Category: History

This is the best non-fiction book I’ve read in a decade. I highly recommend it. The over-all value of the book lies in tracing the origins of what I find to be a common tactic when debating a leftist. You present them with arguments, facts, and logic, and, at the end, they will say something like:

“Well this is all just your white male prejudice,”; “that’s only logic, come down to reality,”; “those are just your definitions, and all definitions are ultimately arbitrary”; or, even, “I don’t feel that you’re right, and why is your logic better than my feelings?”

Hicks has provided an explanation, lying in the history of philosophy, for why so many people seem to consider such responses to a logical argument to be persuasive. That explanation lies, mostly, in the ideas of dead, white, male philosophers who lived two-hundred years ago. Those notions have slowly “trickled down” to the masses, and infect the majority of people’s minds today -especially any college student with a “gender studies” or “black studies” degree.

The author expressly states his theme in his table of contents:

“Thesis: The failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary.” (Table of Contents, Pg. i.)

Did I find this, in fact, to be his theme based on my reading of the book? Overall, I’d say, yes. I’ll start with Hicks’ definition of “postmodernism”:

“Postmodernism rejects the entire Enlightenment project. It holds that the modernist premises of the Enlightenment were untenable from the beginning…” (Pg 14)

“Postmodernism reject the Enlightenment project in the most fundamental way possible -by attacking its essential philosophical themes. Postmodernism rejects the reason and the individualism that the entire Enlightenment would depend upon.” (Pg. 14)

His definition of “postmodern” is basically a “negative definition”. He defines it as an attack on the Enlightenment. What does he think the Enlightenment stood for?

“In philosophy, modernism’s essentials are located in the formative figures of Francis Bacon…Rene Descartes…, for their influence upon epistemology, and more comprehensively in John Locke…for his influence upon all aspects of philosophy.” (Pg. 7)

 “Bacon, Descartes ,and Locke are modern because of their philosophical naturalism, their profound confidence in reason, and especially in the case of Locke, their individualism. Modern thinkers stress that perception and reason are the human means of knowing nature -in contrast to the pre-modern reliance upon tradition, faith, and mysticism. Modern thinkers stress human autonomy and the human capacity for forming one’s character -in contrast to the pre-modern emphasis upon dependence and original sin. Modern thinkers emphasize the individual…“ (Pg. 7)

To sum up, Hicks sees three “types” of philosophical attitudes in the Western World:

The “Pre-modern”, as exemplified by the Christian Medieval, and, probably, the Ancient Greek worlds;

the “modern” attitude, which started around the time of Francis Bacon; and

the “postmodern”, whose origins he goes on to explain later in the book.

What was the “failure of epistemology” he says “made postmodernism possible”?  He doesn’t spend too much time explaining what “epistemology” is. He clearly is familiar with, and sympathetic to, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. I assume he generally agrees with what she said in “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”. I also think he is assuming people reading his book will already have some general understanding of the subject of philosophy and its basic questions. But, early on, he defines what he views as the “Enlightenment epistemology”, which is:

“If one emphasizes that reason is the faculty of understanding nature, then that epistemology systematically applied yields science. Enlightenment thinkers laid the foundations of all the major branches of science. In mathematics, Isaac Newton….developed the calculus….Linnaeus…a comprehensive biological taxonomy…Lavoisier…the foundations of chemistry.” (Pg. 9)

Hicks says there were:

“…philosophical weaknesses…” that had “….emerged clearly by the middle of the eighteenth century, in the skepticism of David Hume’s empiricism and the dead-end reached by traditional rationalism.” (Pg. 24)

But, he says that the real “counter-Enlightenment” started from 1780 to 1815 with a split between Anglo-American culture on the one hand and German culture on the other. (Pg. 24) In Germany:

“Immanuel Kant is the most significant thinker of the Counter-Enlightenment.” (Pg. 27)

Kant’s priority was to defend religion from the Enlightenment:

“I here therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” (See Second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant.)

How did Kant “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith”, according to Hicks?

