From Reason TV’s summary:

Joshua Zader’s intellectual relationship with Ayn Rand began as it does for so many, during his college years. He then blazed a trail uniquely his own among Rand admirers by creating The Atlasphere—an online networking and dating site for the fans of Rand’s novels with particular emphasis on The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Zader found inspiration in Rand’s portrayals of independence and integrity, saying: “Rand’s ethical vision was really one where we want to create a win-win world for everybody, and that there shouldn’t be conflicts of interest among rational people if you’re using an ethical system where everybody is treated as an end in himself.” Zader has seen the real life impact of Rand’s ideas through his work on The Atlasphere, which currently boasts over 19,000 members.

Zader discusses the some finer points of Rand’s thought and novels, her supporters, her detractors, and her continuing impact. As a student of Buddhism, Zader explores how her ideas relate to what may seem like a conflicting view of the world. Zader: “Sometimes I see Buddhism as a set of practices in search of a philosophy, in an analogous way that Objectivism could be seen as a philosophy in search of a set of practices.” Joshua Zader blogs at Mudita Journal.

Approximately 10 minutes. Joshua Zader was interviewed by Ryan Seals, filmed by Alex Manning and edited by Hawk Jensen.

A few of my own reactions, in no particular order:

They sent me a preview of the edited footage earlier this year, for proofing purposes. I’m surprised by how little overlap there is between the proofing footage and the footage they used here. No complaints, but it definitely emphasizes a different theme than the footage they sent. It was over an hour-long conversation, so there are a lot of ways to stitch together the topics we covered.

I felt Ryan Seals did a good job of coming up with interview questions. I remain grateful for his creativity in suggesting topics to explore.

I will be very interested to hear how other Objectivists respond to my comments about Objectivism and Buddhism, which are bound to be controversial, at least in some circles.

What do you think of the interview?

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If any of you have been to one of these seminars, I would be very interested to hear what you thought.

A few thoughts I’ve not yet had a chance to integrate fully:

- I agree with something Nathaniel Branden said once, that knowing someone calls him- or herself “an Objectivist” tells you almost nothing about that person — except perhaps whether they are likely to go to church on Sunday. It doesn’t tell you how honest they are, how rational they are, how hard-working they are, how respectful they are, how successful they are, how happy they are, etc.

- Personally, the biggest advantage I got from Objectivism was having a coherent framework for my ideas. That certainly seems valuable, but it’s hard for me to measure its value in an empirically demonstrable way, i.e., in terms of a “worldly advantage.”

- Overall, whatever advantages there are to some of Rand’s more profound ideas (e.g., your life is an end in itself, you should follow reason, you should be productive), some of the benefits they confer in the real world may well be offset, statistically, by some of her more self-defeating ideas (e.g., encouraging inappropriate moralizing, promoting crude understandings of psychology, discounting the role and importance of emotions).

- When I look at the things that have helped my success and happiness the most, they’ve come more from my exploration of Eastern ideas rather than Objectivism. Objectivism gave me the theory, but the orientals gave me the practices (meditation, Buddhism, radical acceptance, qigong etc.).

From what I have seen, many of the ways that people get ahead in this world are social, emotional, and biological. Objectivism has precious little to say about any of these.

Overall, if you want to define Objectivism as the optimal philosophy for living life on earth, I think we’re looking at something that’s still very crude and preliminary. It’s not even out of beta yet. You might say we’re the beta testers.

My question is, who’s working on the next release? This one’s a bit stale, if you ask me.

Thanks to Kirez for the tip.

You are associated with the Brandens, and novelist Erika Holzer, who do not represent Objectivism and have morally betrayed it’s creator. Out of respect for Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism, I withdraw my membership and support from your institution.

In the six years since I launched the Atlasphere, I’ve received only a handful of e-mails such as this one. It is usually from a young Objectivist, very sincere and committed to the ideas Ayn Rand taught — and still overly deferential to those who teach Objectivism as some sort of secular religion.

Today I sent the following in response:

No problem, I have turned off the rebilling on your subscription and removed your account.

I have a question for you to consider, if you are willing: If you had known someone for many years, and that person had consistently treated you, and everyone else with whom you saw them come into contact, with unfailing decency and respect — would you reject them if you heard a rumor they had “betrayed” Ayn Rand (whatever that means)?

