Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 224th episode of the Atlas Society. Ask my name is Lawrence Olivo, senior project manager at the Atlas Society, the leading nonprofit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in creative ways, like animated videos and graphic novels. Our CEO, Jennifer Grossman has the week off, but I am excited to have join me today, Atlas Society founder and senior scholar David Kelly, alongside senior scholar and professor of philosophy at Rockford University, Stephen Hicks. Now, for those of you watching, I want to remind you whether you're on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, you can use the comments section to type in your questions, and we'll try to get to as many of your questions we can near the latter half of today's stream. Today, the scholars will be discussing a new initiative that started back in April of this year known as the Philadelphia Declaration. Its mission, to unify Liberty advocates across the secular and religious spectrum to forge a common cause against foes against common foes such as collectivism, irrationalism, and authoritarianism. For those interested in reading more about the Philadelphia declaration, it is in the description, description down below and also as a pinned comment. So without further ado, David, Stephen, thank you for joining us.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Thanks for hosting, of course.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: And then we'll be passing things over to David to start things off.
[00:01:28] Speaker C: All right. Thank you, Lawrence.
And, and hello, everyone who's attending.
I'm glad you're here with us.
The as Lawrence said, this is an initiative that actually goes back about a year, when several of us at the outskirts toddy put our heads together about what is the biggest impact we could have. And we came up with the idea of what is now called, has been called the Enlightenment Project, but is in the process of being renamed. But the point is, we put together a document called the Philadelphia Declaration as a statement of our values. That's on the.
Lawrence put that in the chat. Hopefully, it was in the video invitation that you got. And if you haven't read it yet, please do.
Normally, as a teacher, I don't like students reading something other than the course material while I'm talking. But I'm going to let that slide this time because it's important for background. But meanwhile, let me, most of the background for this is in the preamble to the declaration or in the COVID note that was shared, just shared with you.
We have made considerable progress since the April meeting that got us launched and a number of follow up meetings. Jay Leper has been running the project.
He's our board chairman. It is not an Atlas society project per se, but it is it was started by Jennifer Grossman, Jay le Pear, John Aguilaro, and myself. All tis people.
However, it is designed to create a coalition of people across different secular and religious outlooks, but who share a belief in individual freedom and responsibility, and the objectivity of both of those principles and the need to fight for them today against the collectivism that is rampant on both left and right.
So let me, I want to say a few words about possible objections that might arise from an objectivist standpoint.
We're very clear in the statement that we are, quote unquote, parking the difference between religious and secular views.
I consider this part and parcel of the american, you know, concept of individual liberty, that people have the freedom to believe as well as to speak, and that's protected by our, now our First Amendment.
But they also enjoy the protection of a limited government, which does not intrude further into their affairs.
Now, one, this is, you know, advocating freedom in this sense has been an essential part of objectivism for a long time, going back to Ayn Rand.
But some objectivists will take it, might take exception. I want to address this to this audience that we are affiliating with religious organizations. We have some representatives on our team, on our network, from the Acting Institute, a catholic free marketplace, from the other religious organizations, and we made it clear at the meeting and before and after that we are not going to discuss that issue. We are united around values that we share, which we also believe were the founding values, but are still relevant and can be updated today. Now, one objection is that many objectivists have argued, going back to Ayn Rand, that you cannot based your ethical and political views on in collaboration with someone who's, who differs on the underlying philosophy, the metaphysics of God, or, you know, atheism, faith versus reason.
And, you know, I myself have made that argument.
And one of the basis for that is an important essay that Ayn Rand wrote called the Anatomy of compromise. That's in her collection of, called capitalism the Unknown Ideal. And what she says is she makes a couple of points about alliances and collaborations, and the relevant one is, number two, she says, in any collaboration between two men or groups that who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins. So that has been a reason why objectivists were not all that friendly to religious people, however. So that's a point I want to address.
First of all, our project is described in the Philadelphia Declaration. Does nothing endorse or even raise for discussion the issue of religion versus a secular metaphysics, or epistemology and we do not acquire agreement. We have parked that explicitly. We are not endorsing any other view as objectivists than our secular point of view. But we are collaborating with people who share many of the same values. Now, how could they share the same values if they have a different view of the world? Well, part of the answer here is that people acquire their values not just by deducing them from first principles. There are fundamentalists who do that in religion, and there are secular equivalents of that. But these values have a strong inductive basis by anyone who's willing to look at the economics of freedom and the history of free societies versus collectivist or totalitarian ones. And that is what we all share in common and would refer to as our basis.
