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Ryan Takes on 83 For Truth

My friend Ryan Neugebauer took on “83 for Truth” in this traveling video. As he writes in his preface to “Did 83 For Truth Convert Me to Christianity?“:

I called the 83 For Truth hotline in the United States (833-678-7884). I tried to speak in terms of things they could relate to (e.g. hard drugs). I also was hyperbolic (I said there were like 50,000 species that take part in homosexual behaviors when it’s more like over 1,000 observed and confirmed as of 2019 so far, but it makes my point regardless) and lied about details about me (I actually did grow up in a religious household). Nonetheless, they may have gotten me anyway! Listen to find out….

Ryan takes on the view of Aristotelian flourishing against both relgiously-mandated morality and the relativists who deny any possibility of an objective basis for ethics. Along the way, he touches on questions of sexuality, God, and agnosticism. The cinematographer was pretty good at capturing Ryan’s passion.

All I can say is… “Dale” was left pretty much speechless. Well argued, hilarious at times, and … what an opening thumbnail!

Posted in: Culture, Dialectics, Politics (Theory, History, Now), Religion, Sexuality

The Enragés: Dialectics with Ryan & Eric

I was delighted to listen to a new podcast of The Enragés at the Center for a Stateless Society (to which I was recently added as a fellow). The show is hosted by my dear friend Eric Fleischmann, who interviews yet another dear friend, Ryan Neugebauer, on his enlightening article, “Market, State, and Anarchy: A Dialectical Left-Libertarian Perspective” (previously discussed on Notablog here).

I have known Eric since he was a junior in high school, and have had the pleasure not only to read and comment on his work but to highlight his music as well. As for Ryan, we’ve known each other for five years now, and our ongoing dialogue has been a Notablog feature. Ryan has recently begun building an impressive series of self-reflective articles on Medium, detailing his many journeys—intellectual, personal, and spiritual. The courage and vulnerability exhibited in these essays speak volumes.

Aside from my friendship with these two wonderful individuals, they have both been, in many respects, students of my work. The good news is that they have had an impact on my life and work as well; I’ve been challenged by—and learned from—each of them.

The first question out of the gate deals with how we were introduced to one another and on how my dialectical libertarian approach impacted their thinking. It then proceeds into a wide-ranging discussion that lasts nearly an hour-and-a-half. They confront a diversity of issues, including the nature of ‘freed’ markets, the commons, authority, class conflict, and the state. Nearly every political ‘ism’ under the sun is addressed, from free-market-propertarianism and state socialism to distributism, democratic socialism, and anarchism (in all its varieties).

Most pleasing is the way in which they put dialectics to work, focusing on the structural and dynamic problems generated by the system that exists. They both repudiate binary thinking and navigate the tensions we face in our analysis of apparent opposites. And in their exchange, they place high importance on the necessity to adjust to changing contexts in our prescriptive thinking.

Ryan’s fine article is enriched by a commitment to genuinely progressive ideals. But ideals—inspiring though they may be—act primarily as guideposts in carrying forth an agenda for social change. As Eric puts it, Ryan shows that an array of traditions promising social change on both the left and the right often skip the most important starting point for prescriptive thinking: that context matters, that we must begin by asking the questions: “Where are you? What do you have? How did it get there? And what can we do to improve people’s lives in that situation?”

This podcast provides us with a thoughtful exchange that is fully accessible in its substance, conversational in its tone, and not lacking in a sense of humor. Indeed, when Ryan jokingly refers to himself as “Mr. Addendum” or uses phrases like “It depends [on the context]”—he’s preaching to the choir!

Check it out C4SS, Stitcher, Before It’s News, Twitter, and YouTube (see below)!

Posted in: Austrian Economics, Blog / Personal Business, Culture, Dialectics, Education, Film / TV / Theater Review, Pedagogy, Politics (Theory, History, Now)

DWR (9): Woke Warriors and Anti-Woke Crusaders: The Ominous Parallels

This Notablog post is another installment in my ongoing “Dialogues with Ryan” series, an index to which can be found here. Ryan Neugebauer is a very dear friend. I recently highlighted his wonderful interview on The Enragés [YouTube link].

