Objectivism – Dean Cook

The Biden Administration’s “Friendly Censorship”

Murthy v. Missouri is a case that was recently argued before the United States Supreme Court. It involves the allegation that the Biden administration in 2021 coerced social media companies such as Facebook into removing content that concerned COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccine, election integrity, and other matters considered important to the Biden Administration.

The factual findings of the trial court in the case are disturbing, if true:

“For the last few years—at least since the 2020 presidential transition—a group of federal officials has been in regular contact with nearly every major American social-media company about the spread of “misinformation” on their platforms. In their concern, those officials—hailing from the White House, the CDC, the FBI, and a few other agencies—urged the platforms to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites. And, the platforms seemingly complied. They gave the officials access to an expedited reporting system, downgraded or removed flagged posts, and deplatformed users. The platforms also changed their internal policies to capture more flagged content and sent steady reports on their moderation activities to the officials. That went on through the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 congressional election, and continues to this day. “ (5^th Circuit Opinion, Case: 23-30445, Document: 00516889176 , Date Filed: 09/08/2023, Pg. 2) (https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca5/23-30445/23-30445-2023-09-08.html)

The Biden Administration and its defenders seem to have responded to these allegations by saying that the factual findings of the trial court are simply mistaken. They claim that the trial court took things out of context, or just outright misrepresented facts:

“While the legal questions presented are legitimate, a substantial amount of the underlying evidence now before the Court in this case is problematic or factually incorrect. Snippets of various communications between the government, social media executives, and other parties appear to be stitched together – nay, manufactured – more to support a culture war conspiracy theory than to create a credible factual record” (https://www.justsecurity.org/93487/a-conspiracy-theory-goes-to-the-supreme-court-how-did-murthy-v-missouri-get-this-far/)

The government says it was merely engaging in its own speech to combat what it viewed as “bad speech”, and that it did not coerce social media companies into taking down social media posts it disagreed with:

“Brian Fletcher, the principal deputy solicitor general of the United States, argued that the government was legally using its bully pulpit to protect the American public.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/18/supreme-court-social-media-biden-missouri/)

Whether the Biden administration was merely engaged in its own speech or whether it intentionally used the threat of force to coerce social media companies into censoring the posts of their users will be determined through the court process.

Even if the government was simply using its own speech to counter what it viewed as “bad speech”, without any intentional threat of coercion, given the reach of government when it comes to regulating the economy, I think companies and businessmen must, of necessity, take into account what a President and his administration say.

In 1962, Ayn Rand wrote an article titled “Have Gun, Will Nudge” in which she discussed the efforts of then head of the FCC, Newton N. Minow, to “encourage” broadcasters to air certain types of “educational programs”. She noted that the arbitrary power held by the FCC in the form of its licensing of broadcasters meant that it didn’t have to engage in explicit censorship. Broadcasters would attempt to discern through their contacts and back-channels with Washington what the FCC officials would like to see on the airwaves, and then provide it:

“No, a federal commissioner may never utter a single word for or against any program. But what do you suppose will happen if and when, with or without his knowledge, a third-assistant or a second cousin or just a nameless friend from Washington whispers to a television executive that the commissioner does not like producer X or does not approve of writer Y or takes a great interest in the career of starlet Z or is anxious to advance the cause of the United Nations?” (Ayn Rand, “Have Gun, Will Nudge” https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/regulations/pov-have-gun-will-nudge/ )

For the people running a television station, or, today, a social media company, not listening to what the President wants them to post or not post would be almost suicidal. The President has enormous power to bring any company to its knees through executive orders and arbitrary regulations. It doesn’t even matter if the President and his administration intends to engage in censorship. The massive and arbitrary power that the President, and the government in general, holds over any company through economic regulation means any broadcaster or social media company has to take into account what the government wants, just as a matter of self-preservation. If Facebook or Google believes that keeping up certain social media posts might have even a one percent chance of getting them slapped with an antitrust suit, the cost of keeping up the post just isn’t worth the benefits. That’s why true freedom of speech likely isn’t even possible today. As Ayn Rand noted:

“The right to life is the source of all rights — and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”(“Man’s Rights”, Ayn Rand https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/individual-rights/ )

The Basis of Punishment of Criminals When Reading Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand

The Basis of Punishment of Criminals, Based On My Reading of Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights and Government

As far as I can tell, Ayn Rand did not discuss the details of government much beyond saying that it would have police, military and courts:

“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.” (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, emphasis added, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/government.html)

Since Ayn Rand said that there would be police, and did not give any other definition of what “police” are, we can assume that she generally accepted the role police play in contemporary society today, so long as that role was delimited to protecting rights.

The way police function today is by catching criminals, taking them to court for an adjudication of guilt or innocence, and then incarcerating those found guilty for a period of time. (Leaving aside certain petty crimes that only involve a fine, and assuming the death penalty does not exist.) Presumably Rand thought arrest and incarceration was appropriate, but how exactly does incarceration protect rights, and whose rights does it protect?

It does not appear that Ayn Rand ever explicitly discusses how it is that the police and the incarceration process protects individual rights. She says that the purpose of government is based in the right to self-defense:

“The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.” (“The Nature of Government”, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

I can see how an individual can prevent himself from being murdered by using self-defense. If the victim is armed, he can try to outshoot the person trying to murder him, thereby saving his life. If the victim is a quicker draw than the person attacking him, or just a better shot, then he can stop the attacker with a bullet. But, in the case of a person already murdered, he cannot act in self-defense, and the state cannot defend him, because he is already dead. How is the state prosecuting the murderer, after the fact, self-defense? It must be in the sense that every other living person needs to stop the murderer from killing again, and for their own self-defense, rather than the defense of the murder victim, who is beyond help.

Even for lesser crimes, what is the probability that the criminal will re-victimize that particular victim? If a bank robber robs a bank, wouldn’t he be more likely to rob a completely different bank in the future? The bank that was just robbed is more likely to take additional security precautions, so it would be smarter for the criminal to find a new target. Although the government is defending the bank already robbed, it is also protecting other banks that have yet to be robbed.

Also, this still doesn’t explicitly answer the question of exactly how does locking up a person convicted of murder help defend the still living, in the case of a crime like murder? (And, I am just assuming that Ayn Rand would be in favor of incarceration, because I don’t know that she ever explicitly says that this is how criminals should be punished.) I don’t think Ayn Rand explicitly answers the question of “how”, but I think I am able to see logical implications based on her writing. For instance, Ayn Rand said the following:

“If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door-or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into the perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.“ (“The Nature of Government”, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

So, it is “organized protection against force” that is the goal of government. Government is not primarily “organized revenge” or even “organized retaliation”. Government exists for purposes of protection. Only actions by government that protect against force are justified. But, what about the person already murdered? How can he be protected by government? Clearly, the dead cannot be protected, only the currently living. Whatever government does to the murderer is done to protect the currently living, not for the sake of the deceased.

I see only two ways that a government can provide “organized protection against force” in the case of murder, which is generally considered to be the worst crime:

(1) Government establishes a penalty for murder, and that penalty is always imposed, so that everyone is discouraged from committing murder. Government imposes a penalty to protect the currently living from being murdered in the future. The only way that penalty will work is if it is, in fact, imposed whenever a murder is committed. The government is threatening the use of force to protect the currently living. The threat of force by the government is not against any particular individual, but against everyone in society. Another way to look at it is that government promises or declares that anyone who violates individual rights by initiating physical force will be met with force.

(2) Government actually uses force to prohibit future crimes being committed by a specifically identified murderer. Government is actually imposing the force, rather than merely threatening the use of force, to protect the currently living from that particular, identified, murderer.

The first is the “deterrent” or “general deterrence” argument for punishment. The second I’d call the “restraintist” argument for punishment, although I think some legal philosophers might say this is “specific deterrence”.

I should note that I can somewhat see a third basis for how government can provide “organized protection against force”. It would be very understandable that the family and friends of the murdered person would want to enact revenge on the murderer by killing him. I doubt that this feeling is rational, but it is very understandable. It’s also very likely to take place if there is no organized government. By having an organized system of punishment, government can provide friends and family members of the victim with sufficient emotional satisfaction that they might be less inclined to seek revenge. I think this “retributivist” basis might just be a form of “deterrence”, in the sense that it discourages the victim’s friends and family members from seeking revenge against the killer.

Another point to note is that I don’t think the first two, and maybe not even the third, possible bases on which government imposes “organized protection against force”, are necessarily mutually exclusive.

Unfortunately, Rand does not give much in the way of detail about how government, and in particular, the police, will protect individual rights, other than to say that the police represent a delegated and organized use of force in self-defense against criminals. The logical implication seems to be that the police are not just defending the victim, who, in the case of murder, is beyond help, but everyone else in society that could be the criminal’s next victim. A further logical implication is that this organized use of force by police is in the form of incarceration, which serves the purpose of restraining the particular criminal from future crimes, and/or deterring future crime by others.

The Basis of Punishment of Criminals For Murray Rothbard

If my interpretation of the Randian basis for punishment, as lying primarily in “deterrence” and “restraint” is correct, then Murray Rothbard would disagree with Rand. (At the very least, I disagree with Rothbard about the basis of punishment.)

Rothbard explicitly states that retributivism is the basis of punishment of criminals:

“It should be evident that our theory of proportional punishment: that people may be punished by losing their rights to the extent that they have invaded the rights of others, is frankly a retributive theory of punishment, a ‘tooth (or two teeth) for a tooth’ theory.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”)

Rothbard does say that the purpose of using force in retaliation is self-defense:

“Many people, when confronted with the libertarian legal system, are concerned with this problem: would somebody be allowed to ‘take the law into his own hands’? Would the victim, or a friend of the victim, be allowed to exact justice personally on the criminal? The answer is, of course, Yes, since all rights of punishment derive from the victim’s right of self-defense.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”)

But, in many cases, the principle of “an eye for an eye” does not seem to have anything to do with anyone’s defense, whether that be the victim, or other people that the criminal might victimize in the future. The retributivist focuses on the punishment aspect, rather than the defense of others, and this seems true for Rothbard. For instance, he says that a person who has been assaulted should have the right to beat up his attacker in return:

“In the question of bodily assault, where restitution does not even apply, we can again employ our criterion of proportionate punishment; so that if A has beaten up B in a certain way, then B has the right to beat up A (or have him beaten up by judicial employees) to rather more than the same extent.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”)

Although the threat of getting beat up might, to a certain extent, serve a deterrence effect, this is not why Rothbard advocates it. Instead, it is because he thinks the perpetrator of a crime should have the same done to him. (“A tooth for a tooth.”) To me, this seems completely senseless. How does the victim beating the shit out of his attacker, after the fact, help the situation? Also, how would this prevent the victim from being beat up in the future? With incarceration, the attacker is put in jail for a period of time, which better ensures the victim’s safety.

Rothbard does address the “deterrence” viewpoint, and another major modern school of thought, regarding the purpose of incarceration, which is the “rehabilitation” viewpoint. His critique of the “deterrence” viewpoint is that it would involve the use of levels of punishment that most people would regard as inappropriate or unfair. So, for instance, most people would regard shoplifting as a minor crime, and that the punishment should be very light. But, Rothbard says that if shoplifting were legal, then many more people would commit the crime of shoplifting than if the crime of murder were legal. He says this is because more people have “…a far greater built-in inner objection to themselves committing murder than they have to petty shoplifting, and would be far less apt to commit the grosser crime.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”)

As far as I can tell, Rothbard provides no evidence that people would be more likely to commit shoplifting than murder if the two were legal. This does seem likely to me too, but I have no basis for saying that, other than I like to think that most people are not prone to commit murder. If there were no laws, isn’t it likely that people would kill or steal when they thought it would suit them? Does it even matter what they’d do if there were no laws? If we have a theory of rights based on the fundamental right to life, like Ayn Rand’s philosophy, then doesn’t that philosophical system say that murder must be worse than shoplifting, precisely because the former is an assault on the fundamental basis of rights? So, wouldn’t that be the basis of a system of proportionality, in which murder is punished more harshly than shoplifting? This would only seem to be a problem for someone with a utilitarian philosophical basis, which is what Rothbard is criticizing when he criticizes the deterrence school:

“Deterrence was the principle put forth by utilitarianism, as part of its aggressive dismissal of principles of justice and natural law, and the replacement of these allegedly metaphysical principles by hard practicality. The practical goal of punishments was then supposed to be to deter further crime, either by the criminal himself or by other members of society. But this criterion of deterrence implies schemas of punishment which almost everyone would consider grossly unjust.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”, emphasis added.)

Clearly, Ayn Rand is not a utilitarian, but, as already discussed, her views on rights and the nature of government would suggest that “deterrence” is part of the purpose of incarceration of criminals. Incarceration would be for the purpose of protecting the rights of people living in society, as well as the original victim, if he is still alive.

