[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 260th episode of objectively speaking. I'm Jag. I'm CEO of the Atlas Society.
I'm very excited to have Robert Bindonado join us to talk about his new book, A Rebel in the War Between Individualism and Environmentalism.
Also, I know that probably the majority of you hearing my voice are listening to it on podcast, so it's not an issue for you, but we did have, as usual, we're, you know, going to run into some technological difficulties. So unfortunately we're not going to be able to see Robert's video, which is very unfortunate because he's a very, very dapper man. So you're going to have to put up with my mug for the rest of the hours. And I'm really looking forward to this and make sure to kind of go in and queue up and ask your questions as you always do. Robert, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: I really appreciate the invitation. This is a wonderful opportunity to meet with a lot of old friends and make some new ones, I hope.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Indeed, indeed.
Robert has a long and storied history in the Objectivist movement. We're going to get to a little of that, but I'd like to go back even a little earlier to talk about your origin story story. Where did you grow up?
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Well, there's a question as to whether or not I ever did grow up, but I, I was actually born and raised in western Pennsylvania, blue collar family, an old dying middle town.
The county I was raised in was heavily rural.
Farming was a big thing there. The biggest club in my high school was the Future Farmers of America. So that should tell you something.
I was a kind of a lonely kid in terms of my interest. I was a reader. I loved reading, enjoyed, enjoyed that at a very early age.
And I also loved the cartoon. Not cartoon, but the Saturday morning hero shows on tv. The Lone Rangers, Zorro, and of course I was an addict of Batman comics. And those really set me up for everything that happened to me later on. We'll get into that a bit later.
I had a history teacher by the name of Bob Gardner who was a maverick in that he was a political conservative at a time when, well, we were in the Russian. And this was a lot of old New Deal Democrats here. My parents were Democrats.
They were raised during the Depression. And so Bob Gardner was a sort of traditional conservative.
And I was fascinated by some of the perspectives that he would bring into, into the classroom.
So I began to read some of the stuff that he suggested.
He took A shine to me and encouraged me and encouraged me. When I started writing and, and speaking and doing things like that.
I first became a very early age, early teens. I was a rabid anti communist. Then I sort of evolved into a broader conservative, traditional conservative. You have to understand that I was raised in an Italian American home, Catholic, raised, you know, green, grew up in the St. Mary's Catholic Church, had first Holy Communion in my little white suit.
So it was that kind of an environment.
After I read a lot of conservative stuff, there was an interesting thing that happened that was also pivotal, and that was that the little old lady librarian in my high school was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and she also happened to be a member of the Conservative Book Club.
So when she got done reading all of the books that she would buy from the Conservative Book Club, she would stock them on our school shelves.
And I'm sure nobody else but me ever took a peek at them, but I was introduced to people like Henry Hazlett, William F. Buckley, and oh my gosh, they had, I think they had Human Action on the, on the shelves, which of course, no, nobody in junior high is going to look at, but I started reading all that stuff.
Long story short, I became a conservative activist and I started, I was, got very opinionated. I was arguing in class with the teachers and so on, and I started writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper and the editor there, a guy named Len Kolasinski, editor of the Newcastle News, the city where I grew up, he took a shine to me in my letters to the editor and spent time with me when I would bring in whatever I typed up. And by and by degrees I became interested in the whole spectrum of right wing philosophy, you might say. It started out very politically and eventually I went to Grove City College to study economics because by then I had a, a subscription to Freeman magazine, which was the granddaddy of all the libertarian publications, and studied economics there under a regular contributor to the Freeman Economist by the name of Dr. Hans Senholtz, who was a student of Ludwig von Mises at New York. Uh, so that's pretty much the. My youth. It's all kinds of interesting things that happen in there, but that's, that's pretty much it.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Very curious to hear and again see all, all of our friends in the comments. Appreciate you, Alan. Yes, he was going to wear his hat. And Ann, I appreciate the grace, so. And Candace, yes, everyone definitely always needs a good mentor.
And I'm sure that Robert has mentored many young people throughout the years, but perhaps maybe talk about your discovering your greatest, I guess, spiritual and intellectual mentor of all. How did you discover Ayn Rand?
[00:06:36] Speaker B: That was an interesting process.
Jag. It was.
I read, of course, reading all the things that were on the school shelf. I first tackled the Fountainhead, and I think it might have been, I want to say, my sophomore or junior year, maybe my junior year in high school.
