On December 6, 2023, Jake Julius of rattlesnake TV, the podcaster, interviewed Ayn Randian philosopher Stephen Hicks. The interview was an hour long, and I took notes on the interview and will comment on my notes.
Stephen Hicks (S after this): “Philosophy is the mother discipline if you are interested in everything, the ideal platform.”
Jake Julius (J after this): “What is it to be a modern philosopher?”
S: “We just think more. Humans have a big brain which we have to use actively. To be a human being is to think about what matters in your life. What are your top goals?”
My response: Stephen serves as a wise and needed corrector of the deficiencies in the thinking of the wise and brilliant Jordan Peterson. Peterson is too gloomy: he lacks the worldly optimism and expectation that secular humanists have that happiness and pursuits in this world are achievable, and morally desirable to look into, and to invest time and money into.
Peterson dismisses human promotion of self-esteem, and I think a Randian scholar like Hicks would be more appreciative of the worthiness of such a personal goal.
Hicks often repeats that humans have big brains but that each person needs to use his mental horsepower to become smarter, to enjoy life, to be ethical, and to make something of himself. I do not hear this from Peterson.
For my own Mavellonialist philosophy, I would endorse Hick’s promotion of humans having a big brain that they should enjoy and apply, since that dovetails nicely into my advocacy of self-realization as the obligatory end of each human living. Though our big brains have natural and supernatural limits, we can know, finesse, and originate ideas by applying our thinking, feeling and intuition to a myriad of subjects.
S: “You plan what to do with your life and think more broadly than that. Is this the only life there is? Is there an afterlife? Are there gods or a god, and how does that relate to this life?
To the degree that one thinks about life, one is a philosopher, or is philosophically thinking about life. To be a professional philosopher is to think systematically about these issues. The issues are complicated and there are good answers, weird answers, and arguments. We study the arguments laid out by the geniuses, the giant philosophers across history.”
J: “Do you ever read someone, and you have to put them down for a moment and just say wow?”
S: “That happens a lot across 2600 years of genius philosophers. They articulate a view you had not though of before, or you had thought you were on pretty safe ground. It is an aesthetic moment if beautifully said.”
J: “Lay out for us amateurs, a few good books to get us started.”
S: “I will answer that autobiographically. I met a great lecturer in political science. I discovered one’s political views are hinged upon one’s moral views as to what the government should be doing. That depends on what one thinks one ought to be doing. It requires a moral theory that hinges on what you think human beings are, what are their capacities, their general development.
If you are on campus, take interesting professors and read Atlas Shrugged.”
J: “Did you write a book on Rand?”
S: “No, I did some articles and debates on her. The Internet Encyclopedia article on her is by me. You want philosophers to push you to make you think.”
J: “Absolutely. What is postmodernism?”
S: “That is a huge topic. There are lots of philosophers out there and one should always review them all.”
My response: What I like about Hicks--and likely this characterization is consistently applicable to other philosophers belonging to the Atlas Society, Hicks’s associates—is his pluralistic or nonbinary interpretation of reality. He seems that way in personality as well as outlook, not a splitter, not a black and white thinker. The thinkers following the Ayn Rand Institute seem to be more categorical and binary in their thinking, for me.
Hicks advises that the student thinker study all sides of every issue, and that is an objective or moderate recommendation. It is the more extreme, irrational, illogical thinkers that are one-side or one-dimensional in their interests and beliefs.
S: “But in philosophical arguments there is always a 3-way debate. You are not to accept dichotomies, either/or positions. There is a third position historically and it concerns postmodernism.
Some philosophers are religion-friendly: there is a natural world, but beyond that there is a supernatural world. God or the gods created the world and govern the world, and we owe the gods our obligation to that world. Often religion-friend philosophies run into religious challenges. They cannot empirically detect God. Arguments for God’s existence are seen as weak, so people resort to faith, revelation, mystical experience or trusting in tradition.
They deemphasize materialistic pursuits, not need money; they push religious philosophy in a certain direction.
