The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a grotesque violation of the way a free society conducts politics.

No matter how bad his ideas were, we benefited from their public articulation for the simple reason that bad ideas only reinforce good ideas as long as anyone is willing to think—and if no one is, then no amount of killing will save us.

Kirk was, however, the cause of his own death in the sense that the mysticism he preached demands a violent response to the persuasion he practiced.

Therefore, the answer to this attack on our civil rights—meaning those rights that protect our ability to influence the government, of which the freedom to discuss political issues is one—is to embrace reason.

Sometimes people mean what they say. Often they do not.

When health insurance CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated—an act of even greater evil than the assassination of Kirk, and more widely accepted because of it—mainstream media briefly denounced his murder and then explained at length the understandable reasons that existed to murder him.

Anyone who responded in this way endorsed the murder.

This is because every explicit statement comes packaged with an implicit statement made by one’s choice of subject, and these two statements can and often do contradict each other.

If one responds to a murder by focusing on how the victim was bad, then one is implying that the murder was good even if one made a preliminary, perfunctory statement to the contrary.

Do not refrain from condemning such responses out of a misplaced sense of objectivity. Considering only explicit speech and ignoring context is the opposite of objectivity because it is based on the premise that any process of conscious judgment is really just a game of musical chairs played with one’s feelings. The logical conclusion is that logical conclusions have nothing to do with reality and that sticking to the facts is the only way to be safe.

This safety is an illusion, however.

Shorn of context—which includes their speaker’s language, intentions, etc.—words are noise. Even sensations require context. It is impossible, for example, to be aware of one color without simultaneously being aware of another by contrast. Awareness is contextual.

Therefore, do not reject logic and context in the name of objectivity. Instead, use logic to establish context and thereby achieve objectivity.

This means not to ignore someone’s choice of subject when interpreting his words, but to identify the meaning his choice of subject imparts to his words.

Here is my ranking of every anime I’ve watched, from worst to best, excluding Pokémon—which I watched 27 years ago as a child—Dragon Ball, and an anime or two that I watched while distracted and therefore cannot judge fairly.

I watched each of these in Japanese with subtitles.

#4 — Neon Genesis Evangelion

Note: I watched the original series and the original movies.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is unintelligible Freudian garbage, valuable only as an object lesson on the idea of “getting it.”

All creation is caused. Therefore, there is always something to “get.” However, that a creator was motivated by an idea does not matter if it is not “gettable” from his creation.

The show’s only virtues are its ‘90s-anime style and its central twist, which upends a cliché in an interesting way but is wasted on this disgusting nonsense.

“Cliché” is the word to use, by the way. “Trope” is an anti-concept that implies that classifiability is invalidating, which is anti-identity, and therefore anti-existence, and therefore anti-you.

#3 — Cowboy Bebop

Alfred Hitchcock often said, “Some films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake.”

Cowboy Bebop is certainly not cake. It’s a slice of life, even if the life in question is that of an interplanetary bounty hunter.

It took me a week to get through it, but it felt like it took months.

My experience with the show would have been even worse if I had not watched it immediately after Evangelion, compared to which boredom was a relief.

In a way, however, Bebop is worse than Evangelion.

Would you rather be stuck in traffic for hours without your phone, the radio, or company, or be in that same situation except that right outside your window is a massive wreck with blood and guts splattered everywhere?

The latter is at least more stimulating.

I liked one moment in Bebop, which was when Faye ate the last of the food and told the dog, “Those who don’t work, don’t eat. Go find your own food. Me? I’m okay. Women are grand by birth.”

Hot.

#2 — Attack on Titan

Attack on Titan is a late-medieval or early-modern version of Evangelion, in that both are about the last bastion of mankind holding out against giant, mysterious monsters.

One of the best things about the Japanese is their lack of respect for realism. Characters in Titan use hip-mounted grappling devices that allow them to swing around like Spider-Man while dual wielding swords. The show never makes a cowardly apology for this or for any of its other unrealistic inclusions.

It’s good, but its ending was obviously changed last-minute and retroactively ruins the rest of the show by contradicting every setup it was meant to pay off.

