The Intellectual Dark Web is a genuinely strange set of realities, when taken at face value. During a time when so many smart young men were falling out of the official narrative, the establishment New York Times just so happened to promote a set of people who “reject the status quo” 1 . A set of people who form a circle on the sheet of political graph paper, providing the bounds of “respectable discourse”, and an ongoing suite of “but at the same time....” thoughts to undermine any possibility of convictions. Anything outside the bounds of the IDW circle to the right is hate, anything to the left is resentfulness, but within the Special Friends circle “ideas tm ” are to be found. The ideas discussed “might not be right”, but we need to “hear people out to arrive at the truth, which is surely somewhere in between”. To someone familiar with these sorts of traps, this would reasonably be viewed as a scheme to neutralize people who could easily wander off the reservation. Essentially, it’s a subcultural version of the “echo chambers” scam - an incoherent community by design. The most prominent of those involved in this astroturf movement are presented as proceeding from different varietals of scientism that are proliferating (Voegelin 1997). What separates them are - essentially - subjectively valued specifics that don’t exactly lend themselves to adjudication given their arbitrariness (Schwarzmantel 1998) 2 . These views are pretty contemporary, except for the anachronistic efforts by Peterson to rehash the promotion of entheogens in the manner of Terence McKenna, and his 2 Recall the suite of people run in tandem under the New Atheism “movement” years ago. If you don’t like Dan Dennett (and who would), you can like Dawkins, or Sam Harris etc. 1 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html Joseph Campbell-style perennialism 3 . Oh, and of course the point of this essay: Objectivism is apparently a thing again? For some reason to be discovered, Objectivism is back. Interview show host Dave Rubin, a key figure in the IDW, had Yaron Brook on his show a number of times soon after he went into business for himself. This led to his appearance at the Objectivism conference (OCON), hosting a discussion with Onkar Ghate, and a rare Harry Binswanger interview among other things. Around the same time Stephen RC Hicks was palling around with Jordan Peterson, the second most famous person profiled in the NYT article, under the auspices of his book Explaining Postmodernism. For a forgotten ideology, it’s strangely present around this group, which causes one to wonder why that might be? 4 A question that when answered also explains why this essay is worthy of having been written. Objectivism is a weird group of men. Men being the key term in that sentence. When making sense of social organizations and movements, it’s important to make note of this sort of thing. When something that’s meant to address a collective action problem never seems to get any purchase in a mind that isn’t of a very specific character, we need to start questioning why that might be. Is this something that could otherwise gain purchase if it were promoted differently, or is it a trick designed to neutralize people who have the potential for becoming inconvenient like smart disaffected young men (salami 4 While writing this, I forgot to include the fact that Leonard Peikoff’s ex wife is or was (who cares) the speech policy person for Parler. 3 It could be argued that Sam Harris pushing meditation via scientism is a means to get around the Establishment Clause problems that Transcendental Meditation ran into when trying to gain greater purchase in the public schools etc. In that sense, his program is also dated. tactics)? With what’s already been said about the IDW, you probably know where this analysis is going. If one reads books like The Fountainhead (Rand 1943/2005), one of my favorite books, you get the understanding that Objectivism is in dialectical tension with the predominant “Sad Babies” social program. Insofar as someone is a sad baby, we need to venerate them with our attention and care, or else be one of those “idiots on the wrong side of history” and probably a fascist. We need to be oriented downwards to help people, and only risk hurting our necks by looking up. Objectivism answers this by saying that society is held up by the minority of individuals capable of the outcomes that afford the quality of life we individually enjoy - in short the 1% provides the standard of living for the 99% (Reisman 2015). A heroically productive individual’s intellect, unhindered by “we” (Rand 1938/2007), is essentially the motor of human flourishing - the highest value to uphold (eudaimonia). This aforementioned conceptualization of the “we”/selfishness” dialectic is the basis of misunderstandings of Objectivism as well as of legitimate conflict 5 The standard of value in Rand’s system that’s brought to any given choice is the implications for the wellbeing of