Then there are science-friendly philosophers that take the natural world seriously. They are skeptical about gods and the spiritual world. What we know is the natural world. The natural world works according to cause and effect. We sense it. We systematize it.
It is our sensations and perceptions of the world, the data we gather, we do experiments applying logic and math. The whole goal of this is to live as natural beings in this physical world. We want to have a better life, happy and flourishing in this world.
This longstanding debate between religious philosophies and scientific philosophies is a dichotomy. But there is a third position that is sometimes a minority position and sometimes a majority position. This position is very skeptical and pessimistic, attacking both sides of the dichotomy.
You religious people say you have all the answers to life, and you scientists say you have all the answers to life but there are no answers to life. There are no answers. This skepticism announces that no one knows anything.
You religious people: your goal is to achieve the good life in the afterlife to be reunited with the gods. You science people say the good is to live healthy here and for a long time, a meaningful career, strong personal relations, a great sex life, and so on. You have no regrets if you are satisfied with your life.
Here is the third position: you are both optimistic about ultimate values. The truth of everything is ultimately shit. It all is ultimately empty. There is no true love. There is no happy, ever-after story. Everything you build will crumble eventually, and this outlook is a values nihilism.”
My response: I agree with Hicks that there are currently philosophers (few of them) that are religious-friendly (They would sympathize with premodernism.) and many that are science-friendly (These are the modernists.).
I don’t see this as a three-way debate. I do see the debate as an epistemological dichotomy between dogmatists or optimists on one side, and the skeptics and pessimists on the other (These are the ancient and current postmodernists or antirealists.) side. The epistemological optimists are upbeat about the human capacity and possibility of knowing objective reality completely or partially; these optimists would be the religious-friendly and science-friendly philosophers.
I would see these optimists as opposing each other one side of the debate—that universal values are certainly graspable or knowable with probable certainty, explicable whether one is religion-friendly or science-friendly—versus the other side of the debate, the nihilistic postmodernists.
S: “Regarding postmodernism let us first go back to premodernism, which was in effect in Western philosophy from about 400 CE to 1300 CE. Rome in 400 CE is declining, and Europe was sliding into the Dark Ages, going medieval for about 500 years. Christian religious philosophy is dominant in the West: supernatural, authoritarian, otherworldly, with some Stoicism and Greek thinking included.
They were valorizing priests and nuns, committed to vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Lives were short. Everyone was seeking salvation in the next world.
When we get into the modern world about 500 years ago, that religious philosophy is challenged by worldly people, people interested in the world and other cultures. Columbus crosses the ocean and Europeans realize that there are foreign peoples and other religions. The Greeks and Romans are rediscovered, pagan, naturalistic and not Christian.
With modernism cam astronomy, science, a naturalistic, humanistic understanding of what humans can do, with the rise of humanistic individualism. We gain science, technology, and modernistic philosophy.
Then in the late 20th century postmodernism comes along and is now 2 or 3 generations old. It is a skeptical challenge to premodern and modern philosophies. By 1950 philosophy is skeptical both towards science and religion. Science and religion reach dead ends. Skeptics are not sure what to replace them with, or what is possible to replace them with. At its core, the movement of postmodernism is skeptical, adversarial, cynical, pessimistic and mystical.”
J: “Why would someone accept a skeptical, negative, cynical philosophy. Would you tell me?”
S: “There are two ways that the young college student come to embrace postmodernism. If you were already a damaged, alienated, rebellious teenager wanting to tear down the accomplishments of your parents’ generation, you would like postmodernism. If you were perhaps abused in some way or your household was in some way intellectually or emotionally oppressive, you might like postmodernism.
For these students encounter philosophy, they are predisposed to be pessimistic, jaded and see postmodernism as an affirmation of where they are psychologically. Postmodernism matches their damaged selves, and it provides a framework of rationalization for how they are.
Second, people become postmodernists not because they because they like it, but because they got argued into it. Kids growing up in a religious background are rationalistic families, and then encounter some good skeptical arguments against religion or science and the scientific method. These kids learn to be skeptical against objective moral truths or against the hope to build win-win social relations.