In considering the topic at hand of “Woke” and “Anti-Woke”, let me just say that the very word “Woke” verges on becoming what Ayn Rand once called an “anti-concept” insofar as it entails some kind of “’package-deal’ of disparate, incongruous, contradictory elements taken out of any logical conceptual order or context”. Indeed, at this stage, it has become a mere pejorative, which in the hands of its ‘opponents’ is used as a bludgeon against any legitimate social justice cause.

Given these conditions, I’d like to state upfront that my values are fairly in sync with the causes of social justice. When I hear prospective GOP presidential candidate Governor Ron “DeSantimonious” tell folks that the “free state of Florida” is the place “where woke goes to die” and that he’d like to extend his anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-“CRT”-bullying to the country-at-large, I want to puke. Not because there aren’t problems with some of the Woke Warriors (I’ll get to that in a minute), but because his agenda is blatantly authoritarian and no friend to the cosmopolitan cultural values requisite to the sustenance of a free and civil society.

That said, over the course of the past few months, my dialogues with Ryan have focused on several things that need qualification and clarification. Because from what I’ve seen from both the “Woke Warriors” and the “Anti-Woke Crusaders”, I think there is a “false alternative” at work, which is rarely if ever acknowledged. As Rand often said of many of the conventional dichotomies we face in philosophical, cultural, and political discourse: “These two positions appear to be antagonists, but are, in fact, two variants on the same theme, two sides of the same fraudulent coin …”

And in the case of the Woke Warriors and the Anti-Woke Crusaders, the parallels have become all too ominous.

Some of this was touched upon in my previous discussions with Ryan over the problems with cancel culture, but so much more has come to light in the wake of two recent events: 1) the release of the Hogwart’s Legacy video game, which prompted a call to ‘boycott’ that game and all things related to J. K. Rowling because of her strident anti-trans views and 2) this past weekend’s 95th Annual Academy Awards, which prompted condemnations right and left. The Oscars are typically dismissed by conservatives for their ‘woke ideology’ that caters to “inclusivity”. Some of my Objectivist pals went so far as to condemn the Best Picture-winner, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” for its alleged “postmodern incoherence”—perhaps a sign that their “crow” was overloaded, and that they couldn’t quite compute a storyline steeped in nuance and complexity. Some keen observers have interpreted that unique, if challenging, film thru the lens of ‘metamodernism’, in which chaos and catharsis meet, providing us with a reaffirmation of shared values that underscore our common humanity (“we are all useless alone”), our need for efficacy (“it’s only a matter of time before everything balances itself out”) and our yearning for connection (“I will always, always want to be here with you”)—all gloriously sentimental lines that one could not possibly find in a film derided as “nihilistic.”

But then there were those among “cringey ‘progressives’”, as Ryan calls them, who dumped on Best Actor Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser, who starred in “The Whale”. Why? — you may ask. Because he portrayed an obese gay man, while being neither obese nor gay in real life. The Guardian went so far as to call the film “a joyless, harmful fantasy of fat squalor”. Such cringey ‘progressive’ attitudes ignore the remarkably humane, moving, and heartbreaking performance of its lead actor, who embodied (in more ways than just the physical) a character full of regrets, trying to bridge the gaps in his life among family and friends. Along the way, that film confronts not only issues of sexuality, grief, disconnectedness, and alienation, but also the tragic consequences of religious bigotry, and how it can erode the human soul.

Alas, all of this is symptomatic of a deepening cultural divide. While Anti-Woke Crusaders on the right have been trying to suppress every and any mention of ‘the other’ in libraries and books, in classrooms and even in Disneyworld—a clear swipe at people who are not white, male, heteronormative, or otherwise ‘normal’ and ‘decent’, the Woke Warriors on the left have been trying to denounce and suppress anything that does not fall perfectly in line with their social justice ideals. And if can’t be suppressed, then it must be ‘sanitized’ and ‘rewritten’ to conform to those ideals. What we continue to witness is a ‘take-no-prisoners’ culture war, where each side is so caught up in its own narratives, so undialectical, that they blind themselves to the fuller context of any specific issue they address.

Can “Bad” People Create “Good” Art?