the individual choosing. The rational egoist’s ‘selfishness’ presents in a very pro-social sense via the mutual benefit assumed to be gained by any voluntary transaction between parties. Thinking that you need to scheme 5 The philosophy’s belief in the goodness of elevating “I” is also pictured on the cover of Peter Schwartz’s In Defense of Selfishness (2015) around to benefit yourself in life runs counter to Objectivism’s ‘benevolent universe’ presupposition (which is mysteriously not disavowed for being “mysticism”). If this sounds like Kropotkin’s legitimate conflict free “scramble world” behavioral ecology, you’re probably not wrong. The rejection of collectivism is inconsistent if you know the works thoroughly enough. If you’ve read the Nature of Prejudice (Allport 1954), you can absolutely guess where this is going. The tune never changes. Collective notions of groups, and any subordination to ethnos is deemed to be wrong... except when it comes to Israel. This ad hoc departure from the rejection of collectivism has a special cut out for the “shining beacon of reason” in the Middle East. A conspiracy minded person will see this facet as a “backpath” 6 Christian Zionism, which fulfills the same purpose of the CI Scofield type interventions but for atheists. That special carve out for dubious international concern is explicit. What’s never made explicit, however, is the fact that there’s no mechanism to prevent Objectivists from accepting a global system. If non-Israeli nationalisms are for troglodytes, and there’s a possibility of objective minarchist law understood the same by all, then why divy up the world? It makes no sense, but as long as we focus on romantic notions of our individual lives, this can be avoided... What’s the Problem With This: 6 A backpath is an alternative means to arrive at an endgame when a feature of a main quest is inaccessible for some reason. For example: if a main quest character dies, redundancies could exist where the questline would be able to be completed regardless. The first thing worthy of note in this analysis are the academics who study the relationship between worldviews and their implications. This literature presents both a possible motive as to why Objectivism has resurfaced, and also a key to the liabilities adopted by the system. Readers familiar with the relevant works might be aware of Human Ecology as Human Behavior (Bennett 1993), but they might not be aware of Worldviews and Ecology (Berry et al. 1994). The Islam chapter “says the quiet part out loud”, when the author admits that morality needs to be strictly confined to matters of worldly concern so that international agenda timelines can be met (i.e. United Nations Agenda 2030). The philosophy under consideration here not only confines things to the material world, but it goes further to shrink ethics down to an individual’s choices towards flourishing. One of the agendas that’s been openly discussed across a great deal of time is the mass movement of peoples. From years ago on up to today, public plotting has been underway to afford this, as well as how to channel the consequences. We’ve had the Open Conspiracy (Wells 1928) 7 , UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy (Huxley 1948), Road to Equality (Itzkoff 1992), and recently with the mass migration resulting from the overthrow of Libya: Civilization and Barbarism (Newman 2021). The movement of peoples and a world monoculture were said to be a “necessary consequence” of transportation and communication technology innovations. In the process of moving 7 For the people who only know Wells as a fiction writer, he was also a futurist among other things. If you’re unaware of his story, this reference can occur to you as a joke or some appeal to “predictive programming”, and I assure you it isn’t. towards the “rational end”, problems would be resolved as they occurred (i.e. re-establishing corporal punishment to meld the Europeans with the MENA peoples). Relevant to our analysis are these two exemplar laws that can be seen as features of that program: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that stitched up obligatory associations between groups, and the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, which opened up the US to non-traditional sources of people. Coincidentally, a regional problem (segregation), which could’ve been resolved by removing the color-coded boxes people were forced into, “had to be” solved by a federal law that compelled all people together. Not just that, but that thin edge of the wedge just so happened to be inserted immediately before millions of people were to be shoved into the system (1965-present). This has a mysterious concordance with Objectivism... The state barred ethnocentric commercial behavior, which is nominally opposed by adherents who recognize the value in free and voluntary transactions. It’s just that in some sense they’re in a bind. What impetus is there for the Rand crowd to oppose any of this coercion? There can be none. If values are what you’d engage in costly action to uphold, then why oppose these laws? They oppose ethnocentric actions due to their rejection of collectivism, so they leave this coercion be aside from effeminate waffling or providing license 8 . A tacit consent just so happens to exist there, in line with all of the agendas 9 . Another backpath to the goals we’re being shepherded towards. 