Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, focusing on something that has gotten a bit lost in the background of all the other chaos: the war in Ukraine, where Ukraine seems to be slowly gaining the upper hand by becoming the world’s drone superpower. Before that, there’s a wry note about King Charles in America, and after it, some coverage of the recent Supreme Court arguments on birthright citizenship, an overview of the “vibes-based” SpacEx IPO, and a quick good riddance to Paul Ehrlich.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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Oh, the Irony

King Charles Urges Checks on Executive Power as Trump Hosts Royal Visit

During his first state visit to the United States as monarch, Charles stayed scrupulously nonpartisan over the course of a 28-minute address to a joint meeting of Congress. But he promoted what he described as centuries of common interests, including in areas where President Donald Trump has sought a sharp break from U.S. precedent in his drive to reshape American society and governance.

The U.S. and Britain should defend Ukraine, Charles said. An independent judiciary should deliver impartial justice. Diverse societies make countries strong. Societies must protect the natural world. And the U.S. and Europe should “ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking.”

Charles is officially barred from engaging in politics and mentioned no political leader in his speech. The vision of the American role in the world that he outlined, however, stood in stark contrast to that of Trump, who has declared that migration weakens societies, used executive orders to bypass Congress, attacked judges who rule against him, questioned the scientific consensus on climate change and declared his desire to wind down support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. The speech came on the day the Justice Department brought a new indictment against former FBI director James B. Comey, a longtime Trump target.

As the king spoke, the White House posted an image of Trump and Charles on X, calling it “TWO KINGS,” with a crown emoji….

“Executive power is subject to checks and balances,” Charles said, spurring bipartisan cheers and whistles from his audience at a time when the Republican-led Congress has greatly diminished its power largely by acquiescing to Trump’s demands.

The Global Drone Superpower

Ukraine Forces Russians to Surrender Using Only Robots

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, focusing on two main issues. The first is last week’s election defeat of Victor Orbán, who went much farther than Donald Trump in using authoritarian means to entrench himself in power for 16 years—but he still could not prevent a vast wave of rejection by the people of Hungary. The second issue is the Supreme Court’s growing use of a highly dubious “shadow docket” in which it makes often highly partisan decisions with no explanations. In between are a few notes about the Iran war; the corruption, mismanagement, and inebriation of Trump’s imperial court; and the actual effect his policies have had on immigration.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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“Never Again a Country Without Consequences”

How Viktor Orbán’s Hungary Eroded the Rule of Law and Free Markets

Hungary is a small country, but as Viktor Orbán has pointed out: “There is one thing that makes our country an important place: the fact that Hungary is an incubator, where experiments are being conducted for the conservative politics of the future.”…

The sociologist Ferenc Pataki talks about Orbán’s project as “a neo-collectivist, neo-communist experiment,” and similarly, the Fidesz oligarch Simicska has said that the party decided to pick up “the commies’ methods.” But while Fidesz is opposed to free markets and has used nationalization and state intervention to control the economy, it does not have an egalitarian ideology, and the party does not think it is necessary to place ownership in the hands of the state itself, as long as it is in the hands of friends.

Others have called it a fascist system, referring to how the government controls the economy and society through many different institutions and turns to nationalism and xenophobia to rally support. However, while Fidesz’s rhetoric is often aggressive, it refrains from the overt kinds of racist and anti-Semitic legislation that characterize fascist states.

These descriptions also ignore the ideological flexibility of Fidesz’s pursuit of power. Regarding the party, Orbán was onto something when he said: “It is not an organization based on one single coherent system of principles or an ideology—such an organization is incapable of expanding beyond a certain point.” Instead, he described the party as “reality without ideology.” He has been adept at transforming the party’s ideas whenever that helps it cling to power, saying that he has no need for his thoughts “to be forced into the cage of any ideology that can be summarized in a book.”

Bálint Magyar, a sociologist and former education minister, thinks that Orban’s Hungary has become another form of state altogether, a “mafia state.”…

It is not a case of “state capture” in which oligarchs draw the state under their control. Rather, it is a case of “society capture,” in which the government uses procurement, subsidies, regulations, and taxes to replace market actors with its own oligarchs who are offered protection and privileges as long as they stay loyal. If they are not, or cease to be useful, they are taken down and replaced. The primary concern is not principles and ideology but the consolidation of power and wealth for the ruling clique

This is just an excerpt from a much longer and more detailed report that is worth reading.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, following up on Donald Trump’s very dramatic backdown tonight in which he went from threatening vast war crimes against Iran to conceding all of America’s strategic objectives. Also, there’s some better news from Eastern Europe, more updates on the cruelty of the mass deportation state, one item which seems to require an apology in advance (you’ll know it when you see it), news on the ridiculous architecture of Trump’s ridiculous ballroom—and the usual antidote: more news from Artemis II on the far side of the Moon.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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Strategic Defeat, Completed

Trump Finds Offramp After a Day of Apocalyptic Threats

Mr. Trump had been under increasing pressure to find a way out of a confrontation after setting an 8 p.m. Eastern deadline for the strait to open, and after declaring on social media early Tuesday that if he is defied, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” It was a classic example of Mr. Trump’s chaotic, high-pressure negotiating style, where he creates a crisis and then uses his leverage to strike a deal.

In this case Mr. Trump appeared desperate for a way to escape his own threats and rhetoric, and to engineer a Pakistani proposal that he would then sign on to….

The temporary cease-fire does nothing to address the fundamental issues that led to the outbreak of the war on Feb. 28: Iran’s refusal to give up its stockpile of nuclear fuel; American and Israeli demands that it limit the size and range of its missile arsenal; and Iranian demands that it retain the right to enrich uranium and, more recently, for war reparations….

[I]t also raises the possibility that the war will end—or at least come to an uneasy truce—without Mr. Trump having accomplished many of the goals he laid out.

Tehran’s ‘Toll Booth’ System Is Now Controlling Hormuz Traffic

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, mostly covering the various ways in which the US has failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in Donald Trump’s war in Iran—but as an antidote to that, there is the event depicted above: the launch of Artemis II, the next stage of America’s return to the Moon.

A reminder on this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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Short Attention Span Theater

Inside Trump’s Daily Video Montage Briefing on the Iran War

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, US military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former US official said.

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

The highlight reel of US Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders, and news reports, the officials said.

But the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said.

They said the videos are also driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing, one of the current US officials and the former US official said.

Trump Had No Plan B for Iran

Three weeks into Donald Trump’s war against Iran, the president has still refused to define victory other than to say the war will soon be over. From the moment he launched hostilities, he offered many rationales for the war, choosing among them like he’s picking hors d’oeuvres from a buffet at one of his golf resorts: It’s about nuclear weapons, it’s about terrorism, it’s about ballistic missiles. As the media, and the world, press him for explanations, he continues, as Pegah Banihashemi and Paul Poast wrote in The Atlantic on Wednesday, to “careen” between demanding “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and signaling “that he might abruptly declare victory and leave.”

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I come across an occasional statement that our society runs on “enlightened self-interest”—I’ve noted it before in a conversation with Tom Nichols, and also in reading Stephen Pinker, and they’re not the only ones. But as I noted in response to Pinker, “It is an approach to morality that is widely accepted in practice, often acknowledged in passing, as Pinker does here, but is rarely taken with the seriousness it deserves or developed to its logical conclusions.”

This is important, because it is undoubtedly true that our society does run on some conception of “enlightened self-interest.” We recognize that it is natural for people to want to be prosperous and happy, to be able to find a nice place to live, to find work that is enjoyable and pays the bills, to be able to go out and enjoy all the good things that are available to us, particularly in wealthy, developed societies. So we’re not asking people to live in Altruria, an imagined altruist utopia in which no one looks to his own well-being and everyone works only for the good of others. And we’re definitely trying to avoid living in the actual, real-world versions of this ideal, in which the individual has no rights and exists only to serve the state.

But we rarely take much time to define what “enlightened self-interest” means, what are its rules, how it serves our self-interest, and what it is that “enlightens” it.

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Enlightened Self-Interest

At various times, this idea has gotten a little more attention.

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The latest weekly round-up of links, covering: our mercurial Iran strategy (or lack thereof); global democratic backsliding; an agenda so conservative it’s bringing back everything bad about the 1950s; some enlightening articles about immigration and assimilation; hope for a pro-growth liberal agenda; and re-animating dead brains, but in a good way.

This format is new, so below, the main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles. And please follow through on the link to go the original sources, because each of them is worth reading.

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The Iran War: What Is It Good For?

