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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This essay by Ben Bayer was originally published in New Ideal on January 4, 2023. New Ideal is the online journal of the Ayn Rand Institute. Free subscribers gain access to more content than is published on our Substack. Subscribe here.

Why does the “antiracist” movement mobilize to deplatform or fire anyone who slights or asks the wrong questions about the dominant views of “social justice”? What explains the irrational fervor of the “woke”?

John McWhorter, noteworthy Columbia linguistics professor and New York Times columnist, grapples with this question in his recent book, Woke Racism. The book’s subtitle reveals his provocative answer: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. To understand the “woke” movement, he shows, we must take seriously its religious character.

How are we to deal with a social movement guided by blind faith? McWhorter is under no illusion that we can somehow rationally persuade the leaders of the movement to change their ways. Instead, he counsels that we must find “a way to live graciously among them” while insulating “people with good ideas from the influence of their liturgical concerns” (xii-xiii).

But if McWhorter is right about the religious character of the movement, then multitudes of unsuspecting students who otherwise lean secular have accepted an unscientific, religious doctrine. Those of us who want to insulate ourselves and our children from its influence, will wonder whether it’s enough to ignore its advocates and live “graciously” among them. To know what is required to insulate ourselves fully from “the influence of their liturgical concerns,” we will need to know what makes woke doctrine so seductive even to secular, educated people.

While McWhorter’s explanation is good as far as it goes, it doesn’t go quite far enough. In particular, McWhorter’s account doesn’t make explicit what it is about the religious character of the movement that motivates such irrational fervor. Arguably his own evidence points to the fuller explanation we need, but he doesn’t dwell on it. I’d like to bring it to the forefront.

How does religion motivate fervor?

The evidence McWhorter presents of the religious character of the woke movement is compelling. The movement has articles of faith: no one is to question that racism is to blame for most social problems. It has its sacred texts (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo), which are to be read and recited almost ritualistically. It has its own conception of original sin: white people cannot escape their “privilege” and must acknowledge it. It has a gospel that must be spread to all “sinners” and who must repent. The parallels are so striking that McWhorter dubs the members of the movement “The Elect,” a reference to Puritan Calvinism’s class of those predestined for salvation.

How does a religious doctrine encourage nominally secular people to engage in such irrational behavior?

The problem is not that woke activists suffer from some form of mass psychosis. McWhorter stresses that he thinks they don’t, even though they embrace their dogmas in defiance of the evidence and hold others to impossible, contradictory standards (e.g., to be inclusive and multicultural one can’t avoid “cultural appropriation”). Why, if they are neither crazy nor uneducated do they so openly defy intellectual standards?

McWhorter thinks that the new woke religion fulfills the same basic need that traditional religions have fulfilled for countless people for millennia.¹ The need is a “basic sense of succor” (70). Elsewhere he is more specific: it provides a sense of “sheer purpose . . . the basic sense of feeling like you matter and that your life has a meaningful agenda” (40).

This is headed in the right direction, but it’s important that not all religious believers behave like zealots. Consider a “New Age” religion that has also supplanted traditional belief systems in the West, neo-pagan Wicca. This sometimes polytheistic, sometimes pantheist set of beliefs and practices would strike most secularists as a genuine form of religious mysticism. And surely many Wiccans find “comfort” in their magical rituals, including through some sense of purpose from being “interconnected with the cosmos.” Yet even though Wiccans probably embrace their beliefs in animistic spirits and magic irrationally, few are motivated to join a mob marching for a new Inquisition against non-witches or a crusade against monotheists.

Numerous other religious believers go in for a faith but don’t march for its cause. Consider sundry modern Episcopalians or Western Buddhists who formally accept their theologies and practice their rituals, but who would never persecute heretics and apostates. We can say they simply don’t take their religion very seriously, that they don’t see their beliefs as relating to the rest of their lives. But which element of their religion are they ignoring when they don’t see it as relating to the rest of their lives?

The milquetoast modern faithful ignore the same element of their religions that a religion like Wicca simply lacks: a systematic code of morality. The major monotheistic religions come packaged with strict codes of morality because the God they worship is seen as the creator of the universe and the author of its order, and with that its moral laws. A code of morality relates an ideology’s view of the universe to the guidance its adherents need to live.

If the woke crusade while the Wiccans do not, it is likely because the woke share the potent code of morality they probably inherited from the influence of the monotheistic religions. It’s their quest to adhere to this moral code that gives them not merely the sense of a comforting ritual but that of joining a holy quest. No wonder the acts of the woke invite such natural comparisons to a crusade or an Inquisition, two hallmarks in the history of Christian religion.

The motive power behind religious crusaders

The evidence for the central motivating power of moral doctrine in the woke religion is scattered throughout McWhorter’s book, though it is not emphasized enough.

McWhorter notes that “Elect ideology stipulates that one’s central moral duty is to battle racism and the racist” (48, my emphasis). He notes how the woke see the sheer act of bearing witness to the sins of racism (including, notably, their own) as garnering moral credit (49, 66–67). And he notes how this even includes embracing a “self-flagellational guilt for things you did not do,” a reference to apologies for the sins of one’s race.

The reference to “self-flagellational guilt” helps bring out the distinctively religious moral idea that’s at play in the woke crusade. Christianity is perhaps best known for making it a major virtue, but McWhorter compares antiracism’s take on the virtue to that of another post-pagan monotheistic religion:

This is all very Abrahamic, as religion goes. Muslim, Islam — the core of such words in Arabic is the consonants s-l-m, which constitute the concept of submission. One submits not only to a God. To suspend disbelief is a kind of submission. It is no accident that many of the white Elect spontaneously put their hands above their heads as an indication that they understand that they bear “white privilege.” Think of this type, asserting “Oh, I know I’m privileged!” while holding their hand up, palm out, like a Pentecostal. . . . They are so comfortable with that gesture in attesting to their privilege because of an overriding impulse: to indicate submission to a power up there looking down on them.

Or even this: When Elect white people at protests started taking a knee for extended periods to indicate general wokeness after George Floyd’s murder, it was a submission to Elect imperatives. (27–28)

To idealize the morality of submission is to enjoin the virtue of humility. It’s the burning commitment to the duty to avoid, expurgate, and punish the sin of pride that explains the crusade to banish heretics against the woke creed.

The affirmation of the virtue of humility is distinctively religious. In ancient Greece, Aristotle regarded pride not as a sin but as a crowning virtue (“To be the one who thinks himself worthy of great things and [to be] really worthy of them . . . [is] an adornment of the virtues; for it makes them greater, and it does not arise without them.”2) But contrast this with St. Augustine, who formalized the Christian view: “Deign to be lowly, to be humble, because God has deigned to be lowly and humble on the same account, yours not his own.”3 Augustine emphasized the virtue of humility because he was the original champion of the Christian doctrine of original sin: we should not aim for perfection because we are inherently sinful.

It’s the Christian view of pride vs. humility that animates the zealots of the woke religion.

For example: suppose that you are a professor or an employer who thinks that some member of a minority group hasn’t lived up to the relevant educational or professional standards of a task and doesn’t deserve the corresponding rewards. How dare you, say the woke, to think you have the right to judge a member of a historically oppressed group by your standards? You don’t have the right to judge their performance by what you deem to be “objective” standards. Humble yourself and repent, prideful sinner.

Or: suppose that you refuse to admit you’re guilty of the “original sin” of racism, because you judge people on the basis of their character and other achievements, not on the basis of racial prejudice. Here again, the woke object that racism is systemic enough to make you subject to biases and an unavoidable beneficiary of oppression. How dare you think you have the special power to escape from the clutches of your history and the system it created? Humble yourself and repent, prideful sinner.

Or even this: perhaps you’re a black person whose ancestors certainly were oppressed, and while you acknowledge that racial prejudice still exists, you might still claim that you yourself have never been seriously handicapped by it. Even here, the woke will intone, as they seem to have intoned against McWhorter himself: how dare you think you have the personal virtue needed to escape the same systemic oppression? And how dare you disagree with the leaders of your people who know they are victims to whom all the other sinners must submit? You especially should humble yourself and repent, most prideful sinner. Tua maxima culpa.

Earlier I asked: “Why, if they are neither crazy nor uneducated do they so openly defy intellectual standards?” In a way, McWhorter has provided material that helps answer that question: “To suspend disbelief is a kind of submission.” But this helps us see how (as Augustine himself maintained) blind faith is the ultimate form of humility.4 One takes no pride in what one uncritically accepts from others. By contrast, it is an act of intellectual pride to demand evidence and consistency and assert the right to believe only what others can prove.

This is what permits sane and educated people to engage in absurd inquisitorial crusades against heretics. They have knowledge of intellectual standards, but they suppress this knowledge when they think their moral duty demands something more important than a dedication to truth.

The underappreciated challenge of avoiding the influence of religious morality

Judeo-Christian morality has had a powerful influence on Western culture. Two thousand years of cultural dominance will leave a mark on anyone raised or educated by others influenced by the tradition, even on those who ostensibly reject this tradition.5

We can see this especially in the deference to the religious morality of humility in ostensibly secular, left-wing activist movements today. In addition to finding it among woke activists, we see it in the green activists like the members of Extinction Rebellion who demand our faith in an imminent environmental apocalypse and reject even carbon-free nuclear power.6 (The environmental movement generally has deeply Christian historical roots.7) We see it in the transgender activists who try to make heretics of anyone like J. K. Rowling or Kathleen Stock, who raise questions about the merits of transgender ideology and its critique of the biology of sex.

This suggests that we cannot easily insulate ourselves from the influence of the woke crusade simply by “finding a way to live graciously” among its agents. That’s especially true if some of the most thoughtful and upstanding critics of woke religion are still under the spell of the Christian moralism that empowers it. This may seem hard to believe because some of them are adamant critics not only of the woke but of religion, generally. Yet the virtue of humility really is a distinctively religious idea, and it is at work in even their thinking.

For instance, even secular thinkers like Steven Pinker and others in the “rationality community” regularly call for “epistemic humility,” the idea that “perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained.”8 There’s indisputable value in intellectual honesty: in refusing to draw conclusions stronger than one’s evidence permits. But to infer that even the best and most rational science can never attain some kind of truth is to affirm a kind of epistemic original sin and so, not surprisingly, a virtue of epistemic humility.

In rare moments, even McWhorter himself seems to call out the woke for their own alleged intellectual pride: “Since about 2015, a peculiar contingent is slowly headlocking us into . . . supposing that this particular new religion is so incontestably correct, so gorgeously surpassing millennia of brilliant philosophers’ attempts to identify the ultimate morality, that we can only bow down in humble acquiescence” (58–9). Yes, he’s explicitly criticizing their demand that we be humble, but he does it by implying that they are being sinfully prideful in thinking they’ve gotten morality right.9

The real reason woke ideology doesn’t surpass millennia of philosophers’ moral inquiries is that it’s just borrowing from them (albeit without giving credit). The problem here isn’t that it pridefully claims to have identified the ultimate morality. The problem is: “To suspend disbelief is a kind of submission.” The problem is that the religious claim to ultimate morality is advanced without scientific basis. Scientists who can prove a well-integrated case for their position on the basis of the evidence have earned pride in their findings. The woke have not, especially if their morality is itself derived from religion.

Generally, the work of secular thinkers like Pinker and McWhorter is rational and courageous. They deserve to take pride in their intellectual accomplishments. But the fact that even these avowedly anti-religious thinkers seem to have absorbed a religious moral idea suggests that its influence is truly pervasive. It promises comfort against some insecurity that even the most rational of the secular can feel. So, we need to guard against it to fully insulate ourselves against the effects of wokeism.

We need to guard against this insecurity because its consequences weaken the secular defense against wokeism. Consider McWhorter’s recurrent question about the irrationality of the woke movement: “What kind of people do these things? Why do they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?” They are people who call us out for being prideful sinners. They get away with it because we ourselves often feel guilty for our pride. And we will let them continue to do so as long as even we the secular cater to that feeling by venerating such things as “epistemic humility.”

McWhorter himself answers his last question, about why we let them get away with it. He notes that precisely because of the moral progress we’ve made against racism, people disapprove of it and are horrified when charges of it are leveled against them. So many would rather “tolerate some cognitive dissonance” and kneel with woke activists in repentance than be considered an unrepentant bigot. But this willingness to tolerate “cognitive dissonance” is precisely the consequence of a belief in epistemic humility. It’s the idea: Who am I to take my cognitive dissonance as a sign that something is wrong here?

Someone who takes pride in his commitment to the truth, by contrast, wouldn’t tolerate that dissonance: he’d try to understand why he’s been accused of an evil he himself disavows. He’d accept his fallibility and acknowledge that he can make mistakes. He’d even be willing to apologize when presented with evidence of his error. But he’d not kneel before his accusers without that evidence just because his peers were kneeling. And someone long convinced of the evil of racism would likely never accept that self-effacing submission is proper penance for a real mistake.

McWhorter thinks that because the woke movement is based on a kind of faith, we can’t respond to it by arguing with its most devoted practitioners, any more than we could expect to convert many fundamentalist Christians to atheism. Instead, he urges that we “just say no,” and stand up against the woke. “The coping strategy, therefore, must be not to try to avoid letting them call you a racist, but to get used to their doing so and walk on despite it.”

I agree with McWhorter that rational people must proudly walk on despite unfounded charges of racism. But if the woke faith is empowered by a religious belief in the virtue of humility, we will need to do more than simply disassociate ourselves from its practitioners. We can’t live “graciously” among them if that means accepting their ideas and practices as normal. Indeed, McWhorter’s characterization of the movement as religious dogma implicitly classifies it as unscientific and irrational, which is already a harsh but warranted judgment. We need to share this judgment with others, especially the young people we care about, as McWhorter has done in his book.

But we’ll need to do even more than McWhorter has done. To fully quarantine ourselves and others against wokeism, we need to come to grips with the fact that many of us are also already infected with the ideas that empower its followers. This means we will need a new philosophical antiviral. We will need to fully sterilize ourselves from the idea that submission is a virtue, and in another act of intellectual pride, be willing to rethink a secular, scientific morality afresh.10

In the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II, collectivism was still very much alive. Soviet Russia, America’s wartime “ally,” was now its greatest enemy — but one that was more intellectual than military. Ayn Rand’s screen guide, now available for the first time as a book, was written and produced in 1947 as a warning about this ally and its subtle ways using films to undermine America and the individualism it represented. This first archival edition of “Screen Guide” is supplemented by an 11-page afterword by founding CEO of ARI, Michael S. Berliner, providing important historical background from Ayn Rand’s life and career. The Ayn Rand Institute is pleased to reprint the afterword.

The Screen Guide exemplifies the convergence of two significant aspects of Ayn Rand’s life to that point in time: film and political ideology.

Ayn Rand’s Connection to the Film Industry

Films played such an important role in a 30-year period of Ayn Rand’s life that a mini-biography can almost be written by tracing her connection to films, beginning with her mid-teens up to the publication of her “Screen Guide,” when she was in her early 40s. Although she may have attended foreign films earlier, that period officially starts in the winter of 1922 with the first entry in her movie diary, D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. That diary was an ongoing list of movies she attended between 1922 and 1929. It was so important to her as a documentation of her movie-going that she had her sister Nora reproduce the contents in letters to Rand, who had, for reasons unknown, not brought it with her to America. Nora began incorporating that list into her letters apparently just a few days after Rand arrived in America. Rand then copied the information into a small notebook.¹ Each entry contained the film title, her grade for the film, the date and theater, the director, and the principal cast. Nora concludes the list with: “That’s the end!!! Well, aren’t I the most heroic person in the world? The Crusades were child’s play compared to my labors here. To recopy 170 movie entries! . . . I curse the Technicum for giving you free passes.”

The “Technicum” to which Nora referred is the State Technicum for Screen Arts, a school created by Soviet dictator Vladmir Lenin to advance Soviet film. Hoping to learn screenwriting, the 19-year-old Alisa Rosenbaum enrolled in the Institute in the fall of 1924, but she attended for only one academic year: Before she could take courses on screenwriting, she received an invitation to visit relatives in Chicago.

And it was likely that writing assignments at the Technicum marked the start of her writing career. Her first two published works were film-related booklets, both written in 1925: “Pola Negri,” and “Hollywood: America’s City of Movies.”2 Since these were both written before she came to America, her likely source of information was movie magazines that her Chicago relatives were sending to her.

But it was the content of Western films that had such great impact. Operettas (particularly those by Emmerich Kálmán) had been her main inspirations and windows on the West, but, as she put it in her 1960–61 biographical interviews: “movies supplanted the operettas in my life . . . because that was a much more specific, not merely symbolic, view of life abroad . . . . I began to see movies every night practically. And that was the most wonderful period. For Russia that was one of my happiest periods as such. I don’t mean in the total, but at least in this aspect: because it was almost as if I had a private avenue of seeing the world outside. So that those movie stars and movie magazines from abroad became, well, the world from Mars, the voice from Mars.”3 What those films showed of America was especially inspiring: “There were some American movies where you could see New York, just shots, usually long shots, and I would sit through two shows just to catch it . . . and it seemed completely incredible. I can’t tell you how glamorous it was at that distance.” That glamor inspired a goal for the teenage Alisa Rosenbaum: get to America and never return.

When she arrived in “Mars,” on February 19, 1926, she stepped — at first indirectly and then directly — into the film world. In Chicago, Sarah Portnoy, matriarch of one of the two families of relatives with whom she stayed, owned the New Lyric Theater, a movie house on Chicago’s South Side, which Ayn Rand attended almost daily: she saw 234 films in 183 days.

When she wasn’t going to films, she spent her time writing scenarios, as she later related:

Now, the first six months, you see, I had to spend here writing those stories, learning to speak English, and then I had decided that I would go to Hollywood, because I couldn’t yet hope to write in a literary English. I had figured out that, since this was the day of the silent movies, I could write — even if it’s slightly broken English — enough to write an outline, the scenario, just the original of a story, and then somebody else could write the titles. . . . It was putting things in reverse, because, you know, in Hollywood you have to make a name for yourself in some other branch of writing before you go to Hollywood, but I reversed it.

So, after those six months in Chicago, she took the train to Los Angeles, bringing with her an introduction to the publicity department at the studio of Cecil B. DeMille, her favorite American director. Then, on September 4, 1926, her first full day in California, came the “fairy-tale” event of her life: Headed to DeMille’s studio in Culver City, she took the right bus line but in the wrong direction, and it was that fortunate mistake that enabled her to launch her early film career and indirectly to meet her future husband. She finally got on the correct bus to Culver City but arrived later than expected at the studio. After submitting her letter of introduction and getting a perfunctory response, Rand prepared to return to Hollywood, where she had a room at the Hollywood Studio Club, a residence for young women seeking careers in the film industry. Then, in her own words, “Now I walk out of the studio . . . and it has a driveway in front of the main building that goes to a gate. And as I start [to] walk down that driveway, I see an open roadster parked, and a man at the wheel talking to somebody outside the car, and it was DeMille. . . . I was just stunned, because it was such a lucky coincidence.” Because she had taken the wrong bus, she caught DeMille on his lunch break. “I recognized him from pictures I had seen. And I stood there staring at him. . . . So I walked on to the gate, and I stopped at the gate to wait to see him drive by. And it wasn’t too long before he started driving. He drives up to the gate, stops, looks at me, and asks, ‘Why are you looking at me?’ Very, very pleasantly. Apparently he had noticed me before. So I told him I had just come from Russia and I am very happy to see him. So he opens the door of the car and says, ‘Get in.’ I didn’t know where we were going; I got in and he started driving. Now isn’t that a fantastic story?”

