If it wasn't clear from the views I've already espoused on this blog in regard to politics and culture, at this point in my life I consider myself a great many things which can broadly be categorized as "leftist." Specifically, I'm currently a big fan of Pyotr Kropotkin's anarchist communism. But this wasn't always the case, in fact it's a pretty recent development. Prior to this I had a period where I considered myself a "left-leaning centrist" and avoided politics most of the time, and before that (back in and immediately after high school) I was outright conservative. Not just conservative, in fact, but a Randian Objectivist. I know, I know, a goth phase would've been preferable, but that would've required me to go out and buy clothes, whereas all I had to do to get into objectivism was grab a couple books off my (mostly politically-illiterate) mom's shelf. (I was also pretty well primed to accept objectivism due to a lifetime of incidental exposure to conservative talk show hosts such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.)
Now, as I've journeyed leftward, I've noticed one thing about the response to Rand's ideology; it's widely derided, but very few people put in the time to really dissect what she's saying and explain why it's absurd.
Which, y'know, is fair. A lot of this stuff is so clearly and obviously ridiculous to anyone with even a modicum of political or philosophical literacy that, yeah, it'd be a bit of a chore to go over it, probably not worth most people's time. I mean, who really needs to be told that Rand's assertion that, say, Immanuel Kant was the first hippie (actual quote), is ridiculous?
Well, middle and high schoolers who are reading her as their first real engagement with both politics and philosophy, for one. Or really anyone of any age who just doesn't have the philosophical and political framework to put her absurd statements in context and really examine them, and is therefore likely to accept them uncritically.
So that's sort of what I want to do here, a sort of general fisking of Rand's writing, presented in a way that I hope will appeal to people who enjoy Rand's writing (speaking as someone who was previously one of them,) and to from there move along to other political texts I enjoyed and agreed with around that time in my life, essentially roasting my past self.
With my preamble out of the way, let's get into the preamble of the first book I'll be going through: Return of the Primitive, an expanded version of The New Left, with an introduction by Peter Schwartz which will serve as our appetizer here.
Peter Schwartz manages to, in the span of 4 pages, give the impression of someone who has completely and utterly bought into Rand's viewpoints, launching directly with dismissal of leftist movements and ideas with vaguely sinister-sounding labels such as "militant emotionalism." The first paragraph is just a list of vaguely left-aligned (but largely unaffiliated) cultural movements and protests, which it's clear that Schwartz assumes the reader already feels negatively toward as he does little to actually argue against their ideas or tactics; the goal isn't to debunk or criticize these groups, but simply invoke them as an "other" who stand in for "the bad things about 70s society."
Paragraph 2 serves to codify this other, pull the scope in and cast it as something approaching a coherent faction;
"Spearheading this mindlessness was a movement that resisted definition. Its enemies were anyone and anything American, its heroes were dictatorial killers like Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, its goal was indiscriminate destruction--yet its leaders were hailed by cultural commentators as idealistic defenders of the individual against an oppressive state."
Note, however, that even in trying to direct the negative feelings summoned in the first paragraph, he mentions the idea that such direction is difficult or impossible to achieve; he explains this with the allusion to a "movement that resist[s] definition," but the reality is much simpler. The cultural factors he's alluding aren't a movement, they're a loose conglomeration of related but separate viewpoints and doctrines. The group that he's vaguely waving his hand toward is the economic and cultural left as a whole, which simply cannot be defined so narrowly, any more than the economic and cultural right as whole can. Nobody in their right mind would try to claim that Nazis, anarcho-capitalists, evangelicals, neoreactionaries, and neoliberals are all a single "movement" that is simply diversifying itself into a number of superficially different subcategories in an effort avoid definition and criticism, yet this is precisely what Peter Schwartz is doing to the hippies, the Berkeley FSM rioters, communists, civil rights protesters, and 70s liberals. It's not entirely wrong to categorize these groups through concepts like "the left" or "progressives," in the same way that's it's not entirely wrong to categorize the aforementioned counterexamples through concepts like "the right" or "reactionaries," but to claim that they're a coherent, guided movement is to betray a staggering lack of understanding of how politics work, or else a staggering lack of scruples about misrepresenting one's ideological opponents.
