portrays the socialist experiment on the farm as an immediate, admirable success:

In the end they finished the harvest in two days’ less time than it had usually taken Jones and his men. Moreover, it was the biggest harvest the farm had ever seen . . . All through that summer the work of the farm went like clockwork. The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. . . . With the worthless parasitical human beings gone, there was more for everyone to eat. There was more leisure, too, inexperienced though the animals were.4

The novel attributes this initial success to the animals’ collective effort to practice communist economic equality. At this time, two pigs — Snowball (seen as representing Leon Trotsky) and Napoleon (Joseph Stalin) — become the de facto leaders. However, when Napoleon forces Snowball into exile and seizes dictatorial power for himself, life on the farm gets progressively worse, and his cadre of pigs declares themselves “more equal” than the other animals.

The novel’s message is not that socialism is bad. If anything, it upholds the socialist ideal of creating a society of individuals who are to be rendered equal in all respects as far as possible, regardless of differences in capabilities and achievements. The pursuit of this sort of equality is entirely different from the political equality espoused by the American founding fathers in which all individuals are recognized as equal in their rights, as worthy of impartial treatment by the law — even as they may be unequal in many other respects. Socialist equality is rather the the egalitarian equality captured by Marx’s slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Individuals with greater abilities are proscribed from benefitting from their use; the products of their efforts and abilities are to be redistributed to others to achieve equal outcomes for all. And because individuals have no inviolable rights, they may be sacrificed to collective ends like egalitarian equality.

Animal Farm’s claim about Stalin and dictators like him is that they turn a noble and workable socialist experiment into a contemptible dictatorship that undercuts the socialist ideal. But what does it look like to really practice this ideal?

The image Orwell paints of a happy, flourishing farm early in the story does not even resemble the real historical Soviet Union before Stalin. It was a brutal dictatorship that killed tens of thousands of suspected dissenters and sent many more to gulags.5 It also was, as socialism always is, an economic nightmare, rife with rationing, poverty and famine.6

Moreover, it’s just not true that Stalin betrayed the socialist ideal. According to his biographer Stephen Kotkin, Stalin was a true believer in Marxism whose private statements were consistent with his public beliefs.7 And one of Stalin’s most devastating policies was the collectivization of agriculture, a campaign that confiscated private farms and coerced peasants to work on collective farms.8 This policy was in part an attempt to fulfill the egalitarian, collectivist ideal of socialism, redistributing from those with the ability to produce to those with needs. But it resulted in millions of deaths. In both the Lenin and Stalin eras, Soviet Russia was dominated by poverty and oppression as a result of its leaders’ loyalty to socialism.

By portraying socialism as an idyllic success before its corruption by a dictator and suggesting that it wasn’t to blame for Stalin’s crimes, Animal Farm elevates Marxist ideals instead of criticizing them. Orwell implies that un-hijacked socialism would drastically improve human life, obscuring the reality that faithfully practiced socialism actually causes oppression and poverty. That’s a false and blatantly pro-socialist message. And in light of socialism’s devastating impact, it’s a dangerous message.

So business leaders who recommend Animal Farm have fallen for Orwell’s propaganda. Where can they turn for a true defense of freedom against socialism?

Ayn Rand’s depiction of the evil of socialism in Anthem

The pro-capitalism novelist Ayn Rand recognized the danger of Animal Farm back in 1946. She warned Leonard Read, the founder of the free-market organization Foundation for Economic Education, not to promote the novella:

As an advance warning, for God’s sake DON’T recommend “Animal Farm”. . . . It is a book against Stalin, not against Communism. In fact, it is the mushiest and most maudlin preachment of Communism (I suppose the author would call it Socialism, but there is no difference), that I have seen in a long time. The moral of the book is not: “Communism is evil,” but: “Stalin’s Communism is just as evil as Capitalism.” Don’t let’s help to preach that idea.9

Contrary to Orwell, who regarded socialism as a noble ideal that in practice is often corrupted, Rand regarded socialism as evil both in theory and in practice. Although famous for The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Rand also wrote a novella (about 100 pages) called Anthem, which, in contrast to Animal Farm, is genuinely anti-socialist in the most fundamental sense.

Anthem depicts a society in which the egalitarian, collectivist ideal of socialism has completely triumphed. The official policy of this society is to make everyone as equal as possible in all respects and to compel everyone to live solely to promote the good of the whole society. In other words, the society’s stated policies are similar to those of the Animal Farm before Napoleon’s takeover: “All animals are equal,” and all must work for the interests of the farm as a whole. Where in Orwell’s novel the collectivism is merely implied by the rest of the animals’ ideas and practices, the society in Anthem is explicit about its collectivist ideal in its official slogan:

We are one in all and all in one.
There are no men but only the great WE,
One, indivisible and forever.10

But Rand presents a very different portrait of the un-hijacked attempt to practice these ideals. The councils that rule Anthem’s society condemn and attempt to suppress all inequalities, including metaphysically given ones like height, raw intelligence and other forms of ability. Since it’s impossible to bestow greater abilities on the least able, the councils primarily seek equality by tearing down the most able. For example, they deliberately assign intelligent individuals to menial jobs — the protagonist Equality 7-2521, who has a brilliant scientific mind, is ordered to be a street sweeper. They strive to control all aspects of life, from work to meals to relations with others, according to their plans for the alleged good of the “great We.” As a result, they outlaw all individual initiative: everyone must act strictly as ordered.