Back in 2019, in an article entitled “Michael Jackson, Ten Years After: Man or Monster in the Mirror?”, I addressed the issue of whether people whom we perceive as “bad” can in fact create good art. I am the first person to stand up for the principle that our understanding of any artist or thinker is deeply enriched by understanding their life and context (Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, anyone?). I am also of the belief that it is possible—even necessary—to be able to separate the creator from the creation. It’s a hermeneutical truth, as Paul Ricoeur would have emphasized, that every creation is “detached from its author and develops consequences of its own. In so doing, it transcends its relevance to its initial situation and addresses an indefinite range of possible readers.” Every time any creation—be it a book, idea, or artwork—enters the world, it leaves the domain of the creator and begins to speak to countless individuals in myriad ways. And every time each of us, as “readers”, is exposed to that creation, our response to it remains deeply personal, profoundly entwined with our own emotions and life experiences. And that is as it should be.

But things are never quite as they should be.

On February 10, 2023, after the Potter video game was released, my friend Ryan remarked in a Facebook post:

I don’t think it’s inherently wrong to enjoy Harry Potter stuff while opposing JK and her transphobia. I’m tired of puritanical nonsense in social justice circles. There are people who would say that if you grew up enjoying those movies and got a set of the movies before you knew anything about her transphobia, you’re still expected to give up watching and enjoying them. I find that so utterly absurd.

When Ryan wrote that, it was as if the world stopped spinning on its axis for a few folks; many people became incensed over it. And so, I not only came to Ryan’s defense, but took it a few steps further:

This whole thing is INSANE. And now, I’m just going to get on my soap box and let the chips fall where they may! I understand people’s concerns over this issue of putting money into the pockets of those whose views or actions we find abhorrent. Everybody is entitled to make their own decisions on this. But … I have every Harry Potter book, audio book, and DVD, not to mention all the soundtracks to every one of the films. I even bought Harry Potter figurines for loved ones who were in love with the Potter franchise. I despise Rowling’s anti-trans views, but dems de breaks. In the wide scheme of things, my dollars mean little. But if I had to stop myself from purchasing the products of artists / intellectuals who have had moral and legal issues, FUHGEDABOUDIT. I might as well start climbing down into hell right now.

Michael Jackson may very well have been a pedophile, even though he wasn’t convicted in a court of law. I love his music and have bought every MJ release in history; I saw him in person twice, and even saw “MJ: The Musical”. Roman Polanski is a fugitive from justice for having been arrested for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl; I have purchased DVDs and Blu-Rays of some of his greatest films: “Chinatown”, “Rosemary’s Baby”, and “The Pianist”. Frank Sinatra may have been involved with the mob and may have been a notorious ‘womanizer’; I can’t count the number of CDs or the number of films of his that I have purchased over the years.

Suppose the estates of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin and Richard Wagner were still collecting royalties. Those notorious anti-Semites! Woops… I own a lot of the literature of Proudhon and Bakunin and some of the great music of Wagner. To hell I shall go! (I’ll sidestep Kanye West, because I’m not a fan!)

I’d like to find other means of procuring stuff so that it doesn’t appear that I’m “sanctioning” flawed human beings. (Christ, that sounds so Randroid!) But if I can’t, I won’t, and I sure as hell will NEVER censor my aesthetic responses based on the fact that so many people who have contributed to the art and thought of this world are terribly flawed human beings in real life. It may be easier in this day of YouTube to create playlists of musicians without having to pay for it, and I’m all for getting things for less money or for free. But finding pirated copies of films to substitute for the real thing typically doesn’t work; their quality sucks. And in the end, life is too short. I’m just not going to deny myself the pleasure of enjoying the things I love because some of the people who create these works suck as human beings. I’m sure if people look into my past, they’ll find a few skeletons too. “He who is without sin” and all… and yep, I’ll die on this hill.

Moreover, I lamented that —

We live during a period where intolerance of difference has become a virtue. And I’m NOT saying that tolerance requires us to hug Nazis and Tankies; I’m only saying: let’s cut each other a little slack. It’s possible even for people who share broad fundamental values to have lots of differences between them. I relish that! Celebrate the differences, be open to discussing and learning from one another, give people the benefit of the doubt. It’s not all “black-and-white”; life is often an exercise in many shades of gray. And moreover, life is too short.