I find myself in this situation from time to time, and my integrity requires me to (1) trust the evidence of my own senses much more than I trust decades-old rumors and (2) allow people to make mistakes from time to time, without judging them to be rotten to their core.

To whatever extent I give credence to the rumors you and I have both heard, I also must consider some fairly well-corroborated rumors that Ayn Rand herself could, at times, be pretty rotten to people in her life.

In general, I think the Objectivist movement would be better off if its adherents stopped denouncing and undermining one another so much. Naturally, many in the movement disagree, but it does not change my sense that they are wasting valuable time and energy, and causing harm to the overall movement.

There’s no particular need to answer. I respect that you must come to your own conclusions, and hearing mine may make little difference. This is, however, my perspective on the matter, and now seemed an appropriate time to explain it. I hope one day it will make more sense than it might make today.

In his latest post, “Wishing George W. Bush Well,” Amod explores a theme dear to my heart — learning not to vilify those with whom you disagree strongly. At the urging of a spiritual teacher, Amod had begun exploring his ability to wish other people well, including his own “enemies.” He writes:

So I thought: who is my greatest enemy? As a lifelong leftie, in 2005, it didn’t take me long to identify George W. Bush. And so, as part of the practice, I tried sincerely to wish that man well.

The experience was more than unsettling. I cried in the process. But it helped me grow a lot. I had spent a long time feeling such poisonous hatred for that man, which did terrible things to me and my own well-being - in a way that Śāntideva warns us about. It’s a terribly unnerving, but highly rewarding, thing to wish your enemies well. Since your enemies are only human it makes philosophical sense to do so, really, if your main aim is consequentialist - that is, to produce the best results for yourself or for humanity. The trick is that it requires you to give up retribution as a goal, and even for a consequentialist, that’s not easy.

I posted the following in response:

Thank you for posting about your experiences here.

I suppose I’m in the tiny minority of people who think that both Barack Obama and George W. Bush are fundamentally decent people. I wrote a bit here about the Bush side of things.

This put me in a difficult situation once, when I attended a lengthy, delightful Theravadan retreat that was capped off with a lengthy “dharma talk” that included, of all things, a discussion of how evil George W. Bush is.

I wish more Buddhists and liberals would follow your example, because it seems like it would be good for their integrity.

I find myself longing to hear even more from you on this subject. Why did you cry? What did you learn about yourself and about George W. Bush as you did this exercise? Did it make you re-think any of your conclusions about Bush?

I think it would be fair to say that I oppose Obama’s policies as thoroughly as you opposed Bush’s. In my case, it’s hard to identify with either gentleman’s policies, since I am a libertarian and neither administration accurately reflects my desires for U.S. policy, either domestically or abroad.

I often feel that a great deal of damage is done by “hating” the other side, and liberals really went off the deep, cancerous end with Bush for the past eight years. There must be many people in need of the healing you have undertaken yourself.

Buddhists and Quakers seem like excellent candidates to lead by example, in this regard.

Amod has responded in the comments, and I have the sense that I’d like to push him further on the subject of understanding George W. Bush from his own perspective, rather than from within Amod’s worldview. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to explore this with him more soon.

Meantime, check out his blog. I’m glad to have the opportunity to point some readers his way. I’ve also invited him to write a guest post for Mudita Journal at some point; I hope he takes me up on it.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” –Rumi

Shuffling through the ankle deep sand of the narrow paths that pass for streets in a traditional Senegalese neighborhood at 2 a.m., guided by a Sufi mystic who has been having visions since the age of 13, we come across a crowd watching a wrestling match behind a makeshift canvas enclosure. Peeking through the holes in the canvas, along with the street urchins who cannot afford the 10 cents admissions fee, by flaming torchfire we see a pair of incredibly powerful men wrestling shoulder to shoulder, dripping with sweat and dust, wearing only a simple loincloth as they throw each other to the ground with great fierceness. We then walk along the beach in the dark, past a graveyard of holy men, with the huge waves crashing and crabs running in the moonlight. And amidst all of this indigenous, exotic romanticism, the marabout wants me to help modernize Senegal.

