Episode 987: Ayn Rand—Misunderstood and Misrepresented
Air Date: October 21, 2026 | Host: Bob Metz
Clip (Atlas Shrugged Part II 2012):
You say you and Henry Rearden found it in an abandoned car factory.
Dagny Taggart: Yes, in the laboratory of the 20th Century Motor Company.
Robert Stadler: Who holds the patent?
Dagny Taggart: None was ever filed.
Robert Stadler: You could file for it.
Dagny Taggart: I don't want to claim credit for something I didn't create. I just want it to work.
Robert Stadler: You're a person of uncommon character these days. There seems to be an element missing. Converter, transformer. I'm not sure. It might only exist in the mind of the inventor. If you could find. But you haven't found him. Or you wouldn't have called me. I know your distaste for my work at the State Science Institute.
Dagny Taggart: With no evidence you declare Rearden Metal unsafe. Just to keep me from building the John Galt Line.
Robert Stadler: But you built it anyway. Magnificent. I was wrong. I know that now. There was enormous political.
Dagny Taggart: Dr. Stadler, can you think of anyone who could have conceived of this? A scientist, an engineer, maybe ten years ago.
Robert Stadler: Someone this brilliant would surely have caught my attention.
Dagny Taggart: Can you think of anyone now? Anyone left who could bring it to life?
Robert Stadler: Finding a great mind has been increasingly difficult since the disappearances. We've lost many of the best and brightest.
Bob Metz:
Welcome everyone. It is Wednesday, October 21st, 2026. I'm Bob Metz, and this is Just Right, broadcasting around the world and online. Join us for an hour of discussion that's not right wing. It's just right.
In our opener from the movie adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, the characters are dealing with the sudden disappearance of the most productive people in their society. A phenomenon that could be applied to all collectivist countries who forced their producers out of the country, looking for the freedom necessary to be productive. Elsewhere. And that's because the best and brightest were all hiding out in Galt's Gulch, away from the political, social, and economic parasites who kept stealing from them and handicapping their productive abilities. And as the Atlases of their society, in that the entire weight of the world rested on their shoulders, they simply stopped producing and shrugged. Hence the title of Philosopher Novelist Ayn Rand's monumental work, Atlas Shrugged, a fictional novel illustrating some uncomfortable realities that the world faces perpetually. Of course, Ayn Rand's name is one heard regularly on our show, and various applications of her philosophy of Objectivism have been highlighted fairly consistently over the years. But our focus today is less on Ayn Rand and Objectivism themselves than on various pundits and commentators, ostensibly on the right, and with whom I may have a lot in common, talking about Rand and her philosophy in a way that only reveals how little they actually know about Rand's ideas, and some of it is downright cringeworthy.
It's a tremendous frustration for someone like me, and given some recent commentaries I've run across, the time has finally arrived where I simply can't ignore the misrepresentations ascribed to Ayn Rand, and I'll be going on a rant over this right after our reminder that you can write us at feedback@justrightmedia.org. Hear us on WBCQ and on Channel 292 Shortwave. Follow and like us on your favorite podcast platform, and visit us at justrightmedia.org where you can access all of our social media links, archive broadcasts, and the support button that makes it easy for you to support the show. Because as always, your financial support is appreciated and is what makes this show possible.
Now on the opening page of my 1,084 pages long paperback edition of Atlas Shrugged is found the following introduction, and I quote,
"What moves the world? This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world and did. Is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battle not against his enemies, but against those who need him most? Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged is unlike any other book you've ever read. It is a mystery story, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder and rebirth of man's spirit."
And with that very brief overview of what the theme of Atlas Shrugged was all about, without much further ado, let us begin with the reactions to Rand's mystery story by two relatively well-known voices associated with the right, namely Jordan Peterson and Michael Malice, who self-identifies as an anarchist. This is for me an example of how two highly intelligent people can descend to a level of intellectual chaos for the simple lack of clear definitions. It is in many ways, as I said earlier, cringeworthy. But it's probably very representative of how many people approach the ideas of Ayn Rand. To say nothing of the ongoing challenge of establishing rational governance.
On December 21st, 2023, Michael Malice appeared as a guest on Jordan Peterson's show. And were it not for something Malice said very recently on another podcast, which we'll hear a little later, I might have left this exchange on the back burner. But talk about a communications train wreck. So please accept my apologies in advance for having put this train back on its track, even if just to demonstrate where it got onto the wrong track before crashing.
Clip (Jordan Peterson, December 21 2023):
Jordan Peterson: You know, I don't know to what degree you would still ally yourself with the anarchist movement. And I want to know, well, to what degree you do. And also I would like to know what that means.
You open your book with Ayn Rand.
Michael Malice: Yeah.
Jordan Peterson: And I know that's a bit of a tangential intrusion into that question, but she's definitely an arbiter or a spokeswoman for an individualistic stance. So I want to talk to you about Ayn Rand, because I have some ideas about that that I want. But I'm also curious, you obviously regard a focus on the individual as the appropriate medication against this kind of statist intellectual Luciferian utopianism, and I think that's appropriate. But I want to know what your vision of an alternative is and why you adopted that particular vision.
Michael Malice: Well, I don't know that I have a vision per se. I'm not a central planner. But what anarchism means to me, and I do 100% regard myself as an anarchist, is it is an approach to life. It is an approach to treating people peacefully. It is a recognition that political authority is inherently illegitimate, although sometimes it is powerful, and it is regarding our existence as an amazing opportunity and to live life to its fullest, and to realize that to take that away from somebody else is a huge moral outrage. So that is kind of what anarchism means to me. And Rand was asked at one point, she goes, if I had to sum up my worldview or whatever the term she used in one word, it would be this individualism. So, yes, that is exactly what I'm saying.
