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Reprinted from The Objectivist Forum, December 1981

Q & A Department

Q: Does the law of identity imply that at every instant in time a moving object must be located at a definite point in space?

A: No. The law of identity implies that there are no such things as “instants in time” or “points in space”—not in the sense assumed in the question.

Every unit of length, no matter how small, has some specific extension; every unit of time, no matter how small, has some specific duration. The idea of an infinitely small amount of length or temporal duration has validity only as a mathematical device useful for making certain calculations, not as a description of components of reality. Reality does not contain either points or instants (in the mathematical sense). By analogy: the average family has 2.2 children, but no actual family has 2.2 children: the “average family” exists only as a mathematical device.

Now consider the manner in which the question ignores the context and meaning of the concepts of “location” and “identity.” The concept of “location” arises in the content of entities which are at rest relative to each other. A thing’s location is the place where it is situated. But a moving object is not at any one place—it is in motion. One can locate a moving object only in the sense of specifying the location of the larger fixed region through which it is moving during a given period of time. For instance: “Between 4:00 and 4:05 p.m., the car was moving through New York City.” One can narrow down the time period and, correspondingly, the region; but one cannot narrow down the time to nothing in the contradictory attempt to locate the moving car at a single, fixed position. If it is moving, it is not at a fixed position.

The law of identity does not attempt to freeze reality. Change exists; it is a fact of reality. When a thing is changing that is what it is doing, that is its identity for that period. What is still is still. What is in process is in process. A is A.

Email the author - hb@harrybinswanger.com

Almost a million people have viewed this article since it was originally published in Forbes Online at the start of 2014.

President Obama’s Kansas speech is a remarkable document. In calling for more government controls, more taxation, more collectivism, he has two paragraphs that give the show away. Take a look at them.

Though not in Washington, I’m in that “certain crowd” that has been saying for decades that the market will take care of everything. It’s not really a crowd, it’s a tiny group of radicals–radicals for capitalism, in Ayn Rand’s well-turned phrase.

The only thing that the market doesn’t take care of is anti-market acts: acts that initiate physical force. That’s why we need government: to wield retaliatory force to defend individual rights.

Radicals for capitalism would, as the Declaration of Independence says, use government only “to secure these rights”–the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. (Yes, I added “property” in there–property rights are inseparable from the other three.)

That’s the political philosophy on which Obama is trying to hang the blame for the recent financial crisis and every other social ill. But ask yourself, are we few radical capitalists in charge? Have radical capitalists been in charge at any time in the last, oh, say 100 years?

I pick 100 years deliberately, because it was exactly 100 years ago that a gigantic anti-capitalist measure was put into effect: the Federal Reserve System. For 100 years, government, not the free market, has controlled money and banking. How’s that worked out? How’s the value of the dollar held up since 1913? Is it worth one-fiftieth of its value then or only one-hundredth? You be the judge. How did the dollar hold up over the 100 years before this government take-over of money and banking? It actually gained slightly in value.

Laissez faire hasn’t existed since the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. That was the first of a plethora of government crimes against the free market.

Radical capitalists are just beginning to have a slight effect on the Right wing. The overwhelming majority on the Right are eclectic. Which is a nice way of saying inconsistent.

The typical Republican would never, ever say “the market will take care of everything.” He’d say, “the market will take care of most things, and for the other things, we need the regulatory-welfare state.”

They are for individualism–except when they are against it. They are against free markets and individualism not only when they agree with the Left that we must have antitrust laws and the Federal Reserve, but also when they demand immigration controls, government schools, regulatory agencies, Medicare, laws prohibiting abortion, Social Security, “public works” projects, the “social safety net,” laws against insider trading, banking regulation, and the whole system of fiat money.

Obama blames economic woes, some real some manufactured (“inequality”) on a philosophy and policy that was abandoned a century ago. What doesn’t exist is what he says didn’t work.

Obama absurdly suggests that timid, half-hearted, compromisers, like George W. Bush, installed laissez-faire capitalism–on the grounds that they tinkered with one or two regulations (Glass-Steagall) and marginal tax rates–while blanking out the fact that under the Bush administration, government spending ballooned, growing much faster than under Clinton, and 50,000 new regulations were added to the Federal Register.

The philosophy of individualism and the politics of laissez faire would mean government spending of about one-tenth its present level. It would also mean an end to all regulatory agencies: no SEC, FDA, NLRB, FAA, OSHA, EPA, FTC, ATF, CFTC, FHA, FCC–to name just some of the better known of the 430 agencies listed in the federal register.

