Objectivism Is Dumb

This article started life as a brief exercise in dragging my balls over the face of Ayn Rand and anyone who likes her, or her half-baked philosophy. Unable to help myself, it turned into an assault on the core assumptions of objectivism, libertarianism, and liberalism more broadly. The germ of this essay is a sort of response to a Twitter user who idolizes Ayn Rand, is a materialist atheist, and is, as follows from the preceding two statements, a moral derelict. Hopefully there’s not anyone in this woman’s life who relies on her having any sort of integrity, because her idol certainly didn’t.

Libertarianism, broadly defined, is the political philosophy of limited government and maximal human liberty. In short, it is the ideology of having the “freedom to.” You can put just about anything you like after the word “to.” Sitting at the core of this philosophy is the notion that liberty is inherently good, and impinging upon liberty may sometimes be a necessary evil, but an evil nevertheless. “Liberty” and “freedom” in this context are ill-defined terms by design. A philosophy of total freedom doesn’t dictate to anyone what “freedom” means to them, so long as any given person’s freedom doesn’t impinge upon anyone else’s “freedom.” We’ll see how deeply flawed this idea is in a few paragraphs.

Objectivism is the libertarian denomination particular to Ayn Rand. Rand was a Russian Jew who fled the Soviet Union for the United States. Naturally, this had an enormous impact on her personal philosophy, and led her to the belief that unencumbered individual will was the ultimate good in the universe.

Rand describes her philosophy as such: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” Those readers familiar with studies regarding brain function might see how some of the cracks in this idea will form.

Objectivism starts with the notion that reality exists regardless of perception, and that perception is used to apprehend reality, though sometimes in a flawed manner. So far so good. The philosophy then jumps to declaring “rational self-interest” as the highest good, that the primary virtue of objectivism is “rationality,” and that the only true moral obligation a person has is to his own well-being. Here we start to see cracks form.

Having now satisfactorily defined both libertarianism and objectivism, I can now proceed to fatally undermine them.

I think it’s fair to say that most libertarians are materialist atheists. Objectivism is an explicitly materialist atheist philosophy. The assumption of atheism lurks unnoticed behind every part of libertarianism, and renders the ideology down into rank hedonism. Atheism cannot ground objective moral values and duties. That is to say, an atheist cannot give a compelling reason why anyone ought to follow their moral precepts, especially if you can get away with violating them. Any claim to morality an atheist or pagan can make is simply them borrowing Christian morality. (Please feel free to borrow faith in Jesus while you’re at it. You might as well. No need to return it, there’s plenty of Him for all of us.) If you’d like to gainsay me on that point, feel free to do so in the comments section.

If atheism is the soil in which libertarianism is planted, then the seed out of which it grows is the rejection of duty. Squatting at the very core of liberalism (and thus libertarianism and objectivism, as both are liberal philosophies) is the idea that one should not have any unchosen obligations, nor any positive duties. That is to say, you shouldn’t have to do anything you didn’t agree to do. On the face of it, this seems perfectly fine. Getting someone to do something they don’t want to is a headache, and positive incentives generally work better than coercion. However, we haven’t placed this idea of rejecting duty into a temporal, human context. The principle of not having any unchosen obligations transmutes into not having any unwanted obligations. The logic of how one becomes the other is easy to see by applying time. An obligation freely chosen at the time of the choice can sour with time, such as a woman choosing to have sex and accepting the possibility of pregnancy. What seemed like a comfortable trade off when pregnancy was simply an idea becomes an unbearable obligation when the woman finds out she has actually become pregnant. Because the highest value of libertarianism is “freedom,” the highest good of objectivism is “rational self-interest,” shouldn’t the pregnant woman be “free” to kill her child? Is it not in her “rational self-interest” to kill her child if it disrupts her happiness?

We see here where the logic of libertarianism breaks down in two places. The first is the “who/whom” distinction. The second is that man is not a rational animal.

In the instance of a woman seeking to kill her child because it is inconvenient, the child, every bit as much a person as its mother, has no rights because the woman has raw power over her child. She can choose to kill her child and the child can do nothing about it. We see a similar pattern in other instances of power imbalance. On a libertarian view, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a business owner abusing their employees, so long as the abuse is within the bounds of some pre-arranged agreement. The capital owner can do whatever they like because they hold raw power and can dictate terms unilaterally. The employee is left with no practical recourse. In theory, our employee can simply not do business with an abusive business owner. But such theories are limited to the high school lunch rooms where objectivist philosophy is most frequently discussed. In the real world, we had, until very recently, oligarchical markets, Pinkertons, black lists, and company town funbucks that only spent at the company store, none of which violate libertarian principles. Rational self-interest only applies if you have the power to assert it. Most people simply do not.

