Stephen Fry Friday: His Musings on Life, Swearing, Shakespeare, Nanoscience & More

in Books, Life, Literature, Philosophy, Science | October 12th, 2012

Stephen Fry is a man of many tal­ents. He’s a nov­el­ist, con­trib­u­tor to news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines, TV per­son­al­i­ty, come­di­an, pod­cast­er, lin­guist of sorts. And accord­ing to his Twit­ter pro­file, he’s also a “Lord of Dance, Prince of Swimwear & Blog­ger.” In short, Stephen Fry cov­ers a lot of ground, and, through­out the years, we’ve shown you Fry opin­ing on many sub­jects. But you can’t real­ly appre­ci­ate his intel­lec­tu­al range until you’ve seen his mus­ings placed next to one anoth­er. So we’re pro­claim­ing today “Stephen Fry Fri­day” and we’re pre­sent­ing our favorite Fry clips from years past. We start above with Fry’s take on “The Joys of Swear­ing” and the rest fol­lows:

The Strange New World of Nanoscience

What is nano? And how will nanoscience shape our future? It’s all explained in a snap­py 17 minute video —  NANO YOU — that Fry nar­rat­ed for Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 18 

It’s a peren­ni­al fan favorite — Fry reflect­ing on his life, all 55 years of it, and offer­ing up life lessons to young­sters. Truth be told, old­er folks will get some­thing out of this video too.

On Phi­los­o­phy and the Impor­tance of Unbe­lief

Get­ting into the nit­ty grit­ty of phi­los­o­phy, Fry gives us one more life les­son: If you assume there’s no after­life, you’ll like­ly have a fuller, more enrich­ing life.

A Kinet­ic Take on Lan­guage

For a brief time in 2008, Fry pro­duced a series of pod­casts – called “Pod­grams” – that drew on his writ­ings, speech­es and col­lec­tive thoughts. In one episode, he med­i­tat­ed on lan­guage — the Eng­lish lan­guage, his own lan­guage, Barthes, Chom­sky, and Pinker — and then Matthew Rogers took that med­i­ta­tion and ran with it, pro­duc­ing a “kinet­ic typog­ra­phy ani­ma­tion” that art­ful­ly illus­trates a six minute seg­ment of Fry’s longer talk.

Shake­speare’s Satir­i­cal Son­net 130, As Read By Stephen Fry

It’s not sur­pris­ing that some­one this immersed in lan­guage would deeply admire the Shake­speare­an tra­di­tion.…

Why Fry Loves Joyce’s Ulysses

And Joyce’s Ulysses too (which you can down­load as a fine free audio book here).

Stay tuned, we’ll have more Stephen Fry in the months and years to come.…

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What If Money Was No Object?: Thoughts on the Art of Living from Eastern Philosopher Alan Watts

in Life, Philosophy | October 9th, 2012

Alan Watts came to San Fran­cis­co dur­ing the ear­ly 1950s, wrote his best­seller Way of Zen, and became one of the fore­most pop­u­lar­iz­ers of Zen Bud­dhism, Hin­duism, Tao­ism and var­i­ous forms of East­ern phi­los­o­phy. His TV show, East­ern Wis­dom and Mod­ern Life (1960), intro­duced Amer­i­cans to the seem­ing­ly exot­ic con­cept of med­i­ta­tion (watch here). And his radio show and lec­tures forced lis­ten­ers to pause and look at their lives from a fresh per­spec­tive. Again and again, Watts chal­lenged the West­ern empha­sis on mon­ey-mak­ing to the exclu­sion of all else. We’ve heard Watts rail against this soul-crush­ing val­ue in a lec­ture ani­mat­ed by the cre­ators of South Park. (I’m not kid­ding you.) And, in the new­ly-pro­duced video above, he con­tin­ues along the same tra­jec­to­ry. So, as you drink your morn­ing cof­fee and pon­der your day, ask your­self: Are you putting mon­ey-mak­ing before hap­pi­ness itself? Or are you pur­su­ing the pas­sions that bring hap­pi­ness, achiev­ing excel­lence, and then let­ting the mon­ey fol­low? With that, I’ll let you con­tin­ue with your day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Liv­ing: A Free Stan­ford Course Explores Time­less Ques­tions

Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Tech­nol­o­gy Can’t Grasp Real­i­ty

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

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How Political Commitment Led Lucy Lawless (AKA Xena, the Warrior Princess) to Study Philosophy

in Philosophy, Podcasts, Politics, Television | October 8th, 2012

It’s cer­tain­ly not uncom­mon for celebri­ties to take up polit­i­cal caus­es, though this does not usu­al­ly lead to them get­ting arrest­ed for hol­ing up in a high tow­er oil-drilling ship for four days. What’s less com­mon is for this inter­est to bur­geon into a full-on obses­sion with all things philo­soph­i­cal, but that’s exact­ly what hap­pened to Lucy Law­less (best known as Xena, the War­rior Princess).

“I went to the UN sum­mit on sus­tain­able devel­op­ment after get­ting involved in the whole… big oil protest… and I saw all of these peo­ple work­ing very hard but seem­ing­ly at cross-pur­pos­es about how do we cre­ate a just soci­ety.” On a full two-hour episode of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast (which she claims was large­ly respon­si­ble for turn­ing her on to phi­los­o­phy), she describes how this polit­i­cal inter­est drove her to look at the foun­da­tions and his­to­ries of the­o­ries of jus­tice, and even­tu­al­ly decide to go back to school to study phi­los­o­phy, which she’s now doing in New Zealand between flights to the states to film TV spots such as her recent appear­ance on NBC’s Parks and Recre­ation.

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life inter­view with Law­less is a five-per­son, round­table dis­cus­sion of Tom Payne’s 2010 book, Fame: What the Clas­sics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebri­ty. You can lis­ten here:

The the­sis of the book is that celebri­ties serve as an out­let for soci­ety’s aggres­sive instincts. Draw­ing on canon­i­cal texts about reli­gious anthro­pol­o­gy like James Fraz­er’s The Gold­en Bough, the author com­pares the treat­ment of mod­ern celebri­ties to ancient rites where young maid­ens were lav­ish­ly bestowed with finer­ies and then sac­ri­fied. Lucy thinks this well match­es her own expe­ri­ences, and talks about the exis­ten­tial weird­ness involved with being and deal­ing with the famous.

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life has also cov­ered relat­ed top­ics of Freud’s Civ­i­liza­tion and its Dis­con­tents and Niet­zsche’s Geneal­o­gy of Morals. You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast on iTunes.

Mark Lin­sen­may­er runs the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life phi­los­o­phy pod­cast and blog. 

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Philosopher Slavoj Zizek Interprets Hitchcock’s Vertigo in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006)

in Film, Philosophy | September 27th, 2012

Philoso­pher and psy­cho­an­a­lyst Slavoj Zizek is a polar­iz­ing fig­ure, in and out of the Acad­e­my. He has been accused of misog­y­ny and oppor­tunism, and a Guardian colum­nist once won­dered if he is “the Borat of phi­los­o­phy.” The lat­ter epi­thet might be as much a ref­er­ence to his occa­sion­al boor­ish­ness as to his Sloven­ian-accent­ed Eng­lish. Despite (or because of) these qual­i­ties, Zizek has become a fas­ci­nat­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al, in part because all of his work is shot through with pop cul­ture ref­er­ences as dif­fuse as the most stud­ied of fan­boys. And even though Zizek, a stu­dent of the Freudi­an the­o­rist Jacques Lacan, can get deeply obscure with the best of his peers, his enthu­si­asm and rapid-fire free-asso­ci­a­tions mark him as a true fan of every­thing he sur­veys.