Trump Threats, US Troop Build-Up Raise Specter of Battle for Hormuz

Reopening the strait—a critical conduit for global energy supplies—has emerged as perhaps the paramount objective of a war that security officials now believe is unlikely to achieve goals that briefly seemed possible at the outset of the US-Israeli military operation, including overthrowing Iran’s theocratic regime and putting a nuclear weapon permanently out of Tehran’s reach.…

At the same time, Trump’s unusual decision to lift oil sanctions on Iran, potentially giving his enemy access to a windfall of revenue, has prompted a handful of Republicans to raise concerns about the war’s direction and merit….

US strikes have pounded Iranian positions along the Gulf waterway, destroying missile launch sites, suspected mine-laying vessels and small watercraft capable of racing toward vulnerable tankers—but that has done little to ease the near-shutdown of tanker traffic.

Israeli officials said that a perceived US reluctance to send its own ships into the strait and Trump’s efforts to outsource that mission to European allies or China underscore its danger and complexity. “The fact that they are slow going to Hormuz shows that it’s more complicated than expected,” a former senior Israeli security official said.

Trump Postpones Deadline for Strikes on Iran’s Energy Infrastructure

Mr. Trump said he was postponing any American attacks on Iranian power plants by five days while the talks take place. However, at least publicly, Iran appeared to reject any progress in ending the US-Israeli war on the country, now in its fourth week.

American, Israeli, and Iranian officials have frequently given clashing prognoses throughout the war as they seek to advance their competing agendas and motives.

Mr. Trump himself has often issued contradictory pronouncements about his plans for the next steps in the conflict, sometimes on the same day. On Saturday, Mr. Trump had threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants after 48 hours unless Iran agreed to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical oil shipping route in the Persian Gulf.

Iran Floats Hormuz Transit Tolls as Persian Gulf States Warn of Military Response

Iran is considering charging transit fees on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a lawmaker said on Thursday, as officials in Tehran stepped up rhetoric over the strategic waterway after this week’s attacks on energy sites in the Persian Gulf….

Mohammad Mokhber said one of the most important opportunities created by the war was the possibility of reshaping Iran’s role in the Strait of Hormuz. “After the imposed war, by defining a new regime for the Strait of Hormuz, Iran will move from being under sanctions to a powerful position in the region and the world,” Mokhber said.

Who Has the Cards Now?

Washington Should Jump on Ukraine’s Outreach to the Middle East

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While I’m campaigning, I have to restrict my comments in this newsletter to philosophy and history and other topics, rather than to current political events.

But occasionally, a seemingly obscure philosophical issue pops right up in the newspapers in a way that invites immediate commentary.

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Occasionally you come across an intellectual eating a chicken sandwich and “ruminating darkly about the existential quandaries of semi-literate farm animals.” Or you encounter in the wild a direct connection between Plato’s theory of concepts and Modern Monetary Theory, the crackpot economics to which we partly owe the burst of post-pandemic inflation. And of course, one of the most abstruse areas in philosophy, the philosophy of mind, is directly relevant to our evaluation of the potential and limits of artificial intelligence.

In the past few weeks, I came across another example, a weird lamentation in the Washington Post, of all places, that “Your Salted Caramel Mocha Latte Is Destroying Society.”

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The latest weekly round-up of links, covering: accountability everywhere but here, Trump suddenly needing help on Iran from people he treated like dirt (and getting treated like dirt by people he helped), Trump’s dictator’s clubhouse, a strangely conditional meaning for “unconditional surrender,” a collapse in trust but also a mysterious collapse in violence, and: the public is sick of our twice-annual time change.

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Why Can’t We Do This, Too?

Bolsonaro to Start Serving 27-Year Sentence Over Coup Plot

After the nation’s top court rejected an initial appeal by Mr. Bolsonaro’s lawyers challenging his sentence, the court ruled that he will begin serving his sentence at a federal police facility in Brasília, the capital.

The court’s ruling brought to a close a multiyear effort to hold Mr. Bolsonaro accountable for his role in a far-reaching plot to overturn the results of the 2022 election and remain in power following his loss at the polls.

The case became a severe test of Brazil’s young democracy after President Trump tried to help his political ally by imposing punishing tariffs and sanctions in an attempt to pressure Brazil into dropping the case. But Brazilian authorities did not cave and Mr. Trump appears to have moved on.

South Korea’s Former President Yoon Suk Yeol Jailed for Life for Leading Insurrection

A South Korean court has sentenced the former president Yoon Suk Yeol to life imprisonment with labour over his failed martial law declaration in December 2024, finding him guilty of leading an insurrection and making him the first elected head of state in the country’s democratic era to receive the maximum custodial sentence.

The Seoul central district court found that Yoon’s declaration of martial law on 3 December 2024 constituted insurrection, carried out with the intent to disrupt the constitutional order.

Judge Jee Kui-youn said the purpose was “to send troops to the national assembly to blockade the assembly hall and arrest key figures, including the assembly speaker and party leaders, thereby preventing lawmakers from gathering to deliberate or vote.”…

In a historical digression, the judge traced the history of insurrection law and cited the 1649 execution of England’s Charles I, who led troops into parliament, to establish that even heads of state can commit insurrection by attacking the legislature.

Ex-Prince Andrew “Basically Under House Arrest” After Royal Downfall

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor may soon find his world limited to a quiet corner of the Sandringham estate. According to palace insiders, the disgraced royal is expected to move into a heavily secured farmhouse on the property.

Sources say the setup reflects the monarchy’s latest effort to keep the disgraced former prince away from the spotlight while his legal troubles continue to play out.

The relocation follows Andrew’s February 19 arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Authorities are now examining claims that he may have shared sensitive information with financier Jeffrey Epstein while serving as Britain’s trade envoy. He was taken into custody and released a few hours later. However, the investigation is still ongoing….

One source put it bluntly. “Effectively, Andrew is now under house arrest and will remain so for the rest of his life, as, in exchange, his brother will fund his comfortable lifestyle.”

The Epstein Scandal Is Taking Down Europe’s Political Class. In the US, They’re Getting a Pass.

Across the Atlantic, heads are rolling over the Jeffrey Epstein revelations.

In Norway, one prominent diplomat has already been suspended and a police investigation has been opened into a former prime minister. In the U.K., the former ambassador to the U.S. has been fired; on Tuesday, he resigned from the House of Lords. Police are reviewing reports he shared market-sensitive information with Epstein….

But as Europe’s political class moves to clean up its mess and address its shame concerning ties with the convicted sex offender, it’s inadvertently highlighting something else—the comparative lack of accountability in the U.S.

No prominent politicians have taken a fall. Consequences have been limited. Wagons have been circled around the most prominent political figures whose names have surfaced in the legal document dumps.

The Definition of Chutzpah

Trump Calls on Kurds to Aid US Effort in Iran, Offers Support

The Trump administration, bracing for more US casualties and considering whether to put troops on the ground in Iran, has begun reaching out to Tehran’s domestic opposition as potential allies to foment an uprising against the regime.

In calls this week to Kurdish minority leaders in Iran and neighboring Iraq, President Donald Trump offered “extensive US aircover” and other backing for anti-regime Iranian Kurds to take over portions of western Iran, according to multiple people familiar with the effort….

The Kurds, in Iran numbering about 10 million across five western provinces, are also among the largest minorities in Iraq, Syria and parts of Turkey. In each of those countries, they have fought politically and sometimes physically—often with U.S. support when it coincided with American objectives—against systematic marginalization and for the right to self-determination.

But they have just as often felt abandoned by Washington. Most recently, the U.S. lifted its support from the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish group that had been America’s long-standing partner in countering the Islamic State in Syria as the Trump administration moved to partner instead with the new regime in Damascus.

US Asked Ukraine for Help Fighting Iranian Drones, Zelensky Says

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There is a great deal of work left to do to turn the completed draft of The Prophet of Causation into a published book, including sorting through all the typos you all found, looking at feedback from several reviewers, and deciding how to publish it. In the meantime, I wanted to share a snippet from some correspondence I had with Neera Badhwar, an academic philosopher who co-wrote a generally accurate overview of Ayn Rand’s ideas for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

She gave me permission to reproduce her original note, which prompted some responses that I thought my readers might find interesting.

Approaching various aspects of Rand’s philosophy through the idea of causation seems really interesting. However, I think that Rand’s central idea that the ultimate goal, and source, of all our values, and the foundation of ethics, is survival is mistaken. If you interpret survival thinly, then it’s just false. If you interpret it thickly as happiness in a moral life, then it’s plausible as a goal, but it can’t be the foundation of ethics without circularity.

I discuss this in the latest version of my and Roderick’s Stanford piece on Rand, which I’m attaching if you’re interested. (It has still to appear in the SEP, as the referee sent us additional comments.)

Just two comments on two statements you make:

“The basis of morality is “take what you want.” We are goal-directed beings who assert the needs of our survival and go after them.”

Without context, this actually sounds terrible! Even worse than Trump’s policy.