And having been raised a devout Catholic, I had enough savvy to see the implications of some of the things that Rand was saying for my Catholic faith at the time.
And the book really troubled me. I like the individualism, but I was troubled by the book and I never finished it. I read about, oh, three quarters of it, maybe a little more. And I remember turning around to the smartest girl in school named Jackie, who sat behind me. I said, did you ever read this book, the Fountainhead? She said, yeah, I love it. I said, well, I don't, because, you know, I don't. I. I get the idea that she's, you know, an atheist and so on, and I'm just not comfortable with that.
Well, interesting things happened. I was going. I was involved with conservative grassroots activist group named Young Americans for Freedom. And Rand was becoming a thing among those people at that point.
And I set up a new Castle chapter of Young Americans for Freedom. And we had smart kids coming in with all kinds of perspectives. Some of them were interested in Rand.
So I think the summer before I went to college in 1967, I read we the Living, and it blew me away. I mean, I was really blown away by that book being an anti communist.
And I went to a YAF national convention, and there were a lot of kids wandering around with who is John Galton Buttons? And I had no idea who John Galt was. And I remember asking somebody there, who's this John Galt character? And she happened to be a pretty girl. And she said, with stars in her eyes, he's the perfect man.
Well, that aroused my curiosity because I wondered, you know, what kind of a character, a fictional character, would put stars in her eyes like that. So when I entered Grove City College in, in 67, the fall of 67, and went through the college bookstore to get all my supplies. I saw a copy of Atlas Shrugged there. I read the back cover, was very intrigued.
So I, within the first couple of weeks that I was at college, I read Atlas Shrugged.
I was completely blown away. I mean, I. I have to say that Ayn Rand wrecked my college career because after I read Atlas Shrug, which took some time, I Did the only logical thing that a. That a young guy interested in ideas could possibly do is particularly one who, Whose ethics and religion had been challenged. I went back through and read it again, this time with copious magic markers and highlighters and trying to argue with Rand's philosophy. So it was a very active kind of reading.
And yes, she.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: Yes. And then, of course, she won.
I want to keep moving along because otherwise we'll never get to your fantastic new book. But before we even do that, of course, you had a storied career as a public intellectual and a nonfiction writer, and it longer than we could possibly cover in this interview. But in 2009, you turned to fiction with your bestselling series, Vigilante Series, Dylan Hunter. What prompted that shift?
[00:10:46] Speaker B: Well, I think it goes back to when I was a kid watching Zorro and the Lone Ranger and reading Batman comics.
They were all vigilante characters, and the idea of vigilante justice was captivating to me.
The people who, these lone wolf individualists who would stand up for justice and the right in the face of the law, in the face of public opposition. Oftentimes that. That fascinated me.
And I always wanted to write fiction, but I never had the nerve. I had, like you said, a long career writing nonfiction. And what happened in 2009, very difficult times financially for us personally and of course, for the country.
I had to throw a Hail Mary pass and do something. And I had this idea for this character and a story that had been percolating around since about 2003.
And I, I told my wife, you know, we have to do something. You've. You've lost some of your jobs. I've. I'm not working right now.
What I want to do, and, and we need money, so I have to throw a Hail Mary pass. And so I'd like to give this a shot. Now, if I go to my grave without trying to write a novel, I will hate myself.
So. So I did.
And to make a long story very short, it worked out very well for me.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: Tell us a little about your hero, Dylan, Dylan Hunter, and how he's evolved over time.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: Dylan is in the great vigilante tradition that goes back to Robin Hood, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, Batman, as I said.
And that is of the aristocrat with this secret identity who's fighting for justice in an unjust, unjust world.
I've loved the vigilante fiction since I was a kid. I've been passionate about justice since I was a kid. And so all of my nonfiction really Had a justice theme to it. Now, Dylan is an updated version of a lot of those characters.
He is a person with a mysterious past. When you meet him in the initial book, which is titled Hunter, you don't know exactly who he is, but it becomes clear that the name that he's operating under, Dylan Hunter, is not his original name.
And this is a crime story, half crime, half politics.
And it's a story which gradually reveals a lot about his background, which I'm not going to ruin for anybody here.
But the first novel is Dylan having to fight for justice against a legal system that is essentially freeing lots of deadly criminals, murderers. We're talking about freeing them prematurely or not doing anything to them at all. And this happens to touch people who are very dear to him.
So he has the motive, the means, and the opportunity to do something about it. And he does.
And he doesn't do it by. He does it reluctantly. He does it because he doesn't see any other option for himself and for the people that he's trying to fight for.