The Zizek I just described is ful­ly in evi­dence in the short clip above from the three-part doc­u­men­tary The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma. Direct­ed by Sophie Fiennes (sis­ter of Joseph and Ralph), The Pervert’s Guide places Zizek in orig­i­nal loca­tions and repli­ca sets of sev­er­al clas­sic films—David Lynch’s Blue Vel­vet, Stan­ley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go, to name just a few. Zizek’s scenes of com­men­tary are edit­ed with scenes from the films to give the impres­sion that he is speak­ing from with­in the films them­selves. It’s a nov­el approach and works par­tic­u­lar­ly well in the video above, where Zizek gives us his take on Ver­ti­go. As he says of Hitchcock’s film—which could apply to the one he is in as well—“often things begin as a fake, inau­then­tic, arti­fi­cial, but you get caught in your own game.” View­ers of The Pervert’s Guide get caught in Zizek’s inter­pre­tive game; it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing, ridicu­lous, and unset­tling one.

In the clip, through a series of close analy­ses of plot points and cam­era angles, Zizek con­cludes that Ver­ti­go is the real­iza­tion of a male fan­ta­sy, which nec­es­sar­i­ly involves vio­lence and night­mar­ish trans­for­ma­tions. In the “male libid­i­nal econ­o­my,” he says, in the jargon‑y psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic speak of his trade, women must be “mor­ti­fied” before they are accept­able sex­u­al part­ners. Slip­ping out of aca­d­e­m­ic argot, he clar­i­fies: “to para­phrase an old say­ing, the only good woman is a dead woman.” It’s this kind of blunt and utter­ly unsen­ti­men­tal way of speak­ing that rais­es the hack­les of some of Zizek’s crit­ics. But I’m not here to defend him. Watch­ing (and read­ing) him for me is a game of edge-of-your seat “what out­ra­geous or incom­pre­hen­si­ble thing is he going to say next?” and I’ll admit, I enjoy it. So I’ll leave you with a final Zizek-ism. Per­haps it will scare you off for good, or per­haps you’re game for a few more rounds of “per­ver­sion” with this ency­clo­pe­dic crit­ic of the self, the social, and the sex­u­al:

“A sub­ject,” says Zizek, “is a par­tial some­thing, a face, some­thing we see. Behind it, there is a void, a noth­ing­ness. And of course, we spon­ta­neous­ly tend to fill in that noth­ing­ness with our fan­tasies about the wealth of human per­son­al­i­ty and so on, and so on. To see what is lack­ing in real­i­ty, to see it as that, there you see sub­jec­tiv­i­ty. To con­front sub­jec­tiv­i­ty means to con­front fem­i­nin­i­ty. Woman is the sub­ject. Mas­culin­i­ty is a fake.”

You can watch the film in its entire­ty here.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Žižek!: 2005 Doc­u­men­tary Reveals the “Aca­d­e­m­ic Rock Star” and “Mon­ster” of a Man

Good Cap­i­tal­ist Kar­ma: Zizek Ani­mat­ed

Slavoj Žižek: How the Marx Broth­ers Embody Freud’s Id, Ego & Super-Ego

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit: A BBC Adaptation Starring Harold Pinter (1964)

in Literature, Philosophy | September 13th, 2012

Each time I see a ref­er­ence to Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (Huis Clos), I think of the night­club scene in Bret Eas­t­on Ellis’s Amer­i­can Psy­cho, which is fit­ting since that nov­el is, in a sense, about a group of peo­ple who hate each oth­er. No Exit con­jures Sartre’s famous phrase “Hell is oth­er peo­ple,” but in the play, hell is, more accu­rate­ly, oneself—or the inabil­i­ty to leave one­self, to “take a lit­tle break,” by sleep­ing, turn­ing off the lights, or even blink­ing. Hell, in Sartre’s play, means being end­less­ly con­front­ed with the sor­did triv­i­al­i­ties of one’s self through the eyes of oth­er peo­ple. Trapped in a room with them, to be exact, for­ev­er. It’s a chill­ing con­cept.