The story doesn’t end there, for DeMille drove her to the backlot, where they were shooting crowd scenes for his epic King of Kings. In the car, DeMille told her “If you want to work in pictures, you should begin by watching how they work on the set and by observing and learning, so this will do you good.” He then gave her passes for two days, hired her as an extra and eventually as a junior screenwriter. Her career was off and running, and so, ultimately, was her romantic life: On her second or third week at the DeMille Studios, she spotted Frank O’Connor on an early-morning streetcar from Hollywood to Culver City, sought him out on the DeMille set, where he was also working as an extra, later ran into him by chance at a Hollywood library, and married him in April 1929.

After the DeMille Studios closed in 1928, Rand got a job in the wardrobe department at RKO, a job that supplied an income while she wrote We the Living. She lived across the street in an apartment building where she met producer David O. Selznick’s assistant, who gave her the idea for Peter Keating, the second-hander, whose character type features so prominently in The Fountainhead. (Rand’s original title for the novel was “Second-Hand Lives.”) After moving to New York City in 1934, she worked for Paramount Studios, reviewing books submitted to the studio for possible adaptation. Then, after The Fountainhead was published in 1943, she returned to Hollywood to write the screenplay for the film version to be produced by Hal Wallis, who was fresh from his success producing the classic Casablanca. It was upon her return that she became involved with pro-free enterprise people in Hollywood, in particular the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA).

Ayn Rand’s Political Activism

Ayn Rand’s history with politics and political philosophy hardly needs recounting. She witnessed the start of the so-called Kerensky Revolution in February of 1917, and, when 12 years old, adopted the anti-Bolshevik Alexander Kerensky as her hero (downgrading him to “mediocrity” when she met him in 1945). Then, in her mid-to-late teens, she began having political discussions with her father, whom she described as favoring individualism and free enterprise. Although she made anti-Soviet entries in her diary, she kept those ideas secret, knowing that they could be a death sentence. But when she came to America, she became active in politics, working in the 1940 Willkie presidential campaign, writing her “Individualist Credo” and “Individualist Manifesto” and working to form what she called “The Individualist Organization.” Particularly daunting and motivating was her shock at the state of American politics. When she was writing We the Living, she expected that the prevalent view of Communism would be the same as hers. As she explained in her biographical interviews:

Did I know the degree of Pink penetration in America? No. I had no idea of it. I did not know very many people in Hollywood, but those I knew were certainly not Left. And I did not have the impression of the enormous prevalence of Pink sympathizers. Now remember, this was before the New Deal, when the novel was started. And Russia was not even recognized. I did not follow politics or New York publications closely enough to see any particular Pink trend. And I do believe, in retrospect, that it accelerated enormously after 1933, after Roosevelt. . . . My impression, more than anything else, was that people are not sufficiently aware of the menace and the evil of Communism, but that they would be in sympathy with it, I didn’t expect. . . . I took for granted that nobody, except the worst kind of hypocrites, can ever be or advocate altruism.

Still a relative newcomer to America, Rand did not know that the Red Decade had arrived, that period in American history when reverence for the “Soviet experiment” was at its highest.

The Screen Guide

Ayn Rand was not the only anti-Communist in Hollywood. Formed in 1944, the MPA’s membership included DeMille, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, Hal Wallis, and John Wayne. For a short time, Rand was on the executive committee. The MPA organized the writing of “Screen Guide,” which was published over the group’s name in its newsletter, “The Vigil.” Details of the publishing history and Rand’s dealings with the MPA can be found in Robert Mayhew’s Ayn Rand and Song of Russia.

If We the Living can be considered a promise kept to the family friend who urged her to “tell the rest of the world that we are dying here,” then “Screen Guide” can be considered a similar warning. She was telling moviemakers and moviegoers to beware of unknowingly absorbing dangerous ideas — not beware of the Communist Party but of altruistic/collectivist ideas that pervade the motion pictures. The Ayn Rand Papers, housed at the Ayn Rand Archives, contain clippings from major newspapers (including the New York Times) with stories announcing the publication of the guide. These stories are by-lined news stories that summarize “Screen Guide,” including numerous quotes and stressing the MPA’s support of freedom of speech.

Ayn Rand’s Assessment

Let Ayn Rand continue the story about the guide’s impact:

This was just about the time of the Hollywood hearings. And, originally, two men from the Thomas Committee — that was the House committee investigating it — came to Hollywood to interview conservatives. And what they wanted mainly was only factual, journalistic material about penetration of the Director’s Guild, the Screenwriter’s Guild, and things like that. All facts. Well, I had nothing to do with any of it. I didn’t belong to the Writer’s Guild. But, at that same time, the FBI was helping them to investigate, and they attended some of our meetings, of the Board.4 And they had heard about the “Screen Guide for Americans.” It was interesting to me that they had heard it before it was out. And asked us for galleys of it, just for their own interest. Which we supplied. It was just being finally put into booklet form then. And about a week later, I got a call from those investigators that they wanted me to come to Washington to testify on the ideology of films. So, I’m sure it was connected. I later learned that the galleys or some report on it had gone to one of the chief investigators for the Thomas Committee, who was an ex-communist, but of thirty years ago, or something like that. And he was their expert on Communism. He had been urging them to do something ideological for years. And when he saw a report on this booklet, he is the one who urged that I be brought to testify. [I was willing to testify] to bring it out into the open. So long as there was a chance, it would have been the only forum. The real reason why I felt it would be all right, and the real good that I accomplished was this: prior to that hearing there would have been no way to get anything about it into any newspaper or magazine. The idea of Hollywood penetration was hopeless ideologically. As I said, there were quite a few articles appearing about Reds in Hollywood but never about propaganda on the screen. That was the real issue, you see, the touchy issue for Hollywood. And incidentally, the producers and all were quite willing to let it be discussed that there were a few communists around. But it’s the content of movies that they did not want to touch. I suspect partly because the Red pressure would have been on that, partly because they were all scared to death of not knowing how to handle those issues and didn’t want to be involved in ideological disputes. Now, the good that that hearing accomplished is that that was the turning point for Red propaganda on the screen. It vanished after that completely. And then later, a few hints kept coming back, but so feebly and so subtly that only Party members would ever know it. I mean it was too feeble to do any harm to the general public. And there I take credit, for the “Screen Guide for Americans” did it. Now, the best thing was that that “Screen Guide” (in condensed form, but the most important highlights) was reproduced in the drama section of the Times,5 the Sunday Times front page, you know, the drama section, which there would be no way of getting to, except in connection with this hearing. . . . Several other newspapers across the country did the same. My name, you know, is not on it, because it was written for the organization. But one magazine, Plain Talk, reprinted the condensed form without permission, with my name on it.6 And that was the best accomplishment. Then, at first, when the “Screen Guide” came out, the major studios generally kind of ignored it. Progressively, thereafter, I began hearing one studio and another ordering it from the MPA in tens and dozens. And all the points that I made in it — particularly, you know the attacks on the businessmen as villains — disappeared, certainly in the form in which they had been. If you watch old movies on TV, you’ll see the difference. And there I really take credit for it.

The format of the guide is a list of “don’ts,” addressing Conservatives in general but film producers in particular, urging them not to sanction ideas and positions that are destructive of their ideals. Thus “Screen Guide” was not merely a warning about the subtle ways that collectivist ideas are spread. As a call not to support one’s enemies, it was her first public statement about moral sanction, a principle integral to the story of Atlas Shrugged (a crucial insight of the novel’s hero is that “I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win — and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent”). This principle was the theme of Rand’s last public talk, “The Sanction of the Victims,” where she implored businessmen to cease financing universities that are the source of collectivist and thus anti-America ideas. It is, she said, “a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers.”

By the late 1940s, Rand began to cut her ties to the film industry. She had resigned from the executive committee of the MPA, The Fountainhead film had been released in 1949 and had moved the novel back onto the bestseller lists, and she and Frank moved permanently back to New York City in 1951. One final confluence between political ideology and film was her editing for re-release of the newly rediscovered Italian film of We the Living. Produced illegally (i.e., without Rand’s permission) in 1942 in Fascist Italy, a print was discovered in 1968, and Ayn Rand worked on editorial issues, including the script and subtitles, making sure that it contained no remnant of the Fascist ideology that had been introduced by the Italians, who had banned the film when they realized it was as anti-Fascist as anti-Communist.

The immediate practical effect of the guide was to alert people to the dangers of unknowingly spreading Communist propaganda. But Rand’s dealings with the Hollywood Conservatives showed her the futility of dealing with issues unphilosophically, which is what they did. Thus, her admonition to Leonard Read (see her February 28, 1946 letter in Letters of Ayn Rand) that what is needed is philosophic not economic education, and her proclamation to Rose Wilder Lane that her “personal crusade” was not to fight collectivism or altruism (which, she said, were “only consequences”) but to go after “the real root of evil on earth: the irrational” (see letter in revised edition of Letters of Ayn Rand). “Screen Guide” was an early instance of Rand stressing the need to look beneath the surface, a path she traveled in her many political analyses and explained in her 1974 article “Philosophical Detection.” Revealing the fundamental philosophic ideas underlying political and social policies and showing the effects of those ideas was a theme of much of her nonfiction writings after the publication of Atlas Shrugged. “Screen Guide” was also an early (the first?) appearance of one of those uniquely “Ayn Rand” identifications, “the sanction of the victim,” which she so eloquently explained in her New Orleans talk shortly before the end of her life.

Screen Guide for Americans is available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle, with an audiobook to follow soon.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to fight a militarily superior enemy to secure that independence. 250 years later, the American president signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Iran — a far weaker and viler enemy — securing none of his stated war objectives, but acceding to most of the enemy’s demands.

Why has the world’s strongest military power allowed this to happen, in such dramatic contrast to the example of its founders? The answer we must consider is that there’s one final battle in the American Revolution still to be fought — not a military battle, but an intellectual one.

To explain America’s foreign-policy collapse, some will point to the commander in chief’s cowardice and cynical pragmatism about the upcoming elections. His character flaws are many and profound. But few would accuse the president of insensitivity to his base. He is obviously eager to continue appeasing Republican voters who welcomed his promise to stop “forever wars.”

But this just raises the question in a different form. How did once hawkish Republicans —traditional advocates of a confident American foreign policy — become so meek?

A clue to the answer — and a sign that the unfought battle is intellectual — is found in the thinking of the generation of Americans including Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance, and Pete Hegseth who fought in the Iraq war, witnessed its failures, and now guide American policy.¹

Hegseth, who led the “Department of War” into Iran, has put his thinking on record. His 2024 book The War on Warriors recounts his experience in Iraq with the Army’s 101st Airborne. There, as he led a platoon in search of al Qaeda operatives, he was regularly flummoxed by rules of engagement that handicapped his men’s ability to defend themselves and even mandated the release of suspected enemy fighters who would go on to attack them again.

The rules of engagement that bedeviled Hegseth exemplified the Bush administration’s overall approach to its “war on terror.” Time and again Bush sought to elevate the interests of foreign civilians and even enemy soldiers over those of American citizens and soldiers. We saw this not only in restrictive rules of engagement, but in the recurring insistence on dropping humanitarian aid along with bombs, and using war to spread the “democracy” that elected Iran-aligned Islamists in Iraq.

In Hegseth’s thinking, the error of Bush’s policy was to “conflate international law with just war theory.” “Just war theory” is the traditional Christian doctrine that Republicans have also recently invoked to justify the Iran war, in response to criticisms from Pope Leo. Hegseth’s invocation of that doctrine signals his underlying commitment to Judeo-Christian morality.

It’s undoubtedly true that various international treaties encouraged “humanitarian” restrictions that disabled America’s ability to fight a just war. But Hegseth openly doubts that any notion of “just war” can be translated into “universal rules” of war. He says men are too sinful by nature to follow such rules, so we might be “better off winning wars according to our own rules” rather than caring about what he dismissively calls “morality plays.”

Hegseth’s insistence that “just war theory” can never be translated into actionable rules amounts to the confession of a man — and of a nation — in the grips of a contradiction. It’s the contradiction between a morality that demands we humbly turn the other cheek to love our enemy, and the real-world practical requirements of military victory.

To resolve this contradiction is a key element of the American Revolution’s unfought intellectual battle.

But it cannot be resolved by having it both ways. The contradiction is real, and “just war theory” cannot dissolve it. That theory already drastically restricts permissible war and (as I have argued earlier) is in tension with Christianity’s pacifist roots. The pope himself recently repudiated it as inconsistent with those roots and the nature of modern warfare.2 We can either be good Christians or we can confidently fight wars of righteous self-defense and win. We cannot do both.

It’s well-known that Christian moral principles are defined in opposition to the practical needs of life, whether they concern warfighting or moneymaking or sexual fulfillment. So we should expect that a defense secretary trying to answer practical military questions will find little if any real guidance from those principles. He will conclude that warfighting inherently involves (in his words) “shades of gray.”

A culture whose moral principles repudiate practicality can offer no principled guidance for how to be practical. Whatever shaky confidence the practically oriented might muster is then unguided by any standards. This further encourages range-of-the-moment, shoot-from-the-hip pragmatism. We see this in Trump’s cynical foreign policy agenda of coddling dictators (Putin and Xi), betraying allies (Europe and Israel), and toying with weak neighboring rivals (Venezuela and Cuba) only because it’s easy.

The Iran war epitomized the spurt of confidence unguided by ideals. The decision to start the war was not the result of a strategic vision, guided by long-term commitment to achieving specific values, but the whim of a president likely looking to distract from domestic controversies. As a result, even very short-term contingencies, like a lack of cooperation from recently spurned allies or the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz were not planned for.

Such a narrowly “practical” approach is also doomed to be ineffective, because nothing ambitious can be achieved without a single-minded focus on long-range goals — i.e., values. The shifting Iran war objectives (unconditional surrender, regime change, nuclear and ballistic missile disarmament, etc.) were announced and abandoned so quickly because they were unachievable in an unplanned, whimsical, unprincipled war.

In the face of failure arising from such thoughtlessness, it’s then easy to collapse in humiliation, especially if one’s only notion of a moral principle in the first place was humility.

The last, unfought battle of the American Revolution is to finally throw off the shackles of the morality of Christian humility. There was nothing humble about the Declaration of Independence. To declare to the world an intention to stand on your own feet and fight to the death for the right to the pursuit of your happiness is an act of rational pride, not humility. That declaration was possible only because of an Enlightenment philosophy of individual rights that consciously or unconsciously repudiated the Christian morality of humility.

But most American intellectuals never formulated a moral philosophy that fully sanctioned the pursuit of happiness or with it the doctrine of individual rights. They never completed the American Revolution because they never broke free from old European moral thinking (whether Christian or neo-Christian egalitarian). And so America has long struggled with a contradiction between the only moral philosophy it’s known since its founding, and its practical ambitions (in business, in technology, in military affairs) for living life and achieving happiness on earth.

This is why Ayn Rand called for “a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American Revolution.” It’s why she said “For a nation, as for a man, a Declaration of Independence implies a declaration of self-esteem. Neither can stand without the other.”

Anyone who cannot understand how a militarily powerful modern nation like America could capitulate to a weak, medieval theocracy like Iran must know on some level it is not for any failure of power. It’s for unwillingness to use it. But our will is guided by our moral code, and no matter how much many evade it, our dominant moral code says: “love thy enemy.” If ever we are to escape the cycle of spurts of unmoored confidence followed by humiliation, we must declare independence from that moral code and seek another.

A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group on June 21, 2026.

On July 4 the United States will mark 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. The public celebrations, the fireworks, the parades, the bipartisan commemorations all promise to be spectacles. Too little thought, however, has been given to what’s truly distinctive about America. Two media outlets — The Free Press and the Wall Street Journal — stand out for commentary about America’s birthday that highlights capitalism. The Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief described capitalism as “arguably the country’s most distinctive characteristic.”

But to truly understand that characteristic, one must confront a disquieting truth: Today, virtually no one embraces capitalism.

Across the political spectrum, whether the rhetoric centers on due process, the First Amendment, or making America great again, capitalism is the one thing all sides oppose. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were not akin to today’s progressives searching for the next economic handout or today’s conservatives clinging to faith, family and tradition. They were radicals, steeped in Enlightenment thought—and the American Experiment earned its name because they were consciously inventing something new.

To grasp that achievement, we must grasp that they were heirs both to John Locke and to Adam Smith. Just as they sought to separate church from state, so they sought to separate economy from state.

The new American government stripped the state of much of its power to enforce ideological orthodoxy or suppress dissenting views. Gone was the divine right of popes or kings to dictate doctrine. In the New World, the fate of a Socrates or a Galileo would be different. “It does me no injury,” Jefferson wrote, “for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or none. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Likewise, the government was stripped of much of its power to pick economic winners and losers. Titans of industry like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan emerged to transform business and production, earning fortunes in America that the Old World would have strangled in the cradle — through such controls as guilds, royal monopolies, charters, and aristocratic privilege that dictated who was permitted to rise.

America was designed as a haven for the thinker and the producer, for creators of ideas and creators of wealth. Protecting the individual’s rights to life, liberty and property—this was the root of American prosperity and power. America was built for individuals who sought self-reliance, who sought the freedom, intellectual and economic, to pursue their own happiness.

Of course, the journey was complicated by intellectual inconsistencies and severe headwinds. The disestablishment of religion across the states had to continue well into the 19th century. The atrocious denial of rights to millions of enslaved people required a Civil War to begin correcting. But as America approached full capitalism in the latter half of that century, individuals’ standard of living soared, ushering in the modern world.

Today, however, this political ideal has few champions. One dominant political tribe seeks to impose a new “woke” orthodoxy—dictating speech, curriculum, and hiring practices. The other tribe seeks to impose old-style religion—expelling foreign dissenters, censoring late-night critics, and forcing young women to carry a small mass of human cells to term.

Economically, one tribe proudly attains the mayoral office of New York City by declaring it will force some people to subsidize other people’s “free” healthcare, education, and housing. The other tribe proudly wields federal executive power to pick winners and losers through economy-wide tariffs, imposed at the president’s whim but open to be renegotiated if you’re willing to bend the knee.

Capitalism is what made America great. But at our 250th anniversary, it is still — in Ayn Rand’s words — “an unknown ideal.”

What’s required to revive capitalism and restore America’s actual greatness? Grasp Rand’s insight into its true nature: full, consistent capitalism requires “a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”

Image credit: Roy Rochlin / Getty Images Entertainment / via Getty Images

Most people would never go to a medieval bloodletter to treat a fever, or listen to a quack offering a cure for cancer taken from medieval scrolls. The life-saving benefits of modern medical science are too obvious for anyone sane to fully ignore.

Why then do so many listen enthusiastically to clerics of Bronze Age religion for advice about our most important life choices — i.e., morality?

Notably, not only “conservative” commentators but numerous “progressives” have fallen all over each other to praise the recent Catholic encyclical Magnifica Humanitas by Robert Prevost (“Pope Leo XIV”). They exhibit a widespread cultural dependency on religious morality, an irrational, toxic habit we should have kicked long ago.

Among religious “conservatives,” Prevost’s tome was met not only with deference but adulatory relief. The editors of the National Review reveled in the fact that AI companies like Anthropic and eventually “all eyes” looked to the church as a moral authority.¹ They’re reassured that so many would take the church’s moral advice seriously despite its decades of enabling child sexual abuse, like alcoholics reassured by a crowded bar.

The aura of religion’s moral authority blinds even nominally secular commentators into seeing its obvious vices as though they were virtues. The secular “progressive” Atlantic featured a columnist whose favorite passage from Prevost’s tract condemned any attempt to “eliminate suffering,” because it recognized the importance of exalting our “limitations” and “woundedness.”2 He echoes the addict’s delusional rationalization that purity is pathological, because life needs a little poison.