Greater Clarity

The following day, Ryan observed:

Since September 2018 (when I made this account), I’ve been unfriended by several Left-Libertarians and several Conservatives. Funny enough for different stances on the same issues. The Left-Libertarians unfriended me over my lack of puritanism around their conception of identity politics and the Conservatives unfriended me for my defense of Trans/Non-binary identities. Most recently, a right-wing moron from my high school days unfriended me because I called out his stupidity on Trans/Non-binary people. And yesterday I got unfriended by a Left-Libertarian for defending my continued consumption of Harry Potter content. You can’t please everyone and you shouldn’t submit to someone just because they throw a fit. I’d rather people who you have to walk on eggshells around take themselves out of my life. I don’t enjoy being around such suffocating energy. … I don’t kick people out of my life who go to Chick-fil-A, despite my issues with that company donating to anti-LGBT causes. If you do, that’s your prerogative and I won’t shame you for it. But I don’t think these are healthy ways of relating to others. … People who have a certain rigidity on social justice discourse … act like religious conservatives who are investigating thought crime.

Upon reflection, that last sentence, which I’ve highlighted, struck a chord in me: indeed, it is the key to the title of this post. And it wasn’t until after Brendan Fraser won his Best Actor Oscar that it all became clearer. As Ryan remarked:

I swear, some people spend all their days looking for things to be outraged about or to critique. And they cannot stand when others are not in agreement with their critique. …

Just as I call out and condemn the right-wing for their “anti-wokeness” and bigotry, I try my best to call out what I consider absurd, cringey, and outright wrong social “progressivism”.

There’s a contingent of people who will shit on just about anything that doesn’t meet their conception of purist standards. On their view, only a gay man can play a gay man. Only a Trans person can play a Trans person. And so on. Some critique this film [“The Whale”] because Brendan Fraser used prosthetics. First of all, his character was supposed to be like 600 lbs. Goodluck finding a solid actor who weighs that much and can actually do the role without negative consequences. Not to mention, I don’t think any of us would say that’s a good state of affairs to be in (it’s objectively unhealthy and a serious situation).

There’s something to be said for opposing fatphobia, but there’s also something to be said for not glorifying truly unhealthy situations. You don’t castigate and dehumanize people, but you also don’t sugarcoat brutal realities. And in fact, the most HUMAN person in the whole film IS Brendan’s character. This movie made me tear up throughout the entire thing. It addressed multiple difficult issues that intersected (struggles of coming out, a family broken up, struggles with intense weight, grief, etc.). It also involved an actor who was abused in real life. Seeing him triumph, as a survivor of sexual assault myself, was a beautiful thing that made me tear up all over again.

Seriously, if you can only think in such a narrow, one-dimensional way, I feel sorry for you. It cheats you out of the much more messy and complicated (and RICH) realities of actual life. And it leads to, in my opinion, overly rigid and hasty condemnations of things that aren’t even given a fair shake. If you don’t like the film, that’s fine. But if you just want to write it off as a flop that is only about “a fat man” portrayed with prosthetics and nothing more, then you’re just so wrong. It’s so much more than that! Brendan deserved the award, not out of pity due to his very real struggles, but due to an actually brilliant performance!

As a parting shot, he added:

St. Augustine supposedly self-flaggelated himself for essentially just being horny in his teens. Though, I can imagine today a cringey secular “progressive” violently whipping themselves for enjoying imperfect works of art. Or a Conservative “anti-woker” doing similarly for enjoying an actor who is Trans that they didn’t know was Trans. …

Ryan’s comments brought me to a realization about the nature of this conflict between the Woke Warriors and the Anti-Woke Crusaders, “two sides of the same fraudulent coin”. Not quite a “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” (which wasn’t even Hegel’s formulation)—but a necessary insight nonetheless. I wrote:

In truth, I have friends who are among the ‘anti-woke’ crowd and the cringey ‘progressive’ crowd, and I’ve noticed that they are almost two sides of the same coin, offering a false alternative of sorts. And you see this just in their reactions to a film or a performance alone. Each sets up an “ideal” of what they think is “right”, and they will censor their responses to art and deny every emotional reaction to anything that conflicts with their chosen ideal. And then, they’ll attempt to shame others who don’t respond similarly.