They come to doubt that they can know anything or that there are objectives values. There are no genuine relations among human beings, no point to life, so end up as postmodernists.”
My response: Hicks highlights that no genuine human relations are possible, say the postmodernists; all there is endless, vicious power struggling for food, money, influence, territory, and things. This life of constant, eternal, sadomasochistic fighting for power and supremacy is the core human reality, carried out between individuals, but postmodernists see it work itself primarily out between rival groups, and they side with those groups intersectionally—from their point of view—oppressed, held down and back by oppressor groups.
Jordan Peterson has done an admirable job refuting this bleak view of human social prospects. Peterson notes that the negative interacting in power relations is not the only human social potential: we can cooperate, and all prosper in happiness, sharing and plenty in modern, free-market democracies.
I would add that power games and power-relationships can be powerful but peaceful, nonviolent cooperation games among anarchist-individuator supercitizens in a free market constitutional democracy.
J: “This is where it get interesting. One of the fundamental premises of postmodernism is that there are no universal truths, there is no meaning to life—we are just atoms bouncing around. Are there universal moral truths and can we know what they are?”
S: “If you say there are no universal truth, no answers, that nobody knows anything, those are universal claims.”
My response: Yes, the postmodernists have contradicted themselves with this absolutist generalization.
J: “Here is the fundamental fallacy of postmodernism, making a sweeping claim.”
S: “How to make a skeptical claim without being self-contradictory, making the sweeping generalization that one can’t know anything. The postmodernist responds by saying so what, I’m contradicting myself. It is only a problem if contradiction is a problem for me, which it is not. Postmodernist contradiction only is a problem if I accept logic but I’m skeptical about that too. I do not accept that I have to be logical. I’m just using language for rhetorical purposes.”
My response: Though I am a moderate and dialetheist, I believe the law of contradiction holds for all or most of us most of the time, so postmodernist self-contradiction is a damning criticism of their bitter, dark, empty worldview. They are illogical and corrupt and to be fiercely opposed, though their negative epistemological criticism of epistemological optimism remains therapeutic and corrective, as long as we do not travel too far down the path of nihilism as postmodernist urge us to so engage.
They lie all the time: they use language to obfuscate and gaslight those with positive values, but they also use language not just for rhetorical purpose, but they rhetorical flourishes are a weapon to mask and create openings among good people, so that postmodernists can advance their collective holy cause, and take over the world.
S: “Everyone just has their subjective values agenda. If I give you a logical argument that works on you, fine. If I give you an illogical argument with internal contradictions and tension that is fine. If that works on you, all is just a subjective power game.”
My response: The postmodernists want to win, to gain power for themselves and their holy cause, Marxism. They are willing to employ rhetorical and power word games to advance their subjective agenda; they will employ illogical, contradictory arguments--if they work, and bamboozle the young, the confused, the discontented, the malcontents. They will hit the field of discourse in the cultural war with logical, consistent arguments when effective or convenient, as long as such arguments help them gain ground and followers.
In part, they are pathological liars in person and a group: they lie to gain power, and do not believe their own irrational, inconsistent arguments. On the other hand, they are so immersed in the worlds of lies, propaganda, groupthink, and mouthing Party-sanctioned tropes that they can mix contradictory elements and spout nonsense about there being no metanarrative, no objective moral values anywhere to be had, and suffer not at all from cognitive dissonance. They serve, wholly and passionately, a holy cause, the answer to everything, while they sneer that all values are subjective opinion, and that there are no commensurable, overarching themes guiding human behavior. Somehow, epistemological skepticism and postmodernism fit well with mass movement absolutism. In one sense they lie, and in another sense, there is a coherency in the gibberish that they babble and adhere to.
S: “One has to come with counterarguments. If they deny that the scientific method does not give us certainty, I would argue that it does. It does not always give us absolute knowledge, but sometimes it does.”