I can only speculate as to the reason, but this seems to have been done to appease those who wanted certain characters to end up together, or possibly to avoid controversy, given the subjects the show deals with (which I won’t go into because they constitute spoilers).

It’s often said that endings are the hardest part of a story to get right, but this is mistaken. Endings only appear to be the hardest part to get right because it is only at the end that a bad beginning or middle is revealed as such.

Attack on Titan is an unusual case where it is specifically the ending that is bad. The quality of the rest of the show is not an illusion. This was not a J.J. Abrams production. It could have ended well. It just didn’t.

Nonetheless, knowledge of the ending does render the rest of the show unwatchable. Since there are no discrete arcs, there are no rail cars to detach. It’s one big train, and it goes off a cliff.

Though I could never watch the show again given its catastrophic ending, I’ll keep coming back to its second opening (embedded below) until I die. It is at once grave and buoyant, as all the best art is.

If you’ve already decided that the disappointment is worth it, skip the video (since you’ll see it anyway) and go in as blind as possible. The mystery of the world is a big part of the show.

However, if you decide to watch the show because of the video, you’ll still be OK. The spoiler it contains is an early one.

Turn on subtitles unless you speak both Japanese and German.

#1 — Death Note

Death Note is one of my favorite pieces of fiction. I recommend it to anyone, even before Dragon Ball.

This is not because I like it more than Dragon Ball, but because it is both shorter—being 37 episodes as opposed to hundreds—and more widely appealing—being a crime drama as opposed to a martial arts show.

Like Breaking Bad, Death Note is an entry in the Crime and Punishment genre. It follows a character who breaks with his law-abiding past to commit a serious crime and traces the psychological consequences of committing that crime as the mystery of the motive behind it unfolds.

Death Note’s premise is: An ideal young man, disgusted by the evil he sees in the world, finds a notebook that allows him to kill anyone whose name he writes in it and uses it to become the ultimate vigilante, putting him at odds with an eccentric young detective whose genius rivals his own and who leads a police task force to take him down in a clash over competing conceptions of justice.

Now you know whether you want to watch the show.

You should also read Crime and Punishment if you haven’t—“should” referring to the fact that doing so would be worth it to you, not to any duty.

At the time of its original publication, which was serialized, people eagerly awaited each installment in the same way that people today await each episode of their favorite drama series. It wasn’t written for an esoteric literary clique.

The idea that serious art isn’t popular is wrong. The only reason that the great novels of our time aren’t widely read is that they don’t exist.

As for which translation to read, Constance Garnett is safe.

An emotion is a message from the subconscious about how a fact relates to one’s values. It is not always true, but it is always a definite assertion.

Joy says that something has been gained.

Sadness says that something has been lost.

Love says that something should be sought.

Hate says that something should be avoided.

(These concepts are broader than the versions used in everyday life. “Love,” for example, refers to any degree of desire, rather than to the greatest degree specifically.)

Each emotion has a function. Joy and sadness are the ends that make love and hate possible, while love and hate are the means of driving one toward or away from what will bring joy or sadness.

If one did not enjoy sandwiches, then one could not desire them. Conversely, if one did not desire them, then one would be much less likely to walk to the kitchen to make one, even if one did enjoy them.

The four emotions already mentioned are primary. Every other emotion has the same function as one of these, only more complex.

The function of anger, for instance, is to deter threats by inciting retaliation, rather than to move one away from them directly, as simple hate would.

That this is the function of anger is clear if one compares situations that provoke it with ones that do not.

Wasting one’s money on lottery tickets does not provoke it, but robbing someone to pay for those tickets does. This is because wasting one’s money, though possible to deter, is not a threat.

Property damage caused by the weather does not provoke it, but vandalism does. This is because the weather, though a threat, is impossible to deter.

The function is not the feeling, however. Anger is for deterrence, but it is about injustice, as these examples equally demonstrate.

This raises the question of how animals experience anger.

Dogs snarl and bark to warn off threats, yet they lack the moral concerns made possible by reason, including justice.

How is anger possible without a sense of justice?