There is a breed of Westerner who hates our civilization, and wants to return to a more indigenous way of life. But most people who do not have our way of life, long for it. I am reminded of climbing a local promontory in Alaska with an orange-robed Tibetan priest and a group of local hippies, who had asked him to bless the mountain for them. In the blessing ceremony that he was performing, he quite innocently and honestly prayed for them that they would find oil under their land, assuming, as do most people from poor countries, that these people would be delighted to have the gift of sudden wealth. Little did he know that this particular group of people would find the thought of discovering oil beneath their land to be a curse rather than a blessing. Their sudden expressions of repugnance were unimaginable to him.

That said, it is also true that many people from other cultures fear the erosion of their own cultures, even as they long for the comfort, convenience, pleasure, and respect that comes from living the life we enjoy in the “developed” world. A majority of people living on less than $1 dollar per day listen to radio, and a majority of those living on less than $2 per day watch television. They are all watching, at least part of the time, American programs which often show the most tawdry aspects of our culture, unbelievable shamelessness and vulgarity along with unbelievable material wealth.

Senegalese culture is an especially warm, kind, and respectful culture for those who experience it from the inside (for a sense of the warmth and diversity of the music, see here, here, and here). Casual tourists are harassed by beggars and street vendors, so if one does not have personal relationships with individual Senegalese one might not experience the real Senegal. But for those who have the opportunity to develop real relationships here, one can feel a culture that is relatively free from anger, hatred, ego, and vanity.

There are, of course, good people and bad people everywhere. But the social norms here are, on balance, more modest than in the U.S. One of the projects I am working on here is the SEEDS Academy, a basketball academy founded by Amadou Gallo Fall, the VP for International Relations for the Dallas Mavericks. Although the Senegalese tend to be very tall and exceptionally athletic, one of the concerns at the academy is to train the players to be aggressive rather than respectful so that they can compete in the NCAA and NBA.

To take a different kind of example, in watching a video of a Senegalese concert, most of which was the singing of religious songs, the young people at the concert were as enthusiastic as any American concert crowd. But when a Congolese band came on that, instead of religious songs, sang songs with sexually explicit lyrics and quasi-pornographic dancing, the Senegalese young people became suddenly quiet and visibly embarrassed, en masse. This was a spontaneous response and it was not a behavior that one would see in the U.S., where highly sexualized performances at rock concerts are well received.

So the problem that I am currently working on is how to help a country become wealthy while preserving, as much as possible, its cultural integrity. On the wealthy side, the good news is that Senegal is ready to take off and join the world economy as soon as Americans are ready to invest in and purchase from Senegal. I may be exaggerating slightly by putting the burden largely on Americans, but many Senegalese are frustrated with having France as their primary trading partner, because of the various ways in which they EU economy is formally closed and, even more so, because of the ways in which the Europeans are not as culturally adventurous, open, and welcoming as are the Americans. Plus, relative to the French, the Americans have money and spend it. The Senegalese want to do business with Americans.

Unfortunately, many Americans are burdened with an enormous set of prejudices regarding Africa. Our image of Africa is that it is a land of poverty, violence, corruption, and disease. While there are many Americans who are eager to pity Africa and send money, fewer Americans are ready to recognize Africa as a legitimate place to vacation, do business, and build friendships. And with leaders such as Robert Mugabe in place and the Congo civil wars periodically re-erupting, unfortunately many of the negative perceptions of Africa have a basis in reality.

But most of those generalizations do not apply to Senegal. Senegal has been a stable, functioning democracy since independence. Although one should take malaria pills here, especially in the rainy season, there are no unusual health risks here; even the AIDS rate in Senegal is comparable to that in the U.S. The climate along the gorgeous coast is more moderate than is that of Texas; typical Dakar daytime temperatures range from cool and breezy 70s in the dry season to the high 80s in the brief rainy season.

After forty years of socialism, President Wade of Senegal has, since his election in 2000, put in place a thoroughly pro-market agenda: he has created a one-stop shop business registration service that makes opening up a business in Senegal straightforward for both foreigners and natives, and he has an entire office devoted to setting up industrial parks and free zones, with a determination to attract American investment in the free zones. Senegal has secure property rights and a strong tradition of rule of law and contract enforcement; thus businesses that invest here need not worry about many of the legitimate fears that prevent them from investing in many developing world nations. Only seven hours away via a direct flight from NYC, D.C. and Atlanta, Senegal is, in effect, open for business.