Now, I want to move on to a point that the.
About the declaration itself, which includes first a preamble and then a list of shared values. I want to leave most of the questions about those specific values to the question period, to Stephen, first of all, who will follow me, and then to the question period to see what questions comments you have. But I do want to make a few comments up front. One is, you'll notice that the part in the statement, this is, number two, by nature, we are both individual and social beings. Originally, when I first drafted this, and I must say, this declaration has gone through so many revisions with great contributions from many of the people who took part in our discussions.
In my original, I just stressed individualism. But many people said, and I came to agree fully, that we are also social animals, and that matters. And in particular, we want to dispel the notion that is put across by many on the left, that to be an individualist makes you a social atom, just a loner, you know, unconcerned with, uninvolved with other people. And that is not the issue of. That's not what individualism implies. It is what it is, part of our nature. The point is that even as social beings, we do it by individual choice, cooperation, and responsibility. So that's why you'll see in point number two, both the individual paragraph on our values we share as individual beings, but also as social beings.
A second point. We did not include the object specifically objectives value. That productive work is a cardinal value, or close to cardinal.
It is as the top value on which everything else depends, family, relationships, love, friendship, etcetera.
That is a controversial. That is a view that not everyone would accept who is part of our coalition. And it's not really necessary for the point we're making. What we do insist on, and you'll see this throughout the declaration, is the importance of responsibility and agency. We are, you know, whatever we're doing, we are responsible. And of course, that implies implicitly that we are responsible for making a living and supporting ourselves and our families.
But we thought it just. That's. That's all we need, and that's all. There are many people who are aligned with us who might put a higher value on families or relationships than we do. But that's. That's a detail. What we want as a basis for individual liberty, politically, is the idea that individuals should be free to chart their own course in life and take responsibility for that course.
And finally, the last point, really I want to make, is that you'll notice in the declaration that after each point that we affirm, there is an as against section short. And the reason for that is that on the one hand, we wanted to keep the statement positive.
It's not an historical or ancient or classical doctrine, a privileged book or something like the Bible or the Quran.
This is a living philosophy that is alive, and we want to enhance its life today, and it can be updated and modernized. So that's always our focus on the positive. But we also felt you can't really commit to the positive without also rejecting the opposite.
You know, it's a law of non contradiction. If you believe a, then you have to reject, not a. So we wanted to say what it is that we're against, against without spelling it out in sobering detail.
Maybe we'll do that at some point as the project goes along.
And meanwhile, I want to turn the table, turn the podium over to Stephen Hicks, who can provide, who's an expert on postmodernism thought, and many other forms of collectivism that are rampant today. So, without further ado, let's park the questions for now and turn this over to Stephen.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: All right? Yeah. Thanks for that introduction. I think the Philadelphia Declaration is very well crafted document intellectually. I also like its hopeful muscle power in bringing together a number of groups for some cultural activism.
So I wanted to put out some historical and contemporary case studies for us to think through when we're talking about these principles, there is kind of a general, I don't know, philosophical tension that we all face when we think about these strategic issues, how to get stuff done.
At the same time, we want to maintain the integrity of our belief system, our philosophical system. So it would be nice if we never had any tensions between what I think is true, what I think is valuable. And then when I start working with other people, having to do what seems to be compromises or tolerations of various sort, and where I draw the line on, on what counts as a compromise that I can't engage in, or something that I can no longer, no longer tolerate. So there often does seem to be at least a tension between getting stuff done and maintaining the integrity, or we all have. I think if we are thoughtful people, a worked out worldview, sometimes a philosophy, and we think of it as consistent and as well argued, and if any part of that goes away, then the whole system might not work very well. I don't know if it's fragile enough that will collapse entirely. But we have this ideal of a universally integrated philosophy that solves all issue, but at the same time, socially, aside from that ideal, we have to face the reality that we live in society where there's a lot of intellectual diversity, cultural diversity as well. So how do I put this more universal, one set of answers or one set of principles that I think are true and have them operative in a society where there's a great deal of diversity? So part of then, I think, a philosophy that is meant to be a philosophy living on earth is recognizing that living on earth involves other people, and other people have their own minds. And then we have to figure out, under circumstances, when they've used their minds and they're not on board with us, how do we sort out getting them on board with us? What sorts of things can we get on board with them?
