The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
In a recent conversation with a younger libertarian, I heard something that I found somewhat surprising
and somewhat disturbing at the same time.
But later, on reflection, I realized that what I had heard should not have surprised
me, however much it may still disturb me.
My young friend had said, and I paraphrase here, that he was surprised to learn that
I thought of objectivists as libertarians at all.
Based on what he had seen of the positions they took on political issues, especially
foreign policy, he had concluded that they were just another kind of neocon.
I refer to this younger libertarian as my young friend, but the fact is he's no kid.
is in his early 40s, which tells you how long the situation with respect to objectivism
that I'm going to describe and deplore over the next 20 minutes or so has been going on.
That a man in his 40s cannot remember a time when leading objectivists didn't talk in such
a way about questions of US foreign policy and about other questions as well as we shall
will see that they become hard to differentiate from certain kinds of conservatives and hard
to see as any sort of libertarian.
But before I get farther into that depressing theme, there's a new book I'd like to commend
to your attention.
It's a novel entitled Hunter, a Thriller, and it's the work of the prominent objectivist
writer Robert Bidinato.
Now a word of caution.
What follows is not properly a book review, because what I'm really interested in talking
about here is not Bidinato's thriller in its capacity as a novel, an entertainment,
a work of popular art, but rather what it can tell us in its capacity as a cultural
artifact.
As Ayn Rand said, the art of any given period or culture is a faithful mirror of that culture's
philosophy.
But of course, no culture has a philosophy, really, at least if by that we mean a thought-out
set of principles about the central questions any thoughtful person must be led to ask about
the human condition.
What a culture has is an implicit philosophy, what Rand liked to call a sense of life.
Rand argued that it was the artist's sense of life, his implicit view of life, his generalized
feeling about existence, that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable
choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style.
An artist, Rand argued, selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically
and by isolating and stressing them by omitting the insignificant and accidental he presents his view of existence also as we have seen the artist by doing all these self-same things holds up a faithful mirror to the sense of life that dominates the culture or subculture he best fits into in the society in which he lives and it is with this in mind that I want to
Robert Bedonato's Hunter. It is, I think, pretty faithful in the way it mirrors the sense of life of the subculture we know as the objectivist movement.
Hunter begins with Annie Woods, a recently divorced Washington DC-based CIA agent, engrossed in the case of a fellow agent, now gone rogue, who has been selling secrets to the Russians,
the Russians, outing U.S. undercover operatives in the process and getting them killed.
At a friend's funeral, she meets a rising local journalist, Dylan Hunter, who specializes
in writing investigative pieces about crime.
Through his new friend Annie and through the widow of the mutual friend at whose funeral
they met, Hunter learns about a crime victim support group and attends one of their meetings.
He then interviews the various individuals in the group who have lost loved ones to criminals,
often only to see those criminals acquitted on technicalities or released early from prison
sentences that had never been properly proportionate to the seriousness of their crimes in the
first place.
Hunter begins writing a series of Sunday articles about these and similar local cases, and he
He attracts many readers, some of whom are, shall we say, more serious about what they
read than others.
Some of them, or so it soon begins to appear, are what you might call deadly serious about
what they read.
For someone, or some group of someones, has begun systematically tracking down each of
the leniently treated criminals profiled in Hunter's articles and killing them, leaving
Bidinato's tale is very cleverly put together.
It kept me reading on the edge of my seat, so to speak, for two full days last week.
But more to my present point, what does it suggest about the current state of the objectivist
subculture?
What sense of life does it project?
I'm sorry to report that it projects a sense of life dominated by the emotions of fear
and vindictive anger.
It projects the sense that the individual is alone and, too often, defenseless in a scary,
dangerous world in which other people are out to get him, out to take away from him
what is rightfully his, and to assault and torture him just for the fun of it, and to
kill him if that turns out to be convenient.
Some might wonder at this point just why these murderous people are so, well, murderous.
Why they are so intent on committing crimes of this kind.
What in the world contemporary objectivists see when they open their eyes and look around,
it is vain to ask such questions.
In fact, it is worse than vain.
For any inquiry into the reasons, good, bad or idiotic, that someone might have had for
doing what he did, implies, somehow, that there may be some excuse for what he did.
These criminals do what they do because they are animals and dirtbags.
It is in their nature.
The only thing any decent individual can do is hope that these sub-human creatures are
locked up in the darkest available hole and never let out.
Or maybe they should just be exterminated like rodents or roaches.
It is clear from their views on US foreign policy that most objectivists today live in
the very same frightening world that I have just described.
Bidinato himself made the connection between these two issues, domestic crime and international
peace, in a notorious series of attacks on Ron Paul back in 2007 and 2008, on his personal
blog and in The New Individualist, the monthly magazine he was editing back then for the
Atlas Society.
Some people claim that Bidinato lost his job as editor of The New Individualist as a direct
is a perfect result of these articles, which allegedly offended some wealthy objectivist Ron Paul supporters.