Even you, dear reader, are probably wondering how on earth anyone could challenge things like Social Security, government schools, and the FDA. But that’s not the point. The point is: these statist, anti-capitalist programs exist and have existed for about a century. The point is: Obama is pretending that the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society were repealed, so that he can blame the financial crisis on capitalism. He’s pretending that George Bush was George Washington.We radical capitalists say that it was the regulatory-welfare state that imploded in 2008. You may disagree, but let’s argue that out, rather than engaging in the Big Lie that what failed was laissez faire and individualism.

The question is: in the messy mixture of government controls and remnants of capitalism, which element caused the Great Depression and the recent financial crisis?

By raising that question, we uncover the fundamental: the meaning of capitalism and the meaning of government controls. Capitalism means freedom. Government means force.

Suddenly, the whole issue comes into focus: Obama is saying that freedom leads to poverty and force leads to wealth. He’s saying: “Look, we tried leaving you free to live your own life, and that didn’t work. You have to be forced, you have to have your earnings seized by the state, you have to work under our directions–under penalty of fines or imprisonment. You don’t deserve to be free.”

As a bit of ugly irony, this is precisely what former white slave-owners said after the Civil War: “The black man can’t handle freedom; we have to force him for his own good.” The innovation of the Left is to extend that viewpoint to all races.

Putting the issue as force vs. freedom shows how the shoe is on the other foot regarding what Obama said. Let me re-write it:

How does that sound? That’s blaming an actual, existing condition–government controls and wealth-expropriation–not a condition that ended in the late 19th century.

So which is the path to prosperity and happiness–freedom or force? Remember that force is aimed at preventing you from acting on your rational judgment.

Obama’s real antagonist is Ayn Rand, who made the case that reason is man’s basic means of survival and coercion is anti-reason. Force initiated against free, innocent men is directed at stopping them from acting on their own thinking. It makes them, under threat of fines and imprisonment, act as the government demands rather than as they think their self-interest requires. That’s the whole point of threatening force: to make people act against their own judgment.

The radical, uncompromised, laissez-faire capitalism that Obama pretends was in place in 2008 is exactly what morality demands. Because, as Ayn Rand wrote: “No man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others. . . . To claim the right to initiate the use of physical force against another man–the right to compel his agreement by the threat of physical destruction–is to evict oneself automatically from the realm of rights, of morality and of the intellect.”

Obama and his fellow statists have indeed evicted themselves
from that realm.

Email the author - hb@harrybinswanger.com

Reprinted from The Objectivist Forum, August 1981.
Material added, July 20, 2011.

Q: A government has a legal monopoly on the use of physical force within its borders. What is the answer to the “libertarian” anarchists who claim that to maintain this monopoly a government must initiate force in violation of the rights of those who wish to defend their own rights or to compete with the government by setting up private agencies to do so?

A: The anarchist claim merits discussion only to illustrate the sort of self-defeating contradictions generated by anti-philosophical movements, of which the so-called “libertarians” are a prime example.

A proper government is restricted to the protection of individual rights against violation by force or the threat of force. A proper government functions according to objective, philosophically validated procedures, as embodied in its entire legal framework, from its constitution down to its narrowest rules and ordinances. Once such a government, or anything approaching it, has been established, there is no such thing as a “right” to “compete” with the government—i.e., to act as judge, jury, and executioner. Nor does one gain such a “right” by joining with others to go into the “business” of wielding force.

To carry out its function of protecting individual rights, the government must forcibly bar others from using force in ways that threaten the citizens’ rights. Private force is force not authorized by the government, not validated by its procedural safeguards, and not subject to its supervision.

The government has to regard such private force as a threat—i.e., as a potential violation of individual rights. In barring such private force, the government is retaliating against that threat.

Note that a proper government does not prohibit a man from using force to defend himself in an emergency, when recourse to the government is not available; but it does, properly, require him to prove objectively, at a trial, that he was acting in emergency self-defense. Similarly, the government does not ban private guards; but it does, properly, bring private guards under its supervision by licensing them, and does not grant them any special rights or immunities: they remain subject to the government’s authority and legal procedures.

The attempt to invoke individual rights to justify “competing” with the government collapses at the first attempt to concretize what it would mean in reality. Picture a band of strangers marching down Main Street, submachine guns at the ready. When confronted by the police, the leader of the band announces: “Me and the boys are only here to see that justice is done, so you have no right to interfere with us.” According to the “libertarian” anarchists, in such a confrontation the police are morally bound to withdraw, on pain of betraying the rights of self-defense and free trade.

Regarding the purported betrayal, one can only respond: if this be treason, make the most of it.

In fact, of course, there is no conflict between individual rights and outlawing private force: there is no right to the arbitrary use of force. No political or moral principle could require the police to stand by helplessly while others use force arbitrarily—i.e., according to whatever private notions of justice they happen to hold.