They even attempt to suppress what enables individual initiative: independent thought and personal preference. From childhood, the people of this society are subjected to propaganda telling them that it is wrong to think anything that others do not think or to prefer a career, activity or person. Anyone who does not completely subordinate their mind and their capacity to value faces an agonizing conflict between the life they are compelled to live and, on the other hand, their own thoughts, desire and emotions — which they cannot even express without fear of punishment. Even an unstated question or a secret preference, kept hidden within one’s own mind, puts one in conflict with those in power.

In a society like this, it is impossible for anyone to be happy. Equality 7-2521 finds joy only when he figures out how to pursue some of his values — in secret defiance of the councils’ mandates. He observes that none of his fellow citizens are happy: He sees people who frequently cry without reason or scream for help in the night. “Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak,” he observes.11

And this society’s suppression of the individual has caused it to regress from a modern, industrial society back to a primitive level of existence. Its prohibitions on individual thought and initiative quell any technology more advanced than the candle. Its citizens farm at a near-subsistence level, with life expectancy dramatically reduced.

The picture conveyed by Anthem: practicing egalitarian collectivist ideals consistently causes poverty and oppression. The problem isn’t “corruption” of the socialist ideal — it’s that the socialist ideal itself is corrupt.

And Anthem offers a value beyond astutely showing the evils of socialism. Its critique of socialism is inextricable from its depiction of the source of invention, progress and prosperity: the independent, individual mind, which pursues new truths regardless of the demands of authorities or the views of the majority. By defying the society’s prohibitions, Equality 7-2521 becomes a scientific innovator who creates a technology that promises to improve human life. Anthem contends that, to have a society where such people can succeed, one must reject the whole collectivist worldview and embrace the moral right of the individual to think freely, to pursue his own initiatives, and to pursue his own happiness.

Anthem, not the pro-socialist Animal Farm, is the short fictional antidote to socialist ideology because it reveals the evil of the socialist moral ideal. Those like Griffin who want to stem the resurgence of socialism would do themselves a service by reading and recommending it.

In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Don Watkins, Onkar Ghate, and Keith Lockitch discuss the Institute’s recently announced educational program on Objectivism: ARU Core.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. Yet, given how far it has drifted from its founding political ideals, is America still worth celebrating?

In his opening address at the 2026 Objectivist Summer Conference, “America at 250: What Do We Have to Celebrate?” Gregory Salmieri argues that the answer is yes. America’s founding made possible a distinctive way of life centered on independent judgment and productive achievement, one that endures and continues to benefit Americans today.

Drawing on history, Salmieri traces the emergence of this way of life and argues that Ayn Rand’s conception of the producer best captures the ideal implicit in it. He maintains that America is still “the country of the producer,” citing advances in artificial intelligence, energy, spaceflight, and supersonic flight. However, Salmieri stresses, the culture behind these achievements remains more felt than understood, leaving the country vulnerable. Celebrating America, he concludes, requires understanding and living up to the principles that made this way of life possible.

Among the topics covered:

• America’s crisis of national self-esteem

• The Enlightenment roots of America’s founding principles

• The producer as the ideal implicit in the American way of life

• The continuing vitality and vulnerability of America’s culture of production

• Americanism as an achievement rather than a birthright

This talk was recorded live on June 26 in New Orleans as part of the 2026 Objectivist Summer Conference and is available on The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast stream. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here.

In this episode of the Ayn Rand Institute podcast, Ben Bayer and Tristan de Liège examine recent socialist electoral victories, and analyze critical reactions that fail to identify the philosophical essence of the movement.

Topics include:

• Allegations of “extremism”

• What the “extremism” charge hides

• Are socialists “democratic”?

• Socialism and communism

• Socialist and MAGA populism

• Religious communism, godless capitalism

Resources:

• Ayn Rand “Extremism’: or the Art of Smearing,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

• Entry on “socialism” in the Ayn Rand Lexicon

• Ben Bayer, “Meet the New Socialism, Same as the Old,” New Ideal, Sept 2, 2019

• Ben Bayer, “ICE Tyranny Is What Democracy Looks Like,” New Ideal, Feb 25, 2026

• “Why Socialists Fear the Republican Party Platform,” ARI Podcast, Jul 25, 2024

• “Trump’s Anti-Capitalist Control Over Businesses,” ARI Podcast, Sept 18, 2025

This episode was recorded on July 23, 2026.

Image credit: AI via Getty Images