Religion’s aura may dazzle because we do need light. There are real questions worth answering about the proper development and use of AI. And AI itself cannot answer our deepest moral questions — about AI or anything else. There’s no substitute for human intelligence. But then we should work to answer these ethical questions in the same way that tech researchers used to develop AI: intelligently. We should make rigorous, critical, ambitious use of the scientific method, rather than religious faith.

So it’s revealing that Prevost’s tract contains no new data about the consequences of using AI, no proposed experiments for evaluating the effects of regulating it — no new thinking at all. Many of his anecdotes are not even about AI per se, but about decades-old problems with the digital economy, e.g., the plight of workers involved in reviewing content for “disturbing material.”3 A rational thinker would consider that AI image recognition technology could save people from reviewing this content and look for ways to encourage the development of such technology. But Prevost is no such thinker.

His missive is only a repackaging of conventional anxieties about AI, candy-coated with superficial facts about tech and fancy theological terminology to make Catholic values easier to swallow. The values are thoroughly faith-based and mystical. We’re told we must protect “dignity” by forcing taxpayers to fund jobs that create no value for private employers. They supposedly possess this dignity “by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God.”4 We’re told the state must protect the “common good” through regulations on AI innovation. This “common good” is “not the sum total of individual benefits” but a transcendent “greater good” that “we could not explain.”5 We’re told to take this all on faith, without rational explanation.

Religious faith has long operated like a cartel in the morality business. Its customers think they can’t get it anywhere else, supposing that morality inevitably appeals to someone’s feelings. They assume it cannot be scientific or fact-based. So religious faith, itself a kind of feeling, seems the only source of morality.

But just as we can’t leave the guidance of our most sophisticated and powerful technology to mindless machines, we also can’t leave it to mindless faith and other unscrutinized emotions. It’s time to think rationally about how to kick the religious morality habit and formulate a scientific code of ethics.

Our best scientists serve as role models. Consider Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI.”6 For decades he toiled in obscurity, convinced that if neurons help brains think, electronic “neural nets” could emulate them. His peers thought this was hopeless: AI needed to emulate logicians’ formal algorithms, and replicating the more organic cognition of living things would take too much computing power. Indeed, many of his hypotheses failed. But colleagues suggested hybridizing neural nets with other algorithms. He listened, and did more experiments. When the necessary computing power was available, he and his colleagues developed some of the first reliable image recognition technology, selling it to Google for a fortune. The rest is history.

Hinton’s achievement might not have been just a result of impressive intelligence, but also of a commitment to certain values. Scientists seek the truth, come what may, regardless of peer skepticism. They willingly abandon pet hypotheses in favor of proven rivals. They courageously, ambitiously push forward to know more and more truth, building practical applications that test their theories further, improving human life in the process. Scientific objectivity is not “value-free.” Objectivity — the methodical pursuit of the truth — is itself a value.

What if, to understand scientific objectivity, we need to see it as requiring moral character virtues of honesty, integrity, and pride in one’s work?

Whether they know it or not, the best scientists could already be offering us an implicit alternative moral code — and the factual basis of value claims. Biologists can’t offer evolutionary explanations without showing that traits or behavior are naturally selected when they promote the good of the organism. And doctors regularly identify facts about what is healthy for our bodies and thus good for our lives.

Don’t we also need to assess the “health” of our personal character to live a happy life? What if this is the job of a scientific ethics?: To discover the virtues practiced by scientists — and engineers, and businessmen — by which we characteristically discover the truths by which we explain, predict, and control the world, and thus successfully live.

Yet our culture discourages even the possibility of a scientific ethics, because of its continuing dependence on a toxic religious morality that promotes fear of the truth, hatred for those who pursue it and of their success in life. Religion has sold this fear and hatred for centuries and even secular ethicists have absorbed it. It’s why they tolerate the values that Prevost proclaims on blind faith. It’s why they resonate with the central image in his screed, the Bronze Age myth of the Tower of Babel, about how God punished ambitious builders, fearing they would gain confidence in their own minds. And it’s why they even empathize with his perverse lamentation of using technology to eliminate suffering, fearing that it will somehow “dehumanize” us.

The scientific pursuit of truth is the most glorious distinction of our humanity, and AI technology is its latest expression. To be proper custodians of this technology — not to mention of our economies, our governments, and our nuclear weapons — we must learn to extend the virtues of science to every domain of life — especially to morality. Elsewhere I have outlined the case that’s already been made for such an ethics but so far ignored by our culture. We need to find a scientific ethics if we are to break free from addiction to a morality that is the toxic brew of atavistic witch doctors.

Have political connections to Donald Trump’s second administration become a get-out-of-antitrust-jail card?

In June 2025, the Department of Justice, following an alleged “boozy backroom” meeting between officials and lobbyists, settled its attempt to block the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)–Juniper Networks merger.1 Democratic senators, Republican appointees fired after decrying the settlement, and antitrust purists all protested that antitrust had become “politicized” because corruption and personal favoritism had replaced legal procedure.2^, 3^, 4^, 5 But that was just the beginning.

Less than a month after Paramount agreed to pay Trump a $16 million lawsuit settlement, the Trump administration green-lit the Skydance–Paramount merger.6 Skydance’s CEO is the son of Larry Ellison, a close personal ally of the president.

Shortly after, the family connection seemed to pay off even more. Netflix abandoned its pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) in the face of massive regulatory hurdles. The freshly baked Paramount–Skydance snatched WBD, expecting a smooth sail through DOJ offices in exchange for “sweeping changes” at Trump-critical CNN.7^, 8^, 9^, 10

Finally, the DOJ and Live Nation Entertainment struck a surprise settlement agreement, stunning the judge who had just kicked off the trial.11 It followed a White House meeting prompted by Donald Trump’s friend and former Live Nation board member Ariel Emanual. Trump obliged, calling around to ask, “What’s the holdup”?12

The administration’s antitrust enforcement exhibits the consequences of leaving vast, arbitrary power in executive hands. Antitrust scrutiny is often a matter of life and death for a business. While politically favored firms coast through reviews, others face the full wrath of regulators.

But the critics are misleading the public about the alternative to Trump’s use of antitrust power. In their letter to the judge, Democratic senators argue that the HPE–Juniper deal should be reviewed based on merit and public interest, not political favors and influence peddling.13 Many states’ attorney general refused to sign the settlement and pushed the Live Nation trial to its conclusion, boasting about taking on the role the corrupt federal government agency abdicated.14 The same coalition also promised a “vigorous review” of the Paramount–WBD deal.15

All of them presume that there could be non-arbitrary, legally proper antitrust enforcement. But there never has been such a thing. Trump’s use of antitrust to make businesses fall in line is just the most recent overt instance of a long history of arbitrary enforcement driven by favoritism. Antitrust has been subject to political whim from the outset.

The Long History of Presidential Favoritism in Antitrust

The Sherman Antitrust Act itself, the bedrock of the U.S. antitrust law, was born of political favoritism. Senator John Sherman sought Republican votes from small local manufacturers who wanted protection from competition with larger, more productive national corporations. A promise to control trusts also helped Republicans sway Democrats away from opposing another form of controlling trade Republicans preferred — tariffs.16 With the Sherman Act on the books, business survival came to depend on the regulators’ and president’s favor rather than productivity.

The famous “trustbuster,” Teddy Roosevelt, used political power to target what he called “bad trusts” (associated with the publicly reviled and uncooperative J. D. Rockefeller), while sparing the “good trusts” (linked to the more supportive House of Morgan).17

The other Roosevelt, FDR, similarly manipulated enforcement. He basically suspended antitrust during the early New Deal to secure corporate cooperation with price controls.18 But when he needed a scapegoat for failing New Deal policies, FDR launched a rhetorical war against business concentration.19 His appointee to lead Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, Thurman Arnold, would preside over the most aggressive period of antitrust enforcement to date (even though that wasn’t FDR’s intention).20 Soon though, Arnold was pushed out by the administration that needed big business’s support in the war effort.21 Thus, business experienced periods of lax, extremely aggressive, and again lax antitrust enforcement, morphing with the changing goals and rhetoric of FDR’s administration.

The pattern of brazen influence-peddling continued with both Democrats and Republicans.

President Johnson “threatened to block a merger involving a leading Houston bank unless the head of the bank helped secure the endorsement of the leading Houston newspaper for Johnson’s 1964 campaign.”22 Meanwhile, favorable rulings by the Federal Communications Commission allowed LBJ’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, to maintain a TV station monopoly in Austin, Texas.23 No antitrust enforcer looked her way, thanks to Johnson’s political clout.

In 1969, President Nixon ordered his deputy attorney general to stop interfering with the International Telephone & Telegraph’s purchase of Hartford Fire insurance Company (the largest merger in America at the time) because ITT’s CEO was a friend, an ally, and a contributor. These campaign contributions to influence antitrust merger decisions became part of the Watergate scandal.24

Just weeks after Obama’s reelection, his appointees dropped an investigation into Google that could have turned into the biggest antitrust case since Microsoft’s. Unsurprisingly, some former Google executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt, were crucial assets in Obama’s 2012 campaign.25

The tables turned against Google when the first Trump administration, now criticized for not enforcing antitrust, pushed a case against Google right before the 2020 elections to make Trump appear tough on Big Tech.26

Throughout their 135-year history, U.S. antitrust laws always followed the presidential whim of the moment. President Trump’s blatant use of antitrust during his second term to reward his allies and punish dissenters is raising more eyebrows just because it’s more brazen. Sherman shrouded his favoritism towards small manufacturers under the language of promoting “competition.” Trump simply doesn’t care to obscure his motives, such as wanting a change in CNN’s content and leadership.27

Delinking the power that antitrust controls give the government over business from presidential whim would make antitrust enforcement somewhat less arbitrary. But purging such corruption from the halls of the DOJ and the White House would not and could not make it objective.

Objective Enforcement in the Courts?

When an administration threatens to prevent a business merger, why don’t the companies say to the government: “See you in court”? Litigation is expensive, of course, but companies like Netflix can afford it. If the executive branch makes antitrust enforcement decisions for nefarious reasons, the need to convince a judge that it is actually following the law should limit its ability to do so with impunity.

But there is a reason companies are reluctant to go to court. No matter what the facts are about its business operations, a company and its expert lawyers cannot determine if they have a winning case. This is not only because the Supreme Court over time only increased the uncertainty that businessmen face in “predicting in any particular case what courts will find to be legal and illegal under the Sherman Act,” but because the antitrust “laws” themselves are neither clear nor well-defined.28 Companies facing roadblocks or massive fines or break-ups cannot know how the judge should rule in their case any more than they can know which cocktail will sway an administration official’s arbitrary power in their favor.

Consider the central principle of antitrust: The Sherman Act declares illegal every contract, combination, or conspiracy that is deemed to be “in restraint of trade or commerce.”29^, 30 But any contract is a “restraint of trade” of sorts by its nature: If I sign a contract that says I will purchase spare parts from you for five years in exchange for consistent delivery, a discount, and maintenance and repair services, we thereby both “restrain trade” for five years with anyone else who would like to fix my machines or sell me parts. Yet no businesses can plan long-term without such “restraints.”31

For example, Schwinn & Co. found that the only way it could compete in the bicycle market against mass merchandisers like Sears and Montgomery Ward was to assign exclusive territories to independent bicycle wholesalers. A condition of this contract was that wholesalers could not sell to anyone other than franchised retailers, and retailers could not sell outside their assigned territory.32

But in 1967 the court ruled Schwinn’s contracts illegal “restraints of trade.” Had Schwinn just vertically integrated with retailers by directly owning them (as it started doing after the ruling), it would have avoided antitrust scrutiny. But no matter how many lawyers it consulted in advance, Schwinn could not have known that vertical integration wouldn’t be condemned as “restraint of trade,” but contracts with independent retailers would. Other companies have been severely punished for vertical integration as allegedly a form of seeking monopoly power. Moreover, about a decade later, the courts reversed course, ruling that territorial restraints were actually acceptable.33 No one, then or now, can say which court’s “interpretation” of antitrust law — territorial restraints are or are not illegal — is correct.

Now take the rules prohibiting “attempts to monopolize.” After a century of debate, judges still have no way to distinguish between “willful acquisition or maintenance of [monopoly] power” and “growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident,” as the Federal Trade Commission says courts should do.34^, 35

In the famous Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America) case, Judge Learned Hand tried but failed to make this distinction meaningful. In his 1945 opinion, Hand first reiterated the arguments that “a single producer may be the survivor out of a group of active competitors” and should not be punished after winning “merely by virtue of his superior skill, foresight and industry.”36 But then he condemned Alcoa for precisely these traits, writing that “nothing compelled” the company to willfully “embrace each new opportunity as it opened [Alcoa’s foresight], and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization [Alcoa’s industry], having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel [Alcoa’s skill].”37

Hand failed because on a free market there is no such distinction to be made.

A company willfully pursues market power by building superior products and engaging in excellent, future-looking, long-term strategy. Yet to avoid a charge of “willful acquisition” of power and to instead grow “naturally” in the eyes of antitrust law, the company would have to not embrace new opportunities, not build a team of top talent, not anticipate changes in the market, and not invest in future production. But then no growth would exist. Businesses do not grow automatically, as though preprogrammed by nature, and they don’t grow accidentally. They grow through conscious, ambitious plans to make a profit by besting competitors. Both “natural growth” and “willful acquisition,” if they refer to anything, refer to the same thing.

But because antitrust law pretends that they are distinguishable, any business can be charged with an antitrust violation simply for pursuing success, whenever a regulator or a judge feels like it. All that is needed is just to place the growth and success of a company like Alcoa into the arbitrary category of “willful acquisition of power” rather than the arbitrary category of “natural growth.” Alcoa and the like have better chances to defend themselves in the backroom of a cocktail bar than in court.

Then there is the Clayton Act that prohibits exclusive dealing where it would “substantially lessen competition.”38

Consider the HPE–Juniper merger. On one interpretation, a merger between an enterprise IT provider (HPE) and a networking specialist (Juniper) increases competition by creating an integrated entity capable of tackling Cisco, the current WLAN market leader. But under another interpretation, the deal reduces competitive pressures in the enterprise wireless LAN sector by reducing the number of companies in that market.

How would one adjudicate between these perspectives? Allowing the merger because it enhances competition or preventing it for “substantially” inhibiting competition are both compatible with antitrust law. A judge might as well flip a coin. Which means that there are no objective criteria by which the companies could know that their envisioned conduct, their prospective merger, is lawful or unlawful.

Similarly, some argued that Netflix’s attempted purchase of WBD would “kill the entire movie theater business” through consolidation.39 Others countered that Netflix is competing not only with Disney and Amazon, but with YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, and video games: “Combining Netflix and Warner Bros. doesn’t reduce competition. It strengthens traditional entertainment against far larger digital rivals and preserves a major studio.”40 Both verdicts — that the purchase restrains trade or enhances it — are compatible with antitrust laws.

Under antitrust law, businesses cannot know in advance whether their most routine business decisions are legal or illegal. This means that they are not operating under the rule of law. And this is why they are reluctant to go to court. It’s akin to a dice roll.

The history of antitrust enforcement shows that attempting to navigate antitrust laws in the courts is in principle no different from navigating executive favoritism through personal relationships with politicians and informal backroom deals. Only it’s a judge one needs to “convince” instead of someone politically connected enough over a cocktail. Because antitrust law itself is arbitrary, even the best intentions of the judiciary can’t rectify this problem.41

There Is No Better Alternative to “Politicized” Antitrust

Arbitrary enforcement is not an unfortunate bug of the antitrust system. It is a feature that resulted from trustbusters’ realization that writing antitrust laws to be as definite as laws against traffic violations or theft, which prohibit exact and specific actions that are knowable in advance by the citizenry, wasn’t feasible.

Trustbusters could have banned specific activities like exclusive sales agreements, preferential contracts, or price discrimination (such as selling the same item at different prices in different places).42 But such clarity would effectively outlaw business itself, a result beyond the goals of even the most aggressive anti-big business pundits. Louis Brandeis, a leading progressive legal scholar and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice, for example, believed concentration was inherently evil. But even Brandeis had to disgruntledly acknowledge and help persuade President Woodrow Wilson that one cannot enumerate, define, and outlaw “unfair” practices that allow business to grow big without simultaneously criminalizing ordinary contracts that every small business engages in and depends on.43^, 44

So instead, they left us a system that grants arbitrary power to the executive and judiciary to decide when they happen to like or dislike a business’s practices. As a consequence, an uninterrupted string of favoritism and whim-based decisions plague successful American businesses to this day.

Donald Trump’s use of antitrust to reward his favorites and punish critics is brazen.45 But contrary to the wishful thinking of his critics, judicial process dressed in the veneer of objective application of vague statute cannot resolve the problem. As we’ve seen, the difference is illusory.

Calling for “depoliticization” of antitrust as if that is an obvious solution is a farce. We should castigate the corruption of backroom deals. But it is mere posturing unless we grapple with the fact that there is no such thing as the objective application of arbitrary power.

This essay by Ben Bayer was originally published in New Ideal on July 19, 2019. New Ideal is the online journal of the Ayn Rand Institute. Free subscribers gain access to more content than is published on our Substack. Subscribe here.

The “new atheists” and the “intellectual dark web” are two of the most interesting circles of thinkers to have emerged in the last fifteen years. In the overlap between the two circles, there is a small cadre of thinkers like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker who oppose both religion and “political correctness” in the name of the “Enlightenment values” of science and reason.

The emergence of thinkers who celebrate reason and critique forms of irrationality on both the cultural “right” and the “left” is an extremely positive development. Enlightenment values gave birth to the United States of America and they have the power to move our culture in a direction of more freedom, innovation, and progress.

And yet, there is a reason that Enlightenment values are now in need of defense. They have come under sustained attack because the thinkers of the original seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment failed to fully understand their philosophical roots. If today’s champions of science and reason are to succeed, they need to do more than to recycle the ideas of the past. No doubt they themselves realize that they need new ideas.

If we are to judge by one crucial sign, there is one respect in which the new champions of the Enlightenment are insufficiently radical; indeed, they are downright conventional. This is the stance they take on what I will argue is a crucial presupposition of the values of science and reason: a commitment to the reality of human free will.

How new defenders of the Enlightenment deny free will

The idea that human beings have free will, that each individual is fundamentally in control of his destiny and is not the pawn of deterministic genetic or environmental forces, was a core idea implicit in the Enlightenment period. It’s the idea that made possible this period’s celebration of the individual: of anyone’s ability to become educated, to produce and invent, and to rise by his or her own efforts.

Arguably, it was this conviction about the efficacy of individual initiative that made possible the period’s spirit of rebellion against authorities both religious and secular, and thereby enabled the many forms of social and economic progress that Steven Pinker documents in his recent book Enlightenment Now.

Yet both Pinker and Harris are openly critical of the concept of free will. Harris, for example, wrote an entire book arguing that free will does not exist. He draws on findings from contemporary neuroscience, biology, and psychology to argue that “we can’t make sense of [free will] in scientific terms.”¹ While Pinker has not devoted an entire book to the subject, his volume The Blank Slate argues that what we know about genetics is “eroding the concept of free will and personal responsibility” and that our “conscious mind — the self or soul — is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.”2

Pinker and Harris are not the only figures critical of free will among recent secular champions of science and reason. In essay after essay in the various organs of the intellectual dark web, we see a special predilection for one form of determinism or another. We see an ongoing articulation of the assumption that the only alternative to academic orthodoxy’s explanation via environmental “social construction” is explanation via genetics and evolutionary history. Left out of the conversation entirely is the possibility of a factor beyond “nurture” or “nature”: that human beings choose their paths, rather than being shunted along those paths by either social pressure or ancestral endowment.

