Is the first Ayn Rand conference in Australia worth $770?

Several weeks ago I was approached by the Ayn Rand Institute in America to help promote their first ever conference in Australia with guest speakers Dr. Yaron Brook and Dr. Nikos Sotirakopoulos. The pitch to me was that we all share a strong support for free markets.

I really didn’t know much about her, except that she is very popular among the more libertarian types of people in my circles of influence.

I’m always keen to collaborate and promote ideas and movements which are allied, and generally prefer to be silent on organisations and identities not really in the same lane as me, but doing what they think is best, so I began to research Ayn Rand and the speakers being promoted.

The conference costs $500 U.S. – that’s currently about $770 in local currency, and runs Friday night and all weekend. I really should charge a lot more for the Church And State Australian Summit, which is still only $100 for two very full days (if you pay full price), with catering an optional extra!

I discovered Dr. Yaron Brook is, amusingly, simultaneously hostile to and very uninformed about Christianity. He seems to be working off low-information caricatures of Christians, just like Ayn Rand did.

As much as I resonate with the free market objectives of the conference, I think the overt hostility of Rand and Brook to Christianity makes it necessary for me to not just withhold my recommendation, but to strongly warn people against wasting such a large amount of money on ideas actually destructive to Western Civilisation.

Ayn Rand has almost been beatified by elitist libertarians who effectively regard her as the patron saint of rationalism and materialism. The reverence with which they hold her is impressive and you might feel like you would respect her thinking too once exposed to it – until you start listening to her speak for herself.

So allow me now to introduce you to the ideas of Ayn Rand, and you judge whether such ideas multiplied throughout society would make a better world in which to live.

One meme shared by someone promoting this Ayn Rand conference quotes her saying:

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

Phil Donahue examined Ayn Rand’s gospel of selfishness, which she called “objectivism”, in a live interview with her in 1979. He asked what’s so bad about wanting to help other people and do good for other people. Ayn Rand answered:

“Nothing… if it’s not your primary aim in life, and if you don’t regard it as a moral virtue.

 

That would be cannibalism… Altruism means not merely kindness, but self-sacrifice. It means that you place the welfare of others above your own. That you live for others, for the sake of helping them, and that justifies your life. That’s immoral, according to my morality.”

Ayn Rand doesn’t get her own morality, and nor does anyone else. She absurdly claimed altruism was the basis for Communism, Nazism and every dictatorship. It is obvious to any rational person that no dictatorship is based in kindness and self-sacrifice, but the complete opposite. They may have been effectively propagandised by patently false claims to altruism, but there was certainly nothing actually altruistic about them.

Rand no more gets her own “morality” than woketivists get their own “truth”. It was actually dictators claiming their own morality which resulted in the cruelest, most lethal dictatorships in human history – nothing to do with altruism.

Donahue asked Rand:

“Original sin sure takes a beating in your writings, doesn’t it? If there’s no original sin, then what do we need Calvary? Why do we need the crucifixion? From what are we redeemed?”

Rand answered:

“Look, if you take Jesus Christ as an ideal human being, and that is properly the view of Christians. What do you do with your ideal being? You put Him on the cross. You torture Him and murder Him for the sake of those who are less virtuous… To redeem the sinners, as you say. I think that’s a monstrous idea. If I were a Christian, I would resent it enormously. The ideal men are to be appreciated and followed… and listened to, not crucified.”

So what about this Century, what does Dr. Yaron Brook teach? In this video, Brook explains:

“I generally still think of Christianity as negative because I think it does much more damage… Nothing good it could have done, could have overcome that institutionalising of altruism. And of course the mysticism is so dramatic, but I think even worse is the altruism in terms of the Christianity’s legacy.”

In that video, Brook includes a clip of Rand being interviewed by Donahue, and here’s what he thought was worthy in her thinking.

“I don’t approve of religion because it’s mystical, because it’s based on faith, not on reason and facts.

 

I am [smart enough to know whether or not there’s a God] and everybody here is.

 

I know that there isn’t [a God] because I’ve been given no evidence.

 

I say it’s a bad sign psychologically [if you believe that there is a God]. It is a sign of a psychological weakness of a man who is afraid to stand on his own mind and his own responsibility. Because, you see, the absence of proof has gone on for centuries. Every argument for the existence of God is incomplete, improper, and has been refuted, and people go on and on because they want to believe. Well, I regard it as evil to place your emotions, your desire above the evidence of what your mind knows.