All this is without getting into the complete unsubstantiated and unproductive practice of branding the movement as "mindless," identifying its goals as "indiscriminate destruction" and its adherents as "enemies of america." This sort of rhetoric clarifies the intention of this piece; not to enlighten the reader about the ideas and viewpoints of these leftist groups, but to smear them and cement them in the reader's mind as "bad people who must be resisted." It's an appeal to emotion, plain and simple, which is heavily ironic considering the "rationalist" stances proselytized by Schwartz and Rand throughout this book.
Skipping ahead past some aggrandizement of Rand and her statements on this "movement," we get into the first attempt at a substantive description, let alone criticism, of the "new left":
"Those doctrines were fused, in the 1960s, into an overwhelming hostility toward one distinctively Western target: industrialization. The New Left declared the West was corrupt and that its influence had to be eliminated through the renunciation of technology. People were exhorted to give up their automobiles and shopping centers, their air conditioners and nuclear power plants."
Our enlightened, 21st-century, information-age perspective may notice something slightly weird about this claim; it conflates 20th-century industrialization with "technology" as a whole. Rand herself could perhaps be given some leeway for making this mistake in 1971 (though not too much considering that a bow and arrow is an example of technology and is not in any way industrialized or pollutive in itself, without getting into the fact that there's nothing particularly rational about assuming that the current state of technology is the final state of technology), but Schwartz was writing this introduction in 1999. By that point in time, the industrialization of society and technology was already on the decline, giving way to personal computers, the ongoing project to sanitize energy production, and the internet. There's simply no way to excuse this conflation of industrialism with technology as an honest mistake in the year 1999; Schwartz is intentionally and maliciously strawmanning his opponents.
And he continues adding straw to the scarecrow, declaring that this anti-technology sentiment, this appeal to "primitivism," is embodied in two modern political phenomena: Environmentalism, and Multiculturalism.
Then it gets... weird. Rather than backing up this claim, Schwartz digresses into a wildly inaccurate description of what primitivism is, followed by a final sting to pin all these consequences on environmentalism:
"Primitive, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means: "Of or belonging to the first age, period, or stage; pertaining to early times..." With respect to human development, primitivism is a pre-rational stage. It is a stage in which man lives in fearful awe of a universe he cannot understand. The primitive man does not grasp the law of causality. He does not comprehend the fact that the world is governed by natural laws and that nature can be ruled by any man who discovers those laws. To a primitive, there is only a mysterious supernatural. Sunshine, darkness, rainfall, drought, the clap of thunder, the hooting of a spotted owl--all are inexplicable, portentous, and sacrosanct to him. To this non-conceptual mentality, man is metaphyscially subordinate to nature, which is never to be commanded, only meekly obeyed.
This is the state of mind to which the environmentalists want us to revert."
So... There's a lot to unpack here. As I previously alluded to, the first problem with this paragraph is that it's a trick. Instead of backing up the claim that environmentalism is equivalent to primitivism and then going from there, Schwartz is bypassing the "prove your claim" part and skipping right into talking about why primitivism is bad, and therefore you should totally be against primitivist, which by the way environmentalists totally are please don't question that claim. This is something you see all the time in political discussion, where people will make an argument that subtly takes it as read that a different, often absurd, claim that they've made either explicitly or implicitly, is accepted as true. To be clear, the idea that environmentalism is equivalent to primitivism is absurd.
There's also the fact that his idea of what primitive humanity was like is just... wrong. Actually, not just wrong. Wrong and also ridiculous. The vast majority of sentient animals seem to have some grasp of causality, at least implicitly. When you make a motion as if you're throwing a ball, your dog will reflexively turn to follow it, because your dog associates the cause of that movement with the effect of the ball flying across your yard. Primitive man learned what plants to eat and what to avoid based on what he observed to make people sick or to kill people, he learned to make fire by observing the effects that sparks have on dry wood. Even agriculture, which is culturally viewed as the sort of endpoint of primitivism (and I have no doubt that Schwartz is viewing primitivism through this colloquial lens rather than an anthropological one) was achieved through the application of observation and causal reasoning. It's true that early peoples tend to ascribe events to supernatural causes, but even this isn't indicative of a lack of causal thought, indeed it's proof that even the most primitive of humans have an inborn desire to explain the world around them through the lens of causality. The fact that they identified an incorrect cause as a result of not having perfect information about the world around them doesn't change this.
