Not Owned, Not Owed with Timothy Sandefur Transcript

How has the struggle to define individual liberty shaped the cultural world we live in today? That’s what Timothy Sandefur explores in this episode of Objectively Speaking. 

Returning for a third time on Objectively Speaking, Sandefur is no stranger to The Atlas Society, having joined us previously to discuss his books Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man and Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness. He joins Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman to discuss his latest book, You Don’t Own Me: Individualism and the Culture of Liberty, which explores how the idea of individual freedom has shaped not only politics and economics but also the arts—from pop music to poetry, from “Star Trek” to the blues, and from Western novels to architecture. Watch the interview HERE or read the transcript below.

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JAG: Jennifer Anju Grossman

TS: Timothy Sandefur

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JAG: Hello everyone, and welcome to the 285th episode of Objectively Speaking. I'm JAG, CEO of The Atlas Society. I'm very excited to have three-time returning guest Tim Sandefur join us to talk about his new book, You Don't Own Me: Individualism and the Culture of Liberty. As you guys can see from my much bookmarked copy here, I enjoyed it immensely and so this is going to be a real treat. Tim, thanks for joining us.

TS: Thanks for having me back.

JAG: First, I love your book's title taken from Leslie Gore's 1964 hit song, but I had not realized that it was part of a series that began with It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To and then Judy's Turn To Cry. How did the song, You Don't Own Me, fit into the growing feminist consciousness at the time asserting female autonomy and independence?

TS: Yes, that's great because I can't definitively prove that the three songs were intentionally designed to go together, but they definitely make a series that starts with a song that's basically Leslie singing about how she wants to be the ideal girlfriend, and it has this docile tone of resignation and she's so thrilled that she's been approved of by a man and so forth. Then in the next song, Judy's Turn To Cry, in that song she's proven herself by making Judy jealous that Bobby's come back to her. It's not a bad thing. It's not demeaning or anything, but it is definitely a portrayal of femininity as sort of a secondary status, that she has no personal goals or identity of herself. She just wants to be featured with some guy and she sees her value in his eyes. 

You Don't Own Me...[is] completely different. In that song, Leslie is singing that she stands for herself. She belongs to herself as a free, independent person, and she doesn't expect to be bossed around and controlled by her boyfriend.

Then the third song comes along, You Don't Own Me, and it's completely different. In that song, Leslie is singing that she stands for herself. She belongs to herself as a free, independent person, and she doesn't expect to be bossed around and controlled by her boyfriend. When you put the three together, it's almost like it's the evolution of a literary character from one position to another. They fit together almost like a story. Again, I can't prove that they were intended that way, but they definitely come off that way. Of course, you Don't Own Me became an anthem in the early ’60s as the feminist movement was really gaining momentum at the time.

JAG: How does this contrast with other literary and artistic treatments of women not as autonomous beings, but as property, such as Nabokov's Lolita and Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.

TS: Yes, so Lolita is a little bit different because in Lolita, of course, the book is narrated by this satanic evil character. It's not a novel that's trying to spread the word that women are property. Quite the contrary. Instead, what happens is Lolita is treated as a figment, as a piece of property by Humbert Humbert, who is this satanic character. I think the Shakespeare play is a little bit more ambiguous. It's really not clear whether Shakespeare meant or didn't mean that women should be in this subordinate situation. At the end of The Taming of the Shrew we have this bizarre scene where women are told directly and the audience is instructed that women should be secondary and subordinate to their husbands. 

It is definitely true that women throughout much of history were regarded as secondary and as essentially the belongings of men, or at least as secondary in terms of God.

Yet in the original play, it's actually told in what they call a frame story where the characters exist within a play. It's a play within a play. We're told that the story that you've just seen has been presented to somebody as a story. It's ambiguous in that sense. But laying those things aside, it is definitely true that women throughout much of history were regarded as secondary and as essentially the belongings of men, or at least as secondary in terms of God. The relation to creation: I'm thinking of Milton in Paradise Lost who says that Adam was made for God alone and Eve was made for God in him, that is in Adam, so that she's sort of a secondary being in the order of creation. Contrast that with the image in You Don't Owe Me that says I'm a self-reliant, self-sufficient human being. I set my own destiny and I'm responsible for myself.

JAG: Historically, conceptions of individuals as children or property has been used to justify everything from monarchical rule to slavery and Jim Crow laws. How does this fundamentally diverge from the sensibility that developed in the Enlightenment as articulated by John Locke?

Magna Carta says, I, King John, hereby give the following liberties. It's important that the plural word is used there: liberties, because it's a finite list of liberties that are being given to the people by the king, because apparently the king owns all of these liberties and can decide who gets them.

TS: Yes, it is true that Lincoln has this great line where he says the kings in the Old World never rode the backs of the people because they wanted to. Of course, they always rode the backs of the people because it was better for the people that they be ridden. Right? That's sort of the attitude that you find in monarchical and tyrannical government, that the people don't really know what's best for them and therefore they need to be controlled for their own welfare. So, people were so often treated as functionaries of the state or the nation or the race or the collective of whatever that sort might be. 