It is not—but it is possible without an objective sense of justice. In fact, it is only possible without an objective sense of justice, and this can be verified through introspection.

Imagine that someone you were playing poker with cheated, and that you lost money as a result. If you understand justice in conventional terms, then this scenario will make you angry.

However, if you stop to consider that duty is a false concept, that the cheater has no fundamental obligation to you—even if he has one derived from what he owes himself—then you will find that your anger vanishes. You may still feel other emotions, such as disgust, but you will not feel anger.

This is because anger is not actually based on the concept of justice generally, but on the idea of intrinsic moral rights specifically.

Lacking the ability to reason, animals cannot consider alternatives beyond the perceptually apparent. This makes them largely amoral, but it does not make them robots. An animal still experiences a sense of ought in the form of its emotions.

It is the naive projection of these imperatives onto others—similar to the way that a child attempts to hide by closing his eyes—that is responsible for an animal’s sense that it has intrinsic rights, and hence for its capacity for anger.

A lion feels that it should hunt. It holds this truth to be self-evident. Consequently, when another lion infringes its territory, competing with it and making hunting more difficult, it feels that lion is wrong. When it roars, it is righteously declaring that its intrinsic rights are being violated.

No such rights exist, however. Justice is objective, which is to say that it is based on one’s relationship to others—on how one’s treatment of others redounds to oneself—rather than on some supernatural entitlement others supposedly possess.

Even though anger is false, do not feel guilty for experiencing it so long as you have not let it drive you to act irrationally. Even the most conscientious man will occasionally feel anger before he can summon the knowledge that will dispel it.

It is not even always unhelpful. It can aid one in situations that call for physical violence, which is why it exists in the first place, although in a free society—of which ours is still at least a crumbling semblance—anger does more harm than good.

It is therefore advantageous to gain some measure of control over one’s anger by recognizing that it, like the mirage of a desert oasis, is an illusion. Just as there is no water—only a misconstrued heat distortion—so there are no intrinsic moral rights—only feelings based on a false conception of justice.

Production is the essence of human existence, yet one half of the species is noticeably worse at it than the other.

Women are physically weaker than men, of course, but since wealth generation depends more on thought than manual labor, this does not explain the productive gap between the sexes.

Women’s inferior mathematical, mechanical, and navigational abilities also fail to explain it. Whatever their cognitive deficiencies, women retain the basic capacity to reason, and this can overcome any intellectual limitation.

Just as the man with the longest legs can walk no farther than anyone else—only faster—so the man with the biggest brain can reach no level of understanding beyond anyone else.

Speed is even less of an advantage in intellectual matters because those in front are constantly shortening the mental distance between themselves and those behind them by sharing what they have learned.

It is, therefore, only the willingness to think that distinguishes a genius from an ordinary mind.

Women rarely are geniuses, however, and this is not a culturally specific phenomenon.

Unlike the races, which have experienced different cultures for most of history due to geographical separation, the sexes have existed in equal numbers in every culture that has ever existed, including those most conducive to female achievement.

Ancient Greece, for example, was free enough that it would have produced some female philosophers worth studying if oppression were responsible for women’s lack of intellectual contributions to a society.

Yet, across all societies, over thousands of years, the number of noteworthy female thinkers that have existed is most reasonably rounded to zero.

The deepest reason for this—and for women’s inferior productivity generally—beyond any issue of physical strength or mental aptitude, is that women lack ambition.

This should be clear from the failure of the modern world to place any great number of women into positions of authority even as it blatantly discriminates against men.

No matter how much space is reserved for them under the false premise that they were formerly unwelcome, women are not interested in becoming elite producers.

This is not to say that women are utterly unproductive. Many do contribute to the productivity of mankind, just not as women.

In other words, wealth creation would decrease if women disappeared, but it would increase if they transformed into men (something which is not currently possible, gender ideology notwithstanding).

This fact is obvious enough that any further attempt to establish it would be pointless. As a female character written by a female author said, “the hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”

Therefore, let us sharpen this edge and move on: Women are weaker, dumber, and lazier than men, so why do they exist?

For reproduction, obviously—and partly.