“The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality -or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material from reality…or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti- reason camps…the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason.” (Pg. 28)

“Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality -real, noumenal reality- is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products….Limited to knowledge of phenomena that it has itself constructed according to its own design, reason cannot know anything outside itself.” (Pg. 29)

In this way, reason was, according to Kant, limited to the “phenomenal realm”, while the “noumenal realm”, the realm of religion, was off limits to reason. (Pg. 29)

Since Kant posited his epistemic system to save religion, how did it come to be used by a bunch of largely, “irreligious”, if not atheistic, post-modern intellectuals? The rest of Chapter Two of Hick’s book lays out the “evolution” of Kant’s way of thinking by subsequent German philosophers, especially Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. He sums these subsequent, pre-twentieth-century philosophers at the end of Chapter 2 in this way:

“The legacy of the irrationalists for the twentieth century included four key themes:

1. An agreement with Kant that reason is impotent to know reality;

2. an agreement with Hegel that reality is deeply conflictual and/or absurd;

3. a conclusion that reason is therefore trumped by claims based on feeling, instinct, or leaps of faith; and

4. that the non-rational and the irrational yield deep truths about reality.” (Pg. 57)

In the Twentieth Century, Hicks sees this tradition as having been continued by most major philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, who “…agreed with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer that by exploring his feelings -especially his dark and anguished feelings of dread and guilt- he could approach Being.” (Pg. 59)

According to Hicks:

“Heidegger offered to his followers the following conclusions, all of which are accepted by the mainstream of postmodernism with slight modifications:

1. Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of realty;

2. Reason is subjective and impotent to reach truths about reality;

3. Reason’s elements -words and concepts- are obstacles that must be un-crusted, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked;

4. Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all;

5. Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason;

6. The entire Western tradition of philosophy -whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Lockean, or Cartesian- based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to overcome.” (Pg. 65-66)

Note that little has been said about the political views of post-modern intellectuals yet. Hicks observes that, in fact, most post-modern intellectuals are on the political left. (Pg. 84) Starting at Chapter 4, he addresses the connection between the epistemology and metaphysics advanced by German philosophers since Kant, and its political implications. The reason for the modern socialist’s rejection of reason lies in the failure of socialism in theory and in practice:

“As modernists, the [early] socialists argued that socialism could be proved by evidence and rational analysis, and that once the evidence was in, socialism’s moral and economic superiority to capitalism would be clear to anyone with an open mind.” (Pg. 86)

Free market economists, such as Ludwig von Mises, Milton Freedman, and Friedrich Hayek, have largely won the debate when it comes to the theoretical case for capitalism over socialism. (Pg. 87) The moral/political debate is more “up for grabs”, but, even here:

“…the leading thesis is that some form of [classical] liberalism in the broadest sense is essential to protecting civil rights and civil society…” (Pg. 87)

By the 21st Century the:

“…empirical evidence has been much harder on socialism. Economically, in practice the capitalist nations are increasingly productive and prosperous…every socialist experiment has ended in dismal economic failure…Morally and politically…every liberal capitalist country has a solid record of being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives. Socialist practice has time and time again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships in history prior to the twentieth century.” (Pg. 87-88)

The success of the capitalist world and the failure of the socialist nations created a “crisis of faith” for those on the left. As Hicks notes:

“This is a moment of truth for anyone who has experienced the agony of a deeply cherished hypothesis run aground on the rocks of reality. What do you do? Do you abandon your theory and go with the facts -or do you try to find a way to maintain your belief in your theory?” (Pg. 89)

Hicks believes the modern left’s abandonment of reality and reason in favor of “post-modern thinking” is their effort to “have their cake and eat it too”:

“Here then, is my second hypothesis about post-modernism: Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.” (Pg. 89)

Hicks notes that just as religious thinkers faced a “crisis of faith” during the Enlightenment, in which it was widely recognized that there was no way to prove the existence of god on “naturalistic” and rational grounds, so to, by the 1950’s and 1960’s, there was no way for socialists to use naturalistic and rational grounds to justify socialism. It had failed in theory and in practice, and, with revelations about the brutality of the Soviet Union, it had very little moral standing left. (Pg. 89-90) If they wanted to hold onto socialism, they had to reject reason and reality:

“Postmodernism is born of the marriage of Left politics and skeptical epistemology….Confronted by harsh evidence and ruthless logic, the far left had a reply: That is only logic and evidence; logic and evidence are subjective, you cannot really prove anything; feelings are deeper than logic; and our feelings say socialism.” (Pg. 90)

The rest of Chapter Four describes the evolution of modern anti-individualist thought, starting with Rousseau and moving on to Hegel and Marx.