And gradually that evolves in the course of the. Of the novels, where in the.
He was reconciling himself in the first novel to his new identity and name.
In the second novel, which has environmentalism, interestingly enough, as. As its theme, Dylan has to reconcile himself with continuing to do vigilante actions, which he really doesn't want to do, and his lover, Annie woods, doesn't really want him to do. And that gets very complicated.
In the third book, Winner Takes all, he fully embraces the role of a secret vigilante. And so there's that evolution. There's also an evolution in his romance with Annie evolves from wary suspicion in the first book to conflicts over his violent acts, and then to full reconciliation of the two in the third book. And of course, that's going to get continuing complications as I continue to write these stories.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: What's. What's harder, writing fiction or writing non fiction? What's more fun for you as well?
[00:15:47] Speaker B: I'd say what's more for me is writing fiction. But writing non fiction is a lot. It's a lot easier. But writing fiction is very, very hard.
It is for me. There are people who just knock this out, but I. I'm a thematic writer. I start with a. With an idea.
I generate conflicting characters from that idea, that premise, and then I develop the story off of the conflicting characters. I develop the plot line out of that. It's. It's a very meticulous process that I am very OCD about it.
And so it becomes. It was a real challenge, all of the books, but the third book is so complex in its plot structure and the number of characters and the number of things I was juggling. It was the hardest thing I'd ever written. I also think it's one of the best things I've ever written, and the Amazon reviewers seem to seem to agree with me on that.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: Got a question here from Jackson Sinclair, who's a regular viewer and friend of Objectively speaking, he asks, what do you think of. What do you think about the perspective of vigilantism today, given the more polarized political climate?
[00:17:08] Speaker B: I have an essay up on my fictional website, which is biddonotto.com easy to find.
An essay that I wrote about whether I really endorse vigilantism in real life.
There may come a time when it's necessary, but I think it's a bad idea because once you. You break down the barriers of the law, not every vigilante is going to have the moral code that Dylan Hunter does, which is very strict. He has his own set of principles and rules that he follows to make sure that he stays within bounds. I think that once vigilantism would become popular in a society, a whole lot of people would take it up and start practicing it who are not Dylan Hunter and don't have his moral code and his perspective on these things. He was, by the way, his background was as a Princeton graduate in political philosophy. So he has read all the great books and he's very savvy on moral issues and philosophical issues.
I had to get that in a character that I would be writing about, of course.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Of course. Well, you know, we get these dozens of questions that come in on Instagram every week. And I do a quick one minute answer to several questions. And I got a sort of a strange one last week, and I'll tell you how I responded to it, and I'd like to hear how you did. So the questioner asked, would Batman's crime fighting do more good if he charged for his services via the the law of supply? The law of supply being that if you increase the price of something, that more supply will come to the market. And I thought that was interesting, but a little problematic because of course, Batman isn't motivated by profit. He derives his wealth from Wayne Industries.
And while I could see that perhaps if he charged, maybe that would raise revenue and he could deploy, say, a fleet of bat drones to cover Gotham or train an army of fellow fellow crime fighters.
But given that he's motivated by justice, I would think that he would be unlikely to ignore potential victims just because they couldn't pay. And also to your point earlier, that if we just started to have an increase in vigilantes, we would be at the point where we had given up on having a functional justice system and police force, and that really would this down the road to energy.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: And you raised the right point, and that is that once this, once vigilantism becomes an economic competition, you can sort of predict where that's going to go.
We get Hatfields and McCoys type situations developing all over the place.
And it was precisely to avoid that sort of thing that we have a legal system in the first place. You have to have courts of final appeal. And that court of final appeal shouldn't be some individual who has his own viewpoint. It makes a wonderful fantasy. I enjoy writing about it because it also allows me the opportunity to address the various injustices in society. And as a cautionary tale, it also allows me to point out what happens if society doesn't address issues of injustice, if the legal system becomes completely corrupted and what will happen, what kind of a breakdown will occur. I think that vigilantism is going to become more and more a thing if we do not get a justice system that actually enacts and enforces justice.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: All right, we've got some more great questions from our regulars. My modern Gault asks, did Rand's perspective on romanticism influence your writing or was it more of those classical stories from your youth combination?
[00:21:47] Speaker B: I think that my Dylan Annie romance is probably the most obviously affected by Rand. It's an extremely Randian romance as it develops through that. You start out in, in the first book, you have a Thomas Crown Affair type situation where there you have a cat and a mouse.