Poverty is the worst problem facing Senegal, and it is clearly the legacy of forty years of socialism. When Senegal achieved independence in 1960, it had one of the strongest manufacturing sectors of any African nation. Leopold Senghor, the first leader of independent Senegal, was educated by French socialists and therefore believed that government control of the economy was superior to capitalistic competition. Until 1986, a hundred and sixty-one different manufactured items essentially had government-granted monopolies due to the misguided belief that competition was harmful to economic progress.

The impact was exactly the reverse; sixteen years of government-enforced monopolies resulted in a shrunken manufacturing sector with poor quality standards that prevented Senegalese industry from competing in the global market. A series of reforms starting in 1986 began to open up the economy, but just as the transition economies of eastern Europe struggled when initially faced with global competition, so too did Senegal’s economy. Moreover, the combination of ongoing socialism with more open trade resulted in the collapse of the Senegalese manufacturing sector.

The dominant cultural and religious force in Senegal is Sufi Muslim, with more than 95% of Senegalese being followers. Among the Sufi brotherhoods, the most powerful one is the Mourides, founded by Cheikh Amadou Bamba, a charismatic mystic who is beloved for resisting the French colonial powers in the late 19th and early 20th century. Bamba preached a principled non-violence [PDF link to a brochure about Bamba’s teachings], decades before Ghandi, and hard work as the path to holiness, and one of his first disciples was a highly successful entrepreneur who added entrepreneurship as one of the paths through which work became holy. As a consequence, the Mourides diaspora around the world tend to be successful entrepreneurs wherever they go. Moreover, because Mouridism is ethical first and foremost, Bamba, in his own way, launched the first generation of Conscious Capitalists(R).

Thus in a world in which a common prejudice towards Muslims is the belief that they are terrorists, and a common prejudice towards Africans is that they are lazy, passive, and unethical the Mourides are globally distinguished for being especially peaceful Muslims and especially hard working, ethical, entrepreneurial Africans. I don’t want to exaggerate; decades of dependence on NGOs and government have undermined the work ethic in Senegal. But if Wade is able to complete his project of releasing his people from decades of socialism, the future looks bright for Senegal.

Unlike many African leaders, Wade is moving in the right direction. But always and everywhere, economic freedom only results in economic growth if entrepreneurs build successful companies, and African entrepreneurs can only build successful companies if they receive investment capital and if consumers purchase their products and services. But if Senegal’s beautiful beaches are over-run by the drunken spring break party crowd from the U.S., and if all of the investment comes from the most short-sighted and calloused businessmen from France, the U.S., China, and the Arab world, Senegal may become wealthier but a land destroyed by drunkenness, corruption, pollution, and prostitution. But if the best and most caring people come to Senegal as tourists and investors, and learn to love and respect the music, the people, and the culture, then perhaps Senegal can develop as the first wealthy nation in black sub-Saharan Africa while also providing a model of how to modernize in a culturally respectful manner.

Michael Strong
CEO & Chief Visionary Officer
FLOW

UPDATE (from Joshua) — I just forwarded this newsletter to Mudita Forum, with the following prefatory note:

I regularly enjoy the newsletters I get from Flow CEO Michael Strong. The folks at Flow have something unusual going on: They understand the importance of Eastern spiritual teachings as well as the importance of free markets and individual liberty. They’re dynamic that way, in the best possible sense. I’d say they’re a heavily Tier-II organization (in spiral dynamics parlance), in ways that even Ken Wilber’s Integral crowd often seems too self-limited and “green.”

Below is the most recent newsletter that I received from FLOW. If you enjoy it as much as I did, you might want to consider signing up to receive the newsletter on their web site. They also have a Facebook page.

They’re one of the few organizations out there that I get actively excited about, in terms of their ability to strike to the heart of human goodness — both spiritually and politically. I hope you find them valuable, too.

Last week’s article “Inflation Nation” in the New York Times, by financial historian Allan Meltzer, is one of the best I’ve seen on the subject. (Thanks to Greg Feirman for e-mailing the link.)