 

[I’m not impressed with all the order in the world and universe] because the order is only in good cases in the minds of your scientists who are able to understand some part of it. But there isn’t an artificial order in the universe, and it’s not chance. What would be the alternative? Nature. That the universe, and remember, universe is everything that exists, has always been here. Because you cannot discuss or know anything about what was here before anything existed.”

Sadly for the ramblings of this logically incoherent, morally corrupt God-mocker, Professor Stephen Hawking taught:

“I would like to discuss whether time itself has a beginning, and whether it will have an end. All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning… This is probably the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology.”

If cosmologists had read Genesis as literal history, they would’ve come to that knowledge a lot sooner and gotten on with the subsequently justified research.

It’s a sign of philosophical weakness that Rand and her acolytes actually believe there are no coherent arguments for the existence of God, and they would be much more enlightened after spending a weekend reading some of them than wasting $770 on this pseudo-cult.

The final video I’ll share of the factually frail ideas of Dr. Yaron Brook is titled, “Christianity and Capitalism are Not Compatible”. In it, he’s asked to explain what the contradiction is between the morality of Christianity and the morality of capitalism.

What is it with these moral relativists? There is no subjective morality – there is only objective morality, and immorality. But anyway, he accepts the premise of the question and answers:

“The essence of the morality of Christianity is sacrifice. It’s suffering for a cause, a cause external to you, a cause that you have no interest in this life in, only in another life, in a mystical life, in a temple. So it’s all about sacrificing for others.

 

Jesus on a cross… is willing to give up his life in the most brutal, horrible death for sins other people committed. It’s the ultimate altruistic act… And so the whole idea here is that you should live for other people, you should sacrifice for other people, you should die for other people.

 

What makes you a saint is not helping other people. If helping other people made you a saint, then Bill Gates would be a saint. The great entrepreneurs and industrialists in Korea would be saints, because they helped other people. They changed the world. They made the world a better place for millions and billions of people. Businessmen are saints.

 

Christianity doesn’t think they’re saints. Why? Because they benefited from helping other people. They helped themselves while helping other people. And that’s not acceptable in Christianity. It has to be pure. You have to live for others. You have to suffer in helping others to be a saint.

 

So Christianity, at the end of the day, is about sacrifice. It’s about altruism. It’s about living for others.
And that’s what gets you into heaven. And when you don’t do that, Christians who pursue their own interests in this world, accumulate wealth, maybe run a business, do stuff like that, they feel guilty. So guilt is part of Christianity because altruism is anti-life. And when you live, you feel guilty because you should have been Mother Teresa. You should have suffered. And I think there’s this real conflict.

 

And that’s why you can’t base capitalism on Christianity. Because capitalism is about succeeding. It’s about trading. It’s about win-win relationships. It’s not about suffering. It’s not about sacrifice. It’s not about giving. It’s about making, producing, trading. And Christianity is not about that.”

I sincerely offered to sit down with Dr Brook when he comes here and teach him about Christianity, because he is so manifestly uninformed about it (as I claimed at the top of this article) yet claims authority to teach about it.

Christianity categorically does not teach that one may not benefit from helping others. The Apostle Paul wrote that a worker is worthy of his wages, that those who don’t work don’t eat, and himself had a trade making tents to earn money. Jesus taught in the parable of the talents that He wants His servants to “do business” and generate a return on investment, and to do any less is “wicked and lazy”.

Christianity is of course about living for a purpose literally infinitely higher than oneself, but is in no means incompatible with capitalism any more than the extravagantly generous philanthropy of Bill Gates and other industrialists is mutually exclusive with their very profitable productivity.

Capitalism at its best, least exploitative kind, is promoted and protected by the personal responsibility and freedom expounded by Christianity. In fact, altruism is the perfect motivation for capitalism because, as the globally renowned capitalist, ethical salesman, author and motivational speaker (and Christian) Zig Ziglar said:

“You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

I’m still waiting for my contact at the Ayn Rand Institute to take me up on my offer to help Dr Brooks deal with authentic Christianity instead of the counterfeit caricature he currently debates.

So for interested Aussies, my recommendation is that the Ayn Rand religion and any derivative conference is little more than the blind offering to lead the blind, even if while advocating for free markets. They are – without factual, rational basis – hostile to the foundation of Western Civilisation, Christianity.

Dave Pellowe is a Christian political educator & commentator, founder of The Good Sauce, convener of the annual Australian Church And State Summit and host of Good Sauce’s weekly The Church And State Show. Since 2016 Dave has undertaken the mission of arming Christians to redeem culture through events from Perth to Auckland, videos, podcasts and articles published in multiple journals across Australia and New Zealand. [more]

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