In this BBC adap­ta­tion of Sartre’s play, called In Cam­era, cer­tain details have changed. Instead of the “Sec­ond Empire fur­ni­ture” from Sartre’s descrip­tions of the hell­ish room, we have a bright­ly-lit mod­ernist gallery space. The bronze objet d’art in Sartre’s play has been replaced by mas­sive abstract paint­ing and sculp­ture, a com­men­tary, per­haps, on the way the bour­geois space of art gal­leries impos­es arti­fi­cial deco­rum on every­one inside. It’s as incon­gru­ous with the sit­u­a­tion as the haughty draw­ing room of the orig­i­nal. Aside from the mise en scene, In Cam­era is large­ly faith­ful to the dia­logue and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Sartre’s play. Fea­tur­ing absur­dist play­wright Harold Pin­ter as the insuf­fer­able writer and jour­nal­ist Garcin, Jane Arden as Inez, Kather­ine Woodville as Estelle, and Jonathan Hansen as the valet, In Cam­era was part of the BBC series “The Wednes­day Play,” which ran from 1964 to 1970 and pre­sent­ed orig­i­nal work and the occa­sion­al adap­ta­tion. Only the sec­ond episode in the series, In Cam­era ran on Novem­ber 4th, 1964 and was adapt­ed and direct­ed from Sartre’s orig­i­nal by Philip Sav­ille.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intel­lec­tu­als

Sartre, Hei­deg­ger, Niet­zsche: Three Philoso­phers in Three Hours

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Ayn Rand’s Philosophy and Her Resurgence in 2012: A Quick Primer by Stanford Historian Jennifer Burns

in Philosophy, Politics, Stanford | September 4th, 2012

The Col­bert Report Mon — Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Jen­nifer Burns
www.colbertnation.com
Col­bert Report Full Episodes Polit­i­cal Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

In 2009, Stan­ford his­to­ri­an Jen­nifer Burns pub­lished God­dess of the Mar­ket: Ayn Rand and the Amer­i­can Right, which traced Rand’s intel­lec­tu­al devel­op­ment and her rela­tion­ship to the con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­er­tar­i­an move­ments. It was some­what for­tu­nate tim­ing. Indeed, from the first day Pres­i­dent Oba­ma took office, the defend­ers of pre-2008 cap­i­tal­ism began buy­ing Rand’s well-known book, Atlas Shrugged, by the dozens. Now, with Paul Ryan, a card-car­ry­ing Ran­di­an, get­ting the VP nod from the Grand Old Par­ty, Burns and her book are get­ting anoth­er moment back in the spot­light. They’re help­ing answer some very basic ques­tions peo­ple might have: How do you pro­nounce her first name? What is her phi­los­o­phy of objec­tivism all about? Why does the right adore some­one who mer­ci­less­ly mocked their core reli­gious beliefs? And, what would Rand have thought about a polit­i­cal fig­ure like Paul Ryan? Would the love have been rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed?

They’re all good ques­tions — ones that Burns recent­ly addressed on The Col­bert Report (above), in the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, and now in the lat­est edi­tion of Stan­ford Mag­a­zine. We’ve extract­ed a few of the key Q & A’s:

First things first, I always stum­ble on her name. What is the cor­rect pro­nun­ci­a­tion of Ayn?

Here’s a good trick to remem­ber it. In keep­ing with her phi­los­o­phy of self­ish­ness, “Ayn” rhymes with the word “mine.”

So what does Rand’s phi­los­o­phy of objec­tivism boil down to?

Here is how Rand summed it up in ten words or less: “meta­physics: objec­tive real­i­ty; epis­te­mol­o­gy: rea­son; ethics: self-inter­est; pol­i­tics: cap­i­tal­ism.”

If I was going to break that down a lit­tle bit, meta­physics is objec­tive real­i­ty, which means we can only rely on our mind and on rea­son. It’s our only guide to thought and action. Epis­te­mol­o­gy, rea­son. The only way we can know any­thing is through the rea­son­ing mind. Ethics, self-inter­est. Rand claimed that self­ish­ness was a virtue. It was vir­tu­ous to pur­sue your own inter­ests and defend your own inter­ests. And pol­i­tics is cap­i­tal­ism because lais­sez-faire cap­i­tal­ism for her was the only sys­tem that allowed the indi­vid­ual to real­ize his or her full poten­tial and to keep the fruits of his or her labor and not be oblig­at­ed to oth­ers or pun­ished for suc­cess.