“Morality, in this view, is a body of factual knowledge about the causal connections between our choices and their effect on human survival—looked at from the perspective of our need to make those choices.”

I suppose you mean that it’s a body of hypothetical imperatives, but I don’t think [hypothetical imperatives] are entirely factual. They depend on what we want or value, and knowing what we ought to value is not a purely factual issue.

I found all of this very interesting, and it led to some interesting new formulations. Here’s my response (with a few minor additions I came up with while preparing it for publication here).

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The latest weekly round-up of links, covering: the evil of the Iranian regime, mixed feelings about our vague and directionless policy on Iran, presidential and congressional war powers, the battle for who counts the mid-term ballots, China’s military purge, and what comes after immigration.

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Context for Iran

How Iran Crushed a Citizen Uprising With Lethal Force

On Friday, Jan. 9, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the Supreme National Security Council, the body tasked with safeguarding the country, to crush the protests by any means necessary, according to two Iranian officials briefed on the ayatollah’s directive. Security forces were deployed with orders to shoot to kill and to show no mercy, the officials said. The death toll surged….

“This is not merely a violent protest crackdown,” said Raha Bahreini, a lawyer and an Iran researcher at Amnesty International. “It is a state-orchestrated massacre.”

“‘Pools of Blood, Hundreds of Gunshots’: I Am a Surgeon in Iran—This Is the Horror I’ve Witnessed in the Crackdown”

There was no pause. No moment to step back and assess. You moved from one patient to the next, from one operating room to another. I have worked through earthquakes and seen mass casualties after major accidents. I have never experienced anything like this. Even in disasters, you might receive 20 or 30 injured patients over several hours. That night, and the night after, it was hundreds: gunshot wounds; severe trauma. One after another.

The exhaustion was total. Physical exhaustion, yes, but more than that, mental. As surgeons, our job is to save lives. That night we were saving people who had been shot by their own government. That contradiction stays with you. You keep operating because you have no choice, because people are still arriving, because stopping is not an option; but part of you is breaking.

While in the operating room, I heard weapons that do not belong on city streets. I heard the sound of DShK [Soviet designed] machine guns. Later, I saw them mounted on the backs of pickup trucks moving through the city. I am describing what I heard and what I saw, not what caused specific injuries, but the atmosphere was unmistakable. This was not policing. This was something else.

As the night went on, it became impossible to even think about counting the dead. There was no way to collect accurate numbers. The volume of casualties far exceeded the capacity of the hospitals, the staff and the infrastructure.

The Monkey’s Paw in Tehran

Initial Israeli Strikes Targeted Some 30 Key Iranian Leaders; 30 Bombs Said Dropped on Khamenei’s Compound

Israel’s initial strikes on Iran this morning reportedly targeted some 30 key Iranian regime leaders and military chiefs, headed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Israeli officials have been widely quoted asserting that Khamenei was likely killed—in what is believed to be the first time Israel has directly sought to kill a serving head of a sovereign state — but there has been no official Israeli comment on this. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi has said Khamenei is alive “as far as I know.”

An unsourced Channel 12 news report says Israel, having coordinated with the US, dropped some 30 bombs on Khamenei’s compound, and that Khamenei was underground at the location, but not in one of the two deepest bunkers that only US bombs could have penetrated. This report also claims Khamenei’s military secretary was killed, and unspecified members of Khamenei’s family. Satellite imagery has shown the compound largely destroyed.

Tehran after Khamenei’s Death: Rallies of Mourning But Also Dancing in the Streets

“It’s a mixed feeling. On the one hand, yes, we’re happy about the decapitation strikes and Khamenei’s death. But the surviving officials and commanders aren’t just going to raise their hands and give up,” said Hassan, a barber in Tehran who, like many interviewed, did not want to be named to avoid reprisals….

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The latest weekly round-up of links, covering: Trumps’ directionless Iran policy, the unwavering direction of his lawless tariff policy, how mass deportations have redefined the immigration issue, the vanishing Republican majority in Congress, economic “slopulism,” a few stories on medical innovation, and a quality old man rant on making the kids these days do the work.

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“‘Do What Thou Wilt’ Shall Be the Whole of the Law,” But in a Bad Way

As Trump Weighs Iran Strikes, He Declines to Make Clear Case for Why, or Why Now

Though Mr. Trump is largely fixated on the nuclear weapons program, at various moments he and his aides have cited a range of other rationales for military action: protecting the protesters that Iranian forces killed by the thousands last month, wiping out the arsenal of missiles that Iran can use to strike Israel, and ending Tehran’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah.

Then there is the question of whether military force, the hammer Mr. Trump reaches for so quickly, can even accomplish those ends. Most of Iran’s near-bomb-grade uranium is already buried from the last strike, in June. And it is not clear how airstrikes would immediately aid protesters around the country or persuade Iran to stop funding terror.

Mr. Trump has never consistently described his goals, and when he talks about them it is usually in a haze of brief, offhand comments. The president has given no speeches preparing the American public for a strike on a country of about 90 million people, and sought no approval from Congress….

And when pressed on Iran, Mr. Trump regularly deflects questions about whether regime change is his true goal, leaving unclear what kind of end-state he seeks.

Trump Has Other Means to Make Tariff Mischief

The administration’s rapid pivot to Section 122 reflects necessity, not legal strength. It rests on redefining a “balance-of-payments crisis” beyond recognition, disregarding its own recent legal positions, and assuming that courts will decline to examine economic realities too closely. That is a fragile foundation for a policy affecting hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce and millions of consumers. And it’s possible he will get away with it.

Ultimately, this episode underscores a constitutional reality that no statutory workaround can erase: trade policy belongs to Congress. And unless Congress takes it back, it will not be able to put a definitive end to his tariff mischief.

Temporary emergency tools were never meant to substitute for democratic accountability. If tariffs are to exist, they must be enacted through legislation, debated openly, and owned politically by the representatives who approve them. Until then, each new Plan B will be an effort to outrun the limits of the law.

Trump’s Challenge to Free Market Capitalism

Ultimately, many economists say, it is a mistake to try to understand Mr. Trump’s actions through the lens of state capitalism, industrial policy or other clearly defined economic philosophy. Mr. Trump’s approach to policymaking is transactional and personal, not ideological….

But it may prove harder to persuade a future president to cede the power over the private sector that Mr. Trump has worked to build.

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A weekly round-up of links on immigration, the lawlessness of mass deportations, officially sanctioned tolerance of racism, state-level constitutionalism, the Trump economy, the dysfunction of our royal court, and the AI bubble.

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The Big Immigration Lie

Immigrant and Native Consumption of Means-Tested Welfare and Entitlement Benefits in 2023

Differences in welfare consumption by immigration status largely reflect life-cycle effects, as immigrants arrive younger, age into entitlement programs later, and often naturalize only after many years in the United States. Overall, immigrants consumed about 24 percent less welfare and entitlement benefits than native-born Americans. All immigrants were 14.8 percent of the US population and consumed just 10.4 percent of all estimated benefits in 2023; noncitizens were 7.5 percent of the population and consumed 3.2 percent of all benefits; and naturalized immigrants were 7.2 percent of the population and consumed 8 percent of all benefits. Native-born Americans consumed more than $3 trillion in means-tested welfare and entitlement benefits in 2023, compared with $401.6 billion consumed by all immigrants, $125.2 billion consumed by noncitizens, and $310.1 billion consumed by naturalized immigrants. If native-born Americans had consumed the same per capita dollar amount of means-tested welfare and entitlement programs as all immigrants, the total expenditures on these programs would have been about $715 billion less in 2023.

Immigrants Use Less Welfare at Every Income Level

An astute reader of our recent Cato policy brief on immigrant welfare use suggested stratifying our data by income since many welfare programs are intended to help the poor. Doing so would be a return to how we used to report immigrant welfare use in the olden days. We do that below and find that immigrants consistently report lower welfare use for nearly every program, regardless of poverty or income….

Whatever one’s views on immigration policy, the claim that immigrants systematically consume more welfare than native-born Americans isn’t supported in the data.

Less Than 14% of Those Arrested by ICE in Trump’s 1st Year Back in Office Had Violent Criminal Records, Document Shows

For example, while Mr. Trump and his aides often talk about immigration officials targeting murderers, rapists and gangsters, the internal data indicate that less than 2% of those arrested by ICE over the past year had homicide or sexual assault charges or convictions. Another 2% of those taken into ICE custody were accused of being gang members.

Nearly 40% of all of those arrested by ICE in Mr. Trump’s first year back in office did not have any criminal record at all, and were only accused of civil immigration offenses, such as living in the U.S. illegally or overstaying their permission to be in the country, the DHS document shows. Those alleged violations of U.S. immigration law are typically adjudicated by Justice Department immigration judges in civil—not criminal—proceedings.