“There is only one basic principle to which an individual must consent if he wishes to live in a free, civilized society: the principle of renouncing the use of physical force and delegating to the government his right of physical self-defense, for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement. Or, to put it another way, he must accept the separation of force and whim (any whim, including his own.)” (Ayn Rand, “The Nature of Government,” The Virtue of Selfishness)

The basic questions that the anti-philosophical “libertarians” ignore or evade are: what is the nature and source of individual rights, and how are these rights to be implemented? Only by answering these questions can one proceed to consider what is or is not proper self-defense in concrete cases.

But the answers to these questions are far from self-evident. To establish even the general principles on which the detailed, concrete administration of justice depends requires political and legal philosophy (and the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics these fields presuppose). The “libertarians” take a short-cut: they plagiarize Ayn Rand’s principle that no man may initiate the use of physical force, and treat it as a mystically revealed, out-of-context absolute. This one principle, deprived of its philosophical base, is expected to replace jurisprudence, constitutions, legislatures, and courts. Then they imagine that the rest of us are obligated to accept, on faith, any gang’s promise that their use of force will be “retaliatory.”

Bear in mind that, in fact, those who would be granted the right to enforce their own notions of just retaliation include leftists who consider government intervention in the economy to be retaliation against business activities that the leftists view as “economic force.” Then there are the terrorist groups who claim that random slaughter is “retaliation” against “Zionist imperialism,” “British rule,” etc. Are we to assume that the country will have been converted to “libertarianism” before anarchism is instituted? Very well. One wing of the “libertarians” holds abortion to be murder; in their view, force against women who have abortions is retaliation in defense of the right to life. Another wing welcomed the New Left rioters of the 1960’s, including the Black Panthers, as liberators who were retaliating against “state coercion.” How will the principle of no initiated force—in a philosophical vacuum—resolve disputes of that kind?

In any society, disputes over who has the right to what are inescapable. Even strictly rational men will have disagreements of this kind, and the possibility of human irrationality, which is inherent in free will, multiplies the number of such disputes.

The issue, then is: how are political and legal disputes to be settled: by might or by right—by street fighting or by the application of objective, philosophically validated procedures?

The most twisted evasion of the “libertarian” anarchists in this context is their view that disputes concerning rights could be settled by “competition” among private force-wielders on the “free market.” This claim represents a staggering stolen concept: there is no free market until after force has been excluded. Their approach cannot be applied even to a baseball game, where it would mean that the rules of the game will be defined by whoever wins it. This has not prevented the “libertarian” anarchists from speaking of “the market for liberty” (i.e., the market for the market).

By their talk of “competition” in the context of government, these “libertarian” anarchists endorse the statists’ equation of production and force (see “The Nature of Government”). “Competition” is an economic, not a political, concept; it refers to the voluntary exchange of values, not to the exchange of gunfire.

Behind the puerile fantasies of “market solutions” to political and legal disputes lies the collectivist notion that the ideas of the individual are determined by social institutions, so that once the “proper” social institutions have been established, “the people” will automatically agree on political and legal issues, and government will no longer be necessary. In the Marxist version of anarchism, once a socialist economy has “conditioned” men to altruism, they will automatically act according to the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” In the “libertarian” version, once a capitalist economy has been established, rational selfishness will become automatic, and “the market” will act to resolve whatever short-lived disputes still arise. In the words of one of the “libertarians”: “Legislation forcing the parties [in a dispute] to submit to binding arbitration would be unnecessary, since each party would find arbitration to be in his own self-interest. Nor would it be necessary to have legal protection for the rights of all involved, because the structure of the market situation would protect them.”

In any irreconcilable dispute, at least one party will find that its view of justice is stymied. Even under anarchy, only one side will be able to enforce its ideas of where the right lies. But it does not occur to the anarchists that when one of their private “defense agencies” uses force, it is acting as a “monopolist” over whomever it coerces. It does not occur to them that private, anarchistic force is still force—i.e., the “monopolistic” subjection of another’s will to one’s own. They are aware of and object to the forcible negation of “competing” viewpoints only when it is done by a government.

Thus, their actual objection to government is not to its “monopolistic” character, but to the fact that “A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.” (“The Nature of Government”)

The real target of the anarchist’s attack is objectivity. Objectivity requires one to prove that one is acting within one’s rights; they do not want to be held accountable to anyone for anything—not even regarding their use of physical force. They damn governmental retaliation because it is objective; they demand to be “free” to use force on whim.

