Have political connections to Donald Trump’s second administration become a get-out-of-antitrust-jail card?

In June 2025, the Department of Justice, following an alleged “boozy backroom” meeting between officials and lobbyists, settled its attempt to block the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)–Juniper Networks merger.1 Democratic senators, Republican appointees fired after decrying the settlement, and antitrust purists all protested that antitrust had become “politicized” because corruption and personal favoritism had replaced legal procedure.2^, 3^, 4^, 5 But that was just the beginning.

Less than a month after Paramount agreed to pay Trump a $16 million lawsuit settlement, the Trump administration green-lit the Skydance–Paramount merger.6 Skydance’s CEO is the son of Larry Ellison, a close personal ally of the president.

Shortly after, the family connection seemed to pay off even more. Netflix abandoned its pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) in the face of massive regulatory hurdles. The freshly baked Paramount–Skydance snatched WBD, expecting a smooth sail through DOJ offices in exchange for “sweeping changes” at Trump-critical CNN.7^, 8^, 9^, 10

Finally, the DOJ and Live Nation Entertainment struck a surprise settlement agreement, stunning the judge who had just kicked off the trial.11 It followed a White House meeting prompted by Donald Trump’s friend and former Live Nation board member Ariel Emanual. Trump obliged, calling around to ask, “What’s the holdup”?12

The administration’s antitrust enforcement exhibits the consequences of leaving vast, arbitrary power in executive hands. Antitrust scrutiny is often a matter of life and death for a business. While politically favored firms coast through reviews, others face the full wrath of regulators.

But the critics are misleading the public about the alternative to Trump’s use of antitrust power. In their letter to the judge, Democratic senators argue that the HPE–Juniper deal should be reviewed based on merit and public interest, not political favors and influence peddling.13 Many states’ attorney general refused to sign the settlement and pushed the Live Nation trial to its conclusion, boasting about taking on the role the corrupt federal government agency abdicated.14 The same coalition also promised a “vigorous review” of the Paramount–WBD deal.15

All of them presume that there could be non-arbitrary, legally proper antitrust enforcement. But there never has been such a thing. Trump’s use of antitrust to make businesses fall in line is just the most recent overt instance of a long history of arbitrary enforcement driven by favoritism. Antitrust has been subject to political whim from the outset.

The Long History of Presidential Favoritism in Antitrust

The Sherman Antitrust Act itself, the bedrock of the U.S. antitrust law, was born of political favoritism. Senator John Sherman sought Republican votes from small local manufacturers who wanted protection from competition with larger, more productive national corporations. A promise to control trusts also helped Republicans sway Democrats away from opposing another form of controlling trade Republicans preferred — tariffs.16 With the Sherman Act on the books, business survival came to depend on the regulators’ and president’s favor rather than productivity.

The famous “trustbuster,” Teddy Roosevelt, used political power to target what he called “bad trusts” (associated with the publicly reviled and uncooperative J. D. Rockefeller), while sparing the “good trusts” (linked to the more supportive House of Morgan).17

The other Roosevelt, FDR, similarly manipulated enforcement. He basically suspended antitrust during the early New Deal to secure corporate cooperation with price controls.18 But when he needed a scapegoat for failing New Deal policies, FDR launched a rhetorical war against business concentration.19 His appointee to lead Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, Thurman Arnold, would preside over the most aggressive period of antitrust enforcement to date (even though that wasn’t FDR’s intention).20 Soon though, Arnold was pushed out by the administration that needed big business’s support in the war effort.21 Thus, business experienced periods of lax, extremely aggressive, and again lax antitrust enforcement, morphing with the changing goals and rhetoric of FDR’s administration.

The pattern of brazen influence-peddling continued with both Democrats and Republicans.

President Johnson “threatened to block a merger involving a leading Houston bank unless the head of the bank helped secure the endorsement of the leading Houston newspaper for Johnson’s 1964 campaign.”22 Meanwhile, favorable rulings by the Federal Communications Commission allowed LBJ’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, to maintain a TV station monopoly in Austin, Texas.23 No antitrust enforcer looked her way, thanks to Johnson’s political clout.

In 1969, President Nixon ordered his deputy attorney general to stop interfering with the International Telephone & Telegraph’s purchase of Hartford Fire insurance Company (the largest merger in America at the time) because ITT’s CEO was a friend, an ally, and a contributor. These campaign contributions to influence antitrust merger decisions became part of the Watergate scandal.24

Just weeks after Obama’s reelection, his appointees dropped an investigation into Google that could have turned into the biggest antitrust case since Microsoft’s. Unsurprisingly, some former Google executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt, were crucial assets in Obama’s 2012 campaign.25

The tables turned against Google when the first Trump administration, now criticized for not enforcing antitrust, pushed a case against Google right before the 2020 elections to make Trump appear tough on Big Tech.26

Throughout their 135-year history, U.S. antitrust laws always followed the presidential whim of the moment. President Trump’s blatant use of antitrust during his second term to reward his allies and punish dissenters is raising more eyebrows just because it’s more brazen. Sherman shrouded his favoritism towards small manufacturers under the language of promoting “competition.” Trump simply doesn’t care to obscure his motives, such as wanting a change in CNN’s content and leadership.27

Delinking the power that antitrust controls give the government over business from presidential whim would make antitrust enforcement somewhat less arbitrary. But purging such corruption from the halls of the DOJ and the White House would not and could not make it objective.

Objective Enforcement in the Courts?

When an administration threatens to prevent a business merger, why don’t the companies say to the government: “See you in court”? Litigation is expensive, of course, but companies like Netflix can afford it. If the executive branch makes antitrust enforcement decisions for nefarious reasons, the need to convince a judge that it is actually following the law should limit its ability to do so with impunity.

But there is a reason companies are reluctant to go to court. No matter what the facts are about its business operations, a company and its expert lawyers cannot determine if they have a winning case. This is not only because the Supreme Court over time only increased the uncertainty that businessmen face in “predicting in any particular case what courts will find to be legal and illegal under the Sherman Act,” but because the antitrust “laws” themselves are neither clear nor well-defined.28 Companies facing roadblocks or massive fines or break-ups cannot know how the judge should rule in their case any more than they can know which cocktail will sway an administration official’s arbitrary power in their favor.

Consider the central principle of antitrust: The Sherman Act declares illegal every contract, combination, or conspiracy that is deemed to be “in restraint of trade or commerce.”29^, 30 But any contract is a “restraint of trade” of sorts by its nature: If I sign a contract that says I will purchase spare parts from you for five years in exchange for consistent delivery, a discount, and maintenance and repair services, we thereby both “restrain trade” for five years with anyone else who would like to fix my machines or sell me parts. Yet no businesses can plan long-term without such “restraints.”31

For example, Schwinn & Co. found that the only way it could compete in the bicycle market against mass merchandisers like Sears and Montgomery Ward was to assign exclusive territories to independent bicycle wholesalers. A condition of this contract was that wholesalers could not sell to anyone other than franchised retailers, and retailers could not sell outside their assigned territory.32

But in 1967 the court ruled Schwinn’s contracts illegal “restraints of trade.” Had Schwinn just vertically integrated with retailers by directly owning them (as it started doing after the ruling), it would have avoided antitrust scrutiny. But no matter how many lawyers it consulted in advance, Schwinn could not have known that vertical integration wouldn’t be condemned as “restraint of trade,” but contracts with independent retailers would. Other companies have been severely punished for vertical integration as allegedly a form of seeking monopoly power. Moreover, about a decade later, the courts reversed course, ruling that territorial restraints were actually acceptable.33 No one, then or now, can say which court’s “interpretation” of antitrust law — territorial restraints are or are not illegal — is correct.

Now take the rules prohibiting “attempts to monopolize.” After a century of debate, judges still have no way to distinguish between “willful acquisition or maintenance of [monopoly] power” and “growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident,” as the Federal Trade Commission says courts should do.34^, 35

In the famous Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America) case, Judge Learned Hand tried but failed to make this distinction meaningful. In his 1945 opinion, Hand first reiterated the arguments that “a single producer may be the survivor out of a group of active competitors” and should not be punished after winning “merely by virtue of his superior skill, foresight and industry.”36 But then he condemned Alcoa for precisely these traits, writing that “nothing compelled” the company to willfully “embrace each new opportunity as it opened [Alcoa’s foresight], and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization [Alcoa’s industry], having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel [Alcoa’s skill].”37

Hand failed because on a free market there is no such distinction to be made.

A company willfully pursues market power by building superior products and engaging in excellent, future-looking, long-term strategy. Yet to avoid a charge of “willful acquisition” of power and to instead grow “naturally” in the eyes of antitrust law, the company would have to not embrace new opportunities, not build a team of top talent, not anticipate changes in the market, and not invest in future production. But then no growth would exist. Businesses do not grow automatically, as though preprogrammed by nature, and they don’t grow accidentally. They grow through conscious, ambitious plans to make a profit by besting competitors. Both “natural growth” and “willful acquisition,” if they refer to anything, refer to the same thing.

But because antitrust law pretends that they are distinguishable, any business can be charged with an antitrust violation simply for pursuing success, whenever a regulator or a judge feels like it. All that is needed is just to place the growth and success of a company like Alcoa into the arbitrary category of “willful acquisition of power” rather than the arbitrary category of “natural growth.” Alcoa and the like have better chances to defend themselves in the backroom of a cocktail bar than in court.

Then there is the Clayton Act that prohibits exclusive dealing where it would “substantially lessen competition.”38

Consider the HPE–Juniper merger. On one interpretation, a merger between an enterprise IT provider (HPE) and a networking specialist (Juniper) increases competition by creating an integrated entity capable of tackling Cisco, the current WLAN market leader. But under another interpretation, the deal reduces competitive pressures in the enterprise wireless LAN sector by reducing the number of companies in that market.

How would one adjudicate between these perspectives? Allowing the merger because it enhances competition or preventing it for “substantially” inhibiting competition are both compatible with antitrust law. A judge might as well flip a coin. Which means that there are no objective criteria by which the companies could know that their envisioned conduct, their prospective merger, is lawful or unlawful.

Similarly, some argued that Netflix’s attempted purchase of WBD would “kill the entire movie theater business” through consolidation.39 Others countered that Netflix is competing not only with Disney and Amazon, but with YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, and video games: “Combining Netflix and Warner Bros. doesn’t reduce competition. It strengthens traditional entertainment against far larger digital rivals and preserves a major studio.”40 Both verdicts — that the purchase restrains trade or enhances it — are compatible with antitrust laws.

Under antitrust law, businesses cannot know in advance whether their most routine business decisions are legal or illegal. This means that they are not operating under the rule of law. And this is why they are reluctant to go to court. It’s akin to a dice roll.

The history of antitrust enforcement shows that attempting to navigate antitrust laws in the courts is in principle no different from navigating executive favoritism through personal relationships with politicians and informal backroom deals. Only it’s a judge one needs to “convince” instead of someone politically connected enough over a cocktail. Because antitrust law itself is arbitrary, even the best intentions of the judiciary can’t rectify this problem.41

There Is No Better Alternative to “Politicized” Antitrust

Arbitrary enforcement is not an unfortunate bug of the antitrust system. It is a feature that resulted from trustbusters’ realization that writing antitrust laws to be as definite as laws against traffic violations or theft, which prohibit exact and specific actions that are knowable in advance by the citizenry, wasn’t feasible.

Trustbusters could have banned specific activities like exclusive sales agreements, preferential contracts, or price discrimination (such as selling the same item at different prices in different places).42 But such clarity would effectively outlaw business itself, a result beyond the goals of even the most aggressive anti-big business pundits. Louis Brandeis, a leading progressive legal scholar and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice, for example, believed concentration was inherently evil. But even Brandeis had to disgruntledly acknowledge and help persuade President Woodrow Wilson that one cannot enumerate, define, and outlaw “unfair” practices that allow business to grow big without simultaneously criminalizing ordinary contracts that every small business engages in and depends on.43^, 44

So instead, they left us a system that grants arbitrary power to the executive and judiciary to decide when they happen to like or dislike a business’s practices. As a consequence, an uninterrupted string of favoritism and whim-based decisions plague successful American businesses to this day.

Donald Trump’s use of antitrust to reward his favorites and punish critics is brazen.45 But contrary to the wishful thinking of his critics, judicial process dressed in the veneer of objective application of vague statute cannot resolve the problem. As we’ve seen, the difference is illusory.

Calling for “depoliticization” of antitrust as if that is an obvious solution is a farce. We should castigate the corruption of backroom deals. But it is mere posturing unless we grapple with the fact that there is no such thing as the objective application of arbitrary power.

This essay by Ben Bayer was originally published in New Ideal on July 19, 2019. New Ideal is the online journal of the Ayn Rand Institute. Free subscribers gain access to more content than is published on our Substack. Subscribe here.

The “new atheists” and the “intellectual dark web” are two of the most interesting circles of thinkers to have emerged in the last fifteen years. In the overlap between the two circles, there is a small cadre of thinkers like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker who oppose both religion and “political correctness” in the name of the “Enlightenment values” of science and reason.

The emergence of thinkers who celebrate reason and critique forms of irrationality on both the cultural “right” and the “left” is an extremely positive development. Enlightenment values gave birth to the United States of America and they have the power to move our culture in a direction of more freedom, innovation, and progress.

And yet, there is a reason that Enlightenment values are now in need of defense. They have come under sustained attack because the thinkers of the original seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment failed to fully understand their philosophical roots. If today’s champions of science and reason are to succeed, they need to do more than to recycle the ideas of the past. No doubt they themselves realize that they need new ideas.

If we are to judge by one crucial sign, there is one respect in which the new champions of the Enlightenment are insufficiently radical; indeed, they are downright conventional. This is the stance they take on what I will argue is a crucial presupposition of the values of science and reason: a commitment to the reality of human free will.

How new defenders of the Enlightenment deny free will

The idea that human beings have free will, that each individual is fundamentally in control of his destiny and is not the pawn of deterministic genetic or environmental forces, was a core idea implicit in the Enlightenment period. It’s the idea that made possible this period’s celebration of the individual: of anyone’s ability to become educated, to produce and invent, and to rise by his or her own efforts.

Arguably, it was this conviction about the efficacy of individual initiative that made possible the period’s spirit of rebellion against authorities both religious and secular, and thereby enabled the many forms of social and economic progress that Steven Pinker documents in his recent book Enlightenment Now.

Yet both Pinker and Harris are openly critical of the concept of free will. Harris, for example, wrote an entire book arguing that free will does not exist. He draws on findings from contemporary neuroscience, biology, and psychology to argue that “we can’t make sense of [free will] in scientific terms.”¹ While Pinker has not devoted an entire book to the subject, his volume The Blank Slate argues that what we know about genetics is “eroding the concept of free will and personal responsibility” and that our “conscious mind — the self or soul — is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.”2

Pinker and Harris are not the only figures critical of free will among recent secular champions of science and reason. In essay after essay in the various organs of the intellectual dark web, we see a special predilection for one form of determinism or another. We see an ongoing articulation of the assumption that the only alternative to academic orthodoxy’s explanation via environmental “social construction” is explanation via genetics and evolutionary history. Left out of the conversation entirely is the possibility of a factor beyond “nurture” or “nature”: that human beings choose their paths, rather than being shunted along those paths by either social pressure or ancestral endowment.

This element of the worldview of the new defenders of the Enlightenment is decidedly orthodox. There is nothing more intellectually conventional than the assumption that we can only explain behavior by nature or nurture. It has long been held by intellectuals across the board that free will is an unscientific idea, a kind of superstitious holdover from religion.

But if there’s an orthodox dogma that real intellectual renegades need to challenge, it’s this assumption that free will is unscientific. Drawing on the work of a serious intellectual innovator (Ayn Rand), I will present a view of free will that should clarify why a commitment to the reality of free will is what makes meaningful the very idea of scientific objectivity.

Why reason and science need free will

Suppose you enter a conversation about the relevance of an alleged discovery of disparities in average IQ among ethnic groups. You might argue, as Pinker does, that it wouldn’t make a difference to the case for the political rights of individuals, because “[e]nlightened societies choose to ignore race, sex, and ethnicity in hiring, promotion, salary, school admissions, and the criminal justice system because the alternative is morally repugnant.”3 Surely in saying this, both you and Pinker are saying that members of a society ought to choose to pursue the morally enlightened path, rather than choose the morally repugnant alternative path.

For that matter, think about why you would start such a conversation in the first place. You wouldn’t get involved if you thought there is no possibility that someone in your audience will at least edge his way slightly closer to your view of the truth. To enable this, you might encourage him to look at the facts, for instance facts about what people have in common even though their IQs may differ. In doing this, part of what you are saying and thinking is that he ought to choose to look at the facts and follow the rational path, rather than to choose to ignore them and follow the irrational alternative path.

These two examples illustrate the fact that unless people face real alternatives in their action and thinking, these conversations have no point. That is to say, unless people have free will, the very conversations that defenders of Enlightenment values want to have are pointless.

In fact the same presupposition, that we face real alternatives in life, far from being unscientific, is itself a crucial part of scientific knowledge and practice.

Defenders of science like Pinker and Harris will surely agree that good scientists don’t base their theories on ancient tradition or popular prejudice. This is why they side with Galileo against the church and with Darwin against the creationists. Surely they will acknowledge that good scientists will even resist the conventional prejudices of their own scientific colleagues, as Franz Boas did when he worked to overturn the racist theories cherished by the leading anthropologists of the nineteenth century.4 But what’s common to all of these cases of good science is the scientist’s choice to observe the facts on his own and then to use dispassionate logic to test his theories against the facts, not fantasies or feelings or entrenched assumptions about what “everybody knows.”

Scientific objectivity requires even more than simply resisting the prejudices of others. It also means choosing to resist one’s own idiosyncratic hunches or musings. Consider Johannes Kepler, the great astronomer. After many dozens of attempts to save the idea that the orbit of heavenly bodies must be circular, he chose to give it up. He realized the only shape that could make sense of the astronomical data was an elliptical orbit, even though he had long cherished the idea that the motion of the heavens must be perfectly circular.5 Then the physicist Isaac Newton used Kepler’s data and conclusions to formulate his own law of universal gravitation, but famously chose to refuse to speculate about the cause of gravity. He knew he didn’t have the data to infer it, even as other scientists like Descartes famously erred on the same subject as they failed to resist the temptation to speculate.6

Galileo, Darwin, Boas, Kepler and Newton were scientific achievers. They were not simply passive observers recording the facts; they were active interpreters who had to carefully deliberate about whether they had checked every relevant fact, performed every important test, solved every equation. They could have given in to laziness or dogmatism, but they didn’t. In many cases they even exerted heroic effort to maintain their adherence to the facts in opposition to what must have been an extraordinary social pressure to ignore them. That’s why we celebrate those who exercise scientific objectivity and criticize as unscientific those who fail to. When scientists exercise the discipline of keeping their minds focused on the facts rather than indulging in fantasy and prejudice, they are choosing to use their minds in the proper way.

Every one of us faces the same choice of looking at the facts or not, and we face it constantly. This is what it means to have free will. You can observe your free will in action any time you take a moment to introspect your thought processes. Your free will is your choice to focus or not, your choice to be rational or irrational, your choice to be objective or subjective. It’s what Ayn Rand called the choice to think or not to think.7 I agree with her that this is the real essence of free will.

The fact that free will is implicit in the practice of science is part of what made it an implicit core tenet of the Enlightenment. Science, reason and objectivity are values — norms that are regarded as ideals to be pursued. But to regard them as normative, action-guiding values implies the possibility of choosing them or not. If we are determined by our genetics or environment, there is no such alternative. We will do whatever we are determined to do; no other outcome is possible. This means that determinism is at odds with the deepest commitments of the Enlightenment.

All of this means that when critics of free will suggest that we ought to pay attention to the alleged scientific facts in support of their position, their argument is incoherent. They think we really ought to look at the facts, and agree with their position, which presupposes that we can choose to look at the facts (or not).8 But the position they argue for is that we can’t help what we do, so we have no choice about whether we do or don’t look at the facts. The allegedly scientific argument against free will undercuts itself.9

Free will is consistent with the scientific worldview

Even though it is demonstrable that science requires free will, the allegation that there is something mysterious and unscientific about free will is widespread, and it warrants a response. It is an allegation with a long history and many facets, but addressing a few of the representative allegations should suffice for our purpose. (In the concluding section, I will also try to explain why this worry about free will has been so enduring, in spite of its shortcomings.)

One concern is that the idea of free will is in tension with a principle that is central to the scientific worldview, the principle of cause and effect. Harris, for example, argues that just as we cannot be held responsible for things we may do as a result of neurological disorders, we also cannot be held responsible for anything we do with a normal brain, since both are cases in which our actions are caused by prior physical events.10 What’s more, he argues (following a popular argument by dilemma) that if our decisions and actions are not determined by any antecedent factors, they would then be random, causeless accidents, and still not things for which we are responsible.

It is important that many scientists today acknowledge that it is no longer obvious that every element of the universe follows mechanistic, deterministic laws: quantum phenomena at the subatomic level are often seen as notable exceptions. Whatever the proper interpretation of quantum physics, the fact that not everything that we observe readily fits a deterministic framework should remind us that in science, observations come first, not theories. Our theory should not begin with the assumption that all causality is mechanistic; we should accept mechanistic causality into our worldview only to the extent that we observe it and find the need to infer it.

The obvious source of observational data about free will is our ability to introspectively observe ourselves making choices. Interestingly, Harris regularly claims that he himself cannot introspect any conscious cause of his actions: he notes that he does not understand why he makes various decisions (like tea versus coffee).11 Yet as we have illustrated, the choice of tea versus coffee is not the central kind of choice in which our free will consists. It is our choice to raise or lower our level of awareness, the choice to search for the truth or not, a choice that any scientist should realize he or she faces in any process of investigation.

Any theory of causation needs to be reconciled with this introspective data. The idea that the only alternative to mechanistically determined causation is random chance assumes that causal relationships hold only between present actions and antecedent events. But there is an alternative to this view of causation. In another conception of causation, a causal relationship is the simultaneous relationship between the nature of an entity and its actions. This is fully consistent with the idea that it is in our nature as human beings to be able to choose from a finite array of definite possibilities, and that it is the person or agent, not any previous state, that is the cause of his chosen actions.12

A second common concern is that to believe in free will, one has to accept a mystical view about an immortal, disembodied soul, a view that is either unsupported or contradicted by what we know today about biology and physics. Pinker reiterates this concern when he says that free will would only make sense if the human soul were a kind of “ghost in the machine, a spirit or soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls levers of behavior.”13 His concern is buoyed by the worry that the idea of free will is inherited from religion, not science.

As I have described it, there’s nothing supernatural about free will. On the contrary, free will is just an aspect of the human mind’s natural capacity to be conscious of the world. It’s a power that requires first and foremost a biologically healthy, functioning brain. It’s a power that goes out of existence when the brain is damaged or when the body ceases to function. It’s a fact about what it means for a human being to be conscious, not an attribute of some immortal soul.

We do not need to invoke the supernatural to explain the human mind’s power to think or not. On the contrary, the idea that an all-powerful divine being knows the future and controls our destiny has always been at odds with the idea of free will. Historically, the first advocates of determinism were religiously oriented thinkers (in particular, the Stoics and St. Augustine). Those same religious thinkers struggled to make room for the idea of moral responsibility in a universe governed by a supernatural power. They gave “compatibilistic” definitions of “freedom,” stripping it of any implication of real alternate possibilities (just as many contemporary secular determinists do).14

It was only after religious thinkers invented determinism that philosophers like Alexander of Aphrodisias, Pelagius, and Thomas Reid came to free will’s defense.15 They were religious themselves, so they had a devil of a time trying to reconcile the free will they defended with the existence of a divine power.

Free will is consistent with discoveries in neuroscience

Of special interest today is the allegation that specific scientific findings, especially in the field of neuroscience, reveal facts about the brain that rule out the presence of free will. In particular, Sam Harris showcases studies like those done by Benjamin Libet as refuting the existence of free will.16 These studies surely demonstrate important facts about the brain, but their results should be unsurprising to anyone who takes free will seriously. (Note that this section can be safely skipped by anyone uninterested in the details of neuroscience.)

Libet’s experiments show that people who are asked to spontaneously move their wrist report having made the conscious decision about when to do so about 350 ms (i.e., about one third of a second) after unconscious brain activity that is associated with a readiness to move (the “readiness potential”). This is taken by skeptics about free will as evidence that it is unconscious brain activity and not the conscious decision that is causally fundamental to our actions. They see the conscious decision as an effect (perhaps a merely accidental side effect) of the deeper cause in the brain.