This element of the worldview of the new defenders of the Enlightenment is decidedly orthodox. There is nothing more intellectually conventional than the assumption that we can only explain behavior by nature or nurture. It has long been held by intellectuals across the board that free will is an unscientific idea, a kind of superstitious holdover from religion.

But if there’s an orthodox dogma that real intellectual renegades need to challenge, it’s this assumption that free will is unscientific. Drawing on the work of a serious intellectual innovator (Ayn Rand), I will present a view of free will that should clarify why a commitment to the reality of free will is what makes meaningful the very idea of scientific objectivity.

Why reason and science need free will

Suppose you enter a conversation about the relevance of an alleged discovery of disparities in average IQ among ethnic groups. You might argue, as Pinker does, that it wouldn’t make a difference to the case for the political rights of individuals, because “[e]nlightened societies choose to ignore race, sex, and ethnicity in hiring, promotion, salary, school admissions, and the criminal justice system because the alternative is morally repugnant.”3 Surely in saying this, both you and Pinker are saying that members of a society ought to choose to pursue the morally enlightened path, rather than choose the morally repugnant alternative path.

For that matter, think about why you would start such a conversation in the first place. You wouldn’t get involved if you thought there is no possibility that someone in your audience will at least edge his way slightly closer to your view of the truth. To enable this, you might encourage him to look at the facts, for instance facts about what people have in common even though their IQs may differ. In doing this, part of what you are saying and thinking is that he ought to choose to look at the facts and follow the rational path, rather than to choose to ignore them and follow the irrational alternative path.

These two examples illustrate the fact that unless people face real alternatives in their action and thinking, these conversations have no point. That is to say, unless people have free will, the very conversations that defenders of Enlightenment values want to have are pointless.

In fact the same presupposition, that we face real alternatives in life, far from being unscientific, is itself a crucial part of scientific knowledge and practice.

Defenders of science like Pinker and Harris will surely agree that good scientists don’t base their theories on ancient tradition or popular prejudice. This is why they side with Galileo against the church and with Darwin against the creationists. Surely they will acknowledge that good scientists will even resist the conventional prejudices of their own scientific colleagues, as Franz Boas did when he worked to overturn the racist theories cherished by the leading anthropologists of the nineteenth century.4 But what’s common to all of these cases of good science is the scientist’s choice to observe the facts on his own and then to use dispassionate logic to test his theories against the facts, not fantasies or feelings or entrenched assumptions about what “everybody knows.”

Scientific objectivity requires even more than simply resisting the prejudices of others. It also means choosing to resist one’s own idiosyncratic hunches or musings. Consider Johannes Kepler, the great astronomer. After many dozens of attempts to save the idea that the orbit of heavenly bodies must be circular, he chose to give it up. He realized the only shape that could make sense of the astronomical data was an elliptical orbit, even though he had long cherished the idea that the motion of the heavens must be perfectly circular.5 Then the physicist Isaac Newton used Kepler’s data and conclusions to formulate his own law of universal gravitation, but famously chose to refuse to speculate about the cause of gravity. He knew he didn’t have the data to infer it, even as other scientists like Descartes famously erred on the same subject as they failed to resist the temptation to speculate.6

Galileo, Darwin, Boas, Kepler and Newton were scientific achievers. They were not simply passive observers recording the facts; they were active interpreters who had to carefully deliberate about whether they had checked every relevant fact, performed every important test, solved every equation. They could have given in to laziness or dogmatism, but they didn’t. In many cases they even exerted heroic effort to maintain their adherence to the facts in opposition to what must have been an extraordinary social pressure to ignore them. That’s why we celebrate those who exercise scientific objectivity and criticize as unscientific those who fail to. When scientists exercise the discipline of keeping their minds focused on the facts rather than indulging in fantasy and prejudice, they are choosing to use their minds in the proper way.

Every one of us faces the same choice of looking at the facts or not, and we face it constantly. This is what it means to have free will. You can observe your free will in action any time you take a moment to introspect your thought processes. Your free will is your choice to focus or not, your choice to be rational or irrational, your choice to be objective or subjective. It’s what Ayn Rand called the choice to think or not to think.7 I agree with her that this is the real essence of free will.

The fact that free will is implicit in the practice of science is part of what made it an implicit core tenet of the Enlightenment. Science, reason and objectivity are values — norms that are regarded as ideals to be pursued. But to regard them as normative, action-guiding values implies the possibility of choosing them or not. If we are determined by our genetics or environment, there is no such alternative. We will do whatever we are determined to do; no other outcome is possible. This means that determinism is at odds with the deepest commitments of the Enlightenment.

All of this means that when critics of free will suggest that we ought to pay attention to the alleged scientific facts in support of their position, their argument is incoherent. They think we really ought to look at the facts, and agree with their position, which presupposes that we can choose to look at the facts (or not).8 But the position they argue for is that we can’t help what we do, so we have no choice about whether we do or don’t look at the facts. The allegedly scientific argument against free will undercuts itself.9

Free will is consistent with the scientific worldview

Even though it is demonstrable that science requires free will, the allegation that there is something mysterious and unscientific about free will is widespread, and it warrants a response. It is an allegation with a long history and many facets, but addressing a few of the representative allegations should suffice for our purpose. (In the concluding section, I will also try to explain why this worry about free will has been so enduring, in spite of its shortcomings.)

One concern is that the idea of free will is in tension with a principle that is central to the scientific worldview, the principle of cause and effect. Harris, for example, argues that just as we cannot be held responsible for things we may do as a result of neurological disorders, we also cannot be held responsible for anything we do with a normal brain, since both are cases in which our actions are caused by prior physical events.10 What’s more, he argues (following a popular argument by dilemma) that if our decisions and actions are not determined by any antecedent factors, they would then be random, causeless accidents, and still not things for which we are responsible.

It is important that many scientists today acknowledge that it is no longer obvious that every element of the universe follows mechanistic, deterministic laws: quantum phenomena at the subatomic level are often seen as notable exceptions. Whatever the proper interpretation of quantum physics, the fact that not everything that we observe readily fits a deterministic framework should remind us that in science, observations come first, not theories. Our theory should not begin with the assumption that all causality is mechanistic; we should accept mechanistic causality into our worldview only to the extent that we observe it and find the need to infer it.

The obvious source of observational data about free will is our ability to introspectively observe ourselves making choices. Interestingly, Harris regularly claims that he himself cannot introspect any conscious cause of his actions: he notes that he does not understand why he makes various decisions (like tea versus coffee).11 Yet as we have illustrated, the choice of tea versus coffee is not the central kind of choice in which our free will consists. It is our choice to raise or lower our level of awareness, the choice to search for the truth or not, a choice that any scientist should realize he or she faces in any process of investigation.

Any theory of causation needs to be reconciled with this introspective data. The idea that the only alternative to mechanistically determined causation is random chance assumes that causal relationships hold only between present actions and antecedent events. But there is an alternative to this view of causation. In another conception of causation, a causal relationship is the simultaneous relationship between the nature of an entity and its actions. This is fully consistent with the idea that it is in our nature as human beings to be able to choose from a finite array of definite possibilities, and that it is the person or agent, not any previous state, that is the cause of his chosen actions.12

A second common concern is that to believe in free will, one has to accept a mystical view about an immortal, disembodied soul, a view that is either unsupported or contradicted by what we know today about biology and physics. Pinker reiterates this concern when he says that free will would only make sense if the human soul were a kind of “ghost in the machine, a spirit or soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls levers of behavior.”13 His concern is buoyed by the worry that the idea of free will is inherited from religion, not science.

As I have described it, there’s nothing supernatural about free will. On the contrary, free will is just an aspect of the human mind’s natural capacity to be conscious of the world. It’s a power that requires first and foremost a biologically healthy, functioning brain. It’s a power that goes out of existence when the brain is damaged or when the body ceases to function. It’s a fact about what it means for a human being to be conscious, not an attribute of some immortal soul.

We do not need to invoke the supernatural to explain the human mind’s power to think or not. On the contrary, the idea that an all-powerful divine being knows the future and controls our destiny has always been at odds with the idea of free will. Historically, the first advocates of determinism were religiously oriented thinkers (in particular, the Stoics and St. Augustine). Those same religious thinkers struggled to make room for the idea of moral responsibility in a universe governed by a supernatural power. They gave “compatibilistic” definitions of “freedom,” stripping it of any implication of real alternate possibilities (just as many contemporary secular determinists do).14

It was only after religious thinkers invented determinism that philosophers like Alexander of Aphrodisias, Pelagius, and Thomas Reid came to free will’s defense.15 They were religious themselves, so they had a devil of a time trying to reconcile the free will they defended with the existence of a divine power.

Free will is consistent with discoveries in neuroscience

Of special interest today is the allegation that specific scientific findings, especially in the field of neuroscience, reveal facts about the brain that rule out the presence of free will. In particular, Sam Harris showcases studies like those done by Benjamin Libet as refuting the existence of free will.16 These studies surely demonstrate important facts about the brain, but their results should be unsurprising to anyone who takes free will seriously. (Note that this section can be safely skipped by anyone uninterested in the details of neuroscience.)

Libet’s experiments show that people who are asked to spontaneously move their wrist report having made the conscious decision about when to do so about 350 ms (i.e., about one third of a second) after unconscious brain activity that is associated with a readiness to move (the “readiness potential”). This is taken by skeptics about free will as evidence that it is unconscious brain activity and not the conscious decision that is causally fundamental to our actions. They see the conscious decision as an effect (perhaps a merely accidental side effect) of the deeper cause in the brain.

The Libet experiment helpfully demonstrates that human action is a complex product of the interaction between the conscious mind and the physical brain. This should be a surprise to no one, except for those who think free will is a capacity of a disembodied soul that floats free from the body and has the power to affect it without mediation by the brain. But as mentioned above, the power to raise or lower our degree of awareness is a power that depends on and is mediated by the physical brain.

Philosophy alone cannot predict how the brain mediates the powers of the conscious mind. But it can help us understand the significance of those scientific discoveries by defining the scope of those conscious powers.

Free will is fundamentally the control you have over your conscious thinking processes; it is not a form of control over every spasm of your body or every rumination of the subconscious mind (say, about a desire for coffee vs. tea). Even when you intentionally move your body in a given situation, it is often on the basis of specific desires and beliefs about the results of the action, and these beliefs and desires may be stored in your subconscious.

But intentional actions count as intentional, even when spurred by subconscious beliefs and desires, because those subconscious mental states were themselves programmed by your previous choices, about the extent to which you choose to think or not about your factual knowledge and about what you value.17 This has important consequences for how to interpret the Libet experiment.

Someone who feels an urge to flick his wrist randomly in a Libet-style experiment has already made many conscious choices leading up to this point. First, he had to choose to use his mind or not to answer the question of whether to participate in the experiment, vs., say, simply accepting the invitation passively as a result of social pressure. Having made the choice to use his mind to answer the question, he then deliberated about whether participating in the experiment was worth his time. Having decided to participate and strap on the apparatus, he then decided to comply with the instructions, rather than simply daydreaming through the experiment. This point is of special interest: it is when he consciously chose to instruct his subconscious mind to pick a random moment at which to flick his wrist.18

The experiment certainly helps to show that a prior decision to act spontaneously works through subconscious instructions that depend on measurable brain activity. But again, this should not be surprising. Nobody who seriously believes in free will thinks that when one decides to act spontaneously, one gives instructions to a free-floating soul which temporarily leaves the body and then returns to magically cause the body to move without mediation by the brain.

The decision to instruct oneself to act spontaneously certainly happens well before the measured readiness potential, and yet it is not a moment measured by the experiment itself. Nobody has ever done a Libet-style experiment showing brain activity preceding and determining this prior decision, or any of the other decisions leading up to it that are more obviously cases of the choice to think or not. I don’t think they ever will.

Any Libet-style experiment asks subjects to introspect their choice so as to record its timing. But the possibility of measuring the precise timing of such an event is rendered notoriously difficult, if not impossible, if it is the choice to engage or re-engage the use of one’s consciousness, or not.

If one begins in a semiconscious daze, one is not alert enough to record precisely when one raises one’s level of awareness. If one is already fully conscious and chooses to maintain that state, it is not clear at which point one should mark the beginning of a choice that is made continuously. And because the choice to focus means focusing primarily on facts other than the choice itself, one’s ability to monitor the choice itself would involve divided attention and would likely be imprecise.

The imprecision here matters. Experiments of this type attempt to identify the brain activity that allegedly causes our choices mere fractions of a second before we make them. No self-report about the timing of a choice to focus could be precise enough to be compared meaningfully to brain activity measured on the scale of thousandths of a second.

Those looking to the Libet experiment for anything of significance about free will are simply looking in the wrong place.

Of course, the most fundamental reason that no experiment will ever disprove the existence of free will is that no experiment can give us reason to change our minds about whether or not it is possible to change our minds. No scientific evidence can refute an essential presupposition of the scientific method itself.

In the meantime, we should welcome with a warm embrace all of the facts discovered by neuroscience. But we should remember that good science doesn’t just passively record facts, it actively interprets them, making an effort to avoid prejudice. However we eventually interpret the data of neuroscience, one thing will be sure: if scientists are going to identify its truths, they’ll need to choose to focus their minds to do it. That means using their free will.

The unactualized potential of the Enlightenment

I mentioned earlier that the concept of free will was an idea implicit in the achievements of the Enlightenment. It was implicit because few if any Enlightenment thinkers were willing to defend it explicitly.

So it is not an accident that today’s neo-Enlightenment figures are skeptical of free will: many of the greatest defenders of science and reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were themselves determinists (e.g., Spinoza), or at least ambiguous in their promotion of free will (e.g., Locke). Those who came the closest to defending the idea that human beings make genuine choices, undetermined by antecedent factors, packaged their arguments with untenable metaphysical doctrines like mind-body dualism (e.g., Rene Descartes), faith-based epistemologies (e.g., Thomas Reid), or both (e.g., Immanuel Kant).

Kant was a noteworthy and pivotal figure in the Enlightenment’s treatment of the concept of free will. On the one hand, Kant recognized in scattered places in his work that there is something incoherent about supposing that deterministic beings could have rational, objective reasons for believing in determinism. (A deterministic being is simply prompted to believe things, and cannot objectively evaluate what he believes as rational or irrational.19)

On the other hand, Kant’s deeper theoretical views committed him to the idea that the “phenomenal” world studied by scientists is deterministic. So is, he thought, our consciousness as we ourselves introspect it. This meant that no one could ever observe free will. This formalized the prejudice that free will is inherently unscientific. On Kant’s view, free will, if it exists at all, has to exist in the “noumenal” realm, a realm inaccessible to reason and observation. How we are to know that such a realm exists is never explained. Kant famously held up the triumvirate of “God, freedom [meaning freedom of the will], and immortality” as objects of faith rather than reason.

For many reasons we cannot explore here, Kant’s philosophy was instrumental in bringing the Enlightenment to a close, and his packaging of free will with the notions of God and the immortal soul is just one of the reasons.20 When he popularized the claim that free will, a key presupposition of the scientific method, was itself akin to these other religious concepts, he engendered secular skepticism about free will that led to a torrent of philosophical determinism in the nineteenth century (from Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and many, many others), which in turn went on to set the scene for today’s intellectually orthodox secular skepticism about free will.

You can see the remnants of Kant’s package deal among the advocates of Enlightenment values today. Because they see themselves as advocates of science and reason, they are rightly skeptical of the claims of religion. But because they accept Kant’s package deal, they assume that consistently scientific thinkers should reject free will on the same grounds.

The new “back to the Enlightenment” thinkers have much to recommend them. But until these champions of science and reason think more deeply about the ideas that made the scientific revolution both meaningful and possible — chief among these being the concept of free will — they will not be able to appreciate what made this period so revolutionary. They will remain entrenched in the intellectual orthodoxies that have prevented a return to Enlightenment values since approximately the time of Kant. This means they themselves will not be able to become the renegades they would like to become. They should make a different choice.

Soon ARU Press will release a collection of Ben Bayer’s essays, Breaking Free From Faith-Based Morality. The collection will feature essays previously published in New Ideal on the subject of the religious roots of altruistic morality. The collection is aimed at secular readers who consider themselves rational and scientific, but who are nonetheless in the grip of the morality of altruism that dominates our culture. It argues that altruism is essentially faith-based, and that a principled commitment to reason requires abandoning it. To offer them an alternative, the final chapter of the book shows how Ayn Rand validated a fully scientific ethics. We are pleased to publish this final chapter online in anticipation of the release of the book.

In 2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali scandalized the atheist community by announcing that she had converted to Christianity. She argued that atheism offers no meaningful positive values, at a time when the West needs to defend its values — whether from militant Islam or the “woke” movement on campuses: “[W]e can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: What is it that unites us? The response that ‘God is dead!’ seems insufficient.”

To Ali, only Christianity can provide the guidance we need. She credits it as the source of “an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom, and dignity.” By contrast, as Christianity’s cultural influence has waned, we are left with the problem that

the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. . . . The line often attributed to G. K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”¹

Here she echoes a theme that religious apologists have sounded for centuries: Only the existence of a divine moral lawmaker who transcends human interests and culture can ensure the existence of meaningful, objective moral guidance.2

Doubtless, religion’s decline has created a cultural void that the secular dogma of “woke” egalitarianism has been eager to fill. And this is due in no small part to atheists’ failure to offer the world a convincing philosophic code of objective moral guidance.

But the alternative to “irrational quasi-religious dogma” is not irrational fully religious dogma. In reality, it’s religious faith that truly makes it possible to “believe in anything” about matters of value, undermining objectivity. In this essay, I will show the real meaning of objectivity, and the arguments that have already been given for the guidance it implies. It’s guidance that many atheists have so far failed to embrace when offered, let alone to formulate for themselves.

Atheists typically try to answer the question Richard Dawkins grapples with in his book Outgrowing God:

Lots of people seem to think you need to believe in some sort of god, any kind of ‘higher power,’ in order to have any chance of being moral – of being good. Or that, without belief in a higher power, you’d have no basis for knowing right from wrong, good from bad, moral from immoral. This chapter looks at . . . whether we need belief in God or gods or some sort of ‘higher power’ in order to be good [my emphasis].3

Dawkins says belief in a God who punishes immorality could motivate ostensibly moral behavior.4 He also observes that non-believers like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros can be very generous in their philanthropic giving, and that there are very few atheists in prison.5 He then offers biological and cultural explanations for this behavior. The leading cultural explanation is the influence of various ostensibly secular moral philosophies. The implied answer to his question is, we don’t need religion for moral guidance, for other secular theories can provide this guidance as well.

But to say that we don’t need religion for moral guidance implies some people can still get it from religion. This “me too” approach concedes that religion has really offered meaningful guidance worthy of emulation. But we should not be so ready to concede that faith-based religious morality has ever offered meaningful guidance, especially if, as I shall argue, it cannot offer objective guidance.

There is an alternative. We can build a secular, scientific account of morality. As I will argue, only a scientific theory can offer truly objective moral guidance. The point is not that we don’t need religion to find meaningful moral guidance. The point is that religion cannot offer it in the first place.

In this essay I will show how to build a secular, scientific morality from the values of science itself, beginning with the value of scientific objectivity. To clear the ground for building it, we must first brush aside religious misconceptions about objective morality. They fail to appreciate its true meaning, and clarifying this meaning will help show why the value of objectivity explains our admiration for important virtues of character. This will point the way to objectively identifying the factual basis for moral truths.

A fully scientifically objective morality must also be willing to challenge the content that many current secular moral theories have inherited from religious codes. Atheists who truly value the rebelliousness of the Enlightenment must be willing to break free from the dominant culture that surrounds them.

Why religion is the enemy of objectivity

Far from being an exemplar of objective morality, religious morality is anathema to it.