Jordan Peterson: Yeah, so that's where okay, okay. So let me delve into that a little bit.
Michael Malice: But it's also just important because you know, Berkman and Goldman, there's this boomer idea that more government is left-wing and less government is right wing, and it puts Goldman and Berkman on the right wing. It's just this weird thing because they want Hitler to be a leftist because that right wing is good, Hitler's bad, Hitler's leftist, that kind of mindset. I hate this idea that right good, left bad, or vice versa. There were the fight against totalitarianism was a series of dots that are often completely counterintuitive. And I think it's very important historically when people fight, these individuals who fight against this kind of atrocities that they give to give...
Jordan Peterson: Okay, so you're looking at something like attempting to replace the right wing versus the terrible communists narrative with something more like people who are concerned with the individual against the collective. Okay, okay, fine. I see, I see. Okay, so now here's I rate reread Rand, Ayn Rand's books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I think the third time I read both, and I read them within the last couple of months.
Michael Malice: Oh wow. Yeah, yeah.
Jordan Peterson: So I was she's a curious figure to me because Ayn Rand had every reason to despise the Soviet Union and was a very good countervoice to their machinations. But here's the problem I have, and you can help me sort this out. Like I certainly agree with you that a society that isn't predicated on something like recognition of the intrinsic and superordinate worth of the individual is doomed to catastrophe. But here's the rub as far as I'm concerned, and this is what I had really had a problem, especially this time when I went through Rand's books. It's like Galt, John Galt, for example, and Francisco d'Anconia.
Michael Malice: Howard Roark.
Jordan Peterson: Roark. Correct, her heroic capitalists, essentially. They're not precisely heroic capitalists, they're heroic individuals who compete in the free market. Okay, and that's and that's fine. And you can see the libertarian side of that, and I'm also a free market advocate, and partly because I think that distributed decision making is a much better computational model than centralized planning. So now the Randian heroes identify themselves as fervent individualists, and they're pursuing their own selfish ethos.
Michael Malice: Yes.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, so that's the rub to me. Because here's the problem. And I don't know how to distinguish individualism from hedonism. And I don't know how to distinguish hedonism from possession by one of these lower order motivational states. So when Rand says we should be able to pursue our own selfish needs, she's kind of taking a classic.
Michael Malice: She doesn't say selfish needs, she says self-interest.
Jordan Peterson: No, she I would say she moves between those two because
Michael Malice: She doesn't say needs I'm positive.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, she may never say needs.
Michael Malice: She attacks that word all the time.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, okay. Right, right. Fair enough. Okay, okay. So I'll back off on the need side. But does she say simultaneously that I have no right to pursue my needs?
Michael Malice: She doesn't use that word. She says you pursue your self-interest to the best of your abilities.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, but she also uses the word selfish.
Michael Malice: Yes.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, okay, so fine.
Michael Malice: In a very idiosyncratic way.
Jordan Peterson: Right. So the liberal types, the Scottish liberals believe that if people were encouraged to pursue their self-interest, that that would produce a self-regulating system. Now Rand seems to accept that as a proposition. Yes.
Michael Malice: Yes.
Jordan Peterson: So if people are freely able to pursue their self-interest, then a system of free exchange will emerge out of that that has the appropriate qualities of governance.
Michael Malice: Yes.
Jordan Peterson: This is the thing. This is this is what I don't quite understand. Is that that self-interest? Okay, so it seems to me that for that self-interest to work, then it has to be a self-interest that's commensurate with the structure that would emerge if everyone was pursuing their self-interest simultaneously. Let's say you and I make an arrangement, and it's a long-term arrangement, and at one point you decide that it's in your self-interest to violate that agreement because you can garner an intense short-term gain as a consequence.
Michael Malice: But there's a long-term cost.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, that's fine. Okay, so...
Michael Malice: In this relationship, and also there's a long-term cost in terms of myself.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, what's the cost?
Michael Malice: The cost is I'm no longer a person of integrity. I'm not a man of my word.
Jordan Peterson: Right. So you're seeing her self-interest as something that's nested inside a larger scale conceptualization of integrity.
Michael Malice: Yes.
Jordan Peterson: And then, okay.
Michael Malice: And then in fact, the whole point of The Fountainhead is she's contrasting these two types of selfishness. The first is Peter Keating, who's this basic striver social climber who has no internal self at all, no values other than what he sees. She's like, This is evil, someone who has no self and whose values are a strictly a function...
Jordan Peterson: of comparison
Michael Malice: ...of those around her.
Jordan Peterson: Right, but okay,
Michael Malice: Hold on. As opposed to Howard Roark, who is selfish in the sense that he pursues his own goals and values in accordance with his moral code. And I think those are the two definitions of selfishness.
Jordan Peterson: Fine, fine. So I can say, I'm gonna play devil's advocate against Rand, and for now we can be out. Okay, so I would say, well, on what grounds are you criticizing Peter Keating's decision, self-interested decision to prioritize status above all else. I mean, that's what he thinks is appropriate. On what grounds do you believe that that's inappropriate? They're both self-interested.
Michael Malice: They're not self-interested because Peter Keating doesn't have a self. There's no one there.
Jordan Peterson: That's okay. That's all right, that was my mystery. So what does it mean for there to be something there? So he's reduced, he's reduced himself to one dimension, which is social comparison. But that's not nothing, that's one dimension.