Whereas in the Enlightenment you had this real rediscovery. But it had been so long that you could call it a brand new discovery that people are self-sufficient in the sense that they have rights and they are autonomous beings capable of making their own decisions and with a moral right to make their own decisions, a moral dignity to themselves and that they come together to create the state as opposed to the state creating them or vesting them with their rights or their personality or their autonomy. That was a real transition in political philosophy. James Madison even has an essay where he comments on this. He says that in Europe charters of liberty were granted by power, and in America charters of power have been granted by liberty. What he means is to contrast the Declaration of Independence with Magna Carta. 

Magna Carta says, I, King John, hereby give the following liberties. It's important that the plural word is used there: liberties, because it's a finite list of liberties that are being given to the people by the king, because apparently the king owns all of these liberties and can decide who gets them. The reverse of that is in the Declaration of Independence where it says people are fundamentally free. They own themselves by nature and then they come together and create the state by a charter. Right. That's a real reversal of the way that politics had been imagined before then. That's reflected in popular culture, as you said, with this shift from especially women, but other minority groups too, being treated as if they were secondary and they only had the rights that the majority gave to them, and transitions into a world where everybody is inherently free. Then they get to choose or to decide whether to create a state or society or whatever.

JAG: Yes. It's not just secondary, but specifically seen as children, that somehow slave owners or the state is benevolently patriarchal and is going to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves. In your book, you give some examples of how in the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. this concept of adulthood also manifested itself.

In his “I Have a Dream” speech, King goes out of his way to use the term adulthood. The reason why is because throughout American history, black Americans were very often treated as if they were children.

TS: Yes. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, King goes out of his way to use the term adulthood. The reason why is because throughout American history, black Americans were very often treated as if they were children. The very long tradition, for example, of referring to black people by their first names and white people by their last names: what that led to is that in the late 19th and early 20th century after the Civil War, a lot of black lawyers, but also other writers and artists, would often use only their first initials. They would go as JM Smith in order to make it impossible for white people to call them by their first names. It became such a tradition in the South, especially, but throughout the country to refer to black people by their first names as if they were subordinate. 

Incidentally, there's a funny story, and I don't mention this in the book, but maybe the word funny isn't appropriate, but you'll get what I mean. In the 1960s, there was a case where a black woman was called as a witness and the lawyer was asking her questions. This is in a Southern state courtroom. The lawyer asking her questions kept calling her by her first name, and she refused to answer unless he referred to her as Mrs. So-and-So. She was held in contempt of court and she appealed that, and that got appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court reversed the contempt order without an opinion and sent it back to the trial court. I take that to mean that you have a constitutional right to be referred to by your last name in the United States of America. It's a small thing, but it indicates dignity. Right? It indicates respect and personhood and not treating you as if you're some sort of child who needs a paternalistic state to guide you or a strong man to defend you or whatever.

JAG: Well, of course, we previously had you on the show to talk about your masterpiece of a biography, Frederick Douglass: Self Made Man. I'd love to put that link in the chat as well. If you haven't read that, folks, I highly recommend it. No surprise that you have a chapter on Frederick Douglass in which you're quite passionately making the case against this growing cynical abandonment, hopelessness, helplessness, dreamlessness. What are some examples of that today on both the Left and the Right?

On the Right, we also see this too, in the form of power politics, especially nowadays, where the idea that notions such as justice and equal rights are really just political rhetoric, that...it's all about power and who can make things happen.

TS: Yes, what I was trying to talk about there is this cultural sense, this cultural attitude of nihilism that has become very popular in our culture in the past, I would say, 20 years or so. It's reflected in everything from television shows to the nonfiction writings of popular intellectuals today. My particular target in the chapter that you're talking about is Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote a book called Between the World and Me several years ago, which is just a monster piece, you might say, of nihilism, of a total refusal to believe in the possibility of ideals. Not just to doubt the possibility of freedom and justice, but to deny that such things have any meaning at all is really the message that Ta-Nehisi Coates teaches. Have to hand it to him, he is entirely consistent about this. He believes that ideals are meaningless and are created as a tool to fool you into accepting the chains of your own slavery. 

On the Right, we also see this too, in the form of power politics, especially nowadays, where the idea that notions such as justice and equal rights are really just political rhetoric, that when it comes down to it, it's all about power and who can make things happen. What happens is when a culture has that, it tends to start to lust for the strong man and desire some leader on a white horse to come in and just impose his will. Let's get rid of all this fussy lawyer talk about due process of law. That's one, by the way, that you see a lot on the Right, the denial that due process of law has any real meaning, when that is in fact the oldest and most important of all of our constitutional rights. Of course, ideals, including that one, have meaning. Some time ago, I shouldn't be doing this, but sometimes I get into little arguments on Twitter, and sometime ago I saw somebody on Twitter arguing that law doesn't actually exist. There is no such thing as law until the Supreme Court tells you what the law is. The constitutionality of a law doesn't exist until the Court says something. You have a law. Is it constitutional or not? There is no answer to that question until the Supreme Court answers it. 

Frederick Douglass...very much believed that ideals are real things. Yes. Maybe they are out of reach at any particular moment. Maybe they're very demanding. Maybe we fall short of them, but that hardly means that they're not real.

Well, that's nonsense, because that assumes that the Supreme Court creates the law and imposes its will. That's not the way law works. Law is a process of reason and deliberation and discussion over meaningful principles. But on the Right and on the Left, you have this denial that ideals or principles have any meaning. I think it’s deadly to our culture. It stands very opposed to everything Frederick Douglass stood for in his life. He very much believed that ideals are real things. Yes. Maybe they are out of reach at any particular moment. Maybe they're very demanding. Maybe we fall short of them, but that hardly means that they're not real.

