The Atlas Society Asks Stephen Hicks Transcript

Stephen Hicks is an Atlas Society Senior Scholar and former professor of Philosophy at Rockford University who joined CEO Jennifer Grossman on June 11, 2020, for one of our earliest episodes of The Atlas Society Asks, to discuss the then-recent COVID lockdowns and the rise in Black Lives Matter and Cancel Culture. Watch the entire video HERE, or check out the transcript below. 

‍

JAG: Jennifer Anju Grossman

SH: Stephen Hicks

‍

JAG: Welcome to our sixth episode of The Atlas Society Asks. Today we are joined by our senior scholar, Stephen Hicks. Before I even get into introducing Stephen, I wanted to remind all of you who are attending on Zoom, that you can ask Stephen questions, which I’ll get to after I’ve asked a few of my own. So there’s a Q&A icon at the menu at the bottom of the screen where you can just type in your questions, and we’ll get to them. For all of you who are joining us on Facebook, first of all, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. And you can just type your questions into the comment stream on Facebook. Stephen, in addition to being our senior scholar, is also a professor of Philosophy at Rockford University. He’s also director of the Center of Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He has written at least five books, Explaining Postmodernism, and also just wrote the intro to our Pocket Guide to Postmodernism. So, stay tuned for that. Also, Nietzsche and the Nazis, Entrepreneurial Living, The Art of Reasoning, and most recently, Liberalism, Pro and Con. Stephen, again, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

SH: Thanks, JAG, for having me.

JAG: First of all, the most important question: How are you? Where are you and if you would share with us a little bit of your quarantine story, it’s a little harrowing.

Towards the tail end of the lecture tour was when things were ramping up on COVID-19 responses, and we ended up being stuck in Australia... it was impossible to get out of the country and back to the US with all of the flight cancellations and reschedules, etc.

SH: Well, I’m back home now in Illinois and easing into my summer schedule. The academic life is wonderful for giving one lots of time for reading and writing over the summer. My quarantine story has been a bit of a roller coaster, as we had to transition from our normal, small-class in-person teaching to putting everything online, and that was a big shift. Lots of pedagogical issues for the liberal arts institution that we tried to be. The other part of it was interesting. I was in Australia for a lecture tour. And that was going wonderfully. But towards the tail end of the lecture tour was when things were ramping up on COVID-19 responses, and we ended up being stuck in Australia. I mean, there are worse places in the world to be stuck for a while. But it was impossible to get out of the country and back to the US with all of the flight cancellations and reschedules, and so forth. So we ended up with a couple of weeks extra in Australia, which was quite nice, but eventually made it home and everything is back to semi-normal now.

JAG: Well, in talking about universities and talking about institutions, talking about what’s happening right now we’re going to weave in your philosophical perspective on COVID and epidemics. Right now, my email stream is filled up with what a lot of people are seeing: a lot of companies, a lot of people saying it’s really important that we all stand with Black Lives Matter to end structural racism and institutional racism. From just a perspective of words and what they mean and the importance of words, what do people mean when they talk about structural racism? What is the origin of that terminology, where it comes from, and what’s your perspective on it?

[Racism] is a kind of primitive cognition, and in many cases, it is a problem of self-esteem.

SH: Yes, well, we’ll start with racism itself, which is an intellectual and a moral abomination. It’s a kind of primitive cognition, and in many cases, it is a problem of self-esteem. Racism is a kind of collectivism where you group people into what you take to be racial groups and think that there are significant normative differences between the racial groups, that some are cognitively superior and some are morally or culturally superior. And sometimes that can spill over into the idea that they should have different political standings, and so forth. All of that is wrong and corrupt. 

We are first and foremost individuals. The most important things about us are our own beliefs, that we’ve chosen for ourselves, our own goals, our character, our habits. So, there’s an obvious dehumanization that’s built into any sort of racism that says the first and most important thing about you is some collective group membership, and I’m going to treat you on the basis of that. That’s an injustice. We are individuals, and first and foremost we should be treated as individuals.

There are issues, of course, about whether racial categorizations are real or not. I don’t think that’s a philosophical issue. No. When we perceive ourselves, we can see differences in hues, and sometimes in facial structures. And we wonder about the right way to categorize those things when we’re children. And very quickly, though, I think that becomes a scientific issue to be sorted out by people who are geneticists and biologists, and so forth. 