Michael Malice: But it's nothing to him. It doesn't matter to him. It only matters to other people, so therefore it matters to him. This is not coming from the call's not coming from the side of the house. So if you want to be someone who's high status, who no one genuinely likes or admires, knock yourself out.
Jordan Peterson: Let me tell you why I have a harder time placing anarchy in that position. So you have a social hierarchy in place, right? But it's a voluntary social hierarchy. And every single level of the hierarchy has a requisite responsibility, and that makes a pyramidal structure that's the alternative to the tyrant and the slave. Maybe there's two ways you could conceptualize the individual, and this is where I have the problem with the anarchical viewpoint. The identity that Rand is promoting is actually a reflection of the harmonious operation of that whole hierarchy. It can't be simply located at the level of the individual. See, the thing about Rand is that Rand doesn't spend much time detailing out the necessary structure of the subsidiary hierarchy that would have to be produced to transform an emphasis on individual orientation into a complex and sophisticated society. I don't think it's enough to say if people were just pursuing their own enlightened self-interest that society would automatically harmonize. I think that mental health is actually the harmony in that hierarchy of being and not something that you have in your head.
Michael Malice: I mean, Rand called her philosophy Objectivism, so I completely agree with you. I don't I think anytime you're introducing subjectivism to a large extent, you're treading on thin ice.
Jordan Peterson: Objective in relationship to what? Like where's the objective reality that that Rand's pattern of behavior is aiming to what would you say to adapt to?
Michael Malice: Everywhere. We live in it. There's nowhere else to go.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, so it's well, so that's the polity that I'm thinking about. So how do you fluid?
Michael Malice: It changes all the you could job you can podcast, you can get divorced.
Jordan Peterson: Right, but there's principle, it's not entirely fluid because it's not entirely fluid. If you accept the necessity of these embedded relationships, multiple embedded relationships, okay. So why exactly? I'm not trying to catch you out here. I'm curious. Well, why do you conceptualize that as anarchy?
Michael Malice: Because it's voluntary.
Jordan Peterson: Yeah, okay, fine. So that's the fundamental principle.
Michael Malice: Yes.
Jordan Peterson: Well, I think the principle of voluntarism is extraordinarily important, right? Because it's actually a sign of the optimization of the relationship.
Michael Malice: Yes, correct.
Jordan Peterson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, but all right, fair enough. All right. Yeah, but wait, now wait.
Michael Malice: Well, I think we should cut it here. I got what I wanted.
Jordan Peterson: Okay.
Michael Malice: Now this relationship can only go in a bad direction.
Jordan Peterson: There's a complication. Here's the complication. All right, so well, it's unfortunate that it's a complication, but there is a complication. So now we get one person in there. Who plays status game? That brings the conversation in some ways to a halt. So you can imagine you could set up a stable society of cooperators. But the problem is if you drop one person in there who's a shark, like a short-term hedonistic psychopath, they can take everything. Okay, so you said you said you can't use force. What do you do with people who don't play fair?
Michael Malice: If you're at a party, let's go this party scenario, and there's someone there who's just being an ass, yeah, whoever's home it is, it's their domicile. At a certain point, you tell them get the F out.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, but but then you have the problem of the necessity of force in that situation.
Michael Malice: It's not force, it's your home. If it's their trespasser at that point. At any moment, you could be like Malice, you know what? You are really crossing a line. We're cutting it here. Get the hell out. And that's not force. It's still your this is your house.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, then we need to define force.
Michael Malice: No, that, and that's what private property does. Private property delineates who has the position to determine what happens within that area.
Jordan Peterson: You're defining private property as, I believe, as a domain where you are
Michael Malice: Sovereign.
Jordan Peterson: Yeah, well, and so what so when what that means is that you have the right and maybe even the responsibility to use requisite force in that situation to maintain the necessary peace that's a precondition for voluntary association.
Michael Malice: Well, I wouldn't even call it force because if I'm trespassing, I'm the one who's initiating force. If I go to someone's home where I'm not welcome, I'm the one who's using force.
Jordan Peterson: I need a definition of force. Because look, if you throw prisoners in prison, because they continually violate other people's property,
Michael Malice: they're they're they're the ones who initiated force by by going after somebody else and now they were locked into a cage. They're the ones who initiated force as as a who started this chain, and what is done to them is a consequence, which is let's assume it's done a rational and above board manner, is a consequence of their actions.
Jordan Peterson: So okay, okay, so you're implying, I believe, that the use of force. This is why we need a word, because like if I have to throw you out of here, most people would say by the normative meaning of the word force that I use force to throw you out. Now, you're clear. claiming that-
Michael Malice: But not in the moral sense.
Jordan Peterson: Right, right, not in the moral sense. Okay, so this definition that you use that equates anarchism with voluntary with volunteerism. I wouldn't say necessarily that that's how anarchism is viewed in the popular culture.
Michael Malice: And by that's by design, just the same way the Soviet Union is viewed as somehow infinitely preferable to Nazi Germany in the popular culture, right?
Jordan Peterson: Is there a difference then in your argument for anarchism and the libertarian argument for a radically restricted government? Like they dovetailed.
Michael Malice: Yes, six months.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, so what do you mean?
Michael Malice: Meaning this minarchist delusion is completely incoherent. There's no such thing as a minimal government, and we've run this experiment. The Constitution was designed to create the smallest government possible and ended up creating the largest government that's ever existed. So if you're going so talking about Plato Aristotle, so you think it's inevitable that the government just?
Michael Malice: I don't think so, that's what the data tells us.