JAG: Right. Well, and I think it just underlies the importance of art, whether it's music or literature or film or architecture, in concretizing these Ideals.

TS: In fact, there's a great line. There's a philosopher named Iris Murdoch who has a great line where she says man is the only animal that creates a picture and then tries to be like the picture. I think that's a beautiful encapsulation of the way ideals work. We imagine a better self or a better nation or a better world, and then we work our way toward that thing. It's a really special thing that only human beings are capable of doing. That's why art is so crucial, it's one of the ways that we depict or picture to ourselves what a better world is like. Or in the reverse, if something like Dostoevsky, we picture to ourselves what a worse world would be like and how to avoid it.

JAG: Right, right. As Ayn Rand said of Atlas Shrugged, it's not a prophecy of our unavoidable destruction, but a testament to man's power to avoid it if he chooses to change course. So, of course, my absolute favorite chapter in your book was “Navigating by Fixed Stars: The Moral Trajectory of Star Trek.” Since it is my impression that Objectivists significantly over-index with Star Trek fans, I hope you won't mind if we spend a bit of time there. How does the evolution of the franchise's tone provide advantage over the evolution of liberalism since the John F. Kennedy era?

TS: Yes, actually this plays in really well with what I was just saying, because the recent efforts by the Star Trek franchise, shows like Discovery, for example, are riddled with this cynicism, if not nihilism, that I was just talking about. Compare that with the high idealism of the original 1960s Star Trek or Star Trek: the Next Generation, which had their flaws, but they all had at their core this belief in a better world or better galaxy. Today's Star Trek has fallen off the rails because it doesn't believe in that ever since J.J. Abrams took over the franchise and influenced it in such a terrible direction. Because of this denial of the meaning of idealism, I think it's really gone downhill. 

Now in my essay, what I talk about in that chapter is that you can use the evolution of the Star Trek franchise to chart how liberalism has transformed from 1966 to the present day. The original series was written and produced and acted by a lot of World War II veterans. Gene Roddenberry, who created Star Trek, was a World War II veteran. Jimmy Doohan, who played Scotty, lost a finger fighting in the war. These were guys who had faced real evil. They knew that evil really existed and more, they knew that the idea that it's none of my business if oppression is going on over there is a falsehood. That's important because in the Star Trek world there's this thing called the Prime Directive that says you should never interfere with how a planet is evolving. Right? You should have this hands-off attitude. Well, the reason that this Prime Directive idea was introduced into the franchise is because it is a bad thing. Star Trek, the original series, preaches against the Prime Directive. It says, of course, it is my business if somebody else is being enslaved. 

By the time Next Generation comes along, people have embraced this idea of it's none of my business if somebody else is being enslaved. Who are we to judge? Moral relativism, cultural relativism.

But then you fast forward past the Vietnam era to The Next Generation and that has changed everything. The Vietnam experience changed America a great deal. By the time Next Generation comes along, people have embraced this idea of it's none of my business if somebody else is being enslaved. Who are we to judge? Moral relativism, cultural relativism. They gradually seep into The Next Generation's episodes to the point where Captain Picard spends a lot of his time trying to figure out how not to exercise moral judgment. Very much the opposite of the original Star Trek. I should add a footnote and say I don't mean this to diss Next Generation. There are some really good episodes of it. I enjoy watching it. But there are, you can find these, this gradual arc where the show becomes more and more relativistic over time and ends up not being able to even defend itself. For example, in the episode of Next Generation when they decide that warp speed is a bad thing because it pollutes the galaxy. I'm not making this up. Well, how do you have Star Trek without warp speed, right? It ends up being very self-destructive because it loses track of its original Enlightenment-influenced ideals.

JAG: Those familiar with Ayn Rand know that she reserved some of her sharpest criticism for the culture in the counterculture in general and hippies in particular, calling the hippie movement, quote, an anti-conceptual, anti-rational, anti-life phenomenon, end quote. She complained that hippies are people who preach the renunciation of values, yet demand to be supported by the values they denounce. It seems that Star Trek, both the original series and later iterations also offered a cultural commentary on space-age hippies or those seeking to reject technology in favor of a more primitive lifestyle.

TS: Yep, yep, that's true. There's an episode called the “Way to Eden” of the original series. In the 1960s, that specifically is a commentary on hippies. This group of futuristic space-hippies steal a spaceship and Captain Kirk tracks them down. The reason why is because they're trying to find a mystical planet called Eden where everything is perfect. They do eventually find the planet. Spoiler alert, it turns out that it's not Eden. In fact, it is the opposite. Everything on the planet is poisonous. The hippies all die from this poison. It's a spooky prediction of things like the Jonestown Massacre, honestly.

JAG: Right.

The message it's trying to teach is that the anti-civilization, anti-technology, anti-rationality element of the hippie movement, which does not encompass the entire hippie movement by any means, but was a major part of it.