When we look at the craft of filmmaking, we can certainly judge some things “objectively”: the authenticity of the costumes, the quality of the cinematography, visual effects, sound effects, etc., in other words, the science of the craft of filmmaking. But when it comes to things like the performances by an actor, yes, there are technical “rights” and “wrongs”, but if the performance doesn’t speak to you, if it doesn’t get you ‘RIGHT HERE’ (in your heart, soul, etc.) … you’re just not going to respond to it positively. That’s where the “subjective” response of the viewer, who has a lifetime of emotional responses to countless events and experiences, either connects with what they’re seeing on the screen … or not. And ultimately, that’s what the response to art is about on a profoundly personal level: Do you connect with it?

I sometimes think that the “anti-wokesters” and the cringey “Woke Warriors” are trying to sever that connection on the basis of “principles” that they themselves can’t practice on a personal level. God forbid they react positively to something that “in principle” they denounce. They’re forced to twist themselves into ideological [or psychological] pretzels in order to justify how “awful” something actually is. They will engage in an act of self-censorship if that’s what it takes, or in an act of shaming those who have positive reactions to the things that they’re so busy denouncing. The Anti-Wokesters and the cringey “Woke Warriors” end up becoming mirror images of one another.

My response to art is never going to be dictated by ideology; I either like it or I don’t. I can give credit where credit is due to a technical achievement, but I think all this howling from both sides is so counter to the very human connection between the viewer and the artwork. If the art speaks to me, it speaks to me. Rigid ideologues be damned.

And that’s the bottom line: The Crusaders and Warriors, right and left, are ultimately adapting a rigid ideological, quasi-religious manner of engaging with the world.  And on this, I’ll give the final word to Ryan:

If the “anti-woke” crowd and cringey “progressives” tore each other apart on an island somewhere, I think the rest of us would go on living in peace.

Amen, brother, amen!

Postscript (19 March 2023)

A H/T to my friend Michael Zigismund for bringing to our attention an article by my friend Cathy Young in The Bulwark, published on March 1, 2023. In “Ron DeSantis’s Illiberal Education Crusade“, Young writes:

In some ways, red-state “anti-woke” bills are broader and cruder in their attempts at speech regulation: No campus policy against “discriminatory speech” has ever tried to kill entire academic programs and majors the way HB 999 would kill critical race scholarship and gender studies. (Here, DeSantis is taking a page from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the proud champion of “illiberal democracy” and the darling of American “national conservatives,” who signed a decree effectively banning gender studies programs in Hungarian universities five years ago.)

One may debate just how bad things have gotten in the academy. (The Knight Foundation, which has done annual surveys on the campus climate for speech since 2016, finds that close to 60 percent of students believe freedom of speech is more important than for a campus to be made “safe” from offensive speech or ideas.) But in any case, the notion that political pressures on the right can “fix” the damage from political pressures on the left is deeply misguided. The most likely result of these interventions in Florida—and similar legislation now being proposed in other states following Florida’s example—will be further polarization and wagon-circling. The left will brush aside critiques of speech suppression by institutional power and cultural diktat, arguing that only censorship by the government matters. The right will defend political interventions as the only way to curb the progressive stewards of culture and academe. This particular culture war may turn into a race to the bottom between the “red” and the “blue”: legally and institutionally coercive crusades to squash “wokeness” on the “red” side, knee-jerk defenses of “woke” institutional and cultural coercion on the “blue” side.

Indeed, the illiberalisms of left and right are slowly eroding the cosmopolitan values upon which a free and open society depends. The conservative right goes crazy when it hears that the books of Mark Twain or Roald Dahl are being sanitized, but instead of standing up for preserving the integrity of texts or contextualizing them for the importance of historical authenticity, it strikes back with policies that try to eliminate all mentions of “wokeness” in the curriculum, such that one publisher, Studies Weekly, has now gone to extensive lengths to publish “multiple versions of its social studies material, softening or eliminating references to race — even in the story of Rosa Parks — as it sought to gain approval in Florida,” as the New York Times has reported. When will the madness end?

Posted in: Culture, Dialectics, Film / TV / Theater Review, Music, Politics (Theory, History, Now), Rand Studies, Religion, Sexuality

Song of the Day #2040

Song of the Day: The Good Son (“End Credits”) [YouTube link], composed by the legendary Elmer Bernstein, is a lush, melodic closing to the 1993 psychological thriller, starring Macaulay Culkin and Elijah Wood. This cue is more expansive in its motif and variations than the “opening credits” I featured in 2021. And it provides the “end credits” to my Nineteenth Annual Film Music February Festival. My loving thanks to my dear friend, Ryan Neugebauer, for introducing me to (or reminding me of) so many of the films and entries for this year’s Festival. Till next year …

Posted in: Film / TV / Theater Review, Music

That’s What Friends Are For!