There is a powerful but still underappreciated objection to the idea that divine commandments provide the basis for objective standards of morality. It concerns the arbitrariness of the alleged divine commands themselves.

The classic illustration is the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament. God commands Abraham to kill his only begotten son, and Abraham willingly begins to comply. Believers take solace in the fact that God was only testing Abraham and didn’t make him go through with it.6 But what God is testing — and what the story is celebrating — is Abraham’s willingness to kill out of arbitrary blind faith. If God says he should not kill, that makes it immoral; but if God arbitrarily changes his mind and asks Abraham to kill an innocent child, it is moral after all.7 A moral code with divine commandments as its basis is shot through with arbitrariness.

This is the answer to those who bemoan that atheists are capable of believing anything. On the contrary, it’s precisely a religious morality of groundless faith that demands arbitrary belief. The example of Abraham’s submission to God’s arbitrary will has too often inspired believers, from Christian inquisitors to Islamic terrorists and mullahs, who arbitrarily believed their acts of murder and oppression to be noble because it was dictated to them by a higher power.

Defenders of religious morality claim that theirs is an “objective” morality because human beings have no say in what God commands, so whole cultures can be “wrong” if they disobey these commands.8 But this also means God cannot be wrong, no matter what he commands. What God commands of Abraham, for example, is unaffected by the extreme distress Abraham might feel or the pain Isaac would suffer from being sacrificed.

Does the mere independence of an alleged divine commander’s will from human consciousness make a code based on it “objective”?

“Objective” is sometimes used to mean the sheer mind-independence of a fact. But while a divine commander’s will is imagined to be independent of human minds, it’s obviously not supposed to be independent of every mind. It is itself supposed to be the will of an alleged supernatural mind. That means that according to divine command theory what counts as moral is totally dependent on God’s arbitrary caprice.9

In fact, only in a godless universe can any facts be truly mind-independent. In the fantasy of a God who creates the universe, all of nature depends on his mind for its existence and character. Such a God could have made the laws of nature radically different: gravity could work in reverse, living creatures could be immortal, etc. God could suspend any law he authored by permitting “miracles.” He could make all of his creation disappear. There are no objective facts in the universe imagined by theistic religion.

More importantly, religion poisons the very practice of the objective method of discovering truth.

When ordinary non-academics speak of “objectivity,” they don’t simply mean the mind-independence of a fact. They mean the method that minds use to know these facts.10 Objective journalism and objective science are objective not because the perfect newspaper article or lab report already exists out there in reality, waiting to be discovered.11 Rather, they’re objective because they are products of human beings who have attended to the relevant mind-independent facts because they practice objectivity, the logical method of committing to discovering the truth, come what may.

The objectivity of human value should be thought of in the same way. Values are not mind-independent entities. Rather, valuing is something human minds do: It’s the conscious evaluation and pursuit of certain objects by conscious beings. We have a choice about how to evaluate these objects: We can do it by rationally deciding what furthers our lives, or we can default by acting on unprocessed emotional reactions.

Refugees who flee a primitive, oppressive country for a modern, civilized one, are often valuing objectively, not subjectively. It is not wishful thinking that their life would be better in one country rather than another; they can have perfectly good reason to think it is true. In this approach, objective values are what we form through a commitment to the truth, while merely subjective values ignore or defy it.

Far from being objective, the values of religious morality are thoroughly subjective. The whole lesson of the story of Abraham is that God is testing Abraham’s blind willingness to follow a command to kill. He hears a voice in his head and is expected to follow its demands without being able to know where it comes from, whether from the imagined God, a demon, or just his own delusions. He’s relying, at bottom, on an unscrutinized feeling of fear, not any commitment to the truth.

This is why religious moralists in practice do not appeal to any kind of reasoning from first principles to justify the content of their moral code. Instead, they appeal directly to the arbitrary authority of scripture, scriptures purporting to contain revelations about God’s will like the one experienced by Abraham. We are given no reasoned explanations for why scriptural commandments serve any purpose, human or divine. Though some religious commandments may have been informed by the life experience of their human authors, they often command us to surrender what is actually good for our lives. Like Abraham, most follow these commandments not out of reverence for real values in their lives but out of irrational fear of disapproval or punishment by real and imagined authorities.

Because objectivity means following a scientific method to know the truth, faith-based morality is the enemy of objective morality. Atheists should not seek to show why one does not need to be religious to uphold an objective morality. They should be clear that religious faith cannot uphold an objective morality. Only a scientifically objective approach that rejects blind faith can.

Being a truth-seeker rather than a blind-faith believer also accounts for the essence of other morally admirable character traits. Seeing this is the first step to building a truly objective code of morality.

Admirable character traits of the truth seeker as moral virtues

Consider what was so admirable about Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story, at least before she converted to Christianity.

Ali was born and raised in a fundamentalist Muslim family in Somalia. At an early age she was indoctrinated by clerics, beaten by her mother, even subjected to horrific female circumcision. When her family left to live in Nairobi, Kenya, she received a more cosmopolitan education that opened her mind to new books and ideas. When her family tried to arrange her marriage with a man she’d never met, she rebelled and escaped to Europe to make a new life for herself. Famously, she rejected Islam and became an atheist.12 She spoke up intransigently against injustice and oppression, even in the face of death threats year after year.

When Ali first rose to prominence, her secular admirers agreed that the primitive, Islamic society she had rebelled against was vicious and celebrated her escape from this society as a real act of moral heroism.

Notably: admiration is a moral emotion that responds to admirable character traits. We admired the will to overcome obstacles and speak up even in the face of grave threats. These are the same character traits that many admire in other great activists, dissidents, and artists. In admiring how they all “speak up,” we are admiring their indefatigable commitment to learning and telling the truth.

But that is also the central value of the scientist.

Consider Katalin Kariko, one of the co-developers of the Covid mRNA technology. To identify the biochemistry behind this new and dynamic form of vaccine technology, she had to engage in the right methods of thinking. To achieve the value of knowledge, objectivity demands not only a commitment to use the right methods to discover the truth, but also to reject the temptation to blind oneself by convenient fictions. So Kariko had to form the right general habits of thought like: the intellectual honesty to avoid lazily fudging data because of confirmation bias, the courage to move forward without external support and in the face of hostility, and the independent thinking needed to experiment with entirely novel genetic methods.

Kariko’s story shows that the character traits of the great scientist are just supremely clear examples of the character traits of the morally virtuous man or woman. The intellectual virtues of science are continuous with moral virtues. Because human action is guided by thought, choosing the right ways of thinking — the ways that keep us focused on the facts rather than fantasy — is essential to choosing the right way of acting, and hence of forming the right kind of character.

Many widely recognized moral virtues have the same relation to the value of seeking the truth. Honesty means commitment to the truth, not faking it. Integrity means valuing the truth enough to act on it. Justice means recognizing the truth about the characters of other people.13 And this is only a preview: There’s more to be said about how many other virtues relate to a basic virtue of the rational pursuit of the truth.14

But what does it mean to identify moral virtues? Can there be such a thing as scientific truth about what’s the right or wrong virtue to practice? What could make the principles of morality objectively true, i.e., provable by reference to observable facts?

The factual basis of moral value judgments

Part of the reason atheists are so late to the game in defending a secular code of morality is that secular skeptics have long thought moral value judgments have no basis in facts. They have sided with David Hume’s view that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.”15 Morality, they say, is a subjective relic of religious superstition, and if God is dead, morality is a joint casualty.

One source of this skepticism is that moral value judgments contain very abstract concepts, not closely tied to the observable things around us. We can’t see honesty or integrity or justice or goodness in the way we see tables or chairs, dogs or cats.

But a concept’s high level of abstraction doesn’t make it just hot air. The concept of the “atom” refers to something totally invisible. Full proof of the existence of atoms came only in the 19th century, when scientists were about to infer their existence as the cause of a variety of observed effects. Now everyone (aside from a few highly skeptical philosophers) thinks that scientists refer to real facts when they talk about atoms, even if the concept is highly abstract.

Highly abstract concepts can refer to real facts by means other than causal inference. Sometimes they simply condense a wide array of disparate observable facts. Consider concepts of the scientific method like “experiment,” “hypothesis,” “replicable,” etc. They refer to real activities, mental products, and their qualities in relation to a scientific purpose. Thermometers, sheets of gold foil, and cathode ray tubes have no visual resemblance. But scientists use these various objects to do experiments that helped prove the atomic hypothesis, provided that the results were replicable.

We need to conceptualize the actions of the scientific method because our thoughts are not automatically true — we are fallible. Thinking the world is flat doesn’t make it so: To learn its shape, we need to make systematic astronomical and terrestrial observations. Wanting to be pregnant doesn’t make one pregnant: Only specific biochemical tests reveal whether the effect has been brought about by its actual causes.

So precisely because we need to base our thinking on the facts, we also need concepts of methods of rational thinking, concepts of norms. There are better ways of doing experiments, of forming and testing hypotheses, and there are worse ways. Experiments should be replicable, evaluation of results should often be double-blind, and experimenters should not fall prey to confirmation bias, etc. There are definite courses of mental action that help us identify the truth. Our concepts for these scientific and logical norms refer to real facts because the methods are real facts, and we need to use these methods to discover further real facts.

Importantly, scientific and logical norms don’t just describe the research process; they prescribe courses of actions that scientists ought to pursue if they are to achieve the value of the truth. So if concepts of scientific norms refer to real facts, concepts of moral norms could do the same. What if moral norms simply identified the fundamental means to achieve some other salient end?

We obviously need concepts of practical norms to guide action toward success more generally. These norms are themselves based on scientific findings, most obviously in the life sciences. Biology describes and explains the processes of growth, locomotion and metabolism. Physiology describes and explains specific living activities of specific organisms: respiration, circulation, digestion, excretion, etc. But biological explanation itself is an essentially normative practice, and this has normative implications.

For all that secular moralists invoke evolution in the attempt to explain the ethical beliefs of human beings, they miss the key aspect of evolutionary science that bears most directly on value theory.16 Evolutionary biology explains the origin of the structure, traits and behavior of living things by explaining how those features came to be good for the organism, resulting in the replication of its species. See how quickly Richard Dawkins resorts to this language in his defense of evolutionary explanation in The Blind Watchmaker:

[B]iologists can be much more specific than that about what would constitute being ‘good for something’. The minimum requirement for us to recognize an object as an animal or plant is that it should succeed in making a living of some sort. . . . It is true that there are quite a number of ways of making a living — flying, swimming, swinging through the trees, and so on. But however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.17

We appeal even more directly to value judgments about the good of the organism in the applied life sciences. Fields like medicine and nutrition not only describe but prescribe methods needed to fend off or cure illness and sustain health: methods of immunization, medication, surgery, nutrition, etc. A new virus or poison or mental pathology hinders life; a new vaccine or antidote or therapy helps sustain it. The actions and products that actually result in self-perpetuation of life are those we regard as healthy or proper, as good for the life of the organism.

What if principles of morality are like the principles of the applied life sciences? They would concern not just the health of one’s body but the health of one’s soul. Here “health of one’s soul” only means the health of one’s personal character, one’s basic, psychologically characteristic mode of operation, the basic premises and emotional dispositions one works from habitually. The existence of the entire field of clinical psychology demonstrates that there are healthy and unhealthy psychological characteristics. Moral norms could identify the actions needed to become the kind of person with the kind of character who lives successfully. Virtues like honesty, integrity, courage, and justice could help one to acquire the knowledge one needs to find and make a better life.

Importantly, while such moral norms could help us strengthen our character to navigate our relations with other people, they need not be limited to rules for social relations. Indeed, what makes dissidents and scientists so courageous is precisely their commitment to live free from others’ influence, to go by the judgment of their own mind in answering the big questions of life. And it can also be courageous to act in the face of great challenges, even when imposed not by others but by nature. Consider the courage of someone battling a deadly cancer. The relationship that morality governs is not primarily that between you and other people, but that between you and reality.

Because there are scientifically knowable facts that make it true that moral virtues are good for human beings (ultimately, biological facts), a code of such virtues could be an objective morality.

Dramatizing a morality that celebrates objectivity

In my opinion, the philosopher who did the most to show how the values of science inform secular objective morality was Ayn Rand. She was a radical whose absolutism about the value of reason led her to challenge conventional views about morality, whether religious or otherwise. That attitude systematically informed her social and political analysis, creating her reputation as a cultural iconoclast.

Some may find it odd that a non-academic novelist would have special insight into the foundations of an objective morality. But recall how early in the essay I observed the character traits of admirable people. I modeled this on Rand’s own method of inquiry.18 As a novelist interested in projecting ideal characters, she made careful observations of real people she admired, and conceptualized the character traits that distinguished them from others. Her creative process began with collecting the data about moral character with which the science of ethics must begin.

Rand’s earliest fictional heroes and heroines are, above all, truth seekers and truth tellers in search of freedom. Kira Argounova of We the Living strives to escape the Soviet Russian communist system that works to crush her career as an engineer and the man she loves. Equality 7-2521 of Anthem escapes from the dystopian totalitarian society that rejects his reinvented light bulb after he’s rejected his society’s moral code. Howard Roark of The Fountainhead is an architect with a new vision of how to build who is unwilling to compromise it for wealth or fame, or to cater to society’s irrational moral demands.

Rand held up her heroes and heroines as admirable precisely for their devotion to objectivity. As a practitioner of objectivity herself, she was not content to simply admire them. This is where her work as a novelist shaded into her work as a philosopher, as she sought to understand why they were admirable. In both the traits she celebrates in her fiction and in her nonfiction conceptualization of them (in speeches in the novels and in later nonfiction essays), we see her moving from firsthand observations to highly abstract standards of value that integrate and explain the more concrete virtues and values she had earlier identified inductively.

After writing The Fountainhead (1943), Rand had identified certain key moral virtues animating her heroes in the pursuit of their values, especially the value of the truth: virtues like honesty, integrity, and independence.19 By the time she had written Atlas Shrugged (1957), she had identified the fundamental virtue linking all of these (and others): the virtue of rationality.20 She saw all of the virtues as actions of recognizing important facts of reality that bear on human living.21 As forms of rationality, they each govern both thought and action as each is subject to the same basic questions:

A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? — Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow — right or wrong? Is a man’s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life — right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power — right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have — and the answers came from a man’s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.22

In Rand’s view, “right or wrong” applies to both thought and action generally, because both are exercised by choice, and both are evaluable by reference to reality-oriented standards. They can be justified or unjustified, rational or irrational. Thought itself is the crucial human action that guides all others.

But Rand’s work as a philosopher did not end with simply finding a common denominator among the moral virtues. She was also deeply concerned with the question of how and why moral norms count as cognitively meaningful truths, the kind of truths that skeptics and relativists would consider impossible.

The philosophic foundations of Rand’s objective morality

In her nonfiction treatise “The Objectivist Ethics” (1961), Rand explores the foundations of morality that she first identified in a speech by the hero of Atlas Shrugged. Here I’ll only highlight some of the essentials of her view of the foundations of objective morality.23

She begins by asking her readers to be deeply philosophical about the very starting point of ethics:

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?

Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all — and why?

Is the concept of value, of “good or evil” an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality — or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence?24

One hallmark of her concern for objectivity here is first her unwillingness to begin by simply choosing among the conventional codes of values our culture already has to offer. She is preparing the way for a radical critique of nearly all of those codes and an independent reconstruction of a new moral code from the ground up.

A second hallmark is her concern to do this reconstruction with attention to basic philosophical questions about what could make a code of morality true or false in the first place. Rather than looking for a theory that captures popular “intuitions” about moral case studies — asking how applying the concept of “value” makes us feel — she asks about the metaphysical basis of the concept of “value,” i.e., what if any facts it refers to in reality.

She goes on to argue that it is the fact that a class of entities faces the alternative of existence or non-existence that explains the need for and thus the meaning of value concepts like “good” and “bad.” Only living organisms, unlike inanimate entities, face this alternative in the sense that they must engage in “self-generated, goal-directed action” to maintain their existence. To maintain their existence, living organisms must follow a specific course of locomotion, nutrition and growth:

That which is required for its survival is determined by its nature, by the kind of entity it is. . . .[T]he fundamental alternative of its existence remains the same: if an organism fails in the basic functions required by its nature — if an amoeba’s protoplasm stops assimilating food, or if a man’s heart stops beating — the organism dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action.25

Inanimate entities can of course be destroyed, but they don’t need to do anything to remain in existence. If the universe were lifeless, with nothing but stars, rocks, and energy fields, there would be no goal pursuit to succeed or fail, no entities to which anything could be good or bad. In such a counterfactual unbiological universe, we would not need to invoke value concepts to explain the continued existence or change of various inanimate entities. Physical and chemical explanations would suffice.

Rand had been thinking about these basic questions about the foundations of value theory while writing her novel Atlas Shrugged, and she even found a way to dramatize this very issue, one that might otherwise seem like a technical theoretical issue, in an important scene. A minor character, a recent college graduate who had been enamored of skeptical-relativist ethical theories comes to abandon his jaded worldview after having been inspired by the admirable rationality of his boss (Rearden). Fueled by this inspiration he stands his ground when their factory is attacked by agitators, and is mortally wounded. His philosophical development in favor of moral objectivity reaches its denouement as he comes face to face with the value significance of the life or death stakes of his predicament:

His eyes wandered over the vast darkness, then rose to Rearden's face; the eyes were helpless, longing, childishly bewildered. “I know . . . it’s crap, all those things they taught us . . . all of it, everything they said . . . about living or . . . or dying . . . Dying . . . it wouldn’t make any difference to chemicals, but — ” he stopped, and all of his desperate protest was only in the intensity of his voice dropping lower to say, “ — but it does, to me . . . And . . . and, I guess, it makes a difference to an animal, too . . . But they said there are no values . . . only social customs. . . No values!” His hand clutched blindly at the hole in his chest, as if trying to hold that which he was losing. “No . . . values . . .”26

Tragically he dies, and Rearden observes that “what he was carrying in his arms was now that which had been the boy’s teachers’ idea of a man — a collection of chemicals,” dramatizing how value concepts apply only to the living, not the inanimate.27

Understanding the connection between life and value also points to the ultimate value that sets the standard of evaluation. “Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action.”28 What is living action (nutrition, locomotion, growth) good for? It’s good for more nutrition, locomotion, growth.29 Life is an end in itself, not in the sense of being an end state, but in the sense of being a self-reinforcing activity that is the means to the end of more of itself.

And there is nothing else beyond an entity’s engagement in such self-reinforcing activity that is at stake. Value concepts identify success and failure conditions for this activity. They have no other factual basis. As she cashes it out, “To speak of ‘value’ as apart from ‘life’ is worse than a contradiction in terms. ‘It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”30

This represents a crucial part of the answer to Rand’s question: Do we need values at all, and why? Fundamentally, we need them because we are living organisms. This in turn explains how the concept of “value” can be used to grasp and express truths: The concept is used to identify the truth of what furthers the life of an organism.

Rand goes on to explain that human beings need a code of values — moral values — because we are a distinctive kind of living organism that must consciously choose the values we pursue, and so we need guidance in our choices. Objective moral values are values that are chosen because they’re consciously, rationally validated by reference to the facts about what is required to further one’s life.31

By using a scientific method to search for the basis of the concept of “value,” Rand also formed a theory of value that accounted for the value of the scientific method itself. A consequence of her unwillingness to defend a value theory that simply rationalizes cultural moral prejudice is its distinctively modern approach to key issues in moral philosophy.

Rand’s distinctively modern objective morality

Rand was ahead of her time in realizing the philosophic significance of the difference between the living and the inanimate.