The Libet experiment helpfully demonstrates that human action is a complex product of the interaction between the conscious mind and the physical brain. This should be a surprise to no one, except for those who think free will is a capacity of a disembodied soul that floats free from the body and has the power to affect it without mediation by the brain. But as mentioned above, the power to raise or lower our degree of awareness is a power that depends on and is mediated by the physical brain.

Philosophy alone cannot predict how the brain mediates the powers of the conscious mind. But it can help us understand the significance of those scientific discoveries by defining the scope of those conscious powers.

Free will is fundamentally the control you have over your conscious thinking processes; it is not a form of control over every spasm of your body or every rumination of the subconscious mind (say, about a desire for coffee vs. tea). Even when you intentionally move your body in a given situation, it is often on the basis of specific desires and beliefs about the results of the action, and these beliefs and desires may be stored in your subconscious.

But intentional actions count as intentional, even when spurred by subconscious beliefs and desires, because those subconscious mental states were themselves programmed by your previous choices, about the extent to which you choose to think or not about your factual knowledge and about what you value.17 This has important consequences for how to interpret the Libet experiment.

Someone who feels an urge to flick his wrist randomly in a Libet-style experiment has already made many conscious choices leading up to this point. First, he had to choose to use his mind or not to answer the question of whether to participate in the experiment, vs., say, simply accepting the invitation passively as a result of social pressure. Having made the choice to use his mind to answer the question, he then deliberated about whether participating in the experiment was worth his time. Having decided to participate and strap on the apparatus, he then decided to comply with the instructions, rather than simply daydreaming through the experiment. This point is of special interest: it is when he consciously chose to instruct his subconscious mind to pick a random moment at which to flick his wrist.18

The experiment certainly helps to show that a prior decision to act spontaneously works through subconscious instructions that depend on measurable brain activity. But again, this should not be surprising. Nobody who seriously believes in free will thinks that when one decides to act spontaneously, one gives instructions to a free-floating soul which temporarily leaves the body and then returns to magically cause the body to move without mediation by the brain.

The decision to instruct oneself to act spontaneously certainly happens well before the measured readiness potential, and yet it is not a moment measured by the experiment itself. Nobody has ever done a Libet-style experiment showing brain activity preceding and determining this prior decision, or any of the other decisions leading up to it that are more obviously cases of the choice to think or not. I don’t think they ever will.

Any Libet-style experiment asks subjects to introspect their choice so as to record its timing. But the possibility of measuring the precise timing of such an event is rendered notoriously difficult, if not impossible, if it is the choice to engage or re-engage the use of one’s consciousness, or not.

If one begins in a semiconscious daze, one is not alert enough to record precisely when one raises one’s level of awareness. If one is already fully conscious and chooses to maintain that state, it is not clear at which point one should mark the beginning of a choice that is made continuously. And because the choice to focus means focusing primarily on facts other than the choice itself, one’s ability to monitor the choice itself would involve divided attention and would likely be imprecise.

The imprecision here matters. Experiments of this type attempt to identify the brain activity that allegedly causes our choices mere fractions of a second before we make them. No self-report about the timing of a choice to focus could be precise enough to be compared meaningfully to brain activity measured on the scale of thousandths of a second.

Those looking to the Libet experiment for anything of significance about free will are simply looking in the wrong place.

Of course, the most fundamental reason that no experiment will ever disprove the existence of free will is that no experiment can give us reason to change our minds about whether or not it is possible to change our minds. No scientific evidence can refute an essential presupposition of the scientific method itself.

In the meantime, we should welcome with a warm embrace all of the facts discovered by neuroscience. But we should remember that good science doesn’t just passively record facts, it actively interprets them, making an effort to avoid prejudice. However we eventually interpret the data of neuroscience, one thing will be sure: if scientists are going to identify its truths, they’ll need to choose to focus their minds to do it. That means using their free will.

The unactualized potential of the Enlightenment

I mentioned earlier that the concept of free will was an idea implicit in the achievements of the Enlightenment. It was implicit because few if any Enlightenment thinkers were willing to defend it explicitly.

So it is not an accident that today’s neo-Enlightenment figures are skeptical of free will: many of the greatest defenders of science and reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were themselves determinists (e.g., Spinoza), or at least ambiguous in their promotion of free will (e.g., Locke). Those who came the closest to defending the idea that human beings make genuine choices, undetermined by antecedent factors, packaged their arguments with untenable metaphysical doctrines like mind-body dualism (e.g., Rene Descartes), faith-based epistemologies (e.g., Thomas Reid), or both (e.g., Immanuel Kant).

Kant was a noteworthy and pivotal figure in the Enlightenment’s treatment of the concept of free will. On the one hand, Kant recognized in scattered places in his work that there is something incoherent about supposing that deterministic beings could have rational, objective reasons for believing in determinism. (A deterministic being is simply prompted to believe things, and cannot objectively evaluate what he believes as rational or irrational.19)

On the other hand, Kant’s deeper theoretical views committed him to the idea that the “phenomenal” world studied by scientists is deterministic. So is, he thought, our consciousness as we ourselves introspect it. This meant that no one could ever observe free will. This formalized the prejudice that free will is inherently unscientific. On Kant’s view, free will, if it exists at all, has to exist in the “noumenal” realm, a realm inaccessible to reason and observation. How we are to know that such a realm exists is never explained. Kant famously held up the triumvirate of “God, freedom [meaning freedom of the will], and immortality” as objects of faith rather than reason.

For many reasons we cannot explore here, Kant’s philosophy was instrumental in bringing the Enlightenment to a close, and his packaging of free will with the notions of God and the immortal soul is just one of the reasons.20 When he popularized the claim that free will, a key presupposition of the scientific method, was itself akin to these other religious concepts, he engendered secular skepticism about free will that led to a torrent of philosophical determinism in the nineteenth century (from Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and many, many others), which in turn went on to set the scene for today’s intellectually orthodox secular skepticism about free will.

You can see the remnants of Kant’s package deal among the advocates of Enlightenment values today. Because they see themselves as advocates of science and reason, they are rightly skeptical of the claims of religion. But because they accept Kant’s package deal, they assume that consistently scientific thinkers should reject free will on the same grounds.

The new “back to the Enlightenment” thinkers have much to recommend them. But until these champions of science and reason think more deeply about the ideas that made the scientific revolution both meaningful and possible — chief among these being the concept of free will — they will not be able to appreciate what made this period so revolutionary. They will remain entrenched in the intellectual orthodoxies that have prevented a return to Enlightenment values since approximately the time of Kant. This means they themselves will not be able to become the renegades they would like to become. They should make a different choice.

Soon ARU Press will release a collection of Ben Bayer’s essays, Breaking Free From Faith-Based Morality. The collection will feature essays previously published in New Ideal on the subject of the religious roots of altruistic morality. The collection is aimed at secular readers who consider themselves rational and scientific, but who are nonetheless in the grip of the morality of altruism that dominates our culture. It argues that altruism is essentially faith-based, and that a principled commitment to reason requires abandoning it. To offer them an alternative, the final chapter of the book shows how Ayn Rand validated a fully scientific ethics. We are pleased to publish this final chapter online in anticipation of the release of the book.

In 2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali scandalized the atheist community by announcing that she had converted to Christianity. She argued that atheism offers no meaningful positive values, at a time when the West needs to defend its values — whether from militant Islam or the “woke” movement on campuses: “[W]e can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: What is it that unites us? The response that ‘God is dead!’ seems insufficient.”

To Ali, only Christianity can provide the guidance we need. She credits it as the source of “an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom, and dignity.” By contrast, as Christianity’s cultural influence has waned, we are left with the problem that

the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. . . . The line often attributed to G. K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”¹

Here she echoes a theme that religious apologists have sounded for centuries: Only the existence of a divine moral lawmaker who transcends human interests and culture can ensure the existence of meaningful, objective moral guidance.2

Doubtless, religion’s decline has created a cultural void that the secular dogma of “woke” egalitarianism has been eager to fill. And this is due in no small part to atheists’ failure to offer the world a convincing philosophic code of objective moral guidance.

But the alternative to “irrational quasi-religious dogma” is not irrational fully religious dogma. In reality, it’s religious faith that truly makes it possible to “believe in anything” about matters of value, undermining objectivity. In this essay, I will show the real meaning of objectivity, and the arguments that have already been given for the guidance it implies. It’s guidance that many atheists have so far failed to embrace when offered, let alone to formulate for themselves.

Atheists typically try to answer the question Richard Dawkins grapples with in his book Outgrowing God:

Lots of people seem to think you need to believe in some sort of god, any kind of ‘higher power,’ in order to have any chance of being moral – of being good. Or that, without belief in a higher power, you’d have no basis for knowing right from wrong, good from bad, moral from immoral. This chapter looks at . . . whether we need belief in God or gods or some sort of ‘higher power’ in order to be good[my emphasis].3

Dawkins says belief in a God who punishes immorality could motivate ostensibly moral behavior.4 He also observes that non-believers like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros can be very generous in their philanthropic giving, and that there are very few atheists in prison.5 He then offers biological and cultural explanations for this behavior. The leading cultural explanation is the influence of various ostensibly secular moral philosophies. The implied answer to his question is, we don’t need religion for moral guidance, for other secular theories can provide this guidance as well.

But to say that we don’t need religion for moral guidance implies some people can still get it from religion. This “me too” approach concedes that religion has really offered meaningful guidance worthy of emulation. But we should not be so ready to concede that faith-based religious morality has ever offered meaningful guidance, especially if, as I shall argue, it cannot offer objective guidance.

There is an alternative. We can build a secular, scientific account of morality. As I will argue, only a scientific theory can offer truly objective moral guidance. The point is not that we don’t need religion to find meaningful moral guidance. The point is that religion cannot offer it in the first place.

In this essay I will show how to build a secular, scientific morality from the values of science itself, beginning with the value of scientific objectivity. To clear the ground for building it, we must first brush aside religious misconceptions about objective morality. They fail to appreciate its true meaning, and clarifying this meaning will help show why the value of objectivity explains our admiration for important virtues of character. This will point the way to objectively identifying the factual basis for moral truths.

A fully scientifically objective morality must also be willing to challenge the content that many current secular moral theories have inherited from religious codes. Atheists who truly value the rebelliousness of the Enlightenment must be willing to break free from the dominant culture that surrounds them.

Why religion is the enemy of objectivity

Far from being an exemplar of objective morality, religious morality is anathema to it.

There is a powerful but still underappreciated objection to the idea that divine commandments provide the basis for objective standards of morality. It concerns the arbitrariness of the alleged divine commands themselves.

The classic illustration is the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament. God commands Abraham to kill his only begotten son, and Abraham willingly begins to comply. Believers take solace in the fact that God was only testing Abraham and didn’t make him go through with it.6 But what God is testing — and what the story is celebrating — is Abraham’s willingness to kill out of arbitrary blind faith. If God says he should not kill, that makes it immoral; but if God arbitrarily changes his mind and asks Abraham to kill an innocent child, it is moral after all.7 A moral code with divine commandments as its basis is shot through with arbitrariness.

This is the answer to those who bemoan that atheists are capable of believing anything. On the contrary, it’s precisely a religious morality of groundless faith that demands arbitrary belief. The example of Abraham’s submission to God’s arbitrary will has too often inspired believers, from Christian inquisitors to Islamic terrorists and mullahs, who arbitrarily believed their acts of murder and oppression to be noble because it was dictated to them by a higher power.

Defenders of religious morality claim that theirs is an “objective” morality because human beings have no say in what God commands, so whole cultures can be “wrong” if they disobey these commands.8 But this also means God cannot be wrong, no matter what he commands. What God commands of Abraham, for example, is unaffected by the extreme distress Abraham might feel or the pain Isaac would suffer from being sacrificed.

Does the mere independence of an alleged divine commander’s will from human consciousness make a code based on it “objective”?

“Objective” is sometimes used to mean the sheer mind-independence of a fact. But while a divine commander’s will is imagined to be independent of human minds, it’s obviously not supposed to be independent of every mind. It is itself supposed to be the will of an alleged supernatural mind. That means that according to divine command theory what counts as moral is totally dependent on God’s arbitrary caprice.9

In fact, only in a godless universe can any facts be truly mind-independent. In the fantasy of a God who creates the universe, all of nature depends on his mind for its existence and character. Such a God could have made the laws of nature radically different: gravity could work in reverse, living creatures could be immortal, etc. God could suspend any law he authored by permitting “miracles.” He could make all of his creation disappear. There are no objective facts in the universe imagined by theistic religion.

More importantly, religion poisons the very practice of the objective method of discovering truth.

When ordinary non-academics speak of “objectivity,” they don’t simply mean the mind-independence of a fact. They mean the method that minds use to know these facts.10 Objective journalism and objective science are objective not because the perfect newspaper article or lab report already exists out there in reality, waiting to be discovered.11 Rather, they’re objective because they are products of human beings who have attended to the relevant mind-independent facts because they practice objectivity, the logical method of committing to discovering the truth, come what may.

The objectivity of human value should be thought of in the same way. Values are not mind-independent entities. Rather, valuing is something human minds do: It’s the conscious evaluation and pursuit of certain objects by conscious beings. We have a choice about how to evaluate these objects: We can do it by rationally deciding what furthers our lives, or we can default by acting on unprocessed emotional reactions.

Refugees who flee a primitive, oppressive country for a modern, civilized one, are often valuing objectively, not subjectively. It is not wishful thinking that their life would be better in one country rather than another; they can have perfectly good reason to think it is true. In this approach, objective values are what we form through a commitment to the truth, while merely subjective values ignore or defy it.

Far from being objective, the values of religious morality are thoroughly subjective. The whole lesson of the story of Abraham is that God is testing Abraham’s blind willingness to follow a command to kill. He hears a voice in his head and is expected to follow its demands without being able to know where it comes from, whether from the imagined God, a demon, or just his own delusions. He’s relying, at bottom, on an unscrutinized feeling of fear, not any commitment to the truth.

This is why religious moralists in practice do not appeal to any kind of reasoning from first principles to justify the content of their moral code. Instead, they appeal directly to the arbitrary authority of scripture, scriptures purporting to contain revelations about God’s will like the one experienced by Abraham. We are given no reasoned explanations for why scriptural commandments serve any purpose, human or divine. Though some religious commandments may have been informed by the life experience of their human authors, they often command us to surrender what is actually good for our lives. Like Abraham, most follow these commandments not out of reverence for real values in their lives but out of irrational fear of disapproval or punishment by real and imagined authorities.

Because objectivity means following a scientific method to know the truth, faith-based morality is the enemy of objective morality. Atheists should not seek to show why one does not need to be religious to uphold an objective morality. They should be clear that religious faith cannot uphold an objective morality. Only a scientifically objective approach that rejects blind faith can.

Being a truth-seeker rather than a blind-faith believer also accounts for the essence of other morally admirable character traits. Seeing this is the first step to building a truly objective code of morality.

Admirable character traits of the truth seeker as moral virtues

Consider what was so admirable about Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story, at least before she converted to Christianity.

Ali was born and raised in a fundamentalist Muslim family in Somalia. At an early age she was indoctrinated by clerics, beaten by her mother, even subjected to horrific female circumcision. When her family left to live in Nairobi, Kenya, she received a more cosmopolitan education that opened her mind to new books and ideas. When her family tried to arrange her marriage with a man she’d never met, she rebelled and escaped to Europe to make a new life for herself. Famously, she rejected Islam and became an atheist.12 She spoke up intransigently against injustice and oppression, even in the face of death threats year after year.

When Ali first rose to prominence, her secular admirers agreed that the primitive, Islamic society she had rebelled against was vicious and celebrated her escape from this society as a real act of moral heroism.

Notably: admiration is a moral emotion that responds to admirable character traits. We admired the will to overcome obstacles and speak up even in the face of grave threats. These are the same character traits that many admire in other great activists, dissidents, and artists. In admiring how they all “speak up,” we are admiring their indefatigable commitment to learning and telling the truth.

But that is also the central value of the scientist.

Consider Katalin Kariko, one of the co-developers of the Covid mRNA technology. To identify the biochemistry behind this new and dynamic form of vaccine technology, she had to engage in the right methods of thinking. To achieve the value of knowledge, objectivity demands not only a commitment to use the right methods to discover the truth, but also to reject the temptation to blind oneself by convenient fictions. So Kariko had to form the right general habits of thought like: the intellectual honesty to avoid lazily fudging data because of confirmation bias, the courage to move forward without external support and in the face of hostility, and the independent thinking needed to experiment with entirely novel genetic methods.

Kariko’s story shows that the character traits of the great scientist are just supremely clear examples of the character traits of the morally virtuous man or woman. The intellectual virtues of science are continuous with moral virtues. Because human action is guided by thought, choosing the right ways of thinking — the ways that keep us focused on the facts rather than fantasy — is essential to choosing the right way of acting, and hence of forming the right kind of character.

Many widely recognized moral virtues have the same relation to the value of seeking the truth. Honesty means commitment to the truth, not faking it. Integrity means valuing the truth enough to act on it. Justice means recognizing the truth about the characters of other people.13 And this is only a preview: There’s more to be said about how many other virtues relate to a basic virtue of the rational pursuit of the truth.14

But what does it mean to identify moral virtues? Can there be such a thing as scientific truth about what’s the right or wrong virtue to practice? What could make the principles of morality objectively true, i.e., provable by reference to observable facts?

The factual basis of moral value judgments

Part of the reason atheists are so late to the game in defending a secular code of morality is that secular skeptics have long thought moral value judgments have no basis in facts. They have sided with David Hume’s view that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.”15 Morality, they say, is a subjective relic of religious superstition, and if God is dead, morality is a joint casualty.

One source of this skepticism is that moral value judgments contain very abstract concepts, not closely tied to the observable things around us. We can’t see honesty or integrity or justice or goodness in the way we see tables or chairs, dogs or cats.

But a concept’s high level of abstraction doesn’t make it just hot air. The concept of the “atom” refers to something totally invisible. Full proof of the existence of atoms came only in the 19th century, when scientists were about to infer their existence as the cause of a variety of observed effects. Now everyone (aside from a few highly skeptical philosophers) thinks that scientists refer to real facts when they talk about atoms, even if the concept is highly abstract.

Highly abstract concepts can refer to real facts by means other than causal inference. Sometimes they simply condense a wide array of disparate observable facts. Consider concepts of the scientific method like “experiment,” “hypothesis,” “replicable,” etc. They refer to real activities, mental products,and their qualities in relation to a scientific purpose. Thermometers, sheets of gold foil, and cathode ray tubes have no visual resemblance. But scientists use these various objects to do experiments that helped prove the atomic hypothesis, provided that the results were replicable.

We need to conceptualize the actions of the scientific method because our thoughts are not automatically true — we are fallible. Thinking the world is flat doesn’t make it so: To learn its shape, we need to make systematic astronomical and terrestrial observations. Wanting to be pregnant doesn’t make one pregnant: Only specific biochemical tests reveal whether the effect has been brought about by its actual causes.

So precisely because we need to base our thinking on the facts, we also need concepts of methods of rational thinking, concepts of norms. There are better ways of doing experiments, of forming and testing hypotheses, and there are worse ways. Experiments should be replicable, evaluation of results should often be double-blind, and experimenters should not fall prey to confirmation bias, etc. There are definite courses of mental action that help us identify the truth. Our concepts for these scientific and logical norms refer to real facts because the methods are real facts, and we need to use these methods to discover further real facts.

Importantly, scientific and logical norms don’t just describe the research process; they prescribe courses of actions that scientists ought to pursue if they are to achieve the value of the truth. So if concepts of scientific norms refer to real facts, concepts of moral norms could do the same. What if moral norms simply identified the fundamental means to achieve some other salient end?

We obviously need concepts of practical norms to guide action toward success more generally. These norms are themselves based on scientific findings, most obviously in the life sciences. Biology describes and explains the processes of growth, locomotion and metabolism. Physiology describes and explains specific living activities of specific organisms: respiration, circulation, digestion, excretion, etc. But biological explanation itself is an essentially normative practice, and this has normative implications.

For all that secular moralists invoke evolution in the attempt to explain the ethical beliefs of human beings, they miss the key aspect of evolutionary science that bears most directly on value theory.16 Evolutionary biology explains the origin of the structure, traits and behavior of living things by explaining how those features came to be good for the organism, resulting in the replication of its species. See how quickly Richard Dawkins resorts to this language in his defense of evolutionary explanation in The Blind Watchmaker:

[B]iologists can be much more specific than that about what would constitute being ‘good for something’. The minimum requirement for us to recognize an object as an animal or plant is that it should succeed in making a living of some sort. . . . It is true that there are quite a number of ways of making a living — flying, swimming, swinging through the trees, and so on. But however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.17

We appeal even more directly to value judgments about the good of the organism in the applied life sciences. Fields like medicine and nutrition not only describe but prescribe methods needed to fend off or cure illness and sustain health: methods of immunization, medication, surgery, nutrition, etc. A new virus or poison or mental pathology hinders life; a new vaccine or antidote or therapy helps sustain it. The actions and products that actually result in self-perpetuation of life are those we regard as healthy or proper, as good for the life of the organism.

What if principles of morality are like the principles of the applied life sciences? They would concern not just the health of one’s body but the health of one’s soul. Here “health of one’s soul” only means the health of one’s personal character, one’s basic, psychologically characteristic mode of operation, the basic premises and emotional dispositions one works from habitually. The existence of the entire field of clinical psychology demonstrates that there are healthy and unhealthy psychological characteristics. Moral norms could identify the actions needed to become the kind of person with the kind of character who lives successfully. Virtues like honesty, integrity, courage, and justice could help one to acquire the knowledge one needs to find and make a better life.

Importantly, while such moral norms could help us strengthen our character to navigate our relations with other people, they need not be limited to rules for social relations. Indeed, what makes dissidents and scientists so courageous is precisely their commitment to live free from others’ influence, to go by the judgment of their own mind in answering the big questions of life. And it can also be courageous to act in the face of great challenges, even when imposed not by others but by nature. Consider the courage of someone battling a deadly cancer. The relationship that morality governs is not primarily that between you and other people, but that between you and reality.

Because there are scientifically knowable facts that make it true that moral virtues are good for human beings (ultimately, biological facts), a code of such virtues could be an objective morality.

Dramatizing a morality that celebrates objectivity

In my opinion, the philosopher who did the most to show how the values of science inform secular objective morality was Ayn Rand. She was a radical whose absolutism about the value of reason led her to challenge conventional views about morality, whether religious or otherwise. That attitude systematically informed her social and political analysis, creating her reputation as a cultural iconoclast.

Some may find it odd that a non-academic novelist would have special insight into the foundations of an objective morality. But recall how early in the essay I observed the character traits of admirable people. I modeled this on Rand’s own method of inquiry.18 As a novelist interested in projecting ideal characters, she made careful observations of real people she admired, and conceptualized the character traits that distinguished them from others. Her creative process began with collecting the data about moral character with which the science of ethics must begin.

Rand’s earliest fictional heroes and heroines are, above all, truth seekers and truth tellers in search of freedom. Kira Argounova of We the Living strives to escape the Soviet Russian communist system that works to crush her career as an engineer and the man she loves. Equality 7-2521 of Anthem escapes from the dystopian totalitarian society that rejects his reinvented light bulb after he’s rejected his society’s moral code. Howard Roark of The Fountainhead is an architect with a new vision of how to build who is unwilling to compromise it for wealth or fame, or to cater to society’s irrational moral demands.

Rand held up her heroes and heroines as admirable precisely for their devotion to objectivity. As a practitioner of objectivity herself, she was not content to simply admire them. This is where her work as a novelist shaded into her work as a philosopher, as she sought to understand why they were admirable. In both the traits she celebrates in her fiction and in her nonfiction conceptualization of them (in speeches in the novels and in later nonfiction essays), we see her moving from firsthand observations to highly abstract standards of value that integrate and explain the more concrete virtues and values she had earlier identified inductively.

