In The Fountainhead, novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand fully dramatizes the moral theory of rational egoism--the theory which holds that it is each person's responsibility to choose his goals and values by use of his independent reasoning mind; and that it is his right to pursue these goals in quest of his own selfish, personal happiness. Put another way, conscientious adherence to one's best rational judgment is the only appropriate means by which to live a fully human life--and success, creative achievement and personal happiness are its proper goals and ends. The theme of the novel is the virtue of independence in thought and action: the crucial importance of deriving your values and standards by the exercise of your own best judgment, as opposed to blindly following the judgment of others; and then pursuing these values consistently and indefatigably, as opposed to betraying or compromising them in practice. Dr. Bernstein explores how the plot and conflict of The Fountainhead convey this theme, including a detailed, in-depth analysis of the five major characters in the story--Peter Keating, Ellsworth Toohey, Gail Wynand, Dominique Francon, and the hero Howard Roark.

Who: Andrew Bernstein, professor of philosophy and speaker for the Ayn Rand Institute
What: A talk and Q & A examining The Fountainhead and explaining Ayn Rand's morality of rational egoism
Where: University of Maryland, Arts Building, Room 2309, College Park, MD
When: May 1, 2008, at 8 pm

Admission is FREE and open to the public.

Dr. Bernstein is a visiting professor of philosophy at Marist College; he also teaches at SUNY Purchase (which selected him Outstanding Teacher for 2004) and formerly at Pace University and at Marymount College (which selected him Outstanding Teacher for 1995). Dr. Bernstein lectures regularly at American universities and appears frequently on radio talk shows. His op-eds have been published in such newspapers as The San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Times, Los Angeles Daily News and The Houston Chronicle. Dr. Bernstein is the author of three Ayn Rand titles for CliffsNotes: Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and Anthem. He also authored Penguin's Teacher's Guide to "The Fountainhead," and The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire.

 

The California decision that held homeschooling illegal violates parents' right to control their children's upbringing. An op-ed by Thomas A. Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute.

In 1969 Ayn Rand's Ford Hall Forum talk, "Apollo and Dionysus," addressed the nearly simultaneous events of Woodstock and the first lunar landing. Employing Greek mythology's god of the sun and god of wine, she compared the awe-inspiring accomplishments of NASA's Apollo space program to the famous three-day concert that has come to exemplify the counterculture of the 1960s and the "hippie era." Almost four decades later, Dr. Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, reflects on her words and explores the implications of how American culture since Woodstock has valued individualism relative to collectivism and civilization relative to primitivism.

Who: Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute

What: A Ford Hall Forum talk that will consider how the opposing forces of reason and emotionalism have manifested themselves in American culture in the four decades since Woodstock, with special focus on the rise of religion and environmentalism. A Q&A will follow.

Where: Old South Meeting House, 310 Washington Street, Boston, MA

When: Thursday, May 8, 2008, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

The public and media are invited. Admission is FREE.

Yaron Brook is president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute and is a contributing editor to The Objective Standard. A former finance professor, he has published in academic as well as popular publications. He is frequently interviewed in the media and appears weekly on the new Fox Business Network to debate and discuss current economic and business news. His columns and opinion-editorials are published on forbes.com and in many major newspapers. Dr. Brook lectures on Objectivism, business ethics and foreign policy at college campuses, community groups and corporations across America and throughout the world.

Yaron Brook has an excellent op-ed on Life and Taxes in Forbes:

Your taxes are overdue, if you're just reading this now. But the fact is that every day is April 15 for Jane and John Smith, America’s most tax-savvy couple.

They awaken in their highly mortgaged house (interest deduction), make breakfast for their adopted child (tax credit and exemption), then drive their hybrid cars (more tax credits) to work. John, at his office, signs a contract for solar energy panels (tax credit), but he turns down a promotion that would launch the couple into a higher tax bracket. Meanwhile, across town, Jane signs an application to get historic preservation status (tax credits) for her office building.

Back home that evening, the Smiths write a few tax-deductible checks to charities and then discuss where to put their savings--into a tax-free retirement account, or a start-up business whose income would be taxed at the highest marginal rate? Just before sleep, their thoughts drift to energy-efficient appliance credits and carbon-emission taxes.

Since it's an election year, the presidential candidates are busy figuring ways to add still more carrots to the tax code--so that the Smiths will become still more entangled in a tax policy that fears and distrusts the goals that individuals would select if guided only by rational self-interest.