And all of that, I think, is there's never going to be a recipe, but requires ongoing judgment about not only the general principles, but the particulars of each circumstance. So some historical examples I like to think of that are close to what we are trying to accomplish with Philadelphia declarations.
In this context, for example, as David Kelly is pointing out, we've got lots of quasi authoritarians, both on the left and on the right. Some of them are more rational on the left, and some are less rational on the left. Some are more irrational and less rational on the right as well. Some of them are more collectivized, and we have collectivism in both forms. So this idea of a rationale liberal, in the classical sense, individualistic, right now we are a minority set of ideas and a minority movement. That's the reality that we are facing right now. And how do we advance our ideas in that context? Now, there are lots of success cases, though, that we can draw upon, where similar movements, advancing important values politically and culturally, went from being outlier cases to success cases. And they did most of the time believe that they had one true understanding of the world, that they disagreed with other people on very important things, but nonetheless, there was some important cultural or political value that they wanted to accomplish, and they were willing to work with those other people, and they did so successfully. So I think of, for example, what's usually called the glorious revolution in England in 1688, where the kind of parliamentary democracy came clearly into the ascendancy. And it was the final setting aside and marginalizing of what had been a fairly robust series of centuries of monarchy, sometimes that monarchy approaching absolutist forms of monarchy. But this rise of parliamentary democracy was achieved by a number of people who had wildly different views of what religion was true, what their proper approach to religion was, in many cases, wildly divergent ideas about what proper policies they wanted to see this new democracy to achieve. Nonetheless, what they agreed on as an important value was that an absolute monarchy, despite England's long history with it, was wrong in principle, and that the important goal in the decade or the decades was to get rid of that monarchy and put in place a working democracy. So that was a successful transformation of english political history. And it took.
It was successful after 1688, but there was lots of back and forth over the coming decades. If we think about the american founders, they're prosecuting independents from England in 1776, and then in the following decade, putting together a working constitution. Again, this was seen as an important political value, actually achieving independence, and then a decade later, coming to agreement on what are going to be the constitutional principles. But again, we had people with wildly divergent views on religious issues. Some were deists, some were agnostic, there were a few who were atheists. The majority of them were still consistently religious in a more theistic sense, although, again, great divergence there. But they were able to recognize, despite the disagreements on those fundamental issues, that there's a more important short to medium term goal to be achieved. We can park those differences and work out the constitution.
I'm thinking more philosophically of John Stuart Mill in the 17, sorry, the 18 hundreds. 1859 on into the 1860s, when the ideal of liberal education was cementing its place in England, in Britain, more broadly speaking, in western Europe, and then certainly across the pond in North America, where instead of the idea, that being that we have our true educational philosophy, our one way of doing education, and all students are going to learn only our viewpoint, the idea that what we need in a well formed educational institution is agreement on a certain very general set of principles about what education consists in. And even though all of us who are putting together this new educational institution, say that we are, that we are forming, are going to disagree with each other about science, about politics, about religion, and so forth. Nonetheless, the top values to be achieved here is an idea of liberal education, where we are going to set, so to speak, an educational space where students can explore conflicting ideas, ultimately make up their own minds, and that we, who are the teachers and the professors, even though we disagree with each other about a large number of things, agree on this one important value. And that agreement was what enabled the great explosion of the very successful model of liberal education over the course of the next century or so. Another kind of value, going from transforming a country, as in the case of english parliament, to starting a new country in the. Of the american independence, to starting new educational institutions, to fighting wars. If we think of the example of World War two there, the great short term battle was the fight against the fascists and the Nazis and the japanese authoritarian, militaristic regime, and then the willingness of the western kind of democratic republics, England, America, Canada and so forth, to work with the Soviet Union, recognizing that there, obviously, we have huge political disagreements, and underlying those huge philosophical disagreements about human nature and values and even metaphysics. But nonetheless, the important thing here is fighting this war successfully. And that does mean parking certain issues in order to. To be allies for a few years with the. With the Soviets. Now, I don't think there's ever a fixed recipe. There are general principles at work, and David and the declaration are starting to separate out some of those. I think Rand's points in the anatomy of the compromise are also a useful starting point for reference her. But what I would just say, and then I'll turn things over, is to say that in my thinking about this, I think there's all three things that I find myself thinking through. One is philosophically knowing what your own values are. This is where your philosophy or your religion says, these are the important things in life, my, my meaning of life. And to the extent that you agree with that philosophy, you're going to say, these are my top values, and then you embody those in your life, or you use those to form your own personal value hierarchy. And what you never want to do then is sacrifice a higher value for a lower value or a secondary value. If there's a conflict between those two, you can't pursue both at the same time, for whatever reason. Then it's always the higher hierarchical value that you preserve and the other one you, you set aside. But that's never to say that those secondary values are not important. They don't get enter into the weighing scale.