Chapter 6 discusses Marxism in historical context. Hicks notes that classical Marxism believes socialism would arise in the more advanced capitalist countries, like England and the United States, first. In actual practice, it arose in semi-feudalistic countries like Russia, Eastern Europe, and China. As such, Twentieth Century Marxists, like Lenin, had to modify their thinking to rationalize the need for a violent and brutal aristocracy to bring about socialism. (Pg. 138 to 141)

By the 1950’s and 1960’s the failure of socialism to arise “spontaneously”, as predicted by Marx, resulted in several different strategies to be tried by socialists. Some subtly changed their ethical standards from “need to equality”, which could include the inequalities experienced by small businesses versus big businesses (pg. 151), or the inequality supposedly present between the races. (Pg. 152)

Other mid-twentieth-century Marxists said wealth was bad anyway, giving rise to the environmentalist movement. (Pg. 153).

A third group of Marxists turned to violence in an effort to move the proletarian revolution along in the First World. (Pg. 165-170) As Hicks notes, several international terrorist groups with ties to Marxist thought, including the Weathermen in the US, and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Middle East, arose in the early 1960’s.

What does Hicks consider to be the motives of the 21^st Century postmodern left? He notes that postmodernist thinking contains a whole host of contradictions:

“On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.” (Pg. 184)

“On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.” (Pg. 184)

“Values are subjective -but sexism and racism are really evil.” (Pg. 184)

“Tolerance is good and dominance is bad -but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.” (Pg. 184)

There is a “…contradiction between the relativism and the absolutist politics…” of postmodernism. (Pg. 185)

Hicks sees three possible explanations for this seeming contradiction:

1. Postmodernists are “relativists” primarily and their absolutist leftwing politics are “secondary”. He rules out this possibility because, otherwise, there would be more “conservative” postmodernists, but they are all uniformly left-wing. (Pg. 185-186)

2. The use of postmodernism is a “Machiavellian” strategy to undermine their political enemies. (Pg. 186) When they loose an argument, they will respond with: “Of course you, a white, male, heterosexual, would say that. But we cannot know anything about ‘things in themselves’, so reason is limited.”

3. Postmodernism is ultimately a nihilistic world-view, so the contradiction doesn’t matter to a postmodernist:

“The final option is not to resolve the tension. Contradiction is a psychological form of destruction, but contradictions sometimes do not matter psychologically to those who live them, because for them ultimately nothing matters. Nihilism is close to the surface in the postmodern intellectual movement in a historically unprecedented way.” (Pg. 191-192)

The biggest flaw of the book I see may lie in the author’s treatment and evaluation of Marxism, which I think he gives more credit than it deserves. At several points, he seems to suggest that Marxism is more “pro-reason” than I think it ever was, even in its original “classical” format, as  propounded by Karl Marx himself. Hicks makes an assertion about Marxist socialism that probably isn’t correct at page 86:

“As modernists, the socialists argued that socialism could be proved by evidence and rational analysis, and that once the evidence was in, socialism’s moral and economic superiority to capitalism would be clear…” (Pg. 86, emphasis added.)

He implies that he is including Marxists in the above description of “socialists”, and not just the non-Marxist socialists of the 19th Century, since he goes on to discuss the claims of “Classical Marxist socialism” on the same page. Also, later, he says:

“Beginning in the 1920’s and 1930’s there had been some early suggestions that Marxism was too rationalistic, too logical and deterministic…And early Frankfurt School theorizing had suggested that Marxism was too wedded to reason…” (Pg. 156 to 157, emphasis added.)