And in the Thomas Crown Affair movie, which. The 1999 one was wonderful, the one, the, the later version that had Renee Russo and Pierce Brosnan.
Yeah, they, they were wonderful. And, and that movie was, was. Is one of my favorites as a romance. That is a very Randian romance in many ways. And in that, in that movie, it was a cat and mouse story. And the cat knew she was the cat, the mouse knew she was the cat, the mouse knew he was the mouse, and the cat knew he was the mouse. And at the very beginning, in my Hunter novel, the romance begins with the cat and mouse not knowing that they are the cat and the mouse, which leads from, you know, from the very beginning of the, of the novel very early on, there's this point of suspense that these Two people who fall madly in love with each other. What's going to happen when they find out that they are in a cat and mouse situation?
What is going to happen to their relationship? How are they going to deal with that? How are they going to handle that? And so it's very Randian because Rand love these kinds of conflicts, romantic conflicts between good people, a really good man and a really good woman. And she liked good people in conflict with good people rather than just bad people all the time. And, and that's what I try to do in these novels. So the romance I would say is, is the, is the most obvious aspect. I would also say certainly Rand's principle, moral principle of justice is on full display in all of the books. It's central to the character, central to who he is and central to all the plot lines. And in the second book of course, it takes on environmentalism. And if you don't think that an ism can be turned into a dramatic, you know, pulse pine pulse pounding, nail biting kind of throw thriller. Well, I think I managed to do it there and I'm, I'm very pleased with that. That's sort of the fictional version of my new book, A Rebel in Eden, which of course is non fiction.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: Kingfisher21 asks, what do you find lacking from mainstream storytelling today in comparison to the past?
[00:24:48] Speaker B: Oh gosh. When I think of the storytelling of the past, I'd say the, the scale of the characters, the stature of the characters would be one thing.
They're very Lupian today.
They're, they're on very small scale.
They're not, they're not these grand scale types of characters. You don't get grand scale villains, grand scale heroes and heroines.
It's, they're really shrunken and shriveled and, and I don't like that.
The only place that you see larger than life characters is in the, the real B level, C level and D level action type movies and also novels and so forth. Now there are some exceptions. There are some of my favorite writers are, who are, I would say thriller writers who really capture the scale and stature of, of, of men and women of integrity and virtue.
Michael Connolly with his Bosch character, Harry Bosch, I think the Jack Reacher character of Lee Child.
You had Jack Carr on, as a, as a guest on your, on your show. And I really enjoy his work too. He's another one who writes this sort of thing. And there are others. Stephen Hunter is absolutely one of my favorites. He's, he's a almost flawless writer. When he's at the top of his game and he's almost always at the top of his game. But those folks have still kept stature and their heroes. But as far as literature, literary works are concerned, and not popular literature, there's very, very little out there. And that, that might be the case going back a long ways.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: So given your love of fiction and fiction writing and your relationship with your ever evolving hero, what prompted the pause and the pivot to writing your new book?
[00:27:02] Speaker B: I think one of the motivators was my 76th birthday.
When you hit an age like that, it suddenly becomes sobering. You want to think of, okay, you're going to not be here in at a time period that's at least foreseeable. Now. We never like to think about those things, but what do we want to leave behind? Or do we want to leave anything behind? I'm not.
I'm not vain enough to assume that what I would leave behind would be of vast interest to many people. But when you look back at your work, you like to see some sort of a legacy, number one.
So I had the desire to start collecting what I.
I view is the best of my past writing the stuff that I think has stood the test of time, and put it out in a series of anthologies so that it won't be lost. That's. That's one reason.
The second is that since I'm a writer, I also need to generate income through my profession.
We've had some domestic needs here that had to be addressed, and so publishing more books more rapidly became a consideration. And this was one way to get books out a lot more rapidly. My fiction takes a long time for me to write because it's very complex. As I said, I'm OCD about it. And finally, I. I chose the environmentalism as a theme of the first book in the. In this anthology because frankly, I think I have some fresh things to say about the topic in A Rebel in Eden, and I'm hopeful that readers will agree. This is a perspective that it has a number of elements that I think are fresh and different and thought provoking. And I wanted to get that out there too. So. So all of those reasons were considerations. And it's up to the readers as to whether or not my second consideration, that is the idea of generating some income is going to come to fruition. I hope so.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: So people sometimes casually refer to environmentalism and the movement as a new religion, but you see it as more of a continuation of an older worldview. Could you elaborate on that?