So, the second thing I find myself thinking about is that your value hierarchy also has, so to speak, time coefficients that you think about. What in my value hierarchy is achievable in the short term, what's achievable in the medium term, and what is achievable in the long term? And sometimes you set aside working on longer term values in order to achieve shorter term values. And sometimes achieving those shorter term values helps you, or helps enable you to achieve those longer term values. So, one way of thinking about that in our current context is to say, for example, that suppose you're an objectivist and you are then an atheist, and you are recognizing that there are any number of people who are religious. And so one of your deep disagreements is going to be a metaphysical difference over whether a God exists or not. And that is going to inform your values a lot. And that is an important issue to attend to. But at the same time, a short term issue that we're all grappling with is the remarkable rise of left wing collectivisms and authoritarianisms and right wing collectivisms and authoritarianisms. And whether those left wing and right wing versions of authoritarianism are religious or secular is not as important as the fact that they are collectivist and authoritarian. And so, in the short term, one's disagreements with many people who are religious is much less important than we have much less traction in the short term, and perhaps in the medium term, than one's differences. So, a willingness to work with people who, for whom you have what might seem to be a very fundamental metaphysical difference in the short term is less important. The other thing to think about is not only what one's value hierarchy is, but also this time value, but also the assets that one is bringing to the table, so to speak, how much influence one has, how much wealth one has, how much other forms of power one has.
So, for example, right now, many of the movements that we think of as classically liberal, individualist, more rational, and so forth, are minority movements. And for them to focus on all the ways in which they differ from each other is one way for them to remain minority movements and not making very much success, while recognizing, on the other hand, that if they are able to set aside some of the things that differentiate them from each other, to join their assets together, their wealth, their influence and other assets and so forth, to take on larger enemies, is going to increase their power. So, I don't know. I think kind of the be a silly example but suppose, you know, any one of us who is a public intellectual thinks about how much influence right one has. You know, suppose you have a certain, you know, number of thousands of followers on your platform. But suppose for some reason, you get a chance to debate someone who is, you know, a communist, a hardcore marxist revolutionary, want to kill all the property owners, communist on. On some platform, but that person has 10 million followers. So you could say, okay, this person is, you know, very dangerous, and I disagree with this person on just about everything, and that is important. But to say that I'm. In order to maintain my integrity, I'm not going to debate this person on a public forum. That strikes me as overriding the importance of the assets that both sides are bringing to the table. Because if you then think of the calculus, in this case, I might send, they say, bring my 10,000 followers to the social media forum, but this person is going to bring, say, 10 million people to the social media forum. What that then means is that that person has a chance, of course, to talk to my 10,000 followers and. And convince them to come over to their side. But I also have a chance to talk to 10 million people and influence them to come over to the other side. And I think that's a legitimate factor to think of instead of something just. That's a hard and fast rule that some people are beyond the pale in my value hierarchy. Therefore, I'm not going to communicate with them. So always a judgment call, knowing what your value hierarchy is, knowing what's achievable in the short, medium, and long term. But then also, what's the initial distribution of assets that you have and the other people that you're dealing with are bringing to the table. All of that has to come together in a judgment call in deciding with whom one is going to agree. Now, I have some questions myself about the declaration itself, and David mentioned Rand's anatomy of compromise. I have some questions about that, but I want to stop there and turn things open to general questions and more back and forth discussion.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: Okay, great. Thank you for that, Stephen. David, did you want to follow up with anything before we start getting into audience questions?