Hicks seems to say that Marxism, as originally conceived, is “pro-reason”, when I think it never was. Non-Marxists socialists, the so-called “utopian socialists”, would have been pro-reason, like Hicks said on page 86. The ideas of Marx probably won out over the “utopian socialists” precisely because Marx embraced the Hegelian dialectic, and didn’t depend on classical Aristotelian logic. Marxism is too “arbitrary”, or disconnected from reality, to really be disproved or proved. Any time someone tries to disprove it, a Marxist could just say that person was a “tool of the capitalist exploiters”, and, “of course”, the critic would say that:

“Aware of the fact that communism cannot be defended by reason, the Marxists proceeded to turn the fallacy of ad hominem into a formal philosophic doctrine, claiming that logic varies with men’s economic class, and that objections to communist doctrine may be dismissed as expressions of ‘bourgeois logic.’ “ (Leonard Peikoff, “Nazi Politics,” The Objectivist, Feb. 1971, 12, found at: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/polylogism.html)

Overall, I consider this to be a minor flaw of the book, which deftly traces the “philosophic genealogy” of today’s “postmodern” left. It really helped me to understand the mind of the average leftist, and how she will dismiss reason and say, I’m engaging in a logic:  “…created by dead white men”. Now I see another reason why the average leftist, like some mindless automaton, will point out how I’m a white, male, “bourgeois”, heterosexual -its easier to say this than do any hard thinking about the merits of their political ideology.

(All page number references below are to the 2018, expanded hardcover edition of “Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault”, by Stephen R.C. Hicks, ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7)

In 1962, Ayn Rand asked a student at MIT why so many of “…today’s young intellectuals were becoming ‘liberals’…” (pg. 32) A few weeks later, the MIT student wrote Miss Rand a letter, outlining his thinking on the subject. Miss Rand wrote “Altruism as Appeasement”, which expands on the response she got from this MIT student. This essay can be found in The Voice of Reason. (My page citations below are to the 1989 Meridian version, ISBN number: 0-452-01046-2)

In his letter, the student told Miss Rand that “The majority of college students…do not choose to think; they accept the status quo, conform to the prescribed code of values, and evade the responsibility of independent thought…’In adopting this attitude, they are encouraged by teachers who inspire imitation, rather than creation.’” (Pg. 32)

However, there is another group who are “…not willing to renounce their rational faculty.” Miss Rand then quotes at length from the MIT student’s letter: “‘They are the intellectuals -and they are the outsiders….They are teased and rejected by their schoolmates. An immense amount of faith in oneself and a rational philosophical basis are required to set oneself against all that society has ever taught…The man who preaches individual integrity, pride, and self-esteem is today virtually nonexistent. Far more common is the man who, driven by the young adult’s driving need for acceptance, has compromised. And here is the key -[the result of] the compromise is the liberal.’”

What is the psychological result? Most “liberal intellectuals” are driven by a strong guilt complex, because a person who sets himself against society in favor of rationality will feel guilt due to his rejection by the mediocrities around him. The “liberal” “…’loudly proclaims the brotherhood of all men. He seeks to serve his escapist brothers by guaranteeing them their desire for social security…’” (Pg. 33) “Liberals” are driven to atone for their false guilt, and they do so by working for “…’their welfare…’” (Pg. 33)

Miss Rand agreed with the MIT student regarding the psychological process he had identified, however: “…the situation he [the MIT student] describes is not new; it is as old as altruism; nor is it confined to ‘liberals’.” She says that this is the “…story of men who spend their lives apologizing for their own intelligence.” (Pg. 33)

Miss Rand then describes how this psychological process works out in the mind of the average college student. In an effort to avoid a massive quantity of quotations, I will summarize Miss Rand’s description of this process as best I can, as well as discuss some of my own observations that have led me to believe that Miss Rand is describing a psychological process that occurs very often in the mind of persons that usually self-identify as “liberals” or, more often today, as “progressives”.

When I originally read this essay in the mid-nineties, I was 19 or 20 years old. I hadn’t had enough experience to know if Miss Rand was right, so I just mentally “shelved” the issue. 20 years later, I’ve dealt with and seen enough people, and I’ve spent enough time thinking about their behavior, that I consider Miss Rand’s theory in “Altruism as Appeasement” to be a highly probable explanation for many people that are college educated, and self-describe as “liberals”, “progressives” or “social democrats”.

Miss Rand observes that bright children have a sense of being trapped in a “nightmare universe” when they are growing up. Growing up mostly in the Bible Belt and going to public school, I can relate to this description of childhood. In the South, large numbers of people will tell you that you are going to hell for some inherent moral vice called “original sin”, unless you repent your non-existent guilt to god. This could certainly be a frightening prospect for a child. In my own case, I started questioning the existence of god around age 13, and my mother must have sensed that because I was made to go to church despite the fact that I wasn’t particularly interested. Fortunately, the church that I was sent to was fairly “liberal”, and didn’t take the bible literally, so it could have been worse, I suppose.