Returning again to our example of a filicidal mother, we see how an obligation, previously accepted but later rejected, points to a glaring flaw in libertarian ethics. Objectivism posits that man is a rational animal, and on grounds of rationality that seeking rational self-satisfaction is the only moral duty a man has. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes around normal people can see plainly that man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing one. To be a rationalizing animal is to make irrational decisions and then construct a justification for them after the fact. Those of you who come from the manosphere will recognize this tendency, particularly in women, as the “rationalization hamster.” A woman seeking to have her child killed in the womb is not carefully weighing the pros and cons of motherhood, logically interrogating myriad moral precepts, and arriving at an intellectually satisfying conclusion. What actually weighs on her are her emotions; guilt, fear, and shame versus selfishness and resentment. Rationality plays no part in the decision except to sweep up the crime scene afterwards.

Objectivism hits another roadblock on its journey to set rationality as its cornerstone: most people can’t understand multiple steps of logic. When presented with multiple propositions, most people cannot follow a line of rational inference to a conclusion. A moral philosophy that posits itself as indisputably true is simply not available to the majority of people who live and breathe. It’s doubtful to me that objectivists or libertarians have even considered this fact. Libertarians tend to idolize captains of industry and identify themselves with them. In terms of IQ, doctrinaire libertarians tend to skew to the right side of the bell curve. As such, they would view the inability to harness reason as a deficiency of effort, rather than an inherent deficiency of mental capacity. Thus someone who cannot comprehend the complex legalese on a contract they signed is not a victim of predatory power, but rather simply a dupe who failed to read the fine print. If they are taken advantage of, they had it coming. This ties back into our discussion above on “who/whom?”

Presumably, honoring your word is a core tenet of libertarian philosophy. As demonstrated above, however, we see that holding up freedom from duty as a guiding principle undermines this core mechanism of social trust. It’s not just an argument in principle, either. One need simply look at what’s happened to libertarianism in the past two decades to see my point. Libertarianism is now synonymous with doing drugs and clamoring for legalized child prostitution. If an adult is free to sell sex for Bitcoin, why shouldn’t a child be free to do the same? Again, this ties back into both our “who/whom?” and rationalization discussions. The desire is to get high and molest children. Talk of “freedom” is simply justifying being a moral derelict.

In a way, Marxism is the flip side of the libertarian coin. Both ideologies are materialist. Both ideologies erase the line between economics and morality. Both ideologies put an idea of “freedom” at the center of their respective though processes. Marxism is a sort of inverse-opposite of libertarianism. Where libertarianism is preoccupied with the “freedom to,” Marxism is preoccupied with “freedom from.” This rationale is why twitter communists can say that forcing home builders to provide houses under duress is “freedom.” It provides someone else (they are here thinking only if themselves and what they might receive) with “freedom from,” in this case, freedom from having to pay rent or a mortgage. We see also the solipsism inherent to Marxism and libertarianism. We mentioned before that libertarianism suffers a who/whom problem, and that libertarians picture themselves as temporarily embarrassed captains of industry. No attention is paid to those who might get left behind. Marxism is the answer to that unasked question. Communists show their hand when they demand “the state,” “society,” “the corporations,” etc, give them free housing and food. They know deep down how utterly useless they are and that any sort of meritocracy would leave them penniless. Talk of “workers” or “the poor” are just as much window dressing as the libertarian’s talk of freedom. Credit must be given to the libertarian in this case, as the libertarian only wants to smoke their own pot, not yours.

Social capital, is the secret sauce that makes civilization work. Social capital works in the same way as any other form of capital. Capital in this context is simply something for which someone else is willing to pay. In much the same way you could travel into unclaimed woodland and cut trees into planks to create physical capital, doing activities that make civilization a nicer place to be creates social capital. Great projects like irrigating under-watered farm land contribute much to the pool of social capital, while doing something simple like returning your shopping cart to the cart corral contributes a little, but it’s still a contribution. Most of the complaining about the “shopping cart test” comes from the libertarian quarter of the internet, I’ve noticed. Western civilization has so much civilizational momentum that simply not actively depleting social capital is a contribution to the well-being of society. Simple things, like not murdering someone for their basketball shoes.

Whites tend to, in general, contribute naturally to the well-being of society. White countries, even those outside of Europe, tend to be better places to live than places run by non-whites. The civilizational habits Whites have built up over the many millennia we’ve been around orients us towards the creation of social capital. Whites, in general, feel it a duty to contribute to the health of civilization. Or at the very least not actively erode it. Integrity, honesty, a sense of fair play, shame over wrong-doing, temperance, and continence are all moral duties that contribute to the expectation that you won’t be in danger of bodily harm just by leaving your house, and that when you buy something, it’s what you paid for.

Contrary to the assertions of libertarianism, the above isn’t the case everywhere. The Chinese, for instance, have absolutely no qualms about promising you one thing then delivering something of vastly lower quality. Indians will freely lie about their capabilities and qualifications. Hispanics cheap out on nearly everything. And blacks are largely incapable of comprehending conditional hypotheticals. Even with comprehensive globalization, there hasn’t been any change for the better among non-White cultures, which points to these factors being in-built and unconscious. There’s something to be said about societies that foster a guilt-based morality instead of a shame-based one, but that’s a topic for a different article.