Two of my friends—who really know my penchant for writing and saying a lot in response to any question asked … did this for Facebook. I’m sharing it with my Notablog readers.

For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible. (H/T Benjamin Virnston & Ryan Neugebauer)

Posted in: Blog / Personal Business, Dialectics, Frivolity

DWR (8): A Dialectical Journey from Religion to Politics and Elsewhere

As readers know, I have had an ongoing dialogue with my very dear friend, Ryan Neugebauer, whom I have known for nearly five years. In those five years, we have developed a remarkable friendship, uplifted by spirited intellectual engagement, mutual inspiration, support, and love through good times and bad.

I’ll have more to say about some of his future activities in the coming weeks, but today, I’m just pausing to say how proud I am of his newly published wonderful essay—his first ever posted on Medium—entitled “A Dialectical Journey: From Religion to Politics and Elsewhere“. I’m not promoting the article simply because he describes himself as a dialectical left-libertarian, who places a high value on “the art of context-keeping”, with an explicit nod to my “conception of what dialectics is.”

What impresses me most is Ryan’s intellectual honesty and vulnerability, his willingness to explore his intensely personal evolution that has shaped his attitudes toward religion and ritual, politics and culture, sexuality and social change. As he writes:

It would be easy for some people to wonder why they should trust my thinking after having admitted that I have changed and evolved so much. I’d first respond by saying that I’d be skeptical of the thinking of anyone who hasn’t changed or evolved. No human has a synoptic or total view of everything, so we are all going to get plenty wrong and must engage in a life-long learning process. I also think that most people just go about their lives unreflectively and take whatever they think as “the truth”, which takes little effort. So when they see someone who has changed a lot and expelled a lot of effort, they look down on it and pity the person. Well, much like Socrates, I think the unexamined life is not worth living.

As I briefly mentioned earlier, moving forward I hope to get better in touch with my principles and provide even greater evidence-based arguments in defense of them. I also hope to keep an open mind to conflicting information, which is why I watch content and engage with others that I don’t agree with. It’s unhealthy to stay in an echo chamber where you only hear arguments and commentary in favor of your positions. That’s a sure way to grow callous toward those opposed to your views and to remain quite ignorant. That goes for strict Fox News watchers and MSNBC watchers alike, just as two examples.

A good framework for moving forward would be to get in touch with your own perspectives and arguments. Know why you hold them and what their strengths and weaknesses are. There are no risk-free or negative-free options, as pretty much everything comes with a tradeoff of some kind or another. Know what tradeoffs you’re willing to put up with and why (as one example, do you think that high economic inequality is worth putting up with in the pursuit of some rigid free-market perspective? Why?). Be open to hearing arguments opposed to your position and seek to buttress your position by taking into account criticism/feedback. Be charitable to those who respectfully disagree with you and seek their best, most steel-manned argument to deal with rather than some weak strawman argument. Doing all of that is what I strive to do, even if I still fall short. I think it’s the best way forward if we are to progress in any meaningful sense, personally and as a global community. So, let’s get to it then!

I can’t think of a more refreshing approach to ideas—and to life itself. Here’s to many more articles and much future engagement!

Posted in: Blog / Personal Business, Culture, Dialectics, FYI, Periodicals, Politics (Theory, History, Now), Religion, Sexuality

DWR (7): On Free Will, Rand & Branden

Notablog readers should be familiar with my “Dialogues with Ryan” series, which began on November 7, 2021, and continued with Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6. Today, I add my reflections on a new live streaming video that my friend Ryan Neugebauer posted earlier this afternoon. In it, he discussed a wide range of issues, including the debate over libertarian free will, soft determinism/compatibilism, and hard determinism, the Libet experiment, the self and to what extent it’s an “illusion”, religion and religious ritual, and John Vervaeke’s views on the meaning crisis (a subject to which I will return later this year, when I complete Vervaeke’s brilliant series on the subject). Ryan asked me to comment on the views of Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden with regard to the free will issue. Below are my lengthy comments:

***

I was finally able to watch the full stream and, like the earlier one, I thought it was wonderful. Since I was invited to say a few words, I’ll try to do so in a concise manner! (STOP LAUGHING! I will TRY!)