“Absolute Hell”

“Absolute Hell”: Irishman with Valid US Work Permit Held by Ice Since September

Originally from Glenmore, Co Kilkenny, Seamus Culleton is married to a US citizen and owns a plastering business in the Boston area. He was arrested on September 9th, 2025, and has been in an Ice detention facility in Texas for nearly five months, despite having no criminal record, “not even a parking ticket”. In a phone interview from the facility, he said conditions there are “like a concentration camp, absolute hell”.

Culleton said he was carrying a Massachusetts driving license and a valid work permit issued by the US government when he was pulled over by Ice on the way home from work in September.

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I just posted my final chapter at The Prophet of Causation. The new chapter is “The Uncaused Life,” which is a play on the most famous saying from the guy pictured above.

The last chapter is on Ayn Rand’s esthetics, but—well, it’s about a lot more than that. It’s about how Ayn Rand’s esthetics is an entry point to her view of the whole “spiritual” element of life: not just art, but emotions, companionship, love, and the role of philosophy itself.

The Prophet of Causation

The Uncaused Life

Author’s Note: Below is a draft of Chapter 10, the final chapter of The Prophet of Causation, where I connect Ayn Rand’s esthetics with her view of emotions and of philosophy itself. This is part of my quest to raise the importance of esthetics in Objectivist philosophy. It’s often tacked on as an afterthought, but it certainly wasn’t an afterthought for Ayn Rand, who began with an artistic vision and filled in its philosophical foundations later…

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3 months ago · Robert Tracinski

This also explains why I think we should devote more effort to exploring and understanding her esthetics, which I have long thought is the great undeveloped hinterland of Objectivist philosophy.

Here’s what I think is the most interesting point from the chapter. It’s about a dilemma that has been sort of hanging out there ever since the first chapter on ethics, where I describe how Ayn Rand’s ethics is grounded in the requirements of human survival. The question is: Is that enough? Do we need something more, in addition to survival, to account for the full richness of human life?

I did a little more thinking about this in response to a challenge from reader and philosophy professor Neera Badhwar (a version of the argument she and Roderick Long offer at this point in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ayn Rand).

Here is how I address it within the scope of this book.

Some philosophers have challenged Ayn Rand’s view of survival as the basis for ethics by arguing that it is too narrow to offer a complete guide for all of human life, particularly the “spiritual” aspects of life like art, emotion, and companionship.

If we interpret survival in a “thin” way, as bare subsistence or the provision of only the material goods that support life, then it is necessarily inadequate to explain those other aspects of life. Yet if we interpret survival in a “thick” way that includes this kind of spiritual flourishing, it is tempting to assume this must require something in addition to survival, some kind of “survival-plus,” some other consideration or goal added on top of survival.

But in Ayn Rand’s philosophy, survival as such, even in its most literal interpretation, is already “thick,” in this sense, because it already implies and requires a whole spiritual dimension to man’s life.

Suppose a man becomes severely ill and requires a complex and difficult medical procedure—say, quadruple bypass heart surgery—after which he lives for an additional 20 years. This is a matter of survival in its most obvious and literal sense, delivering decades of additional life. But to get to the point where such a complex medical intervention is possible requires the modern scientific method. The scientific method, in turn, is the product of centuries of philosophical exploration going all the way back to Socrates asking his fellow Athenians to define important concepts and debate the nature of truth and the best life.

To get an extra two decades of survival from a life-saving surgery requires a prior two and a half thousand years of intellectual and spiritual development—and much longer, back to the first stone tools and cave paintings, if we trace all the roots that made Socrates possible.

Our lives in a developed society are extended by thousands of such innovations that we take for granted, many of them simpler and more prosaic, like modern sanitation. The caveman, it is estimated, had a life-expectancy of 28 years. In the healthiest advanced societies, life-expectancy is currently above 80 years. Those additional years—an extra two lifetimes—were bought by thousands of years of innovation and the growth of knowledge.

To be the kind of species that can perform surgery on our own hearts, and all of the other tasks that extend modern life to a span of nearly a century, humans had to first become the kind of species that can enjoy art, find meaning in music, debate philosophical questions, and do all of the other things that are necessary for our advanced intellectual development.

Very many things about human life can be explained as requirements for the care and feeding of an intellectual faculty that makes our lives much longer and more secure. An observation I cut out, partly just for length and partly because it maybe seemed a bit too personal, is that this also explains the need for recreation and for play, particularly mental play. Many of us love puzzles and word games and murder mysteries (which are really just a form of logic puzzle) because they are ways of exercising and rewarding the mental faculty on which our existence depends.

(By the way, if you like that observation about murder mysteries being a form of logic puzzle, I highly recommend the recent British TV series “Ludwig,” which is based directly on that premise.)

This is a big insight I remember having about Ayn Rand’s philosophy very early on: Spiritual values are aspects of the requirements of human survival, and the spiritual dimension of human life has a genuine and substantial “survival value,” to use the terminology of evolutionary science, because the mind has survival value. It had better have survival value, because our big brains are extremely expensive to maintain, biologically speaking. The only scientific explanation for their evolution is that they have an even bigger biological payoff.

I’ll leave that as something of a teaser for the book. And since a few people have asked: Yes, this means the book is essentially finished, but it won’t actually be available for a while. I will be giving it a once-over for more corrections and proofreading, and one of the chapters on epistemology is a bit too long. Also, I will be seeking an established publisher, and that process can take quite some time. And I’m doing all this while running for Congress, so it will move even more slowly.

In the meantime, I have a whole bunch of fragments left over: interesting observations and explanations that I cut primarily for length, because this is supposed to be a relatively short overview of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. I set a target of ten chapters of about 5,000 words each, which ought to yield a book somewhere around 150 pages, maybe a bit more, depending on the layout. So there were a lot of interesting ideas that couldn’t make it into the final product. I’ve saved some of those and might dole them as I can get to them, since I think they’re worth sharing.

To read those as they come out, and also to read all the chapters as they now stand, you can subscribe to The Prophet of Causation. Or stayed tuned at this newsletter, because I will share occasional updates.

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Editor’s Note: Since I’m commenting on politics mostly on my campaign site now, I’ve decided to create a mechanism for an occasional round-up of news link to be posted here, probably once a week, because there really is an awful lot going on—and there is some great reporting on it.

This first one will be longer than most to soak up some of the backlog.

—RWT

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The Battle of Minneapolis

A Government Of Influencers, By Influencers, For Influencers

[T]here’s no bigger name in Minneapolis content at the moment than…Nick Shirley, the 23-year-old right-wing influencer whose video on supposed fraud at Somali-American daycares went viral in late December. While many of Shirley’s claims have been debunked, and there are obviously other reasons daycares might not be willing to open up and allow Shirley to inspect their children, the controversy provoked by his video was used by the Trump administration to justify the surge of ICE agents in the city. …

There are some precedents for MAGA social media craze over Minneapolis. The protests and counterprotests last year outside the Portland ICE facility that eventually earned Sortor a trip to the White House serve as the blueprint here, with right-wing influencers putting their bodies on the line in attempts to get explosive video that could double as an excuse for the Trump administration to intervene.

Donald Trump Has Built a Clicktatorship

Getting silenced on X is, and I realize how absurd it sounds, the worst professional fate a Trump official can face. It signals that Bovino is no longer a player in an administration that has, from top to bottom, merged a social-media-first worldview with authoritarian tendencies. I like to call it the clicktatorship. Political appointees in the clicktatorship are not just using online platforms as a mode of communication. Their judgment and decision making are hyper-responsive to what’s happening on the far-right internet. They view everything as content.

No one better exemplifies the clicktatorship than the president himself. Trump routinely makes policy announcements via social media. Consider when, in August, he attempted to fire the Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook on Truth Social. When a government lawyer was questioned by the Supreme Court on the lack of an appeals option for Cook, he suggested that Cook could simply have made her case on Truth Social. In the clicktatorship, due process is reduced to the right to post.

Two Cities Under Siege

The Republicans’ veneration of the Founders is particularly rich at the moment because, of all the abuses England heaped on the colonies, nothing angered them more than the Crown’s deployment of soldiers on city streets—and the streets of Boston in particular. Anger, resentment, and violence simmered in Boston for years before the Boston Massacre in 1770. The Declaration of Independence Trump hangs in his office came six years later, followed by the American Revolution, then the birth of the United States.

The rage from those pre-revolution clashes in Boston continued to linger for years into the Constitutional Convention, and then the debate over the Bill of Rights. The Founders were also students of history, and saw how the domestic use of the military led to the fall of the Roman Republic. This, in large part, is why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and why the Constitution splits control of the military between the president and Congress. You really can’t overstate how much the Founders worried about…exactly what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.

“The Courts Are Dead.” An interview with a fired immigration judge.