After writing The Fountainhead (1943), Rand had identified certain key moral virtues animating her heroes in the pursuit of their values, especially the value of the truth: virtues like honesty, integrity, and independence.19 By the time she had written Atlas Shrugged (1957), she had identified the fundamental virtue linking all of these (and others): the virtue of rationality.20 She saw all of the virtues as actions of recognizing important facts of reality that bear on human living.21 As forms of rationality, they each govern both thought and action as each is subject to the same basic questions:

A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? — Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow — right or wrong? Is a man’s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life — right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power — right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have — and the answers came from a man’s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.22

In Rand’s view, “right or wrong” applies to both thought and action generally, because both are exercised by choice, and both are evaluable by reference to reality-oriented standards. They can be justified or unjustified, rational or irrational. Thought itself is the crucial human action that guides all others.

But Rand’s work as a philosopher did not end with simply finding a common denominator among the moral virtues. She was also deeply concerned with the question of how and why moral norms count as cognitively meaningful truths, the kind of truths that skeptics and relativists would consider impossible.

The philosophic foundations of Rand’s objective morality

In her nonfiction treatise “The Objectivist Ethics” (1961), Rand explores the foundations of morality that she first identified in a speech by the hero of Atlas Shrugged. Here I’ll only highlight some of the essentials of her view of the foundations of objective morality.23

She begins by asking her readers to be deeply philosophical about the very starting point of ethics:

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?

Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all — and why?

Is the concept of value, of “good or evil” an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality — or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence?24

One hallmark of her concern for objectivity here is first her unwillingness to begin by simply choosing among the conventional codes of values our culture already has to offer. She is preparing the way for a radical critique of nearly all of those codes and an independent reconstruction of a new moral code from the ground up.

A second hallmark is her concern to do this reconstruction with attention to basic philosophical questions about what could make a code of morality true or false in the first place. Rather than looking for a theory that captures popular “intuitions” about moral case studies — asking how applying the concept of “value” makes us feel — she asks about the metaphysical basis of the concept of “value,” i.e., what if any facts it refers to in reality.

She goes on to argue that it is the fact that a class of entities faces the alternative of existence or non-existence that explains the need for and thus the meaning of value concepts like “good” and “bad.” Only living organisms, unlike inanimate entities, face this alternative in the sense that they must engage in “self-generated, goal-directed action” to maintain their existence. To maintain their existence, living organisms must follow a specific course of locomotion, nutrition and growth:

That which is required for its survival is determined by its nature, by the kind of entity it is. . . .[T]he fundamental alternative of its existence remains the same: if an organism fails in the basic functions required by its nature — if an amoeba’s protoplasm stops assimilating food, or if a man’s heart stops beating — the organism dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action.25

Inanimate entities can of course be destroyed, but they don’t need to do anything to remain in existence. If the universe were lifeless, with nothing but stars, rocks, and energy fields, there would be no goal pursuit to succeed or fail, no entities to which anything could be good or bad. In such a counterfactual unbiological universe, we would not need to invoke value concepts to explain the continued existence or change of various inanimate entities. Physical and chemical explanations would suffice.

Rand had been thinking about these basic questions about the foundations of value theory while writing her novel Atlas Shrugged, and she even found a way to dramatize this very issue, one that might otherwise seem like a technical theoretical issue, in an important scene. A minor character, a recent college graduate who had been enamored of skeptical-relativist ethical theories comes to abandon his jaded worldview after having been inspired by the admirable rationality of his boss (Rearden). Fueled by this inspiration he stands his ground when their factory is attacked by agitators, and is mortally wounded. His philosophical development in favor of moral objectivity reaches its denouement as he comes face to face with the value significance of the life or death stakes of his predicament:

His eyes wandered over the vast darkness, then rose to Rearden's face; the eyes were helpless, longing, childishly bewildered. “I know . . . it’s crap, all those things they taught us . . . all of it, everything they said . . . about living or . . . or dying . . . Dying . . . it wouldn’t make any difference to chemicals, but — ” he stopped, and all of his desperate protest was only in the intensity of his voice dropping lower to say, “ — but it does, to me . . . And . . . and, I guess, it makes a difference to an animal, too . . . But they said there are no values . . . only social customs. . . No values!” His hand clutched blindly at the hole in his chest, as if trying to hold that which he was losing. “No . . . values . . .”26

Tragically he dies, and Rearden observes that “what he was carrying in his arms was now that which had been the boy’s teachers’ idea of a man — a collection of chemicals,” dramatizing how value concepts apply only to the living, not the inanimate.27

Understanding the connection between life and value also points to the ultimate value that sets the standard of evaluation. “Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action.”28 What is living action (nutrition, locomotion, growth) good for? It’s good for more nutrition, locomotion, growth.29 Life is an end in itself, not in the sense of being an end state, but in the sense of being a self-reinforcing activity that is the means to the end of more of itself.

And there is nothing else beyond an entity’s engagement in such self-reinforcing activity that is at stake. Value concepts identify success and failure conditions for this activity. They have no other factual basis. As she cashes it out, “To speak of ‘value’ as apart from ‘life’ is worse than a contradiction in terms. ‘It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”30

This represents a crucial part of the answer to Rand’s question: Do we need values at all, and why? Fundamentally, we need them because we are living organisms. This in turn explains how the concept of “value” can be used to grasp and express truths: The concept is used to identify the truth of what furthers the life of an organism.

Rand goes on to explain that human beings need a code of values — moral values — because we are a distinctive kind of living organism that must consciously choose the values we pursue, and so we need guidance in our choices. Objective moral values are values that are chosen because they’re consciously, rationally validated by reference to the facts about what is required to further one’s life.31

By using a scientific method to search for the basis of the concept of “value,” Rand also formed a theory of value that accounted for the value of the scientific method itself. A consequence of her unwillingness to defend a value theory that simply rationalizes cultural moral prejudice is its distinctively modern approach to key issues in moral philosophy.

Rand’s distinctively modern objective morality

Rand was ahead of her time in realizing the philosophic significance of the difference between the living and the inanimate.

We have already seen (in the passage from Dawkins about how biologists think about what it means to be “good for something”) how judgments of biological value are implicit in evolutionary explanations. In recent years, certain philosophically minded scientists have started to catch up with Rand, unpacking the implications of biology for value theory. Steven Pinker, for instance, puts it this way:

Life and happiness depend on an infinitesimal sliver of orderly arrangements of matter amid the astronomical number of possibilities. . . .[The second law of thermodynamics] defines the fate of the universe and the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and knowledge to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.32

Explaining how living things resist entropy requires the attribution of goals or aims (“to fight back. . .” is teleological language). These are not usually conscious purposes (as they are for human beings). In his book articulating the neuroscientist and bioanthropologist Terence Deacon’s theory of natural teleology, Jeremy Sherman describes the aims of a simple bacterium:

Of all the possible work that glucose could do, within the bacterium those possibilities get channeled, limited, narrowed, constrained, or aimed into work that benefits the bacterium. Work isn’t possible without energy, but glucose energy doesn’t aim itself. The bacterium does the aiming. . . .

The bacterium’s means include its capacity to aim or channel that glucose into the bacterium’s functional work, which among other things includes finding more glucose.

And the bacterium’s most fundamental end? As I’ve already suggested, it’s circular. The bacterium’s fundamental end is regenerating its ability to aim work. It regenerates its own aims, and reproduces them, regenerating its aims in its progeny selves.33

Sherman goes on to explain how recognizing these natural goals is the key to solving Hume’s “is-ought” problem.34

Moral theories based on facts about the biological requirements of human life are nothing new. In the last few decades, prominent philosophers like Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson (among others) have followed the lead of the arguments first offered by Aristotle in ancient Greece to formulate codes of morality that derive from the “human form of life.”35 But Rand’s approach even parts ways with these traditional life-based accounts of ethics in favor of a more scientific approach.

Even the contemporary Aristotelians are still working from a pre-modern view of biology. The idea they borrow from Aristotle is that there is a kind of proper functioning for each distinctive type of living organism. There’s something right about this, but they have little to say about what explains a given organism’s distinctive form of life.36 They will say, for instance, that it’s the function of the bacterium to pursue glucose, or the function of bobcats to hunt, without explaining what makes this process out of so many others so special.

While Rand also revered Aristotle, her deeply biological perspective on value made her approach to ethics much more modern.37 Her understanding of what explains an organism’s distinctive form of life is informed by a post-Darwinian approach to biology.38 Living things are distinguished from the inanimate insofar as they are engaged in a constant struggle for existence. Everything about a living organism’s physiological structure, its use of energy, and its behavior makes a difference for better or worse in that struggle. Its distinctive form of living is the most distinctive and powerful activity it relies on to help win that struggle for existence. Here we see her surveying the range of distinctive forms of life according to their survival value:

The simpler organisms, such as plants, can survive by means of their automatic physical functions. The higher organisms, such as animals and man, cannot: their needs are more complex and the range of their actions is wider. The physical functions of their bodies can perform automatically only the task of using fuel, but cannot obtain that fuel. To obtain it, the higher organisms need the faculty of consciousness. A plant can obtain its food from the soil in which it grows. An animal has to hunt for it. Man has to produce it.39

We’ve already seen how the values she’s celebrating in the person of her fictional heroes and heroines are implicitly the values of the scientist: virtues such as honesty, independence, integrity. The fact that the distinctively human form of life depends essentially on human consciousness is a sign of how Rand, unlike almost any other thinker, appreciates the biological value of the pursuit of truth itself.

The content of her code, her celebration of objectivity, is equally modern in its orientation. And it depends on an especially objective survey of what makes human life possible.

The modern code of the producer, not the predator

Even as Rand argues that basic value concepts derive from organisms’ struggle for existence, she does not mean that human life is “red in tooth and claw.” She was far from a “social Darwinist.” Our basic means of survival is not predation or exploitation of others of our species, but the discovery of causal connections that enable us to discover the resources, build the tools, trade with others, and otherwise reshape our natural environment to our purposes. In other words, she saw rationality itself as the distinctively human form of life:

Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. . . . He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available — but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no “instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge — and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.40

For human beings, nothing better enables thriving in defiance of entropy than grasping the truth about what enables successful living.

Rand realized that reason’s power to discover the truth included fundamentally the truth about the practical requirements of successful living. So she uniquely added productiveness to her list of the moral virtues.41 Human life requires not only the pursuit and attainment of the values needed for survival, but the creation of these values out of the raw material of nature. This is at the root of her view that human beings survive not by exploiting each other but by trading the values they’ve created with those created by others. Here again we see her sensitivity to the differences between organisms’ distinctive forms of life:

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals. But just as animals would not be able to survive by attempting the method of plants, by rejecting locomotion and waiting for the soil to feed them — so men cannot survive by attempting the method of animals, by rejecting reason and counting on productive men to serve as their prey. Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment, at the price of destruction: the destruction of their victims and their own. As evidence, I offer you any criminal or any dictatorship.42

It’s this rejection of a life of force and the embrace of productiveness that is at the root of her embrace of the “trader principle” and with it, her case for capitalism.43

Here Rand’s theory significantly updates the old Aristotelian view. Aristotle held that practical and theoretical reason were essentially distinct functions, and that the latter was a superior faculty dedicated to the contemplation of timeless truths for its own sake. Aristotle thought that those who were better suited for philosophic contemplation should be served by “natural slaves” who could not engage in such superior forms of reasoning.44 For Rand, whose thinking is informed by the scientific and the industrial revolutions, “theoretical” reason is a powerful practical tool, not a form of play.45

Here too Rand was ahead of her time. For too long philosophers sympathized with Nietzsche’s irrationalist idea that believing useful falsehoods is what helps us survive.46 Religious philosophers like Alvin Plantinga ape Nietzsche’s amateur take on evolutionary theory when they blithely assume that cognitive faculties evolved to survive could not be adapted to know the truth.47

Some philosophically minded scientists like Steven Pinker and Kevin Mitchell have started to catch up with Rand’s seemingly obvious idea that our mind’s grasp of truth serves our survival.48 Brains that developed to grasp truth, especially highly abstract truth about the causal dynamics of the world, are better suited to explain, predict and control it. So they are also more likely to be favored by a process of evolution by natural selection.

In recognizing and celebrating the power of individual human productive ability, Rand makes a case for individual freedom and by implication repudiates Aristotle’s old arguments for slavery.49 Importantly for Rand, human reason is not automatic but must be operated volitionally. It’s precisely because this must be chosen that we need political freedom to make choices if we are to live. Her celebration of rationality also implies that justice is a virtue: the virtue of applying rationality to the judgment of the character of other men, by recognizing and rewarding the value of friends, repelling and punishing the evil of enemies, and the need to respect the rights of all.50

But the fact that reason operates volitionally also means that we must choose which values to pursue and even whether to value our lives or not. This is why we need the guidance of morality. But the fact that we must choose the values we pursue — including the overall ends that dictate our means — is the basis of a skeptical worry we should now address.

Answering relativism by evaluating the ultimate ends

At the heart of our need for a moral code, for Rand, is our need to guide our volitional choices. This is one of the reasons she rejects the “categorical imperative” approach. We have no unconditional duties because all moral norms are understood only as identifying the causal requirements of achieving chosen values, including the value of life itself.51

But philosophers sometimes think moral norms can’t just express knowledge of the means to a chosen end. They argue one could then choose any arbitrary horrific goal and thereby justify it. This would amount to a form of relativism.

For example, they’ll object that we could choose death as our goal and evaluate a suicide terrorist as good because he’s highly effective at killing, even at killing himself. What if Mohammad Sidique Khan (one of the 2005 London Underground bombers) exclaims “we love death as you love life?” That’s his chosen goal — shouldn’t we now just evaluate his means to his chosen end? He was very effective in his ability to destroy and so would count as virtuous in relation to that end.

Indeed the difference between the suicide terrorist and the productive builder is emblematic of the civilizational conflict that exploded on September 11, 2001. If we can’t explain why one is objectively evil and the other is objectively good, the modern religious apologists will object that we need values more robust than those based on the choice to live.

It is possible to assess the causal efficacy of some “means” to any arbitrarily chosen “end,” but moral evaluation is also concerned with evaluating the ends themselves.52 Here Rand’s defense of why it’s only the fact of life that makes the fact of valuing possible shows why we can evaluate one chosen ultimate end as good and everything else as evil.53

One can say that death is one’s goal. But one can’t say it with any cognitive meaning. Rand’s whole reason for thinking that life is what makes values possible is that one must do certain things to live while one doesn’t need to do anything to become inanimate. Death is the default state if one does nothing at all. So there are no “musts” or “should” governing action toward it. This is why it’s important that what makes life an end in itself is not simply being one of many possible end states. There are many such end states one could pretend to treat as a goal. “Life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action.”54

So it’s true that the end of life has to be chosen. All values are in relation to the choice to live, and there is no categorical imperative “Thou shalt live.” But Rand’s point is that, while one can choose not to adopt it, there is only one thing that can be chosen as an end in itself: one’s own life. Any other choices incompatible with that end are evil.

From this perspective, one can not only rule out the “ends” of nihilistic killers, but also many of the other highest “goods” proposed by moral philosophers. To the extent that these codes seem plausible, they draw their plausibility from implicit reliance on the end of life. For example, the utilitarians who identify the greatest happiness of the greatest number cash in on the sense that pleasure is good because in fact it’s the sensation that indicates the successful attainment of a biologically necessary goal. But they go astray when they try to treat an aggregate sum of many individuals as a kind of ultimate good, when it’s not good to any living entity for any purpose, because there’s no super-organism to whom this aggregate sum matters.

Just as one might wonder what fact lets us privilege one’s own life as an ultimate end, one might also wonder what permits regarding the value of scientific rationality as a basic virtue. How do we know that the value of rationality isn’t just a “Western prejudice,” a purely emotional preference derived from Enlightenment culture? When suicide terrorists say they love death more than life because their faith compels them to, how can we dispute their preference for avowed irrationality? This parallel skeptical worry is addressed in the same way.

Importantly, the commitment to know the truth is not a preference but a choice. It’s the choice to ask questions and pursue the truth, versus refusing to ask questions out of fear of the truth. Seen this way, it’s not a choice between two coequal alternatives, like chocolate and vanilla. It’s a fundamental choice to engage one’s reason or to subvert it. It’s only once we engage reason that we can make deliberative choices between alternatives and reveal or begin to habituate our preferences.

Just as life is not a co-equal alternative to death, so choosing to engage one’s mind to grasp the facts is not a co-equal alternative to closing one’s mind through blind faith. The ultimate value of life is not an arbitrary end but the precondition for the possibility of values as such, and rationality is not the product of an arbitrary preference but the precondition of evaluating anything else as arbitrary.55 These points are parallel because for Rand, embracing reason comes to the same thing as embracing life, since in fact rationality just is the distinctively human way of life.

The close linkage of accepting rationality and accepting the ultimate value of one’s life is another sign that there is no special skepticism about objective morality that isn’t just skepticism about the possibility of rational knowledge as such. As I’ve argued throughout, to accept the scientific world view is already to accept a set of values. Formulating an objective morality is simply working out the implications of this set of values for practical action in the world.

By the same token, anyone serious about rejecting religious faith in the name of rationality should also reject every implication of religious morality, including any of the content of its moral code that’s been unwittingly inherited by secular ethics.

Rand’s radical rejection of all religious morality

Because Rand saw rationality as the basic virtue, indeed because she thought human life required embracing reason as an “absolute,” she was radically opposed to religious morality. She rejected all faith-based morality, including any attempt to secularize faith-based morality via appeals to intuition or convention.

Rand saw faith not just as a failure to exercise rationality, but as a negation of the moral virtue of rationality and hence as anathema to morality. In reality, she saw faith as “fear of independence,” a vicious choice to submit one’s mind to the authority of others, as Abraham is supposed to have done before almost killing his only son.56

As a minor character in Atlas Shrugged puts it: Morality is “judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.”57 Religious believers who accept their moral dogmas on faith, fearing disapproval by authorities or God himself, know no such dedication. A moral code based on fear of disvalue is the opposite of one based on love for values.

What’s more, if morality is fundamentally based on the needs of human life, there is a demonstrable incoherence in the religious view that the will of God is the font of moral authority. To illustrate her point that it’s only living things that can pursue goals, Rand offers the following thought experiment:

[T]ry to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals.58

Everything she says about the hypothetical robot applies in spades to a hypothetical God. In the religious fantasy, God too is immortal, immutable, and indestructible. But then he too can have nothing that makes a difference to him for better or worse. Thus, it makes no sense to attribute to him the will or plan to achieve any higher purposes, in accord with which human actions can be judged as good or bad, right or wrong.

As with utilitarianism, religious morality gains its plausibility to the extent that it mimics a life-based morality. If we were to imagine God as a living being, we could imagine that some events could serve or thwart his purposes.59 If we thought of ourselves as like his children we might think of his moral guidance as like the wisdom of a more experienced human being about living life. Religious morality cashes in on these confusions by drawing from the roots of morality in the needs of individual life and then tearing up those roots by transferring its ultimate goal to an imaginary immortal higher being.

In light of this and other parallels between the method of religious and utilitarian morality (note also the connection between faith and the method of intuition), it’s natural that they also share similarities in the content of their moral code. While utilitarians talk about the basic value of happiness, they also argue that morality sometimes demands that an individual sacrifice his happiness to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number.60 So the utilitarian “consequentialists” share with their Kantian “deontologist” rivals the idea that morality concerns impersonal, impartial, or agent-neutral value. The influence of both of these theories is the reason secular ethics today is dominated by one version or other of altruism, the idea that morality is essentially other-regarding or “unselfish.”

Given how Rand understands value per se as a relationship between actions and successful living, she rejects the idea that morality is concerned with impartial or agent-neutral value. She embraces the connection between value and interests, in particular self-interest, and rejects the equation of morality with altruism. And she must, because the very basis of value is the requirements of a living thing’s struggle for its own existence. This is why she is an avowed opponent of all versions of the morality of self-sacrifice, religious or secular.

Rand’s idea that there is a “virtue of selfishness” is obviously controversial and raises many questions (which have been answered at length in various books). Many stem from a confusion between her view and a Nietzschean predation view that we have already addressed.61

Rand portrays human social life as healthy and successful when it’s characterized by win-win mutual exchange to mutual benefit, not by win-loss exploitation. Just as she denies that one should sacrifice others out of irrational desire, she likewise denies that one should sacrifice oneself to others’ desires. This is part of the reason she adds a final virtue to her list, one seen by Christian morality as a mortal sin: pride.62 As she sees productiveness as the virtue concerned with the creation of material values, pride is the virtue concerned with creating psychological values like self-esteem, an effect of which, she claims, is

your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.63

Conclusion

Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells us that she converted to Christianity in part because “atheism failed to answer a simple question: What is the meaning and purpose of life?”

On several levels, she is correct. Atheism fails to answer that question because atheism is simply the lack of belief in God, and a simple absence of belief answers no question. It’s also true that many atheist thinkers have failed to take seriously people’s need for these answers and have simply failed to do serious work formulating a secular, rational ethics. To the extent that many have tried, they’ve often modeled their attempts on ideas they take from religious ethics and so fail to offer a true alternative.

But in light of the alternative I’ve now presented, Ali’s sweeping implication that no atheist thinker has offered serious answers to these big questions cannot be taken seriously.

Ayn Rand was born in a repressive, authoritarian society (Soviet Russia). She had the independence to flee from it and take refuge in the West (she came to America in 1926). She too was an atheist. But when Rand came to the West, she did not take the thinkers in her midst as offering a satisfactory alternative to the system she escaped. She was not content to pick one of the dominant moral or political philosophies of her day off the shelf, even though they were revered in the country that was her salvation. She took the best elements of the philosophy of the West (the Aristotelian worldview), but proceeded to try to answer the major questions of morality on her own.

As a radically independent thinker, Rand was willing to challenge the basic dogmas of religious morality that were embraced by religious and secular thinkers alike. Anyone who admires the independent pursuit of truth, anyone who does not need truth to be dictated to them by external authorities, should be willing to do the same.

This essay by Elan Journo was originally published in New Ideal on May 13, 2019. New Ideal is the online journal of the Ayn Rand Institute. Free subscribers gain access to more content than is published on our Substack. Subscribe here.

Tribalism is resurging. One of its most obvious manifestations can be seen in politics. Today what seems to matter first and above all else is loyalty to one’s political tribe and its leaders, not the facts about an issue, not the truth on any given controversy, not the right policy to adopt — all of these are pushed to the background.

The writer Andrew Sullivan is particularly incisive in capturing today’s pervasive political tribalism: “so many severe critics of George W. Bush’s surveillance policies,” Sullivan observes, “became oddly muted when Obama adopted most of them; Democrats looked the other way as Obama ramped up deportations to levels higher than Trump’s rate so far.” For their part, Sullivan notes, Republicans have exhibited the same mindset. They “were obsessed with the national debt when Obama was in office, despite the deepest recession in decades. But the minute Trump came to power, they couldn’t be more enthusiastic about a tax package that could add trillions of dollars to it.” In her book Political Tribes, the legal scholar Amy Chua summarizes our current state this way: “At different times in the past both the American Left and the American Right have stood for group-transcending values. Neither does today.”

Tribalism is resurgent also on college campuses. Students are taught to view themselves, and others, as primarily members of some group, or tribe, defined by race, by gender, by sexual orientation, by economic status — or, increasingly, by some intersection of these group memberships. These groupings are then plotted out in a matrix of privilege and oppression. The key lesson they’re given is about viewing people not as individuals but as “representatives” of some tribal group. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University, has raised the alarm about the push for such “identity politics” in academia.

Academia and politics are just two of the most salient illustrations. Tribalism has moved from the fringes of society to the mainstream. We live in what’s becoming a tribal age.

What does that bode for our future?

Consider some recent harbingers of tribal violence on American soil. Tribalism was a factor in the 2018 massacre in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life Synagogue. The attacker was animated by an us-versus-them hostility to “outsiders,” not only immigrants, but especially Jews. Tribalism lay behind the rioting of rival tribes in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, which turned deadly. A horde of white-supremacist tribes rallied at the University of Virginia campus, bearing torches and chanting, and the next day, carrying weapons, they sought to prevent the removal of a Confederate statue. Among the counter-protesters were tribalists calling themselves “Antifa.” Tribalism was also behind the massacre in 2015 at the Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The killer hated blacks, viewing them as enemies of his (white) people, and he chose that church knowing he could find a number of blacks in one place, whom he could easily put to death.

What we can expect from tribalism, when it’s unleashed into the cultural mainstream, encouraged, and normalized, is savagery. Take a look at societies where tribalism is deeply enmeshed in the culture. Look at the unending tribal conflicts of the Balkans; the hundreds of thousands of corpses that piled up during the eruption of tribal conflict between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda; the sectarian wars that pervade the Middle East. Our tribal future promises to be dark, brutal, violent.