In the philosophical battle for a free society, the one crucial connection to be upheld is that between capitalism and reason. The religious conservatives are seeking to tie capitalism to mysticism; the “libertarians” are tying capitalism to the whim-worshipping subjectivism and chaos of anarchy.

To cooperate with either group is to betray capitalism, reason, and one’s own future.

[Added July 20, 2011]

There are two further, though lesser, arguments for anarchism that I also want to answer.

The first might be called “the argument from moral freedom.” This argument holds that it is wrong to impose morality by force, and that government, as a monopoly, necessarily does this, since it is on moral grounds that it prohibits “competitors.” The alternative to imposing morality by force, these anarchists claim, is letting a thousand flowers bloom—i.e., non-monopolizing “defense agencies,” each attracting, voluntarily, “customers” who patronize whichever agency has the moral outlook they find most congenial.

But this ignores the fact that our subject here is not the hiring of fruit-pickers or programmers but the hiring of gunmen. Terms drawn from the realm of voluntary trade, such as “competition” and “customers,” do not apply to transactions whose purpose is to command obedience. The purpose of the hired guns is precisely to establish a monopoly over human interactions, to force others to obey to one’s idea of what ought to be.

The wielding of force is monopolistic by its very nature: it is the subjugation of one side’s will to that of the other. Force does not permit dissenters to go their own way. By its nature, force is the imposition of value-judgments—the coercer’s ideas about how those subject to his power ought to behave. The monopolistic imposition of the coercer’s moral ideas is not affected by whether the force-wielder is called “the government” or “Joe’s Defense Agency.”

If one must avoid imposing moral ideas by force, then one must renounce force altogether—i.e., practice pacifism. Like all arguments against the monopolization of force, “the argument from moral freedom,” reduces to an advocacy of pacifism. Pacifism is the most nearly consistent form of anarchism. Few anarchists, however realize this. They implicitly assume that there is such a thing as physical force that lets dissenters go their own way.

Let me concretize this. If someone shoots at me and I shoot back, I am using force to impose my morality—my right to my own life—on the gunman shooting at me. To avoid imposing my morality by force, I could only try to persuade him not to kill me. I could not use defensive force against him.

The non-initiation of force principle is itself a moral principle. Individual rights are moral principles. Is it wrong to use retaliatory force to “impose” freedom and to protect rights?

This points to the equivocation in the term “imposing morality.”

It is indeed wrong for the government to “impose morality” in the sense of trying to force men to be virtuous. But that is not what a proper, limited government does: its coercive “imposition” of morality is retaliatory force used to protect freedom. It is indeed in the name of morality that the government “imposes” freedom: freedom is what makes virtuous action possible. But only the free choice of the individual can make virtue actual. Virtue cannot be coerced.

For example, it is wrong for the government to make men go to church or to stop them from going to church; it is right for the government to wield retaliatory force to secure their freedom to make this choice for themselves. Force used to maintain freedom is force used to “impose morality” to that extent. This is true whether the force is wielded by the government, a private group, or an individual. Again, the only alternative is not merely the absence of government but the absence of retaliatory force—i.e., pacifism.

The failure of “anarcho-capitalists” to see this brings me to a second point:

Anarchism is a product of and expression of collectivism.

“Anarcho-capitalists” fail to see the pacifist implications of their position because they think in terms of groups instead of individuals. They think in terms of “defense agencies,” and picture many “competing” (i.e., conflicting) agencies. These anarchists could not avoid the pacifist implications of their positions if they realized that both a government and a “defense agency” is just a group of individuals. When reduced to the level of individual-to-individual interactions, it becomes clear that “not imposing morality by force” means no individual can use force to defend himself— e.g., cannot shoot back at someone who starts shooting at him.

What if an anarchist holds that an individual is morally justified in using retaliatory force? Then so is any other individual, and so is that organization of individuals we call “the government.” The individual vigilante is acting just as monopolistically as the government. Both the retaliating individual and the government seek to stop someone else’s action. If it is morally proper for an individual to defend himself by force, it is morally proper for him to band together with others to do so—i.e., to form a government.

The same facts that make individual self-defense moral—i.e., the right to self-defense—makes governmental force moral if it is used in defense of the rights of individuals.

Government is not a collective super-organism. Government is the agent of individuals—the individuals who established and support it, by delegating their right of self-defense to it. If those individuals have the right to defend themselves, then the government, as their agent, has the right to do so on their behalf. Only a collectivized mentality can hold that the police, acting on my behalf, cannot forcibly exclude “competitors” but a “defense agency” can.

Put it this way: a proper government is a defense agency, and to carry out its mission it can’t let “competitors” (other gangs) use unsupervised force.