The Enlightenment gestated scientific materialism and the notion of a mechanical cosmos. They believed that they had discovered the secrets of the universe, that it simply is, and always was, and that it was rational. What they ignored as they reached the top of the mountain of knowledge is that Catholic priests and monks had carried them the entire way, fighting against the pagan creation myths of their ancestors, and against the petty and capricious local gods that stood in the place of Christ for a time, establishing the creative supremacy of God Almighty, and that an orderly, rational universe was created by a rational, orderly mind. Enlightenment thinkers forgot that they were standing on the shoulders of giants.

Liberalism, the natural heir to the Enlightenment, and all her bastard children, are standing on the shoulders of those same giants, even more ignorant of the precariousness of their footing. Ayn Rand, a Russian Jew, washes up on the shores of America, sees the pleasant conditions and material bounty and concludes it was always like this. It’s no different than a Marxist insisting the cause of poverty is evil rich people “hoarding” their wealth, and not simply the natural state of man, temporarily overcome through tremendous effort. They look upon the results of a hundred generations of men fulfilling the duties imposed by society, and assumed it’s as natural as the sunrise. Prosperity has spoiled the Liberal and bred within he/him a pernicious normalcy bias.

Ideally, a government exists to facilitate the accumulation of social capital, removing barriers to its creation and erecting barriers to its depletion. Facilitating the creation of social capital is to facilitate every person within a society to perform their duties as best as they are able. As mentioned previously, White countries have accumulated so much social capital for so long, we are able to tolerate a state of affairs that represents a total inversion of the ideal. A state of affairs in which the government actively burns through the accumulated social capital created over decades while cruelly punishing men who are still in the habit of fulfilling their duties to their country.

Before I propose a solution to this state of affairs, I would like to talk about what the solution is not. I believe it is baked into the White man’s DNA to try to better their circumstances. Any solution to our dispossession that demands a change in our nature is doomed to fail, either through not working, or leaving us appreciably worse than before. An attempt to emulate the behavior of Jews, blacks, Arabs, Hispanics, etc, is a recipe for disaster. Not only are our racial playbooks completely different, we’re not even playing the same game. Trying to make deals with powerful ethnic cohorts is also a non-starter. Showing up to the political arena with a thirty-seven point policy wishlist is just pathetic. They hate us for who we are, we want them to leave on account of what they do. One is a more powerful motivator than the other. Forming grand plans about the structure of The Ethnostate™ and demanding adherence to a pipe dream isn’t going to do anyone any good either. I could go on, but I hope you get my point.

I’ve advocated BANTS (Be A Nigger to The System) in the past, and I still do. BANTS must be used with the proper mindset. For those unaware, BANTS is the idea that you, as a White person, should never ignore an opportunity to take advantage of The System (your job, government services, actively not cooperating with law enforcement, working off the books, etc), just like a nigger would. Thus “Be A Nigger to The System.” You must be cautious to not become the nigger you’re acting like. To defeat monsters, we mustn’t become monsters ourselves. Think of BANTS not as a solution to your problems, but rather as a raid on enemy supplies. There’s still more work to do, and you’ve been granted resources by providence to accomplish higher goals.

The solution is not to take power, but rather to build power. We must, each of us, put ourselves in positions where we can leverage our natural inclination to better our circumstances while sacrificing as little to the system as possible. The exact way of going about that is an entire series of articles by itself. For now, however, we can start with small steps. Stop giving money to people who hate you. Start giving money to people who provide worthwhile goods and services who are on your side. Make friends in real life and form intentional communities. Become less dependent on The System. In short, our duty is no longer to the broken society in which we live, but to one another.

At this point in the game, very little is being asked of each of us. Libertarianism would be rather tolerable if, on the whole, they knew the shot and recognized the notion of duty in principle, even if they honored the concept in the breach. Instead, libertarianism and objectivism form a powerful example of false assumptions leading to incoherence.

Before wrapping up this article, I feel I must defend myself. I’ve been accused of being a libertarian myself, and the accusation is not entirely unfair. I agree wholeheartedly with some of the goals of libertarianism (limited government, low taxes, voluntary association, individual rights, etc), and I view advocates of big government as irresponsible layabouts or neurotic control freaks (usually both, and neither without reason). My adoption of these stances is based on my experience. Whites, particularly White Americans, have done a pretty damn good job forming voluntary associations without the need of daddy government’s commands or permission. As I pointed out above, the much touted “spontaneous order” is simply an aspect of Western European, and thus American culture. It’s the recognition, at a deeply internalized level that freedom is the reward of virtue, not vice versa.

And frankly, nobody in this thing has given me any reason to think things would be better with them in charge instead of nobody at all. Quite the opposite.