[00:31:07] Speaker C: No, I'm seeing a number of great questions in the chat box. So, Lawrence, if you can moderate a q and a, let's go right there.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: Of course. Great. So we did have a super check come in. And, Stephen, I think you've already kind of addressed this question already, but I thought I'll just bring it up so both of you could directly tackle it. This is a super chat from Mark Goodkin, who asks, who states, Ayn Rand discussed the idea that a political ally who shares some superficial common ground, but stems from opposite philosophical premises could be more dangerous than an outright opponent? What are your thoughts?
[00:31:47] Speaker C: Yeah, well, that, that is, um, you know, a comment allied to her anatomy of compromise, which I quoted earlier. And, um, it can work out that way. It certainly can. I think the analysis, you know, in rents day and up, you know, until recently, it applied wholesale to the conservative movement because they, they said, we're not, you know, we can't ethically defend capitalism, but it's more efficient. Well, if you get, if you say we can't ethically defend it, you give the whole game away to the liberals.
On the other hand, if you say, I don't agree with you about the existence of God or religious foundation for my values, I don't agree.
But would you agree that when we look at the world and observe the consequence of the history of free societies versus collectivist, totalitarian, stalinist, fascist, communist, whatever, when we look at that history, do you see anything that you would. That would, that is, that you're. That you would incorporate into your case for freedom? And almost everyone would say, of course, yes, same with economics. All the economic understanding of why markets work and government planning and other totalitarian interventions do not work.
So there's. I think Rand's point is a good piece of advice, but it is, you know, it has to be, you know, applied in a certain context of, you know, the. Who the relevant parties are, who the facts are, and so forth. And that's what we're trying to do with the Philadelphia Declaration.
So I don't hold that this is an absolute, a piece of doctrine that we must follow, you know, in the sense of applying it rationalistically rather than intelligently.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Okay.
Yeah, I like Mark Goodkun's question here as well.
I think the tricky thing is the word superficial in the question. So if we have someone we're considering to be an ally who has superficial common ground, as he puts it, but stems from opposite philosophical premises, I think that's to attend, correctly to one important thing that has to be one's consideration. So suppose, I'm trying to think of an example here. So suppose you're fighting a war.
War is kind of an extreme political situation. So there's your team or your army and the other army over there. And so you are, say, in a trench warfare, you've got all of your fellow soldiers lined up beside you, and you turn to the guy next to you who has a gun and he's on your side, and you get to know this guy a little bit. Now suppose, just to make the contrast strong, suppose, you know, he, you're an atheist and he's a theist and you are, I don't know, a capitalist and he's a socialist. So in this context, you are allies in this political thing. You're fighting this war against those other guys, but on the underlying things that are more fundamental in your philosophical worldview, you disagree on everything. But the question then is, and this brings in David's context, question. The context right now in the short term, is he's willing to point guns at those guys over there, and those guys are pointing guns at you. So the question is, are you willing, over the course of the next week or month, while this war is going on, to say to the guy next to you, you know, the fact that you and I disagree about religious fundamentals and we disagree about political fundamentals, but we only agree right now that those guys are the enemy and they're trying to kill us right now, we can set aside those differences, live, so to speak, to fight another day, hopefully win this war. And then having won that war, we will be able to then have a social space in which you and I can then carry on the discussion peacefully about who has the right politics and who has the right religion. And I think that's the right way. That then is to say, it's not only the value hierarchy, what's superficial and what isn't in a philosophical sense, but also what are the context within which you are trying to achieve your values? I'll pause there for a moment.
[00:36:54] Speaker A: Okay. Another question we've got coming in, and I think this speaks to a larger question directed at you, David. But Ann M. On YouTube asks, were the religious people at this meeting regarding the Philadelphia Declaration also concerned about their own communities reaction to working with secular groups? And just to add on to that question, there's a few others. I guess we can understand where an objectivist or more secular minded people might have, might be thinking going in to create this initiative. But what were some of the points of contention or main focus of concern for religious people who were attending?
[00:37:41] Speaker C: Oh, gosh, it's a lot potentially to say. The meeting that we held in Philadelphia in April was a full day of discussion, and it was largely focused on eliciting thoughts from the people who were there, and many issues came up. I think I mentioned in my introduction that one issue was the role of that human beings are social animals that sometimes gets left to the side by objectivists, including myself.
But it is, and it turns out to be an important point. Now, some people thought, with a religious background, I veering toward a more fully altruistic view of, you know, living for others.