My response: These brief remarks from Hicks is very salient and significant for me. He is a Randian, so they are epistemological optimists, and here he asserts that the scientific method does give us certainty and absolute knowledge at least sometimes; that is hugely important. If the smart Randian professors in 2023 acknowledge that objective knowledge about reality, nature and values can be certainly perceived, conceptualized and described linguistically, evidentially, or mathematically, they would ease my worries about my own epistemological agnosticism about humans ever being able to know for certain the world of noumena as nature or supernature. I am not a pure Objectivist, but am a qualified Objectivst or modestly optimistic epistemologist; I settle moderately for human capacity to gain probable certainty or probably true knowledge of nature and supernature, and that has been my defense against postmodern skepticism and doubt.
Hicks the atheist and materialist is not going to grant me that supernature exists, let alone that I could gain probably certain or absolute knowledge of deities and the world of spirit—which he is convinced are nothing, do not exist, and we cannot ever conceptualize or make claims about nothingness, what does not exist. Still, I know supernature and the good deities exist, and probably certain knowledge about their existence, intentions and expectations of us as our bosses is sufficient for me to build a life around. Still, I am quite fond of Randians and other physicalists, for they have much to teach we religious believers, and we must listen, cherish them and protect them against religious fundamentalists that would go after and bracket scientists and secular humanists that do not believe in God. The Divine Couple do not want us going after any group of people: that is what the devils do.
I am not an expert in epistemological argumentation as Hicks is, but I will seek to find out what are the epistemological, current arguments for their absolute optimism about the human ability to use their big brains to encounter and record their encounters with the world of noumena as it is in itself.
S: “We need to go through all the arguments. In cognition science puts us in contact with the world. Science integrates those things into a significant package. Science begins with observations of the world. Our senses and perception put us in contact with the world. We perceive objects, their actions, relations and so forth.
We need an articulate defense of sense perception, of concepts, of abstractions, of puzzles that arise. We as humans form concepts and then put concepts into propositions and state them. We form historical and fictional narratives that are meaningful to us. Propositions lead to narratives.
We are all unique individuals yet are equals. These narratives are significant and meaningful to us. How can these narratives from long dead thinkers be meaningful to us in the contemporary world? Why do fictional stories make us aware of the power of narratives?
Scientists put together propositions and theories to explain how the world works. They use logic and mathematics to explain it. Where does this logic and mathematics come from?
The point is just to respond to postmodernism as that what comes at a long end of philosophical arguments. They insist that sense perception is crap. Concept formation is a crap narrative, strung along subjectively. Logic is a subjective construction. Mathematics is nothing.”
J: “I think it is interesting that some postmodernists do not seem stupid. Where should they get credit, so we are not too quick to reach a binary conclusion? Where do they have a point and then go off the edge?”
My response: Jake, for an amateur intellectual, is spot on: these two questions about postmodernism, at this juncture of their conversation, are well characterized, and seek to elicit the relevant responses from Hicks.
S: “Good question. I will be both complimentary and uncomplimentary to them. In my book, Explaining Postmodernism, I note how postmodernists in the modern world are a reaction against reason and naturalism to reach skepticism and postmodernism.
Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, and others are brilliant even though I think they are fundamentally wrong.”
My response: Dennis Prager and Eric Hoffer have never denied that academics and intellectuals are not brilliant and experts. One wonders about how they apply their expertise. Prager notes that most of them lack wisdom and religious faith, and that renders them foolish, stupid, cruel, evil, and able to make very poor decisions like promoting group power struggles, collectivist-altruist ethics, the need to worship and obey elites, Marxist economics, and totalitarian political structures.
S: “The first generation of postmodernists, Foucalt, Derrida, Lyotard and Rorty, wrote and lectured from the 1950s to the 1970s. They all had PhDs in philosophy from top universities. They are fundamentally wrong. They are postmodernist because they bought into the best skeptical arguments available, and then conclude that these arguments are unanswerable. What do we do next they ask if we think reason is crap, that we know nothing about the world.