[00:29:36] Speaker B: Sure.
First, I Should say that the first chapter of the book is a sweeping overview of the environmental movement that touches on some of those issues.
But they're explored in far more depth in chapter three, which is laden with lots of footnotes. I did a lot of research into the scholarly literature on the mythological roots of environmentalism. That's something that hasn't been written about very much. And yet when I started doing research about where did environmentalism come from, it became very clear to me that it was largely a product of a long standing mythology in Western civilization that goes back probably to the ancient Greek writer Hesiod, to the Roman writer Ovid, certainly to the book of Genesis and the Garden of Eden.
This myth that I'm talking about is very. It takes various forms with the Greeks and Romans and Hindus and others. It was called the. The myth of the ages in which there was a. A golden age in the distant past.
That golden age in which man lived in harmony with nature.
Nature provided everything he could possibly want. He didn't have to work, he didn't have to face down any risks.
He had an automatic kind of existence in which nature was bountiful and took care of him.
And self responsibility without having to exert effort and face risks. And self responsibility was not necessary.
And all of those myths, the Golden Age myths and the Eden myth, all wind up to end wind up in a fall from that pure pristine nature and man living harm in harmony and in pristine nature.
In the Golden Age myths, they go through a Silver Age and a Bronze Age and these various stages, the myths vary as to what they call them, but they are a sign or these various ages. Man is getting more and more involved in nature as a developer, as an active presence, and he's screwing it all up.
[00:32:22] Speaker A: And.
[00:32:25] Speaker B: These various subsequent ages are ages of decline into chaos and violence and so forth.
Everything was just great in nature until man came along, started using his intellect, using his ambition, and trying to develop the world around him and utilize the world around him for his own purposes. When he did that, he screwed everything up. He became an enemy of nature. And you had this fall from grace, this decline. And of course the Eden myth, it's the same thing. You, God plants man in this Garden of Eden, this perfect place where all of man's needs are met.
He has nothing to worry about. He can live in ignorance and bliss until he starts to think and gets curious.
Eve looks at it, at the fruit and takes the fruit of the forbidden tree of knowledge, of good and evil, and that was verboten.
People were not Supposed to be that ambitious. As a result, they're cast out of the garden. There's the fall from grace. He's. They're cast out of the garden and they have to spend the rest of their days.
Well, Genesis and the Bible make it very clear what they're, what they're confronting this by the sweat of thy brow, they shall, you know, make and eat your bread and all of these things. It they are essentially thrown into their, onto their own devices of self responsibility.
Life is going to become risky and effort laden. And I look at this and I, I ask myself another question. This is the mythology of the past, but why was it so popular? Why was it so enduring?
And I think one innovation in my book is that I tie the mythology to human psychology and human development.
When we're little, when we are first born, we are in an Eden type state.
We are in a golden age.
Our needs are met.
We don't face risks, our parents face them for us. We don't have to exert effort in order to feed ourselves, sustain ourselves.
Our parents are going to take care of that too. We don't have to engage in any self responsibility at all.
We look back at our childhoods and it's a time of play.
It's a time of happiness and play and no responsibilities whatsoever. And if you think about it, this idea of this golden age of the past I think lives in the subconscious of many, many people who are nostalgic for that state of childhood and childhood play and infancy when they didn't have to really assume the responsibilities of adulthood.
[00:35:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yes. It would be a very kind of alluring psychological inclination or temptation, which is ironic given that you've called it the Eden premise. We have some other great questions that are piling in. So Iliacin asks, with companies backing away from DEI and ESG initiatives, do you think the tide is turning or these ideas are just retreating to come back in a new form? I know this is an environmentalism issue that you have been focusing on for a long time. You've written about extensively for the Atlas Society. So yes. Do you optimistic or are these kind of with us always and being repackaged in one formulation or.
Or the other?
[00:36:27] Speaker B: I just read yesterday that a lot of companies, major corporations, are repackaging and relabeling a lot of their DEI stuff in order to avoid detection.
They're still involved with it. They've just changed the names of their departments, changed the names of their programs, shuffled some personnel around and they're still doing a lot of this Stuff that's one aspect of it. But you ask yourself why?
And I think it continues to come back to this underlying mythology. It, it strikes me how many fanatics of all kinds of ideologies, you can prove your case to them, you can give them facts till the cow came home, you can give them logical arguments to death.
And they still cling to their mythology, they, they cling to these stories.