What Schwartz (along with most other Randians) is doing with these arguments is making a bid to claim a monopoly on rational thought; the fact of the matter is that the human brain automatically organizes itself in a way which results in some degree of rationality. It is not a perfect rational instrument, but it is an instrument which generally attempts to grasp at rationality; certainly there are irrational or anti-rational tendencies contained within it, a natural byproduct of the process of natural selection which produced it, and as we come to understand more about how the human mind works it's possible we'll find that the irrational outweighs the rational in its functionality, but regardless, it is unavoidable that the seed of rationality exists within every person, imprinted upon the workings of their brain. This idea is threatening to the Randian viewpoint, because it is predicated on the idea that rationality is a tool reserved for only the elite among philosophers, those who have wholly dedicated themselves to its pursuit, and that all others are the vanguard of irrationality or, in many cases anti-rationality. By limiting their conception of what rational thought is to formal rationalist philosophy, and defining rational thought as the highest standard of value in regards to ideas, Randians are attempting to shift definitions in such a way that make them winners by default in the battle of ideas, by virtue of being the only ones with any guns. This stands in direct opposition to the realities of human history, epistomology, and philosophy. Indeed, if there were no informal reason by which early man sought to understand the world around him, what framework would there be on which to build formal rationality? None at all.
Schwartz goes on to connect primitive irrationality to tribalism, and tribalism to multiculturalism, again without bothering to really support these assertions in any meaningful way, to say nothing of the fact that they're built on a rotten foundation of misunderstanding reality; There's no real point in going into further detail on this segment because it's simply a repeat of the last with a few key points swapped out. This is one aspect of the objectivist writing style which is at once one of its greatest strengths and one of the most irritating aspects of it; it's repetitive to a fault, often going far out of its way to frame ideas in a cyclical, rhyming manner that helps to give the impression of a coherent worldview through the appearance of connections being drawn between disparate elements. It makes it easy to accept what's being told to you if you don't know better, feels elegant if you already agree, and makes for a frustratingly plodding reading experience if you disagree.
Most of the rest of the introduction, in fact, is simply repetition of the idea that the "New Left" is an insidiously anti-human influence, presented through dubious and unsubstantiated claims that these ideas have gained traction in society "by default," through a lack of examination and history of conservative opposition claiming that they're "good ideas which go too far." There is one segment which I'd like to highlight simply because it's amusing:
"For example [of the gradual permeation and acceptance of leftist ideals in society], in the 1960s there were repeated, charged confrontations between corporations and "back-to-nature" hippies over such matters as pollution and recycling. Now, Earth Day is an annual cultural event--promoted by big business; now, countless products advertise themselves as "ecology friendly" (such as McDonald's hamburgers, which the company boasts come from no cows that graze at the expense of the planet's "rain forests:); now, the major villains in children's cartoon programs are not criminals, but greedy tree-loggers; and now, most states, according to a news report in the New York Times, "require schools to incorporate environmental concepts into virtually every subject in all grade levels." "
What Schwartz is describing here is the process of capitalist recuperation of radical rhetoric; He describes this as the "trappings" of leftist theory and rhetoric being left behind while the "substance has endured," when in truth the exact opposite is the case. What has been done is that the radical, resistant, and conservationist images of these viewpoints has been co-opted by the very capitalist systems which they sprang up in opposition to, while that opposition of the capitalist status-quo, the actual substance of these arguments, was left behind to rot and be forgotten. The fact that Schwartz would identify "we should recycle" and "food should be sustainably sourced" as the core of the movement indicates a fundamental failure or refusal to actually engage with the ideas presented. It's something you see today in the corporate attempts to cash in one progressive rhetoric surrounding racial and sexual issues; all of these ideas are built on the foundation of acknowledging the effects that capitalism has on the world around us, and the recuperation is built on dismissing that core, but adopting the vestigial arguments in order to appear willing to self-criticize and change. And in every case, extremist reactionaries will look at this process, and declare that "leftist ideas are insidiously worming their way into the discourse, rotting it from within," falling for the corporate ploys designed specifically to protect capital from these ideas.