Rothbard also dismisses the “rehabilitation” viewpoint because it would seem to lead to absurd results, like incarcerating someone for shoplifting for longer than a murderer, if it is determined that the murderer has been successfully rehabilitated and will not commit more crimes:

“…in our case of Smith and Jones, suppose that the mass murderer Smith is, according to our board of ‘experts’, rapidly rehabilitated. He is released in three weeks, to the plaudits of the supposedly successful reformers. In the meanwhile, Jones, the fruit-stealer, persists in being incorrigible and clearly un-rehabilitated, at least in the eyes of the expert board. According to the logic of the principle, he must stay incarcerated indefinitely, perhaps for the rest of his life…”(The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard, Chapter 13, “Punishment and Proportionality”)

Although I cannot find support in Ayn Rand’s writing for this, I believe “rehabilitation” does play a role in the length of incarceration of someone convicted of a crime, but not quite in the way that I think this term is used by philosophers of law. I think that the possibility that the convict can “rehabilitate” himself, due to the possession of a volitional consciousness means that the length of a prison sentence may be less than the convict’s life. Since people possess volition, even a murderer can change his thought patterns and his actions for the better in the future. I disagree that the government or society can “rehabilitate” a convict, but I think that the convict can “rehabilitate” himself. Lesser crimes, besides murder, are therefore likely to carry less than a life sentence, given the fact of human volition. I think the possibility of self-rehabilitation by the convict is a major factor to consider when weighing the proportionality of the punishment in relation to the crime. The fact of volition must be weighed, as much as possible, against the possibility that a person found guilty of a minor crime might go on to commit more serious crimes in the future, while at the same time, recognizing that the commission of a minor crime might be a “fluke” or a one-time event that would not be repeated by the convict. Additionally, someone found guilty of a murder, who is facing a life sentence, is likely to lie to get out of prison early, so making the determination that he is truly rehabilitated is not going to be easy.

Admittedly, unlike the retributivist system of crime and punishment proposed by Rothbard, determining the extent of the punishment in particular circumstances, along the lines I have proposed, would be more difficult. “An eye for an eye” has the advantage of being easy to implement. If someone is beat up, then they get to beat up their attacker, which makes assessing the punishment easy, albeit ridiculous and irrational.

A Comparison and Contrast of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard On Warfare

Ayn Rand on Warfare

As far as I can tell, Ayn Rand did not write much about when a nation has a right to use organized physical force, on a mass-level, against other nations or other armed groups.

Her essay, “The Roots of War” discusses how Statism is the fundamental source of war in modern times. In that essay, she does not explicitly deal with when, and to what extent, a free or semi-free nation may use its military force. She does make it clear that a free nation should have a military, and that sometimes it should be used:

“Needless to say, unilateral pacifism is merely an invitation to aggression. Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked. But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service-which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man’s right to his own life. There is no contradiction between the moral and the practical: a volunteer army is the most efficient army, as many military authorities have testified. A free country has never lacked volunteers when attacked by a foreign aggressor. But not many men would volunteer for such ventures as Korea or Vietnam. Without drafted armies, the foreign policies of statist or mixed economies would not be possible.” (“The Roots of War”, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

Determining when an individual can use force in self-defense can be quite difficult by itself. It becomes even more complicated when the issue is “scaled up” to a nation-wide or world-wide level.

Since I cannot find anything from Rand’s explicit writings on the conditions under which a country can use military force, I want to start by looking at her writing on when an individual can use physical force.

One passage that I have found helpful in making the distinction between the use of physical force in an improper way verses the use of physical force in a moral manner comes from her essay “The Objectivist Ethics”. In that essay, she discusses what is the difference between the use of physical force “in retaliation” and the use of physical force as an “initiation”:

“The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.” (The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand)

For Rand, whether force is “retaliatory”, which is moral, or an “initiation”, and therefore immoral, turns on her view of values, and who is entitled to those values. For Rand, a value is that which one acts to gain and or keep, with the ultimate value being “man’s life”:

“The Objectivist ethics holds man’s life as the standard of value- and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man.” (The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand)

So, one must hold “man’s life” as the standard, and the purpose of holding that standard for each individual man is his own life. Values are those things which one must have in order to live. Thanks to their rational faculty, human beings can create these values in much greater quantities than they would exist in nature. (For instance, agricultural technology creates much more food per acre of land than would typically be found growing in a similarly sized area of natural land.)

If each man holds his own life as his ethical purpose, then the values he creates, are for himself and for maintaining his own life. In the case of using physical force, whether that force takes the form of a punch, a bullet, or a bomb, it is an “initiation of physical force”, if one is attempting to obtain the values which others have created for their own sustenance. It is “retaliatory force” if one is merely attempting to keep what one has created for oneself.

Something that is not quite captured by the quote from Rand above is the case of someone not trying to gain the values of others, like a bank robber. Some people are simply trying to destroy the values of others, such as a terrorist who kills for some obscure political reason, or a “serial murderer”, who may kill not because they gain any particular value, in any rational sense, from it, but to satisfy some psychological craving. In that case, I think she would still consider this to be an initiation of physical force because they seek to deprive others of their values. So, I think you could expand the concept of an initiation of physical force to include both the use of physical force to gain the values of others, and also to destroy the values of others.

At any rate, Rand’s point is clear. It is not the physical act, the use of physical force, that makes something an “initiation of physical force” versus “retaliatory force”. The action itself may look the same, and the context in which it occurs will determine whether it is “initiation” or “retaliation”. For instance, you cannot merely see a man shoot another man and conclude with certainty that the man who fired the bullet has initiated physical force. You would need to know something about the conditions under which that occurred. For instance, if it was revealed that the person who was shot was wearing a vest of explosives under his jacket, and had just expressed an intention to go detonate it in a crowded movie theater, the shooter is quite probably acting in retaliation against an initiation of physical force. In that case, the man wearing the hidden explosive vest has taken affirmative steps to kill a large number of people by putting together the explosive vest, putting it on, walking towards the movie theater, and expressing an intent to use the bomb. He has initiated the use of physical force. (Although the act is not completed yet.) He has started the use of physical force, and that physical force is directed at the destruction of other people’s values, in this case, their very lives.

For Rand, a nation or a society is nothing but a number of individuals:

“A nation, like any other group, is only a number of individuals and can have no rights other than the rights of its individual citizens.” (“Collectivized ‘Rights’” Ayn Rand, http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-ideas/collectivized-rights.html )

Therefore, a nation and its military has no greater rights than the rights of its individual citizens. What would be an initiation of physical force for an individual would be an initiation for a nation. Similarly, retaliatory force for a nation is physical force that is not aimed at gaining the values of others or depriving others of their values, but at protecting the values of the nation’s citizens.

Murray Rothbard on Warfare

Murray Rothbard seems to hold similar views to those of Rand when it comes to the state as nothing but a collection of individuals.

Additionally, he would hold that all states, insofar as they hold the exclusive right to the use of retaliatory physical force in a given geographic area, are illegitimate, but I am not looking to address his advocacy of “anarcho-capitalism” here. I am instead considering his views on warfare, within the existing framework of nations, as he does in Chapter 25 of his book, The Ethics of Liberty.

For instance, early in Chapter 25 of his book, Rothbard says:

“To be more concrete, if Jones finds that his property is being stolen by Smith, Jones has the right to repel him and try to catch him; but Jones has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine gun fire into an innocent crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more of) a criminal aggressor as Smith is.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 190)

But, what if Smith deliberately hides in a crowd of people, and fires his gun at Jones? Can Jones fire back? Whose fault is it if Jones accidentally hits a bystander during the course of returning fire on Smith, when Smith deliberately used other people as cover? Rothbard does not address the issue.

Rothbard then “scales up” his individual scenario to a group of individuals:

“The same criteria hold if Smith and Jones each have men on his side, i.e. if ‘war’ breaks out between Smith and his henchmen and Jones and his bodyguards. If Smith and a group of henchmen aggress against Jones, and Jones and his bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor; and we, and others in society interested in repelling aggression, may contribute financially or personally to Jones’s cause. But Jones and his men have no right, any more than does Smith, to aggress against anyone else in the course of their “just war”: to steal others’ property in order to finance their pursuit, to conscript others into their posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of their struggle to capture the Smith forces. If Jones and his men should do any of these things, they become criminals as fully as Smith, and they too become subject to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality. In fact, if Smith’s crime was theft, and Jones should use conscription to catch him, or should kill innocent people in the pursuit, then Jones becomes more of a criminal than Smith, for such crimes against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 190)

Rothbard never seems to want to address, in Chapter 25 of “The Ethics of Liberty”, to what degree, if at all, you can risk the lives of innocent people in defending yourself. If you cannot risk the lives of others at all, then there are very few cases where even clear-cut acts of self-defense are justified. A bullet could always go astray and hit an innocent bystander.

For Rothbard, exactly who has violated rights, if you are forced to defend yourself, shoot an attacker, and, for instance, the bullet goes through your attacker and hits someone behind him? Common law legal systems would likely limit culpability to what is ‘foreseeable’, or some other similar concept. This is the idea that whether you commit a rights violation has something to do with your intent, and/or what you could have expected to be the reasonable probable result of your actions. So, if a bullet goes through your attacker, makes a weird series of ricochets, and hits someone you didn’t even know was behind your attacker, you are probably going to be excused from any sort of legal culpability. (It should go, almost without saying, that nothing I say here should be construed as legal advice.)

My point is, your intentions, your state of mind, to some extent, matters when you use force. Why does your state of mind matter? I think Ayn Rand would say it’s because it points to your purpose in using force. If your purpose in using force is to protect your values, that is different from using force to destroy another person’s values, or to gain another person’s values:

“The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.” (The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

Accidentally shooting a bystander while defending yourself from a robber is not an attempt to obtain values. This is not to say that all such accidental shootings of bystanders should be completely excused by the legal system. Maybe some particularly reckless acts in self-defense should cause some level of criminal liability, but the level of culpability is probably not the same.

When you shoot a hold up man in self-defense, and accidentally shoot someone else, your level of culpability is lesser (although possibly not completely excused). Why? because you were not seeking ‘to gain a value’. You were seeking to protect a value. Your intentions when using force matter.

What does this all have to do with warfare? It gives us guidance on how to look at uses of force by certain countries. If a country is attempting to kill enemy soldiers and accidentally kills civilians in the process, this is not the same level of culpability as intentionally targeting civilians, because the country is not seeking to destroy values. Furthermore, it may even completely excuse the unintentional killing of civilians, in some circumstances.

Go back to the individual level for a moment. Imagine if a criminal shoots at you with a baby strapped to his chest. You have no ability to take cover, and you cannot safely run away without getting shot, so you shoot back and kill the baby in the process of shooting the robber. Have you violated the baby’s rights? I think the answer is very circumstantial, but I can see a set of circumstances where you would have no other choice. (It’s an extreme, ‘lifeboat scenario’, admittedly.) In that case, the fault lies with the person who strapped a baby to his chest and then tried to kill you, leaving you with no other choice but to die, or shoot back.

More fundamentally, how is the risk that you might hit an innocent bystander in an act of self-defense different from the possibility that, for instance, your car might suffer a mechanical breakdown while you’re driving it, go out of control, and hit a pedestrian? Both are actions aimed at enhancing or promoting your life. Both could have unintentional and even unforeseeable, deadly consequences for innocent third parties. I do not think that others have a right to be 100% risk-free from your actions. If that were the case, then things like airplanes would have to be illegal. It’s always possible an airplane will malfunction, fall from the sky, and kill a family in their home. Airline companies, to a certain extent, put us all at risk of death from crashing airplanes.

All other people have a right to is that you will not: (a) intentionally use force to deprive them of values, nor will you: (b) use force in such a way that it would be reasonably foreseeable that the force would deprive them of their values. (Examples of such unreasonable uses of force would be things such as: driving a car at 80 mph through a neighborhood street where children are about, target shooting with your gun in a field that children are playing in, etc.)

Expand the situation of the criminal using a baby strapped to his chest as a human shield to the national level. If an organization of terrorists hides behind civilians, and then fires rockets at your country, can your army shoot back with rockets? Again, it’s going to be very circumstantial. Sometimes, the army might be able to stop the attacks in some other way, such as an anti-missile system. But, sometimes, the army may have to fire missiles back, and, in the process, unintentionally kill civilians. In that case, the fault lies with the terrorists, not with the army. The terrorists are no different than the criminal who tries to murder you while using another person as a human shield. The responsibility for the death of any innocents lies with the terrorists. For Rand, I believe the initiation of physical force, the rights violation, lies with the person who used other people as cover while committing acts of violence.

Rothbard, on the other hand, does not seem to agree with this. For instance, he considers all nuclear weapons to be illegitimate:

“…a particularly libertarian reply is that while the bow and arrow, and even the rifle, can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, that modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even ‘conventional’ aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 190, emphasis added.)