How can we counteract the trend of intensifying tribalism? We need first to understand its nature and source. Sullivan, Chua, and Haidt — among today’s most clear-eyed critics of current tribal loyalties — have described some important features of our present predicament.

But they leave us with a muddled conception of tribalism. An unintended result is to normalize tribalism, pushing it further into the cultural mainstream. We need an analysis that pinpoints its essential nature. To that end, I will show that we have much to gain from Ayn Rand’s philosophic analysis of tribalism. Rand not only penetrates deeply into the phenomenon of tribalism, she lays out clearly a positive alternative, the ideal of individualism, which is the antidote to tribalism.

Today’s political-cultural landscape

Sullivan, Chua and Haidt point us toward some telling features of today’s political-cultural landscape. Each notes that tribalism means seeing oneself as a member of some group, and viewing your life, other people, the world from a group-first perspective. Chua argues compellingly that race is a salient, if not the major, form of “political tribalism” in America today.

Sullivan captures how loyalty to a political group is appealing to some. “One of the great attractions of tribalism,” he observes, “is that you don’t actually have to think very much. All you need to know on any given subject is which side you’re on. You pick up signals from everyone around you, you slowly winnow your acquaintances to those who will reinforce your worldview, a tribal leader calls the shots, and everything slips into place. After a while, your immersion in tribal loyalty makes the activities of another tribe not just alien but close to incomprehensible.”

Such tribal loyalty, Sullivan writes, is uncritical, unthinking, blind. “When a party leader in a liberal democracy proposes a shift in direction, there is usually an internal debate. It can go on for years. When a tribal leader does so, the tribe immediately jumps on command. And so [after Trump’s election] the Republicans went from free trade to protectionism, and from internationalism to nationalism, almost overnight.”

Sullivan notes the same mindless obedience to the tribal leader in the growing Republican approval of Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian leader who, just a few years earlier, was (correctly) recognized as a significant menace. It’s not that Putin became less authoritarian — indeed, he was more aggressive domestically and internationally — during the intervening years. The difference is that the Republicans’ tribal leader, Trump, now admires Putin.

Sullivan, Chua and Haidt all observe how tribal groups in today’s culture typically exhibit a suspicion, even hostility toward nonmembers, outsiders, them. For example, Haidt laments a growing trend on campus of teaching students to think that “Every situation is to be analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people.” This leads to a “paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.” Chua writes that when tribes feel threatened, they “close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.”

Sullivan, Chua, and Haidt succeed, up to a point, in analyzing some manifestations of tribalist behavior in our culture. But beyond that, what they offer only muddles our conception of tribalism, and they effectively normalize a pernicious phenomenon. They share two profound confusions: (1) they claim that tribalism is in some sense innate, and (2) they claim that there can be good forms of tribalism. Neither of these claims is true.

Is everyone a tribalist?

For Sullivan, Chua and Haidt, tribalism is an innate, built-in factor in human nature. Chua asserts that “Humans are tribal,” suggesting that the impulse — or “instinct” as she also puts it — to belong to a tribe has a neurological basis. Sullivan offers a similar perspective, basing his view on observations from anthropology. He notes: “Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society.” Although few actual tribes exist today, he observes, “that doesn’t mean that humans are genetically much different.”

Haidt, for his part, notes that, “When we look back at the ways our ancestors lived, there’s no getting around it: we are tribal primates. . . . Tribalism is in our hearts and minds.” It’s something we’ll “never stamp out entirely,” though he seems to think its effects can be mitigated. Even so, we must recognize, Haidt claims, that our minds have evolved “for tribal warfare and us/them thinking.” Certain factors, then, can “turn on [students’] ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle.” We are, in short, hardwired to be tribal.

Is every single one of us tribal? Pause to trace out the full meaning of that claim. To be tribal is to put blind loyalty to the tribe above your own first-handed grasp of the truth and of right and wrong. That describes some people, but there’s no evidence for the sweeping claim that within each of us is a raging tribalist itching to burst out and blindly follow the group’s dictates, even to the point of savagery.

This assumption that tribalism is an unavoidable feature of human nature leads to a second claim, which further clouds the issue. The claim is that there are, in fact, good forms of tribalism.

“Good” tribalism?

In her widely praised book Political Tribes, Chua writes that “Some tribes are sources of joy and salvation; some are the hideous product of hate mongering by opportunistic power seekers.” [Emphasis added.]

Sullivan believes that there is such a thing as “healthy tribalism.” This form of tribalism gives people a “sense of belonging, of unconditional pride, in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts. There are hip-hop and country-music tribes; bros; nerds; Wasps; Dead Heads and Packers fans; Facebook groups. (Yes, technology upends some tribes and enables new ones.) And then, most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.” None of this is a problem, he writes; tribalism only becomes a problem when it is something intense, all-consuming, overpowering of our other loyalties.

Haidt argues that there are benign, good forms of “identity politics.” What distinguishes these good forms of tribalism is that they draw a wider circle of inclusion, rather than a narrow one of exclusion. They acknowledge the common humanity of those involved. He gives the example of Martin Luther King Jr.’s push for civil rights. Things go wrong, in Haidt’s view, when people cling to “identity politics” tribes as a way of excluding and vilifying others, instead of coming together around an awareness of our common humanity.

What explains this shared notion that some tribes are healthy, benign, good? For Chua, Sullivan and Haidt, the observable fact that people join into groups is explained by our tribal drive. Belonging to groups is something we “crave,” it’s an expression of our “tribal instinct,” we’re born that way. But we can also see something important about the groups people join: not all of them are bad. Being a Packer’s fan or a member of a Facebook group for Dead Heads is obviously, and crucially, different from, say, belonging to a white supremacist gang or an “Antifa” cell. Since some groups are destructive and others are benign, this apparently implies that our innate tribal drive manifests itself in bad tribes and good tribes.

This bizarre view ignores the reality of what a tribe is. Think of the tribes in Rwanda, in the Balkans, in the Middle East; or the American tribes of white supremacists and of “Antifa”: all of these groups have far more in common with each other — in how they view themselves, how they behave — than they do with groups of Packers fans and Dead Heads. But Chua, Sullivan, and Haidt lose sight of the obvious fact that not all groups are tribes. This fact eludes them because they insist, without good evidence, on a tribal instinct to account for why we human beings form groups, rather than live in isolation.

What is the difference between a tribe and other groups? Ayn Rand offers a clarifying answer, one that flows from her philosophic account of the nature of today’s tribalism.

Tribes vs. non-tribal groups

Rand observed that tribalism has so infused people’s thinking that they struggle to understand “what constitutes a rational human association.” She wrote those words in 1973, but they apply, with added force, today. In sharp contrast with Sullivan, Chua, and Haidt, Rand views tribalism as entirely avoidable. It reflects, not an innate feature of human nature, but a path that people choose. So, on her view, not all groups are tribal, and, there’s no such issue as distinguishing between “good” and pernicious tribes. Instead, we need to understand what sets tribalism apart from other, proper, ways in which individuals come together into groups. Rand writes:

There is a crucial difference between an association and a tribe. Just as a proper society is ruled by laws, not by men, so a proper association is united by ideas, not by men, and its members are loyal to the ideas, not to the group. It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one’s own (and one should be free not to deal with them). All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds (philosophical, political, professional, etc.) — not by the physiological or geographic accident of birth, and not on the ground of tradition.

Two key points here deserve special emphasis.

First, notice Rand’s stress on what counts as rational loyalty to a proper group. For example, you choose to join a tennis club because you value the sport, want to get better at it, and wish to find other players who share your passion. Your loyalty is to the values that define the club, and that you’ve joined for the sake of. Or, you sign on to a political party because you’ve thought about its positions, you believe its principles merit your support, and you want to see those ideas enacted. These two examples, which can stand for an endless variety of others, contrast with the kind of tribal loyalty we saw earlier, particularly in Sullivan’s examples of Democrats and Republicans acting in loyalty not to any principles, but to their tribe’s leader.

Second, notice Rand’s focus on the individual. Proper associations are the product of the choices of individuals to come together over shared ideas and values and principles. For Rand, the individual is the starting point, not only when distinguishing tribes from other groupings, but in all moral-political thinking.

The ideal of individualism was a defining theme of Rand’s philosophic thought and writing, and it was fundamental to her analysis of tribalism. Rand’s conception of individualism, it’s important to note, was distinctive. For many people, an individualist is someone who follows his emotions, whose “individuality” is defined by negation: by rejecting whatever other, conventional people do and believe. For Rand, that’s a caricature. Such a person is as beholden to the group as is the conformist: he watches what the group does and then does the opposite. Central to Rand’s conception of individualism is a deep-rooted commitment to facts and reason. On Rand’s view, an individualist is someone who accepts the responsibility of living by their own independent, first-handed judgment.

This independence of thought is a hallmark of Rand’s fictional heroes. To give just one example, the character Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead, is an innovative architect who puts nothing above his own rational judgment, his own understanding of the truth, and his own artistic standards — amid immense social pressures to conform to unthinking tradition and conventional standards. The individualist, in Rand’s conception, is fundamentally active-minded. Such a person is committed to grasping the facts, reaching conclusions guided by reason, and acting in line with what’s true and morally right. Clearly, this contrasts sharply with what we’ve already identified as distinctive characteristics of the tribalist. What lies beneath those tribal characteristics?

What tribalism is

Let’s start by looking at one variety of tribalism that surged to the forefront decades ago and that Rand analyzed. In her 1977 lecture “Global Balkanization,” later published in essay form, Rand examined the rise of “ethnic” tribalism in Europe and North America. At the time, “ethnic” groups not only in the Balkans, but also in Scotland, Spain, France, Italy, Canada, and elsewhere clamored for political recognition and separatism — in the name of realizing their collective identity. Why were men and women in scientifically and technologically advanced societies going tribal? In answering that question, Rand points us toward the essentially anti-intellectual nature of tribalism. She observed:

Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live? Obviously, they will seek to join a group — any group — which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group — they will be pulled obediently to join a group.

Which group? If people have absorbed the idea that their own mind and judgment are unreliable, and if they have been deprived of self-esteem, they can feel no confidence to make the right choice. What that leaves each of them with is to join some “unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.” In today’s world, that power is labeled your “ethnicity,” which is some agglomeration of your genetic lineage (i.e., racism) and the traditions practiced by your grandparents.

There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred — brute, blind, virulent hatred — than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way — then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion and hatred.

“Ethnic” tribalism was, and remains, a common form of a wider phenomenon. For Rand, the term “tribalism” encompasses a range of manifestations that share a common root. These included racism, “ethnic identity,” xenophobia, caste systems, guild socialism, gang culture. (To that list we might add today’s assorted gender-based tribes.) What’s in common to such tribes is a distinctive, anti-intellectual mindset.¹

Tribalism as a chosen, not innate, mental passivity

For Rand, the tribal mindset is in no way innate. Ultimately its sources lie in an individual’s choice to default on the responsibility of independent thinking. Rand characterized that mindset as a special kind of cognitive passivity, especially in regard to conceptual thinking and fundamental principles. “It is a mentality,” she writes, “that decided, at a certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further.” The tribalist’s passive, anti-effort, anti-intellectual mentality, on Rand’s account, “is not a product of ignorance (nor is it caused by a lack of intelligence), but rather self-made, i.e., self-arrested.”

Take the example of a white supremacist “protestor” in Charlottesville. From belonging to his tribe, the white supremacist gets ready-made views, rationalizations, rituals that save him the bother of having to think. He avoids the effort of activating his mind, looking at the facts and forming his own judgments of individuals. Instead, he absorbs from the collective: my group good, outsiders bad. By such passive conformity and by continually signaling his loyalty in action, the tribal member avoids the responsibility of developing a genuine sense of self-worth. Instead, he attempts to derive a pseudo self-esteem from the fact of his membership in the tribe. The achievements of others deemed “white” somehow imbue him with value. Fundamental to this mindset is a chosen dependence on the tribe and its leaders. Tribalism is an anti-intellectual form of collectivism.

Rand’s conception of tribalism, with its source in a particular kind of passive mindset, clarifies features of tribalism that Sullivan, Chua and Haidt have called to our attention: the hostility to outsiders and the indifference to moral thinking and principles. From Rand’s perspective, these symptoms flow from a self-arrested consciousness.

Rejection of moral thinking

The tribe enables, and encourages, its members to abdicate on the responsibility of engaging in moral thinking and applying principles. The tribal member can shirk that cognitive effort. In return, the tribe demands something he’s only too willing to give: an unquestioning, uncritical, unthinking loyalty to the group. Rand observes:

The basic commandment of all such groups, which takes precedence over any other rules, is: loyalty to the group — not to ideas, but to people; not to the group’s beliefs, which are minimal and chiefly ritualistic, but to the group’s members and leaders. Whether a given member is right or wrong, the others must protect him from outsiders; whether he is innocent or guilty, the others must stand by him against outsiders; whether he is competent or not, the others must employ him or trade with him in preference to outsiders. Thus, a physical qualification — the accident of birth in a given village or tribe — takes precedence over morality and justice.2

Rand added that the accidental, physiological traits are only the “most frequently apparent and superficial qualification” for tribal membership. The factor uniting such tribes is their anti-intellectual mentality. Moreover, the beliefs or principles that supposedly unite some of today’s (ostensibly) political-ideological tribes are better understood (in Rand’s words) as “minimal and chiefly ritualistic.”

This is manifest in the tribalist’s rejection of moral thinking. For tribal Republicans it was a grave moral offense that President Bill Clinton had an affair with an intern and lied about it. But notice the conspicuous absence of outrage today, from supposed moralists, about President Trump’s apparently numerous extramarital affairs, including with a porn actress, and the lies, payoffs and cover-ups to silence his bedmates. If an action is unwise or destructive or immoral, the fact that it is your tribe’s guy doing it cannot make it wise or constructive or virtuous. But for the tribal mentality, that’s what matters. And that’s all that matters, when you’ve abandoned moral ideas and principles. The tribalist is profoundly antimoral.

Hostility to outsiders

To the tribal mentality, outsiders are felt to be a special kind of threat. When he’s around people of his own tribe, he is comfortable: they are like him (usually sharing his skin color or other physiological, accidental features); they share his unquestioned customs and traditions and ways of living. Among them, he can remain in his state of mental lethargy. And this kind of mentality copes within a tribal grouping, so long as no part of it is challenged. But outsiders constitute one kind of challenge to it and provoke a response that ranges, as Rand puts it, from “fear to resentment to stubborn evasion to panic to malice to hatred.”3

To engage with “outsiders” means having to communicate, trade, evaluate, interact with people who differ from those he’s familiar with. “Outsiders” means “the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang — the world of all those people who do not live by his ‘rules.’” To interact with them means having to exert the kind of conceptual mental effort that he has habitually avoided, and he feels ill-equipped to the task. “If his professed beliefs — i.e., the rules and slogans of his group — are challenged, he feels his consciousness dissolving in fog. Hence, his fear of outsiders.” He does “not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror.” The threat he feels is not existential but pertains to his ability to think and deal with the world: to deal with “outsiders” requires “that he rise above his ‘rules’ to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it.”

This gives us insight into some of the tensions we see today on college campuses. Students are taught to view themselves and everyone else as members of tribal groups defined usually by perceptual, physiological markers. And they’re taught that their own tribe possesses their own way to understand the world: for example, that we’re locked into a structure defined by power and domination over one another. This comes to be held as a precarious dogma. When they encounter people who hold differing views or who question their dogmas, those outsiders are felt to be a threat. The contrasting views and questions are felt to be provoking, because in a sense they are: they are prompts to reflect on one’s own beliefs, question whether one has any reasons for one’s positions, and try to form abstract principles that it would be right to act on. And this takes cognitive effort, which the tribal mentality seeks to avoid and dreads. It’s a reminder of the tribalist’s sense of cognitive impotence and inability to deal with the world — outside of the tribe.

We can see aspects of how that mindset experiences non-tribal members, in the words of one student, a self-described former “radical” activist. The student came to regard certain political dogmas as “sacred,” which in this context means not to be questioned, and bristled at people who held different views, no matter what their reasons.

If someone does question those beliefs, they’re not just being stupid or even depraved, they’re actively doing violence. They might as well be kicking a puppy. When people hold sacred beliefs, there is no disagreement without animosity. . . . [P]eople who disagreed with my views weren’t just wrong, they were awful people. I watched what people said closely, scanning for objectionable content. Any infraction reflected badly on your character, and too many might put you on my blacklist.

Taking this sketch as illustrative of a particular kind of tribalist, we can see how some students come to experience “outsiders.” An outsider’s mere voicing of an opposing view is felt to be “doing violence” to them. This us-versus-them attitude runs deep, and if there seems to be no way to bridge the gulf — the outsiders are clearly wrong and unreachable — you can see why it would fuel fear, suspicion, hatred, and worse.

The rise of tribalism

What explains the resurgence of tribalism? It’s illuminating to contrast Rand’s explanation with the views of Sullivan, Chua and Haidt. On their premise that a tribal drive is innate, they suggest a number of social, cultural, economic and political factors that somehow, and often in combination, switch on “our tribal circuits.”

Chua, for example, stresses economic inequality as a major factor: people who feel hard-done-by economically gravitate toward tribalism, resenting the “elites.” The issue of economic inequality is hugely complex and widely misunderstood, and it may well agitate some people toward resentment. For all such cultural, political and economic factors, however, you can find many individuals who are exposed to them, but who do not succumb to tribalism. Conversely, you can find many individuals who are untouched by, say, severe poverty, who are in fact super-wealthy, who are beneficiaries of every conceivable opportunity in life, and yet are highly tribal: for example, Donald Trump.

This kind of explanation fails because it ignores the fact of human agency and volition.

For Rand, by contrast, tribalism is the result of a default on independent thought, and to understand its rise, we need to look at our culture’s dominant ideas and their spread. An individual’s choice to become dependent on a tribal group occurs within, and is influenced by, a particular cultural context. Rand observed several major contributing factors that, across decades and centuries, helped to re-inject tribalism into the culture. The resurgence of tribalism in the 1970s — which we’re still living through today — is a product of long-established intellectual trends permeating the schools, the universities, political life. These trends push people to become tribal.

The thrust of these trends is to negate two values that came to the fore in the Age of Enlightenment: individualism and reason. The subversion of these ideas has been unfolding across decades in schools and in universities. When students learn that reason is unreliable, that we cannot reach truth, that we can only trust the inter-subjective agreement of a group, they emerge as adults lacking confidence in their own judgment and their self-worth. They’ve been groomed for tribalism.

The greater the intellectual-cultural assault on individualism and reason, the more we can expect a rise in tribalism. Seeking guidance and a semblance of self-esteem, people imagine that they can gain both from a tribe. Rand observed that “Tribalism is a product of fear, and fear is the dominant emotion of any person, culture or society that rejects man’s power of survival: reason.”

Consider, for example, the meaning and implications of just one recent book on psychology and moral thinking, intended for general readers, which showcases cutting-edge academic research. The book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, is not only a best seller, but actually widely read. Its key messages: We’re all driven by our passions and emotional reactions; reason steps in to provide after-the-fact rationalizations. Rather than a “scientist searching for truth,” reason is like a cross between “a politician searching for votes” and a “full-time in-house press secretary,” justifying whatever view we already hold, no matter how bad. The book instructs us that the “worship of reason” is one of the “most long-lived delusions” in Western history. To give up on this “rationalist delusion” is to be “wary of any individual’s ability to reason” and to reach truth. And, finally, the academic research purportedly shows that we’re innately tribal; it’s unavoidable.

The book’s author is Jonathan Haidt. But Haidt is not even remotely in the vanguard of intellectuals who are openly dismissive of reason; on the contrary, Haidt thinks of himself as trying to make our cultural and political discussions more reasonable. Yet the effect of his book is not only to subvert reason and individualism, but also to whitewash and push tribalism further into the mainstream. Haidt’s book is one drop within a vast intellectual tide, sweeping throughout the culture. The origins of that tide date back two centuries to the counter-Enlightenment.

That tide exerts a powerful impact on some, it leaves some untouched, and it impacts others partially. Rand drew attention to subtler manifestations of the tribal mindset: specifically, the cases of individuals who are torn inwardly between tribalism and their own judgment. They have adopted tribalism in some areas of life, but not fully, and use their own judgment in other areas. Compared to political activists pushing a tribalist agenda, she regarded these cases as more tragic and harder to deal with. Such inwardly torn individuals, Rand observed, are products of “modern education who do not like the nature of what they feel, but have never learned to think.”

Since early childhood, their emotions have been conditioned by the tribal premise that one must “belong,” one must be “in,” one must swim with the “mainstream,” one must follow the idea of “those who know.” A man’s frustrated mind adds another emotion to the tribal conditioning: a blindly bitter resentment of his own intellectual subservience.

Such cases of torn individuals point to important aspects of Rand’s distinctive explanation of tribalism and its resurgence. First, it’s not innate, but a matter of the individual’s default on independent thinking within a cultural context that too often tells him he is unable to think. Second, precisely because it’s a default — a matter of choice — the individual can choose, though it is hard, to work his way out of a tribal mindset, resist the cultural influences engulfing him, and exert his mental resources to become independent on principle, in every facet of life. Finally, a culture’s dominant ideas, she argued, can (and should) be changed, so that people emerge from their schooling better equipped to think and confident in their own judgment. Within a culture that prizes reason and individualism, its dominant intellectual trends and ideas would encourage and equip people to be independent, rather than blindly obedient to a tribe. It is that kind of future that Rand believed is achievable.

An antidote to tribalism

The spread of tribalism, Rand observed, “is an enormously anti-intellectual evil.” There’s no bargaining with tribalism, no accommodation, no compromise to be found with it. Tribalism can, and must, be marginalized and eliminated.

The antidote for tribalism — the positive to aim at — is the ideal of individualism, which animates Rand’s philosophic thought and novels.

The heroes of her novels and the kind of real-life heroes she admired were individuals who looked at the world with unborrowed vision. They were “first-handers” who put nothing — no authority, no group loyalty; nothing — above their own perception of the facts. They were passionate idealists committed to grasping what’s true, and understanding what’s right and wrong — not what some group told them to believe. The source of their virtue lies in their choice to think for themselves.

For Rand, that path is open to every single one of us, if we choose it. We can seize the reins of our minds and look at the world ourselves, drawing our own conclusions and making our own evaluations. The means of leading an independent life are within our grasp, if we will ourselves to be active-minded in all areas of life, at all times, on every issue, as a matter of committed policy. It is this fundamental commitment to reality that’s a necessary condition for self-esteem — the false promise of which is part of the tribe’s pull. It’s this fundamental commitment to reason and facts that enables you to pursue your own goals and happiness in life; to find the people you rightly choose to associate with and to love.

And, on Rand’s account, it is this fundamental orientation to reality, rather than some collective, that inoculates the individual from the virulent pull of tribalism.

In a video post, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani singled out Citadel CEO Ken Griffin as the target of the new luxury home tax.¹ Griffin courageously responded calling the video stunt “creepy,” “weird,” and “frightening.”2 While pushing back, however, there is a subtle way in which Griffin and others who rightfully stood up for him inadvertently endorsed Griffin’s attackers.

Griffin is right to be alarmed. New York is where Blackstone executive Wesley LePatner was fatally shot, and where many, including the mayor’s own campaign director, celebrated the killing of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare.3 For the mayor to gleefully boast “We’re Taxing the Rich” in front of a private residence of another financier just blocks from Thompson’s murder scene is to put a target on Griffin’s back for another monster to aim at.

As an act of admirable defiance in such a violent climate, Griffin threatened to halt a $6 billion development project and pivot his firm’s expansion to Miami, a city he says “embraces business” rather than “redistributed handouts.” Additionally, Griffin and editors at The Free Press andThe Wall Street Journal who came to his defense, appealed to Griffin’s track record: the companies he built, number of jobs he created, level of taxes he paid, and philanthropy he provided to NYC charities.4^,5

The combination of vindicating Griffin’s wealth and threatening to withdraw it from Mamdani’s hands is a good start. So is equating Mamdani’s “tax the rich” rhetoric to a racial slur, as Steven Roth of Vornado did.6

But the message should have been less compromised and more proudly defiant. Listing Griffin’s “contributions” to the city to justify Griffin’s freedom to build and enjoy his wealth only bolsters Mamdani’s case. The need for such “contributions” is the idea the socialist mayor and his supporters rely on to stigmatize the rich. It is even worse to explicitly endorse him, as Roth did when he said that Mamdani’s leadership, with a few tweaks, “could make this great city even greater.”