We have already seen (in the passage from Dawkins about how biologists think about what it means to be “good for something”) how judgments of biological value are implicit in evolutionary explanations. In recent years, certain philosophically minded scientists have started to catch up with Rand, unpacking the implications of biology for value theory. Steven Pinker, for instance, puts it this way:

Life and happiness depend on an infinitesimal sliver of orderly arrangements of matter amid the astronomical number of possibilities. . . .[The second law of thermodynamics] defines the fate of the universe and the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and knowledge to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.32

Explaining how living things resist entropy requires the attribution of goals or aims (“to fight back. . .” is teleological language). These are not usually conscious purposes (as they are for human beings). In his book articulating the neuroscientist and bioanthropologist Terence Deacon’s theory of natural teleology, Jeremy Sherman describes the aims of a simple bacterium:

Of all the possible work that glucose could do, within the bacterium those possibilities get channeled, limited, narrowed, constrained, or aimed into work that benefits the bacterium. Work isn’t possible without energy, but glucose energy doesn’t aim itself. The bacterium does the aiming. . . .

The bacterium’s means include its capacity to aim or channel that glucose into the bacterium’s functional work, which among other things includes finding more glucose.

And the bacterium’s most fundamental end? As I’ve already suggested, it’s circular. The bacterium’s fundamental end is regenerating its ability to aim work. It regenerates its own aims, and reproduces them, regenerating its aims in its progeny selves.33

Sherman goes on to explain how recognizing these natural goals is the key to solving Hume’s “is-ought” problem.34

Moral theories based on facts about the biological requirements of human life are nothing new. In the last few decades, prominent philosophers like Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson (among others) have followed the lead of the arguments first offered by Aristotle in ancient Greece to formulate codes of morality that derive from the “human form of life.”35 But Rand’s approach even parts ways with these traditional life-based accounts of ethics in favor of a more scientific approach.

Even the contemporary Aristotelians are still working from a pre-modern view of biology. The idea they borrow from Aristotle is that there is a kind of proper functioning for each distinctive type of living organism. There’s something right about this, but they have little to say about what explains a given organism’s distinctive form of life.36 They will say, for instance, that it’s the function of the bacterium to pursue glucose, or the function of bobcats to hunt, without explaining what makes this process out of so many others so special.

While Rand also revered Aristotle, her deeply biological perspective on value made her approach to ethics much more modern.37 Her understanding of what explains an organism’s distinctive form of life is informed by a post-Darwinian approach to biology.38 Living things are distinguished from the inanimate insofar as they are engaged in a constant struggle for existence. Everything about a living organism’s physiological structure, its use of energy, and its behavior makes a difference for better or worse in that struggle. Its distinctive form of living is the most distinctive and powerful activity it relies on to help win that struggle for existence. Here we see her surveying the range of distinctive forms of life according to their survival value:

The simpler organisms, such as plants, can survive by means of their automatic physical functions. The higher organisms, such as animals and man, cannot: their needs are more complex and the range of their actions is wider. The physical functions of their bodies can perform automatically only the task of using fuel, but cannot obtain that fuel. To obtain it, the higher organisms need the faculty of consciousness. A plant can obtain its food from the soil in which it grows. An animal has to hunt for it. Man has to produce it.39

We’ve already seen how the values she’s celebrating in the person of her fictional heroes and heroines are implicitly the values of the scientist: virtues such as honesty, independence, integrity. The fact that the distinctively human form of life depends essentially on human consciousness is a sign of how Rand, unlike almost any other thinker, appreciates the biological value of the pursuit of truth itself.

The content of her code, her celebration of objectivity, is equally modern in its orientation. And it depends on an especially objective survey of what makes human life possible.

The modern code of the producer, not the predator

Even as Rand argues that basic value concepts derive from organisms’ struggle for existence, she does not mean that human life is “red in tooth and claw.” She was far from a “social Darwinist.” Our basic means of survival is not predation or exploitation of others of our species, but the discovery of causal connections that enable us to discover the resources, build the tools, trade with others, and otherwise reshape our natural environment to our purposes. In other words, she saw rationality itself as the distinctively human form of life:

Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. . . . He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available — but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no “instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge — and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.40

For human beings, nothing better enables thriving in defiance of entropy than grasping the truth about what enables successful living.

Rand realized that reason’s power to discover the truth included fundamentally the truth about the practical requirements of successful living. So she uniquely added productiveness to her list of the moral virtues.41 Human life requires not only the pursuit and attainment of the values needed for survival, but the creation of these values out of the raw material of nature. This is at the root of her view that human beings survive not by exploiting each other but by trading the values they’ve created with those created by others. Here again we see her sensitivity to the differences between organisms’ distinctive forms of life:

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals. But just as animals would not be able to survive by attempting the method of plants, by rejecting locomotion and waiting for the soil to feed them — so men cannot survive by attempting the method of animals, by rejecting reason and counting on productive men to serve as their prey. Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment, at the price of destruction: the destruction of their victims and their own. As evidence, I offer you any criminal or any dictatorship.42

It’s this rejection of a life of force and the embrace of productiveness that is at the root of her embrace of the “trader principle” and with it, her case for capitalism.43

Here Rand’s theory significantly updates the old Aristotelian view. Aristotle held that practical and theoretical reason were essentially distinct functions, and that the latter was a superior faculty dedicated to the contemplation of timeless truths for its own sake. Aristotle thought that those who were better suited for philosophic contemplation should be served by “natural slaves” who could not engage in such superior forms of reasoning.44 For Rand, whose thinking is informed by the scientific and the industrial revolutions, “theoretical” reason is a powerful practical tool, not a form of play.45

Here too Rand was ahead of her time. For too long philosophers sympathized with Nietzsche’s irrationalist idea that believing useful falsehoods is what helps us survive.46 Religious philosophers like Alvin Plantinga ape Nietzsche’s amateur take on evolutionary theory when they blithely assume that cognitive faculties evolved to survive could not be adapted to know the truth.47

Some philosophically minded scientists like Steven Pinker and Kevin Mitchell have started to catch up with Rand’s seemingly obvious idea that our mind’s grasp of truth serves our survival.48 Brains that developed to grasp truth, especially highly abstract truth about the causal dynamics of the world, are better suited to explain, predict and control it. So they are also more likely to be favored by a process of evolution by natural selection.

In recognizing and celebrating the power of individual human productive ability, Rand makes a case for individual freedom and by implication repudiates Aristotle’s old arguments for slavery.49 Importantly for Rand, human reason is not automatic but must be operated volitionally. It’s precisely because this must be chosen that we need political freedom to make choices if we are to live. Her celebration of rationality also implies that justice is a virtue: the virtue of applying rationality to the judgment of the character of other men, by recognizing and rewarding the value of friends, repelling and punishing the evil of enemies, and the need to respect the rights of all.50

But the fact that reason operates volitionally also means that we must choose which values to pursue and even whether to value our lives or not. This is why we need the guidance of morality. But the fact that we must choose the values we pursue — including the overall ends that dictate our means — is the basis of a skeptical worry we should now address.

Answering relativism by evaluating the ultimate ends

At the heart of our need for a moral code, for Rand, is our need to guide our volitional choices. This is one of the reasons she rejects the “categorical imperative” approach. We have no unconditional duties because all moral norms are understood only as identifying the causal requirements of achieving chosen values, including the value of life itself.51

But philosophers sometimes think moral norms can’t just express knowledge of the means to a chosen end. They argue one could then choose any arbitrary horrific goal and thereby justify it. This would amount to a form of relativism.

For example, they’ll object that we could choose death as our goal and evaluate a suicide terrorist as good because he’s highly effective at killing, even at killing himself. What if Mohammad Sidique Khan (one of the 2005 London Underground bombers) exclaims “we love death as you love life?” That’s his chosen goal — shouldn’t we now just evaluate his means to his chosen end? He was very effective in his ability to destroy and so would count as virtuous in relation to that end.

Indeed the difference between the suicide terrorist and the productive builder is emblematic of the civilizational conflict that exploded on September 11, 2001. If we can’t explain why one is objectively evil and the other is objectively good, the modern religious apologists will object that we need values more robust than those based on the choice to live.

It is possible to assess the causal efficacy of some “means” to any arbitrarily chosen “end,” but moral evaluation is also concerned with evaluating the ends themselves.52 Here Rand’s defense of why it’s only the fact of life that makes the fact of valuing possible shows why we can evaluate one chosen ultimate end as good and everything else as evil.53

One can say that death is one’s goal. But one can’t say it with any cognitive meaning. Rand’s whole reason for thinking that life is what makes values possible is that one must do certain things to live while one doesn’t need to do anything to become inanimate. Death is the default state if one does nothing at all. So there are no “musts” or “should” governing action toward it. This is why it’s important that what makes life an end in itself is not simply being one of many possible end states. There are many such end states one could pretend to treat as a goal. “Life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action.”54

So it’s true that the end of life has to be chosen. All values are in relation to the choice to live, and there is no categorical imperative “Thou shalt live.” But Rand’s point is that, while one can choose not to adopt it, there is only one thing that can be chosen as an end in itself: one’s own life. Any other choices incompatible with that end are evil.

From this perspective, one can not only rule out the “ends” of nihilistic killers, but also many of the other highest “goods” proposed by moral philosophers. To the extent that these codes seem plausible, they draw their plausibility from implicit reliance on the end of life. For example, the utilitarians who identify the greatest happiness of the greatest number cash in on the sense that pleasure is good because in fact it’s the sensation that indicates the successful attainment of a biologically necessary goal. But they go astray when they try to treat an aggregate sum of many individuals as a kind of ultimate good, when it’s not good to any living entity for any purpose, because there’s no super-organism to whom this aggregate sum matters.

Just as one might wonder what fact lets us privilege one’s own life as an ultimate end, one might also wonder what permits regarding the value of scientific rationality as a basic virtue. How do we know that the value of rationality isn’t just a “Western prejudice,” a purely emotional preference derived from Enlightenment culture? When suicide terrorists say they love death more than life because their faith compels them to, how can we dispute their preference for avowed irrationality? This parallel skeptical worry is addressed in the same way.

Importantly, the commitment to know the truth is not a preference but a choice. It’s the choice to ask questions and pursue the truth, versus refusing to ask questions out of fear of the truth. Seen this way, it’s not a choice between two coequal alternatives, like chocolate and vanilla. It’s a fundamental choice to engage one’s reason or to subvert it. It’s only once we engage reason that we can make deliberative choices between alternatives and reveal or begin to habituate our preferences.

Just as life is not a co-equal alternative to death, so choosing to engage one’s mind to grasp the facts is not a co-equal alternative to closing one’s mind through blind faith. The ultimate value of life is not an arbitrary end but the precondition for the possibility of values as such, and rationality is not the product of an arbitrary preference but the precondition of evaluating anything else as arbitrary.55 These points are parallel because for Rand, embracing reason comes to the same thing as embracing life, since in fact rationality just is the distinctively human way of life.

The close linkage of accepting rationality and accepting the ultimate value of one’s life is another sign that there is no special skepticism about objective morality that isn’t just skepticism about the possibility of rational knowledge as such. As I’ve argued throughout, to accept the scientific world view is already to accept a set of values. Formulating an objective morality is simply working out the implications of this set of values for practical action in the world.

By the same token, anyone serious about rejecting religious faith in the name of rationality should also reject every implication of religious morality, including any of the content of its moral code that’s been unwittingly inherited by secular ethics.

Rand’s radical rejection of all religious morality

Because Rand saw rationality as the basic virtue, indeed because she thought human life required embracing reason as an “absolute,” she was radically opposed to religious morality. She rejected all faith-based morality, including any attempt to secularize faith-based morality via appeals to intuition or convention.

Rand saw faith not just as a failure to exercise rationality, but as a negation of the moral virtue of rationality and hence as anathema to morality. In reality, she saw faith as “fear of independence,” a vicious choice to submit one’s mind to the authority of others, as Abraham is supposed to have done before almost killing his only son.56

As a minor character in Atlas Shrugged puts it: Morality is “judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.”57 Religious believers who accept their moral dogmas on faith, fearing disapproval by authorities or God himself, know no such dedication. A moral code based on fear of disvalue is the opposite of one based on love for values.

What’s more, if morality is fundamentally based on the needs of human life, there is a demonstrable incoherence in the religious view that the will of God is the font of moral authority. To illustrate her point that it’s only living things that can pursue goals, Rand offers the following thought experiment:

[T]ry to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals.58

Everything she says about the hypothetical robot applies in spades to a hypothetical God. In the religious fantasy, God too is immortal, immutable, and indestructible. But then he too can have nothing that makes a difference to him for better or worse. Thus, it makes no sense to attribute to him the will or plan to achieve any higher purposes, in accord with which human actions can be judged as good or bad, right or wrong.

As with utilitarianism, religious morality gains its plausibility to the extent that it mimics a life-based morality. If we were to imagine God as a living being, we could imagine that some events could serve or thwart his purposes.59 If we thought of ourselves as like his children we might think of his moral guidance as like the wisdom of a more experienced human being about living life. Religious morality cashes in on these confusions by drawing from the roots of morality in the needs of individual life and then tearing up those roots by transferring its ultimate goal to an imaginary immortal higher being.

In light of this and other parallels between the method of religious and utilitarian morality (note also the connection between faith and the method of intuition), it’s natural that they also share similarities in the content of their moral code. While utilitarians talk about the basic value of happiness, they also argue that morality sometimes demands that an individual sacrifice his happiness to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number.60 So the utilitarian “consequentialists” share with their Kantian “deontologist” rivals the idea that morality concerns impersonal, impartial, or agent-neutral value. The influence of both of these theories is the reason secular ethics today is dominated by one version or other of altruism, the idea that morality is essentially other-regarding or “unselfish.”

Given how Rand understands value per se as a relationship between actions and successful living, she rejects the idea that morality is concerned with impartial or agent-neutral value. She embraces the connection between value and interests, in particular self-interest, and rejects the equation of morality with altruism. And she must, because the very basis of value is the requirements of a living thing’s struggle for its own existence. This is why she is an avowed opponent of all versions of the morality of self-sacrifice, religious or secular.

Rand’s idea that there is a “virtue of selfishness” is obviously controversial and raises many questions (which have been answered at length in various books). Many stem from a confusion between her view and a Nietzschean predation view that we have already addressed.61

Rand portrays human social life as healthy and successful when it’s characterized by win-win mutual exchange to mutual benefit, not by win-loss exploitation. Just as she denies that one should sacrifice others out of irrational desire, she likewise denies that one should sacrifice oneself to others’ desires. This is part of the reason she adds a final virtue to her list, one seen by Christian morality as a mortal sin: pride.62 As she sees productiveness as the virtue concerned with the creation of material values, pride is the virtue concerned with creating psychological values like self-esteem, an effect of which, she claims, is

your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.63

Conclusion

Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells us that she converted to Christianity in part because “atheism failed to answer a simple question: What is the meaning and purpose of life?”

On several levels, she is correct. Atheism fails to answer that question because atheism is simply the lack of belief in God, and a simple absence of belief answers no question. It’s also true that many atheist thinkers have failed to take seriously people’s need for these answers and have simply failed to do serious work formulating a secular, rational ethics. To the extent that many have tried, they’ve often modeled their attempts on ideas they take from religious ethics and so fail to offer a true alternative.

But in light of the alternative I’ve now presented, Ali’s sweeping implication that no atheist thinker has offered serious answers to these big questions cannot be taken seriously.

Ayn Rand was born in a repressive, authoritarian society (Soviet Russia). She had the independence to flee from it and take refuge in the West (she came to America in 1926). She too was an atheist. But when Rand came to the West, she did not take the thinkers in her midst as offering a satisfactory alternative to the system she escaped. She was not content to pick one of the dominant moral or political philosophies of her day off the shelf, even though they were revered in the country that was her salvation. She took the best elements of the philosophy of the West (the Aristotelian worldview), but proceeded to try to answer the major questions of morality on her own.

As a radically independent thinker, Rand was willing to challenge the basic dogmas of religious morality that were embraced by religious and secular thinkers alike. Anyone who admires the independent pursuit of truth, anyone who does not need truth to be dictated to them by external authorities, should be willing to do the same.

This essay by Elan Journo was originally published in New Ideal on May 13, 2019. New Ideal is the online journal of the Ayn Rand Institute. Free subscribers gain access to more content than is published on our Substack. Subscribe here.

Tribalism is resurging. One of its most obvious manifestations can be seen in politics. Today what seems to matter first and above all else is loyalty to one’s political tribe and its leaders, not the facts about an issue, not the truth on any given controversy, not the right policy to adopt — all of these are pushed to the background.

The writer Andrew Sullivan is particularly incisive in capturing today’s pervasive political tribalism: “so many severe critics of George W. Bush’s surveillance policies,” Sullivan observes, “became oddly muted when Obama adopted most of them; Democrats looked the other way as Obama ramped up deportations to levels higher than Trump’s rate so far.” For their part, Sullivan notes, Republicans have exhibited the same mindset. They “were obsessed with the national debt when Obama was in office, despite the deepest recession in decades. But the minute Trump came to power, they couldn’t be more enthusiastic about a tax package that could add trillions of dollars to it.” In her book Political Tribes, the legal scholar Amy Chua summarizes our current state this way: “At different times in the past both the American Left and the American Right have stood for group-transcending values. Neither does today.”

Tribalism is resurgent also on college campuses. Students are taught to view themselves, and others, as primarily members of some group, or tribe, defined by race, by gender, by sexual orientation, by economic status — or, increasingly, by some intersection of these group memberships. These groupings are then plotted out in a matrix of privilege and oppression. The key lesson they’re given is about viewing people not as individuals but as “representatives” of some tribal group. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University, has raised the alarm about the push for such “identity politics” in academia.

Academia and politics are just two of the most salient illustrations. Tribalism has moved from the fringes of society to the mainstream. We live in what’s becoming a tribal age.

What does that bode for our future?

Consider some recent harbingers of tribal violence on American soil. Tribalism was a factor in the 2018 massacre in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life Synagogue. The attacker was animated by an us-versus-them hostility to “outsiders,” not only immigrants, but especially Jews. Tribalism lay behind the rioting of rival tribes in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, which turned deadly. A horde of white-supremacist tribes rallied at the University of Virginia campus, bearing torches and chanting, and the next day, carrying weapons, they sought to prevent the removal of a Confederate statue. Among the counter-protesters were tribalists calling themselves “Antifa.” Tribalism was also behind the massacre in 2015 at the Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The killer hated blacks, viewing them as enemies of his (white) people, and he chose that church knowing he could find a number of blacks in one place, whom he could easily put to death.

What we can expect from tribalism, when it’s unleashed into the cultural mainstream, encouraged, and normalized, is savagery. Take a look at societies where tribalism is deeply enmeshed in the culture. Look at the unending tribal conflicts of the Balkans; the hundreds of thousands of corpses that piled up during the eruption of tribal conflict between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda; the sectarian wars that pervade the Middle East. Our tribal future promises to be dark, brutal, violent.

How can we counteract the trend of intensifying tribalism? We need first to understand its nature and source. Sullivan, Chua, and Haidt — among today’s most clear-eyed critics of current tribal loyalties — have described some important features of our present predicament.

But they leave us with a muddled conception of tribalism. An unintended result is to normalize tribalism, pushing it further into the cultural mainstream. We need an analysis that pinpoints its essential nature. To that end, I will show that we have much to gain from Ayn Rand’s philosophic analysis of tribalism. Rand not only penetrates deeply into the phenomenon of tribalism, she lays out clearly a positive alternative, the ideal of individualism, which is the antidote to tribalism.

Today’s political-cultural landscape

Sullivan, Chua and Haidt point us toward some telling features of today’s political-cultural landscape. Each notes that tribalism means seeing oneself as a member of some group, and viewing your life, other people, the world from a group-first perspective. Chua argues compellingly that race is a salient, if not the major, form of “political tribalism” in America today.