He wrote on his blog in November 2007, for example, that there was
an interesting parallel between Ron Paul's view of America's foreign enemies
and the common liberal view of America's domestic criminals,
for the same sort of arguments advanced by many libertarians
have been offered by liberals to explain the heinous acts of common criminals.
Read any sociology or criminology text, and you'll find endless laundry lists of causal
explanations for crime, poverty, neglect, poor parenting, lousy schools, poor socialization,
Inadequate prenatal care, hunger, disease, bullying, racism, police brutality, social
stigmatizing, untreated psychological disorders, victimless crime laws, you name it.
To Bidinato, back in November 2007, in what he now describes as a post of which I'm particularly
proud, it seemed clear that these two positions were very closely related.
Just as many libertarians like Ron Paul treat the actions of al-Qaeda and other terrorists
as blowback for the sins of American society against them, he wrote, liberal social science
professionals treat the actions of homegrown criminal thugs as blowback for the alleged
sins of American society against them.
These bloody acts are never the terrorists' or the criminals' fault, responsibility,
you see.
You may remember that during the Cold War, precisely the same sort of explanations were offered by liberals, and later by left libertarians such as Murray Rothbard, to lay the blame for communist aggression at the West's, especially America's, doorstep.
It was our imperialist provocations around the world that were driving the Soviet block to respond
by conquering and butchering millions, building weapons of mass destruction, constructing the
Berlin Wall, etc. It was our economic and cultural imperialism that was driving indigenous peoples
everywhere into the arms of the communists. I defy anyone to draw a rational meaningful
Distinction between such explanations for criminal or terrorist aggression and excuses for it.
After all, causal explanations for human actions aim at exonerating the actor for committing them,
by treating those acts as if they were not under the actor's conscious volitional control,
but as if they were instead deterministically driven responses to external provocations or causes.
Just as I reject the liberal excuse-making industry that denies volition and rationalizes the acts of criminals,
I am totally fed up with the disgraceful foreign policy perspectives of those libertarians
who portray the United States as the causal agent of every evil on earth,
thus rationalizing the atrocities of foreign terrorists and despots.
Well, I guess if I were assigned the task of composing a detailed reply to this indictment,
I'd probably begin by pointing out that neither Ron Paul nor any other libertarian I've ever encountered
in print or in person has ever said that the 9-11 terrorists, or anyone else in the Middle East,
has ever been victimized by American society. Some liberals do make this claim about criminals,
But no libertarian makes it about people abroad who have grievances against the US government.
The US government is not American society.
Further, neither Ron Paul nor any other libertarian I've ever encountered in print or in person
has ever said that the 9-11 terrorists or any other terrorists anywhere were not responsible
The Theory of Money and Credit
Is making war really the best response to a terrorist attack like the one that took place
on September 11, 2001?
So one would deduce from the public pronouncements of leading objectivists over the past decade.
One receives the definite impression that few, if any, of these leading objectivists
have ever met a war they didn't like or at least believed with the grim firm-jawed determination
they felt was appropriate to a Randian hero was somehow necessary.
A war is a campaign of mass destruction and mass murder carried out by governments.
In what morally coherent sense could such a thing be deemed necessary?
Ayn Rand herself was never so simplistic about war as her followers of today are.
Wars, she wrote in 1967, are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate.
The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause
of wars.
When a nation resorts to war, it has some purpose, rightly or wrongly, something to
to Fight for, and the only justifiable purpose is self-defense.
As I hope most libertarians of today do remember, Rand could see no such justification for the
U.S. presence in Vietnam.
She called the war the U.S. government participated in for nearly two decades in Southeast Asia
a war in which American soldiers are dying for no purpose whatever.
There was a sense, though, in which Rand saw the Vietnam War as no worse, no more blameworthy
than any of the other wars the U.S. government had been involved in during the 20th century.
There still are people in this country, she wrote in 1974, who lost loved ones in World
War I.
There are more people who carry the unhealed wounds of World War II, of Korea, of Vietnam.
There are the disabled, the crippled, the mangled of those wars' battlefields.
No one has ever told them why they had to fight, nor what their sacrifices accomplished.
It was certainly not to make the world safe for democracy.
Look at that world now.
The American people have borne it all, trusting their leaders, hoping that someone knew the
purpose of that ghastly devastation.
The United States gained nothing from those wars except the growing burden of paying reparations
to the whole world, the kind of burden that used to be imposed on a defeated nation.
There was a dark pessimistic side to Rand's sense of life, certainly.
Think of We the Living and of the opening chapters in Atlas Shrugged.
But Rand never seemed completely consumed by fear and vengeful anger in the way her contemporary
Followers do.
And this is a tragedy, because Rand and objectivism were such an important force for good in the
early history of the contemporary libertarian movement.
There was a time when it seemed that most libertarians were Randians.
And even if that's a slight, or more than slight, exaggeration, the Randian influence
on the early contemporary movement was undeniably substantial.