Griffin’s accomplishments, such as the wealth he created, careers and trade he facilitated, are crucial to his defense as evidence of his personal productive virtue. They show he truly has earned his wealth. Roth drew attention to this by calling Griffin the “epitome of the American Dream.” That is the correct attitude. But it’s only correct in the true meaning of the American Dream as encoded in the Declaration of Independence. The right to the pursuit of happiness means individuals have a moral right to live, produce, and keep the property they earn for their own sake. They do not have to justify their existence by their service as a piggy bank for the needs of others.

If Griffin and his supporters want to mount a principled defense and rally supporters to their cause, especially while celebrating the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration and its ideals, they need to stop giving material and intellectual bribes to thugs who oppose the values this country was built on.7

Philosopher Ayn Rand argued that evil gains power only because the good appeases it and willingly accepts the role of its servant. When Griffin and his defenders say that what makes him good is his “contributions” to the city, and when Roth endorses the “young, smart and energetic” socialist, all of them validate their mortal enemy as having moral goals worth pursuing. They surrender their right to keep their wealth and accept the socialists’ demand to seize it, merely disagreeing on “fair” proportions. Rand called this terrible error “the sanction of the victim.”8

Rand dramatizes the error in her novel Atlas Shrugged. Only as long as the industrialist Hank Rearden accepts that his duty is to sustain his family can they continue milking him. Only as long as Dagny Taggart keeps working sleepless nights can her brother James, along with his cronies, continue looting and distributing the benefits of the railroad Dagny’s effort alone keeps afloat. But Dagny and Rearden eventually discover that the only way to bring the end to their enemies is to stop abetting them. Griffin needs to learn this lesson from Atlas Shrugged: he too is a victimized producer who needs to withdraw his sanction from vicious looters like Mamdani.

But unfortunately Griffin did not offer Atlas in his defense. Instead, he offered to distribute George Orwell’s Animal Farm to New York ninth graders. Like many others, Griffin confuses the novella with an educational tool against socialism. But Orwell was a self-proclaimed socialist, and Animal Farm is at best a critique of Stalinism, which Orwell saw as a corrupt perversion of the noble crusade for socialism.9^,10 By recommending it, Griffin grants another moral sanction to the crusade for expropriating from those with ability in favor of those with need. That is a crusade that would put an end to the American Dream.

If business leaders like Griffin truly wish to defeat the ugly campaigns to stigmatize the rich, they must first withdraw their sanction of the ideas that empower their destroyers. They must stop justifying their wealth by reference to how much of it the producers give away and start asserting their right to keep what they earn as a matter of individual right.

As a first step, Griffin should rescind his recommendation of Animal Farm. Instead, he could support distributing Rand’s short, fictional work — the 1938 novella Anthem (for which a distribution system to high schools is already in place).11 It is a story that celebrates the moral independence of the individual and the right of each person to live for his own sake.

Only when producers stop begging for permission to exist can they finally strip the power from the “creepy” and “frightening” attacks on their achievements.

“The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society.” — Ayn Rand

We just launched the Atlas Prize for Independent Thought — a competition challenging 16–22-year-olds to analyze, question, defend, or critique the ideas in Atlas Shrugged featuring a $100,000 top prize.

This is not your typical essay contest; it’s a multi-round intellectual gauntlet in which contestants prove their potential through an essay, an oral exam, and — if they qualify — a finals event in New York City.

The goal: to find the next generation of new intellectuals — young people with the potential to become philosophical “heavyweights” who can change the world with the power of their ideas.

But this all hinges on getting the Atlas Prize in front of the right audience: young minds who demonstrate not only intelligence and ambition, but intellectual integrity.

That’s where you can help.

We’re looking for creators and influencers — YouTubers, Substackers, podcast hosts — who have the ear of intellectually serious young people. A mass following is not necessary; in fact, niche creators may be even better as long as they have an audience of the right people.

Do you know anyone who fits that description? A name and a line of context are all we need; a warm introduction would be even more appreciated. Please send ideas to atlasprize@aynrand.org.

Thank you in advance for your help. Together, we can find the next generation of Objectivist intellectuals.

Ayn Rand is well known to millions of fans as the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but she also built an enduring legacy as a public intellectual, not only through the written word but also from behind the lectern.

In biographical interviews, now housed in the Ayn Rand Archives, Rand once admitted, “I don’t particularly enjoy speaking, neither the process, nor the question periods.”¹ Yet, she recognized the value of reaching an audience through the spoken word, whether on radio, television, or in a packed auditorium before a live audience.

From her earliest public appearances in the 1930s to her nationally broadcast interviews in the 1960s to her addresses at the Ford Hall Forum and at West Point, Rand used these venues as a platform for advancing her radical new philosophy.

A Novelist and a Public Intellectual

In May 1936, a month after the publication of her first novel, We the Living, Rand was referred to as “probably New York’s busiest lecturer” by the New York World-Telegram, citing her presentations at various clubs.2 In one of these talks, titled “Whitewashed Russia,” Rand promoted her new novel while challenging the pro-Soviet sympathies of Western intellectuals.3 It is among the earliest documented examples of Rand’s public speaking career.

During this period, Rand witnessed the growing popularity of communism in intellectual circles, the very thing she had fled in Soviet Russia. She had seen firsthand the impact of collectivism on the lives of individuals, and watched with horror as those same ideas manifested in America, particularly under the policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

To counter this growing trend, Rand devoted three months, unpaid, to work for the 1940 presidential campaign of Republican candidate Wendell Willkie. She prepared “intellectual ammunition” for Republican writers and speakers, and also answered questions before live audiences. Decades later, Rand reportedly said that she enjoyed those experiences immensely, particularly clarifying complex ideas and communicating with antagonistic audiences.4

Even before Rand achieved significant recognition as a bestselling author and public intellectual, she sought opportunities to confront prevailing cultural ideas directly, a trend that would continue, with increasing scope, for the rest of her life.

Atlas Shrugged as a Turning Point

During the years she was writing Atlas Shrugged (1945 to 1957), Rand’s public speaking activity was minimal, but soon after its publication this would change dramatically.5

When the book was published in 1957, Rand believed she had fulfilled her purpose as a novelist: presenting “her ideal man” and “ideal view of existence,” as well as a new, rational code of morality.6 She expected the novel to spark serious engagement, even if in the form of strong, intelligent opposition.

Instead, she was “enormously shocked by the state of the culture and by the attacks on Atlas, not by the attacks themselves, but by the fact that there was nobody to oppose them.”7 What she encountered instead was “abysmal, stupid hooliganism,” smearing, self-contradictory reviews instead of real, intellectual engagement.8

Because the intellectual establishment refused to grapple with her ideas, and because no other cultural voices were defending them, Rand saw a need to take her case directly to active-minded members of the general public.

She also came to see, through ongoing conversations with her students, particularly Leonard Peikoff, that some elements of her philosophy were more radical than she had initially realized.9 This deepened her commitment to elaborating on her ideas in multiple formats, whether in essays and books or in lectures, interviews, and Q&A sessions.

Rand was acutely aware of her own limitations as a speaker, both because of her preference for the written word and knowing that her Russian accent would be a barrier for effective communication.10 But by 1961, she stated that she was eager to face the challenge of speaking before live audiences:

Right now, I am beginning to feel not only that I want to do it, but actual enthusiasm and impatience. I’m beginning to be very nervous about all my speaking engagements, because it’s time to get to work. And I have not felt that since I finished Atlas. So that is a very good sign. It reminds me of the early days of approaching The Fountainhead or Atlas, that is, the feeling of I am taking on a big assignment.11

From 1959 to 1961, Rand appeared in a series of four television interviews with Mike Wallace. Starting in 1960, she engaged in more than sixty broadcasts on WBAI radio in New York City and gave talks at major universities. One such talk, “The Objectivist Ethics,” was delivered at a 1961 symposium titled “Ethics in Our Time” at the University of Wisconsin, later republished as the first chapter in The Virtue of Selfishness. In this same period, she spoke at Yale, M.I.T., and Lewis & Clark College (where she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree and delivered “The Goal of My Writing”).12

Her influence expanded further into mainstream culture with three appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1967.13 In an era when late-night television reached millions of Americans, Rand used Carson’s platform to present her ideas to a mass audience. Over the course of three interviews, she discussed topics ranging from happiness and creativity to the Vietnam War, the military draft, and the moral foundations of capitalism. The audience response was extraordinary. Thousands of letters poured into NBC and into Rand’s office, marking one of the strongest public reactions to her television appearances.14

The Ford Hall Forum and Rand’s Later Speaking Career

Rand’s ultimate goal was to reach active minds. Of all her speaking platforms, none proved more enduring or important than the Ford Hall Forum in Boston.15 Starting in 1961, Rand gave nineteen lectures at the Forum, each one a major cultural event within the growing Objectivist movement.16 The Forum, founded in 1908, had a long-standing reputation for open inquiry. Rand praised it as a rare institution that treated ideas with the seriousness they deserved.

Rand valued the presence of the Forum’s president, Judge Reuben Lurie, who served as moderator for sixteen of Rand’s nineteen talks at the Forum. His skill in managing audience questions and his respectful demeanor created an atmosphere in which Rand could reach the kind of minds that she had always sought.

Lurie commented on the uniqueness of Rand’s events at the Forum, noting that she attracted crowds of people that had traveled from all over the country.17 Frances Smith (who worked for the Ford Hall Forum for forty years, serving as executive director, president, and chairman of the board) stated that Rand’s talks would fill the thirteen hundred-seat auditorium, and that an overflow crowd of about five hundred people would listen (through a loudspeaker) to Rand’s talks in an adjacent building.18 Beyond the walls of Jordan Hall and later Alumni Hall, Rand’s talks were broadcast on Boston’s WGBH radio, then re-aired in other cities (such as on WBAI and Columbia’s WKCR radio).

Rand’s career as a speaker culminated in several landmark addresses. In 1974, she delivered “Philosophy: Who Needs It” to cadets at West Point, a speech that later became the title essay of her final book of the same name, published posthumously in 1982.19 In that lecture, she made the case not for her particular philosophy but for the importance of philosophy as such, and that the subject is unavoidable for every living person. Leonard Peikoff reported that the crowd of twelve hundred greeted Rand with a standing ovation.20

Her last public lecture, “The Sanction of the Victims,” was delivered in November 1981 at the National Conference on Monetary Reform in New Orleans, in which she urged an audience of investors and businessmen to stop supporting ideas and institutions that furthered their own destruction: “millions of dollars are being donated to universities by big business enterprises every year . . . . some of [the] worst anti-business, anti-capitalism propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.”

She was scheduled to deliver the lecture again at the Ford Hall Forum in the spring of 1982, but she died in March of that year. In her place, Leonard Peikoff, Rand’s legal and intellectual heir, took the stage and read the speech to a packed hall in Boston. Peikoff would continue Rand’s tradition at the Forum over the next two decades, delivering a total of fifteen Ford Hall Forum talks between 1982 and 2003.

A Legacy at the Podium and On Air

Rand’s speaking engagements were ultimately part of a larger intellectual campaign: to reclaim the culture by offering a positive, rational alternative to modern intellectual trends.

These events often left a deep and lasting impression on those who attended, inspiring a generation of students, scholars, and professionals to carry her ideas forward. In the 1997 documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, several individuals who heard Rand speak recalled how her talks were received by those in attendance. Leonard Peikoff recalled that “she faced, at first, very antagonistic audiences. They booed her, they tried to out-yell her, but, of course, she was immutable. She was herself on the lecture platform, and I’ve seen audiences start booing and end up cheering.”21

Those who heard her speak often remarked on the intensity of her presence and her capacity to deal with questions directly and unflinchingly. Harry Binswanger, who first saw Rand speak at M.I.T. in 1962, remarked in Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life that “she had the ability to deal with anything that could come up from an audience. . . . We were just coming out of the ’50s . . . when no one would take a stand on anything. . . . But she was there making the most dramatic and passionate statements, saying everything was simple, absolute, clear cut.”22

The effect of this clarity was felt not just in the lecture hall but in the hours that followed. The late John Ridpath, an acquaintance of Ayn Rand from 1962 to 1982, and a professor of intellectual history and economics at York University, remembered post-lecture gatherings in Boston where Rand would entertain questions until dawn.23

Perhaps the best summation of why Rand engaged with the public in the way that she did came during her second television interview with Mike Wallace in 1960. After she gave a grim prognostication of the state of the world and the lack of men of great ability in today’s culture, Wallace commented that Rand must be “an awful pessimist.” Rand responded: “Oh, not at all. Ideas brought us here and ideas can take us out. I am the opposite of a pessimist. Why do you think I come out and defy 2,000 years or more of civilization? Because I know that if the right is on my side, if reason is on my side, I will win. The right ideas have always won.”24

This essay by Ben Bayer was originally published in New Ideal on July 19, 2023. New Ideal is the online journal of the Ayn Rand Institute. Free subscribers gain access to more content than is published on our Substack. Subscribe here.

How would you react if a friend urged you to live a more morally virtuous life?

Like many, you might fear that if you took this advice, life would become harder and less filled with joy. A morally virtuous life, you might think, is about constraining your ambitions in life, giving up pleasures and spending time working at soup kitchens. You might think that people who are fussy about morality aren’t very practical.

You might say no to such an impractical way of living. But if you’re like many, even if you choose the practical over your idea of the moral, you’ll feel a twinge of guilt, thinking that what you’re foregoing is still somehow admirable.

There is a way out of this dilemma, if you rethink what it means to be moral. And you can observe, in the lives of actual people, that moral virtue is an indispensable tool for living a successful, practical life.

No one could be more practical than an inventor who created revolutionary technology and made a fortune in the process. Consider how a man like Thomas Edison accomplished this through an inveterate concern for right and wrong.

At first his concern might not seem like the stuff of morality. What I have in mind is how Edison used his knowledge of physics and mathematics to determine the exactly right level of vacuum and filament material that would allow an inexpensive incandescent light to burn for over a thousand hours. He famously tested thousands of different materials before he found one with the most luminescent electrical resistance that would still not burn too rapidly (it was bamboo).

Yet we should not brush off concern for the right and wrong outcome of his experiments as mere assessment of the correct means to an end. His ambition was to create something of great value by drawing on the best within him. He created a life-giving and profitable technology by having the courage to envision this never-before dreamed of goal, and the integrity to finish his quest to find out how to make it. His work expressed a dedication to the true and the good, and it earned him a fortune.

Of course, a new technology wouldn’t be practical if no one knew of its benefits. George Westinghouse was another productive achiever who made it his ambition to bring alternating current to market in the United States. Westinghouse did not invent AC but was one of the few to recognize its advantages over direct current in transmitting electricity economically over long distances. He worked to raise the necessary funds and to fend off both a propaganda campaign alleging the danger of AC and the skepticism of his board of directors. Later during the global financial panic of 1907, he ushered the company through bankruptcy so it could survive through the rest of the twentieth century.

Westinghouse’s business decisions, like Edison’s engineering decisions, exhibited integrity and courage. He confidently drew on his valuable knowledge of both engineering and economics in the face of popular opposition to bring the right product to market. His decisions brought energy to millions of people and rightly made him rich.

Because their society also saw morality and practicality as opposed, Edison and Westinghouse themselves might have felt guilty about their success rather than appreciating the moral virtue by which they achieved it. But we can imagine what it might take for an individual in such a position to challenge his society and see things anew.

There is a fictional rendition of such a transformation in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. Hank Rearden, a man much like Edison and Westinghouse, is an engineer who creates a new metal that’s tougher and cheaper than steel. But when a friend tells him that he is “one of the last moral men left in the world,” he’s taken aback. His friend explains:

If you want to see an abstract principle, such as moral action, in material form — there it is. . . . Every girder of it, every pipe, wire and valve was put there by a choice in answer to the question: right or wrong? You had to choose right and you had to choose the best within your knowledge — the best for your purpose, which was to make steel – and then move on and extend the knowledge, and do better, and still better, with your purpose as your standard of value. You had to act on your own judgment, you had to have the capacity to judge, the courage to stand on the verdict of your mind, and the purest, the most ruthless consecration to the rule of doing right, of doing the best, the utmost best possible to you.

Rearden has more to learn about how to evaluate himself morally. He’s allowed both his ungrateful family to mooch and government officials to loot the products of his mind. They’ve succeeded to the extent that Rearden feels that he deserves no moral credit for his productiveness. But Rearden’s friend reminds him, “You have judged every brick within this place by its value to the goal of making steel. Have you been as strict about the goal which your work and your steel are serving? . . . By what standard of value do you judge your days?”

In the novel and in her nonfiction philosophic work, Rand went on to define a new standard of morality that made explicit what it means to act on “the most ruthless consecration to the rule of doing right.” To see how Rearden takes up his friend’s challenge and comes to see the moral virtue behind his own practicality, I urge you to read the story of Atlas Shrugged.

Image credit: KAMAZON STUDIO / Shutterstock

Political assassination attempts, like the one against President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, are rightly condemned from every political corner. So is the rising tide of political violence. But that’s not been true of some malicious acts of domestic terrorism impacting a wider group of people. Instead of righteous indignation there’s been relative silence, or even worse, endorsement. Why?

I’m speaking of the string of attacks and related threats against people who lead and work for corporations.

The latest attack to make the headlines was the arrest of a 20-year-old man for throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home in San Francisco and then threatening to burn down OpenAI headquarters.¹ The perpetrator carried a list of names and addresses of other AI company officials, and a manifesto “warning” other tech company leaders that he planned to target with violence for their support of AI technology. He was apparently inspired by the December 2024 assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.2

There have been other attacks copying the Thompson murder. Someone else shot at Altman’s house just a few days after the firebombing.3 A 29-year-old man who burned down a Kimberly-Clark warehouse in California just days before the attack on Altman also compared himself to Thompson’s killer.4 The July 2025 killing of four Blackstone employees in New York City who had been mistaken for NFL executives bore similarities to the Thompson killing, for which it was widely celebrated online.5

The missing outrage against this trend and failure to appreciate the true nature of those who support it is a great cause for concern.

While the copycat crimes have been reported in the Wall Street Journal, editorial commentary on them has been sparse. The Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, understandably raised the alarm about it in a staff editorial.6 But editors at both the New York Times and the Journal have failed to comment on it. And while the Times editorial board did comment on the (failed) assassination attempt against Trump in July of 2024, they had nothing to say about the killing of Brian Thompson months later, to say nothing of the recent Altman attack.7

The Times did run an op-ed by tech commentator Aaron Zamost calling the Altman attack “disturbing” and (finally getting around to it in the final sentence of the piece) “wrong.”8 But the rest of the piece focuses on rationalizing popular fear of and anger toward the tech industry, arguing that “tech has faced little to no accountability for its failures.” Zamost suggests that violence against the tech industry is an “indictment” of the sort of failures that any fallible business suffers.

Zamost’s article was titled “An Attack on Sam Altman Sends a Terrifying Message.” Shockingly, this is what he makes of that terrifying message: “The whole thing is disturbing and jarring, but I’m hopeful it will change how some tech leaders deal with the societal consequences of their success.” But the “whole thing” he’s referring to includes the violence. So while he says violence is the wrong way to send this message, in hoping business leaders change in response to it, it seems he’s still hoping that terrorism will work.

Some are hoping even more explicitly that the terrorists will win. This was the theme of the recent New York Times podcast interview by Nadja Spiegelman with Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino.9 Though the podcast was widely panned for its endorsement of shoplifting goodies from Whole Foods, few have paid attention to Piker and Tolentino’s overt endorsement of violence to terrorize corporate America into submission.

In the podcast, Tolentino actually objects to shoplifting from corporate stores if it’s secretive. Only if it’s made known as part of direct, collective action is it justifiable. Much better than “microlooting,” she says, was the macrolooting of the 2020 George Floyd protests. Piker too says that this violence could be justified if it were part of a campaign of “organized disruption that would be infinitely more effective.”

Doubling down on this, they both argue that the firebombing of the Kimberly-Clark warehouse, causing nearly $500 million in damage, would have been justified if it were part of a similar collective campaign. Here’s Tolentino: “Do I think some sort of fire could hypothetically be framed within a collective action that is tactically useful? Yes.”

Likewise, Tolentino expresses frustration that the Democrats didn’t immediately use the issue of Brian Thompson’s murder” to push a “unified message toward universal health care.” Piker says they are “feckless” for failing to exploit the terrorist threat for political gain.

Revealingly, no one on this obscene podcast is actually willing to morally condemn the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Instead they perversely rationalize it as a response to the “social murder” allegedly perpetrated by health insurance companies.

All of this is actually much more evil than the petty pilfering that the podcast has otherwise been lampooned for advocating. These podcasters were apologizing for and even endorsing terrorism, pure and simple. Terrorism is not just any political violence, but violence specifically directed at frightening the wider public into acquiescing to the terrorist’s political goals.

The effects of Brian Thompson’s murder already show evidence of terrorism at work. After the murder, health insurance companies responded by closing their headquarters and hiding the identities of their executives out of fear of such attacks.10 They beefed up private security measures, not just for executives but for all their employees. And it’s not just health insurance companies. Similar security measures have been adopted by airlines, tech companies, and major retail outlets. A third of S&P companies have doubled their security spending since 2020.11

Because of the abstract, hypothetical nature of their formulations, Tolentino’s and Piker’s statements are likely protected by the First Amendment. That shouldn’t exempt them from our censure, and definitely not from financial consequences. If the New York Times had any self-esteem, especially as a corporation that itself needs to be free from violence to do its business, it would fire Nadja Spiegelman for her ill-chosen podcast and forswear any further collaboration with Piker and Tolentino. It’s far from censorship to refuse to provide a platform for voices advocating terrorism against peaceful businesspeople.

And, it’s imperative to refuse that platform. A podcast by the New York Times does far more to normalize this endorsement of terrorism — and encourage more of it — than anything coming from a Twitch gamer’s channel.

But there’s also cause for soul searching here even among those who think of themselves as critics of the Marxist posturing of the Pikers of the world. Why indeed has there been so little attention to and outrage about the terrorizing of corporate America?

Could it be that there’s less outrage toward terrorism directed against businesspeople because the dominant moral dogma of our culture still sees profit-driven activity as less than noble? I, for one, reject that dogma. They are innocent victims of terrorism. Not only that: Contrary to the Marxist smear of “exploiters,” their productivity, industriousness, and ingenuity create valuable products and services we choose to buy.

If you find it strange that I’d suggest there’s unjust prejudice against businesspeople, surely the heightening violence against them should now be a reason to question whether you yourself have that prejudice.

A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group.

California found a convenient piggy bank to raid in response to its looming budget crisis. A proposal to tax 5% of the net worth of roughly 200 billionaires is gaining momentum.1^, 2 Proponents claim this “Billionaire Wealth Tax” (BWT) will save California’s crumbling health care system from federal funding cuts.3 While not a serious solution to an out-of-control spending problem, the initiative still draws on popular demand for the ultra-rich to pay their “fair share.”4

Support for the proposal is widespread, despite fears of losing much of the budget the wealthy already fund by pushing them out of state, and of BWT eventually expanding to everyone (as income tax did).5^, 6 Why do Californians, most of whom also believe the state wastes taxpayer money anyway, support the BWT? Why do they think it is “fair”?7

“Billionaires have built their extraordinary fortunes with the help of California resources,” the BWT initiative says.8 But it’s ridiculous to suggest they used roads or bridges thousands of times more intensely than the rest of us, proportionate to how much they’re now being asked to fork over.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia has bought into a version of this idea, saying he will pay “whatever taxes” he must if that’s the cost of access to California talent.9 He is wrong and owes no such fee. Talent follows visionaries like Huang. Nvidia, Google, Meta, and other startups over the last half century made California attractive to skilled, ambitious people. Huang and other entrepreneurs generously compensated them with salaries, bonuses, and stock options. They were not taken advantage of.

Two-thirds of California’s annual takings come from income taxes, 40 percent of which, on average, comes from the top 1 percent of earners.10 It’s manifestly unfair that a small minority carries such a disproportionately heavy burden in the first place.

Californians are turning a blind eye to what most would recognize as a grave injustice in a different context. Few would condone taking their neighbor’s jewelry to cover a credit card debt. It doesn’t become fair when a few individuals are singled out for outright wealth appropriation simply because others need it.