First, it must be noted that this seems like a suicidal viewpoint. In a world where countries like China and Russia have nuclear weapons, to say nothing of North Korea and Iran, Rothbard’s apparent call for unilateral nuclear disarmament by freer Western nations would mean we’d be subject to nuclear annihilation at the whim of some dictator. But, more fundamentally, who has initiated physical force here? Is it the United States for threatening to obliterate North Korea should that totalitarian dictatorship attempt to harm our citizens, or is it the madmen (and women) in charge of that country? Does the United States gain a value in destroying North Korea’s ability to wage war against us, or does the United States merely preserve the values of its people -that is their lives, liberty and property?

(As an aside, I think Rothbard also forgets about a use of nuclear weapons that would not involve the death of innocent civilians. Imagine an island nation, in say, the East China Sea, that was being invaded by a much larger nation from the mainland. That invasion force would come in the form of a floating armada of ships. What if the island nation were to use nuclear weapons to obliterate the invasion force while it was still in the water? No civilians would be harmed, and the possession of nuclear weapons by that island nation would serve as a deterrent to invasion.)

Rothbard is also fairly explicit that all modern warfare is illegitimate:

“All State wars, therefore, involve increased aggression against the State’s own taxpayers, and almost all State wars (all, in modern warfare) involve the maximum aggression (murder) against the innocent civilians ruled by the enemy State.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 193)

At root, I think the difference between Rothbard and Rand on the legitimacy of certain acts of warfare by freer nations comes down to Rothbard either misunderstanding, or explicitly rejecting, the fact that the distinction between an “initiation of physical force” and “retaliatory physical force” lies in what values are, and what ultimate purpose they serve. I think Rothbard desired to create a “libertarian” view of Rand’s non-initiation of physical force principle that is severed from Rand’s underlying view of values, and the standard of “man’s life”. I started reading Rothbard’s book, “The Ethics of Liberty” prior to October 7, 2023, but those events caused me to want to write something about his views on warfare in particular. In the future, I will turn back to a comparison and contrast of other features of his book to the ideas of Ayn Rand.

Knowing When To Pronounce Moral Judgment

“I will confine my answer to a single, fundamental aspect of this question. I will name only one principle, the opposite of the idea which is so prevalent today and which is responsible for the spread of evil in the world. That principle is: One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment….

The policy of always pronouncing moral judgment does not mean that one must regard oneself as a missionary charged with the responsibility of ‘saving everyone’s soul’ -nor that one must give unsolicited moral appraisals to all those one meets. It means: (a) that one must know clearly, in full, verbally identified form, one’s own moral evaluation of every person, issue and event with which one deals, and act accordingly; (b) that one must make one’s moral evaluation known to others, when it is rationally appropriate to do so.

This last means that one need not launch into unprovoked moral denunciations or debates, but that one must speak up in situations where silence can objectively be taken to mean agreement with or sanction of evil. When one deals with irrational persons, where argument is futile, a mere ‘I don’t agree with you’ is sufficient to negate any implications of moral sanction. When one deals with better people, a full statement of one’s views may be morally required. But in no case and in no situation may one permit one’s own values to be attacked or denounced, and keep silent.” (The Virtue of Selfishness “How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society,” https://courses.aynrand.org/works/how-does-one-lead-a-rational-life-in-an-irrational-society/)

I read this article when I was about 15 or 16 years old. It’s been over thirty years now, and I’ve re-read it many times.

I’ve tried to live by it, but I’ll admit there have been times when I’ve failed to pronounce moral judgment where I should have. Usually, this was when I was lapsing into some form of altruism, and “felt sorry” for someone, or when I was just afraid for no good reason.

But, even when I try to live by it, I never quite know when it is necessary to make my moral evaluations known to others. Sometimes, it’s clear that I do not need to pronounce any sort of moral judgment. For instance, my online Spanish tutor is quite religious, and during our conversations in Spanish, she will sometimes talk about going to church every Sunday. In that circumstance, I don’t think it’s necessary, or appropriate, to tell her I think Christianity is an institution that has caused 2,000 years of irrationality and human misery. I also don’t consider this a moral breach on her part. She is from a poor country, with people who are generally less educated, and everyone is quite religious. I consider her religiosity to be a genuine error of knowledge, and our relationship is so delimited, that it would make no sense to try to change her mind. When she talks about church, I just engage in the conversation, and ask her questions about it. For instance, she once said she goes to a Church online, and I asked her, genuinely curious: “How do they handle communion?” (She told me that they pull out their own bread and wine, and the preacher blesses it from a distance -makes as much sense as in person, I guess.)

At other times, I don’t always know where that line is -of when I need to speak out, and say something. I recently had something happen, which I cannot discuss, where I did speak out, but I still don’t know if it was right, or if I should have remained silent. Unfortunately, the older I get, I realize that it is sometimes very hard to apply the virtues, especially when I’m acting on less than perfect knowledge, and I am under an extreme “time crunch”, where I have to make a decision quickly. It also takes me time to “process” certain facts, and it can be months later before I realize the implications of something.

I will say that, even today, it can still cause me a lot of anxiety to pronounce moral judgment. It is sometimes an extreme act of will to proceed with the right course. It seems so contrary to everything that many people in society implicitly and explicitly pressure us to do, whether those people are authors, journalists, teachers, intellectuals, religious figures, or, quite frequently, lawyers.

The Fields of Grammar, Logic, and Epistemology: What Are Their Similarities and Differences?

I’ve been studying Spanish with a good bit of dedication lately. I had taken some Spanish courses in college, and I tend to be around a lot of Spanish-speakers in my professional environment. I would like to have the ability to converse with native speakers in another language, and, given my preexisting knowledge base in Spanish, I decided to start with that.

When studying Spanish grammar, I was realizing that my English grammar knowledge was a little rusty. Like most adults, I can implicitly use proper grammar most of the time because saying it a certain way “just feels right”. But, I have difficulty saying why a particular word combination in a sentence is the grammatically correct combination. For instance, saying: “the brown dog ran,” is correct in English, not: “the dog brown ran”. (In Spanish, this is what you would say: “El perro marrón corrió.”)

Thinking about grammar then got me to thinking about what, exactly, is the difference between it and epistemology? It also reignited a question I asked myself years ago, but I don’t think I ever explicitly answered. How is epistemology different from logic? Both grammar and logic seem to be similar to epistemology, but also seem to be different and serving different functions. This is a comparison and contrast of the three with an attempt by me to subsume them under a broader category.

Definition of Epistemology

A standard dictionary definition of epistemology is the following:

“the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epistemology

According to Objectivism, the connection of our concepts to reality is an important aspect of the study of epistemology:

“The issue of concepts (“known as the problem of universals”) is philosophy’s central issue. Since man’s knowledge is gained and held in conceptual form, the validity of man’s knowledge depends on the validity of concepts. But, concepts are abstractions or universals, and everything that man perceives is particular, concrete. What is the relationship between abstractions and concretes? To what precisely do concepts refer in reality? Do they refer to something real, something that exists- or are they merely inventions of man’s mind, arbitrary constructs or loose approximations that cannot claim to represent knowledge?” (“Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, “Forward”, Ayn Rand)

Everything I know about this field is through my study of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, so I will approach it from that standpoint. If someone has a different viewpoint, or thinks that epistemology represents something else, I am happy to hear what they have to say, however Ayn Rand’s discussion of concept formation in “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” does seem to relate to the mainstream definition of epistemology from the dictionary quoted above. Whether concepts refer to something in reality does seem to have to do with “…grounds of knowledge…” and “…its limits and validity…”.

Epistemology doesn’t seem to relate to any particular knowledge, but to “knowledge” in general or “knowledge” considered as a concept itself. It asks how does any concept that exists in our head come to be in the first place? It presents a particular mental methodology, or “roadmap”, for how to form valid concepts. For instance, we can have a concept of “ghost”, but most people would say that is not a valid concept, while a concept of “atom” is a valid concept. The former refers to nothing real, while the later refers to something that there is good scientific evidence for the existence of. That implies a methodology for validating concepts. Epistemology would be concerned with that mental methodology.

There are other mental methodologies that don’t refer to anything concrete in reality, but seem to serve a similar purpose of validating certain content. Two of these are “logic” and “grammar”.

Definition of Logic

Logic is defined in the dictionary as:

“a science that deals with the principles and criteria of validity of inference and demonstration : the science of the formal principles of reasoning…” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/logic

Logic concerns a method of dealing with propositions to determine their validity. (Propositions being made up of individual concepts.) For instance: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.” That is a particular way of arranging propositions leading to a valid conclusion.

Note that when I discussed the concept of “atom” above, I said that can be shown to be valid using scientific evidence. The existence of atoms was inferred from various scientific experiments and observations. Democritus inferred the existence of atoms through the use of a thought experiment and decided that there had to be a point beyond which you couldn’t divide something, and called that indivisible unit an “atom”. But, he didn’t have any actual experimental observations to verify that. John Dalton noted that chemical compounds, no matter the amount of that particular compound, always had the same ratio of elements in them, which also suggested an indivisible unit for each element contained in a compound. (I’d also note that what would be considered valid scientific evidence seems to be connected more to the field of “logic” than “epistemology”.)

Definition of Grammar

Grammar is defined in the dictionary as:

“…the study of the classes of words, their inflections (see inflection sense 2), and their functions and relations in the sentence…”

“a study of what is to be preferred and what avoided in inflection (see inflection sense 2) and syntax (see syntax sense 1)…” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grammar

Grammar deals with the study of the different types of words in language and how words are arranged into sentences and paragraphs to make a coherent writing or speech. For instance, grammar classifies words according to whether they are “verbs”, “nouns” , “adjectives”, or “adverbs”. It also studies how these different categories of words are used in conjunction with each-other to produce a coherent sentence, such as the “subject” and the “predicate” in a sentence.

Grammar would also be connected to logic and epistemology. A series of words could be a valid group of concepts without being grammatically or logically correct. Simply stating a string of valid concepts does not form a grammatical or logical sentence. Randomly saying: “grass, book, runs, red, girl” is not a coherent sentence. If you arrange the words so that they say: “The girl with red hair runs through the grass with a book,” then you’ve said a coherent sentence. You could also state a grammatically correct sentence that would be disconnected from anything in reality: “The ‘slog’ with the ‘tig’ ‘grosh’ ‘blarns’ through the ‘gald’ with a ‘igot’.” Here, I’ve substituted non-sense words with the original sentence. It’s still grammatically correct, but it has no connection to reality, because the words don’t represent valid concepts.

What should we call areas like grammar, logic, and epistemology, that all seem to deal with a set of mental methods for dealing with or arranging certain mental content according to certain rules or standards?

Ayn Rand says these are “concepts of consciousness”. Just as one can form a concept of some external phenomena, like “rock”, “bird”, or “planet”, so too can you form a concept based on certain psychological phenomena. For instance, “love” is a concept formed by isolating two or more instances of the psychological phenomena, that is, instances when you feel some form of “love”, then retaining its distinguishing characteristics, while omitting the object and the measurements of the process’s intensity. So, you might feel some love for your pet, and you might also feel a more intense form of love for your wife. What you feel for the pet is less intense than what you feel for your wife (hopefully), but the feeling is similar. From these two introspectively observed psychological phenomena, you can then retain the distinguishing characteristics, the feeling, but omit the intensity of the feeling, and then define love as something like: “A feeling of positive esteem for someone or something.” (You can also probably just define love ostensively, by demonstration, in terms of the feeling which you feel. This is similar to how you know the feeling of “pain” without needing to give it a verbal definition, or you know the color “blue” just by pointing to examples.)

In her book “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, Ayn Rand goes on to say that certain categories of concepts of consciousness “…require special consideration. These are concepts pertaining to the products of psychological processes, such as ‘knowledge’, ‘science’, ‘idea’, etc.” (“Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, “Concepts of Consciousness”, Ayn Rand)

She then says that a sub-category of concepts pertaining to the products of psychological processes can be characterized as “concepts of method”. She seems to distinguish this sub-category by the fact that concepts of method are systematic courses of action devised to achieve certain goals, where the action can be entirely psychological, or it can involve physical action, too. Unlike concepts such as “the science of physics” or “knowledge”, a concept of method is aimed at achieving a particular goal. (Id.) An example of a concept of method would presumably by something like “the scientific method”, which allows for adding content to the concept that is “the science of physics”.

Logic is then a concept of method aimed at achieving knowledge, in any subject, through systematic and non-contradictory identification. Epistemology is a concept of method aimed at showing a connection between the concepts in one’s head and the facts of reality, such as by showing that abstractions are ultimately the product of observed concretes through a process of measurement-omission. Grammar “…is a science dealing with the formulation of the proper methods of verbal expression and communication, i.e., the methods of organizing words (concepts) into sentences.” (Id.)

Hopefully this little foray into the topic of grammar, epistemology, and logic, and how I think they are related to each other, has been useful.