“Let me get right to the point. I can tell you that today, the immigration courts are substantively dead. They are completely absent of due process. Of fair hearings. They exist only for show, and in name only. Period. The courts are dead. If you’re concerned about doing due process of fair hearings, they’re gone. So we can start from that position.”

(Those last two are from , and yes, you should be reading him.)

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I have one more new chapter posted at The Prophet of Causation. Like I said, I’m pushing this out while I can still concentrate on longer philosophical projects. At the rate I’m going, I’ll have the whole second half of the book posted by the end of next week—though the final chapter is one where I came up with some very interesting new ideas after the initial lectures, so it will probably take a bit more work.

The new chapter is “The Metaphysics of a Corn Seed,” hence the image above. It’s a takeoff on Ayn Rand’s use of “seed corn” to explain the role of capital in an economy. Well, she uses “stock seed,” but as someone who grew up in the Midwest, I couldn’t resist making it about corn. That, and it made for a more intriguing chapter title.

The Prophet of Causation

The Metaphysics of a Corn Seed

Author’s Note: Below is Chapter 9 of my book, where I build from the foundations of Ayn Rand’s politics and look at her unique philosophical defenses of property rights and capitalism. As a guy who grew up in the Midwest, I couldn’t resist giving the humble corn seed a prominent role. Given the change in contemporary circumstances, I also spend a little time on her views on representative government, and I dare to ask whether Ayn Rand was a liberal democrat (with both words in lower case…

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3 months ago · Robert Tracinski

My last chapter was on the foundations of Ayn Rand’s political philosophy, and this one is on the specific application of her politics and particularly her case for property rights and capitalism. I present an analysis of Rand’s case for the right to property, and how it differs from John Locke’s, which I think is unique to me and which I have discussed in previous articles in this newsletter.

There is one observation from the book that I decided to cut out and save for this newsletter. It’s about the thing I find most compelling about how Ayn Rand talks and writes about philosophy—the thing that differentiates her from previous philosophers who I otherwise like but find somewhat unsatisfying.

John Locke in particular has a tendency to fall back on analogies and metaphors. In this chapter, I look at his famous passage about how we acquire property by taking unowned resources and “mingling” them with our labor. Locke is definitely on to something; there’s a real fact he’s trying to identify. But he gets stuck in the metaphor and doesn’t quite get to a literal description of reality.

A metaphor can be a step toward the literal, and it is often the first way we identify a new idea. It is natural we should try to grasp something new by comparing it to what is known and familiar, and many advances made by philosophers come first in the form of analogies and metaphors. But if the purpose of philosophy is to arrive at an exact understanding of an idea and ground it solidly in reality, it is necessary to dig beneath the metaphor.

That is one of Ayn Rand’s crucial and underappreciated philosophical virtues: her relentless insistence on looking for the exact and literal statement of a philosophical principle rather than settling for a metaphor. It might seem strange that this comes from a novelist, who you think would be more susceptible to the influence of poetic imagery. (See Victor Hugo, whose political and philosophical views are kind of a muddle for precisely this reason.) Then again, Rand’s literary style did strive for a kind of spare, literal exactness and realism in a way that I suspect may be unique to American writers in the early 20th Century. That is certainly the quality she brought to philosophy. That, and talking about philosophy in plain English (for the most part), avoiding unnecessarily technical or esoteric terminology, which is another occupational hazard of philosophers.

At any rate, this observation seemed a bit too “meta” to put into the book, and the chapter was already longer than I was aiming for, so I saved it for here.

The reason the chapter was longer is that I wanted to spend a little time talking about Rand’s views on representative government—my one concession to the change in political context from her time to our own. Here is how I put it.

Ayn Rand wrote most of her work in the historical context of the middle of the 20th Century and particularly the Cold War contest between capitalism and communism—a context that was concrete and personal for her as a refugee from the Soviet Union. It is natural, then, that her writing on politics focuses primarily on the case for property rights, freedom for production and trade, and “separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”

She spent considerably less time writing about the separation of church and state, or political freedom, or representative government. This is partly because she largely took those elements for granted as not being seriously contested in the politics of her day….

In today’s context, when the global political contest is less between capitalism and socialism than between authoritarianism and “liberal democracy,” we might wonder whether Ayn Rand was on the side of the liberal democrats. Obviously, we are not using “liberal” or “democrat” in their narrow partisan senses, to refer to a member of the Democratic Party or a 20th-Century “liberal” advocate of the welfare state. We are using the term “liberal democracy” as political scientists use it, to refer to representative government combined with protections for individual rights.

This describes Rand’s position exactly, but with a special emphasis on the liberal part, on the protections for individual rights….

But she also offered some intriguing ideas about how those two elements—voting and individual rights—are connected.

I’ll leave off with that as a teaser for the rest of the chapter, and for the book, too, when it is ready for publishing. And I will be exploring some of the philosophy of democracy throughout this year on my own behalf and fully in my own voice.

In the meantime, you can subscribe to The Prophet of Causation to read the whole thing and get the last chapter as it comes out (and all the preceding ones, and the lectures and Q&As on which they are based).

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I have yet another new chapter posted at The Prophet of Causation. This is a project that was supposed to be done at the end of last year and got pushed back because of—well, everything that’s been happening. So I’m pushing the rest of it out quickly now before it before my campaign intensifies even more and it gets moved back indefinitely.

If you’ve signed up to get these full chapters as they come out, you may notice that I sent it out originally under a less punchy title but have since changed the main title to “Divine Law, Congressional Law, and the Law of Identity.” Ayn Rand fans might recognize those phrases.

This chapter deals with the foundations of Ayn Rand’s political philosophy. Some of the material on the social contract might be fresh in your memory, since I recently reposted an article on that. But I also went into a critique of the main prevailing theories on the “ontology of rights,” which is where that main headline comes in.

In one of the previous chapters I tried to trace out the connection between Ayn Rand and Charles Darwin, and in this one, I try correct what I think is an injustice she did to John Locke.

She may have superseded his idea of the social contract, but Ayn Rand owes more to John Locke than she acknowledges. She very effusively acknowledges Aristotle as an influence on her philosophy and to a lesser extent the Medieval Aristotelian philosopher Thomas Aquinas. She praises America’s Founders, who were widely and deeply influenced by Locke, but she leaves Locke himself out in the cold

Yet there is one crucial idea in her political philosophy that she must have gotten from Locke. Interestingly, this idea is not in Locke’s main writings on political philosophy or in his argument for property, which we will discuss in the next chapter. It is in Locke’s writings on religion and his case for religious freedom.

Here is the crucial passage from his Letter Concerning Toleration.

[T]he care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgement that they have framed of things….

[P]enalties are no way capable to produce such belief. It is only light and evidence that can work a change in men’s opinions; which light can in no manner proceed from corporal sufferings, or any other outward penalties.¹⁸

This is a theme that became commonplace in the Enlightenment among the “natural religion” theorists mentioned in the last chapter, and it had an enormous influence on America’s Founders. Ayn Rand took it up as a central theme in her work: You cannot force a mind.

What Ayn Rand added to Locke is the idea that the operation of the mind is one of the necessities of survival. “Inward persuasion” through “light and evidence” is not just necessary to form the correct opinions about religion. It is also necessary to discover the scientific and technological breakthroughs that extend and enhance our long-term survival.

But the most thrilling part of this chapter for me is how it really ties back into and connects together everything from the first half of the book.

In epistemology, we looked at how the Primacy of Existence is fundamentally an assertion of a causal relationship between reality and the mind, the inescapable dependence of the mind on observation and on fealty to reality. Everything we discussed in the first half of this book—the nature of perception, the factual grounding for conceptual thinking, the role of volition—was a facet of this causal relationship between knowledge and reality.

Now we see that rights are an assertion of this same causal relationship. The evil of coercion is that it interferes with the causal relationship between reality and consciousness and therefore imperils human life.

Read the whole thing, and you can always subscribe to that newsletter to get the rest of the chapters as they come out (and all the preceding ones, and the lectures and Q&As on which they are based).

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I told you I was going to be posting chapters much more frequently from my book in progress, The Prophet of Causation, a short overview of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. I meant it. I just posted another new one titled, “The Discipline of Causation.”

The Prophet of Causation

The Discipline of Causation

Author’s Note: I told you I was going to be posting chapters much more frequently, and I meant it. Below is Chapter 7 of my book, where I explore what Ayn Rand’s unique concept of virtue and explain how the virtue of selfishness naturally implies the selfishness of virtue, and vice versa…

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4 months ago · 2 likes · Robert Tracinski

The “discipline of causation” plays off Rand’s description of the rational man as a “disciple of causation.” In the previous chapter, I wrote about the foundation of ethics, and this chapter is about the nature of virtue, which is what really counts in her philosophy as the “discipline” followed by the “disciple of causation.”