Public schools, especially high school, were filled with their share of bullies -by which I mean children that would engage in low-level initiations of physical force, especially against anyone who didn’t seem to fit in, or that their emotions told them deserved such treatment. (By low-level initiations of physical force, I mean things like handing out quadriceps contusions —a “deadleg”- or being spit on, or having your books knocked out of your hands in the hall, etc.) Although in my case, by the 11th grade, most of the kids that were initiating physical force against others had either been removed from the school to a special “alternative school”, or were already in jail. Additionally, Plano Independent Schools contain a large number of children with parents that actually care about academic achievement and personal success, so my overall public school experience wasn’t what I’d call a “nightmare”. I suspect that an inner-city public school would be four years of complete hell all the way through, and make my experience look like I was living in Galt’s Gulch (a utopia).

I discovered Ayn Rand’s philosophy when I was about 15, and I did note that most people were hostile to Miss Rand’s ideas, if they knew about them at all. I did have a couple of teachers that seemed sympathetic towards her ideas, but that was rare. So, I can relate when Miss Rand says that the intelligent teenager wants to “…understand things and issues, big issues, about which no one else seems to care.” (Pg. 33)

Miss Rand goes on to say that most intelligent teenagers start college with the hope that it will be better, but their first year is too often a “psychological killer”(Pg. 33). He went to college hoping to find answers and meaning, and some companions to share his interest in ideas. She notes that he may find a handful of teachers that live up to his hopes, but “…as to intellectual companionship, he finds the same gang he had met in kindergarten, in playgrounds, and in vacant lots: a leering, screeching, aggressively mindless gang playing the same games, with latinized jargon replacing the mud pies and the baseball bats.” (Pg. 34)

I found Rand’s description of college to be fairly accurate at the University of Texas at Austin, which is easily the most left-wing school in Texas. One English professor was particularly terrible. He interpreted everything we read through the lens of “multiculturalism” and “feminism”. He told the class that Thomas Jefferson was a racist and a hypocrite when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. I raised my hand and disagreed with him. I told him that the Declaration of Independence may not have been consistently applied at the founding, but it formed the intellectual basis on which the nation eventually moved towards abolishing slavery. His response was that the civil war was the reason the slaves were freed. I disagreed, and said that slavery would have been abolished eventually anyway. In that professor’s mind, ideas had nothing to do with it. The use of physical force was all that mattered. It makes me wonder why he bothered to be a professor at all, if he thought ideas were so futile.

Going back to Miss Rand’s essay, how do too many intelligent college students deal with the intellectual wasteland that is college? “There are many wrong directions he can make at this crossroads, but the deadliest -psychologically, intellectually, and morally- is the attempt to join the gang at the price of selling his soul to uninterested buyers. It is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns…by professing that his thinking is dedicated to some social-altruistic goal.” (Pg. 34) She notes that this is rarely a conscious decision on his or her part. It is done gradually and subconsciously and by semiconscious rationalization. She also notes that altruism “…offers an arsenal of such rationalizations: if an unformed adolescent can tell himself that his…subservience is unselfishness…he is hooked. By the time he is old enough to know better, the erosion of his self-esteem is such that he dares not face or reexamine the issue.” (pg. 34)

What is the psychology of an intelligent person who goes to college and professes that he is using his mind to serve others? Such a man or woman has some “…degree of social metaphysics [secondhandedness]…” (Pg. 34) The concept of “social metaphysics” requires some explanation, which Rand does supply: “Basically, a social metaphysician is motivated by the desire to escape the responsibility of independent thought, and he surrenders the mind he is afraid to use, preferring to follow the judgments of others.” (Pg. 34)

If you’ve read Miss Rand’s book The Fountainhead, the character Peter Keating is the ultimate “second-hander” or “social metaphysician”. If you haven’t read that novel, it could be thought of as the “go along to get along” type of personality. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/go_along_to_get_along) It does not mean never compromising on non-fundamental or trivial matters. So, for instance if you are going to dinner with a friend, and they prefer Italian food and you want Chinese, and you compromise by going to an Italian restaurant, with the understanding that next time you will pick the restaurant, that isn’t social metaphysics. That is simply recognizing that there are a range of food preferences that vary by person, you can only go to one place at a time, and that friendship is about shared values, which means showing an interest in what your friends are interested in.