9 This is kind of a Discourse on the Voluntary Servitude point (Boetie 1553/1975). The system compels rejection of coercion, but the individual actors don’t uphold the policy in place of alternatives they’d rather commit their time towards. 8 “Why open old wounds” some say. On the topic of ecological concerns, Objectivists are clearly the other side of the discourse. Look no further than the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (Epstein 2014), and the Toxicity of Environmentalism (Reisman 2015). They’re on the side that supports the idea that we can actually have jobs and get to live off reliable energy to make ourselves better off. This sounds like something that runs counter to the orchestrated decline of the middle class, but in reality the other precommitments it’s stitched together with prevent this. Yaron Brook often states: it should be easy to work here, but very hard to become a citizen. If the US is 350 million people, with 7 billion more people flying in on standby as the global population can be shipped in on a work visa, you can say goodbye to bargaining power in any transaction as a worker. In not being authorized to apply any brakes to the movement of people, those in poor places who’ve been fed the minimal conditions to study towards skills that would get them work visas, can be resettled in the US with no resistance. This presents serious problems. Firstly, the movement of people in these policies isn’t curated by any reference to their beliefs, and any concern about groups supporting anti-free market politics is denounced as prejudice (e.g. demographics in voting). Further, there’s no concern about which people from these groups would actually be given jobs that would afford their movement into the country in the first place. How can the major corporations support all of the progressive anti-industrial agendas, and then the immigration be given over to their hiring preferences? This makes no sense. If immigration is an issue of hiring, then why can’t corporations just hire everyone into the country that will support their efforts towards neo-feudalism? How does it support your well-being to support preferences that run counter to yours in the zero-sum game of politics? Additionally, how does it support your flourishing to have companies that dictate what’s allowed to be said online staffed by people who agree with them? The agendas handed down from the management face the same problem every workplace has: the principal agent problem. Would it not benefit your efforts towards flourishing having those directives transgressed against? Apparently not. The US is the only good country to ever exist, and we need to fill it with anti-liberty agents from everywhere else 10 . I don’t know how that makes sense, but that’s entailed by the philosophy. So, the preferences behind who gets to enter into the country, who those people vote for once entered in as citizens, and their efforts once on the job, run counter to Objectivism. Does it go further? Yes it does. There is a suite of means through which the coexistence of peoples amounts to what is called “ecological interference”. These have consequences at the level of individuals as well as at the group level. A very accessible individual-level reality is that: people live in houses and apartments. This is a painfully stupid observation, but significant for our analysis. If mate choice is 10 Israel is irrelevant here, since “open borders for Israel” doesn’t exist outside of anti-zionist comments online. assortative, which it is, then who lives around you is relevant for your prospects in this feature of your life. Given the yoking of Objectivism to Darwinism (Binswanger 1976/1990), there’s no choice but to see the sexual domain as key to flourishing and thereby detrimental implications of the philosophy in this space would be bad. How the mass movement of people presents a problem here is that: the density of ‘reproductively relevant’ people is bound to diminish as heterogeneity increases in a given territory. Maybe for people who’ve more likely traits (center of the distribution), a given amount of change will be less consequential, but for the Objectivists who are unrepresentatively smart and bookish, said amount of change will probably be of greater consequence. Indifference to the coercion that ramped up in the 1960s affords this meddling. Because rational egoism is in place, there’s means to counter coercive movements of people (Greenhill 2010). If those people are sad babies, then they have no means to place demands onto the