When the Society for Individual Liberty did a study of libertarian party members in the
early 1970s, they found that more than a third of them were self-described objectivists.
As recently as 2008, the Liberty Poll, conducted by Liberty Magazine, reported that the thinker
who most influenced our respondents' intellectual development was Ayn Rand.
And though, as I've said, her outlook on things did have its dark corners, Ayn Rand was basically
an exponent of a bold, adventurous, confident sense of life.
The sort of sense of life you'd expect to be associated with libertarian ideas.
Her heroes weren't generals or people in law enforcement.
They were engineers, inventors, designers, people focused on what they could do with
their lives.
People preoccupied with the supposed menace to all their hopes and dreams, posed by a
vast army of almost unimaginably vicious antagonists who seek to destroy them for no reason at
all.
One is reminded of Benjamin R. Tucker's observation that libertarian anarchists of his stripe
were just un-terrified Jeffersonian Democrats.
If Tucker thought the Jeffersonians were terrified because of their determination to cling to
To the institution of government, what would he think of today's objectivists?
Of course Robert Bidinato and his fellow fear mongers will tell you that they're terrified
with perfectly good reason.
After all, haven't we been victimized by terrorist attacks in the last decade?
Did not thousands die?
But the events of 9-11 did not terrify the objectivists.
They were already terrified for no reason long before that.
They merely use the 9-11 attacks as a pretext in an effort to make their terror look less
irrational and absurd than it actually is.
Bidinato told me via email over the weekend that he doesn't advocate the sort of vigilantism
that figures in his novel.
He wrote, and I quote this with his permission, the vigilantism in the novel is intended solely
as a fictional device to highlight and dramatize the complete absence of justice in the current
legal system.
I deliberately crafted the vigilante character in the novel to hold a clear, specific code
of honor regarding his illegal actions.
He only kills killers.
He does not target public officials with violence, but only with poetic justice.
He takes no actions that will threaten innocence.
And he would rather be arrested than use violence against cops.
But in the real world, vigilantism would never be subject to such honorable constraints.
Instead, it would degenerate into a violent competition of reprisals and vendettas, unlimited
by any moral or legal principle.
Does Bidinato not see that this is an excellent description of exactly how his beloved war
War on Terror has worked out in practice, and of how it must work out in practice.
The U.S. government claims that its actions are subject to honorable constraints, and that
it strives to avoid taking actions that will threaten innocence.
But this is the real world, and in the real world, whatever high-minded platitudes politicians
and military people may mouth, war is never anything but a violent competition of reprisals
Can anything be done about this unfortunate development in the evolution of objectivism
as a movement and as a subculture?
Perhaps not.
In a very perceptive blog post written just this past April, Bidinato wrote about what
What he called the form in which we really encounter and accept our foundational beliefs
about ourselves and the world around us.
We first encounter and accept these foundational beliefs, according to Bidinato, early in life
and in the form of stories, or what I call narratives.
The myths that we learn in childhood, at mother's knee, in church, in schools, in films and
Novels represent primitive fundamental interpretive stories about our world, how it works, what
it means, what is right or wrong, who are the good guys and the bad guys.
These narratives are pre-philosophical, in fact they are acquired in their germinal forms
while we are still far too young to subject them to critical analysis.
They thus actually tend to determine which abstract philosophies, ideologies, economic
theories and political policies we later find appealing.
These latter feel right to us, largely because they mesh with the myths, fairy tales, parables
and stories we already absorbed during childhood.
Moreover, the more deep-rooted the myth, either personally and or culturally, the more desperately
Certainly we cling to it.
We cling to it even when it may sometimes be utterly false and lead us over a cliff.
We cling to it because to challenge or criticize it means to unravel a lifetime of investments
in values, choices, relationships, careers, emotions and money.
And who wants to do that?
Who indeed?
Not I think Robert Bidinato.
He confesses in this blog post that I've found it to be increasingly pointless to argue philosophy,
economics and politics with most people.
Why?
Because we are talking past each other.
You may prove a point with unassailable facts and irrefutable logic.
However, the other person replies, yes, but those words usually signal that you've reached
the ultimate barrier to further reasoning and communication.
have challenged his narrative, and in my experience, that is ground he'll rarely, if ever, concede.
I think everyone who has listened up to this point knows what sort of narrative defines
the world for Robert Bidinato.
You can get a taste of it in his new novel, Hunter.
It makes for an absorbing read, as I've indicated.
But as a guide to real life and the real world, it is sorely skewed.
It's too bad, really.
From what small dealings I've had with him, I'd say that Robert Bitonato is a good guy.
He's highly intelligent, with a genuine knack for putting words together, and on top of
that, he has the good sense to grasp the truth about the importance of private property and
free markets to civilization.
It's damned inconvenient for the rest of us in the libertarian movement that he and so
many others like him are so damned terrified.
This is Jeff Riggenbach.