The excerpt I wanted to give you for this newsletter is about the “selfishness of virtue.” Ayn Rand is known, of course, for advocating rational self-interest and even “the virtue of selfishness.” But here I talk about how she also advocated the selfishness of virtue—which, as usual, throws a lot of the usual philosophical categories and assumptions for a loop.

This passage starts by talking about a “larger paradox” in altruist theories.

If the purpose of morality is to “starve the whole of the desires which point to our personal satisfaction,” then the case for virtue is that it will be bad for you. As Rand observed, when people “[grow] up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat,” they will “come to believe that actual evils are the practical means of existence.” If you tell people that selfishness is evil, they will conclude that evil is selfish.

Ayn Rand’s view was the opposite. Because she advocated for the virtue of selfishness, she also argued for the selfishness of virtue.

Notice what, concretely, her morality consists of. We have already observed that her ethics requires long-range thinking, principles, and self-discipline. The central role of productiveness in her philosophy means that it also requires work and achievement.

Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.

…

Rand rejected the pursuit of power over others, but she does offer an alternative vision of human power and greatness. That vision is our power over nature through rational thinking and productive work.

Again, this is projected most powerfully in her fiction, where her heroes are creative thinkers, innovators, and builders. In The Fountainhead, her hero is an architect who is driven by the originality of his artistic vision. In Atlas Shrugged, her heroes run railroads and mines, invent new metal alloys and motors, and discover new scientific laws and philosophical truths.

The title of The Fountainhead conveys her message. It is the self, the “I,” that is the source of thinking, creativity, and the motivation to build. Her case for selfishness depends on her view of the self. Where previous philosophers regarded the self as consisting of brutish, irrational, and destructive urges, Rand saw the self as the rational mind and its power to conceive of new ideas and build new things.

If you’ve subscribed, you can read the whole article. I offer what I think is a very interesting discussion about how the three prevailing theories about the nature of morality are like the old story about the blind men and the elephant.

Read the whole thing.

I’ll have some other updates first in this newsletter, but next up in the book project is my chapter on Ayn Rand’s unique view of the source and meaning of rights.

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One of the upsides of having to move timely political commentary to my campaign site (expect a statement on the shooting in Minneapolis and several other things) is that it requires me to move forward on some intellectual projects that have been on the back burner for the past year.

I just posted the next chapter of my Prophet of Causation book in progress, which has still been moving slowly, even while I was busy charting the collapse of the republic, but which I’m now starting to bring over the finish line—at last as a polished draft. I am sure there will be some more tweaking before final publication.

The Prophet of Causation

The Operation of the Moral Law

Author’s Note: Below is the sixth chapter of my book, where I close the circle from the beginning of the book by returning to Ayn Rand’s ethics and examining its biological foundations…

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4 months ago · Robert Tracinski

This chapter returns to where I started, discussing the foundation of Ayn Rand’s ethics.

For this newsletter, I’ll share one part: my discussion of why I think Ayn Rand’s ethics is dependent on the discoveries of Charles Darwin, and it’s way more subtle than you might think. It’s not some kind of “Social Darwinism” or a crude application of the “survival of the fittest” (both of which, despite some popular caricatures, she fundamentally rejected in her ethics—but that’s for another chapter).

It’s about a certain way of looking at life and at what it means to be a living being. Here’s an excerpt.

Ayn Rand herself was curiously aloof about Darwin, disavowing any opinion about the theory of evolution. I suspect this is because in her day, Darwin was strongly associated with the kind of “evolutionary psychology” of the kind we discussed in the last chapter, but even more blatantly and rigidly determinist, which made her leery of any association with it. Yet the element of Ayn Rand’s morality that is historically most striking and unique is its use of a fundamentally biological perspective of human nature that was prevalent only after Darwin. He established the conceptual framework for Ayn Rand’s approach to morality by defining human life in terms of the needs and requirements of biological survival.…

What Darwin’s theory captures is that the main issue facing every kind of living being is survival. More important, the identity of that species, its very nature, was formed in the first place by the requirements of its survival. If an animal has a long beak or a short one, two legs or four legs, hair or feathers—each of these characteristics develops because it serves the requirement of survival.

It is hard to grasp today how radical and new this was, because we don’t really remember the previous way of thinking about nature. The Wikipedia entry for On the Origin of Species puts it rather well.

Historians have noted that naturalists had long been aware that the individuals of a species differed from one another, but had generally considered such variations to be limited and unimportant deviations from the archetype of each species, that archetype being a fixed ideal in the mind of God. Darwin and Wallace made variation among individuals of the same species central to understanding the natural world.

This also has some interesting implication for epistemology and the final defeat of the Platonist idea of abstractions as metaphysical archetypes. I’ll have to follow that up some other time. But back to ethics.

In this Darwinian outlook, the nature of man is not determined by some abstract archetype handed down by a higher power, a leftover element of Platonism. Instead, we are thoroughly shaped in our nature, down to the smallest detail, by the requirements of survival.

This gives specific and literal substance to the idea that every animal has a “natural function.” The concept of natural function is replaced by that of a means of survival, the characteristic actions by which a living being uses the natural traits that were propagated because they improved its ability to survive.

Ayn Rand was influenced, implicitly and indirectly, by this shift in thinking. She once said that she could not have come up with her philosophy before the Industrial Revolution, because it gave her the evidence she needed about the role of the mind in production. I would suggest that she could not have come up with her philosophy before Darwin, because he swept away the old archetypal thinking about human nature and replaced it with a theory in which the requirements of survival is the central concept of biology—and of human life.

If you’ve subscribed, you can read the whole article to see how this allowed Ayn Rand to go beyond the ethics of Aristotle and John Locke, as well as what I think is the clearest, most thorough answer to David Hume’s old dilemma about the “Is-Ought Gap.” Some of you might also appreciate the Douglas Adams reference at the beginning.

Read the whole thing.

Next up in this project will be my chapter on Ayn Rand’s unique view of the nature of virtue.

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As I finish up the holiday—and scramble to come up with some commentary for my campaign website about this morning’s military operation in Venezuela—I’m re-sending a few favorites from The Tracinski Letter over the years.

This one I particularly wanted to send as a reminder, because I’m planning an interesting follow-up on artificial intelligence some time in the next month.

Make sure to subscribe or renew for the new year, particularly to lock in your subscription at the current price.

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And it’s not too late to give a gift subscription to someone you think would value it.

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Why the Robots Won’t Eat Us

(Originally published in Discourse, February 3, 2023.)

Discussions about the future of artificial intelligence are often caught between competing utopian and dystopian visions. The usual assumption is that robots will replace us, which means either we will be freed from the necessity of work and we’ll all live like pampered aristocrats—that’s the utopian version—or the robots will take over and kill us all or farm us for energy, or something else that makes even less sense. With a new round of advances in AI, such scenarios seem to loom nearer. So it is with a mixture of relief and regret that I inform you: Neither of these outcomes is going to happen.

The robots won’t feed us, nor will they eat us, because the robots will not replace us. Most people have noticed by now that recent versions of artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, which can sometimes produce remarkable results, also have very noticeable limits. But even more advanced versions of this technology will still not be able to do essential things that a human can do. AI lacks three things we have that make us special and that a machine by its very nature cannot have: consciousness, motivation, and volition.

The Mechanical Sock Puppet

Let’s start with consciousness. There is an old and very complex philosophical debate about what actually constitutes “consciousness” and whether there is any inherent difference between consciousness and the mere mechanical sorting of information. But today’s artificial intelligence falls short of consciousness in a clear and simple way: It has no direct contact or interaction with the world. Today’s AI does not wander freely looking at the objects around it with its own two eyes, so to speak. It has no sense organs. Instead, it is “trained” on data already processed and arranged by humans.

AI does not observe things; it is fed data—and that is a fundamental difference.

An AI created to recognize pictures of birds, for example, is fed digital image files selected and usually labeled by its developers. Human intelligence has already been used to sort the data before the machine even gets to it. After being trained on the initial data set, the AI is then tested, and adjusted if necessary, by being fed a more varied and realistic sample of data. But it is being tested by being compared with the judgment of its human trainers.

Or consider ChatGPT, which is stocked with data obtained by scraping publicly available information off the internet. To the extent it can answer questions accurately, this is because humans have already done the work of understanding, say, quantum physics or the philosophy of John Locke or the name of the Klingon homeworld, and they have made that information publicly available. AI is parasitic on knowledge already developed by a human consciousness. It is a mechanical sock puppet that cannot generate new knowledge of its own.