Bob Metz:
In rejecting the notion that simply viewing anarchism as voluntarism is not how the popular culture sees it, Michael Malice made it clear that he doesn't know what anarchism is either, blaming it on yet another of his misunderstandings regarding the nature of left and right. According to him, aligning the left with evil and the right with good is the result of some kind of boomer conspiracy based on a desire to want Hitler to be a leftist because the right wing is good.
But Hitler was a leftist. Socialism, communism, and fascism alike all reside on the left, since they are all simply variants of collectivism, as opposed to individualism, which sits clearly on the right, and why the right is the good.
Perhaps the closest definition of anarchism matching that of Malice's can be found in Tom Burnham's Dictionary of Misinformation, which we have often quoted on this show, and which glaringly reveals the Achilles' heel of anarchism, and I quote,
"Entirely in contrast to the popular conception, anarchism is probably the most idealistic and peaceful of political theories. As a philosophy, it assumes a system in which the individual is free and living in peace. It looks forward to a time when human beings can coexist within a framework of voluntary associations."
End quote. So in other words, anarchism is a make believe fantasy, which assumes a system of freedom. How convenient. Good luck with that.
And far from being a boomer conspiracy, anarchy is defined in most dictionaries along the lines of these Funk and Wagnalls definitions.
"Anarchism, the theory that all forms of government are incompatible with individual and social liberty and should be abolished."
"Anarchy, the absence of government, lawless confusion and political disorder, general disorder."
And here's the real kicker. Ayn Rand on anarchy, and I quote:
"Anarchism as a political concept is a naive floating abstraction. A society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. Even a society whose every member were fully rational and moral could not function in a state of anarchy. It is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitate the establishment of government."
End quote. And just to add insult to injury, Rand was a complete opponent of libertarianism, calling it, quote,
"The latest aberration of some conservatives who claim simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism. Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either. Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by the concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshipping fringe of the collectivist movement where it properly belongs."
End quote. Ouch. I can't even begin to pretend to understand how it is that as both an anarchist and admirer of Ayn Rand, that Michael Malice has never addressed this glaring contradiction with respect to her opinions on anarchy. And if, as he contends that anarchy simply means voluntarism, why insist on clouding everyone's understanding by using the word anarchy? The only answer to this, I think, is because his real objective is an abolition of government, not the establishment of a voluntary society. Talk about delusional, or even worse, makes you wonder why he changed his last name from Kreshmer to Malice.
And then there was his utterly embarrassing and irrational definition of the word force. No wonder Jordan Peterson kept screaming, I need a definition of force. Forcibly kicking someone off your property or forcibly locking them into a cage is not force, explained Malice, and a contradictory argument that was so stupid on its face, it was possibly the most cringeworthy and credibility-killing thing he could ever have come up with. "If you throw prisoners in prison because they continually violate other people's property, they're the ones who initiated the force. What is done to them is a consequence," he says.
Michael Malice needs to be introduced to the real and actual ideas of Ayn Rand. He would then learn that force comes in three basic flavors: initiatory, which he acknowledges, but then there's defensive force and retaliatory force. How can you even talk about throwing, quote quote, throwing people in prison and acknowledging that something is being done to them without calling that force? Or for that matter, without acknowledging a government and legal system that would be necessary to establish any kind of prison system in the first place.
Ironically, Malice correctly asserts that there's no such thing as a minimal government. But that's only true because government is not measured by size or quantity. You either have government or you do not. So when libertarians and conservatives say "more freedom through less government," what that translates into is fewer restraints on the use of force, which is the legitimate function of government. And of course, that would imply that zero government would translate into 100% freedom, about as retarded an idea as you can get.
Government is not force. Force is what is governed, emphasized author Isabel Paterson, considered by many to have mentored Ayn Rand. The degree to which any society can even be called civilized can only be measured by how that society governs the use of force. It is forgotten. That tyranny reigns in a state of anarchy. And I emphasize state, not the personal ideology of any given individual calling themselves anarchist. There is no more or less government. There's just government, or there is just rule.
And anarchy, by the way, is what most of the Western world is suffering under today. Lawless confusion and political disorder, general disorder, thanks to political rule, not to governance.
And although I could spend another whole hour elaborating on Jordan Peterson's difficulty with the concept of selfishness, the best way to address that concern briefly is by simply acknowledging that everyone acts in their own self-interest. The only variable is whether that action is rational or irrational.
So that was the Michael Malice of 2023. But coming up next on this side of the bumper is the Michael Malice of 2026 on his own September 30th podcast with his guest @Hoe_math, while on the return side of the bumper, podcaster Liam Out Loud finds himself forced to ask, who is John Galt?
Clip (Michael Malice, September 30 2026):
Michael Malice: Good afternoon, Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. Guys, we need a long intro here because we're going to be going deep into philosophical stuff on this episode, and let me explain what we're going to be talking about.
So recently, Ayn Rand, when she obviously was very big into politics, and towards the end of her life, she was much more interested in epistemology, which is the study of how do we know what we know. And when I first started reading Rand, I could not care less about any of that. And in recent months, I'd say, I've very much gone down this rabbit hole because I came to the epiphany that different people think in different ways. And when you say it out loud, it's pretty obvious. But on the other hand, we don't use that as an operating assumption. I think that's one of the big reasons people talk past each other. It's that people who are significantly less intelligent than you are perceiving the information in significantly different ways, to the point at which you cannot productively have a conversation other than using enormous effort to try to translate it into their terms.
I think social media might be the first time in human history where human beings of significantly different intelligence levels are communicating with each other at extended length. And the results have been, well, you could all see that for yourselves.