Was she con­cerned about the less for­tu­nate?

That was not a big part of her ethics. Her ethics were based on the indi­vid­ual and on the individual’s right to pur­sue his or her goals. The indi­vid­ual was not oblig­at­ed to oth­er peo­ple. If you chose, because of your own val­ues, to help oth­er peo­ple or to engage in char­i­ty, that was fine, but that did not make you a moral per­son. What made you a moral per­son is rely­ing on your­self, pur­su­ing your own inter­ests, and not being a bur­den on oth­ers.

Some of the char­ac­ters she depicts the most neg­a­tive­ly in her nov­els are peo­ple like social work­ers. She thought social work­ers were [about] the most evil peo­ple pos­si­ble because they made their lives on the mis­ery of oth­ers. Moral­i­ty and ethics, for her, had noth­ing to do with help­ing oth­er peo­ple.

Why has Ryan start­ed to mea­sure his sup­port for her?

She is very hard for politi­cians to embrace because not only is she not reli­gious, she’s antire­li­gious. The fact that Ryan gave Atlas Shrugged as a Christ­mas gift [to staffers] is a tremen­dous irony because Rand was a fire-breath­ing athe­ist. She did not believe in God. She called reli­gion a psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­der. She tru­ly believed you need­ed to use rea­son and log­ic and no faith what­so­ev­er.

So as Ryan’s star began to rise, he quick­ly began to back away from her for that very rea­son. And he made this sort of clum­sy sub­sti­tu­tion of St. Thomas Aquinas as his major inspi­ra­tion rather than Ayn Rand, although he’s on the record in mul­ti­ple places very recent­ly talk­ing about Rand and not talk­ing about Aquinas.

You can read the full inter­view here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ayn Rand Instructs John­ny Car­son on the Virtue of Self­ish­ness, 1967

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Face to Face with Bertrand Russell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish’

in Philosophy, Television | August 31st, 2012

In April of 1959 the British philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian Bertrand Rus­sell sat down with John Free­man of the BBC pro­gram Face to Face for a brief but wide-rang­ing and can­did inter­view. Rus­sell rem­i­nisced about his ear­ly attrac­tion to math­e­mat­ics. “I got the sort of sat­is­fac­tion that Pla­to says you can get out of math­e­mat­ics,” he said. “It was an eter­nal world. It was a time­less world. It was a world where there was a pos­si­bil­i­ty of a cer­tain kind of per­fec­tion.”

Rus­sell, of course, dis­tin­guished him­self in that rar­i­fied world as one of the founders of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy and a co-author of Prin­cip­ia Math­e­mat­i­ca, a land­mark work that sought to derive all of math­e­mat­ics from a set of log­i­cal axioms. Although the Prin­cip­ia fell short of its goal, it made an enor­mous mark on the course of 20th cen­tu­ry thought. When World War I came along, though, Rus­sell felt it was time to come down from the ivory tow­er of abstract think­ing. “This world is too bad,” Rus­sell told Free­man. “We must notice it.”

The half-hour con­ver­sa­tion, shown above in its entire­ty, is of a qual­i­ty rarely seen on tele­vi­sion today. The inter­view­er Free­man was at that time a for­mer Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment and a future Ambas­sador to the Unit­ed States. Rus­sell talks with him about his child­hood, his views on reli­gion, his polit­i­cal and social activism, even his amus­ing con­vic­tion that smok­ing extend­ed his life. But per­haps the most famous moment comes at the end, when Free­man asks the old philoso­pher what mes­sage he would offer to peo­ple liv­ing a thou­sand years hence. In answer­ing the ques­tion, Rus­sell bal­ances the two great spheres that occu­pied his life:

I should like to say two things, one intel­lec­tu­al and one moral:

The intel­lec­tu­al thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are study­ing any mat­ter or con­sid­er­ing any phi­los­o­phy, ask your­self only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Nev­er let your­self be divert­ed either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have benef­i­cent social effects if it were believed, but look only and sole­ly at what are the facts. That is the intel­lec­tu­al thing that I should wish to say.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very sim­ple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is fool­ish. In this world, which is get­ting more and more close­ly inter­con­nect­ed, we have to learn to tol­er­ate each oth­er. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some peo­ple say things that we don’t like. We can only live togeth­er in that way, and if we are to live togeth­er and not die togeth­er we must learn a kind of char­i­ty and a kind of tol­er­ance which is absolute­ly vital to the con­tin­u­a­tion of human life on this plan­et.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell on the Exis­tence of God and the After­life

Three Pas­sions of Bertrand Rus­sell (and a Col­lec­tion of Free Texts)

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’

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Ayn Rand (Paul Ryan’s Moral Heroine) Instructs Johnny Carson on the Virtue of Selfishness, 1967

in Philosophy, Politics, Television | August 14th, 2012

Since Wis­con­sin Sen­a­tor Paul Ryan may soon be only a heart­beat away from the pres­i­den­cy of the Unit­ed States, it might be good to pause for a moment and con­sid­er the man’s val­ues. In par­tic­u­lar, it might make sense to get acquaint­ed with his stat­ed source of moral inspi­ra­tion.

“The rea­son I got involved in pub­lic ser­vice,” Ryan said in 2005, “by and large, if I had to cred­it one thinker, one per­son, it would be Ayn Rand.”

The Russ­ian émi­gré writer and philoso­pher Ayn Rand believed that self-inter­est was the great­est good and that altru­ism was unspeak­ably wicked. “Altru­ism is a mon­strous notion,” she said in 1981. “It is the moral­i­ty of can­ni­bals devour­ing one anoth­er. It is a the­o­ry of pro­found hatred for man, for rea­son, for achieve­ment, for any form of human suc­cess and hap­pi­ness on earth.”

Ryan was deeply impressed when he first read Rand’s books as a young­ster. “I grew up read­ing Ayn Rand, and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my val­ue sys­tems are,” Rand told The Atlas Soci­ety in 2005. “It inspired me so much that it’s required read­ing in my office for all interns and my staff.”

Rand called the Unit­ed States a “nation of mon­ey,” and she meant it as a com­pli­ment. “The words ‘to make mon­ey’ hold the essence of human moral­i­ty,” she wrote in a famous pas­sage in her 1957 nov­el, Atlas Shrugged. In Rand’s hier­ar­chy of virtue the Amer­i­can indus­tri­al­ist is “the high­est type of human being” and the needy are rab­ble. “Par­a­sites, moochers, loot­ers, brutes and thugs can be of no val­ue to a human being,” Rand wrote in 1963. “Nor can he gain any ben­e­fit from liv­ing in a soci­ety geared to their needs, demands and pro­tec­tion, a soci­ety that treats him as a sac­ri­fi­cial ani­mal and penal­izes him for his virtues in order to reward them for their vices, which means: a soci­ety based on the ethics of altru­ism.”

If Rand taught Ryan “quite a bit” about who he is and what his val­ue sys­tems are, then per­haps Rand’s state­ment above should tell us some­thing about Ryan’s cur­rent bud­get pro­pos­al, which would slash $3.3 tril­lion from pro­grams for low-income earn­ers over the next decade while pro­vid­ing a wind­fall for the wealthy in the form of tax cuts that would net an aver­age $265,000 a year for those with incomes greater than $1 million–over and above the $129,000 they would already receive from Ryan’s exten­sion of the Bush tax cuts. In Ryan’s bud­get the rich are released from their unjust bur­den as “sac­ri­fi­cial ani­mals” while the “par­a­sites,” “moochers” and “looters”–i.e. the elder­ly, the dis­abled and the poor–are taught a les­son in virtue.

For a quick primer on Rand’s philosophy–straight from the horse’s mouth–watch her 1967 appear­ance (above) on The Tonight Show Star­ring John­ny Car­son.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Col­bert on Ayn Rand

Mike Wal­lace Inter­views Ayn Rand (1959)

William F. Buck­ley Flogged Him­self to Get Through Atlas Shrugged

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