The social metaphysician regards society -others- as the standard of reality. The social order as it happens to exist is accepted by him, or her, and then he or she operates within it. A social metaphysician can be quite successful at operating within that social order, but she never questions it. This is why Rand called them social metaphysicians.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the most fundamental aspects of the nature of reality. Metaphysics are the principles that must be understood before one can study particular sciences like physics or biology. For instance, in Miss Rand’s philosophy, she accepts the existence of an external universe as the given. The entities that make up the universe have a particular nature and those entities act in accordance with that nature. According to Miss Rand’s system of metaphysics, an entity is what it is regardless of anyone’s desires or wishes to the contrary. If one is a social metaphysician, then the metaphysical, i.e., reality, is less important than the “man-made”. The man-made includes all of our social institutions and customs. Unlike reality, the man-made depends on human choice, and could be other than it is. For instance, America is a Republic and not a Monarchy because people chose to make it that way. It’s continued existence as a Republic depends on human choice. The social metaphysician simply accepts these man-made customs as the given, and rarely questions them. In fact, a social metaphysician has so internalized this way of thinking, that anyone who questions generally accepted social institutions will make her feel uneasy.

Social metaphysicians who are less intelligent, and didn’t go to college, are the “good old boys” and “rednecks” that one might see in a small, rural town. The social metaphysician is also quite common in inner cities, but I don’t know what the polite word to describe them would be. For lack of a polite term, I will call them “black rednecks”. A “black redneck” from a large inner city like Chicago or New York will be highly critical of anyone from his neighborhood who studies hard and tries to better his economic standing. He will accuse high-achievers in his race of “acting white”. This is a perfect example of the social metaphysician attitude. The “black redneck” believes there are certain social customs and institutions that are not to be questioned -unfortunately those social customs and institutions in minority communities include the belief that gaining knowledge and education is not in accordance with being of African descent. Anyone from his racial group who defies those customs is therefore a traitor in the social metaphysician’s eyes. There was once a great episode of a show that I didn’t typically watch that covered this topic, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” where the “nerdy” character “Carlton” is accused of being a race-traitor.

Another great essay by Rand describing basically the same mentality as this type of social metaphysician, the “anti-conceptual tribalist”, can be found in Philosophy: Who Needs It called: The Missing Link.

The intelligent teenager who goes to college and has the “social metaphysician” mindset will not become a redneck, though. He (or she) will become a “liberal” -which is the “educated” equivalent. To a social metaphysician college student, it seems like all of his professors and peers accept the idea that the individual must sacrifice himself to the “common good”. This means that in the social metaphysician’s eyes, the idea of self-sacrifice is one of the social institutions and custom of college. It is the social order that is not to be questioned.

The psychology of social metaphysics doesn’t entirely explain the “liberal mindset”, however. The college “liberal” is also engaged in “intellectual appeasement”: “…an intellectual appeaser surrenders morality, the realm of values, in order to be permitted to use his mind. The degree of self-abasement is greater [than the social metaphysician]; the implicit view of the mind -as functioning by permission of the mindless -is unspeakable. (Nor does the appeaser often care to speak of it.)” (Pg. 34)

“There are as many variants of the consequences [of being an intellectual appeaser] as there are men who commit this particular type of moral treason. But certain scars of psychological deformity can be observed in most of them as their common symptoms.” (Pg. 35) Rand then describes some common consequences of being an intellectual appeaser.