And then it turns out I got beat to the punch, Hoe_math is a popular YouTuber. He had a whole video breaking down levels of consciousness. And I think the central, you know, you think of intelligence as a spectrum, you know, IQ is a hundred in the middle, we use IQ's heuristic here, but it's not a spectrum. There are certain switches where at certain levels people do not understand certain things.
Hoe_math, thank you so much for joining. You're keeping your anonymity, and I don't blame you at all. How much of what I just said do you think is spot on?
Hoe_math: I think it's all spot on. I think it's sort of an entry-level take on it. But basically, the levels build on each other. So at level one is basically every living thing is at that level, and that is just if you're a bacteria, you know where food is and you know where danger is. You're just having this experience. But a bacteria can never understand what's going on in the mind of another bacteria.
This is something that we do when we develop metacognition, which I call thinking about thinking. And we get to a point where we start doing things like throwing virgins in volcanoes, right? And the reason that you would do that would be you're projecting. You're like, well, the volcano is angry. Why would I be angry? Not enough virgins, right? Maybe that's what the volcano wants.
Michael Malice: Unintelligent people don't understand the difference between cause and effect, right? They understand only loose correlation.
Hoe_math: Yeah. And it is related to IQ. Your IQ is going to limit the level that you can think at. If I see two things happen, which is that's how the ego gets involved. The higher the level you get to, the lower your ego involvement is. So at the very low levels, if I see two things happen at the same time, well, then they must be related. They must be the same thing, and then I can do something about it. And that's why they do rain dances. Because if I do a dance, I must be so important, the weather will change for me.
Michael Malice: Or cargo cults.
Hoe_math: Yeah, exactly. And you see this in these hilarious videos where you go to Africa and there's a guy trying to make a helicopter out of a lawnmower engine.
Michael Malice: No, you're joking.
Hoe_math: Oh no, that's real. They take like they have like wooden slats for the propellers, and they try to run they don't even have the tail propeller because they don't know what it's there for. And and they just they just try to run this thing because it spins, like it spins like the helicopter, and so it must be a helicopter.
Michael Malice: Oh wow. Yeah. Go ahead, please, sir.
Hoe_math: Like association, there's a difference between a fact and a story, and people will tell you a story as if it's a fact.
Michael Malice: This is another epiphany I had in the last year. Human beings aren't truth seeking animals, they're narrative seeking animals.
Hoe_math: Yeah.
Michael Malice: And for years, conservatives would throw out like data points about the budget and tax rates and blah, blah, blah, while people on the left would have these big narratives, and the narratives are always gonna win. If you're gonna persuade people that you need to tell them a story, a special story they can emotionally buy into. Facts may not care about your feelings, but your feelings sure don't care about those facts. Yeah, exactly. And that is how you move people, especially females.
Hoe_math: Exactly. You can have a story like this story here is mostly uncomfortable facts, and then there's a few lies in there. And then this story is mostly nice facts with a few ugly facts, but there's at least no lies in it. People should be seeking stories that are made of true things, but they really will seek ones that make them. You say that they're that we're narrative seeking animals. I would go even deeper and say comfort seeking, and narratives are what creates comfort from what you observe.
Michael Malice: And by the way, this is something being done explicitly. The 1619 project, which is, you know, horrifically evil, has is for those who don't know, it's a move to redefine history and America's founding, not as the Declaration of Independence, but as 1619, which you think when the first slave was brought to the states, and it's an attempt to have people view America as this is what's important about America being a slave country, as if we're America was somehow unique in this regard.
First of all, it's not historically accurate. They're telling a story, but they explicitly said this is just a new way of looking at history. They're create explicitly creating a new narrative, and now this is of course being taught in schools and so on and so forth. It's exactly what you're discussing here.
Hoe_math: It's yes, just it's narrative manipulation to make people behave certain ways.
So what's really important about narratives is not so much whether or not they're true because narratives can't be true, it's who's whose narrative is it and what does it do? And the way that they're we're so easily able to create narratives now. It's just the one, two, three. She looks at the phone, it says man bad, and then she looks up from the phone, sees a man, and just like the kid with the monster under the bed, she says, Well, the man must be bad, right?
So, like the Lindsay Clancy, her husband must have done it, right? Because my phone says man bad to me all the time. And then, well, what can I do about that? What can I do to change this situation? Like maybe we should send her money, maybe we should, you know, manipulate the jury. So that insulated way of thinking where they're fed a narrative that makes them feel comfortable, and then they look up from the phone and begin to project it everywhere without thinking about it, because they're comfort seeking rather than truth seeking, and then they do something to exert control over the situation that is breaking everybody up into these tiny little groups of incompatible beliefs, which is I don't know what we're gonna do about that. I moved away.
Clip (Liam Out Loud, September 20 2026):
Liam Out Loud: Well, it looks like I've caught the attention of the Chinese broadcasting corporation, better known as the CBC. How did the CBC, a 1.4 billion dollar taxpayer-funded liberal propaganda machine, describe conservatives while flashing my face across the screen?
CBC: They're young male and frustrated.
Liam Out Loud: Let's break these labels down one by one. First up, young, honestly, I'll take it. Secondly, male. Of course, the CBC would give people biological labels after spending the last decade gaslighting the public into joining a delusional gender cult. Lastly, frustrated, being called frustrated by an organization built on mediocrity and DEI hires, although at this point that's just saying the same thing twice, is genuinely hilarious. As for the CBC calling me conservative, it's ironic that an organization which claims gender is non-binary believes thought itself must be binary. According to them, if I reject their collectivist ideology marketed under the false label of liberalism, despite being its complete antithesis, I must be a conservative boogeyman. I reject both the label and the box they're so desperate to shove me into. But I do thank them for the opportunity to set the record straight on who I actually am.