I don't think that was very widespread.
But the.
So back to the initial question about whether, you know, the people who are there are taking this back to the groups and how that's going. That is still in process, and we are still urging people to share the declaration. And if they are leaders of one of the organizations, then is there a way that they can see to incorporate some of the ideas in their own projects? The whole idea of our initiative is that it's not a new nonprofit, not a new organization. It is a collaborative, a cooperative. So anyway.
But we're still finding out people are going back to taking the declaration, sharing it, talking with people on their teams. And by the way, I would urge everyone we've posted the declaration and the introduction to it are on the Atlas Society website. Please share it with anyone you think might be interested. We're trying to build a coalition here.
So while I'm on the subject, but I will say, and this is a relevant point, maybe to another question.
At one point, I went back and looked at everyone who had participated in the project so far, starting with a meeting in April, and just said, are they religious or secular? It was just my own interest, and I don't have that. I don't remember. But I do remember that the religious people participating in the meeting outnumbered the secular ones, even though all the organizers, myself, John and Jay, were secular. So I guess that that's what occurs to me on this point.
[00:40:40] Speaker B: Lawrence, can I jump in? I wasn't at the meeting, so I can't speak particularly to what the question is asking. But I would like to just add another point about contextualizing is that when we're talking about this division between people who are secular and people who are religious, both of those are still very broad abstractions, and they do important conceptual work for us when we're thinking philosophically and about life. But at the same time, an important thing about concepts is when you apply them, you always have to put the measurements back in, so to speak, using, using objectivist language. And what that means to me is that when I think about religious people and religious institutions, I recognize pretty quickly that they are not all the same.
[00:41:33] Speaker C: And.
[00:41:34] Speaker B: And so very quickly, religion stops being just kind of one kind of uniform blob of human beings who believe a certain number of things. So one of the really important measurements to put back in is there are many religions still functioning in the United States for whom the separation of church and state is an important part of their religion. And for other religious groups operating in the United States, an absolute opposition to separating church and state is an important part of their approach to religion right now. So when I'm thinking about the possibility of working with religious groups, that divide becomes very important to me. And any group that says, no, we reject the First Amendment. We reject church state separation on principle. Well, then it's not very likely we're going to be able to work with those. But that does leave a huge number of people who are religious who are willing to say, yeah, I think the First Amendment is absolutely important. I'm on board with separating church and state. Religion is a private, individual matter. The government should be out of it. We should have lots of freedom of conscience, freedom of forms of worship. And that's someone who's much closer to an operational philosophy or operational politics. That's. That's close to what objectivism stands for. So, yes, they're much more likely to want to be able to work with that kind of person. Now, then we might say, well, there are other values in religion. Not all of them are, how individualistic are you? How much are you in favor of separation of church and state and so forth, but how rational is your religion? And there are many people in the United States who think of themselves as religion, but they believe in the material world. They want to live happily in the material world. They want to become rich, have a nice house.
They believe in cause and effect. They believe in science. And God functions for them as a kind of behind the scenes architect or engineer who put the whole university together and got it going. And that's what being religious means to them, in contrast to lots of people for whom, you know, they are religious, but they believe the world is mysterious and doesn't make any sense, and God is this shadowy, very angry figure who just punishes people and is someone to be scared of. So they're both religious, but those are two very different understandings about the nature of God and how it operates in one's life. So, again, when I'm thinking about religious people and when I can work with them and when I can't, knowing what kind of religion they have, there is very important individual friendships, doing business with them, being in a school with them, or doing political activism with them.
[00:44:37] Speaker A: Okay, another question that's come in. This one is from, I like numbers on YouTube, who asks, do some liberty groups avoid coalitions to hope the establishment doesn't identify them as a threat? So I guess the question is there perhaps in the United States or elsewhere, is there more of a history of maybe persecution for people who are trying to bring about this more liberty minded change?
[00:45:07] Speaker C: I just want to make one point about that and nonprofit groups, and we're talking about mostly nonprofit groups, think tanks and others are competing very fiercely for support members and especially for donations.
So there can easily be a highly competitive and sometimes hostile relationship between different groups, even if they share many of the same principles.