There are no certainties, so postmodernism grows out of that. Any intellectual needs to engage with their arguments.”
My response: Hicks wanted them to do more to develop their skeptical arguments against reason.
S: “Where I am less complimentary is that postmodernism has declined as an intellectual movement. I am not impressed with postmodernists since Rorty, Derrida. It has declined in the last two generations. These current philosophers are clever enough to get PhDs and to get published but not original or brilliant now.
This intellectual mediocrity is built into the postmodern project because if you have reached a skeptical conclusion as postmodernism does that there are no truths, that it is pointless, and that the scientific method is crap, then, at 22, you quit intellectually growing, and you bracket off learning. I will now be non-rational, non-logical, non-scientific.
There is no way for us to understand each other. We are all trapped in our own subjective narrative. These subjective narratives are now race-based, gender-based, ethnic-based, based in identity politics.
Human relations are not possible for all are locked into their own styles and can’t communicate. With this epistemological worldview, it is very hard to understand where others are coming from. You just stay within what you already happen to believe. You are completely alienated from the cognition and values of other cultures: they cannot be understood so why try. What possibilities do you have as a postmodernist to understand ancient Greek thinkers?
I am not interested I history because there are no universal truths, no cause and effect principles allowing us to learn from history.
If you read postmodern journals, you see they are only interested in current issues and interests, cut off from ancient and other inputs. Postmodernists do not study Locke and Aristotle. They started out with brilliant skeptics but are now stultified, now an institutionalized type of decline. I go to a bookstore and glance at postmodernist books, and I read arguments from 25 years ago. These tropes are about politically successful colonizing of language and much of the higher education (movement directors), law school, education schools, some professions too. Postmodernism is intellectually inert but flourishing culturally.”
J: “Are these ideas of postmodernism destructive? Does the idea of resentment attract resentful people?”
S: “It goes both ways as people come of age and think about things in a principled way. If they already have a resentment psychology there are lots of ways for them to be damaged, like adapting the resentful, envious outlook. Postmodernism allows them to rationalize their resentment.
Healthy students can be guided by postmodernist professors and become damaged. They arrive on campus eager, fresh-faced, and by the time they are juniors, they do not bathe, they have weird colored hair, sporting multiple piercings. They convey a I-hate-the-world attitude. Something has happened in those two years where damage occurs.
This damage keeps people from being successful engineers, entrepreneurial successes. If all is pointless, they under-achieve, and some are active saboteurs with no positive, creative projects.
A lot has changed since the 1990s when I started teaching. I see in the educational journals that postmodernists took over educational schools and teacher certification. Now postmodernism is in all the primary, middle and high schools.
They are damaging kids and their cognitive development, not learning both sides of an argument, not learn a lot about history. The students do not learn that you can understand a lot about the world from alien, philosophical and religious frameworks. Kids need reading, writing, math, and science.
Kids are really damaged, not taught universal truths, universal moral truths, that humans have rights, the right to life, liberty, and happiness. We are not to worry about skin color but personal character. They do not learn about the universal principles of liberty and equality before the law, that, in some sense, race, sex, gender and ethnicity do not matter, but more fundamentally that there is a universal humanity and moral code that should be adopted.”
My response: We Neo-modernists as Mavellonialists must teach and promote that the individual is where the objective and universal or personified, instantiated and made explicit and expressed clearly.
If the emphasis is group identity and group-rights, group-living, and altruist-collectivist values, that is where lies, corruption, irrationalism, fantasy, subjective and local are centered.
S: “Postmodernists are locked into claiming that people are of different, vying genders, races, and ethnicities and all are in conflict with each other, and that we have no recourse to reason and logic to settle our differences.
Then we teach young people tribalism and set them up for a lifetime of conflict and isolation from other groups, a regressive tendency.”
My response: This is a critical point to grasp: postmodernists and collectivists like Marx view the world as group versus group (individuals as individuals are not important), and human history of war, tribal aggression and imperialism is a history of endless power struggles and warfare. This endless war of all against all, about which group is up and victorious, and which group is down and conquered is dismal and only a cynical view of humans and their potential.