  1. On the libertarian free will vs. hard determinism debate, I agree with you 100%. I’ll preface this by saying I am a political and social theorist by profession, neither a trained philosopher nor a cognitive scientist. But, as you know, I look at things from a dialectical perspective, and this almost always leads me to charting a middle course through ‘extremes’ of all kinds. Like you, I too don’t like labels such as ‘soft determinist’ or ‘compatibilist’, but I think these approaches seem far more context-sensitive than the polar alternatives. I think that no choice is made outside a context and that context includes a mixture of in-born qualities, cognitive and emotional development distinct to each individual’s experiences, the social and cultural context within which we live, and the ways in which these contexts either nourish and promote or constrain and inhibit our ability to make choices. Hence, we choose, but our choices are never made outside a context, which both frames and influences them. (How much and to what degree is an open question…)
  2. I mentioned the work of Nathaniel Branden during the stream, but I’ve also been asked to comment on Ayn Rand’s approach to the issue of free will. While hard-core “Objectivists” will tell you that Rand was an ardent advocate of what is today known as ‘libertarian free will’, contained in her comment that the choice “to think or not to think” is the essence of that approach, it is true, as you note, that it’s far more centered on what she and Branden called the ability to volitionally raise or augment our focal awareness. That’s a far more meta- approach to this question (what Rand and Branden saw as a ‘psycho-epistemological’ issue).

    But I think she and Branden end up far closer to the ‘soft determinist/compatibilist’ view than most people realize. Each recognizes that there are myriad experiential factors that go into any individual’s capacity to augment focus and Rand was particularly critical of the anti-conceptual means exhibited in both culture and education, which undermined children’s abilities to augment focus and to move toward critical thinking. Having those abilities stunted by what she called ‘the comprachicos’ (a term meaning ‘child-buyers’, borrowed from Victor Hugo’s “The Man Who Laughs”), Rand argued that the cognitive damage done to people from a young age was fully in keeping with a distorted social system that required the stunting of that ability, the inculcation of obedience, and the bolstering of hierarchical authoritarian social structures.

    Branden, of course, went further, insofar as he added a substantive psycho-therapeutic dimension to this issue. He used an array of clinical techniques based on an integrated biocentric view of the human organism (with no bifurcation of body and mind ever implied), designed to help individuals in their own lives and in the context of the larger culture and social system in which they live to ‘break free’ of many of the constraints imposed by this context. Neither he nor Rand suggested that it was possible for anyone to jump out of their own skin and view things from a ‘synoptic’ vantage point outside the larger context of which they were a part, since we are both creatures of it, and creators of it. But he was committed to helping individuals reclaim aspects of their disowned selves, so often a product of their embedded past patterns, influenced by personal, cultural, and structural factors.

    I know that we often joke about the Randroids; I have been a frequent target of their scorn and they have been a frequent target of my ridicule. And they have done, in my view, more damage to the legitimately radical and enlightened elements in Rand’s approach than any of her critics.

    That said, my take on Rand has always charted a ‘middle course’ between the extremes of those acolytes and sycophants who believed she had popped out of the head of Zeus as a modern goddess of wisdom and those critics who have ridiculed her as a cult figure of no philosophical, intellectual, or critical importance. I reject both approaches unequivocally. I state that here only because what I’ve said about Rand above might strike those on either side of this divide as … surprising.
Posted in: Culture, Dialectics, Education, Pedagogy, Politics (Theory, History, Now), Rand Studies

Song of the Day #1975

Song of the Day: The Planets, Op. 32, IV: Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity, composed between 1914 and 1916 by Gustave Holst, is part of a seven-movement orchestral suite. Check out a wonderful recording by James Levine and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (below) as well as this recording of the full suite by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Andre Previn [YouTube links]. It’s my favorite of the seven integrated sections. I want to thank my dear friend Ryan Neugebauer for having introduced me to this, and so many more musical selections that will be featured in the coming months.