I'm not offended they called me a conservative. I'm offended they think I'm that moderate. I'm undeniably radical. Not in the Molotov cocktail lobbing kind of way, but in the truest sense, fundamentally different from the norm. I've spent my entire adult life trying to become one of one. I am undeniably unapologetically me. I have no interest in being equal to anyone, and I don't even waste a second comparing myself to others. What actually terrifies me is the idea of being equal to myself, of stagnating, plateauing, becoming static. My strength comes from living in a constant state of self-overcoming, not from identifying with a group.
There are three different types of people in this world. Those who mindlessly follow the herd, marching wherever they're told, those who are cast out by the herd, left bitter, broken and lost, and those who carve their own path and walk it without hesitation. I'm not interested in creating a new herd or leading an old one. I just want to be left alone by the powers that be. I don't care if people agree with me. My confidence isn't built on consensus.
But these power-drunk maniacs and their propaganda machines won't tolerate independence. Because the one thing they fear more than dissent is someone who doesn't need their approval.
Five years ago, I came to a hard truth. We're not just living under cultural pressure. We're living through the early stages of totalitarianism. The key difference between a dictatorship and totalitarianism is awareness. In a dictatorship, people know they're being oppressed. But in the West, as long as the masses can rot their brain in front of a screen while stuffing their face with Uber Eats delivered by a migrant who has lied to about the economic opportunities of Canada, they believe they're free.
Conformity today isn't just cultural, it's compulsory. This isn't some passing trend you can just tune out. It's an impending mandate enforced by jackboots and amplified by propaganda machines. Laws are now being written to force people like me to speak the slogans the herd finds comforting. It's state-sponsored ventriloquism to protect the deluded from reality. Bioweapons and military responses were deployed to crush resistance. The resources built by the competent are being seized to subsidize the incompetent, leaving myself to ask, who is John Galt?
Bob Metz:
You're listening to Just Right, Broadcasting Around the World and Online. And that last sentence perfectly described the scene in our opener from Atlas Shrugged, explaining the disappearance of the competent as the result of resources built by them being seized by the incompetent. And I loved how Liam Out Loud said he was offended by being considered a moderate, because he's a radical.
But in asking for the right to just want to be left alone by the powers that be, it must be understood that whenever people don't agree with you, then they won't leave you alone. In any society operating on consensus, rule by a collective majority, rather than by consent, which is self-governance without ruling others, this is inevitable.
In a majority rule of democracy, you must agree or else, which exactly explains why we find ourselves today being inundated with endless irrational propaganda and the fining and jailing of people who publicly make their disagreements with the state public. So if you're not interested in creating a new herd or leading an old one, then you have by default consented to being ruled by others.
But again, it's back to that inescapable axiom. You may not be interested in politics, but politics is always interested in you.
Now, getting back to someone who is not only opposed to politics but to government itself. When Michael Malice revealed he had no interest at all in epistemology, that certainly explained his earlier train wreck conversation with Jordan Peterson. But I still don't think he gets it.
I couldn't believe my ears when I heard him reveal his epiphany that one of the reasons people talk past each other is they are perceiving information in significantly different ways to the point where you cannot have a conversation with significantly less intelligent people other than by expending enormous effort to try to translate it into their terms. Talk about a perfect description of his earlier conversation with Jordan Peterson.
The part he still doesn't get is that it's not about significantly less intelligent people, but about epistemology. The definitions of the words that they are using to communicate with each other. I mean, objectively speaking, I would regard both Michael Malice and Jordan Peterson as being highly intelligent. So clearly that's not the determinant factor. If you can't agree on definitions, you just can't have any conversation, whether you're a moron or a genius.
And of course Ayn Rand was all about epistemology, but on philosophical grounds, Ayn Rand was an Aristotelian, and on the subject of Aristotle, she had this to say, and I quote,
"If there is a philosophical atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle. He has been opposed, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and like an axiom used by his enemies in the very act of denying him. Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests on his achievements. The conflict of Aristotle versus Plato is the conflict of reason versus mysticism."
End quote. And to offer us a very enlightening insight into this conflict on this side of the upcoming bumper, Carl Benjamin from his August 22nd, 2024 Timeless Podcast speaks about the philosophical differences between Plato and Aristotle. And on the return side, Right Angles, Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, and Steve Green have a bit of fun toying around with the idea of establishing their own Galt Gulch.
Clip (Sargon Of Akkad, August 22 2024):
Carl Benjamin: There have long been two conflicting impulses in political philosophy, and we can trace them back and frame them as a difference in approach between Plato and Aristotle.
I was recently reading Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper dedicates six entire chapters of the book to dismantling Plato's worldview and showing how, due to his commitment to transcendental forms, Plato's Republic is an attempt to construct a city that is perfect in its constitution and therefore unchanging through the ages. And it got me thinking about how this reflects on our modern state. Because the purpose of Plato's state is stability, and it's understandable why Plato, as an Athenian, would be concerned with stability above all else.
He was born near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, which was an intense conflict between Athens and Sparta, which lasted until he was a young man, an adult, and in which Athens lost. Plato wrote The Republic thirty years after the war ended, and it's evident that he had nurtured a great admiration for Sparta, and saw in Lycurgus's dogmatic system of laws, a permanence, which democratic Athens, as a roiling mass of energy and contradictions, could never match. Plato positions himself as an outsider looking inwards, searching to identify aspects of reality that he assumes must be there while he makes his judgments from a remote and aloof place.