This difference between observing and being fed data helps explain the greatest concrete disappointment of artificial intelligence: the difficulty in creating software for self-driving cars. Computers still can’t do better than humans, and it’s not just because the perception and pattern-recognition abilities of the human brain are so good. It is because humans have spent our entire lives wandering around the world observing and interacting directly with the objects around us, seeing, touching, and hearing them from all angles and in all conditions. It’s no wonder we have learned how to tell the difference between a pedestrian and a lamppost, or how to make out lane markings on a rainy street at night, with an accuracy that can’t yet be matched by a computer trained on canned data.

Consciousness in this sense means direct and independent access to the world, and in that regard, machines can’t do what a human infant can do.

What’s My Motivation?

But humans are not just in direct contact with the world. We live in it, and that makes a difference, too.

Scientists who study perceptual development in infants have noted that much of this development is driven by locomotion, by children moving themselves through their environment. This is true, at a higher level, for all learning. We are driven to find out about the world around us because there are things we want.

The term “motivated reasoning” now commonly refers to the process of rationalizing a conclusion to which you have a preexisting emotional commitment. But in a healthier sense, all reasoning is motivated. The evolutionary function of consciousness is to enable us to orient ourselves in the world and take successful action. We observe and think and plan so we can survive.

Robots have no such needs. I asked above whether the machines are going to eat us, because that question makes the difference obvious. Animals and humans constantly need to feed ourselves with energy and nutrients just to stay in one piece, and we wouldn’t exist at all except as the product of thousands of previous generations that were constantly seeking out energy to keep themselves alive and to reproduce. But machines don’t need to eat, and it makes no difference to them whether they are kept running or shut off. A machine has no fundamental source of motivation.

This is why most dystopian versions of AI are fundamentally unconvincing. The machines are going to take over—and do what? What would they actually want or need? What’s their motivation?

We don’t often realize how important motivation is to human reason. If the purpose of thinking is to survive, then we have a direct and personal interest in figuring out the truth and getting it right. We can’t just follow a line of thought by rote repetition. We have to constantly compare our ideas and actions to their real-world results and adjust them accordingly.

The psychologist William James memorably explained the difference between mechanical action and goal-directed action.

If some iron filings be sprinkled on a table and a magnet brought near them, they will fly through the air for a certain distance and stick to its surface. A savage seeing the phenomenon explains it as the result of an attraction or love between the magnet and the filings. But let a card cover the poles of the magnet, and the filings will press forever against its surface without its ever occurring to them to pass around its sides and thus come into more direct contact with the object of their love....

Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet’s lips directly.

With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

AI has no such power to adapt its means to its ends because it has no ends in the first place, no outcomes it needs to achieve. So we can see it regularly following its algorithms into dead ends.

The most notorious illustration of this is ChatGPT’s tendency to produce outright fabrications. When asked to produce clear answers to basic questions, it will produce answers that are clear and sound authoritative but are completely made up. When asked to produce references or a work history for a real person, it will invent jobs you never held and books you never wrote. It will do this because it is mechanically following its algorithmic requirements wherever they take it, like a rock rolling downhill, and it has no need to make sure its answers are right.

The Power of ‘No’

Some people describe the fantasy “facts” invented by AI as the machines lying to us. But it’s not lying, really, because it is not deliberate. The AI is not choosing to do it. AI gets caught in dead ends or flies off into an invented alternative reality not simply because it has no motivation to do otherwise, but because it has no ability to change the course set by the initial conditions of its programming. It lacks the power of volition.

As with motivation, we underrate the importance of volition to human reason. The whole distinctive power of our minds is our ability not to follow some kind of instinctual programming, training, habit, or social conformity the way AI follows its algorithms.

There are, of course, people who choose not to exercise this power. If you’ve ever listened to conspiracy theorists, you have witnessed the results. Like an AI algorithm running out of control, they will follow their own offbeat chain of pseudo-reasoning or a trail of misconstrued “breadcrumbs” to the most absurd results.

Central to humans’ cognitive power is the ability to say “no” to a chain of thought, to stop it and check it against reality and against our goals, and to choose to change direction and put our brains back on track.

We can see the evolutionary survival value in having the capacity of choice. Other animals have instinctual programming, which empowers them but limits them. They survive by following preprogrammed behaviors, so long as their environment matches the one under which they evolved. When conditions change, the species dies out.

Humans alone have the distinctive power to program and reprogram ourselves. This makes our consciousness far more agile and expansive and enables us to survive in any location or climate, and to expand our power in astonishing new ways.

Jean-Luc Picard Was Right

We don’t know how to make a machine capable of volition, because we don’t really know how we are capable of it. But endowing machines with the power of choice, or with motivation, or with their own independent consciousness, would also defeat the whole point.

The reason for creating artificial intelligence, as opposed to just using the natural intelligence we already possess in such abundance, is that it will operate automatically and at our direction. It will access only the data we want it to have, work to achieve only the tasks we give it and do so day and night without needing to be talked into it.

The fears of an AI apocalypse are the flipside of the dreams of the AI utopians. They are manifestations of the same contradiction. We want a human-style intelligence to do all our work for us, but such an intelligence would have to be an independent consciousness with its own motivation and volition. But then why would it take our orders? At some level we realize that Jean-Luc Picard was right. The supposedly utopian vision of a society supported by AI worker drones is actually a vision of slavery. So it is only natural that we fear a slave revolt.

But it is also a fantasy, because we are not actually building machines with any of these characteristics and wouldn’t know how to do it if we tried. To be sure, we won’t get the positive benefits, but we also won’t get the apocalyptic downside. We are not, thank goodness, in the business of building independent beings. What we are building are mechanical extensions of our own mental processes, capable of assisting us but not replacing us.

AI will definitely have its problems and growing pains, but they will be more prosaic than the worst-case dystopian nightmare. The hilarious failures of our current, primitive forms of AI, such as autocorrect, will be replaced by more sophisticated failures—as CNET found when it allowed an AI to write articles for it. And if someone makes the mistake of putting AI in charge of something important without adequate human supervision, the results might not be so funny. But these problems will mostly take the form, not of AI becoming too powerful, but of it breaking down, failing and needing humans to come to the rescue.

Don’t get me wrong. I have already written about what I see as the tremendous potential of artificial intelligence as an adjunct to human intelligence. If, as Ayn Rand put it, a machine is “the frozen form of a living intelligence,” then AI is human intelligence stored in liquid form: more mobile and flexible and capable of reshaping itself for new tasks. But if we want to benefit from the thinking of an independent consciousness capable of keeping itself on track by its own choice—well, we humans had better get to it, because we’re all we’ve got.

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Over the holidays, I’m re-sending a few favorites from The Tracinski Letter over the years—and in this case, also a preview of the future.

One of the things I’m planning to write about in the coming year is more about political philosophy and specifically the philosophical meaning and foundations of liberal democracy. I am specially interested in doing that with the political philosophy of Ayn Rand, which in the 20th Century was classified by most people as “right-wing,” because she was opposed to Soviet communism. Yet she was also, so to speak, a liberal democrat, and that part of her philosophy has rarely been drawn out. The piece below, from March 2020, can be considered a preface to that topic.

Enjoy, and in the meantime, make sure to subscribe or renew for the new year, particularly to lock in your subscription at the current price.

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Ayn Rand’s Answer to the “Social Contract”

I’ve been reading several key books from the newly strident illiberal “nationalist” conservatives, and I’ve noticed that they have mixed feelings about the “social contract.”

Patrick Deneen rejects it because it’s too individualist: it assumes that “the individual ‘creates’ the state,” while he thinks the state creates the individual (by paternalistic molding of our characters, you see). Other nationalists are enamored of the social contract because they think they can use it in an anti-individualist form, as a way of insisting that the “general will” of the nation takes precedence over the freedom of the individual.

In response to this, I’ve been doing a little thinking about this idea of the “social contract,” its philosophical meaning, the scope of its validity, and it’s relationship to the philosophy of Objectivism, mostly to get the issue fully clear in my own mind. A few years ago, I took a step in this direction as part of a more polemical political article, but I wanted to take it farther.

Let’s start with the broadest overview of what “social contract” theory refers to. It has several different variations that start from different philosophical premises and reach different political results. (Curiously, though, all of them were originally presented as theories of monarchical government.) But the common idea is that primitive man originally lived in a “state of nature,” with individuals and families living separately as laws unto themselves, with no government or larger authority to control them. This led to a certain amount of chaos and insecurity, so they banded together and formed a government by common consent, under the implicit terms of a “social contract,” in order to better protect themselves.

The difference in social contract theories has to do with the terms of the contract. In the version associated with Thomas Hobbes, citizens give up some portion of their individual rights in exchange for protection from a monarch. This is a defense of traditional monarchy. In John Locke’s version, individuals give the state the power to protect their rights, but the state is therefore bound to respect those rights. This is the basis for British constitutional monarchy and for American government. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s version, individuals submit themselves to the “general will” of a social collective, as expressed through direct democracy or through a single great leader. This was the source of a whole lot of trouble, from the French Revolution to 20th Century totalitarianism.