individuals of recipient states, and can be denied entry. Defense against transparent war-like efforts are also handily dealt with, as well are intra-state violent efforts 11 . This sounds like it deals with the issue of outside threats, but in reality only amounts to clipping half of the matter of group synergies (Corning 1983). Cooperation in conflict might be neutralized, but conflict in cooperation isn’t. If a people, such as the ethnocentric Chaldeans (Henrich & Henrich 2007), were to set up shop in a territory held by Objectivists they’d easily find themselves economically displaced by those who care to enter into the same economic niches (DeBach & Sundby 1963). If a 11 Assuming nothing is encountered like a conditional strategy that’s initiated by a “friendly” establishment period, but flips towards coercive efforts once the numbers are locally established (Islam, etc.). mutually beneficial transaction benefits both parties, and we want the best prices to get as far as we can for a given income, then why not shop at the stores where ethnocentrism’s efficiencies have driven down prices? You can’t judge the Chaldeans as a group, and discriminate against them, because that’s collectivism/prejudice. When you reject teams, and a team appears, you have no choice but to accept being deposed (Hammond & Axelrod 2006) 12 Obviously, this is because the system of private property says that we get to decide what becomes of what it is that we own, and greater efficiency in one social organization affords the driving down of prices beyond the alternative’s capacity. But it doesn’t stop there. Ethnocentrism and traditional belief systems that afford coherence lend themselves towards more qualified referrals for business deals, and ‘easy-ins’ to industries, as well as redundancies in the case of a firing 13 . If your side is bound up in pursuing its idiosyncrasies disjuncted from tradition, “wanting to be an engineer unlike those other girls(!)”, and being salami sliced off into irrelevance by the technologies of mass production (Beniger 1986), you’ll find yourself at a disadvantage in linking-up with others. Objectivism is anti-affiliative, and business is affiliative. This leads us into the threat of accepting the “basic bitch” take on pareto improvements that’s so common, and thereby failing to reason in terms of economics beyond stage one (Bastiat 1850/2011)(Sowell 2009). If one were to follow the implications of these 13 See my essay Centrism, Protestantism and Intelligence 12 Outside of extenuating circumstances. failings at the level of the individual entrepreneur on up to the higher levels of organization, the full scope of this can be known. Not only is flourishing threatened at the individual level in running a business / being hired, but the texture of life in a society is also threatened. So You’ve Been Economically Displaced: Giving your prospects away to those who’ve chosen coherence and convictions has implications for your group’s flourishing as well as individual / societal goals. The generic resource of money affords you the ability to support the maintenance and development of social structures outside of what would be volunteered. Given the fact that there’s no universal social structure / socially relevant external construction, and the individual instantiations of said realities have characteristics out from the preferences of the purposive agents that’ve constructed them, this is a clear loss 14 . Losing economic ground means losing control of the ecology, and living in a world made in the image of others. Continuing with our Chaldean example: middleman minorities need services performed for them since they’ve confined themselves to a niche. If ‘where the money is’ shifts towards performing work for this people group, then maximizing your own flourishing will entail performing services for your disposessors, if you’re so inclined. In the case of 14 Which is to say: you never encounter categories out in the world, you encounter specific instantiations with specific characteristics. This is relevant to a problem with Objectivist epistemology which sits on Aristotle’s peripatetic axiom - “what’s in the mind was first in the senses”, but I’m not critiquing this from the perspective of philosophy. building or maintaining a church building - a driver of ethnocentric attitudes - the coherent groupishness of the Chaldean strategy could be furthered (Dutton 2019). As the dispossession progresses, the disenfranchised smart men just so happens to be further neutralized. Relying on other groups also means being beholden to their preferences with your public efforts, since they can elect to not hire you if you make yourself inconvenient for them. A high local frequency of coherent people with defined tastes has additional benefits over a group of idiosyncrasy fetishists. While Objectivism drives agreement that the state should be confined to a policing program that upholds the system of private property, it doesn’t align much