BWT is also not a routine tax increase. Many have noted its retroactive nature.11 BWT would apply to billionaires residing in California starting January 1, 2026, even though the vote on the proposal is not due until November. If not the whole BWT, then at least this provision will likely be struck down because the U.S. Constitution forbids retroactive laws. It would be unconstitutional and unjust for a city council to pass a law in December effective last January, making driving on Tuesdays a $10,000 offense. The BWT does the equivalent.

But BWT, like any wealth tax, reaches into the past in a more fundamental way. It would remain unjustly retroactive even if effective only from a future date. It penalizes the value of stock portfolios (and other assets) which are the result of past production and investment decisions. This makes it just as unfair as a retroactively enforced tax. The state scammed the wealthy by luring them to build their lives, companies, and wealth under one set of rules, just to turn the tables after they’ve planted roots. If the billionaires had known their wealth would be so brazenly taken away, they wouldn’t have built it — or their lives — in California. They could, of course, sell their assets, register them as income, and pay 13.3 percent California income tax in addition to 20–37 percent federal capital gains tax. The only way to avoid that is to leave California for good.

Retroactively targeting the results of past production and investment makes the BWT blatantly un-American. In the American ideal, the government’s role is to protect individuals’ life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. This, crucially, involves protecting the property with which they build their lives. Even in cases where it’s thought that the state needs property “for public use,” as the 5th amendment reads, the state must justly compensate the individual to whom it belonged.12

Since billionaires have taken nothing they haven’t already paid for, the BWT is plain expropriation without compensation. The unjust taking flips the relationship between the government and the individual that the American ideal established. By reaching into the past, the California government acts as ruler rather than as a servant.

California faces a budget crisis. But its moral crisis is more urgent. As incredible producers, as Americans, and as Californians, the wealthiest few should not have to surrender their earned wealth. They should be left alone to live, plan, work, and enjoy the results of their ingenuity.

Instead of demanding that productive geniuses carry a welfare state on their shoulders, Californians should direct their rage toward the cause of the crisis: the officials running the dysfunctional system and burning taxpayer money at unprecedented levels.13^, 14

A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group.

Does the First Amendment separate church and state?

Thomas Jefferson thought so. In a letter written early in his presidency, Jefferson famously described the First Amendment to the US Constitution as “building a wall of separation between Church & State.” But Jefferson’s often-used metaphor of a wall is, by itself, insufficient to convey with precision the principle of church-state separation and the reasons in support of the principle. In the ensuing years, public debate has overly focused on the metaphor and become increasingly confused.

To resolve this confusion and clarify the vital principle at stake, Ayn Rand Institute philosopher Onkar Ghate has contributed a chapter called “A Wall of Separation between Church and State: Understanding This Principle’s Supporting Arguments and Far-Reaching Implications” in the book Foundations of a Free Society: Reflections on Ayn Rand’s Political Philosophy, edited by Gregory Salmieri and Robert Mayhew. The editors of New Ideal are pleased to publish Ghate’s chapter here.

The explicit separation of church and state is a vital new principle of the American experiment in freedom. The most philosophical of America’s Founding Fathers, Jefferson and Madison, certainly viewed it in this way. As did Ayn Rand, who in political philosophy saw herself as securing and extending the foundation built by these Enlightenment thinkers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Rand described herself politically as a radical for capitalism and, when briefly expanding on her position, would often make the following comparison: “When I say ‘capitalism,’ I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism — with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”¹

Rand’s comparison, however, would now increasingly fall on deaf ears. Americans today, far from being able to extend the reasons supporting church-state separation to the economic realm, have little understanding of this principle or of the arguments advanced by Locke, Jefferson, Madison, and others in its favor. This is the topic of my essay. I begin by examining today’s confused popular debate about the proper relation between church and state, and why almost no one in America upholds a “wall of separation” between the two anymore. Most of the rest of the essay then focuses on the actual principle of church-state separation and why a “wall of separation” is an appropriate metaphor for the principle and its supporting arguments. I conclude with a brief discussion of why Rand thought both that the principle extends to the economic realm and that this extension is vital to the full, consistent case for freedom.

The Popular Debate about Church-State Separation

Perhaps the easiest angle from which to see the confusion in today’s American debate is this: people are debating a metaphor with little to no understanding of the abstract principle for which it is a metaphor. I distinguish three major factions sparring in this debate, which I call the Religionists, the Secularists, and the Compromisers.

The metaphor of “a wall of separation between church and state” is usually traced back to Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, though one certainly can find earlier uses of similar imagery. The US Supreme Court famously expanded on Jefferson’s metaphor a century and a half later in Everson v. Board of Education: “The clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between church and state.’ . . . That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.”2 But if this is all one has to guide one’s reasoning — a metaphor and no principle — numerous questions will arise that seem to throw the idea into doubt and disrepute.

For instance, with the description of the wall as “high and impregnable,” the implication seems to be that the church is completely walled off from the state and the state is completely walled off from the church. Never the two shall meet. How can this be proper? It seems to imply that the government cannot intervene in religious ceremonies or set foot on church property no matter the circumstances. But what if a church is practicing some ritual of human sacrifice? What if, on church grounds, boys are being raped? Or, to take much less disturbing examples, what if a church’s bells are ringing throughout the night or a mosque is loudly broadcasting prayers in the early morning? Do neighbors have to put up with the noise, with no recourse to the government, because church is completely walled off from state? Surely not. Church grounds are not a separate country, as some view the grounds of an embassy.

So, most people think, the church cannot be completely walled off from the state. What about in the other direction? Is the state completely walled off from the church? If it is, does this mean that if a person becomes a member or an official of a church, he can no longer work in government? Does it imply that religious people should not make political arguments or engage in public advocacy? Some people in the debate seem to hold this. Those trying to defend the separation of state from church will often say that religion is a private matter, which should not be brought out in public. The “public square,” as they put it, using another metaphor, should be “neutral” and “religion-free.” As President Obama stated their view, they think you have to “leave your religion at the door before entering into the public square.” But this is wrong, Obama said. Did Martin Luther King violate the Constitution when he, often in religious terms, protested governmental oppression of blacks? Should the government have jailed those who advocated for the abolition of slavery in religious language? Should their appeals have been ignored? If the answer to these questions is “No,” then, many Americans conclude, the state is also not completely walled off from the church, politics from religion.3

But if the First Amendment does not erect a wall of separation between church and state, high and impregnable, what exactly does it do? What does the metaphor mean? This is the focus of the debate. One faction — often labeled “the Religious Right,” but which I call the “Religionists,” in part because this faction cuts across the (blurry) left-right political spectrum — frequently asserts the following: The First Amendment creates freedom for religion. It prevents the government from persecuting religion. The state cannot stop someone from preaching or practicing his religion by fining or imprisoning him. On this interpretation, the “free exercise” clause is the heart of the First Amendment.4 It creates a one-way wall of protection for churches against the power of the state. All the “establishment” clause means, by contrast, is that the state cannot erect one church as the state-sanctioned and supported church of the United States. This leaves many powers still in the hands of the federal government to aid and support religion and religious groups — just as the government today aids and supports autoworkers, the unemployed, and banks deemed too big to fail.

But many people object to the Religionists’ interpretation of the First Amendment. It permits much too much intermingling of religion and politics, they contend, and thereby violates the rights both of nonbelievers and of people whose religious beliefs do not enjoy governmental aid and support. A different interpretation of the First Amendment, and of the wall of separation it creates, is needed. This is supplied by the faction typically labeled “the Secular Left” — so the basic debate is supposedly between the Religious Right and the Secular Left. But for reasons similar to why I prefer the term “Religionists,” I rename this second group the “Secularists.” What do the Secularists claim that the First Amendment means? It means freedom from religion.

Why do we need freedom from religion? Because religion has been a source of strife, discord, warfare, and tyranny throughout history, particularly when religion wielded political power. So we have to say to religion: hands off government. You cannot get any taxpayer money to support your religious organizations or programs; the government is not going to display your religious symbols in its buildings; the government is not going to begin the day in governmental schools with religious prayers; in short, the government is not going to allow any believers to use the law to “impose [their] narrow morality on the rest of us.” This quote is from a flyer handed out by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in which it is also stated, “Not only is it un-American for the government to promote religion, it is rude.” The public square, Secularists say, must be religion-free.

The heart of the First Amendment, on this interpretation, is the “establishment” clause, which not only prohibits one church from being established as the state-sanctioned and supported church of the United States, but also prohibits any funding of churches or religious organizations and any involvement of religion in government. It creates a one-way wall of protection for both the government and the “public square” against the power of the church. The “free exercise” clause, by contrast, is secondary. As a citizen, you are free to practice your religious beliefs in private. But do not bring them out in public, into the “public square.” In effect, the Secularists treat religion as many people treat sex: so long as it is voluntary and consensual, do whatever you want behind closed doors but do not display it in public, because no one else wants to hear it and no one else wants to see it.

To this, of course, the Religionists have a response. They say to the Secularists, in effect, that when you tell us that religion is a private matter not to be brought into the “public square,” what you are declaring is that our religious beliefs are dirty laundry not to be aired in public. Who are you to decide this? The “public square” can contain anything in it, no matter how crazy or disgusting — it can contain Hippies, Communists, and pornography — but not a display of the Ten Commandments. It can contain the Piss Christ but not the nativity scene. Governmental schools can teach Marxist pseudohistory and “diversity training” but not prayer or faith-based opposition to gay marriage. Attacks on religion are permitted, but not acknowledgments of it. This, the Religionists say, is unjust — a violation of our rights to free exercise and free expression — and must stop.

Enter the Compromisers, which I suspect is the largest faction numerically. The Compromisers say that we live in a “pluralistic,” “multicultural” society, and what we need to do is balance the interests, rights, and values of members of competing factions. Obviously, there is no wall of separation between church and state, high and impregnable, in either direction. At most, to quote the words of Justice Burger — who, notice, is still speaking in metaphors and images — there is a line of separation which, “far from being a ‘wall,’ is a blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier depending on all the circumstances of a particular relationship.” Others talk of a “very permeable wall,” a wall “punctuated by checkpoints,” and a wall “with a few doors in it.”5 On this interpretation of Jefferson’s metaphor for what the First Amendment accomplishes, there is no principle which it symbolizes. There are only ongoing compromises and concessions made in the hope of satisfying opposing factions.

Is there freedom for religion, as the Religionists demand? Yes, answer the Compromisers. America is a predominantly religious country. America has a public religion, which it is appropriate if not crucial for the federal government to recognize. As Jon Meacham, former managing editor of Newsweek states the point: “public religion is consummately democratic. When a president says ‘God bless America’ . . . each American is free to define God in whatever way he chooses. A Christian’s mind may summon God the Father; a Jew’s, Yahweh; a Muslim’s, Allah; an atheist’s, no one, or no thing. Such diversity is not a prescription for dissension. It is part of the reality of creation.”6 What is the problem, the Compromisers in effect wonder, if one’s fellow Americans look at one suspiciously when one declares: “No thing bless America?” What is the problem if one is simply forced to acknowledge the reality of creation?

But is there also freedom from religion, as the Secularists demand? Yes, the Compromisers answer again. We need some religion in government, but not too much; obviously, we must not go to extremes. After all, Meacham tells us, the great problem of the twentieth century was totalitarianism, but so far the great problem of the twenty-first century is: extremism.7 How we are to know the proper amount of religion in politics is, of course, left unspecified.

We now have before us the contours of America’s popular cultural debate about church-state separation, a debate between the Religionists, the Secularists, and the Compromisers. I submit that no members of these factions understand what Jefferson’s metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state means because no one understands the principled, philosophical position that the metaphor is meant to capture. And having lost sight of the principle and its supporting arguments, people today are increasingly abandoning the metaphor as unhelpful and misleading, thereby letting crumble this crucial pillar of American freedom. It is past time to take a look beyond the metaphor to the principle it encapsulates and the arguments on behalf of that principle.

The Locke-Jefferson Case for Church-State Separation

I regard Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) as the seminal text for the American separation of church and state, and will treat it as such.8 Jefferson and Madison were familiar with Locke’s Letter and echo its language and arguments. They do, however, extend and generalize the argument in certain ways, particularly Jefferson, the Founding Father who is my focus here.

In essence Locke’s is a jurisdictional argument: if one understands the proper and limited jurisdiction and powers of a church and the proper and limited jurisdiction and powers of a state, one will recognize that there exists a wall of separation between church and state. Observe that we are already well beyond the terms of today’s cultural debate. Neither the Religionists nor the Secularists nor the Compromisers speak much about the proper delimited purpose and functions of the state. Today many people seem to think that the state can do virtually anything, so long as it respects and follows a democratic process. Someone who holds this will never accept or even understand the principle of church-state separation. If the state can provide medical insurance, bail out banks, fund the research of professors, and set the curriculum of primary and secondary governmental schools, why can it not also ban prayers in the schools it runs, aid faith-based charities, and fund a Billy Graham? If the government’s powers are virtually unlimited, then it can legitimately control virtually anything, so long as it follows the appropriate procedures; it is a mistake to think of it as, in principle, walled off from any area of life.

In contrast to this, Locke is concerned with defining and justifying the state’s proper purpose and functions, which in his view are highly delimited. His basic goal in the Letter, he tells us, is to identify the limited jurisdictions of both state and church: “I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other” (1689 [1824], 9–10). When Locke accomplishes this, his conclusion is that “the church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these societies” (21). It is certainly natural to describe Locke’s conclusion here as being that a wall of separation exists between church and state. With this basic framework in mind, let’s turn to his argument.

First, Locke has a definite conception of what the proper scope of government is. The state is not a Leviathan with unlimited power. It is an institution created by individuals to protect each person’s natural rights — to secure, on earth, each individual’s life, liberty, health, and property (10). The state’s legitimate powers are derived from this basic purpose. True, Locke does often speak of the public good, and it is not obvious that this notion is reducible to securing the rights of all the individuals involved. Nevertheless, the essence of his view remains that the state is created to protect the rights of the individual. A proper state, Locke argues in the Letter, does not have the power to tell us how best to live our lives in this world. The decisions of how to maintain our health and estate, to use Locke’s examples, are up to us: our own thought, judgment, reason and action (22–23).9 And if the state does not have this kind of power over our lives on earth, he says, it certainly does not have it in regard to the next world. As Locke puts it, the power of the state “neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the salvation of souls” (10).

This is Locke’s view of the proper jurisdiction and delimited power of the state: its function is nothing more and nothing less than to secure the rights of the individual citizens. Now consider a church. A church is simply a voluntary association of individuals who have chosen to come together to worship God in a certain fashion. We are all free to form or join a church, if we agree with its teachings, and free to leave, if we disagree (13–14). As a voluntary association in civil society, a church has no power to use force. Like any other voluntary association, it must use persuasion, argument, exhortation. Given this, Locke thinks there is not much reason for state and church to come into contact — any more than there is reason for state and, for example, voluntary chess clubs to come into contact. Consider why.

The job of the state, as we have seen, is not to take care of our lives in this world or of our souls in the next world. Both jobs are our responsibility, and we must possess the freedom of thought and action to carry them out. This implies that the state qua state has no business trying to teach, let alone to enforce, any doctrines about how to take care of our lives in this world or the next. The “business of law is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth, and of every particular man’s goods and person” (40). An aspect of this point is that the state also has no role in trying to ensure that citizens are acting as though they believed that this or that idea were true — that, for example, they are acting as though a carbohydrate-rich diet is superior to a protein-rich one or that Luther’s version of Christianity is superior to Calvin’s (18–19). Indeed, Locke holds that the attempt to enforce religious conformity is particularly wrongheaded. As is the case for any idea, we cannot coerce someone into understanding and accepting an idea he does not grasp firsthand to be true; all we can do is make him mouth the words or act as though he believed the idea. But in the case of religious doctrines, God obviously would grasp the hypocrisy of someone just mouthing the words or acting as though he believed them, and therefore it is particularly wrongheaded to think that we can save a man’s soul through coercion (10–11). Thus the state is not charged with the task of propagating or enforcing any doctrines, including religious ones, and in this respect will not come into contact, let alone conflict, with churches.

A church, on the other hand, is concerned with doctrine, specifically doctrines about the next world and salvation. But as a voluntary, private association it is not concerned with protecting an individual’s rights and worldly goods from encroachment by the actions of others — that is what the state properly does, as the agency of coercion. In essence, therefore, the state has no business scrutinizing what goes on inside a church qua church — and a church has no business trying to wield the state’s coercive power. There exists, in principle, a wall of separation between state and church. But this principle does not mean that church and state are literally cut off from each other, with no contact at all. In particular, a church is not like the grounds of a foreign embassy.

Basically, Locke argues that for any action which does not violate the rights of an individual, every individual or voluntary association of individuals is free to perform that action, including a church. But for any action that does violate the rights of the individual, no individual or group is free to perform that action, including every church (34–36). Thus, to use Locke’s examples, a church can sacrifice a calf as part of a religious ceremony. But it cannot sacrifice a human being (34). And when the state intervenes in a church’s affairs to stop human sacrifice, it is not policing religious doctrine but only protecting the rights of an individual against actions that encroach upon them. In other words, the state does not care why a church is trying to murder a person, whether it be for religious reasons or not; it only cares that a church is trying to murder someone, irrespective of the reason.

This broaches a wider issue. Locke notes that many people think state and church must come into constant contact and become intertwined because both state and church seek to promote morality and moral action. But they do this in fundamentally different ways, Locke argues (41–43).

First, churches may promote morality only by voluntary means. To live a good life in this world, and certainly with a view to our eternal happiness, requires that we be inwardly convinced that what we are doing is right — and that we are doing it precisely because it is right. This conviction cannot be coerced. We must have liberty of conscience. So a church, like every other person and association, must respect the individual’s right of conscience: in the realm of morality a church can try to teach and persuade, but it must not reach for a sword.

Second, the morality and goodness of one’s own life is not at the mercy of other people’s choices. In this world we should not care, Locke says, if our neighbor lives a bad life. We should not care if he eats too much, spends too much on remodeling his house, or drinks his money away in a bar. The pain and suffering from his errors and irrationalities will be his, not ours. Our rights and freedom to live remain intact. Likewise, Locke says, why should we care if our neighbor is committing sins against God and thus jeopardizing his soul in the next world? That is his problem, not ours; he is the one going to hell, not us. So long as we retain the liberty of conscience to ensure that what we are doing is right, we are safe; no recourse to government is necessary.

This implies that, third, the state promotes morality only in the sense of protecting the rights of the individual, including his liberty of conscience. In effect, the state preserves the conditions in which we can each live a good life, but we then, as individuals, have to take advantage of those conditions. Thus Locke’s position is that even though both church and state are concerned with promoting morality, they must do so in fundamentally different ways. A church is concerned with teaching and propagating moral doctrines; the state is not. The state is concerned with protecting by force an individual’s rights, including liberty of conscience; a church is not. And so long as an individual’s rights are respected, he need not worry about the moral stature of others in regard to this world or the next. State and church therefore remain fundamentally separate, each in a principled way walled off from the other.

This is Locke’s basic account of the principle of church-state separation in his Letter.

I now want to highlight two crucial ideas that Locke is counting on for his argument, in order both to appreciate the scope of the argument and, much more importantly, to indicate why Locke would be so concerned, from the perspective of establishing a proper government, to separate church from state. The first, obvious point is that Locke’s argument rests on him having an account of natural or individual rights and of the state’s essential function as securer and protector of these rights; both of these issues are discussed in the Second Treatise, though the latter issue more so than the former. The second and less obvious point is that Locke’s argument rests on a definite conception of what religion and God are. This point is worth exploring in a bit more detail.

Locke, as we have seen, argues that the salvation of one’s soul is independent from other people’s actions. This viewpoint conflicts with many other religious approaches. What would happen, for instance, if I told a Taliban leader that he should stop beating up women for showing their skin? I point out to him that even if these women are sinning against God it has no effect on him and the salvation of his soul. Now if this Taliban warrior decided to answer me instead of immediately slitting my throat, I think he would answer thus: “Of course it affects me! God demands obedience from everyone. He demands that we all carry out His will. If I don’t enforce obedience to Allah by everyone, He will strike me down!” If I replied that God does not want blind, unreasoning obedience, that a woman has to be inwardly persuaded that God would want her to cover up, and that this reasoned conviction has to be why she will not show her skin in public — how would the Taliban leader answer me? “Reasoned conviction? Persuasion? She has to be convinced by reasons and evidence!? I didn’t need these things to embrace Islam! Why should she? What she needs is to fear and obey. And my knife is pretty effective at generating fear and obedience!”

Now, of course, I don’t think this sort of religious mentality is restricted to the Taliban; it has characterized many religious movements across the centuries. But it is not Locke’s attitude; his approach to religion is light-years from this type. Locke does believe in God and in two worlds, but each world is rational and orderly. For Locke, in effect, God is a powerful but rational overlord. Reason constrains Him. Locke’s attitude in the Letter is basically that God would not be so unreasonable as to make the salvation of our souls depend on blind faith or on the choices and actions of other people, over which we have no control. To do so would be to create an irrational universe.

For Locke, our lives in this world are between each of us and nature. We each have to use our reason to work and produce and live well; so long as our rights are protected, we need not be concerned with the choices and actions of other people and the mess they may make of their own lives. Similarly, our lives in the next world are between each of us and God. In regard to this realm too we each have to use our reason and conscience to do what we think is right. And we need not be concerned with the religious choices and actions of other people, including any sins against God that they may commit, because a rational God would never make the salvation of our soul depend on preventing or rectifying other people’s sinful actions. Thus the root of Locke’s particular approach to religion is the supremacy he gives to reason. He is not at the point of discarding faith entirely. But he subordinates it to reason. “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.”10 And this emphatically includes matters of faith. “Reason and faith [are] not opposite, for faith must be regulated by reason” (Essay IV 17 § 24). But if faith is not the opposite of reason, what is it?

Basically, faith is the acceptance of an idea as true because God has revealed it. Revelation means getting a message from God, which cannot contradict reason but which can supplement it. But even if God sends the message directly to you — you have to rationally judge whether the message is in fact from God. Locke suggests that it is pretty hard to get the evidence necessary to be convinced that God is communicating with you. Why is it so hard to be rationally convinced of this? Because there are two other possibilities. It could be Satan who is communicating with you. Or, and Locke suggests this is the much more typical case, it could just be a whim of yours, that you really, really want to believe — and so you pretend to yourself that it is the word of God. This last is an aspect of what Locke calls Enthusiasm, which he dislikes. He hates all those people who, devoid of rational arguments for their position, “cry out, It is a matter of faith, and above reason” (Essay IV 18 § 2). About this Tertullian kind of religious mentality (namely, the “We believe it because it is absurd” crowd) Locke says, in his sober way, that this “is a very ill rule to choose their opinions or religion by” (§ 11).

Locke further argues that it is this kind of mentality — a mentality that betrays its own rational nature, a mentality that subordinates reason to whim — that will coerce others. This kind of person, Locke says, “does violence to his own faculties, tyrannizes over his own mind, and usurps the prerogative that belongs to truth alone.” The kind of person who abuses and tyrannizes his own mind, will abuse and tyrannize the minds of others. As Locke asks rhetorically: “Who can reasonably expect arguments . . . from him in dealing with others, whose understanding is not accustomed to [arguments] in dealing with himself?” (Essay IV 19 § 2).

This I think is a profound insight. And it points to both the deeper reason and the deeper way in which Locke separates church from state. The very purpose of the state is grounded in reason — for Locke, man’s natural rights are connected to the fact that man is a rational being. And the formulation and execution of laws, Locke stresses in the Second Treatise, must be done in accordance with reason. There is no room for Enthusiasm in how the coercive power of the state will be deployed in society. To give Enthusiasm such room would be to create a government with arbitrary power and thereby to descend into tyranny. The extent to which churches and religions are dominated by Enthusiasm (and Locke seems to think this happens a fair amount) is the extent to which it is vital to ensure that churches and religions have no say in controlling or directing the use of force in society. Government must be the province of reason, not Enthusiasm.

With all this in mind, let us turn to Jefferson and Madison’s implementation of the principle of church-state separation. They build on this entire Lockean philosophical foundation. They accept Locke’s principle of church-state separation and extend it. They essentially agree with Locke that the state’s proper jurisdiction is to protect the rights of the individual from encroachment by the actions of others, and nothing more. A proper and limited state, therefore, as the point was often expressed, takes no cognizance of religion. They also essentially agree that religion is a personal matter between oneself and God — between “me and my Maker” as Jefferson often states the point; other people’s sins are their problem, not yours. They agree that religion and blind faith are unnecessary to run a proper government and a threat to it; only the idea of individual rights and the guidance of reason are needed. And they agree that reason has supremacy over faith. They demand the freedom to follow the dictates of conscience, as it was often expressed. To them this means to follow reason and (moral) conviction, and not to be coerced. An individual’s conscience, properly, should yield only to evidence and arguments, not Enthusiasm.