It is true that sexual differentiation has enabled processes of genetic mixture and selection that have allowed many species, including our own, to survive, but these do not occur at the behest of a Platonic Form of Reproduction.

If squirrels did not mate, then they would die out, but if mating did not feel good, then they would not do it. No supernatural force would inculcate within them a duty to the future of squirrel-kind.

The form that reproduction takes, therefore, is the result of an ongoing negotiation between the requirements of a species’ survival and the interests of its individual members.

These interests become more complex as an organism’s awareness and ability to take action grow. For men, sex is about reveling in one’s competence as a man, which is to say, as a rational animal, which is to say, as a producer, production being “the application of reason to the problem of survival,” as Ayn Rand put it.

Sex is an act of super-production. By manufacturing joy itself—hers and, as a result, his own—a man goes beyond the problem of how to survive to solve the problem of why to survive.

The form of joy that a man experiences during sex—specifically, during orgasm—is happiness.

Happiness is a sense of metaphysical competence rooted in the knowledge that existence obeys the law of identity and is therefore intelligible to reason.

“Metaphysical” here does not mean “godly.”

To be godly is to have the power to transgress the bounds of the universe. To be manly is to have no need to.

Even though a man’s competence is the primary issue in sex, a woman still experiences a sense of exaltation when he demonstrates it on her. Her survival depends on his ability, and therefore her ability to draw a competent man into her service is itself a profound form of competence.

It is still a derivative form, however. Women are not subhuman, but they are subman. Happiness is therefore beyond them.

This can be seen in their relative lack of interest in orgasm. Since they do not experience happiness, for them orgasm differs from the rest of the sexual experience only in degree, whereas for men it differs in kind.

Men experience happiness because it is better to give than to receive—and it is men who play the active part in sex, pay for dates, take financial responsibility in marriage, etc.

However, providing for another is not only better than being provided for—it is better than providing for oneself.

This is because there is greater pleasure in an external perspective on the enjoyment one’s work has made possible than there is in an internal one—although personal consumption is, of course, entirely proper.

The relevant principle is that of objectification: The external is the real.

Just as one enjoys seeing others well-dressed even when one is well dressed oneself, so a man enjoys seeing a woman gorge on the fruit of his labor even when he knows its sweetness.

Yet, if women merely externalized consumption, homosexuality would be no perversion. Any man can consume.

What no man can do is look as fine as a woman while doing it. As J said to K in Men in Black, “You know what the difference is between you and me? I make this look good.”

Femininity is the stylization of consumption. When a woman paints her nails, she is showing off how far removed she is from the need to work—and thereby stressing her role as a consumer—by treating a universal symbol of labor as nothing but another opportunity to decorate herself.

Women are self-painted works of art, and their theme is pleasure—not happiness, the emotion of highest abstraction, but immediate, visceral, sensory and perceptual, concrete pleasure.

As passengers in life, women can become mesmerized by the beauty of the passing scenery in a way that men, as drivers, cannot—not without endangering them both.

However, as drivers, men benefit from women’s self-indulgence by experiencing their gratification vicariously.

In this way, men and women are perfect complements.

There is an asymmetry between them, however, in that a driver cannot have a passenger until he has learned how to drive, while a passenger can be driven without knowing anything.

In other words, men cannot be romantic before being productive, since they are romantic by providing, while women do not need to be—and ideally are not—productive at all.

On the other hand, a driver does not need a passenger—even if he might benefit from one tremendously—while a passenger does need a driver.

In other words, men are independent, while women live in accordance with their nature only in the context of a romantic relationship with a man.

For men, romance cannot be primary—for women, it must be.

As evidence that women have both the freedom and need to channel all of their energy into romantic pursuits, note how they make up the large majority of the audience for both love stories and dating simulators. “Shipping”—the practice of fantasizing romantic relationships between fictional characters—is also an almost exclusively female pastime.

Now, what about her?

Ayn Rand was unhappy with her role as a female leader of men. As a “man-worshiper”—by which she meant males specifically—she desperately wanted to find men she could look up to. Her superiority made this impossible, however, and inevitably resulted in a tumultuous romantic life.