outside of that. Due to this it doesn’t so broadly offer a hedge against the more panspecific / monoculture social structures put upon us (i.e. Walmart, McDonald’s, Subway). It could actually be argued that Objectivism actually provides license for an invasion of alternative social structures pending the relevant actors are capable, since laissez-faire is laissez-faire (more induced complicity). The Objectivist scheme supports putting you into an inchoate state outside of a coherent consumer body. This might not seem like something that adds up to anything significant, but the ecological interference is clearly seen when you see it as an invasion of a territory held by a coherent people. Suppose we have a territory strictly held by Italian people, whose tastes have a distinctly Italian character, and this involves visiting everyday eateries as well as the expensive one that’s the “special occasions” venue. One day a person of another group initiates an ‘animal invasion of one’. This person, of no local body, has no ethnic affinity for the local food service places, and thereby expresses less of a preference for eating at them, choosing to eat there less frequently. On the issue of the special occasion venue, the atomized person has less cause to book such a place or pay the premiums asked. Atomization doesn’t lend itself to needing a lot of seats. Supposing a series of others from the invasive group continued to set up shop, we’d expect to see sales seen by the small businesses to gradually diminish. (replacement of the “80%” of sales people (ethnics) with the “20%”(outsiders)). This invasion damages the local small businesses in favor of the panspecific structures, unless replacement ethnic structures would achieve viability. If people are willing to travel within 2 miles to take care of whatever relevant business, then converting the cells on our 2x2 sheet of graph paper towards invasives will move the firms towards failure. Everyone goes to McDonald’s, but not everyone eats the “you people eat this shit?” 15 offerings. As these ethnic social processes slide down from whichever level of excess (profitability) they were operating at, they’ll yield fewer resources to spend on bringing the greater system into alignment with the preferences of the owners. Since people have to eat, substitutes will have to be otherwise transacted, and thereby others will be enriched. This will change the hands that profits are placed into, and will result in different investment patterns since preferences are unique subjective assessments. 15 In Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky recounts having said this during a particularly “traditional” meal at a family’s house. Nobody eats some foods unless they’re nailed to them, and even then they don’t necessarily like it. Saul’s response was a source of bonding and added legitimacy to him as “not another clueless city liberal”. The aims fulfilled by the work will gradually shift from the specific people’s ends towards some other party’s. A possibility of coherence building up would exist for these invasives if they were actual religious ethnics. If that were true, the prior economic social structures could be replaced by the corresponding invasive businesses. A Chinese restaurant could start to siphon off the generic resource of money within the territory to support its maintenance and those of the family rather than the Italians. Once the displacement provides spare resources, it could provide part of the basis to get a local religious organization built up. Further still, it could support manipulating the politics towards a convenient state. No different from what was there before. But, we don’t have that with Objectivists. With them all we get is the ruin of the structure from before, and increased viability in the prospecting forecasts of the monoculture firms. When the only basis for coherence on offer is the pecuniary motive fulfilled through the sale of Salt Sugar & Fat, that’s all you’re left with. When you reject ethnos, God, and fitting in, in favor of the worship of idiosyncrasy, you forgo the possibility of subsidiarity outside of your own home... which you’ll end up losing for having been economically displaced. Decline Towards Atomized Monoculture But, it doesn’t end at the level of the individual community. The ruin of coherence isn’t a focal issue; it diffuses throughout the entirety of the system. The gradual subordination of the ecology to the panspecific social structures flows from the micro to the macro. To understand the issue across the levels of organization, three works are revelatory: 1. Hirasawa’s Sim City (1995) 2. RL Dabney’s Secular Education (1890/1994) 3. Murray Bookchin’s Rise of Urbanization and Decline of Citizenship (1987) Sim City ended up, admittedly, being an album of ersatz inter-cultural world music, which points to a serious problem with the atomization problem at a greater level of organization. The city in question ended up not being anywhere