Schwartz's introduction to the 1999 reprinting of these essays serves its purpose well, because in the span of 4 pages it displays all the rhetorical tactics and fallacies that Rand herself will be using for the next 250; He appeals to the emotions of the reader, fearmongers about ideological opponents, ignores history and reality, substituting his own and calling it "objective," and then attempts to monopolize that "objectivity" by pointing out the multitude of ways in which it fails to adhere to the reality the rest of the world observes. In 4 short pages, Schwartz effectively and eloquently displays how irrational, ahistorical, counter-factual, egotistical, and often absurd the objectivist line of argument generally is. And next time, we'll go straight to the horse's mouth for further demonstration.
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| Nicole's political reading material, 2009 vs 2019 |
Now, as I've journeyed leftward, I've noticed one thing about the response to Rand's ideology; it's widely derided, but very few people put in the time to really dissect what she's saying and explain why it's absurd.
Which, y'know, is fair. A lot of this stuff is so clearly and obviously ridiculous to anyone with even a modicum of political or philosophical literacy that, yeah, it'd be a bit of a chore to go over it, probably not worth most people's time. I mean, who really needs to be told that Rand's assertion that, say, Immanuel Kant was the first hippie (actual quote), is ridiculous?
Well, middle and high schoolers who are reading her as their first real engagement with both politics and philosophy, for one. Or really anyone of any age who just doesn't have the philosophical and political framework to put her absurd statements in context and really examine them, and is therefore likely to accept them uncritically.
So that's sort of what I want to do here, a sort of general fisking of Rand's writing, presented in a way that I hope will appeal to people who enjoy Rand's writing (speaking as someone who was previously one of them,) and to from there move along to other political texts I enjoyed and agreed with around that time in my life, essentially roasting my past self.
With my preamble out of the way, let's get into the preamble of the first book I'll be going through: Return of the Primitive, an expanded version of The New Left, with an introduction by Peter Schwartz which will serve as our appetizer here.
Peter Schwartz manages to, in the span of 4 pages, give the impression of someone who has completely and utterly bought into Rand's viewpoints, launching directly with dismissal of leftist movements and ideas with vaguely sinister-sounding labels such as "militant emotionalism." The first paragraph is just a list of vaguely left-aligned (but largely unaffiliated) cultural movements and protests, which it's clear that Schwartz assumes the reader already feels negatively toward as he does little to actually argue against their ideas or tactics; the goal isn't to debunk or criticize these groups, but simply invoke them as an "other" who stand in for "the bad things about 70s society."
Paragraph 2 serves to codify this other, pull the scope in and cast it as something approaching a coherent faction;
"Spearheading this mindlessness was a movement that resisted definition. Its enemies were anyone and anything American, its heroes were dictatorial killers like Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, its goal was indiscriminate destruction--yet its leaders were hailed by cultural commentators as idealistic defenders of the individual against an oppressive state."
Note, however, that even in trying to direct the negative feelings summoned in the first paragraph, he mentions the idea that such direction is difficult or impossible to achieve; he explains this with the allusion to a "movement that resist[s] definition," but the reality is much simpler. The cultural factors he's alluding aren't a movement, they're a loose conglomeration of related but separate viewpoints and doctrines. The group that he's vaguely waving his hand toward is the economic and cultural left as a whole, which simply cannot be defined so narrowly, any more than the economic and cultural right as whole can. Nobody in their right mind would try to claim that Nazis, anarcho-capitalists, evangelicals, neoreactionaries, and neoliberals are all a single "movement" that is simply diversifying itself into a number of superficially different subcategories in an effort avoid definition and criticism, yet this is precisely what Peter Schwartz is doing to the hippies, the Berkeley FSM rioters, communists, civil rights protesters, and 70s liberals. It's not entirely wrong to categorize these groups through concepts like "the left" or "progressives," in the same way that's it's not entirely wrong to categorize the aforementioned counterexamples through concepts like "the right" or "reactionaries," but to claim that they're a coherent, guided movement is to betray a staggering lack of understanding of how politics work, or else a staggering lack of scruples about misrepresenting one's ideological opponents.
All this is without getting into the complete unsubstantiated and unproductive practice of branding the movement as "mindless," identifying its goals as "indiscriminate destruction" and its adherents as "enemies of america." This sort of rhetoric clarifies the intention of this piece; not to enlighten the reader about the ideas and viewpoints of these leftist groups, but to smear them and cement them in the reader's mind as "bad people who must be resisted." It's an appeal to emotion, plain and simple, which is heavily ironic considering the "rationalist" stances proselytized by Schwartz and Rand throughout this book.