Sullivan captures how loyalty to a political group is appealing to some. “One of the great attractions of tribalism,” he observes, “is that you don’t actually have to think very much. All you need to know on any given subject is which side you’re on. You pick up signals from everyone around you, you slowly winnow your acquaintances to those who will reinforce your worldview, a tribal leader calls the shots, and everything slips into place. After a while, your immersion in tribal loyalty makes the activities of another tribe not just alien but close to incomprehensible.”

Such tribal loyalty, Sullivan writes, is uncritical, unthinking, blind. “When a party leader in a liberal democracy proposes a shift in direction, there is usually an internal debate. It can go on for years. When a tribal leader does so, the tribe immediately jumps on command. And so [after Trump’s election] the Republicans went from free trade to protectionism, and from internationalism to nationalism, almost overnight.”

Sullivan notes the same mindless obedience to the tribal leader in the growing Republican approval of Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian leader who, just a few years earlier, was (correctly) recognized as a significant menace. It’s not that Putin became less authoritarian — indeed, he was more aggressive domestically and internationally — during the intervening years. The difference is that the Republicans’ tribal leader, Trump, now admires Putin.

Sullivan, Chua and Haidt all observe how tribal groups in today’s culture typically exhibit a suspicion, even hostility toward nonmembers, outsiders, them. For example, Haidt laments a growing trend on campus of teaching students to think that “Every situation is to be analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people.” This leads to a “paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.” Chua writes that when tribes feel threatened, they “close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.”

Sullivan, Chua, and Haidt succeed, up to a point, in analyzing some manifestations of tribalist behavior in our culture. But beyond that, what they offer only muddles our conception of tribalism, and they effectively normalize a pernicious phenomenon. They share two profound confusions: (1) they claim that tribalism is in some sense innate, and (2) they claim that there can be good forms of tribalism. Neither of these claims is true.

Is everyone a tribalist?

For Sullivan, Chua and Haidt, tribalism is an innate, built-in factor in human nature. Chua asserts that “Humans are tribal,” suggesting that the impulse — or “instinct” as she also puts it — to belong to a tribe has a neurological basis. Sullivan offers a similar perspective, basing his view on observations from anthropology. He notes: “Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society.” Although few actual tribes exist today, he observes, “that doesn’t mean that humans are genetically much different.”

Haidt, for his part, notes that, “When we look back at the ways our ancestors lived, there’s no getting around it: we are tribal primates. . . . Tribalism is in our hearts and minds.” It’s something we’ll “never stamp out entirely,” though he seems to think its effects can be mitigated. Even so, we must recognize, Haidt claims, that our minds have evolved “for tribal warfare and us/them thinking.” Certain factors, then, can “turn on [students’] ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle.” We are, in short, hardwired to be tribal.

Is every single one of us tribal? Pause to trace out the full meaning of that claim. To be tribal is to put blind loyalty to the tribe above your own first-handed grasp of the truth and of right and wrong. That describes some people, but there’s no evidence for the sweeping claim that within each of us is a raging tribalist itching to burst out and blindly follow the group’s dictates, even to the point of savagery.

This assumption that tribalism is an unavoidable feature of human nature leads to a second claim, which further clouds the issue. The claim is that there are, in fact, good forms of tribalism.

“Good” tribalism?

In her widely praised book Political Tribes, Chua writes that “Some tribes are sources of joy and salvation; some are the hideous product of hate mongering by opportunistic power seekers.” [Emphasis added.]

Sullivan believes that there is such a thing as “healthy tribalism.” This form of tribalism gives people a “sense of belonging, of unconditional pride, in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts. There are hip-hop and country-music tribes; bros; nerds; Wasps; Dead Heads and Packers fans; Facebook groups. (Yes, technology upends some tribes and enables new ones.) And then, most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.” None of this is a problem, he writes; tribalism only becomes a problem when it is something intense, all-consuming, overpowering of our other loyalties.

Haidt argues that there are benign, good forms of “identity politics.” What distinguishes these good forms of tribalism is that they draw a wider circle of inclusion, rather than a narrow one of exclusion. They acknowledge the common humanity of those involved. He gives the example of Martin Luther King Jr.’s push for civil rights. Things go wrong, in Haidt’s view, when people cling to “identity politics” tribes as a way of excluding and vilifying others, instead of coming together around an awareness of our common humanity.

What explains this shared notion that some tribes are healthy, benign, good? For Chua, Sullivan and Haidt, the observable fact that people join into groups is explained by our tribal drive. Belonging to groups is something we “crave,” it’s an expression of our “tribal instinct,” we’re born that way. But we can also see something important about the groups people join: not all of them are bad. Being a Packer’s fan or a member of a Facebook group for Dead Heads is obviously, and crucially, different from, say, belonging to a white supremacist gang or an “Antifa” cell. Since some groups are destructive and others are benign, this apparently implies that our innate tribal drive manifests itself in bad tribes and good tribes.

This bizarre view ignores the reality of what a tribe is. Think of the tribes in Rwanda, in the Balkans, in the Middle East; or the American tribes of white supremacists and of “Antifa”: all of these groups have far more in common with each other — in how they view themselves, how they behave — than they do with groups of Packers fans and Dead Heads. But Chua, Sullivan, and Haidt lose sight of the obvious fact that not all groups are tribes. This fact eludes them because they insist, without good evidence, on a tribal instinct to account for why we human beings form groups, rather than live in isolation.

What is the difference between a tribe and other groups? Ayn Rand offers a clarifying answer, one that flows from her philosophic account of the nature of today’s tribalism.

Tribes vs. non-tribal groups

Rand observed that tribalism has so infused people’s thinking that they struggle to understand “what constitutes a rational human association.” She wrote those words in 1973, but they apply, with added force, today. In sharp contrast with Sullivan, Chua, and Haidt, Rand views tribalism as entirely avoidable. It reflects, not an innate feature of human nature, but a path that people choose. So, on her view, not all groups are tribal, and, there’s no such issue as distinguishing between “good” and pernicious tribes. Instead, we need to understand what sets tribalism apart from other, proper, ways in which individuals come together into groups. Rand writes:

There is a crucial difference between an association and a tribe. Just as a proper society is ruled by laws, not by men, so a proper association is united by ideas, not by men, and its members are loyal to the ideas, not to the group. It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one’s own (and one should be free not to deal with them). All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds (philosophical, political, professional, etc.) — not by the physiological or geographic accident of birth, and not on the ground of tradition.

Two key points here deserve special emphasis.

First, notice Rand’s stress on what counts as rational loyalty to a proper group. For example, you choose to join a tennis club because you value the sport, want to get better at it, and wish to find other players who share your passion. Your loyalty is to the values that define the club, and that you’ve joined for the sake of. Or, you sign on to a political party because you’ve thought about its positions, you believe its principles merit your support, and you want to see those ideas enacted. These two examples, which can stand for an endless variety of others, contrast with the kind of tribal loyalty we saw earlier, particularly in Sullivan’s examples of Democrats and Republicans acting in loyalty not to any principles, but to their tribe’s leader.

Second, notice Rand’s focus on the individual. Proper associations are the product of the choices of individuals to come together over shared ideas and values and principles. For Rand, the individual is the starting point, not only when distinguishing tribes from other groupings, but in all moral-political thinking.

The ideal of individualism was a defining theme of Rand’s philosophic thought and writing, and it was fundamental to her analysis of tribalism. Rand’s conception of individualism, it’s important to note, was distinctive. For many people, an individualist is someone who follows his emotions, whose “individuality” is defined by negation: by rejecting whatever other, conventional people do and believe. For Rand, that’s a caricature. Such a person is as beholden to the group as is the conformist: he watches what the group does and then does the opposite. Central to Rand’s conception of individualism is a deep-rooted commitment to facts and reason. On Rand’s view, an individualist is someone who accepts the responsibility of living by their own independent, first-handed judgment.

This independence of thought is a hallmark of Rand’s fictional heroes. To give just one example, the character Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead, is an innovative architect who puts nothing above his own rational judgment, his own understanding of the truth, and his own artistic standards — amid immense social pressures to conform to unthinking tradition and conventional standards. The individualist, in Rand’s conception, is fundamentally active-minded. Such a person is committed to grasping the facts, reaching conclusions guided by reason, and acting in line with what’s true and morally right. Clearly, this contrasts sharply with what we’ve already identified as distinctive characteristics of the tribalist. What lies beneath those tribal characteristics?

What tribalism is

Let’s start by looking at one variety of tribalism that surged to the forefront decades ago and that Rand analyzed. In her 1977 lecture “Global Balkanization,” later published in essay form, Rand examined the rise of “ethnic” tribalism in Europe and North America. At the time, “ethnic” groups not only in the Balkans, but also in Scotland, Spain, France, Italy, Canada, and elsewhere clamored for political recognition and separatism — in the name of realizing their collective identity. Why were men and women in scientifically and technologically advanced societies going tribal? In answering that question, Rand points us toward the essentially anti-intellectual nature of tribalism. She observed:

Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live? Obviously, they will seek to join a group — any group — which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group — they will be pulled obediently to join a group.

Which group? If people have absorbed the idea that their own mind and judgment are unreliable, and if they have been deprived of self-esteem, they can feel no confidence to make the right choice. What that leaves each of them with is to join some “unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.” In today’s world, that power is labeled your “ethnicity,” which is some agglomeration of your genetic lineage (i.e., racism) and the traditions practiced by your grandparents.

There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred — brute, blind, virulent hatred — than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way — then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion and hatred.

“Ethnic” tribalism was, and remains, a common form of a wider phenomenon. For Rand, the term “tribalism” encompasses a range of manifestations that share a common root. These included racism, “ethnic identity,” xenophobia, caste systems, guild socialism, gang culture. (To that list we might add today’s assorted gender-based tribes.) What’s in common to such tribes is a distinctive, anti-intellectual mindset.¹

Tribalism as a chosen, not innate, mental passivity

For Rand, the tribal mindset is in no way innate. Ultimately its sources lie in an individual’s choice to default on the responsibility of independent thinking. Rand characterized that mindset as a special kind of cognitive passivity, especially in regard to conceptual thinking and fundamental principles. “It is a mentality,” she writes, “that decided, at a certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further.” The tribalist’s passive, anti-effort, anti-intellectual mentality, on Rand’s account, “is not a product of ignorance (nor is it caused by a lack of intelligence), but rather self-made, i.e., self-arrested.”

Take the example of a white supremacist “protestor” in Charlottesville. From belonging to his tribe, the white supremacist gets ready-made views, rationalizations, rituals that save him the bother of having to think. He avoids the effort of activating his mind, looking at the facts and forming his own judgments of individuals. Instead, he absorbs from the collective: my group good, outsiders bad. By such passive conformity and by continually signaling his loyalty in action, the tribal member avoids the responsibility of developing a genuine sense of self-worth. Instead, he attempts to derive a pseudo self-esteem from the fact of his membership in the tribe. The achievements of others deemed “white” somehow imbue him with value. Fundamental to this mindset is a chosen dependence on the tribe and its leaders. Tribalism is an anti-intellectual form of collectivism.

Rand’s conception of tribalism, with its source in a particular kind of passive mindset, clarifies features of tribalism that Sullivan, Chua and Haidt have called to our attention: the hostility to outsiders and the indifference to moral thinking and principles. From Rand’s perspective, these symptoms flow from a self-arrested consciousness.

Rejection of moral thinking

The tribe enables, and encourages, its members to abdicate on the responsibility of engaging in moral thinking and applying principles. The tribal member can shirk that cognitive effort. In return, the tribe demands something he’s only too willing to give: an unquestioning, uncritical, unthinking loyalty to the group. Rand observes:

The basic commandment of all such groups, which takes precedence over any other rules, is: loyalty to the group — not to ideas, but to people; not to the group’s beliefs, which are minimal and chiefly ritualistic, but to the group’s members and leaders. Whether a given member is right or wrong, the others must protect him from outsiders; whether he is innocent or guilty, the others must stand by him against outsiders; whether he is competent or not, the others must employ him or trade with him in preference to outsiders. Thus, a physical qualification — the accident of birth in a given village or tribe — takes precedence over morality and justice.2

Rand added that the accidental, physiological traits are only the “most frequently apparent and superficial qualification” for tribal membership. The factor uniting such tribes is their anti-intellectual mentality. Moreover, the beliefs or principles that supposedly unite some of today’s (ostensibly) political-ideological tribes are better understood (in Rand’s words) as “minimal and chiefly ritualistic.”

This is manifest in the tribalist’s rejection of moral thinking. For tribal Republicans it was a grave moral offense that President Bill Clinton had an affair with an intern and lied about it. But notice the conspicuous absence of outrage today, from supposed moralists, about President Trump’s apparently numerous extramarital affairs, including with a porn actress, and the lies, payoffs and cover-ups to silence his bedmates. If an action is unwise or destructive or immoral, the fact that it is your tribe’s guy doing it cannot make it wise or constructive or virtuous. But for the tribal mentality, that’s what matters. And that’s all that matters, when you’ve abandoned moral ideas and principles. The tribalist is profoundly antimoral.

Hostility to outsiders

To the tribal mentality, outsiders are felt to be a special kind of threat. When he’s around people of his own tribe, he is comfortable: they are like him (usually sharing his skin color or other physiological, accidental features); they share his unquestioned customs and traditions and ways of living. Among them, he can remain in his state of mental lethargy. And this kind of mentality copes within a tribal grouping, so long as no part of it is challenged. But outsiders constitute one kind of challenge to it and provoke a response that ranges, as Rand puts it, from “fear to resentment to stubborn evasion to panic to malice to hatred.”3

To engage with “outsiders” means having to communicate, trade, evaluate, interact with people who differ from those he’s familiar with. “Outsiders” means “the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang — the world of all those people who do not live by his ‘rules.’” To interact with them means having to exert the kind of conceptual mental effort that he has habitually avoided, and he feels ill-equipped to the task. “If his professed beliefs — i.e., the rules and slogans of his group — are challenged, he feels his consciousness dissolving in fog. Hence, his fear of outsiders.” He does “not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror.” The threat he feels is not existential but pertains to his ability to think and deal with the world: to deal with “outsiders” requires “that he rise above his ‘rules’ to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it.”

This gives us insight into some of the tensions we see today on college campuses. Students are taught to view themselves and everyone else as members of tribal groups defined usually by perceptual, physiological markers. And they’re taught that their own tribe possesses their own way to understand the world: for example, that we’re locked into a structure defined by power and domination over one another. This comes to be held as a precarious dogma. When they encounter people who hold differing views or who question their dogmas, those outsiders are felt to be a threat. The contrasting views and questions are felt to be provoking, because in a sense they are: they are prompts to reflect on one’s own beliefs, question whether one has any reasons for one’s positions, and try to form abstract principles that it would be right to act on. And this takes cognitive effort, which the tribal mentality seeks to avoid and dreads. It’s a reminder of the tribalist’s sense of cognitive impotence and inability to deal with the world — outside of the tribe.

We can see aspects of how that mindset experiences non-tribal members, in the words of one student, a self-described former “radical” activist. The student came to regard certain political dogmas as “sacred,” which in this context means not to be questioned, and bristled at people who held different views, no matter what their reasons.

If someone does question those beliefs, they’re not just being stupid or even depraved, they’re actively doing violence. They might as well be kicking a puppy. When people hold sacred beliefs, there is no disagreement without animosity. . . . [P]eople who disagreed with my views weren’t just wrong, they were awful people. I watched what people said closely, scanning for objectionable content. Any infraction reflected badly on your character, and too many might put you on my blacklist.

Taking this sketch as illustrative of a particular kind of tribalist, we can see how some students come to experience “outsiders.” An outsider’s mere voicing of an opposing view is felt to be “doing violence” to them. This us-versus-them attitude runs deep, and if there seems to be no way to bridge the gulf — the outsiders are clearly wrong and unreachable — you can see why it would fuel fear, suspicion, hatred, and worse.

The rise of tribalism

What explains the resurgence of tribalism? It’s illuminating to contrast Rand’s explanation with the views of Sullivan, Chua and Haidt. On their premise that a tribal drive is innate, they suggest a number of social, cultural, economic and political factors that somehow, and often in combination, switch on “our tribal circuits.”

Chua, for example, stresses economic inequality as a major factor: people who feel hard-done-by economically gravitate toward tribalism, resenting the “elites.” The issue of economic inequality is hugely complex and widely misunderstood, and it may well agitate some people toward resentment. For all such cultural, political and economic factors, however, you can find many individuals who are exposed to them, but who do not succumb to tribalism. Conversely, you can find many individuals who are untouched by, say, severe poverty, who are in fact super-wealthy, who are beneficiaries of every conceivable opportunity in life, and yet are highly tribal: for example, Donald Trump.

This kind of explanation fails because it ignores the fact of human agency and volition.

For Rand, by contrast, tribalism is the result of a default on independent thought, and to understand its rise, we need to look at our culture’s dominant ideas and their spread. An individual’s choice to become dependent on a tribal group occurs within, and is influenced by, a particular cultural context. Rand observed several major contributing factors that, across decades and centuries, helped to re-inject tribalism into the culture. The resurgence of tribalism in the 1970s — which we’re still living through today — is a product of long-established intellectual trends permeating the schools, the universities, political life. These trends push people to become tribal.

The thrust of these trends is to negate two values that came to the fore in the Age of Enlightenment: individualism and reason. The subversion of these ideas has been unfolding across decades in schools and in universities. When students learn that reason is unreliable, that we cannot reach truth, that we can only trust the inter-subjective agreement of a group, they emerge as adults lacking confidence in their own judgment and their self-worth. They’ve been groomed for tribalism.

The greater the intellectual-cultural assault on individualism and reason, the more we can expect a rise in tribalism. Seeking guidance and a semblance of self-esteem, people imagine that they can gain both from a tribe. Rand observed that “Tribalism is a product of fear, and fear is the dominant emotion of any person, culture or society that rejects man’s power of survival: reason.”

Consider, for example, the meaning and implications of just one recent book on psychology and moral thinking, intended for general readers, which showcases cutting-edge academic research. The book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, is not only a best seller, but actually widely read. Its key messages: We’re all driven by our passions and emotional reactions; reason steps in to provide after-the-fact rationalizations. Rather than a “scientist searching for truth,” reason is like a cross between “a politician searching for votes” and a “full-time in-house press secretary,” justifying whatever view we already hold, no matter how bad. The book instructs us that the “worship of reason” is one of the “most long-lived delusions” in Western history. To give up on this “rationalist delusion” is to be “wary of any individual’s ability to reason” and to reach truth. And, finally, the academic research purportedly shows that we’re innately tribal; it’s unavoidable.

The book’s author is Jonathan Haidt. But Haidt is not even remotely in the vanguard of intellectuals who are openly dismissive of reason; on the contrary, Haidt thinks of himself as trying to make our cultural and political discussions more reasonable. Yet the effect of his book is not only to subvert reason and individualism, but also to whitewash and push tribalism further into the mainstream. Haidt’s book is one drop within a vast intellectual tide, sweeping throughout the culture. The origins of that tide date back two centuries to the counter-Enlightenment.

That tide exerts a powerful impact on some, it leaves some untouched, and it impacts others partially. Rand drew attention to subtler manifestations of the tribal mindset: specifically, the cases of individuals who are torn inwardly between tribalism and their own judgment. They have adopted tribalism in some areas of life, but not fully, and use their own judgment in other areas. Compared to political activists pushing a tribalist agenda, she regarded these cases as more tragic and harder to deal with. Such inwardly torn individuals, Rand observed, are products of “modern education who do not like the nature of what they feel, but have never learned to think.”