TS: The message it's trying to teach is that the anti-civilization, anti-technology, anti-rationality element of the hippie movement, which does not encompass the entire hippie movement by any means, but was a major part of it, that that element of it is very dangerous and in fact is a throwback to the fascist movements of the 1920s and ’30s, which was anti-liberal, anti-civilization. The Germans in the 1920s liked to contrast civilization on one hand and culture on the other. Civilization was artificial, man-made liberal based on things like constitutions and laws and contracts and chemicals, capitalism. Whereas culture was an instinctual thing. It was irrational, it was about the spirit, the folk geist, they said, the spirit of the people. It was a deeper way of knowing a more profound thing. It created this spirit of the race in which you participated or should be forced to participate as a good German. That sort of attitude, that anti-civilization attitude was detected by a lot of people, not just Rand, but also another philosopher I really admire named Jacob Bernowski, who criticized this at the same time for the same reason that this anti-civilization, anti-rationality element, as you said, is often called the counterculture, and that was really a throwback to an anti-civilization movement that was essentially self-destructive. 

Now what's interesting to me about Star Trek is the first episode that I mentioned, that “The Way to Eden” with the space-hippies is a little ambiguous about the space-hippies. It's not a direct criticism of them. In fact, Spock, who is so logical, actually sympathizes with them and he says he hopes that they'll find their Eden someday. I think that indicates that the older school liberals, The World War II-generation liberals, who of course were the parents at the time that this episode aired, some of them sympathized, part of them sympathized with what the hippies were trying to do. That's understandable because the hippie movement was a complicated movement. It wasn't a single thing. I think we run the risk of caricaturing it, which is not a good idea in some ways. The hippies were very independent and self-reliant. The hippies revived things like blacksmithing, for example, because they were interested in hand-making things and in going out there and getting back to the land and building from the soil and the ground up. That's a very independent Thoreauvian notion of individualism. Now you and I might have our problems with that, but it's still an individualism of a kind. 

The one thing Star Trek always was was anti-utopia. The message of the original Star Trek is all utopias are dystopias, period. The Next Generation is a little more sympathetic to utopias.

I don't mean to paint with a broad brush here, but in any case, you fast forward to The Next Generation. By The Next Generation, the hippie stereotype has taken hold. By the end of the whole Next Generation franchise you have the show actually praising anti-technology, anti-civilization attitudes and even utopian attitudes. Now the one thing Star Trek always was was anti-utopia. The message of the original Star Trek is all utopias are dystopias, period. The Next Generation is a little more sympathetic to utopias. In some of the films we have Star Trek saying hippie utopias might be a good thing and maybe we shouldn't be exploring and maybe we shouldn't be developing new technologies and maybe we should just sit on our hands and till the soil with horses. It was a complete reversal from the way Star Trek said optimistically that technology and civilization and advancing knowledge can improve the world for all mankind.

JAG: Despite all this, I still found much to enjoy in The Next Generation and later series such as Voyager. But there's one depiction that always troubled me and that was of Quark and the Ferengi in general as cartoonishly greedy capitalists. Any thoughts on that and what it says about where the mindset of the franchise was evolving?

TS: Yes, and you know, it's funny, I actually think that the franchise gradually evolved in a healthy direction in this respect. The Ferengi are introduced basically as this group of very greedy, selfish in a bad way, accumulative, unprincipled, stab-people-in-the-back characters. I think what you see over the course, especially Deep Space Nine, is they added a degree of depth to Quark and to the Ferengi. In fact, there's one episode off the top of my head I can't remember, but there's an episode where Quark actually stands up and defends himself and he says, look, you may hate the Ferengi but we don't go to war with other races. We deal with people. We provide value for value. You may not like us, but at least we're not the Klingons, we're not the Romulans, we're not out there massacring whole civilizations. He's absolutely right. 

The Ferengi started out as this nasty caricature and I think that's largely Gene Roddenberry's doing because he was a member of this ’60s liberal generation that had a lot of qualms about capitalism.

Unfortunately, there are even episodes or moments in The Next Generation where the Ferengi even border on anti-Semitic caricatures. I think that's particularly true in the movie Star Insurrection, which ends with a scene which, if I remember right, was cut from the final movie, but it ends with a scene where Quark is fantasizing about building a bunch of luxury condominiums on this planet and Picard says, well, we're going to make sure that we protect this planet from people like you. What do you mean by “people like you,” Captain Picard? It's a very disturbing moment. I'm really glad that it got cut out of the show. But in any event, my point is that the Ferengi started out as this nasty caricature and I think that's largely Gene Roddenberry's doing because he was a member of this ’60s liberal generation that had a lot of qualms about capitalism. But I think eventually it evolved into a more individualistic and more friendly attitude toward the Ferengi in my estimation.

JAG: All right, well, I was moving on beyond Star Trek as much as I—

TS: Oh, I could spend all day talking about Star Trek. I'm sure you could too.

JAG: I was unfamiliar with another artist that you describe in your book, the Texan novelist Elmer Kelton, who was named apparently the best Western author of all time by Western Writers of America a couple of decades ago. How do themes of self-reliance and integrity manifest in his work?

TS: Yes, Elmer Kelton is the greatest writer you've never heard of. For all of you who might be listening and watching us, I urge you to go out and get some of Kelton's novels and read them. He wrote about six masterpieces. He wrote a lot of books and some of them aren't that good. But he wrote six great masterpieces. The Day the Cowboys Quit, The Time It Never Rained, Stand Proud, The Good Old Boys, which is the only one of his works that's ever been made into a movie. In any case, they're just marvelous books and they have a real respect for the integrity and virtue that was necessary to settle the Western frontier. Kelton was very conscious of this fact. He gave a speech where he talked about the Western and he said it was really unfortunate that the East Coast community, the literary community of America, won't really pay any attention to a Western unless it is anti-the values of civilization. 