Aristotle took a contradictory approach to political life in his Politics. Where Plato begins at the top and organizes a system downwards. Aristotle's worldview begins at the bottom and organizes upwards. For Aristotle, the state was something natural, not artificial. It was the product of the growth of the demos. The state had its genesis in the origin of a civilization, where the first families formed and then banded together to create a polis. And it was from the needs of the people to manage their public affairs that the state first emerges, with the form and function it has shaped by these contingencies.
Aristotle categorized and expanded on Plato's conception of the virtues, locating them primarily within the individual, and as a product of education and habit, rather than something that could be imposed upon an entire class of people externally. For Aristotle, the virtues had to be cultivated through an individual's behavior. Each person ought to cultivate the virtues themselves, and the composite of these well-bred men was how a just state was created.
Where Plato regretted the contingent nature of existence, Aristotle was rooted in the changeable nature of life, and our agency over it.
Though what this dichotomy reveals is the nature of the two different approaches to politics and the state. Plato's approach requires all elements of the system to be artificially locked in place, rendering it brittle and oppressive. But by contrast, Aristotle's approach is dedicated to producing free, flexible, and decent people who have agency over their own lives and who are proud of who they are. This system is obviously more robust and creates a population who are happy with where they are and want to remain there. It doesn't require oppression to maintain itself.
To Aristotle, the changing nature of the world is required to practice the virtues. As events provide opportunities to exercise our decision-making faculties and actually become virtuous.
The reason I'm explaining these two approaches to governance is that in the modern era of data-driven managerial states, our ruling class have clearly decided to choose the Platonic model of governance. This, I think, is a very unhealthy state of affairs, because it is a very negative frame in which the state and society become, like Plato's Republic, brittle and afraid of new events.
This requires a totally different approach to the civilization as a whole, beginning in an education system that is designed not to turn them into cogs in a machine, but places upon them the expectation of advanced reasoning skills and teaches them how to discern truth from falsehood. Such people thrive in uncertain times because they are presented with opportunity, the arch enemy of the manager, and they change the world by their actions.
It's important to remember that only one of these two kinds of society is actually enduring. The problem with trying to preserve a certain state of affairs indefinitely is that as the world changes around it, the state trapped in amber doesn't.
Athens may have lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta, but as things stand now, Athens is the capital of Greece, and Sparta is a small set of ruins that tourists rarely even bother to visit.
Clip (Right Angle, August 7 2024):
Bill Whittle: Is it possible to buy sovereignty and create a country that is freer than America is today?
The great thing about America has always been that America was always the land of freedom that people in oppressed countries could go to in order to be left alone. And it seems like every day that goes by in America, we get left alone less and less and less and less and less. So is it possible? Let's say you had all the conservatives in the country get together and bought a decent sized island somewhere. Can you buy sovereignty? Because if you're a province of any other country, you're essentially subject to their laws. And what I'm interested in is is it possible to find a place on planet Earth where you are subject to your own laws and your own government?
Steve Green: Yeah. Can we get sovereignty? You know, various libertarian groups have tried this over the years, with varying degrees of almost comical lack of success, I'm afraid to say, because I've always been cheering them on. Whereas like there is a proposal, I think the tech bros are doing this now. They're gonna build a floating island and try to make that sovereign.
The whole point of our founding is that these inalienable rights of ours are granted to us by nature or God, depending on your preference, and it's supposed to be for everybody, literally everybody, not just people who can buy in. So, Bill, to answer your question, number one, can you do it with great expense and difficulty, I suppose. But you shouldn't have to. We gotta win it back.
Bill Whittle: I couldn't agree more, and I'm not for a second saying give up the fight. I'm just talking about this as a thought experiment, as a thought experiment, it does interest me, and it interests me in the same way that Galt's Gulch interested me, the idea that if you were to take the really productive people who self-selected, because that's what America was. After its founding, America was the place where the people who had ambition, hard work, willingness to take risks, self-selected and went there and created the most amazing country in the history of the world. And now I'm thinking, well, if the inertia of all of these social programs and all of these intrusions on our rights are turning this into something different, and my entire argument is I don't think America's a place. I think America's an idea.
So I guess what I'm talking about is, well, Galt's Gulch is already taken. So let's say we had a place called Galtogin's Island. And let's say you were able to pull it off. Look, I visited Texas seven, eight years ago for Thanksgiving, and as a Californian, my entire vocabulary in Texas, 50% of the words I spoke in Texas when I was there were they let you do that? I'm not joking. If the country goes the way of California, where everything that is not mandatory is forbidden.
I'm interested in this idea because I look back at the American Revolution and we think, oh, it was the Americans versus the British. But it wasn't. It was the British versus the British. And these men who led this revolution had to fire on their own flag. And there came a point when they felt that the king and the British Army and the Royal Navy and all the rest of it no longer was on their side. And so they had to go through the difficult process of giving up emotionally their allegiance to what they had loved in favor of an idea that they loved more. And that's kind of the essence of this thought experiment. Up until relatively recently, I could not think of a freer place than America, but I can now. And that's a sad, sad, sad thing to admit.
Scott Ott: But I think we also tend to underestimate what we have now. Yeah, you can buy an island somewhere and boy, I really love our new sovereign nation. It's the people that I don't like. How do you populate this place? You just run an ad in the paper and go, you know, hey, this is my manifesto, you want to come and join me in this place, and you're gonna wind up with a lot of people where you go, whoa, whoa, dude, no, no, not that. This is not what we're talking about.
I am often in conversations with people. At first, you're like this, you're just nodding along, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then all of a sudden it takes a turn, and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no. We're not going there. This is not what we're I'm not on board with this.