My Experience With A Sedation-Free Colonoscopy

At some point I’ve meant to blog about my first colonoscopy in April of 2022, but I haven’t gotten around to it. My general practice doctor told me that they now recommend colonoscopies for anyone over 45 every 10 years, so I decided to bite the bullet and do it.

(If you don’t like discussions of body anatomy, I’d skip reading the rest of this.)

I opted to have it done without anesthesia. In the rest of the world, most people do it without anesthesia, but they mostly do it with sedation in the US. I chose no anesthesia because I think there are long term side effects from it. My understanding is that anesthesia can cause dementia in older people. The connection between anesthesia and dementia is still debated by scientists, but if I can safely have a medical procedure without it, I’d rather err on the side of caution.

Finding a doctor in Dallas that would do it without anesthesia was difficult, but I finally found one. Looking back at my medical records, I believe his name was Dr. Ramakrishna V. Behara in Frisco, Texas. (Funny side note: I once went in to see a doctor, and they asked me who I was there to see. I said: “I don’t remember his name, but it’s the Indian one.” The girl at the front desk looked at me and said: “You’re going to have to be more specific than that.”) Anyway, I’m pretty sure this is the profile of the doctor who did my colonoscopy: https://www.bswhealth.com/physician/ramakrishna-behara He seemed knowledgeable and competent. I asked to meet with him at his office ahead of the procedure, and he agreed to do so. (I just needed to talk to the person who was going to be performing such a delicate procedure ahead of time, and look him in the eye.) I would recommend him if you are in the Dallas area, and are looking to do a sedation-free colonoscopy.

The night before, I had to fast and take a diarrhetic that kept me up all night on the toilet.

I had an early morning schedule at the hospital. I drove there, and they hooked up an IV, although I technically didn’t need one since I wasn’t using anesthetic. (They convinced me to ‘just in case’.)

After that I was wheeled into the room with the doctor and two nurses. I was facing a TV monitor with the camera view on it. I thought I’d watch and enjoy the show.

That changed once they started. I had to close my eyes and focus on my breathing once they stuck the device in. It felt similar to what I think having a vacuum cleaner tube up my rectum would feel like. It wasn’t painful, but it felt like I had to urgently defecate, but could not. The only pain I felt was when the muscles around my anal sphincter started to have cramps. I started saying “Oh god, oh god,” over and over, hoping it would be over soon. (I wasn’t sure how long colonoscopies lasted.) The nurse started patting me on the back, trying to soothe me, saying it was okay. Despite all that, the pain wasn’t bad. Like a session of bad cramps. (I think the nurses were more traumatized by my vocalizing discomfort than I was, lol.)

Afterward, I felt a great sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. I had overcome my fears. I do not like medical procedures, but as someone committed to the virtue of rationality as described by Ayn Rand, I recognize they are important to my long-term health and life, which is why I just did it, even though I had to somewhat ‘psych myself up’ to it. (I delayed several months getting up the nerve.) http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/rationality.html

I drove myself to work after the procedure, but I stopped off for some pancakes at IHop. I was starving from my 12-hour fast. They were the best damn pancakes I’ve ever had.

The good news is, I don’t have to do it again for 10 years. I also was glad I opted for no anesthesia, and I plan on opting for no anesthesia next time.

I thought I’d write on this because I saw an article about high profile people dying of colon cancer in 2022. If you’re over 45, seriously consider getting this done, regardless of whether you decide to opt for anesthesia or not. The procedure can drastically reduce your chances of dying from colon cancer.

“We The Living” Review – Rand’s Presentation of Life Under Communism

I think I read or heard that Rand wanted to write the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for Communism with “We The Living”. That is, a work of fiction that would convince people of the underlying irrationality and injustice of the system of Communism. This would be similar to how it’s said “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” moved people towards the abolitionist position and against slavery.

Ayn Rand certainly portrays the monstrousness of Communism with her novel, but there will always be a certain element of the left that will say that the Soviet Union was a perversion of “true communism”. (Rand had a great retort for that, from her later novel “Atlas Shrugged”. To paraphrase her: Leftists always say their gang will do it better.)

To what extent is what happens in “We The Living”, and what happened in the Soviet Union, a “feature” of Communism rather than a “bug”? In other words, to what extent are the social and personal tragedies that occur in the novel a logical consequence of Marxist/Communist ideas that would happen no matter who was in charge?

Marxist Psychology/Mindset

Throughout the novel, Rand illustrates the “Marxist mindset”. I’ll note two examples of that here. First is the tendency towards a sort of “inconsolable rage” that you often see on the left. An early scene from the novel really resonated with me. It is an attitude you see on college campuses and amongst black “civil rights activists”. It is an unquenchable rage that seems all consuming for these people. They can’t ever let something go, and everything is blown out of proportion:

“The woman in the red kerchief opened a package and produced a piece of dried fish, and said to the upper berth: ‘Kindly take your boots away, citizen. I’m eating.’

The boots did not move. A voice answered: ‘You don’t eat with your nose.’

The woman bit into the fish and her elbow poked furiously into the fur coat of her neighbor, and she said: ‘Sure, no consideration for us proletarians. It’s not like as if I had a fur coat on. Only I wouldn’t be eating dried fish then. I’d be eating white bread.’

‘White bread?’ The lady in the fur coat was frightened.

‘Why citizen, who ever heard of white bread? Why, I have a nephew in the Red Army, citizen, and ….and, why, I wouldn’t dream of white bread!’

‘No? I bet you wouldn’t eat dry fish, though. Want a piece?’

‘Why…why, yes, thank you, citizen. I’m a little hungry and…’

‘So? You are? I know you bourgeois. You’re only too glad to get the last bite out of a toiler’s mouth. But not out of my mouth, you don’t!’” (We The Living, Ayn Rand, Chapter 1, Part 1)

Notice how the woman with the fur coat could do nothing to console or placate the woman with the dried fish. First, her accoster criticizes the woman for having a fur coat. Then she says the woman in the fur coat is too good to eat dried fish like her. Then, when the woman in the fur coat says she will eat some of the dried fish, the proletarian woman becomes enraged for trying to take her dried fish. The lower-class woman is so filled with hatred and vitriol, she is inconsolable. Marxist thinking leaves people without the mental capacity to engage in logical thinking, with nothing but their rage remaining. I could imagine this scene playing out exactly the same between a black person berating a white person today on public transportation, after the left has imposed an egalitarian dictatorship on America -complete with reparations.

In fact, this sort of inconsolable rage is consistently excused and even promoted as a legal defense by the modern left. In 1993, Colin Ferguson, a black, boarded a subway train and killed 6 people and injured 19 with a handgun. His lawyers wanted to use a “black rage” defense, in which Ferguson was supposedly so traumatized by “racism” from society at large, that he was entitled to kill white people with impunity, or with a lesser degree of punishment than if he were white and murdered 6 people. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,980835,00.html

The scene on the train from “We The Living” reminds me of a recording I saw a few years back of Muslim and Marxist-thinking students who expressed the same inconsolable rage towards Chelsey Clinton after a shooting of Muslims in New Zealand. From 2:00 minutes to about 3:12 minutes, you can see this confrontation in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOkpBiINKRU

No matter what Miss Clinton tried to say in this video, the far-leftists berating her continued. Their rage was unquenchable. People like this in any sort of position of authority over the lives of white non-Muslims would be the worst sort of tyrants. Its why they’re willing to strap bombs on their chests and blow up innocent people in public spaces.

Prior to the shooting in New Zealand, Chelsea Clinton had criticized US Congress person Ilhan Omar for anti-Semitic remarks. The Muslim female in the video thought this meant Chelsea Clinton was somehow responsible for encouraging the shooting of Muslims that occurred in New Zealand. (Oddly, this Muslim female berating her doesn’t seem particularly devout. She’s not covering her head, which makes me think she’s more neo-Marxist than Muslim.)

I find this incident particularly notable because this was Chelsea Clinton, who presumably holds the same left-wing politics as her parents. The Clintons and their kind have done nothing but encourage the destruction of Western Civilization, but apparently not fast enough for the likes of the students in this video.

It’s not like these student activists were confronting someone like me. I actually think Muslims should stop being Muslim, and embrace secularism. I don’t view them as a racial group, since religion is chosen. Muslims merit discrimination by me for embracing an irrational philosophy. (Although I don’t advocate the use of physical force against someone merely for holding a particular set of ideas.)

Both the Muslim female verbally excoriating Chelsea Clinton and the proletarian woman eating the dried fish in “We The Living” harken back to the character of Madame Defarge from Charles Dicken’s novel “A Tale of Two Cities”. It’s someone who has emptied their soul of anything but a sense of grievance and rage at the “oppressor class”, that supposedly has caused all the ills and problems of their life. All that is left for such a person is a desire for score-settling for, mostly-imagined, slights.

Another illustration of the “Marxist Mindset” illustrated in “We the Living” is the Marxist view of ideas and truth. Marxists do not believe in objectivity. “Objective thought” is just the thinking of those who are in power.

For Marx, at least when it comes to normative concepts like “law”, “morality” and “government”, there is no such thing as “objectivity” -of “true” and “false”. All ideas are just a product of one’s “material conditions”:

“But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto; emphasis added.)

Recognizing this feature of communism, Rand included a subplot in which Marisha Lavrova comes and takes over one of the two rooms in Kira’s and Leo’s apartment. According to the law, since Kira and Leo aren’t married, they are each entitled to a room. However, Marisha is a member of the Communist Party, and her father was a factory worker before the revolution. When Kira and Leo take Marisha to court the following scene occurs:

“Kira and Leo appealed the case to the People’s Court. They sat in a bare room that smelt of sweat and of an unswept floor. Lenin and Karl Marx, without frames, bigger than life-size, looked at them from the wall….

The president magistrate yawned and asked Kira: ‘What’s your social position, citizen?’

‘Student.’

‘Employed?’

‘No.’

‘Member of a Trade Union?’

‘No.’

The Upravdom testified that although Citizen Argounova and Citizen Kovalensky were not in the state of legal matrimony, their relations were those of ‘sexual intimacy’…

‘Who was your father, Citizen Argounova?’

‘Alexandar Argounov.’

‘The former textile manufacturer and factory owner?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see. Who was your father, Citizen Kovalensky?’

‘Admiral Kovalensky.’

‘Executed for counter-revolutionary activities?’

‘Executed -yes.’

‘Who was your father, Citzen Lavrova?’ [Marisha’s father]

‘Factory worker, Comrade Judge. Exiled to Siberia by the Czar in 1913. My mother’s a peasant, from the plow.’

‘It is the verdict of the People’s Court that the room in question rightfully belongs to Citizen Lavrova.’

‘Is this a court of justice or a musical comedy?’ Leo asked.

The presiding magistrate turned to him solemnly: ‘So-called impartial justice, citizen, is a bourgeois prejudice. This is a court of class justice. It is our official attitude and platform. Next case!’” (We The Living, Ayn Rand, Chapter 14, Part 1)

Substitute “class justice” in the above quote with “social justice”, and I think this is where our own legal system is headed. It won’t be long now before being black, or gay, or a member of some other “oppressed group” is more important than any written law. (See my discussion of the use of “black rage” as a defense above.)

Rand had the judge in this scene acting strictly in accordance with the ideas of Marx, as discussed in the passage above from the “Communist Manifesto”.

Marx views the contents of the human mind, our ideas, as nothing but a sort of rationalization for advancing our class. For instance, when addressing some of the criticisms of communism, Marx notes that:

“The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Why does Marx dismiss philosophical and “ideological” criticisms of his viewpoint? Because all philosophy and ideology is nothing but rationalization for him. There is no such thing as “objectivity” for Marx and Engels:

“Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

The predominate ideas of a society are nothing but the “ideas of the ruling class”:

“What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto, emphasis added.)

Education of children is premised on the idea that some ideas are true, while others are false. It is also based in the belief that some concepts will help you to live your life better. You learn how to read because literacy is better than being illiterate. It allows for greater communication and easier learning. You learn arithmetic to keep a budget of your spending, and to determine quantities more quickly than you could through simple counting. You learn calculus to be able to determine the instantaneous velocity of a rocket to put satellites into orbit for tracking the weather. Etc., etc. But for Marx, all education is nothing but a perpetuation of the system of exploitation by the “bourgeoisie”:

“And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto; emphasis added.)

Rand recognized that the Soviets viewed education as nothing but another means of propaganda because “truth”, as such, does not exist. She includes a scene where the new, Soviet education system is discussed. Kira’s mother has begun working at a Soviet public school (which are the only schools). She discusses how children are being taught under the Soviets:

“…what did they do in the old days? The children had to memorize mechanically so many dry, disjointed subjects -history, physics, arithmetic -with no connection between them at all. What do we do now? We have the complex method. Take last week ,for instance. Our subject was Factory. So every teacher had to build his course around that central subject. In the history class they taught the growth and development of factories; in the physics class they taught all about machinery; the arithmetic teacher gave them problems about production and consumption; in the art class they drew factory interiors. And in my class -we made overalls and blouses. Don’t you see the advantage of the method? The indelible impression it will leave in the children’s minds? Overalls and blouses -practical, concrete, instead of teaching them a lot of dry, theoretical seams and stitches.” (We The Living, Ayn Rand, Chapter 3, Part 2)

Schools under the control of Marxists no longer teach concepts and abstract thinking. The goal of education becomes the destruction of the “oppressor class”, however that is defined. Since all past thinking and ideas are “infected” with “counter-revolutionary” ideas to the Marxist, all thinking should stop.