Cormac McCarthy, who is one of the nihilists I mentioned before, who thinks that all ideals are meaningless, that in fact he even thought that storytelling was essentially a meaningless idea...One of my least favorite writers of all time.

For example, Cormac McCarthy, who is one of the nihilists I mentioned before, who thinks that all ideals are meaningless, that in fact he even thought that storytelling was essentially a meaningless idea. His stories don't actually add up to a climax or anything. Horrible writer. One of my least favorite writers of all time. I know that's a very unpopular thing to say, but McCarthy is awful. Or Larry McMurtry, who does admire these virtues, the Western frontier virtues of individualism, self-reliance, but regards them as passe, as doomed. Right? As a thing that we can admire, but only in retrospect. 

Kelton rejected that. He very much believed in these virtues. Now, his books are not political. There's maybe a little bit of a political element to them, but what I love about them is they're not political propaganda by any means. The Day the Cowboys Quit, for example, is a novel based on a true story of the only time cowboys ever went on strike in the United States. There was an effort by ranchers to prevent cowboys from keeping the unbranded calves that they found, which they had previously been allowed to keep. They then could develop their own herd and become cattle barons themselves. The cattle barons tried to stop this, and so the cowboys went on strike. The novel is about a character who starts out opposed to the strike and then gradually comes to sympathize with the strikers, and why that is and what it means to have principles and stand for them when everybody's against you. It's just a marvelous novel and I recommend it very highly to all of you.

JAG: I mentioned the first time you were on the show was to talk about your book Self Made Man, about Frederick Douglass. The last time you were talking about your magnificent book, Freedom's Furies. Of course, it explored the relationships between and the times in which Ayn Rand, Isabel Patterson and Rose Wilder Lane lived. Any similarities between those authors and some of the authors that you explore in your book?

TS: Yes, I don't think that any of them were familiar with Kelton, who comes a little bit later than Patterson or Lane, but was around at the same time as Ayn Rand. I think that's unfortunate because although Rand knew a little bit about the Western, and so did Lane, they didn't pay that much attention to them. Now, I should say Rose Wilder Lane, who was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the secret co-author of The Little House on the Prairie books, was in some ways a precursor to the Western as we know it. The history of the Western as we know it begins with Owen Wister's novel The Virginian in the 1910s, but it sort of changes after that. 

I'm thinking about the great Westerns like The Oxbow Incident or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. These are stories that tell a deep philosophical story in an integrated way, which of course is something that Rand would have sympathized with a great deal.

The Western that you and I are most familiar with dates mostly to the ’50s and ’60s, or the post-World War II era, when it was really the most popular form, the genre of entertainment in America for a long time. One which philosophical ideas could really be explored in depth. I'm thinking about the great Westerns like The Oxbow Incident or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. These are stories that tell a deep philosophical story in an integrated way, which of course is something that Rand would have sympathized with a great deal. My theory is that the Western in that form evolved out of the prairie novels like the ones that Rose Wilder Lane and Laura Ingalls Wilder were writing in the ’30s. I can't prove that, but I suspect it. The commonality between them, of course, is in this strong emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, independence, and the ability of the human being to go out there and with his rational efforts to build a better future for himself or herself.

JAG: Another writer you include as someone championing independence and integrity is Zora Neale Hurston. As with Ayn Rand's fiction, the author dramatizes recurring themes of envy and individualism. What are some examples of that in her writing?

TS: Oh, yes. Hurston, of course, is best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. She wrote four novels or published four novels in her lifetime, and they're marvelous, just really magnificent works of art. Their Eyes is certainly her best novel, but she also wrote a lesser known novel called Seraph on the Suwanee. What's unusual about it is that the characters are all white characters and Hurston was black. There are very few, perhaps no black novelists at that time who were writing novels with white main characters. This novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, is about a character named Arvay who goes through a transition from a sense of bitter entitlement and jealousy to a sense of individualism and self-reliance and how that transition takes place. It's a complicated story and it's one that is quite beautifully told, of course. 

To me, the acid test of this is: is a person happy for another person's achievements. If I hear somebody has accomplished something great, do I think, bastard, or do I think, yes, great, good for you.

In the novel, the climactic moment comes when Arvay decides that, realizes that she's become a better person than she was before and she can let go of the pain of her childhood. She burns down her mother's house. She says to a friend, while the flames are launching, places are not slums. People are slums if they allow themselves to become slums. She's decided not to become like that anymore. This novel was based on Hurston's own life, on her own experiences, because she had been in a very heart-wrenching romantic relationship with a man who had this sense of resentment and envy toward her and toward her writing career. It really caused a great deal of heartache in her life. They ended up separating because he couldn't stand her career. So the novel is a reflection on how it is that people allow what you and I would call envy to eat themselves up. It's not just jealousy like I wish I had that thing. Maybe it starts that way, but it gradually rots the person into hating somebody for their accomplishments and being bitter toward them just because of who they are. To me, the acid test of this is: is a person happy for another person's achievements. If I hear somebody has accomplished something great, do I think, bastard, or do I think, yes, great, good for you. There's a world of difference between those two spirits and you can cross from one into the other, and that's what the novel is about. Again, I strongly recommend it, great novel.