The telling difference between a proper government and a private defense agency is this: a proper government is placed under objective control. Thus non-pacifist anarchists object not to retaliatory force but to placing retaliatory force under objective control. Their objection is to objectivity.

The second argument of “anarcho-capitalists” is “the argument from history”: governments have always grown beyond their proper limits, so we must assume they inevitably do so.

This argument ignores why government has grown. The cause is: bad philosophic ideas—especially altruism. The history of the United States shows exactly this. Our government has grown beyond its proper limits because Americans have rejected the earlier idea of what those proper limits are. The pursuit of happiness is now regarded as ignoble; the moral ideal has become Mother Teresa, because she ignored her own happiness, despised material wealth, and devoted her life to serving the needs of the neediest. In today’s America, the ruling creed is not “Mind your own business” (Benjamin Franklin) but “compassion for the most vulnerable among us” (any politician).

It is men’s ideas that rule their actions and their politics. It is not the power-lust of politicians but the philosophical ideas of the citizenry that have caused the expansion of state power since the founding of this country. The power-lust of politicians would be impotent in a society whose citizenry—and intellectuals—held the Objectivist philosophy of reason and individualism.

Note that if one holds that the majority of men are too irrational to ever see that their own self-interest requires a free society, then one must simply give up and retreat to a deserted island. One cannot consistently advocate any ideas—including anarchism—if the vast majority will not listen to reason. If “the masses” were too irrational to keep government within its proper bounds, they would be too irrational to keep “defense agencies” to the task of actual defense.

One final wrinkle. “Anarcho-capitalists” claim that “the market” would keep defense agencies in check. (This idea represents a collectivist view of the market.) But remember: what is up for grabs here is whether or not there will be a market. When the society is turned over to warring gangs, the race goes to the bloodiest, not to the best producers.

Here again, the “anarcho-capitalists” accept the statist approach of equating the dollar and the gun, production and force. The Left claims that “concentrations of wealth” on the market are coercive. The “anarcho-capitalists” claim that coercion is just another service on the market. But both are wrong: voluntary exchange has nothing in common with coercive interactions.

Production must be kept strictly separate from destruction. A business deals in the creation of goods and services to offer on a free market; a coercer deals in destruction. The proper use of destruction is to combat destruction—to wield retaliatory force against the initiatiors of force. But retaliatory force is still destruction, not production. There is no such thing as “the market for force-wielding.” For there to be a market in the first place, those who would simply seize goods must be met with force. The benefits of a free market presuppose that freedom has been established. Market mechanisms can’t establish or protect the preconditions of there being a market.

“Anarcho-capitalism” is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism can exist only where rights are protected, including property rights. To protect rights, criminals who initiate force must be met with retaliatory force. But the wielding of retaliatory force itself must be placed under objective control, by a constitutionally limited government with objective law. Otherwise, what results is not “competing defense agencies” but civil war. That war will be won by the gang with the most ruthless and most powerful army. Under anarchy, might, not right, determines what the “laws” will be.

In terms of current events, anarchism means Lebanon or Somalia. To link such horrors with the benevolence and prosperity of capitalism is obscene.

Email the author - hb@harrybinswanger.com

Why do Objectivists disagree on immigration? Well, they really don’t. I think we all agree (certainly Leonard Peikoff does) that in a laissez-faire world, there’d be open immigration. The disagreements arise because we are light-years away from that world
.
And it’s not just that we have wrong political conditions. It’s that we know that, within the foreseeable future, we won’t enact the right solutions to the problems created by the statism.

In the case of immigration, the right solution is essentially fourfold:

1. Militarily crush Iran and its ally-states, in an all-out campaign (it would be too short to call it a war). That, coupled with a proper foreign policy, would end the rise of Islam and worry about Muslim immigration.

2. Make immigrants sign away their right–for their whole lives–to any government loot. That would end the worry about poorer immigrants coming to get welfare.

3. Make it impossible for immigrants to get the vote–for their whole lives. That would end the worry about immigrants from statist cultures voting in more statists.

4. Replace multicultural BS with the proud, morally confident assertion of America’s moral superiority over the statist and theocratic societies from which the immigrants are coming. We are right and they are wrong–politically, philosophically, and in other ways. Standing up for our values would end the worry about immigrants diluting (the fast-fading remnants of) American individualism.

But not one of these things is going to happen in the foreseeable future. So what are we to do in regard to immigration?

Look at what this means: given that our government is not going to do the right things, what should it do? But there’s no way to answer that question. If it’s not going to do the right thing, then, by definition, whatever it does will be the wrong thing. Can we pick the best, or least bad, among the wrong things? Yes, to a certain extent, but not in a principled way.