Injustice To The Individual

The biggest injustice perpetrated by the Soviet state in the novel seems to be this: Attributing to children the status of their parents.

For instance, Kira and Leo were kicked out of school because of who their parents were. About halfway through the novel, all college students had to fill out a questionnaire:

“Newspapers roared over the country like trumpets: ‘Science is a weapon of the class struggle! Proletarian schools are for the Proletariat! We shall not educate our class enemies!’

There were those who were careful not to let these trumpets be heard too loudly across the border.

Kira received her questionnaire at the Institute, and Leo -his at the University. They sat silently at their dinner table, filling out the answers. They did not each [sic] much dinner that night. When they signed the questionnaires, they knew they had signed the death warrant of their future; but they did not say it aloud and they did not look at each other.

The main questions were:

Who were your parents?

What was your father’s occupation prior to the year 1917?

What was your father’s occupation from the year 1917 to the year 1921?

What is your father’s occupation now?

What is your mother’s occupation?

What did you do during the civil war?

What did your father do during the civil war?

Are you a Trade Union member?

Are you a member of the All-Union Communist Party?

Any attempt to give a false answer was futile: the answers were to be investigated by the Purging Committee and the G.P.U. A false answer was to be punished by arrest, imprisonment or any penalty up to the supreme one.” (We The Living, Ayn Rand, Chapter 16, Part 1)

Let’s assume, just for a moment, and purely for the sake of argument, that the Communists were correct about needing to institute socialism in Russia. The children of former “class enemies” had nothing to do with the previous system. Children were being punished for nothing more than who their parents were. This “sins of the father visited on the son” attitude is at odds with fundamental concepts of justice in the Western world.

Discrimination against particular, individual, persons simply because they come from a particular class or group will strike almost everyone as unfair.

We see this again when it comes to Leo being unable to get medical treatment under socialized medicine in the novel. In response to Kira begging for medical treatment for Leo, a commissar responds with: “’One hundred thousand workers died in the civil war. Why -in the face of the Union of Socialists Soviet Republics- can’t one aristocrat die?’” (We The Living, Ayn Rand, Chapter 16, Part 1)

Some might respond that while this treatment of the children of the bourgeoisie was unfair under the Soviet Union, “their gang would do better”. I disagree. I think this is a necessary consequence of this system.

Specifically, I think the refusal to provide education or medical care under a Marxist/Communist state like the Soviet Union is a necessary consequence of a socialist economy. Basic Economic theory teaches that if all goods and services are made free, then demand will exceed supply. (Effectively, making medical care or education free is a price ceiling set at zero, which causes shortages. https://fee.org/articles/price-controls-and-shortages/)

Since demand exceeds supply, rationing is necessary. How would a Marxist/Communist state decide who gets what? For instance, there is limited medical care, so who would it make sense to give that medical care to, according to a Marxist? Obviously, supporters of the Marxist/Communist state would get preference. The people in whose name they fight, the proletariat, would get preference. Former aristocrats/bourgeois and their children would be left to die.

Another fundamental feature of a Marxist/Communist state illustrated in “We The Living” is the refusal to let dissenters leave. Why is this? Why not just let Kira and Leo leave, as they try to do at the beginning of the novel?

A mass exodus of their “class enemies” would also be unacceptable to the leaders of a Communist state because, at a minimum, they would say bad things about where they had left. This would undermine support and legitimacy abroad, at a minimum, and might even lead to invasion and military conflict.

So, the Marxist/Communist state cannot let their “class enemies” live within their system, because that would be a threat to the system, and they cannot let them leave, because that would also be a threat to the system. Slowly killing off dissenters through things like denying healthcare to the bourgeoisie would be the, not entirely intentional, but logical, solution. Turning the entire country into a death camp for those against the revolution becomes the Communist ‘final solution’, almost by default.

This can be seen a couple of times with actual historical events after revolutions. For instance, during the French revolution, the nobles had to be systematically murdered by guillotine en masse because they might lead a counter-revolution, whether from within France, or from abroad.

In July of 1918, the former Tsar and his family, including children, were murdered by Bolsheviks and members of the Soviet Secret Police. There is not 100% agreement on why the order to murder them was given, but some historians believe Soviet officials were concerned that if the Romanovs were allowed to go to England, as was suggested at one point, they might serve as a rallying point for counter-revolution. The Bolsheviks couldn’t let them stay in Russia for the same reasons. The only answer was to murder the Tsar and his whole family. That was a logical consequence of Marxist/Communist ideology.

Rand Believed The Soviet Union Would Ultimately Fail

For Rand, society is nothing but a number of individuals. Therefore, if the individual is destroyed under Communism, then that will mean any Communist society would ultimately fail.

Rand recognized at least as far back as when she wrote “We The Living” that the Soviet Union would not last. This is evident in several scenes in her novel. For instance, when Kira hears the “Internationale” being sung she says the following:

“Everyone had to rise when the ‘Internationale’ was played.

Kira stood smiling at the music. ‘This is the first beautiful thing I’ve noticed about the revolution.’ she said to her neighbor.

‘Be careful,’ the freckled girl whispered, glancing around nervously, ‘someone will hear you.’

‘When this is all over,’ said Kira. ‘when the traces of their republic are disinfected from history -what a glorious funeral march this will make!‘” (We The Living, Ayn Rand)

Rand did not see the Soviet Union as a real threat to the West:

“‘They’re not very close, and they can’t see very well. They see a big shadow rising. They think it’s a huge beast. They’re too far to see that its soft and brownish and fuzzy. You know, fuzzy, a glistening sort of fuzz. They don’t know that it’s made of cockroaches. Little, glossy, brown cockroaches, packed tight, one on the other, into a huge wall. Little cockroaches that keep silent and wiggle their whiskers….

’…don’t let them know that yours is not an army of heroes, nor even of fiends, but of shriveled bookkeepers with a rupture who’ve learned to be arrogant. Don’t let them know that you’re not to be shot, but to be disinfected. Don’t let them know that you’re not to be fought with cannons, but with carbolic acid!’” (Pg. 373, We The Living, Ayn Rand, Comrade Stepan Timoshenko.)

Did Ayn Rand See Her Escape From Russia as a “Fluke”?

Given how all of the protagonists from “We The Living” are ultimately killed, in one way or another, an interesting question has arisen in my mind.

Rand believed that fiction writing, and art in general, was a “…selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.” (“Art and Cognition”, The Romantic Manifesto, Rand http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/art.html)

When she showed Kira, Andrei, and Leo being killed either physically or spiritually in the novel, it reflects her belief that anyone who wants to live cannot do so under Communism. They will ultimately be destroyed. Kira has to die in the end of the novel because that is the logical end of communism.

However, Rand did, in fact, escape the Soviet Union. She applied for a visa, and was granted permission to leave Russia in her early twenties. She came to the United States, and never returned.

The conclusion I draw from what happened in her own personal life, versus what happens to the characters in her novel, is that Ayn Rand must have viewed her own escape as a pure fluke. Random luck that you cannot count on with any kind of regularity. Rand thought that the vast majority of people like her would die, either physically like Kira and Andrei, or “spiritually”, like Leo.

How did this affect Ayn Rand’s actions during the rest of her life in America? She was passionately, and tirelessly devoted to opposing collectivism throughout her life. Was this at least partly a function of wanting to speak for the countless others who were permanently silenced by the Soviet Union?

Sex and Romance in “We The Living”

The sexual relationships in We The Living primarily revolve around those between Kira and Leo and Kira and Andrei. (Although there are subplots concerning sexual relationships with other characters, such as that between Irina and Sasha and Pavel Syerov and Comrade Sonia.) Here I will go over those two major relationships in the novel.

Kira meets Leo randomly after she left her cousin Victor on a park bench. Victor had made his own sexual advance on Kira in the park, which she had rebuffed. I’m assuming first cousin marriage was not considered incest or taboo in this time and place. Being from the Southern United States, this is also not unheard of in my own culture, although the science seems to indicate this is not a good idea. http://gap.med.miami.edu/learn-about-genetics/have-questions-about-genetics/if-cousins-get-married-are-they-at-risk-of-having-children-with-genetic-con

For no good reason that I can discern, Kira had gone on a carriage ride with Victor, even though she clearly dislikes him. I found this a little perplexing, since I don’t know what would motivate Kira to do this. She clearly doesn’t care about pleasing her family. All I can guess is that she went out of sheer boredom at spending another evening with her family. Kira and Victor eventually end up at a park.

Kira is making her way home after Victor’s failed romantic overture at the park when she accidentally wanders through the section of town where women in the local sex industry are on the street looking for customers. Leo has gone there looking to hire a sex worker, and mistakes Kira for one. Kira experiences “love at first sight” when she sees Leo. She goes with him, apparently intending to have sex with Leo:

“’Why are you looking at me like that?’ he asked. But she did not answer. He said: ‘I’m afraid I’m not a very cheerful companion tonight.’

‘Can I help you?’

‘Well, that’s what you’re here for.’ He stopped suddenly. ‘What’s the price?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t much.’

Kira looked at him and understood why he had approached her. She stood looking silently into his eyes. When she spoke, her voice had lost its tremulous reverence; it was calm and firm. She said: ‘It won’t be much.’

‘Where do we go?’

‘I passed a little garden around the corner. Let’s go there first -for a while.’” (Pg. 61)

Sex for money, or for other reasons besides sexual pleasure, comes up several times in the novel. Later in the story, Kira offers herself to a random wealthy man for money to get Leo medical care. When she tells him how much she needs, he tells her other sex workers don’t make that much in an entire career. (Pg. 226) In the end, Leo becomes a gigolo. A major subplot is the relationship of Kira’s cousin Victor to Marisha, Kira’s communist neighbor. Marisha is in love with Victor because she was a lower-class person before the civil war, but remembers how her mother used to clean the house of an aristocrat with a good looking son that she fell in love with. Victor reminds her of that good looking aristocratic son. Victor pretends to be in love with Marisha so that he can marry her for status in the communist party. This is a sort of parallel to Kira pretending to love Andrei. In the case of Kira, her actions would generally be regarded as noble, or at least, excusable under the circumstances. In the case of Victor, his actions would generally be seen as ignoble.

Leo eventually realizes Kira is not a sex worker, but he is as fascinated by her as she is by him. They agree to meet again at the same location in a month. The month passes and they meet for the second time. Leo kisses the palm of her hand, and they agree to another meeting in a month. Leo then unexpectedly shows up at Kira’s school a few days or weeks later, and they have a more intimate encounter under a bridge, by a river. They agree to meet in a week, and when that rendezvous occurs, Leo tells Kira he is leaving the country by boat. Kira agrees to go with him, and they have sex for the first time on the boat. The boat is stopped by a military patrol led by Stepan Timoshenko, one of the good communists in the novel. Timoshenko lets Kira go, and also manages to get Leo released a few days later. Soon after that, Kira’s family finds out she’s been sleeping with a man out of wedlock and kicks her out of the house. (Although Kira intended to live with Leo, regardless.)

Around that time in the novel, background is given on Leo’s childhood and adolescence. We learn that his first sexual encounter was at sixteen with an older, married woman. Leo had numerous other sexual relations with women in his late teenage years. The end of the flashback to Leo’s backstory ends with what I thought was a rather curious description of him:

“The revolution found Admiral Kovalensky [Leo’s father] with black glasses over his unseeing eyes and St. George’s ribbon in his lapel; it found Leo Kovalensky with a slow, contemptuous smile, and a swift gait, and in his hand a lost whip he had been born to carry.”(Pg. 139)

In my previous blog entry on We The Living, I noted this “rulers and ruled” idea running through the novel, and this is another example of it. Rand does not seem to present this attitude of Leo in a negative light. She seems to present it as desirable or virtuous, which, again, seems incongruous in comparison to her later works. Also note that this aspect of Leo’s personality plays into Kira’s earlier interest in a fictional young overseer in a play who is whipping the serfs. (Pg. 47-48) Kira likes men who use a certain level of physical force on others, and Leo is the type who likes to use that physical force.

At this point I will note my own evaluation of Leo, which is that I do not care for him. He sounds like he was a womanizer before he met Kira. He never asks Kira to marry him, while Andrei asks her to marry him the first time they have sex. In the end, he becomes a gigolo and gives up Kira for a life of being a male sex worker. The whole point of “We The Living” is that life is unbearable under Communism, but I don’t consider Leo’s way out of a corrupt system to be particularly noble. Andrei had the right idea when he put a bullet in his own brain.