What Jordan Peterson elsewhere and Hicks here is proposing is that rational, temperate, civilized, wise people as individuals can learn to cooperate, dialogue and compromise peacefully, negotiating in good faith to resolve their differences, so endless scenario of power struggles between winners and losers can be transformed into power-sharing and win-win social relations no matter what one’s intersectional collection of personal groups that one identifies with.
They do not state it explicitly, but I will: altruism and collectivism are evil as is group rights and group identities, leading to groups fighting groups and endless warfare and power struggles. Egoism and individualism are good and individual rights emphasis and individual identity will lead us to peace, quiet, cooperation and coexistence as equals; until the world accepts this characterization, healthy peaceful, loving social relations will not be forthcoming.
S: “But I am optimistic. We have made progress against sexism, racism, and ethnocentrism. We made great progress under modernism and postmodernism is doing damage against that progress.”
J: “I like your long answer. I look around and see people that stand against truth and tradition. I saw your video on the uglification of art and people becoming ugly as well. You can’t tell me what is objectively beautiful: I dye my hair blue and put in 8 nose rings. Who are you to tell me I am not beautiful—that is your subjective opinion.”
S: “Yes, I am obese but still cute. The idea of beauty is complicated. We need a proper understanding of human psychology to know what objective beauty is. Postmodernists undermine objective morality and objective aesthetic standards.
Resentment is anti-art. Postmodernist environmentalists destroy art. It is not accidental that 20 years ago the Taliban destroyed works of art. It is nihilism to destroy anything that has beauty and gives others pleasure. Your desire to destroy reveals something about your mind and your values. You are not a creator but a destroyer. That is an act of revelation. If you are not a first-rate talent, you end up hating the gods and the world.
I hate myself, and become poisonous, coming to seek to destroy what was my art ideal, because I can never reach that level of performance.
The same dynamic is at work when someone loves another, are infatuated with someone. You go to the top of the mountain in love, and then that someone dumps you, then you come to hate that person and love itself.
If you were once idealistic, and then terribly disappointed, and the nihilists get a hold of you, you could end up a destroyer. That is postmodernism at its worst.”
My response: Hicks is correct as far as he goes about how disappointed artists and romantics fail at art and love, so their idealism is smashed and, if the nihilists grab them, they are susceptible to becoming destroyers. That happens but is avoidable.
My more humane and optimistic suggestion is that there are few really first-rate talents (Mozart or Einstein); most people of lesser but great creative potential in art and love and living could do brilliantly well if they fail, improve, fail but improve, and keep at it until they break through and achieve artistic and love excellence. They did not lack the ability but did not believe in themselves. They gave up too soon. None ever needs to resort to revenge on the world for personal failure in creating; it is not our job to compare ourselves to others. It is our assignment from God to take our natural blessings and talents and rework them until we create new technology, new poems, new ways to farm, philosophize or make money and find someone else, a new someone to love. Self-realization is more about talent, hard work and self-confidence, and less about raw, innate talent. We can all create and originate brilliantly enough that there is never a need to destroy what another originates or creates, because one cannot eve escape failing. To fail is not to lack talent but is to give up in oneself to early. That is crap. God put us in this world to find truth, create beauty and bring love to the world. If we go to hell as divine punishment, whether for a while or forever, it will because we lied, destroyed, bringing ugliness, hate and malevolence upon a world that has seen too much of these negative activities already.
J: “There is demoralization, after trying to do the thing and failed. I toured Europe and awed in places like Budapest. I was in wonder at real beauty. I am from Australia, and there is not much culture there, but how are we to fight the nihilists that hate beauty?”
S: “You just get away from the nihilists and their environment. There are parents that have failed so they undercut the dreams of their kids sniping at them that they will not amount to anything. Parents sabotage their kids’ optimism, idealism, and romanticism (Ed Notes: And their happiness). That is parenting sadism. Tell the kids to leave that household and avoid toxic people.”
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