It is a contradiction in terms to ask: “On what principle should we act if we are not going to act on the principle by which we should act?”

But philosophy deals in principles.That’s why there are continuing arguments about immigration among those who accept the Objectivist philosophy.

Deprived of the guidance of principles, the issue then becomes one of concrete facts. Do immigrants, in the aggregate, take more out of the economy than they contribute? Some of us think “yes,” others think “no.” Will the immigrants assimilate and become Americans in spirit as well as in legal status, given our multiculturalist intellectual establishment? It’s a factual question, on which views differ. If immigrants are going to be given citizenship, will they vote leftist or could a better Republican strategy (and other ideological work by us) prevent this? Is there a really dangerous threat to our safety from massive Muslim immigration, or is this a very minor issue compared to what’s going to happen to us from Islamic regimes abroad, with or without that immigration?

People can certainly differ on these factual issues, and raw, statistical (!) facts are all we have left when we can’t appeal to principles, because the principled path is not “politically realistic.”

Email the author - hb@harrybinswanger.com

[On cleaning out old files on my hard drive, I came across this which I posted in 2012, on the occasion of my 50th “birthday” as an Objectivist. In the hope that you will enjoy reading it, I am reposting it now, with a few very small changes.]

Exactly 50 years ago, a bored, depressed college freshman, who was only half-listening to a lecture, suddenly sat up straight, leaned forward, and strained to understand every word he was hearing.

The place was MIT’s Kresge auditorium, the lecturer was Ayn Rand, the student was me.

I’m taking this 50th anniversary as an occasion to tell the personal story of my introduction to Objectivism.

These were the words that, 50 years ago, struck me to the core and set my life on a new trajectory:

Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality–or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.

I recall my reaction–the exact words–very clearly. It was “Jesus Christ! I’m drifting in a semiconscious daze right now!”–which had been absolutely true right up until I heard Ayn Rand speak those words. I thought, “This is the most important thing I’ve ever heard. It’s the key to everything: I can take control of my own mind, and thus of my life.” (The wording of that part is approximate.)

I next was puzzled and intrigued by this aspect: her idea sounded familiar, as if I, and everyone, already knew it, as if it were the accepted wisdom; yet I was dead sure I’d never heard anyone say anything remotely like it before. How could that be?

That passage occurred halfway through Miss Rand’s presentation of “The Objectivist Ethics.” For the rest of the lecture, I strained to focus on it, though I couldn’t absorb more than 10% of what she was saying–almost all of it was just unintegrateable to me (in my defense, I was 17). But here’s what I have always recalled.

First, she quoted, more than once from John Galt. But clearly, he was her own fictional creation, so she was quoting herself as an authority. “What nerve!” I thought–but in admiration. (From my college experience, I was already sick of the pretentious, second-handed over-quoting of “authorities”.)

Second, she was absolute, radical, black-and-white. I loved that. It especially made her stand out in what was still the atmosphere of the Eisenhower, “Leave it to Beaver,” 50s, even though JFK was president. It was an era when “That’s a value-judgment” was said in reproach, when no one wanted to rock the boat, when one of the top intellectual hits was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s book, “The Vital Center” (which argued that the arguments for communism and free enterprise were interchangeable, so the best thing to do was take a middle position).

It was a time when profundity was ascribed to statements like, “Everything is relative,” and “Values are subjective.” So Ayn Rand’s certainty, passion, and non-centrism made her stand out–and fit very well with my own premises. (About the only thing I knew about Ayn Rand before attending her talk was when I overheard a student saying, “I’m not advocating radical individualism, like Ayn Rand.” I thought, “Radical individualism? That sounds good.”

Ayn Rand herself gave the best description of what then was de rigeur for intellectual sophisticates: “militant uncertainty, crusading cynicism, dogmatic agnosticism, boastful self-abasement and self-righteous depravity . . .” [For the New Intellectual] That description is unfortunately still applicable.

Third, in the question period, I was struck by her response to two questions. When asked, “Are you an atheist?” she answered, “Of course,” as if slightly surprised by being even asked–something like how you would respond if asked, “Do you wear warmer clothing in winter?” On hearing that “Of course,” I instantly became an atheist. Before, I had been a woozy agnostic (“Maybe there’s some basic principle of the universe–like ‘Every process tends toward equilibrium’–that’s an impersonal kind of divinity.”) The sheer tone with which she said “Of course,” yanked the whole issue out of the realm of “What if?” and threw it into a factual, rational, scientific context for me. I realized that the actual question was: “Do I believe there’s some Spirit-Stuff out there beyond the moon? Is that rational?” And the answer was clearly “No.”