And I think the reason is that these stories give them identity, purpose, meaning, they, they explain the world to them. And that's not something you just discard easily.
I think that people have, retain these commitments and that the only way we are ever going where, the only way we're going to get past this, I think we need to create a new counter mythology, a new counter narrative, if you will, a counter core narrative, something that's inspiring, attractive to people, something that they can, that raises, raises their expectations of themselves, that, that glorifies self responsibility rather than making it something to be resented and feared.
I think that, you know, Rand's fiction obviously did that, but hey, it's only a few novels. We need a whole cultural movement of this sort of thing.
I think that we have the arguments, I mean we've been putting these arguments out for a long time, but I don't see the arguments themselves as making a whole lot of a dent. I think that the arguments need to be packaged into narratives, which is how people accepted the ideas they, they have now. The ideas were packaged in the form of narratives. Every religion has its own mythology.
Most of the ideologies you can think of have their ideology or have their mythology, have their stories, their heroes, their villains, their plot structures.
And that's how they acquire a following.
I asked the people listening in, if they are, if they're fans of Ayn Rand's work, how many of them became fans of Ayn Rand's work because they were read her non fiction, say the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology or the Virtue of Selfishness versus how many of them were drawn to Ayn Rand because of the vision, the romantic vision in her fiction, the narratives that she put forth, the individualism that she dramatized. I think drama beats abstract argument any day of the week. And I think Rand said that herself. If you look at one of these sorely neglected essays of hers in the Romantic Manifesto, the first essay in there first chapter is called the Psycho Epistemology of Art, in which she makes the argument that narratives have a power to motivate people and to make ideas real to them, that abstract arguments will never do and that. That you can write all these philosophical tomes and they have limited value other than to ratify for rational people, ratify for people who are already rational, what they already believe and that they learned when they were absorbing stories as children.
[00:40:49] Speaker A: Yes. So you, you, of course, Ayn Rand called art the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal. And I think it is through art that, that most of us were first enchanted by her ideas. And that's why here at the Atlas Society, with our graphic novels and our animated videos, our music videos, we lean so heavily on.
[00:41:11] Speaker B: Absolutely. You're doing, you're doing a great job with that, by the way. Jag. I think that that's wonderful that, and that you're, you're giving that information and material to young people.
They're the audience. I mean, the world's born anew with every new generation.
And these new generations are the ones we have to reach.
[00:41:32] Speaker A: Yes, of course. And unfortunately, 50 years ago, 70% of young people were reading fiction every day for fun. And today that's down to 10%. So that's why we look and see, well, what are they doing? What are they consuming? And go into any high school library, you'll see all of the shelves lined with graphic novels. And so that's why we pivoted to that. And of course, that's why we have such a dominant digital presence. So in your book, you mentioned Sierra Club founder John Muir as a pivotal figure, maybe not necessarily for the good, in the evolution of the American environmental movement. How did his views to dominate the conservation movement?
[00:42:23] Speaker B: Every movement, ideological movement, philosophical movement, religious movement, has what I. Two factions. I would, I would divide them into what I call the literalists and what I call the contextualists. Now, let me explain what I mean. The, the literalists are what most people would refer to and think of as the fundamentalists. Those are the people who take the doctrine straight up.
They're the ones who are.
They take it very literally. They take whatever their sacred texts are very literally.
They believe every single word of it, and they will not compromise anything.
Then there are the contextualists. Those are the people who try to accommodate the religion, the philosophy, the ideology, the viewpoint, accommodate it to the practical aspects of the world around them. And these two, these two camps also show up in the environmentalist movement, and they go way back. And John Muir was a pivotal figure. He was a founder of the Sierra Club, and he was a. An influence and a friend of Teddy Roosevelt, President Roosevelt, who was, as you know, a progressive and the conservationist and responsible for the national park system that we have today.
Muir was a friend of his, but Muir was not a conservationist. He was a preservationist. And there's a difference. He had. He viewed environmentalism, which. They didn't have that word then, but he viewed this outlook as a fundamentalist, as a literalist. He thought he was very mystical and misanthropic.
He hated and fought human development of natural resources.
He wanted to preserve natural resources for their own sake.
By contrast, another figure who is close to Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, who was the Roosevelt's first head of the US Forest Service, he wanted to develop resources for human use. But he was a socialist, or his policies were socialistic. He believed in nationalization of natural resources and that they would be conserved collectively for human use under strict government regulation.