But I think from a philosophical perspective, it’s very clear—in terms of what philosophy offers—that you are a rational being, that you need to think for yourself, that you need to figure out the way the world works, that you need to work on your character, that you should respect other people’s rights—all of those things are general and universal to all human beings. So, for the years that I’ve thought about this, I don’t see any philosophical significance in any sort of racial categorization. 

The way I think about it sometimes is: a lot of people will focus on issues of intelligence differences. And one of the things that should be obvious is that people of all races can be more or less intelligent. And that there’s something suspect about someone who spends a lot of time worrying about racial differences in intelligence. But at the same time, suppose we were to take someone we all agree was a super-smart guy, like Albert Einstein. Suppose, scientifically, we were able to prove that Albert Einstein is exactly 2.3 times more intelligent than I, Stephen Hicks, am. What would the significance of that be? Would that mean he gets to vote two times and I only get to vote one time, or that somehow he has different virtue character traits, and so forth? All that would be completely irrelevant. 

Now, racism. This is all by way of preamble to your question about all of the terminology surrounding the topic, and some of it is legitimate, some of it, of course, is suspect. And some of it is a matter of smuggling in agendas into an already fraught, ideological concept. 

It’s clear that one kind of racism is just individuals having beliefs about other individuals and wanting to categorize them based on racial categorization differences. So, we can talk about racism at an individual level. And I think that’s the most important and prevalent version of that. 

But we also know that historically, racial differences have been used among institutions. Some businesses have had formal segregation policies that were not forced upon them by legal frameworks, (for example)] separate rooms for people of different racial categories, and so on. We also know that there has been legal racism where there are different laws for different races, and so on. So, I think there is some legitimacy to the concept of institutional racism: that is to say, if you have an institution—a business institution, a religious institution, a sporting association, which is a kind of institution, or a government, which is a kind of institution—if they have as part of their formal policy and their formal practice racism built into them, then that’s an institutional racism. And it’s wrong, right? So, it should be something that we fight against and when we should have common cause with people—even if they have different philosophical understandings and solutions and so on—to form strategic alliances for eliminating any forms of racism that are there.

[Structural racism] is a more suspect concept... it tends to not see people as individuals.

Structural racism, I think, is a more suspect concept, because in all of my readings, that concept comes out of certain kinds of sociologies that tend not to see people as individuals. There’s lots of historical sociology, going back to Comte and Marx in the 19th century, that tends to see individuals not as real but as formed by the social structures into which they are born. And those structures tend to eliminate agency. Exactly what these structures are and how they operate and how they undermine or override or shape us—is all quite mysterious, and I don’t think any of that is philosophically true or sociologically true. 

But the people who are now—several generations later—working within those sociological traditions will use a label like structural racism. And they don’t typically mean formal rules or practices by institutions. They do mean this more shadowy, semi-Hegelian, semi-Comtean, and semi-Marxist kind of labeling. And I don’t think that’s a legitimate label. 

Now, I do have to be open: If there is some version of structural racism that means something different than legal racism or institutions having a formal policy or practice—I’m open to that argument. But I haven’t seen it. I’ve only seen it coming from suspect philosophical traditions. 

JAG: Okay, well, just as a follow-up to that question about institutional racism, and so that I understand, let’s say laws, which treat people from the government, but government is an institution, universities are an institution, businesses are an institution, clubs are an institution. What is your perspective now, particularly looking at it through historical time when we could point to several examples of institutional racism and segregation, and slavery, things like that? It would seem to me that it’s improved. The other question is: Is capitalism an institution, and as an institution (if it is an institution), is it one that could be argued is racist? Or is it otherwise?

SH: An interesting network of questions there. You’re asking the long historical question: Have we improved or not? I think, yes, absolutely. We have made huge, huge improvements over previous centuries, and so on. If you want to go back to the long term, if you go to the 1600s or the 1500s. The idea then was that different races and different ethnicities, and so forth, some are obviously better. And that was a universal belief. And it’s not until the 1600s, but then especially getting into the 1700s even finding just a few individuals challenging the kinds of racial and ethnic prejudices that had been baked into the human condition for millennia. And then in historical time, we’ve made astonishing progress in eliminating large amounts of individual racism. I think all of the surveys that I have seen show that the vast majority of Americans now and Canadians now are not racist at all. You have to look really closely and start to get into kind of micro-racist types of language—to say: if you look at this particular formulation of this practice by this person that maybe you can see it as having some hint of racism. The overt racism, the unquestioning assumption and unquestioned racism that was pretty much universal to the human condition is now much, much less than in any historical time. It’s astonishing how quickly that has happened. 