Ayn Rand’s experience as an intellectual Joan of Arc demonstrates the point of this post. She proved that it is possible for a woman to be the best—and also that it is unhealthy for her to be.

Rather than fight their nature, women should embrace the truth: A woman’s purpose is to objectify a man’s success by enjoying it.

How would you define bribery?

Bribery is payment for a specific judgment.

Here are three examples:

1. A coach pays a referee to favor his team.

2. A lobbyist pays a congressman to vote for a bill.

3. A criminal pays a police officer to overlook his crimes.

It is, of course, legitimate to pay someone to serve as a judge, but if the cause of a judge’s conclusions is the desire for a financial reward, rather than logic, then those conclusions are untrustworthy.

Is the concept in any way distorted or badly applied today because of altruism?

Yes.

A businessman might pay off an agent of the government in order to be permitted to transgress any of the following four kinds of restrictions:

1. Laws which are just.

2. Laws which are unjust, but clear and tolerable.

3. Laws which are clear but onerous.

4. Laws which are incoherent.

Obviously paying to violate a just law constitutes bribery, but it is also bribery to pay to violate a law simply because it is unjust. As long as it is concrete and not too destructive, one should adhere to it out of respect for the value of the rule of law.

There are areas and industries, however, where payoffs are a necessary and expected form of self-defense against regulations that are either ruinous or unintelligible. The concept of “bribery” has no meaning in these areas, because the process of judging whether a man has done the impossible, such as meet unreachable or undefined legal requirements, is illegitimate to begin with and therefore cannot be corrupted.

When the government regulates in such a way that bribery is required, then what is occurring is not bribery at all, but extortion.

The public, however, considers any attempt by business to circumvent any restriction placed upon it by government to be illegitimate, because it believes that government, being non-commercial, is selfless, and therefore objective, lawful, and just, while business, being profit-driven, is selfish, and therefore subjective, lawless, and unjust.

In this way, the lens of altruism makes extortion look like bribery.

Does the term apply only when law officials are involved, or does it apply to dealings between private citizens as well?

Bribery is a form of fraud and need not involve representatives of the law, as the example of the coach bribing the referee demonstrates. In that case, anyone who paid to see the game would have a right to compensation, and both the referee and the coach would be liable. (This is a philosophical statement, not legal advice.)

Why is lobbying not a form of bribery when direct payment for a political decision is?

Direct payment for a political decision is bribery because it makes payment the cause of the decision rather than an honest evaluation of whether, for instance, a proposed piece of legislation is the best way of protecting the rights to life, liberty, and happiness, which is supposed to be the standard in an American context.

On the other hand, there is no corruption in financially supporting a politician who votes in accordance with your views, so long as there is no understanding that he is doing so only because you are giving him money.

Of course, he might allow himself to be biased by the financial rewards you offer even if you never come to an arrangement with him, but if politicians could be deposed for inscrutable mental processes, anarchy would follow. When those processes have been demonstrably corrupted, however, as in the case of bribery, then removal and punishment are appropriate.

So, why not just outlaw financial contributions of any kind and avoid the possibility of bias altogether?

Because either the public controls who is in the government, largely by choosing which political campaigns to fund, or the government itself does, and when the state controls its own membership, tyranny is the result.

In any case, concerns about money corrupting politics are misplaced. Actual corruption is a minor issue. Most of what people call “corruption” is the result of collectivism, which, having no basis in reality, offers no coherent standard by which to make decisions, leaving politicians to be accused of corruption when they make them by whatever standards are left, their own financial interest being a sensible one to turn to.

In early 2022, a group of Canadian cross-border truckers protested a COVID vaccine mandate by occupying Ottawa in their trucks, thereby blocking or otherwise disrupting traffic. Many who opposed the mandate nonetheless disagreed with the methods of the truckers, on the grounds that they were anarchistic and violated the rights of all those whose traffic they disrupted.

The truckers did not violate anyone’s rights, however, because the state had created a conflict of interest between the truckers and everyone else by eliminating the method of protest the truckers might have used in a free society, and in such conflicts, the concept of “rights” does not apply.