One thing that struck me when I founded the Atlas Society, what is now the Atlas Society, in 1990, was how different I made my purpose to meet other libertarian and free market groups that I didn't already have contacts with. And one of the things that struck me, Washington, how cooperative they were. They wanted to, you know, they wanted to welcome as many people to the party as possible, and they weren't so concerned about money. They said, if you have something unique to offer that makes you a value to this movement, you will find donors for whom that value is significant. And it struck me how different that was from many of the competitive attitudes and battles I witnessed on the, among left wing organizations. Anyway. So I'll just leave it there.
Stephen, if you have anything to add.
[00:46:41] Speaker B: No, I don't.
[00:46:43] Speaker A: Okay. Another question. This one comes in from Scott, also on YouTube, who asks, have objectivists in the past been too quick to sweep away any religious person as irrational on a metaphysical level?
[00:46:56] Speaker C: Hmm.
Well, I hate to name names, but. So I won't. But, yes, and, but in this context, let me just say, ayn Rand, although she was an atheist and opposed to religion as a, as a belief system, an informal religion, nevertheless thought that religion was a primitive philosophy. It gave, it served a real human need of providing a view of the world and of values. And I think she argued, and I certainly agree, that it's been superseded by a more secular scientific view, but it still has its, its aim was correct. And secondly, that many religions, weve talked a little bit about the differences among them. There is a huge variety in the role of reason and this worldly values among different religions. And Iran had, for example, great praise for Thomas Aquinas, who, who was, you know, brought a lot of Aristotle back into history and into the culture, and, you know, claimed and with some at least partial justification to be basing his views on reason, not just on blind faith.
[00:48:33] Speaker B: Yeah, this is an interesting question about the history of the objectivist movement. And I'm not going to name names either, but I think there is an issue about rhetoric.
There's a point about rhetoric here, that when you are dealing with other individuals or other groups of individuals, and you're going to have conversations with them, learn from them, maybe teach them, convert influence and so forth, it is important to get to know the individuals as individuals. And I think one of the occupational hazards of objectivism as a philosophy is that it has a very clear understanding about hierarchy of principles and what is a fundamental principle and what is derivative. And it makes a very strong case that one has to get the fundamentals right and then, of course, integrate that with all of the inductive evidence. But you start with metaphysics, and it's close sibling, the epistemological issues, and from there, work your way to ethics, to politics and so forth. So if one emphasizes the philosophical foundational structure of objectivism, then anytime one is dealing with someone who has a metaphysical difference with you, or an epistemological difference with you, then that strikes one as not only philosophically found dimensional, but very, very important. And one's reaction is going to be very, very strong.
But to contrast that when one is dealing with other individuals, it's important to keep in mind that they are not necessarily doing their philosophical framework in that same foundational order, that the psychological order by which people get to their philosophical view is often quite different. In many cases, people will, for whatever individual autobiographical reasons, when those things are written up, their entry into philosophy, say, is that they have certain moral values that they think are very important. That's their personal commitment and that's their foundation. And then they might then start psychologically backing their way into more fundamental issues philosophically about epistemology, to ground that values, or back themselves into certain metaphysical commitments to ground that value. So the psychological order for that individual is different from what an objectivist would think is the proper philosophical order. What that means, though, is that when you're dealing with that individual, you have to get inside their head and recognize what the most important values are or what their psychological order is, so you can communicate with them. Well, in many cases, you will have a metaphysical difference with them, but that's. That's kind of downstream from the things that are really important to that individual.
[00:51:47] Speaker A: Okay, we have about seven minutes left to go. Everything. And I've seen a couple super chats come in, so we'll try to get to those first and see how much time we have left. Mark Goodkin has another question he submitted. He asked, how do you approach compromise with conservatives who are for individual rights and capitalism, but hold communitarian social values like pro life.
[00:52:12] Speaker C: That's a great question.
But the whole idea, our idea behind the Philadelphia declaration was people come from many different directions politically and also religiously. There are many left wing people in religion and many left wing seculars, like most of the postmodernists at Stevens studies. But we didn't want people. We didn't want to recruit people who shared a belief in freedom, limited government, you know, the basic principles, but also shared certain common values that support the political positions. And those have to include, by our standards.
And the kind of people who joined us and helped create the declaration was that one of them is objectivity, being objective.
And, you know, I thought that might be crooks point or a point of controversy, but among religious people. But there was no. They insisted on it.