And so you had these two pivotal pioneer figures in the environmental movement. And very gradually, it was Muir's preservationism which came to dominate the emerging environmental movement. And because he was the closest to the Eden premise, the Eden mythology, the. That everything was just great on this planet until man showed up and started using it. And to him, you know, resource development is resource destruction.
And that is the premise of the preservationists. And that is the premise that really came to dominate the emerging environmental movement when it was ignited in 1962 by Rachel Carton Carson's book Silent Spring.
[00:46:09] Speaker A: Right. With, of course, its vilification of many modern innovations like pestilence, pesticides, and chemical ingredients and foods.
Why do you think that it had such a cultural impact?
[00:46:23] Speaker B: You talking about Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring?
It's perfect. I mean, it's perfect with my own thesis here.
Silent Spring opens with a chapter that is a fable.
And the fable that she tells, it's a short fable that she tells in chapter one of Silent Spring. It is a.
You might say a retelling of the Eden story.
We had a wonderful.
We were living in a wonderful community.
The birds were chirping and everyone was. Was living in nature, in harmony with nature. And then all of a sudden, we started to use chemicals and pesticides and stuff.
And the end of the chapter is, the spring is now silent. The birds are no more. They've all died due to the chemicals that we were spreading and using the pesticides and so forth. And she then goes into nonfiction for the rest of the book after her fable.
That fable is cited by countless environmentalists as the launchpad of the modern environmentalist movement. The book had an enormous impact. It was enormously popular. And the reason was she was tapping into the Eden mythology, this whole thing of the golden age, the golden era of the past, where before man started screwing around with nature.
And she was drawing on that appeal.
I think that's why the book took off. And that was the launch pad for the environmentalist movement, as acknowledged by everybody up to Al Gore. In his own book, when he wrote Earth and the Balance, he talked about how his mother was a huge fan of Rachel Carson in her book and how it. When he read it, how. How big of an impact it had on him.
So it was the Eden myth that did it. It goes back to that. The idea that nature, undisturbed, has intrinsic value, meaning value in and of itself, apart from any valuer, apart from any human valuer.
The concept of intrinsic value makes no sense whatsoever.
It's the idea of. Of a value that without a valuer, doesn't mean anything to, you know, it's unintelligible.
But that's the core bottom premise of, of the Eden mythology.
[00:48:57] Speaker A: Yes.
You know, think of RFK and the Make America Healthy Again movement.
Of course, he was a environmental lawyer. Do you expect of the whole Maha agenda that are an outgrowth of the kinds of things that Carson was pushing, or do you think there's a case to be made that we need to at least understand what kind of health impact the chemicals and artificial ingredients in our food are having?
[00:49:31] Speaker B: My answer would be both. I think that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is, and he's an environmentalist, and he's a chemophobe.
I deal with that issue of the pesticides and chemophobia at length in a chapter called the The Great Pesticide Panic in a Rubble in Eden, where I go over the science and how science has been manipulated and abused to.
To damn a lot of these agricultural chemicals which have saved the lives of millions and millions and millions of people. They were responsible for the green revolution in India in. In earlier eras and, you know, decades past, that has essentially cured the starvation that was rampant. But so on the one side of it, yes, I would say that this is part and parcel of the. Of the Rachel Carson legacy of chemophobia that goes back to the Eden premise. On the other hand, you raise, I think, a valid point, and that is, of course, we always want to look at the stuff that we're ingesting. We want to look at it, we want to look at it scientifically. We want to determine whether it's healthy.
And obviously, if something is unnecessary or frivolous and has potential dangers, there's no point in using It, But I would say my bottom line is, unless it is a absolutely proven hazard, I don't think the government should be banning perfectly innocuous products, let alone products that have proven their value to millions of people over the years.
[00:51:19] Speaker A: Candace Morena asks, is there a big difference between American environmentalism and European environmentalism?
[00:51:29] Speaker B: I can't say that I am as familiar with what's going on in Europe.
And that could be, it could be true, and it might not be true.
I, I know what has caught on in the United States. I've interviewed for some of my Readers Digest investigative articles. I, I interviewed lots of environmentalists, some of the biggies and many of these major organizations, lots of, of scientists and so forth. I, I'm very familiar with the literature and I know that literature and I know what's happening in the United States. I can't say that I'm as familiar what's going on in Europe. And so I'll take a pass on that question. I don't want to pretend knowledge that I don't possess.
[00:52:19] Speaker A: All right, so Robert, you worked as an editor, a writer, and a speaker, speaker here at what is now the Atlas Society.