If I knew a woman in real life who was in love with a guy like Leo, I’d have to ask the question: “Why?” What did he have going for him, other than his looks? He’s a womanizer, an alcoholic, and believes he has a right to order his social inferiors around. I have to think Leo would end up cheating on Kira under capitalism, as much as communism. Kira seemed to think she could “save” Leo, like he was her “project boyfriend”. Near the end, when it is clear that Leo is dead in spirit, if not in his actual physical body, Kira has the following thoughts:

“He had left home often and she had never asked him where he went. He had been drinking too often and too much, and she had not said whether she noticed it. When they had been alone together, they had sat silently, and the silence had spoken to her, louder than any words, of something which was an end. He had been spending the last of their money and she had not questioned him about the future. She had not questioned him about anything, for she had been afraid of the answer she knew: that her fight was lost.” (Pg 439)

Soon after that, during their breakup scene, Kira says the following:

“She turned and looked at him calmly, and answered: ‘Only this, Leo: it was I against a hundred and fifty million people. I lost.” (Pg. 443)

These scenes present strong evidence that Kira believed that her love could save Leo. The desire to fix men is a common attitude of women, especially young women. I also think it’s a mistake. With that said, a reader needs to keep in mind that both of these people are about eighteen years old, so there is possibly a “maturity factor” at play here, for both of them. Although, even at eighteen, I was not a hard-drinking, womanizer with a desire to dominate others, so is it just a matter of immaturity?

The other major sexual relationship in the novel is between Kira and Andrei. With one exception, I like everything about Andrei, on a personal level. He lives in spartan living quarters. (I’m a fan of minimalism and living on as little money as possible.) He’s studying to be an engineer. He tries to eliminate “sentiment” and just be his work. (That can be taken too far, but it’s better than the hordes of teenagers who sit around playing X-Box and smoking pot all day.) To me, this character is a sort of “proto-Hank Reardon”. Even though he has a somewhat “monkish” exterior, when Andrei falls for Kira, he falls hard. Unlike Leo, Andrei knows how much he loves Kira, and isn’t afraid to say it:

“‘Because, no matter what happens, I still have you. Because, no matter what human wreckage I see around me, I still have you. And -in you- I still know what a human being can be.’

‘Andrei,’ she whispered, ‘are you sure you know me?’

He whispered, his lips in her hand so that she heard the words as if she were gathering them, one by one, in the hollow of her palm: ‘Kira, the highest thing in a man is not his god. It’s that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence…’” (Pg. 335)

This scene happens in the last third of the novel, when Andrei is beginning to doubt what he has believed. The doubt comes from what he sees as the corruption of the other communists around him, like Pavel Syerov, but it also comes from his affair with Kira. For the first time in his life, he is in love with a woman, and it is someone that he knows opposes communism. He is honest enough to express a level of vulnerability and doubt that most people would lack the self-confidence to do. Like I said, there is a lot to like here, but he’s also a communist and a member of the secret police. (That’s a pretty big “but”.)

Ayn Rand did everything she could to make this character sympathetic, and she succeeded for me. At one point, Rand describes the following scene, soon after Andrei and Kira have sex for the first time:

“The street light beyond the window made a white square and a black cross on the wall above the bed. Against the white square, she could see his [Andrei’s] face on the pillow; he did not move. Her arm, stretched limply against his naked body, felt no movement but the beating of his heart.” (Pg 233)

For Rand, nothing is an accident. The symbol of a cross on the wall above the bed seems like a reference to the crucifixion story in the Bible. Andrei is almost “Christ-like”. When I say that, I mean in the sense of total devotion to someone or something, even at great cost, which is what I think the story in the Bible means to the modern mind. Near the end, after Andrei learns why Kira was really with him, and he has saved Leo from being shot as an illegal speculator, Leo says he isn’t happy that Andrei saved him. Andrei asks “Why?”, and Leo says the following to Andrei:

“Do you suppose Lazarus was grateful when Christ brought him back from the grave -if He did? No more than I am to you, I think.” (Pg. 421)

Again, an explicit reference to Andrei as Christ in the Bible.

Andrei gives every penny he earns to Kira after they start their affair. (He believes she’s using it to support her family, but she’s actually using it for medical treatments for Leo. This is why Kira is pretending to be in love with Andrei.) Later in the novel, after Andrei learns the truth, he risks everything to save Leo out of love for Kira. This is reminiscent of Sydney Carton from “A Tale of Two Cities”, who goes to the guillotine during the French Revolution to save the husband of the woman he loves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Carton

Kira’s relationship with Andrei is interesting. She initially encounters him at her engineering school, where Andrei is a student, and also an officer of the branch of the GPU at the university. She is at a meeting of students to elect student council members. During the course of that, the “Internationale” is sung:

“For the first time in Petrograd, Kira heard the ‘Internationale.’ She tried not to listen to its words. The words spoke of the damned, the hungry, the slaves, of those who had been nothing and shall be all; in the magnificent goblet of the music, the words were not intoxicating as wine; they were not terrifying as blood; they were gray as dish water.

But the music was like the marching of thousands of feet measured and steady, like drums beaten by unvarying, unhurried hands. The music was like the feet of soldiers marching into the dawn that is to see their battle and their victory; as if the song rose from under the soldiers’ feet, with the dust of the road, as if the soldiers’ feet played it upon the earth.

The tune sang of a promise, calmly, with the calm of an immeasurable strength, and then, tense with a restrained, but uncontrollable ecstasy, the notes rose, trembling, repeating themselves, too rapt to be held still, like arms raised and waiving in the sweep of banners.

It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was the song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength.

Everyone had to rise when the ‘Internationale’ was played.

Kira stood smiling at the music. ‘This is the first beautiful thing I’ve noticed about the revolution.’ she said to her neighbor.

‘Be careful,’ the freckled girl whispered, glancing around nervously, ‘someone will hear you.’

‘When this is all over,’ said Kira. ‘when the traces of their republic are disinfected from history -what a glorious funeral march this will make!’

‘You little fool! What are you talking about?’

A young man’s hand grasped Kira’s wrist and wheeled her around.

She stared up into two gray eyes that looked like the eyes of a tamed tiger; but she was not quite sure whether it was tamed or not. There were four straight lines on his face: two eyebrows, a mouth, and a scar on his right temple.

For one short second, they looked at each other, silent, hostile, startled by each other’s eyes.

‘How much,’ asked Kira, ‘are you paid for snooping around?’

She tried to disengage her wrist. He held it: ‘Do you know the place for little girls like you?’

‘Yes -where men like you wouldn’t be let in through the back door.’

‘You must be new here. I’d advise you to be careful.’

‘Our stairs are slippery and there are four floors to climb, so be careful when you come to arrest me.’

He dropped her wrist. She looked at his silent mouth; it spoke of many past battles louder than the scar on his forehead; it also spoke of many more to come.

The ‘Internationale’ rang like soldiers’ feet beating the earth.

‘Are you exceedingly brave?’ he asked. ‘Or just stupid?’

‘I’ll let you find that out.’

He shrugged, turned and walked away. He was tall and young. He wore a cap and a leather jacket. He walked like a soldier, his steps deliberate and very confident.

Students sang the ‘Internationale,’ its ecstatic notes rising, trembling, repeating themselves.

‘Comrade,’ the freckled girl whispered, ‘what have you done?’” (Pg. 73-75)

Through the course of the novel, their friendship grows, then Andrei suddenly starts avoiding Kira, and she cannot figure out why. As she grows more desperate to obtain medical care for Leo, she eventually seeks out Andrei, with the intention of asking him for money for Leo. (Andrei is unaware of Kira’s involvement with Leo.) When she goes to his apartment, Andrei confesses his love for her, and tells her he had to stop seeing her because he knew he had the power to force her to have sex against her will. As a member of the secret police, Andrei knew he could go to Kira’s house with his men, take her away, and rape her with impunity.

This actually happened in the Soviet Union. Lavrentiy Beria, head of Stalin’s Secret Police, would pick up women against their will, drive them to his house, and rape them. Women who refused were arrested and imprisoned. Women would also agree to sex to free family members. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria

Andrei also knew that Kira would despise him after that, which he couldn’t stand the thought of. To avoid the temptation, he decided to stop seeing her, and avoid her altogether. Andrei tells Kira he’d give her everything he has if he thought it would make Kira love him, but he knows she doesn’t because she hates everything he stands for. Kira realizes that if she pretends to be in love with Andrei she can get the money she needs to save Leo, so she lies and tells Andrei she is, in fact, in love with him, and they sleep together:

“’I can! I love you.’

She wondered how strange it was to feel a man’s lips that were not Leo’s.

She was saying: ‘Yes…for a long time…but I didn’t know that you, too…’ and she felt his hands and his mouth, and she wondered whether this was joy or torture to him and how strong his arms were. She hoped it would be quick.”(Pg. 233)

The exact nature of the relationship between Kira and Andrei eludes me in certain respects. She did feel affection and friendship for Andrei before she pretended to be in love with him. For instance, she worries about his welfare when he tells her he just got back from putting down a peasant rebellion in the countryside. Andrei says three Communists were killed by peasants, and Kira says:

“‘Andrei! I hope you got them!’

He could not restrain a smile: ‘Why, Kira! Are you saying that about men who fight Communism?’

‘But… but they could have done it to you.’” (Pg. 165)

It makes me wonder about how much she enjoyed sex with Andrei? Did she have orgasms with Andrei? There are scenes that seem to indicate she does not:

“His [Andrei’s] hands closed slowly, softly over her shoulders, so softly that she could not feel his hands, only their strength, their will holding her, bending her backward; but his lips on hers were brutal, uncontrollable. His eyes were closed; hers were open, looking indifferently up at the ceiling.” (Pg. 244)

But, later, when Kira is going to see Andrei, there is the implication that she likes the sex with him:

“…Her body felt pure and hallowed: her feet were slowing down to retard her progress toward that which seemed a sacrilege because she did desire it and did not wish to desire it tonight.” (Pg. 381)

What I got from this passage was that Kira did have orgasms from sex with Andrei, and even looked forward to it on occasion, but she felt guilty about it.

Also mixed in with Kira’s feelings towards Andrei appears to be a desire to punish him, or make him a sort of “stand-in” for the whole communist system that Kira, and those she loves, have suffered under. For instance, the first time Kira takes money from Andrei she seems to feel a bit of guilt:

“She wondered dimly how simple and easy it was to lie.

To Andrei, she had mentioned her starving family. She did not have to ask: he gave her his whole monthly salary and told her to leave him only what she could spare. She had expected it, but it was not an easy moment when she saw the bills in her hand…” (Pg. 235)

But, that moment of guilt quickly passes, as this passage goes on to say:

“…;then, she remembered the comrade commissar and why one aristocrat could die in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics -and she kept most of the money, with a hard, bright smile.” (Pg. 235)

(The comrade commissar was an official in an earlier scene who refused to give Leo medical treatment, and mentioned something about how so many had died, so what was one aristocrat to the Soviet Union.)

In this scene, its like Kira felt momentary remorse at taking Andrei’s money under false pretenses, then she remembers that he has helped to bring about that system under which Leo and others would die, and she takes almost all of his money, as a sort of passive-aggressive punishment against him, as representative of the whole system.

It seems that Kira enjoys making Andrei suffer a little, as punishment, but it is a sort of cruelty, with occasional bursts of compassion. In one scene, Andrei is complaining about not being able to see Kira much. She has also told him never to come to her parent’s house, where he thinks that she lives, ostensibly because her family is uncomfortable with communists, but really so that he will not discover Leo:

“But he was smiling again: ‘Why don’t you want me to think of you? Remember last time you were here, you told me about that book you read with a hero called Andrei and you said you thought of me? I’ve been repeating it to myself ever since, and I bought the book. I know it isn’t much, Kira, but…well…you don’t say them often, things like that.’

She leaned back, her hands crossed behind her head, mocking and irresistible: ‘Oh, I think of you so seldom I’ve forgotten your last name. Hope I read it in a book. Why, I’ve even forgotten that scar, right there, over your eye.’ Her finger was following the line of the scar, sliding down his forehead, erasing his frown; she was laughing, ignoring the plea she had understood.”

Later in the same scene, Kira explains that she has come to see Andrei early because she cannot see him that night, as initially promised. Andrei is unhappy about it, thinking he will not get to have sex with her:

“ He was whispering, his lips on her breast: ‘Oh, Kira, Kira, I wanted you -here- tonight…’

She leaned back, her face dark, challenging, pitiless, her voice low: ‘I’m here -now.’

‘But…’

‘Why not?’

‘If you don’t…’

‘I do. That’s why I came.’