First, the intellectual appeaser tends to hate mankind in general, and to regard them as “…evil by nature, he complains about their congenital stupidity…” (pg. 35) I regard the “people are stupid” attitude as the hallmark of the “liberal” or “progressive”. “Liberal” politicians like Michael Bloomberg pass laws to restrict the size of sugary drinks because he thinks people are too stupid to regulate their own caloric intake. The “liberal”, intellectual appeaser view of “…the people at large is a nightmare image -the image of a mindless brute endowed with some inexplicably omnipotent power -and he lives in terror of that image…emotionally, he keeps feeling the brute’s presence behind every corner…The brute is the frozen embodiment of mankind as projected by the emotions of an adolescent appeaser.” (Pg. 35)

In my own experience, the belief that the majority of people are brutish is why most “liberals” are for gun control. They believe that most human beings are seething cauldrons of rage who will snap at the slightest provocation -that they are brutes. I saw this when Texas legalized concealed carry with a license in the mid-1990’s. “Liberals” claimed that it would lead to the “wild west” -with people shooting each other over trivial matters like parking spots. This is not to say that murder never happens, but the world today is arguably less violent than it has ever been. (“Steven Pinker: The surprising decline in violence” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk )

Second, a “…corollary symptom, in most intellectual appeasers, is the ‘elite’ premise -the dogmatic, unshakable belief that ‘the masses don’t think,’ that men are impervious to reason, that thinking is the exclusive prerogative of a small, ‘chosen’ minority.” (Pg. 36) In politics, this “elitism” manifests itself in the form of two types of “intellectual appeasers”. There are the more aggressive “liberals”, who believe in rule by physical force because “…people are unfit for freedom and should be ruled -‘for their own good’- by a dictatorship of the ‘elite’.”(Pg. 36) These are the Michael Bloomberg’s and Hillary Clinton’s of the world, who want to force people to buy smaller soft drinks or to buy health insurance because they are supposedly too stupid to take care of themselves.

Unfortunately, the other type of intellectual appeaser is predominately found in the Republican Party: “The more timorous type of appeasers, the ‘conservatives,’ take a different line: they share the notion of an intellectual ‘elite’ and, therefore, they discard intellectuality as numerically unimportant, and they concentrate on cajoling the brute (‘the masses’) with baby talk -with vapid slogans, flattering bromides, folksy speeches in two-syllable words, on the explicit premise that reason does not work, that the brute must be won through appeals to his emotions and must, somehow, be fooled or cheated into taking the right road.”(Pg. 36)

This analysis of conservatism provides a possible explanation for the popularity of Donald Trump in the Republican party. One thing I’ve noticed about Trump’s campaign is that it tends to be short on many specifics, but it contains a lot of emotional appeals, bromides, and verbal “put downs” of the other Republican candidates. This is not something new within the Republican party, though. Ronald Reagan was the master of “flattering bromides”, “folksy speeches”, and one-liners at debates. Trump is just a little bit more blunt in his delivery than Reagan was.

A third consequence of being an intellectual appeaser is moral cowardice, which is “…the necessary consequence of discarding morality as inconsequential.”(Pg. 36) For the “progressive” intellectual appeaser, the image of the brute is “…the symbol of an appeaser’s belief in the supremacy of evil…when his mind judges a thing to be evil, his emotions proclaim its power, and the more evil, the more powerful.” (Pg. 36)

This can be understood in terms of what the intellectual appeaser has accepted as “good” or “moral”. The intellectual appeaser is a proponent of self-sacrifice in the service of others, which is generally known as “altruism”. This means that “good” action for the altruist consists in destroying one’s own happiness and sacrificing one’s life in order to serve others. As a result, “good” and “right action” is self-weakening, and self-destructive. To the altruist, those who do not engage in self-sacrifice will be regarded as morally bad. However, the altruist can see that people who do not sacrifice themselves to others are more successful at living. For instance, someone who rejects altruism will have more wealth because they refuse to drain off their financial resources to help complete strangers. The person who rejects altruism has an easier life. In the altruist’s subconscious mind, the good has become associated with self-destruction, while the evil has become associated with the efficacious. The mistake lies in the intellectual appeaser’s belief that self-sacrifice is “the good”, when it is, in fact, the opposite of the good -if one wants to live.