Since early childhood, their emotions have been conditioned by the tribal premise that one must “belong,” one must be “in,” one must swim with the “mainstream,” one must follow the idea of “those who know.” A man’s frustrated mind adds another emotion to the tribal conditioning: a blindly bitter resentment of his own intellectual subservience.

Such cases of torn individuals point to important aspects of Rand’s distinctive explanation of tribalism and its resurgence. First, it’s not innate, but a matter of the individual’s default on independent thinking within a cultural context that too often tells him he is unable to think. Second, precisely because it’s a default — a matter of choice — the individual can choose, though it is hard, to work his way out of a tribal mindset, resist the cultural influences engulfing him, and exert his mental resources to become independent on principle, in every facet of life. Finally, a culture’s dominant ideas, she argued, can (and should) be changed, so that people emerge from their schooling better equipped to think and confident in their own judgment. Within a culture that prizes reason and individualism, its dominant intellectual trends and ideas would encourage and equip people to be independent, rather than blindly obedient to a tribe. It is that kind of future that Rand believed is achievable.

An antidote to tribalism

The spread of tribalism, Rand observed, “is an enormously anti-intellectual evil.” There’s no bargaining with tribalism, no accommodation, no compromise to be found with it. Tribalism can, and must, be marginalized and eliminated.

The antidote for tribalism — the positive to aim at — is the ideal of individualism, which animates Rand’s philosophic thought and novels.

The heroes of her novels and the kind of real-life heroes she admired were individuals who looked at the world with unborrowed vision. They were “first-handers” who put nothing — no authority, no group loyalty; nothing — above their own perception of the facts. They were passionate idealists committed to grasping what’s true, and understanding what’s right and wrong — not what some group told them to believe. The source of their virtue lies in their choice to think for themselves.

For Rand, that path is open to every single one of us, if we choose it. We can seize the reins of our minds and look at the world ourselves, drawing our own conclusions and making our own evaluations. The means of leading an independent life are within our grasp, if we will ourselves to be active-minded in all areas of life, at all times, on every issue, as a matter of committed policy. It is this fundamental commitment to reality that’s a necessary condition for self-esteem — the false promise of which is part of the tribe’s pull. It’s this fundamental commitment to reason and facts that enables you to pursue your own goals and happiness in life; to find the people you rightly choose to associate with and to love.

And, on Rand’s account, it is this fundamental orientation to reality, rather than some collective, that inoculates the individual from the virulent pull of tribalism.

In a video post, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani singled out Citadel CEO Ken Griffin as the target of the new luxury home tax.¹ Griffin courageously responded calling the video stunt “creepy,” “weird,” and “frightening.”2 While pushing back, however, there is a subtle way in which Griffin and others who rightfully stood up for him inadvertently endorsed Griffin’s attackers.

Griffin is right to be alarmed. New York is where Blackstone executive Wesley LePatner was fatally shot, and where many, including the mayor’s own campaign director, celebrated the killing of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare.3 For the mayor to gleefully boast “We’re Taxing the Rich” in front of a private residence of another financier just blocks from Thompson’s murder scene is to put a target on Griffin’s back for another monster to aim at.

As an act of admirable defiance in such a violent climate, Griffin threatened to halt a $6 billion development project and pivot his firm’s expansion to Miami, a city he says “embraces business” rather than “redistributed handouts.” Additionally, Griffin and editors at The Free Press andThe Wall Street Journal who came to his defense, appealed to Griffin’s track record: the companies he built, number of jobs he created, level of taxes he paid, and philanthropy he provided to NYC charities.4^,5

The combination of vindicating Griffin’s wealth and threatening to withdraw it from Mamdani’s hands is a good start. So is equating Mamdani’s “tax the rich” rhetoric to a racial slur, as Steven Roth of Vornado did.6

But the message should have been less compromised and more proudly defiant. Listing Griffin’s “contributions” to the city to justify Griffin’s freedom to build and enjoy his wealth only bolsters Mamdani’s case. The need for such “contributions” is the idea the socialist mayor and his supporters rely on to stigmatize the rich. It is even worse to explicitly endorse him, as Roth did when he said that Mamdani’s leadership, with a few tweaks, “could make this great city even greater.”

Griffin’s accomplishments, such as the wealth he created, careers and trade he facilitated, are crucial to his defense as evidence of his personal productive virtue. They show he truly has earned his wealth. Roth drew attention to this by calling Griffin the “epitome of the American Dream.” That is the correct attitude. But it’s only correct in the true meaning of the American Dream as encoded in the Declaration of Independence. The right to the pursuit of happiness means individuals have a moral right to live, produce, and keep the property they earn for their own sake. They do not have to justify their existence by their service as a piggy bank for the needs of others.

If Griffin and his supporters want to mount a principled defense and rally supporters to their cause, especially while celebrating the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration and its ideals, they need to stop giving material and intellectual bribes to thugs who oppose the values this country was built on.7

Philosopher Ayn Rand argued that evil gains power only because the good appeases it and willingly accepts the role of its servant. When Griffin and his defenders say that what makes him good is his “contributions” to the city, and when Roth endorses the “young, smart and energetic” socialist, all of them validate their mortal enemy as having moral goals worth pursuing. They surrender their right to keep their wealth and accept the socialists’ demand to seize it, merely disagreeing on “fair” proportions. Rand called this terrible error “the sanction of the victim.”8

Rand dramatizes the error in her novel Atlas Shrugged. Only as long as the industrialist Hank Rearden accepts that his duty is to sustain his family can they continue milking him. Only as long as Dagny Taggart keeps working sleepless nights can her brother James, along with his cronies, continue looting and distributing the benefits of the railroad Dagny’s effort alone keeps afloat. But Dagny and Rearden eventually discover that the only way to bring the end to their enemies is to stop abetting them. Griffin needs to learn this lesson from Atlas Shrugged: he too is a victimized producer who needs to withdraw his sanction from vicious looters like Mamdani.

But unfortunately Griffin did not offer Atlas in his defense. Instead, he offered to distribute George Orwell’s Animal Farm to New York ninth graders. Like many others, Griffin confuses the novella with an educational tool against socialism. But Orwell was a self-proclaimed socialist, and Animal Farm is at best a critique of Stalinism, which Orwell saw as a corrupt perversion of the noble crusade for socialism.9^,10 By recommending it, Griffin grants another moral sanction to the crusade for expropriating from those with ability in favor of those with need. That is a crusade that would put an end to the American Dream.

If business leaders like Griffin truly wish to defeat the ugly campaigns to stigmatize the rich, they must first withdraw their sanction of the ideas that empower their destroyers. They must stop justifying their wealth by reference to how much of it the producers give away and start asserting their right to keep what they earn as a matter of individual right.

As a first step, Griffin should rescind his recommendation of Animal Farm. Instead, he could support distributing Rand’s short, fictional work — the 1938 novella Anthem (for which a distribution system to high schools is already in place).11 It is a story that celebrates the moral independence of the individual and the right of each person to live for his own sake.

Only when producers stop begging for permission to exist can they finally strip the power from the “creepy” and “frightening” attacks on their achievements.

Ayn Rand is well known to millions of fans as the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but she also built an enduring legacy as a public intellectual, not only through the written word but also from behind the lectern.

In biographical interviews, now housed in the Ayn Rand Archives, Rand once admitted, “I don’t particularly enjoy speaking, neither the process, nor the question periods.”¹ Yet, she recognized the value of reaching an audience through the spoken word, whether on radio, television, or in a packed auditorium before a live audience.

From her earliest public appearances in the 1930s to her nationally broadcast interviews in the 1960s to her addresses at the Ford Hall Forum and at West Point, Rand used these venues as a platform for advancing her radical new philosophy.

A Novelist and a Public Intellectual

In May 1936, a month after the publication of her first novel, We the Living, Rand was referred to as “probably New York’s busiest lecturer” by the New York World-Telegram, citing her presentations at various clubs.2 In one of these talks, titled “Whitewashed Russia,” Rand promoted her new novel while challenging the pro-Soviet sympathies of Western intellectuals.3 It is among the earliest documented examples of Rand’s public speaking career.

During this period, Rand witnessed the growing popularity of communism in intellectual circles, the very thing she had fled in Soviet Russia. She had seen firsthand the impact of collectivism on the lives of individuals, and watched with horror as those same ideas manifested in America, particularly under the policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

To counter this growing trend, Rand devoted three months, unpaid, to work for the 1940 presidential campaign of Republican candidate Wendell Willkie. She prepared “intellectual ammunition” for Republican writers and speakers, and also answered questions before live audiences. Decades later, Rand reportedly said that she enjoyed those experiences immensely, particularly clarifying complex ideas and communicating with antagonistic audiences.4

Even before Rand achieved significant recognition as a bestselling author and public intellectual, she sought opportunities to confront prevailing cultural ideas directly, a trend that would continue, with increasing scope, for the rest of her life.

Atlas Shrugged as a Turning Point

During the years she was writing Atlas Shrugged (1945 to 1957), Rand’s public speaking activity was minimal, but soon after its publication this would change dramatically.5

When the book was published in 1957, Rand believed she had fulfilled her purpose as a novelist: presenting “her ideal man” and “ideal view of existence,” as well as a new, rational code of morality.6 She expected the novel to spark serious engagement, even if in the form of strong, intelligent opposition.

Instead, she was “enormously shocked by the state of the culture and by the attacks on Atlas, not by the attacks themselves, but by the fact that there was nobody to oppose them.”7 What she encountered instead was “abysmal, stupid hooliganism,” smearing, self-contradictory reviews instead of real, intellectual engagement.8

Because the intellectual establishment refused to grapple with her ideas, and because no other cultural voices were defending them, Rand saw a need to take her case directly to active-minded members of the general public.

She also came to see, through ongoing conversations with her students, particularly Leonard Peikoff, that some elements of her philosophy were more radical than she had initially realized.9 This deepened her commitment to elaborating on her ideas in multiple formats, whether in essays and books or in lectures, interviews, and Q&A sessions.

Rand was acutely aware of her own limitations as a speaker, both because of her preference for the written word and knowing that her Russian accent would be a barrier for effective communication.10 But by 1961, she stated that she was eager to face the challenge of speaking before live audiences:

Right now, I am beginning to feel not only that I want to do it, but actual enthusiasm and impatience. I’m beginning to be very nervous about all my speaking engagements, because it’s time to get to work. And I have not felt that since I finished Atlas. So that is a very good sign. It reminds me of the early days of approaching The Fountainhead or Atlas, that is, the feeling of I am taking on a big assignment.11

From 1959 to 1961, Rand appeared in a series of four television interviews with Mike Wallace. Starting in 1960, she engaged in more than sixty broadcasts on WBAI radio in New York City and gave talks at major universities. One such talk, “The Objectivist Ethics,” was delivered at a 1961 symposium titled “Ethics in Our Time” at the University of Wisconsin, later republished as the first chapter in The Virtue of Selfishness. In this same period, she spoke at Yale, M.I.T., and Lewis & Clark College (where she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree and delivered “The Goal of My Writing”).12

Her influence expanded further into mainstream culture with three appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1967.13 In an era when late-night television reached millions of Americans, Rand used Carson’s platform to present her ideas to a mass audience. Over the course of three interviews, she discussed topics ranging from happiness and creativity to the Vietnam War, the military draft, and the moral foundations of capitalism. The audience response was extraordinary. Thousands of letters poured into NBC and into Rand’s office, marking one of the strongest public reactions to her television appearances.14

The Ford Hall Forum and Rand’s Later Speaking Career

Rand’s ultimate goal was to reach active minds. Of all her speaking platforms, none proved more enduring or important than the Ford Hall Forum in Boston.15 Starting in 1961, Rand gave nineteen lectures at the Forum, each one a major cultural event within the growing Objectivist movement.16 The Forum, founded in 1908, had a long-standing reputation for open inquiry. Rand praised it as a rare institution that treated ideas with the seriousness they deserved.

Rand valued the presence of the Forum’s president, Judge Reuben Lurie, who served as moderator for sixteen of Rand’s nineteen talks at the Forum. His skill in managing audience questions and his respectful demeanor created an atmosphere in which Rand could reach the kind of minds that she had always sought.

Lurie commented on the uniqueness of Rand’s events at the Forum, noting that she attracted crowds of people that had traveled from all over the country.17 Frances Smith (who worked for the Ford Hall Forum for forty years, serving as executive director, president, and chairman of the board) stated that Rand’s talks would fill the thirteen hundred-seat auditorium, and that an overflow crowd of about five hundred people would listen (through a loudspeaker) to Rand’s talks in an adjacent building.18 Beyond the walls of Jordan Hall and later Alumni Hall, Rand’s talks were broadcast on Boston’s WGBH radio, then re-aired in other cities (such as on WBAI and Columbia’s WKCR radio).

Rand’s career as a speaker culminated in several landmark addresses. In 1974, she delivered “Philosophy: Who Needs It” to cadets at West Point, a speech that later became the title essay of her final book of the same name, published posthumously in 1982.19 In that lecture, she made the case not for her particular philosophy but for the importance of philosophy as such, and that the subject is unavoidable for every living person. Leonard Peikoff reported that the crowd of twelve hundred greeted Rand with a standing ovation.20

Her last public lecture, “The Sanction of the Victims,” was delivered in November 1981 at the National Conference on Monetary Reform in New Orleans, in which she urged an audience of investors and businessmen to stop supporting ideas and institutions that furthered their own destruction: “millions of dollars are being donated to universities by big business enterprises every year . . . . some of [the] worst anti-business, anti-capitalism propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.”

She was scheduled to deliver the lecture again at the Ford Hall Forum in the spring of 1982, but she died in March of that year. In her place, Leonard Peikoff, Rand’s legal and intellectual heir, took the stage and read the speech to a packed hall in Boston. Peikoff would continue Rand’s tradition at the Forum over the next two decades, delivering a total of fifteen Ford Hall Forum talks between 1982 and 2003.

A Legacy at the Podium and On Air

Rand’s speaking engagements were ultimately part of a larger intellectual campaign: to reclaim the culture by offering a positive, rational alternative to modern intellectual trends.

These events often left a deep and lasting impression on those who attended, inspiring a generation of students, scholars, and professionals to carry her ideas forward. In the 1997 documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, several individuals who heard Rand speak recalled how her talks were received by those in attendance. Leonard Peikoff recalled that “she faced, at first, very antagonistic audiences. They booed her, they tried to out-yell her, but, of course, she was immutable. She was herself on the lecture platform, and I’ve seen audiences start booing and end up cheering.”21

Those who heard her speak often remarked on the intensity of her presence and her capacity to deal with questions directly and unflinchingly. Harry Binswanger, who first saw Rand speak at M.I.T. in 1962, remarked in Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life that “she had the ability to deal with anything that could come up from an audience. . . . We were just coming out of the ’50s . . . when no one would take a stand on anything. . . . But she was there making the most dramatic and passionate statements, saying everything was simple, absolute, clear cut.”22

The effect of this clarity was felt not just in the lecture hall but in the hours that followed. The late John Ridpath, an acquaintance of Ayn Rand from 1962 to 1982, and a professor of intellectual history and economics at York University, remembered post-lecture gatherings in Boston where Rand would entertain questions until dawn.23

Perhaps the best summation of why Rand engaged with the public in the way that she did came during her second television interview with Mike Wallace in 1960. After she gave a grim prognostication of the state of the world and the lack of men of great ability in today’s culture, Wallace commented that Rand must be “an awful pessimist.” Rand responded: “Oh, not at all. Ideas brought us here and ideas can take us out. I am the opposite of a pessimist. Why do you think I come out and defy 2,000 years or more of civilization? Because I know that if the right is on my side, if reason is on my side, I will win. The right ideas have always won.”24

This essay by Ben Bayer was originally published in New Ideal on July 19, 2023. New Ideal is the online journal of the Ayn Rand Institute. Free subscribers gain access to more content than is published on our Substack. Subscribe here.

How would you react if a friend urged you to live a more morally virtuous life?

Like many, you might fear that if you took this advice, life would become harder and less filled with joy. A morally virtuous life, you might think, is about constraining your ambitions in life, giving up pleasures and spending time working at soup kitchens. You might think that people who are fussy about morality aren’t very practical.

You might say no to such an impractical way of living. But if you’re like many, even if you choose the practical over your idea of the moral, you’ll feel a twinge of guilt, thinking that what you’re foregoing is still somehow admirable.

There is a way out of this dilemma, if you rethink what it means to be moral. And you can observe, in the lives of actual people, that moral virtue is an indispensable tool for living a successful, practical life.

No one could be more practical than an inventor who created revolutionary technology and made a fortune in the process. Consider how a man like Thomas Edison accomplished this through an inveterate concern for right and wrong.

At first his concern might not seem like the stuff of morality. What I have in mind is how Edison used his knowledge of physics and mathematics to determine the exactly right level of vacuum and filament material that would allow an inexpensive incandescent light to burn for over a thousand hours. He famously tested thousands of different materials before he found one with the most luminescent electrical resistance that would still not burn too rapidly (it was bamboo).

Yet we should not brush off concern for the right and wrong outcome of his experiments as mere assessment of the correct means to an end. His ambition was to create something of great value by drawing on the best within him. He created a life-giving and profitable technology by having the courage to envision this never-before dreamed of goal, and the integrity to finish his quest to find out how to make it. His work expressed a dedication to the true and the good, and it earned him a fortune.

Of course, a new technology wouldn’t be practical if no one knew of its benefits. George Westinghouse was another productive achiever who made it his ambition to bring alternating current to market in the United States. Westinghouse did not invent AC but was one of the few to recognize its advantages over direct current in transmitting electricity economically over long distances. He worked to raise the necessary funds and to fend off both a propaganda campaign alleging the danger of AC and the skepticism of his board of directors. Later during the global financial panic of 1907, he ushered the company through bankruptcy so it could survive through the rest of the twentieth century.

Westinghouse’s business decisions, like Edison’s engineering decisions, exhibited integrity and courage. He confidently drew on his valuable knowledge of both engineering and economics in the face of popular opposition to bring the right product to market. His decisions brought energy to millions of people and rightly made him rich.

Because their society also saw morality and practicality as opposed, Edison and Westinghouse themselves might have felt guilty about their success rather than appreciating the moral virtue by which they achieved it. But we can imagine what it might take for an individual in such a position to challenge his society and see things anew.

There is a fictional rendition of such a transformation in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. Hank Rearden, a man much like Edison and Westinghouse, is an engineer who creates a new metal that’s tougher and cheaper than steel. But when a friend tells him that he is “one of the last moral men left in the world,” he’s taken aback. His friend explains:

If you want to see an abstract principle, such as moral action, in material form — there it is. . . . Every girder of it, every pipe, wire and valve was put there by a choice in answer to the question: right or wrong? You had to choose right and you had to choose the best within your knowledge — the best for your purpose, which was to make steel – and then move on and extend the knowledge, and do better, and still better, with your purpose as your standard of value. You had to act on your own judgment, you had to have the capacity to judge, the courage to stand on the verdict of your mind, and the purest, the most ruthless consecration to the rule of doing right, of doing the best, the utmost best possible to you.

Rearden has more to learn about how to evaluate himself morally. He’s allowed both his ungrateful family to mooch and government officials to loot the products of his mind. They’ve succeeded to the extent that Rearden feels that he deserves no moral credit for his productiveness. But Rearden’s friend reminds him, “You have judged every brick within this place by its value to the goal of making steel. Have you been as strict about the goal which your work and your steel are serving? . . . By what standard of value do you judge your days?”

In the novel and in her nonfiction philosophic work, Rand went on to define a new standard of morality that made explicit what it means to act on “the most ruthless consecration to the rule of doing right.” To see how Rearden takes up his friend’s challenge and comes to see the moral virtue behind his own practicality, I urge you to read the story of Atlas Shrugged.

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