And as he tried to rise, her arms pulled him down imperiously. She whispered: ‘Don’t bother to undress. I haven’t the time.’” (Pg. 249)

A woman punishing a man with this sort of “passive aggressive behavior”, and/or cruel words that she knows will hurt him is fairly common in life. Women don’t typically use violence to get vengeance. They use manipulation combined with male sexual desire to give a man his comeuppance (real or perceived). For most men, there’s nothing more painful than a woman you’re in love with not responding to your love, or spurning your signs of affection with cruel words or actions. This behavior also shows up in a later novel of Ayn Rand’s very prominently. In “The Fountainhead”, the character of Dominique Francon pretty much makes a career out of using her beauty and the power of her sexuality to make men miserable, namely Peter Keeting and Gail Wynand, although they’ve both done things that merit disapproval. https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/fountainhead/character/dominique-francon/

Andrei and Kira’s sexual relationship is one of the few times I can think of that Rand shows sex from a male perspective. There are only two times that I can think of where she “gets in inside the head” of a male character, concerning sex. One time is Reardon in “Atlas Shrugged”. Reardon thinks about how he wanted to have sex with Dagny Taggart the first time he saw her on the train tracks. I think there were also some other times he thinks about sex with Dagny, but I cannot find the relevant passages now. (Something about how he felt when he would leave her body after an orgasm.) Andrei’s perspective on sex with Kira is also presented:

“He could forgive her the words, for he had forgotten them, when he saw her exhausted, breathing jerkily, her eyes closed, her head limp in the curve of his arm. He was grateful to her for the pleasure he had given her.” (Pg. 249)

In response to a papal declaration, “Humanae Vitae”, Rand delivered a speech called “Of Living Death”. The Pope’s encyclical concerned sex and procreation, and how good Catholics should view sex. During the course of the written version of her speech, Rand responded to a portion of the Pope’s encyclical that if a man viewed a woman as a mere instrument of his selfish enjoyment, instead of as a means for reproduction, then he would no longer love and respect her. In response to this, Rand said:

“I cannot conceive of a rational woman who does not want to be precisely an instrument of her husband’s selfish enjoyment. I cannot conceive of what would have to be the mental state of a woman who could desire or accept the position of having a husband who does not derive any selfish enjoyment from sleeping with her. I cannot conceive of anyone, male or female, capable of believing that sexual enjoyment would destroy a husband’s love and respect for his wife -but regarding her as a brood mare and himself as a stud, would cause him to love and respect her.” (“Of Living Death”, Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason: Essays In Objectivist Thought)

I was curious about how Ayn Rand viewed the male perspective on this. As a woman, it was going to be easier for Rand to present a female perspective, which is why I assume she usually did present sex from the female character’s viewpoint. Did she think that a rational man would want to be an instrument of his wife’s selfish enjoyment? Based on what is presented here about Andrei’s perspective on sex with Kira, specifically, his feeling grateful that he had given Kira pleasure, I think this must be what she thought was the rational male perspective. (This would make sense given her views on the “trader principle” of justice.)

The relationship between Kira and Leo and Kira and Andrei proved to be both entertaining, and enlightening. I recommend that you read the novel yourself, if you haven’t already.

On The Nature of A Shoehorn

Sometimes when reading Ayn Rand, I will read something that seems true, but fairly trivial or unimportant to my particular life. This was generally true when it came to her description of the law of identity. I first read the entry in the Ayn Rand Lexicon on the law of identity sometime in the 1990’s:

“To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. …A is A. A thing is itself.” (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, as found in “The Ayn Rand Lexicon” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/identity.html)

I didn’t see why saying “A is A” had any importance whatsoever. Of course a thing is itself. So what? How is it useful to go around stating the obvious?

About thirty years later, I have at least some inkling of why this formulation is important. The following true story from my life will hopefully give some concrete evidence for the practical benefits of keeping the law of identity in mind in one’s daily life.

I have three shoehorns. One of which I keep in my car, mainly so that I can change into a pair of wingtips I like to wear when I go dancing. (I also typically keep the wingtips in my car.) The shoes are narrow, and difficult to put on without a shoehorn. (I have narrow heels.)

I try to keep the shoehorn in a specific place in my car, so that I always know where it is, and don’t misplace it. Unfortunately, earlier this summer, my car had to go into the auto repair shop for quite an extended time. I have another, older vehicle, a Chevy Trailblazer, which I have been driving in the meantime. When my car went in the shop, I put my wingtips in the Trailblazer, along with the shoehorn.

The layout of the Trailblazer is different from my regular car, causing everything to be out of place, including my shoehorn. Back around early to mid-June, I could not find the shoehorn one day. I searched everywhere I could think to look in that old Trailblazer for the shoehorn, but I could not find it.

I finally gave up on my search and was starting to think I’d have to buy another shoehorn. I usually keep two in my regular vehicle, but the other one was still with that car, which was in the shop. I keep my third shoehorn in my home so that I can put my work shoes on. Since I was busy with other things, I never got around to buying another shoehorn. (I just made do with almost completely unlacing my shoes to be able to fit my feet into them, which is rather time consuming and inconvenient.) A couple of weeks later, I looked down in the front passenger side floorboard of the Trailblazer, and there was my shoehorn. I had searched that area, as well as under the passenger seat, even getting out a flashlight to illuminate dark areas. I had not seen the shoehorn, and yet there it was, lying in plain sight.

I joked to myself that this shoehorn was like the “ring of power” from “The Lord of the Rings”.

This reference may take some explanation for those who are not familiar with those books. In the Tolkien series, an evil magical ring that gives people invisibility and various other powers, is described as having a sort of “will of its own”:

“Gandalf explains that a Ring of Power is self-serving and can ‘look after itself’: the One Ring in particular, can ‘slip off treacherously’ to return to its master Sauron, betraying its bearer when an opportunity arrives.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Power#Powers

In other words, the ring of power has its own agenda, and you will lose it, and someone else will find it when it so chooses. In the novels, Bilbo Baggins finds the ring after another character, Gollum, loses it. Basically, the ring decided it was time for Gollum to lose it, and for Bilbo to find it.

A few weeks later, I went on a vacation, and packed the same shoehorn in my suitcase. Guess what happened when I got back from my trip? I could not find the shoehorn again. I had only taken one suitcase, so if I had brought it back with me, the shoehorn had to be there. I gave the suitcase what I thought was a pretty thorough search, but I could not find it. Thinking again of the ring of power, I started to give up on my search for the shoehorn. Then I explicitly thought:

“Of course, I’m just joking with myself. The shoehorn has a specific nature. It’s not magical, because everything is what it is, and nothing more.”

Explicitly thinking this way led me to the following additional thoughts: “What is the identity of the shoehorn?” I started naming its characteristics or attributes in my mind. I thought: “It’s small, and it’s dark. Both of which make it easily misplaced and easy not to see, given the nature of the human eye.”

I also thought: “What is the identity of my suitcase?” I then started thinking about its attributes. It has one main compartment, and it has two smaller, pouch-like compartments with zippers on the outside. I had checked all three of those locations, and the shoehorn wasn’t there. Then I remembered one other thing about the nature of my suitcase: It has a detachable, somewhat clear, zipper pouch about 10 inches by 5 inches in size. This pouch attaches on the inside main compartment of the suitcase, at the top, by a pair of snaps. I use it to hold toiletries, like my toothbrush. I also keep items in there that I always need, even when I’m not on a trip, like a toothbrush and toothpaste. In other words, there is always some stuff in this small plastic pouch that could obscure something like a shoehorn from my vision on a cursory inspection. I didn’t think I would have put the shoehorn in there because it isn’t a toiletry item. But, I decided I should check it out, and guess what I found?

I believe that this rather mundane example illustrates an important point. Sometimes you have to mentally summon the law of identity, expressly, in order to banish incorrect thinking. In my simple example here, I had “half-jokingly” thought the shoehorn had some magical or mystical properties that made it incapable of being located by me. As a result, I think I started to give up on my search for the shoehorn. It’s like that mystical thinking demotivated me to look for the shoehorn, because I was falling into a pattern of thinking that the shoehorn was somehow intrinsically incapable of being found.

It wasn’t until I willfully re-asserted a “mental framework” that was more rational, with the law of identity, that I was able to think clearly about where the shoehorn could be.

Just like everything else, the human mind has a specific identity, or nature. Part of that identity is that it can develop incorrect thinking patterns or habits, that are detached from reality. In this case, I was falling into the thinking habit of believing my shoehorn was somehow inherently without identity, and therefore unlocatable by me. By mentally summoning the law of identity in my mind, and rededicating my mental attitude to that principle, I was able to develop a specific methodology or plan for locating a lost item. Adhering to the law of identity led to my eventual success in finding the shoehorn.

I would add that adhering to the law of identity doesn’t guarantee success. Sometimes you can do everything right, and factors beyond your control make victory impossible. It might have been the case that I had somehow lost the shoehorn in my hotel room, and left it there. In that case, it would have been unrecoverable. But, by thinking of its specific nature, I was able to better exhaust the possible scenarios under which it was still in my possession in the sense of being lost in some other item of property of mine, like my suitcase. Adhering to the law of identity allowed me to banish any “mystical based” thinking, which thereby maximized my chance of success, even if that chance of success wasn’t 100%.

The law of identity is more than a mere tautology. It can be the difference between victory and defeat. (Or, between putting on my shoes and going barefoot.)

First Review Post For Ayn Rand’s “We The Living”

Earlier in 2022, I re-read Ayn Rand’s novel, “We the Living”. I was motivated, in part, by the war in Ukraine. I thought the novel might provide some insight into the Russian mind.

While reading it, I took fairly extensive notes on my phone, and by writing in the margins of the paper-back copy of the novel. Over time, I’d like to write a series of blog posts on various topics about it.

This first blog post is about several things that seemed slightly incongruous with Ayn Rand’s later writing and novels. Whether these can be reconciled with her later writing is an open question in my mind. Certainly, someone can change their mind on various issues, and I do not consider these things to be glaring contradictions with the fundamentals of her philosophy. It’s more like, when I re-read these things in “We The Living” this year, my “eyebrows went up” a bit.

Before I begin the current post, I want to put in a bit of a disclaimer: It’s entirely possible I’m misinterpreting what she is saying in various parts of the novel. In the context of a work of fiction or art, I believe “artistic license” can be proper, and that can explain some, or all, of this.

Any References to page numbers are to The Signet paper back, 1996 edition of “We The Living”, ISBN number 0-451-18784-9

“Rulers and Ruled”

At points in “We The Living”, I got the impression that Rand almost thought that there were “rulers” and “ruled” in the world. In other words, the sort of idea that there are people who are there to initiate physical force in order to keep other people in line. This would certainly be contrary to her later writings, especially in “Atlas Shrugged”, but also in such essays as “Man’s Rights” and “The Nature of Government”.

The best example of this is early in the novel, when some background information about the female protagonist, Kira is being given. There is some narrative and brief flashbacks giving an explanation of how Kira would have reactions to things and situations that her family regarded as “strange” or “abnormal”. For instance, it says that she “…seldom visited museums…” (Pg. 47), but when she would see construction, particularly of bridges she “…was certain to stop and stand watching, for hours…”(Pg. 47) Another such “incongruous feeling” Kira had is the following:

“When Galina Petrovna took her children to see a sad play depicting the sorrow of the serfs whom Czar Alexander II had magnanimously freed, Lydia [Kira’s very religious sister] sobbed over the plight of the humble kindly peasants cringing under a whip, while Kira sat tense, erect, eyes dark in ecstasy, watching the whip cracking expertly in the hand of a tall, young overseer.” (Pg. 47-48)

The scene involves Kira going with her family to see a play about the suffering of the serfs. These were people tied to the land, and required to work. They were little better than slaves. The only real difference being that the serfs could not be sold to another master, they belonged to whoever owned the land. Russia was one of the last countries to free the serfs, in 1861 under Tsar Alexander II. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/emancipation-russian-serfs-1861

Kira seems to have a sexual reaction to seeing this scene in the play. First, it’s noted that the person handling the whip is a “…tall, young overseer…”, who is presumably male. Additionally, Rand uses the word “ecstasy” to describe Kira’s reaction to this scene. Technically, I think “ecstasy” just means great happiness, but the use of that word combined with the fact that we are talking about a teenage girl watching a tall, young man, suggests sexual attraction to me. More specifically, it seems like she is sexually attracted to not just the young man, but his actions -in watching the whip crack expertly.

I think this scene could be interpreted in one of two ways. First, it could be seen as Kira likes the idea that the serfs were being kept in line with physical force, the whip, by a good-looking young man. Second, it could just be that she is sexually attracted to the display of skill by the young man, in using the whip, not necessarily what he is using the whip on. (In this case, people.) This second interpretation takes into account the early scenes described just before it, in which Kira liked to watch road and bridge construction, and (presumably) liked watching the men displaying skill at construction, too. This second interpretation lines up better with Rand’s overall views on the role of productivity in life, as shown in her later writing. That said, I’m not 100% sure from the context that Ayn Rand didn’t mean my first interpretation: that Kira seems to believe that the serfs were not capable of following rules or law without being kept in line without some physical force being initiated against them, such as a whip. That is, that there are some people who are meant to be ruled.