Now, Ayn Rand went on to explain that she accepted reason and only reason, and that in thousands of years, no purportedly rational argument for God had ever stood up to inspection. And that added a sense of objectivity to my reaction (I already held infinite respect for reason, knowing that it was what had lifted man up from the cave.)

The other answer which impressed me was in response to being asked what Objectivists held in regard to “sexual ethics.” Her answer began: “We are very chaste.” I was impressed once again. Here was a modern, science-loving intellectual who dared to say “chaste”–in an age when everyone pretending to be sophisticated claimed that sex was a matter of hormones held in check only by taboos.

She went on to explain that sex was a great value, that she was pro-sex, not prudish, etc. What her answer said to me was: she takes herself very seriously. She considers her choices, her values, and her person to be sacred. That appealed to me on a deep level.

Shortly after her speaking event came MIT’s spring break, and I returned to my family home in Richmond, determined to buy the book she had been quoting from: Atlas Shrugged. I went to Thalheimer’s department store, which had a book section, and picked up the paperback. It was very thick. I didn’t like reading, finding it a physically uncomfortable process (perhaps due to visual problems), and I had never read a book of more than about 200 pages. Looking at the size of Atlas, I thought, “Wow, this could be 300 or even 350 pages long!” (Fortunately, I didn’t check the actual length.)

Steeling myself, I purchased it anyway, went to a nearby coffee shop, and began reading over my grilled cheese sandwich.

At the top of the second page, I came to this:

The clouds and the shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of a motionless lightning, the length of ten stories.

I was puzzled: how come there was a long crack in a skyscraper? How come the atmosphere of decay? Was this set in the future? Was it science-fiction?

I turned back to the beginning and started to read much more carefully. The rest is history.

I read Atlas very slowly, in small segments, because I needed time to integrate the meaning of what I was reading. It took about a month to finish the novel. By the time I reached Galt’s speech, I was completely sold.

Several things in that first reading stood out in my mind. Early on–I think it was about page 60–I got the idea that Dagny (and Ayn Rand) considered selfishness to be good. On realizing that, I thought: “Wow! She’s gone further than I have: I’ve rejected the idea that selfishness is wrong, but she is saying it is good! I like that!” (I had always been accused of being selfish by my mother, which only made me dislike her.)

To brag a bit: I knew from the first scene with Eddie in the Taggart cafeteria that his mysterious friend, who never was given any lines, was John Galt. That’s because the back cover of my paperback had the line: “The astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world–and did.” I remembered that line when I read Eddie Willers saying to the mysterious stranger:

Motive power–you can’t imagine how important that is. That’s the heart of everything. . . . What are you smiling at?

What, indeed! I “got” it.

Leaving aside falling in love with the characters, especially Francisco, I remember being troubled, from a literary standpoint, when I came to this statement by the old cigarette vendor in the Taggart Terminal: “Miss Taggart, to the best of my knowledge, that cigarette was not made anywhere on earth.”

“Oh no,” I thought. “Is this signaling that the strikers have gone to the moon or Mars?” Because I knew that their doing that was just not credible, and it would have taken the whole novel–and its meaning–into the realm of fantasy. In comparison to that thought, the refractor ray in the Rockies seemed downright conservative.

Another needless (though author-intended) worry came when I read:

In mounting panic, the watchers lost their sense of context and language–and their three voices blended into a progression of indiscriminate shrieks: “We want you to take over! . . . We want you to rule! . . . We order you to give orders! . . . We demand that you dictate! We order you to save us! . . . We order you to think! . . . ”

They heard no answer but the beating of the heart on which their own lives depended.

The current was shooting through Galt’s chest and the beating was coming in irregular spurts, as if it were racing and stumbling–when suddenly his body fell still, relaxing: the beating had stopped.

What? Has Galt died?! That would ruin the whole thing!

It was with infinite relief that I read what actually happened, climaxed by Galt calmly saying:

“It’s the vibrator that’s out of order,” said a voice behind them; they whirled around; Galt was struggling for breath, but he was speaking in the brusque, competent tone of an engineer. “Take it out and pry off the aluminum cover. You’ll find a pair of contacts fused together. Force them apart, take a small file and clean up the pitted surfaces. Then replace the cover, plug it back into the machine–and your generator will work.”

What a scene!

What was I to do when I finished the book? Well, for one thing I read this in “A message from the Author,” that was appended to the end of the paperback edition:

If you are the kind of reader who knows that for 1084 pages he has lived in the atmosphere of John Galt’s world–if you now feel regret at the necessity of returning to the gray hopelessness of a culture that is truly bankrupt–if you have understood that it is ideas which create or destroy a world, a culture or a man–if you have understood that the rejection of reason by the neo-mystics of our age is responsible for the present state of the world–then you now why only a philosophy of reason can lead to an intellectual Renaissance.