It is relevant to the legitimacy of their actions that the truckers were themselves heavy users of the roads they were blocking. In a society that respected property rights, these roads would be privately owned, and those who paid to use them would have influence over their owners. If these owners were suffering financially due to decreased business resulting from a vaccine mandate, then it is possible that they would close their roads as a form of protest.

Regardless of the wisdom of such shrugging, the owners would have the right to engage in it. Government control of the roads makes this impossible, however.

One cannot withhold financial support from the state by refusing to pay to use the roads, which is how one could withhold it from private owners, because regardless of whether one uses the roads, the state will expropriate his wealth to pay for them at the point of a gun through taxation.

Even in a free society, where voluntary contributions to the government replaced taxation, there would still be a difference between the state and a private business. It would be possible to withhold financial support from the government, but the state would still be significantly insulated from economic influence by its monopoly on the use of force, and so its controlling the roads would still either crowd out or diminish the efficacy of legitimate forms of protest.

The introduction of force into society creates conflicts of interest among men by placing them at metaphysical odds with each other. In this case, force in the form of state control of the roads necessitated a conflict between cross-border truckers and the rest of society. It is not wrong for either side to fight for its interests under these circumstances. What is wrong is to create a situation that requires such fighting.

The rider [reason] evolved to serve the elephant [emotion]. — Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind

Jonathan Haidt is the most prominent modern champion of the idea that, as Hume put it, “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Like many modern defenders of ancient errors, Haidt dresses up his philosophical ideas as scientific theories. In this case, he defends his conception of reason as mere rationalization by claiming that, in the process of man’s biological evolution, nature selected for his ability to make excuses for doing whatever he feels like, not for his ability to acquire an abstract level of awareness.

This is wrong, because our need to rationalize derives from our ability to legitimately reason. We only need to make excuses for doing whatever we feel like because we are unavoidably aware, on some level, of the standard of rationality.

Your cat runs around in the middle of the night like a maniac because it feels like it. It is uninhibited by any need for abstract justification. It is only once a creature can reason that it feels any need to justify following its feelings.

Rationalization is a workaround for an obstacle—conceptual awareness—that did not exist before the possibility of rationalization itself did. Reason cannot have been naturally selected for on the basis of the rationalization it makes possible, because it is itself what makes rationalization necessary.

Rationalization is the abuse of our capacity for abstraction, an attempt to turn it against itself and thereby nullify its demands, allowing the rationalizer to behave like the animal he dreams of being.

Ayn Rand said that “evil philosophies are systems of rationalization.” The idea that reason exists to facilitate excuse-making is a rationalization of rationalization.

Normally it would be foolish to attempt to unseat a politician by setting him up against the opponent he most recently defeated, but the unusual way Joe Biden achieved victory in 2020 makes nominating Donald Trump again in 2024 a plausible strategy for the Republicans.

It was unusual that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election because he ran on a lack of negatives rather than on any positives, as “not Trump” rather than as “Joe Biden.” This strategy usually fails, as it did in 2012 when Mitt Romney ran as “not Obama.”

The reason this strategy worked for Biden is that at the time of his election the media had been directing a terrorist campaign against his opponent’s supporters for six years, stretching from when it first urged everyone to “punch a Nazi” to when it fomented the racist “Black Lives Matter” riots.

A common explanation for Biden’s 2020 win is that people just wanted to “return to normalcy” after the madness of the Trump years. This is true, but not in the sense that is usually intended. Just as people did not suffer primarily due to COVID, but due to the forced confinement that statists used COVID to rationalize, so people were not weary primarily of Trump, but of the hysteria, lies, and terrorism that were the left’s response to his entry into politics.

Nonetheless, this response did intimidate the public out of re-electing him. One of the reasons we can be confident of this is that it is abnormal for an incumbent to lose, partly because of the advantages his incumbency confers.

One of these advantages is greater attention from the media, but this is only beneficial when a politician has won his seat by advertising himself, not by hiding from voters, which is how Joe Biden won. If attention benefited him, then he would not have avoided it, and so what usually constitutes an incumbency advantage is actually a disadvantage in his case.