And there it's unbelievable to me how many times I have people who I think I agree with initially, who then say something that's so far off my reservation that I go, how did you think you even had permission to say that to me? Like what was it? Did my facial expression invite that in some way? I am not with you.
So I would just say this. It's kind of like a perpetual motion machine. It's a great idea, but very, very difficult, if not impossible to build. And if you've got one that's working pretty good, I'd say hang on to that one. And as Benjamin Franklin suggested, we've got a republic if you can keep it.
You know, and I know you're just doing this as a thought experiment, but I think that Galt's Gulch only works because the arrogant author of that book thought that the people who lived there would all be intellectuals like herself and would all, you know, share all her views, and that would be the ideal place. I think part of what makes America, the United States of America, a magical nation in a sense, is that we have managed to bring in people from all over the world and still hold on to that idea.
Bill Whittle: Well, I would like to say that this melting pot idea of people coming here and starting new lives as Americans is as intact as it always was, but clearly one of the reasons I brought this up is because we're seeing more and more immigrants coming to this country, not to become Americans, but to take advantage of the American economy and to maintain their own national identities and all of these other things. We've seen all this division along racial lines, national lines, religious lines, and all the rest of it.
It's a thought experiment, and it's a utopian thought experiment, which means it's destined to fail. But if there is ever going to be another republic for us to move to, my absolute 100% conviction is it's got to be someplace very, very, very cold. Because you can't be lazy and stupid where it's very cold. Alaska's a possibility, Antarctica's probably a better one.
It's gotta be a place that's so challenging to live in that your desire to be free is going to overcome your desire for comfort and ease. And that to me is what forged the American character.
People who are running the country now are making it harder to make something new and better. People who are trying to destroy things like freedom of speech, private property, individual responsibility, the right to defend yourself.
All of these fundamental freedoms are under assault. And it interests me to look at what the future of a society based on those principles would look like, mostly as a template for what I'd like to see happen here right here in America.
Bob Metz:
If you've ever seen Raphael's famous painting, the School of Athens, it is there that you will see the symbolic representation of what Carl Benjamin was talking about when he said where Plato begins at the top and organizes a system downwards, Aristotle begins at the bottom and organizes a system upwards. And in that painting, you will see Plato pointing his hand upwards towards the sky, while Aristotle points his down to the ground.
When referring to Plato's commitment to transcendental forms, Benjamin was describing one application of the primacy of consciousness, which is the starting point of all things left. In other words, they just make stuff up. As Benjamin explained, Plato regretted the contingent nature of existence. Aristotle was rooted in the changeable nature of life and our agency over it. And that is because Aristotle represents the primacy of existence.
What this dichotomy reveals, says Benjamin, is the nature of the two different approaches to politics and the state. Exactly. Plato on the left, Aristotle on the right.
Meanwhile, back in Galt's Gulch, most of the voices we featured today seem to have trapped themselves in a gulch of their own making, basically missing the whole point of what Galt's Gulch was actually all about.
Scott Ott's contention that Galt Gulch only works because the arrogant author of that book thought that the people who live there would all be intellectuals like herself and would share her views, and that would be the ideal place. I mean, that was a cringeworthy moment. Did he actually read the book? For heaven's sakes, people, it was just a fictional hideout, not a place to emigrate to.
And the very question, can you buy sovereignty? suggests that somebody is selling it. And who might that be? Unlike land or property itself, sovereignty is based on the ability of any sovereign nation to defend itself by force.
But as an admitted utopian thought experiment destined to fail, Scott Ott's question, how do you populate this place? did address a fundamental issue, especially given his admission that it's the people he doesn't like. The greatest danger to any free society are the citizens and residents themselves. When people are begging to be left alone, it is to their fellow citizens that they are directing their pleas. You know, all those altruistically selfish lefties to whom the word left is never associated with alone, but with the group and with collectivism. The repeated desire to simply be left alone by the state and bureaucrats is really a plea to one's fellow citizens.
So where do we begin? As Carl Benjamin points out with regard to Aristotle, quote, "We must begin with an education system designed not to turn people into cogs in a machine, but places upon them the expectation of advanced reasoning skills and teaches them how to discern truth from falsehood," end quote. But if our education system won't do that, it looks like that responsibility once again falls on our shoulders, one from which we shall not shrug. When you join us again next week on our journey in the right direction, and until then, be right, stay right, do right, act right, think right, and be right back here. We'll see you then.
Clip (Petticoat Junction S06E06):
Attention fellow citizens. Thank you. I called a meeting of this special committee to discuss plans for this coming Saturday. The most momentous occasion in the history of the valley. First of all, when Mr. Rogers and Mr. Harlan arrive in town, I'll give them an official welcome. Then we'll proceed to
Hold it. just hold it, Joe. It's customary when important guests arrive in town, that the mayor extends them an official welcome.
Oh, why not in this case? Why I'm certain that Mr. Harlan and Mr. Rogers will be expecting the leading socialite of the valley to greet them. And that's just what I'll do.
No, you don't, Selma. As entertainment chairman of the every other Wednesday afternoon discussion club, I should have that honor.
Hold your horses, Selma. As leading merchant and postmaster and editor, it's my inalienable civic responsibility to perform that duty.
Sam, That is ridiculous.
Well it's no more ridiculous to some of these other things I've been here?
Hold it, hold it, hold it. So this whole thing won't blow up because of dissension. This is how it'll be handled. I'll be the official greeter, and I'll run the whole shebang.
Meeting adjourned. You hear all that?
Yeah.
Steve, where did I go wrong?
Well, I think it was right after you said attention, fellow citizens.