Tax policy works by attaching financial incentives to a long list of values deemed morally worthy. If you want to maximize your wealth come tax time--and who doesn't?--you must look at the world through tax-colored glasses, "voluntarily" adjusting your behavior to suit social norms and thereby qualifying for tax breaks. In this way, the social engineers of tax policy preserve the impression that you're exercising free choice, while they're actually dispensing with your reason and your judgment.

As an example, consider the choice between buying and renting a home. In a free market, a dollar paid in rent is equivalent to a dollar paid for mortgage interest. But when the federal government offers a mortgage interest deduction--based on some alleged need for an "ownership society"--then each purchase dollar saves a few pennies in tax that a rental dollar does not. So the path to wealth maximization suddenly veers away from renting and toward home ownership.

Over the past century, such social engineering has inflated the nation's tax laws to an estimated 66,000 pages of statutes, regulations and rulings. [...]

Read the rest here.

Irvine, CA--Today Ben Stein's anti-evolution documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opens in theaters. The film claims that advocates of "intelligent design"--the view that life is so complex it must be the product of a "higher intelligence"--are the persecuted victims of a "scientific establishment" dogmatically committed to evolution.

"The premise of Expelled is that proponents of 'intelligent design' have been shunned, denied tenure, and even fired because of a conspiracy to quash the scientific evidence supporting their theory," said Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. "But the truth is: there is no evidence supporting their theory. Intelligent design is completely devoid of any positive scientific content, and consists of nothing more than a religiously motivated attack on evolution. To the extent intelligent design advocates are facing obstacles in academia it is because they are not doing real science: they haven't been 'expelled' they have flunked out of the scientific community, just as a faith healer would flunk out of medical school.

"Observe that intelligent design advocates have pumped millions into publicity-seeking, rather than appealing to scientists with facts and logical arguments. They have spent more time at Christian 'apologetics seminars' than scientific conferences, and have attempted to use the courts to force schools to teach their ideas. Now they are hoping to dupe the movie-going public with a film that misrepresents Darwin's theory and the array of facts that support it--just as the makers of Expelled misrepresented the nature of the film in order to bamboozle respected evolutionary scientists into participating in it.

"Intelligent design advocates will do anything to advance their views--except science.

"The reason for that is simple: doing science has never been their goal. Their goal is to make biblical creationism appear scientific in order to skirt the constitutional ban on religion in public schools. Contrary to the film's claims, the real dogmatists are not the defenders of Darwin, but the religiously motivated advocates of intelligent design."

Those interested in cutting to the truth about the Islamic Totalitarian threat that is descending upon—and arising among—all of us should pay special attention to the works of Andrew Bostom. His blog is a must-read, and his articles in The American Thinker are not to be missed.

Bostom’s major works are The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (Prometheus, 2005) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (Prometheus, 2008). The latter (to be released next week) promises the same profound expertise and virtuous commitment to the truth as found in the former. His works are required reading for anyone who wants to understand the nature of jihad and the hostile attitudes of Muslims toward Jews throughout history.

Dr. Bostom is not a scribbler. He is a scientist, and he approaches his subject with the meticulous loyalty to facts and evidence that define a man of reason. His works do not merely present his conclusions; they detail how his conclusions accurately reflect the relevant facts and available sources. In an article three years ago, for instance, he took on the widespread Muslim claim that “jihad” refers to some kind of “inner struggle” as against external war. In historical terms, “it is a complete crock” he wrote to me in an email—and his article “Sufi Jihad?” shows us why.

Bostom cites a series of Sufi thinkers—the ones who are supposed to favor the spiritual meaning of Islam rather than the violence of the creed—to show that these mystics were in fact dedicated to violence. To take the most important: Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), a towering figure in Islamic thought, a Sufi Muslim who followed the Shafi’I school of Islamic jurisprudence, and an allegedly non-violent man, wrote this of jihad:

[O]ne must go on jihad (i.e., warlike razzias or raids) at least once a year . . . one may use a catapult against them [non-Muslims] when they are in a fortress, even if among them are women and children. One may set fire to them and/or drown them . . . [if one of them] is enslaved, his marriage is [automatically] revoked. . . . One must destroy their useless books. Jihadists may take as booty whatever they decide . . . on offering up the jizya [the tax levied on the dhimmis, the subjugated peoples], the dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold of his beard and hits [the dhimmi] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear . . . their houses may not be higher than the Muslim's. . . . They [the dhimmis] have to wear [an identifying] patch [on their clothing], even women, and even in the [public] baths . . . [dhimmis] must hold their tongue. . . . [cited in Kitab al-Wagiz fi fiqh madhab al-imam al-Safi'i, Beirut, 1979, pp. 186, 190–91; 199–200; 202–203. English translation by Dr. Michael Schub.]