Here are a few choice paragraphs:

It doesn’t help that the administration’s stimulus program is an obstacle to sound policy. It will create jobs at the cost of an enormous increase in the government debt that has to be financed. And it does very little to increase productivity, which is the main engine of economic growth.

Indeed, big, heavily subsidized programs are rarely good for productivity. Better health care adds to the public’s sense of well-being, but it adds only a little to productivity. Subsidizing cleaner energy projects can produce jobs, but it doesn’t add much to national productivity. Meanwhile, higher carbon tax rates increase production costs and prices but do not increase productivity. All these actions can slow productive investment and the economy’s underlying growth rate, which, in turn, increases the inflation rate.

Some of my fellow economists, including many at the Fed, say that the big monetary goal is to avoid deflation. They point to the less than 1 percent decline in the consumer price index for the year ending in March as evidence that deflation is a threat. But this statistic is misleading: unstable food and energy prices may lower the price index for a few months, but deflation (or inflation) refers to the sustained rate of change of prices, not the price level. We should look instead at a less volatile price index, the gross domestic product deflator. In this year’s first quarter, it rose 2.9 percent — a sure sign of inflation.

Besides, no country facing enormous budget deficits, rapid growth in the money supply and the prospect of a sustained currency devaluation as we are has ever experienced deflation. These factors are harbingers of inflation.

Meltzer is rather polite in his conclusions, but the picture he paints is of a train-wreck in the making, given how much federal debt we’re accumulating, how much money the Fed is pumping into the economy, and how unlikely it is that any of the parties involved (Obama, Bernanke, etc.) will change course.

The strongest argument I’ve seen for the inevitability of significant rates of inflation, however, came in the April 2009 issue of Porter Stansberry’s “Investment Advisory” newsletter. Stansberry adds up the U.S. government’s outstanding obligations that it must pay over the next ten years:

It’s impossible to know the government’s real liabilities right now, thanks to all of the off-balance sheet items and quasi-governmental insurance groups. But you can make a rough estimate...

Let’s say $20 trillion for the on-balance sheet OBAMA! spending. Another roughly $50 trillion is coming for unfunded entitlement programs, and probably another $10 trillion for all of the various guarantees to PBGC, FDIC, and Fannie/Freddie. That gets us to something around $80 trillion by 2019 — and my estimate is likely too conservative by a large percentage because it assumes tax revenues can grow substantially.

There are roughly 100 million families in America. How many families do you know can afford to add another $80,000 in debt [actually, if you do the math, it is $800,000 per family, not $80,000] to their balance sheets? That’s how much money we’ll owe, per family, by 2019 — and that’s just for the federal government’s debt. That doesn’t include state or local governments, and it doesn’t include any personal or corporate debt.

Since there are around 300 million individuals in the United States, that works out to around $266,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

There is nowhere for the U.S. government to get that kind of money — no how, no way — but to fire up the printing presses, in one form or another. They certainly can’t get any of it by “raising taxes on the rich,” no matter how much they try.

It’s also worth considering what countries like China, which has 1.9 trillion U.S. dollars in reserves, will do with those dollars when they see massive inflation becoming a reality. Their dollars will soon be chasing many of the same assets our dollars are chasing — driving up prices further.

The results would not be pretty, especially for the poor, middle class, and elderly — anyone living on a more fixed income. And when you combine that kind of inflation with an already-depressed economy, the results are especially disastrous. It could make the inflationary troubles of the 1970s look good, by comparison.

The T-shirt graphic shown below could soon be a lot less funny than it is today.

(If you’ve not seen the full exchange between Jon Stewart and Cliff May, it’s well worth watching, just to get a handle on the depth of Stewart’s intellectual skew. Aside from claiming Harry Truman is a war criminal — for which he later apologized without much explanation of why it warranted apology — he also asserts that the Geneva Convention should protect terrorists. His lack of historical context is staggering, especially considering how many young people today look to him for perspective on current events.)

I’ve been aware of PJTV in the background for a while. Usually they have intelligent, un-telegenic commentators saying interesting stuff that I’m hard-pressed to devote time to watch from start to finish.

But Bill Whittle — of long-time Eject!, Eject!, Eject! blogging fame — is in a class of his own. This guy is an inspiring wordsmith and articulate enough to excel as a star of this new online video format.

I hope to see a lot more like this.