JAG: Any similarities between that novel and the character of Arvay and Dominique in Ayn Rand's Fountainhead?

TS: Yes, I think there are. I think that Dominique in The Fountainhead is a misunderstood character. Rand used to say that Dominique is herself in a bad mood, but that is actually understating it. Dominique is the character who has given up on idealism, who fights down her own idealism, tries to rip out her idealism, tries to become a nihilist because she's been so disappointed so often that she just can't stand the pain anymore. There's a famous line in the book where she says, freedom to want nothing, to depend on nothing. That's not an ideal for Rand. That's not what Rand is preaching in favor of. That's the situation that Dominique has to outgrow, and Arvay in Seraph on the Suwanee is a little bit different because she's not really a nihilist, she's just bitterly resentful. 

It's a lot harder to be a realistic idealist and say, there is something, the world can be better, it can be accomplished and this is how we're going to do it. Even if I fail, at least I've tried. That's a lot harder. 

But what both of these characters do is they discover that ideals are possible if only you will open yourself to them. Which sounds like an easy thing, but often is not an easy thing. Often it's very hard to let go of bitterness. The reason why, and I think this goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning about the culture of cynicism, is it's very easy to be a cynic. It's very easy to be a cynic. All you have to do is go around and say, nah, that's silly, that ideal is meaningless. Let's be hard-headed realists. Hard-headed realism doesn't have any room for idealism, right? Then you look like the smart, clever guy, whereas the foolhardy idealist is out there building castles in the sky. It's a lot harder to be a realistic idealist and say, there is something, the world can be better, it can be accomplished and this is how we're going to do it. Even if I fail, at least I've tried. That's a lot harder. 

There's a line, I'm thinking of a line in Edmond Rostand's play Chanticleer, which is a story about a rooster who thinks that his crowing causes the sun to rise in the morning. It's sort of a comedy. Some of the other barnyard animals gang up on him because they think he's a fool and they reveal to him that actually his crowing does not cause the sun to rise in the morning. So it's a question about how he deals with that disappointed idealism. Later on in the play he says, the reason I knew that my crowing caused the sun to rise was because the forces of darkness rejoiced at my silence. That's idealism. When you silence yourself, when you allow yourself to not believe in the possibility of good anymore, and you say, well, it's all about power, all this due process or justice, those are just pretty sounding words, then the forces of darkness rejoice. So what these books teach is don't let the forces of darkness rejoice at your silence.

JAG: Well, our viewers are not silent. We've got quite a few questions and compliments from one person here, Elmo: Tim is a great intellectual  -- we agree. I am going to get to a few of these. Lock, Stock, Barrel asks: The big question, do the arts tend to lead cultural change or reflect changes that have already occurred?

How do you go about deciding to become a better person? Why should you do that? I think ultimately, it is an aesthetic choice where you say, I want to be that person. That begins with art. 

TS: I think they do both. They reflect them and then help change them. That way, they're like a mirror, and you look into them, and then you can primp yourself and make yourself look better. Right? The arts are a way of expressing ideals, and then they're also a way of teaching ideals, ideas. I think one of the most important roles that the arts play in terms of idealism is, as I mentioned, they allow you to project a better self or a better world or a better whatever, and then work toward that thing. I actually think that this isn't just a question about art. This is a question about what philosophers call metaethics. How do you go about deciding to become a better person? Why should you do that? I think ultimately, it is an aesthetic choice where you say, I want to be that person. That begins with art. 

A lot of the time, if not all the time, I think that’s the reason why kids are drawn to great heroes. Even though when you and I look at the show, we might think it's silly. Right. When I was a kid, I used to watch Knight Rider. When I was a kid, I loved Knight Rider. Now if I watch it, I'm like, how did my parents put up with this show? It's so silly. The reason why is because as a kid, you're looking for what is the best person, what good person could I aspire to be? You look up at heroism, and looking up at heroism, of course, is one of the great things, if not the greatest thing that human beings do. The arts do both. They reflect the times, and then they pass on, ideally, the best of those times to the next generation.

JAG: Yes. Speaking of heroism, I'm reminded of Ayn Rand's praise of, I think, the very first James Bond that came out, in which she talked about how Bond vanquishing his villains told the average viewer that it can be done, that he also can overcome the obstacles in his life. Okay, My Modern Galt has a question: Do you think the dilution of individualist ideas in more modern media is due to creators trying to appeal to a global audience rather than an American audience? I'll let you answer that, but I will throw in my two cents, which is, we are trying to appeal to universal themes and virtues, which I don't think are culturally specific. We have a huge segment of our YouTube audiences from within Venezuela, in the Middle East, in India. But do you think that is possibly why?

TS: Yes, I agree with you, of course. But at the same time, I do think it's true that there is also a large cadre of people out there who try to teach that values like individualism, self-reliance, integrity, and justice are Western values or even white-supremacist values. That's a popular thing to say nowadays. Unfortunately, I think Hollywood does often listen to people like that. I'll give you an example. I don't mention this in the book, but this is one of my favorite examples. The movie Moana, the Disney movie Moana, which is one of my favorites. Love it. This movie is actually one of the most subversive movies in recent years. I don't think people have noticed it. That just proves how subversive it is. The story is about Moana living on this island where she's taught that everything we have, everything we need, is here; you shouldn't go out exploring because we're happy where we are. The symbol of this in the story is the coconut, right? Dad sings this song about considering the coconut. It has everything we need. Why should you bother exploring? 