Posted in: Music

DWR (6): Market, State, and Anarchy

Today, the Center for a Stateless Society publishes an article by my very dear friend, Ryan Neugebauer: “Market, State, and Anarchy: A Dialectical Left-Libertarian Perspective.” Though this is not strictly a part of the series I’ve dubbed “DWR” (“Dialogues with Ryan”), the article certainly evolved over a period of time during which Ryan and I have had many lengthy discussions about so many of the issues addressed in this new piece.

The article offers a wide-ranging critique of the status quo of “Liberal Corporate Capitalism”, before launching into a detailed critique of proposed “alternatives to the status quo”, including “Free-Market Propertarianism”, “State Socialism”, and “Anarchism.” Since Ryan considers himself at minimum a philosophical anarchist (as do I), much of what he has to say entails a perceptive engagement with some points of view that he himself has held over the years. Indeed, what makes the article worthwhile is that it is a dialectical combination of both critique and self-critique.

The article includes many wonderful citations, including some to my own work on the usefulness of a dialectical methodology for a critical libertarian socio-political project. Ryan grapples with the need of radicals to function on the basis of the real conditions that exist. His left-libertarian framework—a framework with which I, myself, have been associated—is one that “seeks to make the best of what we have where we are presently at and always push to do better. It will not however paralyze itself with rigid dogmas and face destruction.” He writes:

Ultimately, I fall on the Left-Libertarian side of things. I especially like its emphasis on a sustainable, non-bloated autonomism—that is, the building of spaces of autonomy in the now and outside the current system. Such autonomism requires the freedom to create without asking for permission in a system that provides signals for judging individual needs and relative scarcity. This will most likely entail a complex mix of commons, markets, and cooperatives. It will also require a movement away from a system that treats land like a typical commodity, a system that encourages dependence on capitalists through subsidies, intellectual property rights laws, crony trade deals, and regulations that restrict competition. Politically, more people need “skin in the game” on a decentralized, local level

Given its wide-ranging scope and its accessible, succinct delivery, I strongly recommend Ryan’s article to your attention! Check it out here.

Posted in: Austrian Economics, Culture, Dialectics, Education, Foreign Policy, Politics (Theory, History, Now)

C4SS: Enough with The Isms!

I enjoyed an Alex Aragona article published on the site of Center for a Stateless Society: “No One is Talking About Capitalism — In Your Sense“. Alex points to many of the problems that I, myself, have noted with using the word “capitalism” in so many different ways that it has become virtually impossible to have any meaningful conversation about it without people talking over each other’s heads. Like so many other writers—including Kevin Carson whose critique of historically real, existing “capitalism” I highly recommend—I have railed against use of that word for seventeen years now, from 2005’s “Capitalism: The Known Reality” to 2021 Notablog posts, “Thinking Outside the Box: You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Chains“, “Thinking Outside the Box (II): The World You Desired Can Be Won“, and “Thinking Outside the Box (III): H/T Roderick Tracy Long!“.

What should be said, however, is that if one takes the lead sentence in Alex Aragona’s essay, and simply substitutes the word “socialism” for “capitalism”, it would be no less true: “If one’s goal is to have productive exchanges when the word socialism is thrown into play, they must stop doing two things: naively assuming people are more or less on the same page when the term is used; and suggesting that one or another meaning of the word is completely wrong.”

In a culture where “socialism” can mean everything from mutualism to tankie political economy, I fear we are all being flushed down a linguistic hole with all these ‘isms’ (“capitalism” at the top of this list, as Alex rightly notes in this essay). It’s become impossible to discuss any of these terms and their meanings in a world where they mean so many things to so many people, regardless of their historical lineage (for better or for worse).

The only ‘ism’ I subscribe to is dialectical libertarianism, not because it is so flexible as to have no meaning, but because it seeks to transcend the old ‘isms’ in favor of a vibrant, evolving project of human freedom and personal flourishing. It is not based on the unknown “ideal” Weberian types of “capitalism” and “socialism”. It gives new meaning to the what the New Left once called prefigurative politics: a project that seeks to build a new society out of the shell of the old—an adage that my friend Ryan Neugebauer always drives home.

No society can be built as if from an Archimedean standpoint; it is built from within, not from without. It can emerge only from the real conditions that exist, whether this means milking the inner contradictions of the current system or creating parallel institutions that supplant the status quo. Or both.

It’s time to get real about what it means to be radical.

Posted in: Austrian Economics, Dialectics, Politics (Theory, History, Now), Rand Studies