Where they extend Locke’s argument is specifically in regard to the idea of liberty of conscience, of which I think Jefferson has the most profound grasp. He seems to see most clearly that the issue of liberty of conscience is, more fundamentally, the issue of freedom of thought, or intellectual freedom, as such. The fundamental issue is the government’s power to persecute or to establish, to penalize or to promote — that is, to police — ideas as such. Religious and moral ideas are but an instance of this. An implication of this fact, as both Jefferson and Madison realize, is that contra Locke a proper government does not tolerate this or that idea or voluntary association, religious or otherwise. The government possesses no power to outlaw any idea or voluntary intellectual association, however morally “intolerable” the idea or association may be. The use of the phrase “religious toleration” at best obscures this fact and at worst implies that a proper government does possess such power — as it still does for Locke: in his Letter atheists are not to be tolerated.

On the Jeffersonian view, by contrast, the government’s jurisdiction, to use Locke’s term, is not ideas but actions, period. In the letter in which Jefferson coins his metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state, he writes that “the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions.”11 He states elsewhere that even though ideas produce actions, the state can intervene only when “principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.”12 The government’s proper power extends “to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”13 Further, he says, our civil rights do not depend “on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”14 He argues that it is not the state’s prerogative to establish ideas about religious matters, or ideas about proper medicine and diet, or ideas about physics, such as censoring Galileo’s discoveries or establishing Descartes’s theory of vortexes. Jefferson maintains that intellectual freedom requires — in his language — that the operations of the mind are not subject to the coercion of the laws.15

Thus Jefferson holds that it is no accident that the First Amendment contains the content that it does, and that it addresses not just religion, but freedom of speech and freedom of the press as well, because what the First Amendment is doing is protecting intellectual freedom as such. Whatever violates any aspect of the First Amendment, Jefferson writes, “throws down the sanctuary which covers the others.”16

With all of this in mind, Locke’s articulation of both the principle of church-state separation and the arguments in its support together with Jefferson’s broadening of the principle’s scope and meaning, let us consider again Jefferson’s metaphor of a wall of separation. Fundamentally, it means more than the idea that a wall of separation exists between church and state; it means that a wall of separation exists between the state and, to use Jefferson’s language, man’s opinions, religious or otherwise. To say that the church is walled off from the state is a shorthand way of saying that the state is to take no cognizance of an individual’s ideas, religious or otherwise. The state’s concern is only with an individual’s actions, specifically with any actions that trespass on the rights of other individuals, irrespective of the particular ideas generating those actions. The state should neither penalize nor tolerate nor promote any ideas — it should be fundamentally unconcerned with and neutral toward the ideas individuals hold. And from the other direction, to say that the state is walled off from the church, means that a citizen, including any voluntary association of them, such as a church, is walled off from using the state’s coercive power either to penalize or to promote ideas, religious or otherwise. If an individual wants to hinder or support an idea, he must argue his case with others and try to persuade them to adopt the idea — not enact a law. Moreover, to say that the state is walled off from the church means there is no room for faith to dictate the terms, purpose, or functioning of government; these are solely the province of reason.

Whether Jefferson (and Madison) consistently held to this position and its logical implications and applications is a separate issue, which I am not here focusing on; I believe, for instance, that just as there is a contradiction in Locke’s basic argument in his Letter and its attitude toward atheists, so there is a contradiction between Jefferson’s argument for church-state separation and his support for public education. Although I will briefly return to this issue below, my central point is to capture the principle that Jefferson was advancing. His metaphor of a wall of separation is meant to capture a principled position, which he argues for by extending and generalizing Locke’s basic argument in the Letter.

Rand’s Development of the Locke-Jefferson Case for Separation

As Jefferson (and Madison) sought to deepen, broaden, and render more consistent Locke’s argument for church-state separation, so Rand seeks to do the same with theirs. On her account the principle rests, fundamentally, on the need to embrace reason as an absolute in both thought and action.

This means, first, that whereas Locke and Jefferson give supremacy to reason over faith and posit a supernatural realm governed by rational considerations, Rand discards all appeal to faith and the supernatural. Neither Locke nor Jefferson is able to demonstrate that God or a supernatural dimension exists, let alone that God is a rational overlord and that religious morality is an affair exclusively between “me and my Maker.” In the end, the existence of God and a supernatural realm must be accepted on faith. And as we have seen, someone like a Taliban warrior whose “faith” tells him something very different about the nature of God and of religious morality will reject the notion that God is constrained by reason and that He does not command us to intervene coercively when other people sin. Rand eliminates from the argument for church-state separation all appeals to the supernatural and to faith, even if it is only a faith that somehow “supplements” reason. She argues that the notion of the supernatural — of something “transcending” existence, identity, causality, and human consciousness, that is, of something “transcending” nature — is incoherent.17 And reason permits no “supplementation” by faith. On her view, it is never rational to embrace an idea or perform an action without some evidence supporting the idea or action. Faith, she maintains — “belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason” — “is the negation of reason.”18 Accordingly, Rand dismisses all knowledge claims that rest directly or indirectly on the notion of the supernatural as attempts to integrate the incoherent, and she places all faith-based assertions into the special category of the arbitrary.19

For Rand, therefore, even more so than for Jefferson, the issue is not religious freedom, as though there were some special freedom pertaining to a supernatural realm and to (supplementary) guidance by faith. The issue is intellectual freedom. The argument for freedom rests solely on the nature and requirements of reason to grasp and navigate this (natural) world. Nor does Rand appeal in her argument to the “rights” or “dictates” of conscience. Insofar as these dictates pertain to the supernatural and supposedly supplement reason, Rand rejects their existence. Insofar as these dictates refer to choice in accordance with moral principles and convictions, Rand regards this as an aspect of reason. Going further than Locke (and Madison and Jefferson), she views “the will” as an aspect of the faculty of reason and views moral knowledge as a species of scientific knowledge: ethics is a science that studies and defines the fundamental values an individual must seek and the fundamental virtues he must practice in order to thrive.20

Thus when Rand writes that reason and force are opposites — that a “rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes. . . . Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this attitude is Galileo.)” — it is important to keep in mind that for Rand this principle encompasses both science and morality.21

It encompasses both, because for Rand, as I have said, reason and will are not two separate faculties. Rather, the faculty of reason sets an individual’s goals and values and determines the ways in which he will pursue them, all of which is done by a volitional process of thought and subsequent action:

Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. 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.22

The attempt to coercively override or bypass a person’s will is the attempt to override or bypass his reason. Or, looking at the same issue from a positive perspective, the choice to activate his conceptual mind and embrace reason — as against evading the facts of reality and the need for thought — is, according to Rand, the root of moral good and evil. The central principle of Rand’s philosophy is that reason is man’s basic means of survival. The essence of morality is the acceptance of reason as an absolute, the passionate quest for knowledge and the commitment to enact this knowledge in the pursuit of one’s own life and happiness. The root moral choice, the existence of which grounds a valid notion of conscience, is the choice to think or not. To betray one’s conscience is to betray one’s mind:

You who speak of a “moral instinct” as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason — man’s reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? — Right or Wrong? . . . A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest — but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.23

Coercion, then, for Rand is a negation of an individual’s reason, will, and moral conscience because these are all perspectives on the unity that is a properly functioning rational faculty. As Rand briefly summarizes her point, “Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.”24 On this approach, the concept of individual rights is formulated precisely to extract coercion from human relationships. The concept is grounded not in the supernatural, Rand argues, but in the “social recognition of man’s rational nature — of the connection between his survival and his use of reason” and thus “preserves and protects individual morality in a social context” by defining the areas in which the individual must be sovereign, free to think and act — free to reason and produce.25

From this fundamental perspective, Rand maintains, the arguments for intellectual freedom and economic freedom share the same root: the requirements of the rational mind to guide the individual. In the realm of thought, this means that the government must not have the power to penalize or promote ideas. As Rand expresses the principle, in terms similar to Jefferson’s, “Since an individual has the right to hold and to propagate any ideas he chooses (obviously including political ideas), the government may not infringe his right; it may neither penalize nor reward him for his ideas; it may not take any judicial cognizance whatever of his ideology. . . . Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime.”26 Rand explicitly extends this principle to the entire realm of thought, including education, scientific research, and the arts, arguing that governmental schools, governmental funding of scientific research, and governmental funding of the arts violate the individual’s right to intellectual freedom.27 Thus she rejects both Locke’s claim that the government should not tolerate atheists and Jefferson’s desire to establish public schools in part so that the people would have the education necessary to safeguard their liberty. In order for the entire realm of ideas to be fully free from coercion, the government must have no power in any way to penalize or promote ideas as such, even if those ideas are necessary for proper government or civilization itself. A “proper government is based on a definite philosophy,” Leonard Peikoff writes in presenting Rand’s conception of intellectual freedom, “but it can play no role in promoting that philosophy.”28

The same essential point follows, Rand maintains, in the realm of production: the government must not have the power to penalize or promote any form of economic activity or organization. This is why she says that there should be a separation of economics and state in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of church and state. The root of industrial production, Rand argues, is abstract thought. “Production,” she writes, “is the application of reason to the problem of survival.”29 “Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions — and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.”30 For thought fully to be free, Rand argues, the realm of production must be free. Or, stating the same point negatively, all governmental controls over and interventions into the individual’s productive activities (and of his ensuing consumption and voluntary trading) are instances of penalizing or promoting ideas.

Take the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as an example. Among the FDA’s activities are determining which drugs a doctor can legally prescribe, which drugs a patient can purchase, and how a company must test and manufacture pharmaceuticals. What if an individual doctor thinks that a particular drug, although banned by the FDA and not without risks, is worth the risk for a particular set of patients? The doctor is not free to act. What if, within this set of patients, some of them judge that they would like to take the drug? They are not free to act. What if a company argues that the way the FDA wants it to test its drugs is wasteful? Or what if it concludes that there is a better way to test for safety or efficacy? Or what if it has invented a whole new process of manufacturing pharmaceuticals, unapproved by the FDA? It is not free to act. In prohibiting actions like the taking of an experimental medicine, the government is effectively banning the thought processes and ideas that generate the action and is discarding the principle that reason is the individual’s basic means of survival. And in promoting (commanding) actions such as how to manufacture a drug, the government is effectively proscribing alternative thought processes and ideas that could generate alternative productive actions. The freedom to produce is a crucial aspect of the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. If the purpose of individual rights is to preserve and protect individual morality in a social context, the two realms that, above all else, must be protected are those of thought and production. Politically, there should exist a separation of church and state (the issue of intellectual freedom) and, for the same reasons, there should exist a separation of economics and state (the issue of economic freedom).

And the idea of “separation” designates the same thing in the economic sphere as in the intellectual sphere — that is, the spheres should be separated in the same way. To say that there is a separation of state from economics is to say that the state is walled off from taking cognizance of another aspect of man’s life-sustaining activities: not only of his abstract thoughts but also of his productive actions. The state neither tolerates nor persecutes nor promotes any form of production or trade. It is not the state’s prerogative to decide whether it should tolerate that Microsoft includes an Internet browser within its operating system — or to decide whether to persecute a firm because it consulted some competitors when setting what prices it would charge — or to decide whether to promote domestic automakers or individual homeowners. All of these activities should be left to the voluntary decisions of the individuals involved. And it is certainly not the prerogative of the state to act as a central planner, trying to “control” and “steer” the entire economy by, say, manipulating the money supply. The job of the state is to secure and protect the individual’s ability to think, produce, and trade, not to try to curtail this activity or to direct it toward some allegedly noble goals that transcend the individual’s own life and pursuit of happiness. Only if the state is so restricted is the individual’s rational, productive mind truly free.

From the other direction, to say that there is a separation of economics from state is to say that every economic actor — be it an employer or an employee, a capitalist or a consumer — is walled off from using the state’s coercive power to stop economic activity he dislikes or to promote economic activity he likes. No one can enact his economic doctrines into law. No one can declare that given my economic views, there should be tariffs on foreign steel producers and subsidies for US corn producers; or that a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile should be legally prevented but a merger between HP and Compaq should be allowed; or that gold should be outlawed as money. If a citizen wants to try to implement his economic views and theories, he must do so privately and voluntarily, seeking as necessary the agreement and cooperation of other individuals. He can stop buying foreign steel and try to convince others to do the same; he can donate his money to US corn producers; he can stop using gold as money and encourage others to do likewise; he can set up a voluntary socialist commune and try to persuade other people to join. But what he cannot do is use the power of the state to override the productive judgment and activities of others. Only if one’s fellow citizens are so restricted from gaining control of the coercive power of the state is one’s rational, productive mind truly free.

For Rand, therefore, freedom forms a unity whose roots are the full requirements of man’s rational mind. As she states her point in a crucial formulation: “Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”31 This principle, that a free mind and a free market are corollaries, Rand regards as the full philosophical extension of the reasoning that led, first, to the principle of church-state separation. Seen from this perspective, the principle that a free mind and a free market are corollaries is the culmination of the Enlightenment’s intellectual quest for freedom.

Why are supporters of President Trump’s war with Iran seeking the sanction of medieval Catholic theology and bickering with the pope?

Vice President Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson and sundry other commentators have now invoked “just war theory” to defend the president against Pope Leo XIV’s criticisms of the war.¹ Their “gotcha” attempts seem to aim at catching the pope in an inconsistency. In reality they reflect the administration’s failure to justify what is truly a righteous war against Iran. Invoking the religious doctrine is a futile and defensive measure that will only undercut the war effort.

Since Trump launched this war, his rationale has shifted dramatically, from helping the protesters foster regime change and the “unconditional surrender” of the Islamic Republic to merely dismantling Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.2 But he’s failed to explain why any of these objectives justifies American blood and treasure.

What he should have stressed from the beginning is that Iran’s 47 years of aggression against American citizens, soldiers, and allies long ago gave America an absolute right of self-defense to eliminate the threat of the Iranian regime.

Contrary to conventional thinking, the Christian “just war theory” does not allow this justification.

Pacifism — the idea that war cannot be justified even in self-defense — has long been the core of the Christian approach to war. This is no “leftist” innovation by the pope. The Catholic Catechism invokes Jesus’s injunction to love your enemies, and the Sermon on the Mount’s beatitude “blessed are the peacemakers.”3 The pope’s sermons are laced with references to Jesus as the “King of Peace,” who told his disciples to put away their swords even to defend him, as he gave himself up to be crucified.4 Christianity’s pacificism comes straight out of its morality of humility and self-sacrifice.

It’s true that the Catechism also contains provisions about “just war.” But it’s noteworthy that the elements of “just war theory” were first proposed by St. Augustine centuries after Jesus. In fact, Augustine had no real “theory” to speak of, just scattered passages sometimes allowing for war, contradicting his earlier denunciations of it in City of God.5 By this time the Church had finally achieved political power and had to fight wars to maintain it. This modest permission represented a compromise between the Christian faith and reality.

But even as Augustine allowed for some war, he never wandered far from his deeply Christian roots. In one letter, he writes: “As to killing others in order to defend one’s own life, I do not approve of this, unless one happen to be a soldier or public functionary acting, not for himself, but in defense of others or of the city in which he resides.”6 This denies a right to actual self-defense, allowing only for self-sacrificial defense of others — the humble, self-sacrificial approach to war. Subsequent formalizations of the notion made this clear, dramatically limiting even a victim of aggression to fighting back only “proportionally” and only as a “last resort.”

Trump is not the first president to humbly defer to just war theory’s irrational restrictions. American foreign policy has done it for decades. It was just war theory that guided us toward fighting “nation-building” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which we prioritized dropping humanitarian aid, not bombs. It demanded that our troops be hindered and endangered by self-sacrificial rules of engagement, tying their hands against dangerous enemies. The fact that we’ve waited half a century to respond to Iran’s many acts of aggression is because we have, indeed, treated war as a “last resort.”

Given this history, there’s no chance just war theory would support a war in which American citizens and soldiers watch in relative safety as Iranians are targeted in response to the threat their Islamist regime has long posed.

And it’s also pointless to debate the applicability of the doctrine to the Iran war. There are no facts that will settle the question of whether, under just war theory doctrine, a particular war is being fought in a “proportionate” manner, as “a last resort,” or with a “good intention.” Not when what counts as “too much” and “too soon” are evaluated against someone’s faith-infused idea of what is “good” to achieve. (Anyway, Vance and Johnson are out of their depth in a debate with Pope Leo XIV about the relevance of Christian humility to its views on war — Leo wrote his dissertation on Augustine’s views of political authority.7)

Politicians’ last ditch eagerness to gain the sanction of religion will only undercut the war effort. One report suggests that the White House actually actively lobbied Vatican diplomats to join the campaign for the war.8 This betrayed a deep defensiveness and lack of independent moral clarity. If the president needs to secure the blessing of the Roman pontiff, and dares not challenge his basic premises, what chance does he have to understand let alone defeat the even more fanatically religious ayatollahs?

Citizens of a free republic rightfully demand their government’s accountability for its decisions to go to war. Obviously, questions of life and death should not be left to anyone’s whim-driven discretion. President Trump has already failed to secure the approval of Congress for this war. He adds insult to injury when instead of giving reasons to a deliberative, elective body, his supporters instead express their faith to impress a foreign cleric.

A morally principled American commander in chief does not traffic in humble faith. He should stand proud for his nation’s right to self-defense on the fully secular moral grounds of protecting its citizens’ individual rights to life and liberty.

We are being pushed to take a bow for a new revolution. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and cadres of journalists and theoreticians have made it their mission to revive the case for socialism.

But didn’t the case for socialism die with the collapse of the Soviet Union and other socialist regimes in Eastern Europe in the 1990s? Not according to the new socialists. The socialism they champion is supposedly new and improved. This time, they say, the socialism they champion is democratic.

When advocates of a political ideology that has so far led to the deaths of tens of millions of people claim that this time it will be different, there’s a heavy burden of proof for thinking they are not advocates of more slaughter. I don’t think the burden can be discharged. In the end, democratic socialism is only superficially different from the socialism that was pushed, bloodily, on its twentieth-century victims.

The meaning of “democratic socialism”

What is democratic socialism, and how is it supposed to be any different?

When asked by Stephen Colbert about what she means by “democratic socialism,” Ocasio-Cortez answered: “what that means to me is health care as a human right. It means that every child no matter where you are born should have access to a college or trade school education if they so choose it.”¹ In a recent prominent campaign speech, Bernie Sanders gives a similar list of policies and concludes, “in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights. That is what I mean by democratic socialism.”2

Bear in mind the mechanism by which both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders would implement these “economic rights.” “Medicare for all” would abolish private insurance, giving government de facto control of the health care industry.3 Sanders’s “College for All” program would push even private colleges to accept more federal funds, hastening the day when the distinction between private and public colleges would come to nothing.4 The new socialist politicians really do advocate state ownership of some of the “commanding heights” of the modern economy.5

Why think that increasing state control of the economy is “democratic”? Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder and publisher of Jacobin magazine, claims in a recent book that “democratic socialism” is a redundancy: socialism, he thinks, simply extends the concept of democracy from the political to the economic realm. In the more consistent socialist vision he advocates, all firms should be owned by the state and controlled by workers, who would all receive a share of their firm’s profits and elect members of a worker’s council and a managing director to run the company. Unemployed workers would be supported by state welfare programs. Such a system would be “the world’s first truly democratic society.”6 The “economic rights” advocated by the new socialist politicians would clearly push us in the direction of realizing this “ideal.”

In advancing this point, Sunkara makes explicit what the politicians often do not: that real democratic socialism goes well beyond the Scandinavian “social democracies.” Though these systems offer significant welfare payments, they have lately been moving to privatize more state-controlled industries.7 Both Sunkara and the politicians want to push in the direction of greater state control.

“Democracy” disambiguated

What will prevent the democratic socialism that Sunkara advocates from exhibiting the authoritarian tyranny of Soviet-style socialism? The answer typically given is that the state ownership will be subject to “democratic control.”

This answer relies on a confusion about the meaning of “democracy.”

“Democracy” originally meant the system of unlimited majority rule, as in ancient Athens, in which every citizen would vote on important decisions governing the city. This is the system that voted to execute Socrates, the kind of tyranny of the majority which the U.S. Constitution was designed to safeguard against. Why is anyone fooled into thinking that socialism will be any better just because it involves tyranny of the many rather than tyranny of the few?

Through various linguistic twists and turns, in modern usage “democracy” has come to mean a political system involving elections while offering some protections for individual rights. This gives the term a more positive connotation. But this redefinition stems from the confusion that the right to vote is the hallmark of a free society. Voting is an important safeguard of individual rights insofar as it serves as a check against a tyrannical government. But it can do this job only in the context of the rule of law, only when laws protecting individual rights cannot be voted away by the majority.8

Revealingly, Sunkara admits that the “democracy” he advocates amounts to unlimited majority rule, when he criticizes the American Founding Fathers for having intentionally subverted democracy. He cites a passage from James Madison’s Federalist No. 10, in which Madison bemoans democracies for generating “turbulence and contention” that negate the individual’s right to property.9 Madison recommends a republican form of government rather than one that allows a majority faction to violate the rights of the minority. Sunkara opposes Madison’s republican constitution in favor of this majority factionalism.

The democratic threat to freedom

Sunkara and other democratic socialists will likely respond that in the system they advocate, they would still insist on protection of basic “human rights,” just not property rights. But can these rights be separated? Ayn Rand argued otherwise. As a refugee from Soviet communism herself, Rand was a direct witness to the manner in which the abrogation of property rights violated basic individual freedoms:

Socialism is merely democratic absolute monarchy — that is, a system of absolutism without a fixed head, open to seizure of power by all comers, by any ruthless climber, opportunist, adventurer, demagogue or thug.

When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the “right” to “redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat human beings as chattel.10

To understand this point, consider the freedom of speech. Does a man have this freedom if he cannot own pen and paper, or a press, or a computer? If individuals must first secure the permission of the relevant council of writers or publishers before they can use these “means of production,” how can they be free to speak? A permission is not a right.

Democratic socialists might respond that it’s only big firms that would need to be democratically governed; private individuals could still own their pens and paper. But how big can an individual’s operation become before it is taken over by the state? Presumably, that question would itself be left up to majority vote. A system in which one’s peers vote to decide how much property one can keep (and how effective one’s speech can be) is not a system of inalienable rights or a system in which one’s life is one’s own.

In actual historical practice, every major socialist system that began with voting by councils eventually transitioned to more authoritarian central control. Sunkara’s Socialist Manifesto itself gives ample evidence of this. The bulk of the book is devoted to a history of failed socialist movements around the world. Sunkara celebrates the short-lived Paris Commune in 1871. Though he neglects to mention how the Paris Commune went as far as to impose censorship and execute dissidents, he does speak favorably of how Marx thought it didn’t go far enough to seize control. We hear of how the moderate Social Democratic Party rose to power in Germany by having members of the rival (but formerly allied) Spartacus League murdered. We hear of how life during the Russian civil war was too chaotic for worker councils to retain control of factories, so central planning was necessary. We hear of how when peasants clung to their grain and kept prices low, Stalin collectivized their farms without the benefit of putting it to a vote, causing millions to starve. We of course hear of the bloody Stalinist purges of fellow communists and of the murderous chaos of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.11

Leave aside times of war: even during peacetime, governing an entire complex society by direct majority rule is difficult if not impossible. Political power has to be invested in representatives and centralized authorities. When a government’s purpose is not to protect the rights of each individual, but to implement the undefinable “will of the people,” factions within the government invariably struggle with each other for the title of representatives of the people. As Ayn Rand puts it, “Since the concept [of “the public interest”] is so conveniently undefinable, its use rests only on any given gang’s ability to proclaim that ‘The public, c’est moi’ — and to maintain the claim at the point of a gun.”12

The inherent brutality of collectivism

As the history of strife among socialist activists and the bloody party purges in Russia and China demonstrate, history’s socialist movements were unable to govern themselves peacefully. Why think that the winners of internal socialist turf wars who then wrest control over a society of those who disagree with them would not treat dissidents even more brutally?

