philosophy Archives — Laissez FaireLaissez Faire

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In Free Market Revolution, Yaron and I argue that certain moral ideas play a central role in whether a country embraces or opposes capitalism. But we only scratched the surface of a vast topic: how ideas shape a political system, and more broadly, an entire culture. In his new book, The DIM Hypothesis: Why The Lights of the West Are Going Out, Ayn Rand heir Leonard Peikoff offers a new theory describing this process. I won’t attempt to summarize that theory, only encourage you to read the book. For those of you who have read it, you’ll find a lot of valuable information in this student Q&A Leonard recently did at the Ayn Rand Institute.

On this week’s Leonard Peikoff podcast, Yaron tackles a bunch of interesting topics:

• Whether efforts at cultural change should focus on teaching good thinking methods
• The parallels between Greece’s and America’s economic situations
• Secession in a capitalist society
• What ended the Great Depression
• Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi scandal

You can listen to the whole thing here.

If you’re already a fan of Ayn Rand but still on the fence about buying Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government, I urge you to listen to this interview I did with Amy Peikoff.

Her podcast, Don’t Let It Go Unheard, is “devoted to discussion of news and politics from the perspective of Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand.” We covered a lot of ground—everything from the election to my future writing plans. Don’t miss it.

Yaron was recently interviewed by Washington Times reporter Joseph Cotto:

Cotto: One of the concerns that Objectivism cites with modern thinking is subjective reasoning, also known as relativism. Why is this such a problem?

Dr. Brook: “It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” This kind of sentiment is common in our culture, and Ayn Rand rejected it. She held there is just one reality, and it is up to us to discover it by means of reason—by looking out at the world and making logical sense of it. And on her view, you can attain objectivity in your knowledge.

Ayn Rand has a distinctive view on the role of philosophic ideas in human life. In the title essay of her book Philosophy: Who Needs It, she discusses how fundamental ideas — ideas about the world, about how we know, about how we should live — are crucially important. The innocuous sounding catch-phrase, “it may be true for you, but not for me” — like so many slogans — actually conveys a particular philosophic view, even if most of the people who use it are unaware of that fact. It’s a form of subjectivism — a denial that there is no “the truth” on a given question. But this view is false. Try walking across a busy freeway while maintaining “it’s true for you, but it’s not true for me” that a truck is about to flatten you at 60 miles per hour.

There are many destructive consequences — beyond the obvious one in that example — that come from believing in that kind of subjectivism. To take another example: we’ve seen essentially this kind of view invoked to justify the erosion of individual rights, when people claim that what you regard as a violation of your property is no such thing, in the eyes of others. One reason that is so harmful is that it undercuts people’s certainty and can leave them disarmed, intellectually and politically.

Much more here.