Any reflections on how Objectivism and the, and the movement has evolved after Ayn Rand's death and you know, throughout the, the last few decades?
[00:52:42] Speaker B: In one word, I would say positively.
And the reason I say that is that there was in the past a wrestling match, a proprietary wrestling match over the term Objectivism.
Who would be authorized to use it, who could use it, who couldn't use it, whether or not things could be added to or amended in the Objectivist philosophy. And with Rand's passing, and the passing of a lot of the people who were her most immediate associates, I think those folks had an understandable proprietary interest in presenting the, presenting Objectivism just as she defined it.
And they made it difficult for people who were in, largely in agreement with the philosophy to kind of pick and choose what they thought was most important and what was of value.
So in one respect, there is, there is now a, a broader base of people who are drawing upon the wellsprings of Rand's work and those of the scholars and writers and thinkers who have come along after her.
And there's what I think is a healthy intellectual competition. There's also a healthy competition of approaches of who you're going to target, of what kind of programs you're going to.
[00:54:20] Speaker A: Have.
[00:54:23] Speaker B: What is going to be the stress. Is it going to be to living a flourishing life, is it going to be educating the young Is it going to be objective of scholarship? I like that. I think it's all healthy and I don't see as much tribal feuding these days and I think that's all for the good.
[00:54:44] Speaker A: Well, from my perspective as CEO of the Atlas Society these nine and a half years, I'd say one of the most remarkable changes and one that some of our scholars have also emphasized is that 20 years ago the sort of energy in Objectivism was largely concentrated here in the United States and perhaps in Canada.
And now increasingly that energy is overseas. And that's one of the reasons we were so excited earlier this year to launch Atlas Society international with our 20 John Galt schools all over the world, in Africa and Latin America and Europe and Asia, in, in South Asia, and of course our new intellectual conference, which is our second student conference in, in Europe later this fall. So that's, that's been very, very exciting and I think there's a lot of potential as well for, for growing these ideas and connecting them with.
[00:55:46] Speaker B: Terrific.
[00:55:47] Speaker A: Yes. Because you know, here, here in the United States, Ayn Rand is still considered by some to be rather controversial. And that kind of stigma just doesn't carry the whole, the same weight overseas.
So Robert, we have a lot of questions here. People wanting to know are you going to be returning to fiction and what's next for you and what's the best way to follow your work?
[00:56:12] Speaker B: Okay, yes, I'm returning to fiction.
I have started a prequel to the Dylan Hunter series.
It's called Blind Eye. It deals with the period of time before Dylan actually became the newspaper journalist in Washington D.C. it deals with a situation that developed when he first got into Washington D.C. and it answers a number of implicit and sometimes explicit background questions that people have had over the years about, about the character and, and how he, how he became who he is.
So I'm very pleased about that and I, I've mentioned that I've had some challenges here that have slowed everything down and divided my focus.
I'm also wanting to write and prepare more anthologies of my non fiction. I don't know whether I can take the time out to write any fresh non fiction from scratch, a non fiction treatise or book or anything like that. I think that's, I'm, I'm probably past that sort of thing now, but I. Looking over a lot of the stuff that I had published and, and spoken on in the past, I think there's.
[00:57:44] Speaker A: Potential, a lot of collection, it's definitely evergreen, no pun intended, with our theme of environmentalism. So thank you so much. Robert, thank you for all that you have contributed to our reading pleasure and to our understanding over the years and to the Atlas Society and to, and.
[00:58:06] Speaker B: If I may, if, if I may. Before we sign off, if I may, you ask me how people could get in touch with me.
[00:58:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:13] Speaker B: They can follow me at my spanking new website, robert the writer.com.
believe it or not, that that available, robert the writer.com I could probably sell it for a quarter of a million dollars.
[00:58:31] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:58:32] Speaker B: If they're interested in my, if they're interested in my fiction, they can, they can find
[email protected].
[00:58:40] Speaker A: Wonderful.
[00:58:43] Speaker B: Either way.
[00:58:44] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll put both of those website in the comments. So thank you. Thanks all of you for joining us. Appreciate again your grace and patience with these technical duties difficulties. I'm sure we'll get them resolved next week. And I am very, very excited to, to have Martin Gury join us. He is a former CIA analyst and he is the author of the somewhat prophetic book Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.
It's, it's really an astounding book and a wonderful listen as well. So I'll see you guys next week. Have a wonderful Independence Day.