The result of the intellectual appeaser’s inverted moral system is his belief that “…the self-assertive confidence of the good [the good by the standard of those who actually want to live] is a reproach, a threat to his precarious pseudo-self-esteem, a disturbing phenomenon from a universe whose existence he cannot permit himself to acknowledge -and his emotional response is a nameless resentment. The self-assertive confidence of the evil [those who violate individual rights] is a metaphysical confirmation, the sign of a universe in which he feels at home -and his emotional response is bitterness, but obedience. Some dictators -who boastfully stress their reign of terror, such as Hitler and Stalin -count on this kind of psychology. There are people on whom it works.” (Pg. 37)

The final result of this sort of moral cowardice of the “liberal” intellectual appeaser is to oppose those who want to live, the actual good, in order to appease those who want to violate individual rights, and eventually “…to pounce upon every possible or impossible chance to blacken the nature of the good and to whitewash the nature of the evil.” (Pg. 37) This is why so-called “liberals” were always quick to apologize for atrocities and human rights violations committed by the Soviet Union. It’s also why “liberals” engage in ad hominem criticisms of Ayn Rand because she collected social security -like we’re all supposed to be forced to pay into that system and then “fall on our own swords” and not try to collect out of it. (This is altruist thinking.)

A fourth consequence of being an intellectual appeaser can be seen in art. “Progressives” are always fascinated by movies and art that is a “…projection of cosmic terror, guilt, impotence, misery, doom…” (Pg. 37) “Liberals” and “progressives” are fascinated with movies that study “homicidal maniacs” (Pg. 37), like “Natural Born Killers” or “Dexter” because of their subconscious belief that such people are the norm. They believe destruction is the norm, while creation is an aberration, because they hate mankind.

A fifth consequence of being a “liberal” intellectual appeaser is “…the dry rot of cynicism…”(Pg. 38) that eventually sets in. As the “liberal” appeaser grows older, any “…pretense at any belief in altruism vanishes from his [or her] mind in a very few years, and there is nothing left to replace it: his independent capacity to value has been repressed -and his fear of the brute makes the pursuit of values seem hopelessly impractical.” (Pg. 38) I suspect that this is the point that has been reached by a politician like Hillary Clinton. At this stage in her life, she is probably running on fumes. Her denial of any responsibility in the attacks on the American embasy in Benghazi, and her attempt to shift blame onto a YouTube video shows this sort of cynicism. In response to Congressional criticism about Benghazi, Hillary Clinton said: “What difference at this point does it make?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka0_nz53CcM) It doesn’t make any difference in Clinton’s mind, because the truth doesn’t matter. All that matters to her is whether she can con the American people into making her President.

Sixth, the intellectual appeaser ultimately spends so much time pandering to her own image of the “the masses” as a stupid, irrational mob, that she eventually “…assumes the standards of those he [or she] professes to despise…Any man who is willing to speak or write ’down,’, i.e., to think down- who distorts his own ideas in order to accommodate the mindless, who subordinates truth to fear -becomes eventually indistinguishable from the hacks who cater to an alleged ‘public taste.’ He joins the hordes who believe that the mind is impotent, that reason is futile, that ideas are only means of fooling the masses (i.e., that ideas are important to the unthinking, but the thinkers know better…” (Pg. 38) In my own experience with self-described “liberals” and “progressives”, this has been true. They will imply to me that reason is just a means of tricking or fooling people, and that objective truth is not even possible.

Ayn Rand had a more realistic picture of the majority of mankind than the “liberal” appeaser: “No, men are not brutes; neither are they all independent thinkers. The majority of men are not intellectual initiators or orginiators; they accept what the culture offers them….their abstract range is limited…The truly deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over…When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.” (Pg. 39)

Ayn Rand was not pessimistic about the future, so long as the more intelligent people refused to become altruistic intellectual appeasers: “No, the average man is not morally inocent. But the best proof of his non-brutality, of his helpless, confused, inarticulate longing for truth, for an intelligible, rational world -and of his response to it, when given a chance he cannot create on his own -is the fact that no dictatorship has ever lasted without establishing censorship.” (Pg. 39)

How does one avoid becoming an intellectual appeaser? By being “…proud of his intelligence -regardless of their [the average person’s] approval or disapproval. No matter how hard this might be in a corrupt age like ours, he has, in fact, no alternative. It is his only chance at a world where intelligence can function, which means: a world where he -and, incidentally, they -can survive.”  (Pg. 39)

Regrettably, I suspect that by the time most people are about 30, it would be very difficult for them to change. They have too many habituated behaviors and thought patterns. But, Ayn Rand remains popular with the young, so I think that there is still a chance.