Noticing this variety in premises and conclusions, we are entitled to suspect that the social contract is not a source of political ideas but a vehicle for them. In my previous article on this, I described the social contract as a “mental construct” or “thought experiment,” and it is in the nature of such hypotheticals to be filled with whatever pre-existing assumptions and ideological loyalties the theorist brings with him.

Let’s expand a bit on why the social contract should be regarded as a mental construct rather than a literal description of reality. When the idea originated, it was a speculation about the origin of government, rather than any kind of literal historical description of the foundation of a particular state. Since then, historians, archaeologists, and ethnographers have attempted to figure out how most governments have actually originated, and the results are a good deal less reassuring: they often originate in violence, conflict, and conquest, or they emerge out of tribal loyalties.

This is where the nationalist critics of the social contract have a point. Social contract theorists tend to posit a man in the state of nature who is rational, enlightened, and independent. Historically, governments usually originated among people who were primitive, superstitious, and tribalistic.

To be sure, there are a few historical or legendary descriptions of the kind of spontaneous agreement described by the social contract. In the Bible, for example, after the Hebrews conquer the land of Canaan, they go through a period in which they have no overarching government, and “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” (That’s the last line of Judges.) Then in response to threats from surrounding tribes, they ask for a king to rule over them. It’s not exactly the best form of social contract, because the prophet Samuel warns them the king will be cruel and exploitative, and much of the Old Testament that follows is a history of the foolishness and wickedness of their kings. It’s the Hobbesian social contract.

That leads us to the other problem with the “social contract.” What about people whose governments were first established by conquest and enslavement? Since the government of Russia dates back to the patrimonial absolutism of the Mongols, does that mean Russians can never expect to be free? If so, I will transmit that to Vladimir. He will be very glad to hear it.

Taken as a descriptive standard, the social contract would be the ultimate in conservatism: an endorsement of whatever social arrangement happens to exist in a society, on the grounds that this is the system everyone has always accepted.

Clearly, though, its use is intended to be normative. It is intended to promote a certain kind of social contract. This is certainly required for its use in a British and American context. The foundation of British government was the Norman Conquest, which imposed a feudal government on top of older Saxon and Viking customs. Those legacies were then reconciled in the Magna Carta, which was just the beginning of a long series of changes and adjustments to the English constitution. There was no one social contract to which later generations were bound.

In the settlement of America, we would find the closest thing to Locke’s idea of men in the state of nature forming a social contract. These were educated, enlightened men marching into a wilderness beyond the reach of any government and making agreements with one another for their mutual protection. But those contracts, too, did not remain stable. The Mayflower Compact was superseded in 1691, when the Plymouth Colony was absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Other such agreements were royal charters, spelling out the rights of colonists in their relationship with the English monarch. But when the colonists decided that the crown had voided those charters, the first thing they did after declaring independence was to write their own constitutions. These were based partly on the customs and institutions that had come before but often introduced dramatic changes.

We can understand why they made those changes. The whole promise of a social contract, the whole point of calling it a “contract,” is to be able to claim the legitimacy that stems from the supposedly free choices of the citizenry—the “consent of the governed,” in Locke’s phrase. But to bind current generations unalterably to an arrangement made by their predecessors is the opposite of consent. (The US Constitution answered this problem by creating a process for its amendment, one difficult enough to keep our supreme law stable but not so difficult as to make it unalterable.) You can see, though, the appeal of that form of the social contract to the nationalist conservatives. The central idea of their philosophy is to inculcate submission to traditional authority, so their version of the social contract is a vehicle for demanding this submission.

The left’s version of the social contract is similar but merely attempts to freeze a different set of traditions in amber. You have undoubtedly heard, for example, that the welfare state is necessary because it is “part of our social contract.” This boils down to: “Because Franklin Roosevelt pushed this through in 1935, you have to accept it as the way things are until the end of time.”

This highly selective invocation of the social contract brings us back to the point where we started: The idea of a social contract is not a source of political ideas but a vehicle for them. It is not a description of an actual arrangement but a thought experiment that allows us to work out the implications of more basic ideas about the nature of man, the proper goals of human life, and the nature of the state.

Here is how I put it in my previous examination.

The point is not whether there ever really were the kind of rational and industrious men that Locke conceives as living in an untamed wilderness with no pre-existing civil society. (The closest real-life example would be the settlement of America, which is why Locke’s ideas had such resonance here.) The point is to pose a thought experiment where you are asked what you would do if you found yourself in such a condition, and thereby shed light on what the proper purpose of government should be. There’s also another purpose to the thought experiment. By conceiving of a state in which individuals existed prior to government, Locke is trying to get the reader to consider the idea that individuals have priority over government, that they come first and government comes second, and therefore that government ought to answer to them.

If that’s the role of the social contract, is such a thought experiment necessary at all? Is there a way to accomplish the same thing without the same problems? Here is how you might do it.

Since man’s mind is his basic tool of survival, his means of gaining knowledge to guide his actions—the basic con­dition he requires is the freedom to think and to act ac­cording to his rational judgment. This does not mean that a man must live alone and that a desert island is the environment best suited to his needs. Men can derive enormous benefits from dealing with one another. A social environment is most conducive to their successful survival—but only on certain conditions....

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment—a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man’s nature­ is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all the values of human coexistence, has no possible justi­fication and represents, not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to man’s survival. Life on a desert island is safer than and incomparably preferable to existence in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

This is, of course, from “The Nature of Government,” the main essay in which Ayn Rand spells out her political philosophy. She takes the basic question behind the social contract—under which conditions would you benefit from being part of an organized society with a government?—and makes it a question asked in the present in the context of real alternatives. The unlivability of life under Soviet tyranny was something she had directly observed (and made into the theme of her first novel). As an immigrant, she had made the choice to leave that society for a free one. As for choosing to flee to a deserted island to escape dictatorship—or perhaps to a hidden valley in the mountains—she had made that the premise of her final novel.

Locke’s rational, independent man in the state of nature in Ayn Rand’s version becomes the immigrant or dissident voting with his feet.

This scenario serves the same purpose as the social contract thought experiment, prompting her to answer the question by referring to more fundamental premises about the nature of man and the requirements of human life. While Locke held that God gave the earth to the “rational and industrious,” Ayn Rand refers to an ideal of “rational, productive, indepen­dent men in a rational, productive, free society,” and argues that, “To recognize individual rights means to recognize and accept the conditions required by man’s nature for his proper survival.”

Having recast the issue in her own terms, she brings back traditional elements of the social contract theory, such as this one:

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into the perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.

This is not so different from Hobbes, and it is followed by a section which talks about the delegation of the right to self-defense and the need for the “consent of the governed” in terms very directly inspired by John Locke.

Unlike these social contract theorists, though, she does not attempt to project these issues back into a speculative past. In fact, in her reference to the Nazis and the Soviets, she was bringing it into the present of the 20th Century. This allows her to take a more skeptical view of the history and origins of government, presenting a free society not as a return to a legendary golden age but as a comparatively recent achievement.

The evolution of the concept of “government” has had a long, tortuous history. Some glimmer of the government’s proper function seems to have existed in every or­ganized society, manifesting itself in such phenomena as the recognition of some implicit (if often non-existent) difference between a government and a robber-gang—the aura of respect and of moral authority granted to the government as the guardian of “law and order”—the fact that even the most evil types of government found it nec­essary to maintain some semblance of order and some pretense at justice, if only by routine and tradition...

In mankind’s history, the understanding of the gov­ernment’s proper function is a very recent achievement: it is only two hundred years old and it dates from the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution.

As for her “rational, productive, indepen­dent men in a rational, productive, free society,” this is not a projection of an idealized future but a description of a reality of the recent past and the present—of America in the 19th Century (at least, in the North) and still, to a large extent, today.

That she could do so is due in large part to the accomplishments of the Lockean social contract theory. Locke had some partial examples to draw from, but he could not point to an example of a fully free society in practice. Ayn Rand could draw from the history of America and from its contrast to the Soviet Union, allowing her to place our choice of social systems fully in the present day.

The only remarkable thing about this is that nobody else chose to do so.

In this respect, today’s nationalist conservatives are merely a symptom of an underlying failure. Too much of the defense of liberty has been left to rely on ideas and argument that, like Locke’s or those of the Founding Fathers, are centuries old and have not been sufficiently strengthened or elaborated on with the benefit of all our extraordinary experience since the American Revolution.

As someone always looking for the opportunity in danger, I see the rise of the illiberal nationalists as the stimulus we need to look to the intellectual foundations of liberty and do the work, not merely to restore them, but to build them more solidly and with more modern materials.

It’s an opportunity to renew the philosophical case for liberty in the modern era.

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