between Japan and Thailand, but outside of that entirely. When you have the music of two peoples, you end up with something of neither 16 . That adjudication wasn’t handled in a decentralized fashion between peoples (negotiation), but instead was handled by a central authority - the artist. Something is, by necessity, to fall off due to the constraints faced under a program of integration. In the real world, economically, this confusion and disintegration has supported the fulfillment of the anti-citizen urbanite outlook and society covered in Bookchin’s aforementioned prescient work. Social structure, today, isn’t seen as being held up by individuals concerned with voluntary fraternity, ethnos, and religion; afforded via 16 Not that electronic music isn’t inherently ethnocidal, but you get the point. No people group traditionally played the Yamaha Miburi. economic activity; ordered under local political/intellectual life - as those realities have been purposefully eroded. Instead, concerns around the texture of life are a matter of economic and commercial consideration. This leaves our worldviews tailor made to fit an asset management society. We meet partners through dating apps, friends through work, and are destined to live in Smart Cities as human capital who need to be processed by asset management firms to yield greater profits. It took a long time to get to the state things have arrived at, and Objectivism is only one mid-20th century system of interventions that afforded it. The Revolutionary War and the Founding landed us in a state that didn’t explicitly acknowledge God, and thereby, made ethics a strictly subjective Rousseauian merry-go-round of Will to Power. The imperialist war of the North against the South established the obligatory association to the regime. The acceptance of the Melting Pot assimilation scam left people deracinated consumer drones in the service of being widget producers in Henry Ford’s factories 17 . Subordinate to this ethnocidal endeavor: the program of Urban Renewal smashed the Euro-American ethnic communities in cities, leaving them as generic “whites” off in the suburbs. The one-two punch of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Hart Celler Immigration Act of 1965 filled the country with people who’d have nothing to do with each other and compelled their association. The disparate impact policies, and other compelled association mechanism, barred defense against this and acted as means to mandate organizations be victims of (quasi-)entryism 18 . There’s neither 18 See the “Judaizing” of occupations noticed by Theodor Herzl in The Jewish State (1946/1896). Also: Organizational Weapon (Selznick 1952) 17 The race obsessed weirdos mysteriously avoid that feature of Ford, instead choosing to use him as someone to cry about Jewish people over. shortage of events and interventions that got us here, nor are there shortages of the neutralizing false alternatives sold to people to sideline dissidents. Societal structures, obligated to accept all of this confusion, are now exactly where the system wants them to be. They can’t be anything to anybody, and only exist to perform economic functions that consolidate wealth away from the inchoate rabble. Those interested in unionization or leaning on the bargaining power of labor have no standing, and worse have the exact opposite demographics one would want when planning a union. If you’re trying to organize in violation of a code of conduct to achieve an end, which is what you’re doing as far as management is concerned when unionizing, you’re going to want your group to have an ethnic basis as seems to be the pattern in negotiating this problem (Salter 2002) 19 . The benefits from informing against others is too present in the heterogeneous organizations. This threat should be no surprise given the fact that ethnic conflict isn’t an ideological issue, but is instead literally just a consequence of putting groups together (Van den Berghe 1967)(Vanhanen 2012) 20 It can be no wonder that contemporary social structure is ordered so transiently, arbitrarily and in such an unimpeded top down fashion. The arbitrariness of the ethical order can only be considered another reality foreseen by RL Dabney, over 100 years ago. After the Civil War, the weapons system of public education rolled into former Confederate territory from the Union side. What was that to mean for the moral education of students? All peoples, at all times, knew education to be fundamentally 20 Which is of course to say that I don’t buy the “postmodern neo-marxist”/critical race theory story told by the IDW. 19 Feel free to tell me this is a reach if you know better than I do. moral, even beyond those mentioned in his essay (e.g. the Roman author Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria). That key reality, inexorably linked to the telos of the institutions, was bound to be compromised via state intervention. If there’s to be “one for everybody”, in a system that