Another example of this “rulers and ruled” attitude is when Rand describes Kira’s attitude about physical labor:

“From somewhere in the aristocratic Middle Ages, Kira had inherited the conviction that labor and effort were ignoble.” (Pg. 49)

First, I thought this was an interesting way to phrase this. How, exactly, does one “inherit” a conviction? Does Rand mean she got this idea from her parents? It doesn’t seem so, because the earlier discussion of Kira’s background seems to show that she is very different from her family, and misunderstood by them. Is Rand speaking of genetic determinism here? Did Kira somehow get this attitude or idea from her genes? Or, is this just a way of saying Kira had, at some point, adopted an attitude from the Middle Ages that was still common, especially in Russia at that time? Second, how, exactly, does Kira think that labor and effort are “ignoble”, and how does that comport with Rand’s later views on productivity? I think what is meant here is that Kira thought that manual labor is ignoble, since the novel goes on from that scene to say that “…she had chosen a future of the hardest work and most demanding effort…” by choosing to be an engineer. (Pg. 50) Clearly, this idea, as understood by Rand’s later writings, would not be correct. Even very intellectually simplistic labor requires some degree of mental effort.

This attitude on work seems almost “Platonic” to me:

“…the ideally just city outlined in the Republic, Plato proposed a system of labor specialization, according to which individuals are assigned to one of three economic strata, based on their inborn abilities: the laboring or mercantile class, a class of auxiliaries charged with keeping the peace and defending the city, or the ruling class of ‘philosopher-kings’.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/work-labor/

My understanding of Plato, and the Ancient Greeks in general, is they believed that there were some people born to do the manual labor, usually slaves, while there were others who were born to do the thinking. These are Plato’s “philosopher-kings”. Rand clearly and explicitly repudiated this notion in her later writings. See, for instance, the story of Robert Stadler, in Atlas Shrugged. This is why, like I said earlier, my “eyebrows went up”, metaphorically speaking , when I read this.

Abortion in “We The Living”

Perhaps because of what was going on in the courts and politically in 2022, I noted that the subject of abortion comes up a couple of times in “We The Living”. As far as I can remember, the topic never comes up in either “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged”. The context in which she brought it up in “We The Living” left me wondering why Ayn Rand included this in the novel. For Ayn Rand, nothing in her fiction is an accident:

“Since art is a selective re-creation and since events are the building blocks of a novel, a writer who fails to exercise selectivity in regard to events defaults on the most important aspect of his art.

…A plot is a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax. The word ‘purposeful’ in this definition has two applications: it applies to the author and to the characters of a novel. It demands that the author devise a logical structure of events….a sequence in which nothing is irrelevant, arbitrary or accidental…” (“Basic Principles of Literature”, The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand)

Operating on the above quote, I assume that having abortion come up in the novel is not “arbitrary” or “accidental” on the part of Rand. She had a purpose there.

There are two ways abortion comes into the novel. (I’m not sure which occurs first now.) First, Kira and Leo get a neighbor living in their house assigned to them. This is a girl about Kira’s age, who is attending another local university. Her name is Marina Lavrova, and she is introduced at Page 177 in the book I was reading. (Signet paperback, 1996 edition of “We The Living”, ISBN number 0-451-18784-9 )

Marina Lavrova’s nickname is “Marisha”, and that is how she is described throughout the rest of the book. She would go on to marry Kira’s cousin, Victor. Marisha is a card-carrying member of the Communist youth group, the Komsomol. Furthermore, her father has good “working class credentials”, having been a factory worker before the revolution, and having served time in the Tsar’s prison system for political agitation. Victor, Kira’s cousin had noticed that Kira and Leo had two rooms, and had told Marisha about it. At that time, Victor is trying to get into the Communist Party, and uses Marisha as a stepping-stone to that end. (Which is also why he marries her.) Although the law allowed Kira and Leo to have two rooms because they are not married, Marisha uses her Communist party card to overrule the law, and moves into the extra room.

Since they are living in such close proximity to one another, Kira knows some fairly intimate details about Marisha’s life. For instance, Kira notes that young men are staying overnight with Marisha, and that she is presumably sleeping with them. After some time passes, Marisha comes to Kira and asks her about how to get an abortion:

“Marisha came in when Kira was alone. Her little pouting mouth was swollen: ‘Citizen Argounova, what do you use to keep from having children?’

Kira looked at her, startled.

‘I’m afraid I’m in trouble,’ Marisha wailed. ‘It’s that damn louse Aleshka Ralenko. Said I’d be bourgeois if I didn’t let him…Said he’d be careful. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?’

Kira said she didn’t know.” (Pg. 183)

A couple of pages later, a scene occurs in which Kira tells a sick Marisha to clean the bathroom, indicating that she must have taken some sort of medication to induce abortion, or has otherwise obtained an abortion:

“’Citizen Lavrova, will you please clean the bathroom? There’s blood all over the floor.’

‘Leave me alone. I’m sick. Clean it yourself, if you’re so damn bourgeois about your bathroom.’

Marisha slammed the door, then opened it again, cautiously: ‘Citizen Argounova, you won’t tell your cousin [Victor] on me, will you? He doesn’t know about…my trouble. He’s -a gentleman.” (Pg. 185)

The second way abortion is brought up in “We The Living” is through the character of Vava Milovskaia, specifically, her father. Vava is introduced at Page 79, when she comes to visit Kira’s cousins and their parents, Vasili Ivanovich Dunaev and Maria Petrova. (Kira’s Aunt and Uncle, by way of her mother, who is the sister of Maria.) Kira is also visiting the Dunaev’s when Vava arrives to see Victor, who she is in love with. Unlike everyone else, Vava is wearing expensive clothing, and jewelry. Although Vava’s family is not in the Communist Party, her father is a medical doctor. It is explained in the book that, at that time, Doctors were still allowed to operate privately, and make money because a doctor was not viewed as “exploiting labor”. Basically, doctors can do their work without the need of any employees, and they are making money only through their own labor, and not by directing the work of others. (Don’t bother trying to make sense out of Marxist ideas.)

At Chapter 12, starting on Page 151, Kira goes to a party thrown by Vava at her parent’s house. During the course of the party, it is noted that Vava lives in (comparative) opulence. How was this possible?

“He was a doctor who specialized in gynecology. He had not been successful before the revolution; after the revolution, two facts had helped his rise: the fact that, as a doctor, he belonged to the ‘Free Professions’ and was not considered an exploiter, and the fact that he performed certain not strictly legal operations. Within a couple of years he had found himself suddenly the most prosperous member of his former circle and of many circles above.” (Pg. 158)

Since he’s a gynecologist, I’m certain the “not strictly legal operations” are abortions. Abortions were legalized in 1920 in Russia. The novel starts in 1922, so abortion was legal by then. However, Stalin again made abortion illegal in 1936. (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-01-04/stalins-abortion-ban-soviet-union ) I would assume that Rand meant that Vava’s father had performed the “not strictly legal” abortions prior to legalization in 1920. This makes sense in light of the last sentence in the above quote, which implies that at least “a couple of years” had passed since he started performing illegal abortions, and that he had passed other people in wealth, over the years, as a result.

In both of these situations, abortion seems to be presented in a somewhat negative light.

Take the story of Marisha and her abortion. For Rand, all choices in a work of art have a purpose. Nothing is without a reason in a novel. So what was her reason for having Marisha get pregnant accidentally and then have to get an abortion? She didn’t have Kira, the protagonist, get pregnant, although Kira was also living with and having sex with Leo by this point on, presumably, a regular basis.

Was Rand saying here that communism encourages abortion/promiscuity? This seems like a possibility, since Marisha was pressured into having sex when she wasn’t ready. Aleshka Ralenko, the guy Marisha was sleeping with, said she’d be “bourgeois” if she didn’t let him penetrate her vaginally. Maybe Rand just wanted to show how someone uses Marxist rhetoric to rationalize getting what they want, such as convincing a girl to have sex when she isn’t ready?

I would assume the difference between Kira and Marisha is that the former was ready for sex and took responsibility for it. (This also raises another interesting question. There was no birth control pill at that time, so what were Kira and Leo using for birth control? Condoms? Diaphragm? Pull out method?) Marisha, on the other hand, was not ready for sex, and wasn’t using anything to prevent Aleshka from ejaculating into her.

It’s also possible Ayn Rand included the story of Marisha’s abortion to give some background information on her, since she eventually marries Victor, who doesn’t really love her, and she has an unhappy marriage. I could also see the scene between Kira and Marisha as just a way to have the two women grow closer together. Initially they do not like each other, but after this, Marisha and Kira seem on friendlier terms. By page 250 (Chapter 1 of Part II), the two young women smoke cigarettes together and enjoy friendly chit-chat. Marisha is one of only three Communists in the novel that Ayn Rand portrays in a fairly sympathetic manner -the other two being Andrei and Stepan Timoshinko. Also, interestingly, all three are either dead or miserable by the end. (Marisha survives, but is in a loveless marriage and very unhappy.)

I cannot help but get the impression that Ayn Rand is saying with the story of Marisha and the story of Vava’s gynecologist father that communism causes abortion. Given her later, express views on abortion, this seems incongruous. Is it possible Ayn Rand changed her view on abortion from the time that she wrote “We The Living?” The situations in which abortion come up in the novel seem to me, morally ambiguous at best. For instance, Vava’s father seems to take a certain joy in being able to “lord it over” the people who used to be wealthier and of a better social status than him. At the party Kira attends at Vava’s house, the point of view switches to the doctor’s perspective:

“…he relished the feeling of a patron and benefactor to the children of those before whom he had bowed in the old days, the children of the industrial magnate Argounov [Kira’s father], of Admiral Kovalensky [Leo’s father]. He made a mental note to donate some more to the Red Air Fleet in the morning.” (Pg. 158)

These are not good or admirable feelings he is having. (Or, at least, they are very mixed.) He isn’t just enjoying his success. He’s enjoying the fact that people that were once above him are now below him. Furthermore, he is going to donate money to the Soviet state, which he regards as having brought him into his new position and power. He not only benefited from the Bolshevik revolution, but he is glad it happened, and supports the system.

In summary, the way this issue is presented in “We The Living” leaves a “question mark” in my mind, that I do not currently know the answer to.

Kira’s Speech About Andrei, Life, and Atheism

The final “incongruity” that I noted in “We the Living” was Kira’s speech to Andrei about atheism and life:

“Do you believe in God, Andrei?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. But that’s a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they’d never understand what I meant. It’s a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do -then, I know they don’t believe in life.”

“Why?”

“Because, you see, God -whatever anyone chooses to call God -is one’s highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It’s a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.”

“You’re a strange girl.”

“You see, you and I, we believe in life. But you want to fight for it, to kill for it, even to die -for life. I only want to live it.” (Pg. 117)

Most of this quote is “spot on” with the rest of Ayn Rand’s later, express philosophy. The last two sentences seem more difficult to reconcile. Here, Kira is speaking of Andrei, who is the “good communist” in the novel. (Incidentally, Andrei is my favorite character from the novel. I can completely relate to the unrequited love he suffers from, as most men probably can.) Rand thought communism, and the people who preached it, were anti-life:

“‘You who are innocent enough to believe that the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for material plunder—the mystics’ scramble for spoils is only a screen to conceal from their mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they clamor for wealth in imitation of living beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live, but their swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is escape.’ …‘You who’ve never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as ‘misguided idealists’—may the God you invented forgive you!—they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.’… ‘Death is the premise at the root of their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice….’” (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

I heard a recording of Ayn Rand where she said there was no such thing as an “honest communist”, and in answering a follow up question, that she “stretched the truth” with Andrei in “We The Living” for purposes of fiction. (I think this is fine, since I believe in “artistic license”, as I said.) She said something about Andrei growing up poor and in a backwards country, which somewhat excused it, but basically didn’t think such a person could exist in real life.

It’s possible Kira was just talking about Andrei, in particular, and not communists in general, but that could be misconstrued, pretty easily, to seem to say something positive about communism. I will say that in the wider context of the novel, that is not what was meant. For instance, Rand also has the following earlier exchange between Kira and Andrei:

“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, as so many of our enemies do, that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods.” (Andrei)

“I loathe your ideals.” (Kira) (Pg. 89)

Ayn Rand already had deep, philosophical, disagreements with the fundamental morality of communism, and not just with some of its nastier practices. She clearly already understood that the issue was deeper than politics, and reached down to morality. Nonetheless, given Rand’s staunch anticommunism, I wonder if she ever regretted including a description of a communist as “believing in life”, as Kira claimed in the above quote?

These were the three things that raised questions in my mind because they are not obviously reconcilable, to me, with some things that Rand wrote later. But, keep in mind that I’m just some guy on the Internet, with no special knowledge of literature, Ayn Rand, or of fiction writing, so I’d love to hear from someone else who has thought about any of this.