What Moana is actually learning in the course of the movie is to reject the values of her society and to instead embrace exploration, adventure, individualism, which of course are the values of what her society used to embrace but has forgotten.

Later on, there was a scene that was sketched out that ended up being cut from the movie, where Moana is by herself on a beach and she's using a stick to whack coconuts out towards the ocean. She's taking like a baseball-bat whack and knocking them off into the sea, and she's cursing about how much she hates coconuts. The cultural-sensitivity committee that Pixar and Disney had hired objected to this and made them take that out. Instead, in the final movie, she's just sitting there throwing sticks into the sand while she curses to herself and doesn't say how much she hates coconuts. Later on in the movie, we see Moana encounter the Kakamora. Those are the little monsters that are shaped like coconuts. She says, coconuts. She whacks them with her orange. She fights against them, right? The reason she says, “Ah, coconuts, I know what to do with these guys,” is because of that earlier scene about hating coconuts. But that got taken out of the movie. The reason that that's significant is because the coconut symbolizes, stay on your island. Don't go exploring. So what Moana is actually learning in the course of the movie is to reject the values of her society and to instead embrace exploration, adventure, individualism, which of course are the values of what her society used to embrace but has forgotten. Unfortunately, that message gets diluted because the political correctness committee ordered them to take that scene out. I think it's a terrible shame.

JAG: In your chapter on the blues impresario Albert King, you observe that “sense of defiant competence” makes the blues so distinctly American. How is that musical genre a celebration of individualism?

TS: Yes, I love the blues. Of all the music that I listen to, the blues is my favorite genre of music. Albert King is my very favorite blues musician. The blues has this reputation of being sad, right? The blues, a sad song. Oh, I lost my wife, and my girl left me, and . . ., blah, blah, blah. But if you actually listen to the music, it's not actually sad. One reason why is because virtually no blues songs are performed in minor keys. A minor key is the longing sound that is used in truly sad music. The lyrics are very often either silly or raunchy or defiant and are songs about how I'm going to overcome the hardships of my life. 

Who was it, I think it was Wynton Marsalis who once gave an interview where he said that listening to the blues is like taking a vaccination. It's a little bit of the smallpox to keep you from getting the smallpox. So the blues has developed into this genre of defying suffering and, well, I shouldn't say developed, it started out as a way of defying suffering. Right? It started out in black American culture, especially in the time immediately after the Civil War when Jim Crow was being put into place and so forth. This music started up and it's all about oh, I've got all these bad things going on and yet the ultimate message is, but I'm going to overcome it anyway. Even if those words don't actually occur in the song, ultimately that's what they're really about.

JAG: Switching now to architecture. Your chapter on Louis Sullivan, the father of the skyscraper, was both inspiring and a little depressing given his demise at the age of 67, alone, bankrupt, living in essentially a tricked-out broom closet. Now, given his mentorship of Frank Lloyd Wright and Rand's study of Wright, among other mold-breaking architects in her research for The Fountainhead, I can't help wondering whether Sullivan was a model for Henry Cameron.

The philosophy that Roark articulates in the book has very little to do with Frank Lloyd Wright's own philosophical views, which were a mishmash of Transcendentalism, and are much more in common with Louis Sullivan.

TS: Yes, oh yes, he certainly was. In fact, the philosophy that Roark articulates in the book has very little to do with Frank Lloyd Wright's own philosophical views, which were a mishmash of Transcendentalism, and are much more in common with Louis Sullivan. While I'm recommending books here, I will urge viewers to get a copy of Louis Sullivan's memoir, which is called “Autobiography of an Idea.” Rand actually mentions it by name, if I remember right. It's in the preface to We The Living, so we know that she read it. “Autobiography of an Idea” is Louis Sullivan's memoir from his birth until about 1893. Now, he didn't die until after or around World War I, so there's a lot left out, but it's written in this incredibly beautiful prose that is very, very individualistic. Sullivan was a poet also. He was an amateur poet, and his favorite poet was Walt Whitman. 

So Sullivan had this very high, individualistic idealism about individualism and democracy, just like Whitman did. Remember, he wrote four books. He wrote a book called Kindergarten Chats, which is written in the form of platonic dialogues between a teacher and a student. The student, in many cases, is obviously Frank Lloyd Wright. He also wrote a book that was just about how to do designs. Then he wrote a book called Democracy, which he just never finished. He sort of scribbled at it for a long time, and it's really unreadable. It's just so long, it never got edited down. Get a copy of “Autobiography of an Idea” and you will see this amazing optimistic, individualistic attitude that Sullivan had in the late 19th century about the possibilities that capitalism was opening up to the world and especially to the refugees of the Old World who had arrived in America.

JAG: Ayn Rand also admired American author O. Henry for his quote, benevolent, almost childlike sense of wonder, for his sense of life. Contrast for us the themes and values we see in O. Henry's stories with those of The Revolt from the Village literary movement, which I first learned about in Freedom's Furies.