Skipping ahead past some aggrandizement of Rand and her statements on this "movement," we get into the first attempt at a substantive description, let alone criticism, of the "new left":
"Those doctrines were fused, in the 1960s, into an overwhelming hostility toward one distinctively Western target: industrialization. The New Left declared the West was corrupt and that its influence had to be eliminated through the renunciation of technology. People were exhorted to give up their automobiles and shopping centers, their air conditioners and nuclear power plants."
Our enlightened, 21st-century, information-age perspective may notice something slightly weird about this claim; it conflates 20th-century industrialization with "technology" as a whole. Rand herself could perhaps be given some leeway for making this mistake in 1971 (though not too much considering that a bow and arrow is an example of technology and is not in any way industrialized or pollutive in itself, without getting into the fact that there's nothing particularly rational about assuming that the current state of technology is the final state of technology), but Schwartz was writing this introduction in 1999. By that point in time, the industrialization of society and technology was already on the decline, giving way to personal computers, the ongoing project to sanitize energy production, and the internet. There's simply no way to excuse this conflation of industrialism with technology as an honest mistake in the year 1999; Schwartz is intentionally and maliciously strawmanning his opponents.
And he continues adding straw to the scarecrow, declaring that this anti-technology sentiment, this appeal to "primitivism," is embodied in two modern political phenomena: Environmentalism, and Multiculturalism.
Then it gets... weird. Rather than backing up this claim, Schwartz digresses into a wildly inaccurate description of what primitivism is, followed by a final sting to pin all these consequences on environmentalism:
"Primitive, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means: "Of or belonging to the first age, period, or stage; pertaining to early times..." With respect to human development, primitivism is a pre-rational stage. It is a stage in which man lives in fearful awe of a universe he cannot understand. The primitive man does not grasp the law of causality. He does not comprehend the fact that the world is governed by natural laws and that nature can be ruled by any man who discovers those laws. To a primitive, there is only a mysterious supernatural. Sunshine, darkness, rainfall, drought, the clap of thunder, the hooting of a spotted owl--all are inexplicable, portentous, and sacrosanct to him. To this non-conceptual mentality, man is metaphyscially subordinate to nature, which is never to be commanded, only meekly obeyed.
This is the state of mind to which the environmentalists want us to revert."
So... There's a lot to unpack here. As I previously alluded to, the first problem with this paragraph is that it's a trick. Instead of backing up the claim that environmentalism is equivalent to primitivism and then going from there, Schwartz is bypassing the "prove your claim" part and skipping right into talking about why primitivism is bad, and therefore you should totally be against primitivist, which by the way environmentalists totally are please don't question that claim. This is something you see all the time in political discussion, where people will make an argument that subtly takes it as read that a different, often absurd, claim that they've made either explicitly or implicitly, is accepted as true. To be clear, the idea that environmentalism is equivalent to primitivism is absurd.
There's also the fact that his idea of what primitive humanity was like is just... wrong. Actually, not just wrong. Wrong and also ridiculous. The vast majority of sentient animals seem to have some grasp of causality, at least implicitly. When you make a motion as if you're throwing a ball, your dog will reflexively turn to follow it, because your dog associates the cause of that movement with the effect of the ball flying across your yard. Primitive man learned what plants to eat and what to avoid based on what he observed to make people sick or to kill people, he learned to make fire by observing the effects that sparks have on dry wood. Even agriculture, which is culturally viewed as the sort of endpoint of primitivism (and I have no doubt that Schwartz is viewing primitivism through this colloquial lens rather than an anthropological one) was achieved through the application of observation and causal reasoning. It's true that early peoples tend to ascribe events to supernatural causes, but even this isn't indicative of a lack of causal thought, indeed it's proof that even the most primitive of humans have an inborn desire to explain the world around them through the lens of causality. The fact that they identified an incorrect cause as a result of not having perfect information about the world around them doesn't change this.