As a candidate, Joe Biden could hide, but as the president, he cannot. Now that the public has gotten a better look at him than it ever got during his 2020 campaign, it might decide to elect Donald Trump instead.

Can art include elements which are not re-creative?

If you recall, Ayn Rand defined art as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments,” meaning simply a model of the world that emphasizes what its creator considers important in life. To achieve this emphasis, an artist picks and chooses what to include in his model.

For example, if he believes that the efficacy of reason is an illusion, he might make a movie about scientists using genetic engineering to revive the dinosaurs for a theme park, and then include the creatures escaping and eating a bunch of people.

He would not include the project’s investors making a huge profit on a successful park, even if he believed that such a thing could happen, because on his view that outcome would be an accident.

But suppose some scientists really had revived the dinosaurs, and they really had escaped from captivity, and this had been recorded on video. Would it be in keeping with the principles of a rational esthetics to use this footage in a movie? Is it legitimate to use something real in a work of fiction?

There’s an anecdote from the making of The Room, the most famous so-bad-it’s-good movie ever made, about director Tommy Wiseau’s approach to filming a scene set in an alleyway. He insisted on having a set built for the scene, and when someone suggested that he simply film in a real alleyway, Wiseau responded that he was making a real Hollywood movie, and real Hollywood movies use sets.

This is the approach to art implied by the question I received, except that Wiseau didn’t go far enough. He probably did use polystyrene boards rather than real bricks for the walls of his set, but the fake brick walls would still have been made of real polystyrene, so it would have been necessary to use some kind of material that only appeared to be polystyrene to have been truly re-creative.

But then, that material would still have been made up of real molecules, which would have been made up of real atoms, which would have been made up of real electrons, etc. In the end, Wiseau would have had to conjure matter from the void in order to satisfy the demands of re-creation, but even that wouldn’t have been good enough, because whatever he would have created ex nihilo would still have really been whatever it would have been.

It is, therefore, impossible to produce a work of art, at least if we accept that “re-creative elements” are all we have to work with. If we do not, then we face the question of how it is possible to create something fake when all that exists is real.

In the Sophistical Refutations, Aristotle identified an error he called the “fallacy of division.” This is the mistake of assuming that what is true of a whole must be true of its parts.

For instance, if a ruler is twelve inches long, then each segment of that ruler must also be twelve inches long. Or, if a ball can roll down a hill, then the hemispheres it comprises must each separately be able to roll down a hill as well. Of course, this won’t work. Only a full sphere can roll continuously and make it down a hill.

So, when does a combination of props and actors and artificial lighting, which are real objects and people and electromagnetic radiation, achieve sphericity and gain the ability to roll?

Real things become a re-creation of reality when they come to be arranged in such a way that they appear to be a model of reality from the perspective of a particular kind of consciousness. The characteristic which the whole possesses but the parts do not is the characteristic of appearing a certain way to man.

The premise of the question I received is that re-creativeness is an intrinsic property of certain things, and then the question itself was whether art can tolerate any impurity in its composition in the form of real components. But there are no fake components. There aren’t two kinds of things, the fake and the real, and the question the artist confronts isn’t whether to pick only from the fake pile or to take some things from the real pile as well. Everything is real. The question is only what combination and arrangement of real things will appear a certain way to man.

There is no such thing as a “re-creative element.” “Re-creation” is a concept pertaining to the relationship between a thing and a mind. Just as there is nothing which is fake in itself, so there is nothing which is intrinsically re-creative. Just as something’s being fake always has to do with how it’s perceived, so something’s being a re-creation always has to do with its relationship to a particular kind of consciousness.

Art is made up of real things, and what makes a certain arrangement of those real things a re-creation of reality is how it appears to man.

Readers of Atlas Shrugged often come away invigorated by the novel’s dramatic portrayal of the power of righteousness and the helplessness of evil in the face of uncooperative victims. However, they also often come away confused about what it means to refuse to cooperate with evil, to “shrug.” This confusion is based on an error that is both deadly and widespread, and those who fail to correct it will end their lives, prematurely or otherwise, in despair.