indoctrinates and provides behavior modification interventions, what falls out the other end will draw the students away from the teachings and discipline their parents would’ve otherwise choose 21 . This falls out of the fact that the families on the receiving end of this conflict, bring different choices to the administrators and staff who must choose what to implement (as well as which information they send home to inform said conflict). Today this conflict has sides that get their marching orders from works such as The Change Agent’s Guide to Innovation in Education (Havelock 1975), and Conservative media that hacks away at the tiniest projections from leftist branches in order to avoid addressing the roots they proceed from. This conflict results in the materials parents were outraged by during the stay at home orders from the state, which fell out of the gradual submission of the right to the left. With no mechanism to afford coherence, you have no numbers to offer a hedge against this. Things have only gotten worse since Dabney’s time. The social engineering education and behavior modification programs have only expanded into additional domains out 21 This would later be run with by people like Urie Bronfenbrenner and those who’ve given his Ecology of Human Development >60,000 citations. The schools give students “autonomy” to develop into exactly what’s available to them, which “just so happens” to be carefully curated towards leftist ends away from their parents. from the schools. The revolution has shepherded us past the point of being bound to the Rock in our moral education, and it did this via a series of ethics that’ve been fabricated to land us in neo-feudalism / the fourth industrial revolution. With no means for any people group to mitigate this, and this diverse mess requiring means to regulate conduct, it’s been imposed from above. The neoliberal ethical suite is now epistemically flimsy justification for: the mass movement of people, the murder of babies to facilitate said movement in Brave New World fashion 22 , the subordination to all vices via legalization of substances / prostitution, customization of reality towards auto-ethnocide through material culture, and orientation towards the “rational men” who sit at the top of cognitive capitalism. Atomization has only afforded this ongoing world replacement and subjugation. Believe it or not, when you listen to malthusians who push darwinism, they wrangle both your resources, status, and reproductive outcomes away from you. As was stated at the outset, the Objectivists are faced with a scenario where they have no mouth, and must scream. They are supposed to transact themselves towards the best states they can, and given the present circumstances, that means being the motor that drives this dystopian shithole towards its panopticon conclusion - the boot on the face of ‘transhumankind’ for all eternity. Atheistic capitalism, again, just so happens to mean building more glamorous toys to enact statism. Objectivism’s status as a proto-IDW fake opposition is now well established. Conclusion: 22 The babies don’t come from tubes tee’d up in anticipation of labor demand. They come from the minimally viable conditions stitched up in poor countries to produce skilled labor with no bargaining power. Inducing the wrong beliefs in others is, again, a criminally neglected feature of animal communication. Lies aren’t restricted to the truth of any locally relevant proposition, but are much more expansive in that they can rise to the level of worldviews. With Objectivism, people who’ve chosen to go their own way in rejection of the system just so happen to have found themselves - again - transmuted into agents of it. Taking the option given to you, by those who hate you, by design always amounts to a scheme to get you to “take your pills” for your own reasons 23 . Objectivism is just another case of this, as has been demonstrated by this essay. While I don’t believe that Objectivism was generated by the system, it seems to me that it’s been afforded the ability to run across time. The structures at the state level on up aren’t strictly capable of generating psychological interventions to wrangle citizens, but surely they’re also capable of identifying what has potential to support its aims 24 . By analogy, this doesn’t seem all that different from the “shopping” that NGOs perform when they’re looking for groups to transact with (Bob 2005). Some movement demonstrates viability (isn’t dead on arrival), funding/organizational support from the NGO would drive the agendas of the backers, and so the transaction goes through. Objectivism showed some kind of potential, and was provided the possibility of gaining purchase in society to achieve the ends of neutralizing people disinterested in the way things were being pushed by the higher-ups. 24 The state was a major player in the development of communications research (Simpson 1996). 23 See Jordan Peterson’s first set of rules.