What Schwartz (along with most other Randians) is doing with these arguments is making a bid to claim a monopoly on rational thought; the fact of the matter is that the human brain automatically organizes itself in a way which results in some degree of rationality. It is not a perfect rational instrument, but it is an instrument which generally attempts to grasp at rationality; certainly there are irrational or anti-rational tendencies contained within it, a natural byproduct of the process of natural selection which produced it, and as we come to understand more about how the human mind works it's possible we'll find that the irrational outweighs the rational in its functionality, but regardless, it is unavoidable that the seed of rationality exists within every person, imprinted upon the workings of their brain. This idea is threatening to the Randian viewpoint, because it is predicated on the idea that rationality is a tool reserved for only the elite among philosophers, those who have wholly dedicated themselves to its pursuit, and that all others are the vanguard of irrationality or, in many cases anti-rationality. By limiting their conception of what rational thought is to formal rationalist philosophy, and defining rational thought as the highest standard of value in regards to ideas, Randians are attempting to shift definitions in such a way that make them winners by default in the battle of ideas, by virtue of being the only ones with any guns. This stands in direct opposition to the realities of human history, epistomology, and philosophy. Indeed, if there were no informal reason by which early man sought to understand the world around him, what framework would there be on which to build formal rationality? None at all.
Schwartz goes on to connect primitive irrationality to tribalism, and tribalism to multiculturalism, again without bothering to really support these assertions in any meaningful way, to say nothing of the fact that they're built on a rotten foundation of misunderstanding reality; There's no real point in going into further detail on this segment because it's simply a repeat of the last with a few key points swapped out. This is one aspect of the objectivist writing style which is at once one of its greatest strengths and one of the most irritating aspects of it; it's repetitive to a fault, often going far out of its way to frame ideas in a cyclical, rhyming manner that helps to give the impression of a coherent worldview through the appearance of connections being drawn between disparate elements. It makes it easy to accept what's being told to you if you don't know better, feels elegant if you already agree, and makes for a frustratingly plodding reading experience if you disagree.
Most of the rest of the introduction, in fact, is simply repetition of the idea that the "New Left" is an insidiously anti-human influence, presented through dubious and unsubstantiated claims that these ideas have gained traction in society "by default," through a lack of examination and history of conservative opposition claiming that they're "good ideas which go too far." There is one segment which I'd like to highlight simply because it's amusing:
"For example [of the gradual permeation and acceptance of leftist ideals in society], in the 1960s there were repeated, charged confrontations between corporations and "back-to-nature" hippies over such matters as pollution and recycling. Now, Earth Day is an annual cultural event--promoted by big business; now, countless products advertise themselves as "ecology friendly" (such as McDonald's hamburgers, which the company boasts come from no cows that graze at the expense of the planet's "rain forests:); now, the major villains in children's cartoon programs are not criminals, but greedy tree-loggers; and now, most states, according to a news report in the New York Times, "require schools to incorporate environmental concepts into virtually every subject in all grade levels." "
What Schwartz is describing here is the process of capitalist recuperation of radical rhetoric; He describes this as the "trappings" of leftist theory and rhetoric being left behind while the "substance has endured," when in truth the exact opposite is the case. What has been done is that the radical, resistant, and conservationist images of these viewpoints has been co-opted by the very capitalist systems which they sprang up in opposition to, while that opposition of the capitalist status-quo, the actual substance of these arguments, was left behind to rot and be forgotten. The fact that Schwartz would identify "we should recycle" and "food should be sustainably sourced" as the core of the movement indicates a fundamental failure or refusal to actually engage with the ideas presented. It's something you see today in the corporate attempts to cash in one progressive rhetoric surrounding racial and sexual issues; all of these ideas are built on the foundation of acknowledging the effects that capitalism has on the world around us, and the recuperation is built on dismissing that core, but adopting the vestigial arguments in order to appear willing to self-criticize and change. And in every case, extremist reactionaries will look at this process, and declare that "leftist ideas are insidiously worming their way into the discourse, rotting it from within," falling for the corporate ploys designed specifically to protect capital from these ideas.
Schwartz's introduction to the 1999 reprinting of these essays serves its purpose well, because in the span of 4 pages it displays all the rhetorical tactics and fallacies that Rand herself will be using for the next 250; He appeals to the emotions of the reader, fearmongers about ideological opponents, ignores history and reality, substituting his own and calling it "objective," and then attempts to monopolize that "objectivity" by pointing out the multitude of ways in which it fails to adhere to the reality the rest of the world observes. In 4 short pages, Schwartz effectively and eloquently displays how irrational, ahistorical, counter-factual, egotistical, and often absurd the objectivist line of argument generally is. And next time, we'll go straight to the horse's mouth for further demonstration.
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