I was that kind of reader, at least about the regret of leaving John Galt’s world. To her appendix, my reaction was: “Jesus! She not only gave me this unprecedented emotional and intellectual experience, she knows that she did!”

That served even more to take this out of the realm of “a story” into the realm of practical reality. There followed a reference to lectures on her philosophy in New York City, with contact information. I realized there was much more to be gained, that there was a “movement,” which had action-implications for me.

After finishing Atlas, not wanting to accept anything on emotion, I decided to take a full year before absolutely committing myself to this philosophy. During the year, I made it a point not only to learn everything that I could about Objectivism, but also to seek out criticism from opponents. I knew that people disagreed with her, and I wanted to hear “the other side.” I knew I was young and ignorant–maybe there was some fatal flaw in the philosophy that could be pointed out to me. People sure seemed to think there was.

But over the course of the year, every time I asked what the error was in her ideas, I got back some answer that was reminiscent of lines given to the villains in the novel. You know, things like “It isn’t that black and white.” And, “She’s advocating dog-eat-dog, the law of the jungle.” And, “No one can prove an issue of values.” And, “Businessmen use force, too–economic force.”

I thought, “It’s not that her opponents see something she missed; she knows their arguments–and the answers to them. She knows what they know–and more.”

So, on March 12, 1963, I formally accepted what had long been true in fact: I was an Objectivist. To mark my acceptance, I repeated the striker’s oath:

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another to live for mine.

Email the author - hb@harrybinswanger.com

[Reprinted from Forbes Online, 3/4/2013]

What has happened to America? When did the land of the free become “You can’t land here”? Did we fight a Civil War to end slavery, in order then to put a wall around the country and keep “undesirables” out? Did we fight against Nazism in order to make our own class of “untermenschen,” and to have petty tyrants demand: “Where are your papers?!”

Freedom of travel is a right. It is a right possessed by every human being, not just by Americans. The Mexican government or the French government has no right to stop you from entering Mexico or France, and our government has no right to stop a Mexican or Frenchman from entering America.

The country does not belong to the government. It does not belong to the majority. Land belongs to individual, private owners, and only they have the right to invite or bar others from coming on their land.

The government has no more right to lock people out than to lock them in. The same principle damning the Berlin Wall damns walls erected to keep people out.

It is said we need to “secure our borders,” but that phrase is pure spin. To secure them against what? Nannies, engineers, carpenters, and waiters?

What about terrorists? The answer to terrorism is not to cower down in a bunker-America. The answer to terrorism is decisive military strikes against our enemies, especially Iran, to punish or end the regimes that sponsor terrorism. Make the rogue regimes worry about securing their borders.

If the laws restricting entry are dead wrong, what are we to think of those “illegals” who have disobeyed these laws? Everyone seems to think that entering the country without the government’s permission is a serious offense, that the illegals should at the least be “sent to the back of the line,” that their law-breaking forever stains them with dishonor. But the law is wrong. The stain of dishonor is not on the illegals but on the illegalizers.

The illegals came here because they value America. They broke an unjust law in order to live a free, better, richer life. In the vast majority of cases, obeying anti-immigration laws would mean never getting to live here. It’s a life sentence.

Breaking bad laws to build a better life is not dishonorable; it is admirable, provided breaking the law involves no use of force. Coming here in defiance of unjust laws is a peaceful act; it is just the avoidance of the force our government would initiate against them. It is certainly wrong to wield private force; it is wrong to take the law into one’s own hand. But these are not involved in illegal immigration.

There is no moral requirement to martyr oneself to any form of obedience to others-neither to their opinions nor to the disgraceful, rights-violating laws they pass.

An “illegal” immigrant is, in principle, like a Jew in Nazi Germany who refused to wear the yellow star. Yes, I grant you that ours is not a barbarous dictatorship like the Nazi regime, and in the name of objectivity, there is a certain deference due to legality and lawfulness as such. But not at the price of wasting one’s life in Senegal, Haiti, or even Greece, instead of America.

The principle established at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials was that a monstrous act cannot be excused by saying that one was merely obeying the law-“just following orders.” Basic morality trumps the merely legal. The corollary is that one cannot be condemned for disobeying a monstrous law merely on the grounds that “those are the rules,” “the nation decided, so just follow orders.” A monstrous law should neither be obeyed nor enforced. It must be repealed.

It is not enough to give “illegals” amnesty. These long-oppressed individuals deserve an official apology from our government.

Email the author - hb@harrybinswanger.com

Email the author - hb@harrybinswanger.com