Consider the kind of revolution Sunkara himself calls for. He maintains that “lawbreaking and sabotage . . . [are] hallmarks of any worthwhile labor militancy,” and urges today’s socialists to create “pressure” for change through “street protests and strike actions” that “force businesses to make concessions to reformers once they are elected.”13

Sunkara more generally urges today’s socialists to shy away from mere political reform and to instead push for widespread class struggle. Indeed, he celebrates Bernie Sanders’s campaign precisely because he sees his rhetoric about the 99 percent versus the 1 percent as inciting just such class conflict. But when someone proposes political change through the clash of rival collectives, why should it be a surprise if individuals are trampled upon in the process? Though Sunkara insists that he abhors the crimes of the socialist movements of the past, he resists any effort to see how these crimes were justified by the very collectivist ideology he endorses.

We should turn one last time to the observations of Ayn Rand, who worked to identify the underlying essence of the ideology that led to these crimes:

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights; under socialism, the right to property . . . is vested in “society as a whole,” i.e., in the collective, with production and distribution controlled by the state, i.e., by the government.

Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia — or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.

The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty, the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure — terrifying, that is, if one’s motive is men’s welfare.

Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly.14

Today’s “democratic socialists” say they want to avoid the terrifying failures of the last century. To evaluate their sincerity, consider their attitude toward the Chavista government in Venezuela, a regime that was originally democratically elected. Ocasio-Cortez refuses to denounce the current regime in Venezuela and said the situation there is “complex.” Sanders argued that the regime has now become undemocratic, but even still refuses to call President Maduro a dictator. And though Sunkara says much about the crimes of twentieth-century socialism, he simply ignores Venezuela, whose experiment with socialism Sunkara’s Jacobin defended for years, until only recently.15

Why, when socialists endorse the same collectivist ideas that have always led to tyranny, should we listen? In this latest socialist revolution, let’s not get fooled again.

When Vice President JD Vance was recently heckled for supporting genocide in Gaza, it was made clear that even after the war in Gaza has wound down, the charge that Israel is a genocidal state still lives.¹ The International Court of Justice is still investigating Israel. Advocacy groups across Europe have opened criminal complaints against their governments for complicity in genocide for supporting Israel with arms.2 And the charge has now been resuscitated about Israel’s recent actions against Lebanon.3

This charge, often delivered with fervor and hatred that barely masks anti-Israel prejudice, carries enormous moral weight for many people as it invites comparisons to the Holocaust. Let’s break down why this claim has no basis in reality.

The Holocaust is the paradigmatic case of genocide. Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews and millions of others.4 What distinguished this massacre from others?

Genocide has a specific motivation: Perpetrators of genocide judge certain groups to be inherently superior to others.5 The Nazis believed that Jews and others were corrupting the German race through intermarriage. From this warped perspective, the mass deportation and murder of millions of innocent and unarmed people was rationalized by the Nazis as an act of self-defense.

But of course the Jews posed no real threat of violence to anyone in Germany, none that could possibly justify removing them by force. Instead, they were merely an obstacle in the way of the perverse goal of racial purification. Thus, in reality, genocide is not any kind of “self-defense” but unprovoked aggression against innocent individuals.

By contrast, Hamas has long posed a military and terrorist threat against Israel, since its founding in 1987. Since it consolidated dictatorial rule in Gaza in 2007, it’s launched numerous rocket attacks on Israel. On October 7th, 2023, their operatives invaded Israel, murdering 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 hostages. It was the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history. Israel rightfully demanded the immediate return of the hostages, and Hamas refused. Israel did not want war: It wanted to hold the perpetrators of October 7th responsible for their crimes, and to allow its citizens to continue with their lives in a free society. In stark contrast with the Nazi genocide, Israel’s war was truly motivated by self-defense.

The attack by Hamas on October 7th, on the other hand, was genuinely genocidal: It aimed at killing Jews and at destroying the nation of Israel out of religiously inspired antisemitic hatred. The 1988 Hamas Charter cites Islamic texts: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees.”6 Sickeningly, Hamas frames the killing of Jews as virtuous and deserving of divine reward, and teaches children in schools that Jews are inherently corrupt, violent, and treacherous.7 All of this aims at fomenting ongoing hatred against Jews, using antisemitic tropes, such as claims of global financial manipulation and warmongering. They eerily echo Nazi propaganda.

Moreover, to the extent that civilians in Gaza suffer from the war, it is the moral responsibility of Hamas. It initiated a barbaric attack, leading Israel to retaliate in self-defense. Further, Hamas treats Palestinians as mere pawns to be sacrificed in their religious and racial war. Hamas orders Gazans to ignore Israeli evacuation orders, intentionally putting them in harm’s way, and uses houses, schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure as command centers or arms depots.

By contrast, Israel clearly has no such mission to kill all Palestinians: It sought the destruction of Hamas. If Israel did want to kill all the Palestinians in Gaza, it could do so easily, by simply smothering Gaza with bombs indiscriminately. Instead, Israel minimizes violence against noncombatants, via humanitarian corridors, bomb warnings, and the use of precision weapons. I would argue that Israel goes too far in attempting to protect enemy civilians. But even if you thought Israel’s military tactics were unjust, this would still provide no basis for the charge of genocide.

The charge of Israeli genocide is morally corrupt. It requires an incredible series of evasions. It evades that Israel’s motivation is self-defense, and that Hamas’s is actually to commit genocide. It evades that Israel seeks to defend its citizens against a genocidal opponent that repeatedly attacks them. In truth, Israel’s war to defeat a fanatical enemy is the moral opposite of genocide.

Consider the moral inversion: The focus of Israel as the perpetrator of genocide not only distracts from this reality but treats the real perpetrators of genocide (Hamas and its many supporters) as victims. Giving Hamas this moral cover enables their genocide.

Justice demands that we condemn this inversion and dismiss the mendacious charge of genocide against Israel.

Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) have a knack for keeping audiences on the edge of their seats, but their most gripping thriller of the year has nothing to do with Stranger Things or Game of Thrones. The story that commanded attention of customers, critics, competitors, the Department of Justice, and President Donald Trump was the attempted merger between the two.

While Netflix had the WBD board’s blessing, the merger faced an insurmountable challenge from regulators’ and Trump’s opposition. Eventually, David Ellison’s Paramount wrested WBD out of Netflix’s hands. But the saga ended with unanswered questions: was Netflix simply unable to outbid its competition, or was it pressured into submission by those holding discretionary power over business by means of antitrust laws? And if two media companies were strong-armed out of the deal, were their First Amendment rights violated?

It might seem that David Ellison’s Paramount simply offered more money than Netflix investors thought WBD was worth. But to think Neflix was simply outbid, one would have to ignore that Paramount’s deal was backed by the president of the United States in exchange for Ellison’s promise of sweeping changes to the Trump-critical editorial board at CNN (owned by WBD).

Ellison himself boasted that Paramount’s regulatory path was more certain than Netflix’s because of his friendly relationship with the administration, and because the size of the Paramount/WBD merger wouldn’t trigger an automatic presumption of illegality under the antitrust laws (as a Netflix/WBD combination likely would). Despite the DOJ’s promise that Paramount will “absolutely not” have a fast track to approval, and despite being a merger of two major legacy film-studio-and-network operators, Paramount in fact faced no hurdles in clearing the review stage in which the DOJ bogged down Netflix.

Because of differential regulatory scrutiny, Netflix didn’t just lose a business opportunity. Together with WBD they were strong-armed out of the deal. Withdrawing in the face of an uphill regulatory battle is not the same as losing a fair competitive bid.

Uniquely concerning, as many recognize, is that they were strong-armed because of Trump’s hostility to Netflix’s ideology and CNN’s critical stance toward the administration. Republicans more broadly opposed the merger because they are terrified of how a diversified Hogwarts could affect their children, fearing that Netflix–WBD would spread more “woke” ideas.

With regard to CNN, the threat to intellectual freedom is out in the open. But the attack on freedom of thought is also on display when antitrust enforcers scrutinize a private business deal because they’d prefer Netflix’s influence in the culture be pruned. Both WBD and Netflix were robbed of their intellectual freedom protected by the First Amendment. Don’t let the idea that it was a routine antitrust merger investigation obscure that.

Even if Paramount weren’t trying to snatch the deal, consider what Netflix and WBD would have had to avoid during the regulatory review process to curry political favor. A stand-up special that would pique the interest of vengeful regulators? A documentary unfavorable to the administration? A movie that triggers sensitivities of the party in power? What would get silently killed or edited while the threat of antitrust loomed over the deal?

Netflix and WBD faced an impossible choice: pursue their business strategy at the cost of fighting an unwinnable regulatory battle while walking on eggshells in their content decisions, or withdraw from the deal. So they withdrew. Paramount’s higher bid made the fight less attractive, but it doesn’t mean the antitrust threat didn’t play a role in swaying WBD away from Netflix.

With the Netflix deal killed, the projects Netflix and WBD would have produced together died too. What things will go unsaid and not be portrayed in what documentaries, movies, or shows that will not be made? The state’s intervention silenced the voice of the new company before it could take its first breath.

To regulate the size of a media company is to regulate the reach of its ideas, and thereby violate the freedom of thought, speech, and action, all of which are inseparable from each other. Blocking a merger between Netflix/WBD because it would have too much “power” is like threatening a publisher by saying, “Nice printing presses you’ve got here — it would be a shame if you lost a few.” Inhibiting the free use of property is inhibiting free thought and communication that property serves.

Regardless of whether you favor Netflix, prefer Paramount, or simply want WBD to stay a separate entity, you should be worried about any side using the force of law to push the outcome in their favor.

If we don’t defend the right of businesses to merge and speak freely, we will soon find that the only voices left are those the government has cleared for broadcast. That is a horror story we should only see on the screen, not in reality.

A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group on April 15, 2026.

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ARI’s Intellectual Incubator invests in early-career intellectuals committed to relentless growth and to impacting their fields. We catalyze their growth through training, mentorship, and work opportunities. One example: We hire Incubator members to develop and teach micro courses in their areas of expertise. Such courses are an opportunity to strengthen their ability to communicate complex ideas with clarity and precision.

The first micro course concluded earlier this month. David Bakker, a graduate student in mathematics and philosophy of science, taught Joseph Fourier’s The Analytical Theory of Heat, using the French mathematician’s work as a case study in the process of scientific discovery.

Over the course of five weeks, Bakker guided students through Fourier’s intellectual journey: how his experimental observations led to the formulation of mathematical laws, how those laws were developed into the heat equation, and how the solution provides genuine physical insight.

Students engaged directly with both the technical and conceptual dimensions of mathematical physics, working through the material inductively. Rather than beginning with finished equations, they started from Fourier’s own observations and gradually reconstructed his reasoning, allowing them to grasp how the theory emerges from the concretes.

In May and June, the Incubator will offer two new micro courses on the intellectual history of the United States, a timely topic on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary. The courses are open to current and former ARI students.

In Political Philosophy of the Founding, Dr. Tristen Fleig, who also attends law school, will guide students through key documents and debates of early American history. Conventional university courses cover the figures and timeline of the Founding, Dr. Fleig says, but they rarely “help students grasp what animated these figures or events. I’ve designed my course so that students can get that experience of just what ideas and principles inspired these men to embark on the radical mission to create a wholly unique nation.”

The Republic of Producers: Natural Rights and the Rise of Capitalism in America, taught by Mohamed Ali, a graduate student in philosophy, will offer a complementary perspective on the philosophical currents that defined America’s creation. “My course follows natural rights theory from Locke through Paine and Jefferson and uncovers the specific legal and social changes it produced in the first half-century of the American republic,” says Mr. Ali. “For anyone who has wondered how philosophy produces real consequences in the world,” says Mr. Ali, “the early American republic offers the clearest possible answer.”

“Core to the design of the Incubator is the recognition that doing intellectual work — writing, editing, teaching, lecturing — is essential to catalyzing growth,” says Elan Journo, a senior vice president at ARI, overseeing the Incubator. “Crucially, micro courses are not simulations or classroom exercises. We hired David, Tristen, and Mohamed as instructors, and we expect them to produce new knowledge and effectively impart it to students. I believe micro courses hold great promise, and I’m eager to see more Incubator members teach them in future.”

Learn more about these courses and sign up here.

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Texas A&M University recently adopted a policy restricting the topics professors can discuss. In a recent discussion, my colleague Ben Bayer made a point that resonated with me: this policy rests on an implicit view of the human mind that is worth challenging.

A&M’s policy bans professors from teaching “gender ideology” and even just raising the topics of “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.” That last part is notable: no discussion of these topics is permitted, even if it includes multiple viewpoints and encourages students to think for themselves.

The implicit view is that exposure to certain ideas, by itself, has a corrupting effect. Hearing the views of “gender ideology” expressed or even described is thought to act on students’ impressionable minds, turning them into adherents to this ideology. The only safe policy is to shield them from such notions entirely.

But I for one don’t experience ideas as imprinting themselves on my mind against my will, turning me into a mindless adherent. I was exposed to many “woke” claims as a college student, but I was able to think about the arguments and evidence presented in their favor and decide whether or not to accept them.

Upon assessing the evidence and arguments, I did accept a few, such as the point that women and non-white people still face subtle forms of discrimination that others sometimes do not notice. But I did not encounter any compelling reasons for the notion that grouping people into identity-based collectives and treating the historically oppressed groups more favorably is a solution. So I did not accept this idea.

True, some people do choose to unthinkingly absorb ideas from others, including “gender ideology.” The idea that all knowledge works this way is probably familiar to religious conservatives. Their worldview preaches blind faith rather than rational understanding as the way to know religious truths. But religious conservatives should not assume everyone parrots the viewpoints of whatever seeming authorities they happen to have encountered.

The only way a university can help dogmatic students who unthinkingly accept ideas from others is by urging them to think for themselves. Sheltering all students from controversial or false ideas to allegedly “protect” those with this mindset only inhibits the intellectual development of the students who are most thoughtful.

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Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for the Wall Street Journal, defines “state capitalism” as “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.”¹ Ip argues that the U.S. is becoming more similar to China by adopting “state capitalism with American characteristics.” Commentators at prominent organizations like The Washington Post, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Cato Institute have made similar statements.2^,3^,4^,5

There’s reason to worry that the United States is heading toward a system like China’s where the government exerts more control over businesses. But the term “state capitalism” obscures the real nature of this disturbing trend and muddies our understanding of capitalism. There’s a different concept — one completely antithetical to capitalism — that accurately captures the current trend, and it’s one that opponents of that trend desperately need to understand more deeply.

The Marxist origin of “state capitalism”

One reason to be suspicious of the term “state capitalism” is its origin. The term doesn’t come from advocates of free markets, but from Marxist theoreticians.

According to Marx, genuine socialism arises only when the state “withers away” after the revolution of the working class. His collaborator Friedrich Engels claimed that a system in which the state seizes private businesses from their owners and runs them itself is still a form of capitalism, and the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht introduced the term “state capitalism” to name the situation Engels described.6^,7

Subsequently, some Marxists have used the term to distance themselves from the Soviet Union. The brutal Soviet dictatorship, they argued, cannot be blamed on socialism, because it is not real socialism — it’s “state capitalism.”8

This origin gives opponents of Marxism (like Ip and Cato) every reason to ask whether it carries false Marxist assumptions that distort discussions of political systems.

It does. The term “state capitalism” presupposes the Marxist view that the defining feature of capitalism is that a “class” of people owns the “means of production” and employs others to perform labor (who are thereby, they say, “exploited”). Marxists consequently don’t claim to recognize a fundamental difference between private industry and industries owned and operated by the state. To Marxists, any society in which one “class” of people owns the means of production is some type of capitalism. Under the “real socialism” they imagine, “classes” will disappear along with the state.

The Marxist view, in essence, is that the state becomes a capitalist by owning and operating a business. But this wrongly conflates private businesses with government-owned businesses. By applying “state capitalism” to China and to Trump’s policy of acquiring ownership shares in businesses, Ip and others are buying into a blatantly Marxist distortion.

Private vs. state-owned businesses

There are fundamental differences between private ownership and state control that must not be ignored. A private business operating in a free economy can only deal with people by voluntary agreement. Its employees, suppliers, customers and investors are free to decide whether to deal with it or not. And it can only stay in existence by figuring out how to make profits — which it can only do by producing goods and services that people want to buy.

Not so with state-owned businesses like China’s three largest mobile carriers, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom. These three companies almost completely dominate the market because the Chinese government prohibits any new company from entering the field unless it is at least 51% government-owned. This means that anyone who wants to do business in the telecommunications market is forced to deal with one of these three firms.

And although Chinese state-owned enterprises have some nominal autonomy in their operation, they must seek approval on all major decisions from a committee of members of the Chinese Communist Party organized within the enterprise.9 And the central government body that oversees many of the country’s state-owned enterprises can force them directly to make changes to their operations. For example, all three of these companies were engaged both in operating cellular networks and in constructing cell towers. In 2014, however, the Chinese government forced these companies to give up their tower construction businesses. It took over their assets related to tower construction and created a new state-owned business, China Tower Company.10

These state-owned businesses operate in a fundamentally different way from Verizon and AT&T. The owners of private companies are free to decide which industries to enter, what goods and services to produce. They succeed by creating value and offering trades that people willingly agree to. But a government forcibly controls the decisions of executives of state-owned businesses companies. And it runs a business like China Mobile by wielding force to limit competition. Describing this authoritarian control as a kind of “capitalism” obscures the fundamental difference between voluntary trade and coercion.

Marxists, of course, want to obscure that difference, because they want to destroy the system of free enterprise. The coinage “state capitalism” doesn’t just permit them to whitewash Marxism by distancing it from the Soviet nightmare; it also enables them to smear private entrepreneurs by equating their operations with government coercion. Advocates of economic freedom should not walk into their trap.

The right concept for America’s ominous direction

Think about what it means more broadly to say that both China and a country with completely free, private enterprise are “capitalist” societies simply because someone or other “owns” its businesses.

China, a country with state ownership of businesses, is a brutal dictatorship that heavily restricts speech, surveils its citizens and arrests them for long periods of time without any due process.11 A country with free markets in which businesses are privately owned could also completely and consistently protect individual rights, including not just property rights but also freedom of expression, personal liberty and due process. On all the most important political issues, such a country would be the opposite of China. Equating them under the label “capitalism” would be absurd. It would serve only to whitewash China and/or smear free countries.

I would argue, following Ayn Rand, that capitalism is best understood as a system “based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.”12 This definition highlights the stark difference between a country of private enterprise and a country in which the economy is largely controlled by the state, and reserves the term “capitalism” only for the former.

On this conception of capitalism, it doesn’t make sense to think the United States was a fully capitalist country even pre-Trump. The U.S. certainly has much more private ownership and economic freedom than China, and it does a far better job protecting citizens’ rights more generally. But the regulatory state has long infringed in major ways on Americans’ economic freedom. By the 21st century, the American economy was already only partly capitalist, mixed with heavy elements of statism. It would be most apt to describe it as a mixed economy moving further and further away from capitalism.

What is it moving toward? If not “state capitalism,” is there a name for the specific type of statism toward which the U.S. is moving under Trump? Another statement from Rand is illuminating here. In contrast to socialism, which abolishes private property in favor of state ownership of industry, there is a variant of statism in which individuals “retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.”13

The name for that system is fascism.

Although people today mainly associate fascism with racism and nationalism, Rand’s point is that there is also a characteristically fascist type of control over the economy.14 In spite of still calling themselves “communist,” the Chinese government exercises this same type of fascist control over many of its officially private businesses. And Trump’s use of tariffs and regulation to control American businesses are an ominous step in America’s journey toward the same destination.

Those of us who oppose the shift of the U.S. political system in the direction of China should name it clearly for what it is. We are not in a transition from one type of capitalism to another, “state capitalism,” but a transition away from capitalism and toward a fascist form of statism. If we are to have a chance at reversing this transition, we must clearly identify it as a fascistic trend, not equate it with its opposite.

Ayn Rand offers an answer in her essay “The Age of Envy.” Originally anthologized in her book The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and now available online for the first time, she argues that hostility to values more generally is nothing less than the defining spirit of our time.

What is this spirit? Rand calls it “hatred of the good for being the good.” It is a drive not to attain the good but to punish and destroy it. Once this motive is named, it can be seen everywhere in the culture, from classrooms to boardrooms.

As one illustration, Rand draws a striking contrast between early conceptions of socialism and modern egalitarianism. However evil and destructive in practice, socialism at least pretended to aim at raising the standard of living for all. By contrast, today’s egalitarians show little interest in achievement or production, seeking instead to level all distinctions, rejoicing in the downfall of the successful. Rand goes on to show how other modern ideologies, such as multiculturalism and environmentalism, are manifestations of the same underlying psychology.

What is the underlying psychology? Rand traces it to a troubled relationship with self-esteem, in which the sight of achievement is experienced not as an inspiration but as something to resent or evade.

A culture driven by hostility to the good demands explanation. Read “The Age of Envy” to see how she accounts for it.

Find a passage from the beginning of the article below.

A culture, like an individual, has a sense of life or, rather, the equivalent of a sense of life — an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence. This emotional atmosphere represents a culture’s dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style.

Thus Western civilization had an Age of Reason and an Age of Enlightenment. In those periods, the quest for reason and enlightenment was the dominant intellectual drive and created a corresponding emotional atmosphere that fostered these values.

Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.

Continue reading the essay here, or find it in Rand’s book Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

Today, April 6, 2026, as the world watched the journey of Artemis II disappear around the far side of the moon — in America’s first manned mission to lunar space in over 50 years — Astronaut Victor Glover quoted scripture. He spoke of the mystery of love and quoted Jesus Christ’s commandment to “love God with all that you are.”

This was not the first stunt bringing religious faith into space. During the very first Apollo manned mission to orbit the moon on December 24, 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts read from the Book of Genesis. Ayn Rand, who was enthusiastic about the human achievement that the space program represented, published scathing criticisms of the incident in her periodical, The Objectivist. Here is an excerpt from these comments:

When, from the distance of the moon, from the height of the triumph of science, we expected to hear the astronauts’ message and heard, instead, a voice reciting the moldy nonsense which even a slum-corner evangelist would not have chosen as a text — reciting the Bible’s cosmology — I, for one, felt as if the capsule had disintegrated and we were left in the primordial darkness of empty space.

If you wonder what perpetuates the reign of irrationality on earth, you have seen a demonstration: it is not done by the worst among men, but by the best—not by the masses of the ignorant, but by the leaders who default on the responsibility of thought — not by witch doctors, but by scientists.

No witch doctor’s power to encourage mankind’s darkest superstitions is comparable to the power of an astronaut broadcasting from the moon.

There are two questions that should be asked: Would the astronauts treat the slightest malfunction of the least significant instrument aboard their spacecraft as carelessly and thoughtlessly as they treated the most important issues of philosophy? And, if not, doesn’t man’s spirit deserve the same disciplined, conscientious, rational attention that they gave to inanimate matter?

The flight of Apollo 8 was a condensed dramatization of mankind’s tragedy: a demonstration of man’s epistemological double standard in the fields of science and of the humanities.

Why this reaction? In her later essay on the occasion of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Rand made clear why the Apollo missions represented a triumph of human rationality:

One knew that this spectacle was not the product of inanimate nature, like some aurora borealis, nor of chance, nor of luck, that it was unmistakably human — with “human,” for once, meaning grandeur — that a purpose and a long, sustained, disciplined effort had gone to achieve this series of moments, and that man was succeeding, succeeding, succeeding!

She says “for once” because in the tradition inherited from religion, “human” has come to mean “imperfect,” “corrupted,” “sinful.” As a champion of the absolutism of reason, Rand saw religious faith as the historical enemy of all forms of human achievement. So it should come as no surprise that she saw the Bible reading as a throwback to the primitive ideas that had long undercut and persecuted the scientific achievement that made the space program possible.

Rand’s full comments are available in the November 1968 edition of The Objectivist (issues were frequently backdated), which can now be purchased in paperback. Between 1962 and 1976, Ayn Rand published a series of periodicals: The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter.

Students interested in learning more about Rand’s philosophy of reason, individualism, and capitalism can learn more by ordering free books like Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. They’ll see why, even though she was fascinated by space exploration, Rand advocated first and foremost “a philosophy for living on Earth.”

It is a philosophy that holds reason as an absolute, and holds that faith is an “only a short-circuit destroying the mind.” It was not “love” of some alleged God that brought man to the moon, but the rational love of truth.