Some today claim that “jihad” means some kind of contemplative inner struggle, that non-Muslims under Muslim rule enjoy equal protection under the law, that there are no slaves in Islam, that non-Muslims need not wear an identifying patch to single them out, or that there is respect for civilians in Islamic thought. But to make this claim, one must disagree not merely with a modern commentator. One must repudiate the most authoritative Islamic mystic since the founding of Islam.

Such is the value of Dr. Bostom’s contribution. He has done the heavy lifting required to bring these kinds of sources to us and to show—not merely by the force of his own conclusions, but in the words of such Islamic authorities themselves—the intellectual origins of the war against the West today.

Conventionally, most people believe that morality can only be based in religious faith that in a world without God no principles of right and wrong could exist. Related to this, philosophers have long held that no objective, fact-based, rational code of values is possible. Regarding both points, this talk shows that the exact opposite is true. The purpose of morality is to guide human life on earth and religion is utterly incapable of it. Flourishing life requires a code of secularism, rationality, egoism and freedom. Religious faith clashes with every principle of a proper moral code, and, as such, has led, and can only lead to, hell on earth.

Who: Dr. Andrew Bernstein, professor of philosophy and speaker for the Ayn Rand Institute
What: A talk arguing for a secular, rational basis for morality. A Q&A will follow.
Where: University of Colorado, Boulder, Wolf Law Building, Room 207
When: Thursday, April 10, 2008, at 7 pm

Dr. Bernstein is a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Marist College; he also teaches at SUNY Purchase. Dr. Bernstein lectures regularly at American universities and appears frequently on radio talk shows. His op-eds have been published in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Times, The Los Angeles Daily News, and The Houston Chronicle. Dr. Bernstein is the author of three Ayn Rand titles for CliffsNotes: Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Anthem. He also authored The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire.

Irvine, CA—Since the publication of Ayn Rand's first novel, We the Living, 72 years ago, sales of her books increased exponentially, having recently reached the mark of 25 million copies, a staggering figure considering the length of her two major novels and the philosophical nature of their themes and ideas.

We the Living, whose theme Ayn Rand described as "the supreme value of a human life and the evil of a totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it," had a small initial printing of three thousand copies. The novel, which tells the story of three individuals facing an all-powerful communist state, steadily gained popularity through word of mouth, as did all of Ayn Rand's novels, and 70 years later has sold more than 3 million copies.

Anthem, Ayn Rand's shortest novel, was published two years later, in 1938, and so far has sold more than 4 million copies. Anthem portrays the struggle of an individual to discover his ego and gain his independence in a futuristic society where individualism is ruthlessly suppressed and the word "I" is no longer used--in conversation or thought.

The recurring theme of the conflict between individualism and collectivism is also present in Ayn Rand's third novel, The Fountainhead, published in 1943. This conflict is dramatized in the story of Howard Roark, an architect whose independent vision and unbreakable artistic integrity pits him against the mediocrity and conformism prevalent in his own profession and in the society of his time. Sales of The Fountainhead reached 20,000 copies in its first six months of existence, climbed to 150,000 copies two years after its initial publication, and recently surpassed 6.5 million copies.

Ayn Rand's last and most important novel, Atlas Shrugged, was first published in 1957 and, like The Fountainhead, has sold more than 6 million copies since its release. With a theme stated by Ayn Rand as "the role of the mind in man's existence," it sought to demonstrate "a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest" and to present a "moral defense of capitalism." The plot of Atlas Shrugged involves the mysterious disappearance of the most able and productive individuals in a collectivist society that oppresses and exploits them while refusing to recognize their need to function in freedom.

The powerful themes and gripping plots of Ayn Rand's stories gained the attention and admiration of millions of readers who, over the span of seven decades, have bought 20 million copies of her novels. Ayn Rand fans also bought 5 million copies of her nonfiction writings, which include essay anthologies such as For the New Intellectual (1 million copies sold), The Virtue of Selfishness (1.25 million copies sold), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (600,000 copies sold) and the Romantic Manifesto (350,000 copies sold).

In 2007 alone, more than 800,000 copies of Ayn Rand's novels were sold, along with 60,000 copies of her nonfiction books--both figures all-time annual records.

According to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, the enduring appeal of Ayn Rand's writings should not be surprising: "Ayn Rand offers readers the opportunity to experience masterful plots with heroes who show us the crucial importance of reason and the supreme value of pursuing our own individual happiness. Based on the growing popularity of her books since their publication, we can confidently predict that sales are bound to increase--and that's a hopeful development not only for the future of capitalism in America but also for the future of freedom on Earth.”