TS: Yes, The Revolt from the Village was this movement that began in the early ’20s, when America was going through a real cultural transition from a largely agricultural society to a largely urban society. New technologies like the automobile and the radio and the telephone were transforming American culture totally. It was the first generation gap in American history. The younger generation had very different attitudes about what life should be than their parents did. Their parents had grown up on the farm, and they wanted to go and listen to jazz in the cities, to drive their model T's to the cities and listen to jazz on the radio. It was a very different culture that the young grew up in between, say, 1905 and 1925. So The Revolt from the Village is this literary movement that reflects that. The most famous of these novels would be Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, which exerted a huge influence on Ayn Rand, as I discuss in Freedom's Furies. Well, O. Henry was a writer in the very early 20th century, about 1900–1910. His career spanned only a decade, and he died right at the end of that. It was like he became a colossally famous writer and then vanished within a span of 10 years. He was probably the most important writer immediately after Mark Twain's death. Well, actually, I guess Twain was still alive during this time, but immediately at the end of Twain's career. 

O. Henry is best known for these short stories that have this really optimistic attitude toward life. Very romantic, spiritually uplifting—life affirming is the term that people use nowadays. I use that term because they're not always happy stories. Some of them are tragedies, and yet they still have this uplifting quality to them. One that comes to mind is there's a story where this girl is trying to choose between two boyfriends and one of them works in this little cigarette stand on a sidewalk, and the other is this really rich guy, and he has the penthouse at the top of one of these new skyscrapers. He takes her up to the top, to the penthouse, to look out from the skyscraper. He looks down on all the people of New York City and he's like, oh, they look like ants from here. She gets really upset and she says no to him and she says yes to the other guy. 

She would rather be at the cigarette stand looking up at what is great than to be up there looking down on everybody as if they're tiny and small and insignificant. That's sort of the spirit of O. Henry.

She says because she would rather be at the cigarette stand looking up at what is great than to be up there looking down on everybody as if they're tiny and small and insignificant. That's sort of the spirit of O. Henry. Right? That's very different from what you see in The Revolt from the Village stories, where the rural communities in small-town America are treated with contempt and as incredibly boring. The whole point of Main Street is that American bourgeois life is boring and pointless and ultimately destroys your idealism. I don't mean that it's a bad novel, on the contrary, it's one of the most important American novels, and you all should read it. But it really has this almost hatred of what America is at that time compared to O. Henry, who for all of his frustrations, deeply loves America and what it stands for.

JAG: Well, your book, You Don't Own Me, this interview could not be more timely because we have in New York City a newly inaugurated mayor who has called on replacing “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” So, as you survey the popular culture of today, the kinds of books and movies and music that people are consuming, do you feel that they are helpful or are they paving the way for people to turn away from independence and individualism?

For the past 20 years we've had a very nihilistic culture, very cynical culture. This is reflected in TV shows like the Battlestar Galactica reboot or Breaking Bad and things like that.

TS: I go back and forth on that myself. I have the feeling that we're on the cusp right now of a real shift in the culture. I think for the past 20 years we've had a very nihilistic culture, very cynical culture. This is reflected in TV shows like the Battlestar Galactica reboot or Breaking Bad and things like that. I think people are fed up with that and I think people are desperate for a new idealism. Unfortunately, socialism and communism have always cashed in on that because they pretend to be idealistic and they're very good at it. So people fall for socialism and communism because they're longing for something that's idealistic. Rand herself wrote about this almost a century ago now. It's a very common phenomenon. We had the question earlier about whether culture follows the world or whether it leads it. I think politics actually follows culture. I think the culture right now is at a point where we want something better and we're going to find something better. It'll be a while before that ripple effect is felt in the political world. I hope that it is felt. I hope it doesn't just go off the edge.

JAG: Well, at The Atlas Society, we are not just waiting for it, we are creating it. We are beginning the process of a full-length feature film of Anthem. I know you discuss Orwell's 1984 in your book, but Anthem is the quintessential encapsulation of what happens when you lose not only the word, but you lose the sense of ego, of individualism. We're hoping and we're planning to provide an artistic means of helping people envision what happens when you replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” and we’re encouraging them to change course. Now, Tim, you are already working on your next book. Tell us about that. Hopefully, you'll come back to talk about it with us. We can follow you on X. Where else can we follow your work?

TS: That's right. You can find me online. I have a Substack and I'm on Twitter and so forth. My next book will be out in April. It's about the Declaration of Independence. In time for the 250th anniversary, I wanted to go through the Declaration and explore each of the grievances listed in it because often people aren't taught what they're referring to, what each of the things listed in there as a complaint, what they mean. So, I start from the beginning of the origins of the tensions between Britain and America in the 17th century, 100 years before the revolution, that people don't know about those kinds of arguments that were going on. Then I lead up to discussing, item by item, what the Declaration is talking about in hopes of giving everybody an idea of its true meaning. I tell this in a narrative style in the lives of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams as they were writing the Declaration.

JAG: Well, we're looking forward to it, so thank you again, Tim, and please say hello, give our regards to Christina. We really enjoyed having you with us today.

TS: Thank you.

JAG: Thanks everyone who joined us. Make sure to join us next week when author and associate professor Musa Al-Gharbi joins us to talk about his book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. See you then.