There had to be enough recognition that the individual is. Individualism, in the pure philosophical sense, means the individual is the unit of existence among human beings. We don't exist as herds or insect termites, like termite nests or anything, or honeybee collections, where literally those insects are social.
They can't live without each other, even in theory. Humans are not like that. We are individuals, but we are social animals as individuals. Now, the kind of conservatives, I think, in your question, who lean very.
[00:54:37] Speaker B: Heavily.
[00:54:39] Speaker C: Toward social values, subordination to any kind of public or collective Orlando class or whatever kind of group, are beyond the pale. They're not with us and won't be. So that's one of the things, you know, believe in a. You can't believe in not a.
[00:55:04] Speaker A: Okay, so we've got about four minutes left, so we'll try to get this last super chat here before we close out. Might need some more clarification, or maybe y'all will understand more than I do. But Brad Bell asks, how does objectivism slash libertarianism balance what I call the commonwealth? Bottom line? He then says, I believe in liberty, but we have clean water, etcetera. So I don't know if you. If Brad is still in the chat, maybe he can add a bit more to that or if y'all can go off that.
[00:55:41] Speaker B: Okay, sounds like the question is orthogonal to what we're discussing here. A more general question about how do you say, you know, you believe in individuals rights, freedom and so forth, but things that are sometimes in the commons, like air or lakes, that are sometimes privately owned, but sometimes in a commons or government control, how do you balance or integrate the individual with the social? I take that to be, that's what the question is asking about, but focused on environmental values.
[00:56:21] Speaker A: Mark Goodwin saying that he might be referring to government services. So maybe that's the question. How do we balance objectivism libertarian with government doing things for the common welfare?
[00:56:33] Speaker B: Okay, so yeah, the example from Brad Bell was clean water. So that's obviously a value to all of us as individuals having clean water. So if we're going to have a kind of division of labor society, I'm not going to purify all of my own water.
I'm going to rely on other people to do so.
Do I think that the free market would do a better job of keeping the water clean, or do I think a government is necessary to keep the water clean? In that case, I would say water is the common good. In this case, that is to say that it's common to all of us that we need to have this water, but this establishment of it in terms of control rights, whether it's private property rights or government control, that I think is a secondary question. So what I would just say that I think water is like any other resource, air or land or mineral or anything, that the arguments for individual private property rights prevail. And typically the places where we have the worst problems with pollution and dirty water, dirty air and so forth are places where it is a commons, where there are no property rights or the control has been substantially by government agencies. And all of the usual mismanagement that occurs then. But that's a big question that I see is not quite on topic of the Declaration out of Philadelphia.
[00:58:13] Speaker A: Right. So, David, I don't know if there's any last minute comments or thoughts you'd like to close us out with today regarding Philadelphia declaration.
[00:58:25] Speaker C: Yes, thank you. Thanks, Steven and Lawrence. But also thanks to everyone who participated and asked questions. I'm sorry we couldn't get to more of them. There were lots of great ones.
But meanwhile, I do want to urge you to circulate the declaration to anyone you think might be interested, and particularly those who are, you know, used Malcolm Gladwell's phrase, connectors, people who have a lot of friends and associates.
We are eager to build a movement, as I said before. So it's on our website and you can easily share it at will. Meanwhile, thank you. And this project is ongoing. I hope you will stay tuned.
We will cover, cover, you know, major developments from the Atlas Society.
Thanks.
[00:59:26] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:59:26] Speaker B: Thanks for me, too.
[00:59:28] Speaker A: Yes, thank you, everyone, for joining us and asking those questions today. So if you enjoyed what we do here, we have webinars each week, so please come back and check us out again. Just a reminder, the Philadelphia decoration is on the Atlas Society website. It is also in the description, description if you're on YouTube or Facebook, and it's also a pinned comment, so be sure to check that out. And then if you want to follow any other events that we're doing, again, go to artless society.org forward slash events next week. Stephen Hicks will be doing on Wednesday and ask me anything. So perhaps Brad Bell, if you're still in the chat, that'd be a more appropriate area to sort of dive into the question you had there. But I regardless, for those of you who are watching on our far regular webinars, be sure to join us next week because Jennifer Grossman will be back, and she will be interviewing Elaine Kmark about the growing political gender gap among young people and exploring what impact this will have on politics, relationship and culture. Again, Stephen, David, thank you so much for joining us. And we'll see you all next time. Take care, everyone.