The path to confusion begins with the realization of a truth: that evil is parasitic. The statist politician, for instance, survives only as a leech on the tax-paying businessman. If the latter produced no wealth, then the former would have none to redistribute in exchange for votes, or with which to fund the very tax agents who shake the businessman down.

One reaches the optimistic conclusion that good occupies a position of power over evil. It has the ability to deprive evil of the material wealth it depends on but cannot itself produce.

But one soon grasps an ominous implication: that this deprivation costs the good at least as much as it does the evil. To avoid having his wealth expropriated, a businessman can refuse to produce any, but this is productive suicide, which differs from a bullet to the head only in that it allows a man to linger on as a zombie dimly aware of his own non-existence.

The good man is thus faced with a dilemma: either allow himself to be a victim of evil men, whose cruelty is limited only by their need for his continued productiveness, or relinquish even the pittance left to him as his incentive to endure their abuse, and overthrow his oppressors at the cost of his own life.

A man’s desire to live becomes his vulnerability, and the extent of his passion the extent of his disarmament. Anyone can attack him and then deter retaliation by appealing to his selfishness. “Shouldn’t you be more concerned with the positive than the negative? Wouldn’t it be wrong to sacrifice your values just to punish me?”

One often hears leftist intellectuals, of the kind found in the pages of Atlas, mock Atlas in this way. “What are the rich going to do about higher taxes? ‘Shrug’? Then they get nothing. They’re too greedy for that.”

How is a good man to respond to such a sadistic villain? Declare that he is a bad person?

It is actually evil, then, which occupies a position of power over good. In such a world, life is impossible, and to such a fact, suicide is the only honest response.

But my failure to take seriously the possibility of pronouncing moral judgment will be conspicuous to some. Those who felt the suggestion was appropriately rhetorical are afflicted by cynicism.

Cynicism is the belief that appealing to morality is ineffectual. This is usually the result of accepting a false, and therefore impracticable, ethics of sacrifice, but even an egoist can become cynical if he fails to introspect on the psychological cost of moral violations. The egoistic cynic believes that good has a material advantage over evil, but not a moral one. This leaves suicide as the only form of shrugging there is.

In reality, however, there is another form, a form that is not only less destructive, but more effective.

Suppose you replied to the leftist, “So you’re celebrating your ability to victimize defenseless men?” Of course, he would reply that the businessman is not merely a “defenseless man,” but an exploiter of the poor.

The cynic does not doubt that appealing to economic fallacies is a losing strategy in a contest decided by reason. He simply does not believe that the leftist would agree to enter such a contest. Why would he make a claim that a freshman economics student could refute when he could just admit to reveling in his power over helpless victims and get away with it? Why would someone who desires to do wrong, and who has the power to do it, submit to moral evaluation?

The reason is that conscious acts of evil incur so great a psychological penalty that they are impossible to perform without debilitating consequences. See the fate of James Taggart in Atlas for a dramatization of this fact. A man cannot acknowledge that his motives are evil without self-destructing. The rationalizations for wrongdoing one encounters everywhere today testify not to morality’s irrelevance, but to its supremacy.

Ayn Rand declared that the way to lead a rational life in an irrational society is to pronounce moral judgment, because it is by this method, not suicide, that one changes society. It works this way because what is right and true does actually matter, even—and in a way, especially—to the wicked.

That suicide is not the path to societal change does not alter the fact that there are times when the actions of evil men make an enterprise unworthy of further pursuit, and at these times it is proper to end such enterprises. Never scuttle an endeavor just to make a point—you can make that point better without injuring yourself—but when evil has robbed your work of its rewards, then use that fact to amplify your moral pronouncements.

Of course, evil depends on material aid in addition to moral cover, but it is impossible to give the former without also granting the latter, making material support a derivative issue. A society that recognizes something as evil will support it neither morally nor materially except to the extent that it is coerced into doing so.

To either live or fight is an impossible choice. Do not let the error of cynicism fool you into thinking you have to make it. It is not the appeal to morality that is ineffectual, but the attempt to ignore it. The evil that flourishes in our time does so because we have failed to publicly identify it, not because we have chosen to live. Continue living, but start fighting.