The vast majority of legal racism has been eliminated. Obviously, the biggest of those was the great movement against slavery, including those that incorporated racism in the great battle against that, which started in the late 1700s. And accelerated over the course of the 1800s. That’s a great human achievement. It’s amazing. 

And then the ongoing segregation, Jim Crow laws, and so forth—and the battles against those in the 20th century. Those have been largely successful. So, I think I’m optimistic about the future trend line. And as much as I disagree with many of the contemporary analyses of racism, and where it comes from and what the solutions to racism are, I think that trend line will continue. 

You mentioned capitalism, specifically as an institution. I think it is fair to say it’s an institution. It’s a set of economic and legal principles and policies that are put in place. And generically, that’s a kind of institution. Capitalism has been one of the great anti-racist forces in history, partly because capitalism comes out of the same set of principles that say people should be free to pursue their own lives, to pursue their own dreams, as individuals, and that very general set of principles applies to people of all races, all sexes, all ethnicities, all religions, and so forth. 

So, as a matter of philosophical principle, capitalist freedom and capitalists’ respect for the individual and the individual’s achievements has been applied to racial issues, and quite successfully. But then also, capitalism builds into it a certain kind of ethos that we should treat people as productive individuals, and that we should be willing to deal with them based on their productive performance: Can they get the job done or not? And as that ethos becomes more widespread in capitalist societies, obviously, it puts any sort of racism on the defensive. That’s because if I can hire someone who is of a different race—but is clearly going to be a better worker than someone of my own race—the profit motive is going to make me want to hire that person of a different race. And even if I have some racist attitudes within me, the profit motive is going to help me overcome that. 

This is also borne out by the historical record. It has been the places around the world, if you look at the historic free ports—Hong Kong, Tangier, Beirut before its disasters, Amsterdam, London, New York—all places where there been free trade and lots and lots of capitalists and capitalism going on—those are the places where you find the most racial mixing and people willing to get along with each other, precisely because they’re there to do business. The desire to do business leads people to set aside any prejudices they have. So, capitalism has been a great anti-racist force.

JAG: It’s a great, great answer. Now, we want to remind everybody to ask questions in the Zoom chat function, ask them on our Facebook stream of this interview. One of the questions I’ve been getting repeatedly when I do the Atlas Society’s Instagram story takeovers, is—everyone wants to know—thoughts on Black Lives Matter. Every corporation and companies: Uber Lyft, everybody you know, is saying “we stand by Black Lives Matter.” What’s your perspective?

SH: The movement, the phrase?

JAG: Well, I guess you could do both? The movement, I don’t think it’s a corporation, is just the insistence that there is structural and institutional racism, particularly with regards to police brutality; what are your thoughts on the phrase?

SH: We’ll start with the movement. I don’t have expertise here, let me say, but I have poked around at the Black Lives Matters website, and looked at some of the people who are proponents of it. And it strikes me as a similar phenomenon to the Tea Party from about 15 to 20 years ago—that it’s a populist, initially grassroots movement that has a significant number of legitimate grievances. But then fairly quickly, you have some disparate other people who join the movement and bring other agendas. And when you scale up, you run into some standard issue. So, the Tea Party 15 or 20 years ago—I’m fuzzy on the dates—was initially worried about government overreach, government bloat, and government intrusion into various people’s lives. Fairly quickly, it seemed obvious that the Tea Party internally was fighting for its own identity: Who are we really? And there were some very disparate elements from strongly religious conservatives to other conservatives who were just small-government conservatives to others who were more libertarian, and even a few anarchists hanging out. And the movement fell apart eventually because it didn’t have a common theme. 

Now, my sense is that Black Lives Matter is in a similar situation. There is one group—and I think this is the healthiest part of the Black Lives movement—that says: There is a problem with racism, and black people are on the receiving end of more racism than other people are. They do not get a fair deal from various sorts of institutions, some of them in the private sector, but particularly in the government sector, and that there are injustices that are real injustices that need to be faced up to. So, the rhetorical force of a phrase like “Black Lives Matter” is a kind of inclusiveness that I think is legitimate, which is to say, the point of government is to protect all people equally, and to provide justice and peace for all people equally. And that’s not happening. And so that is to say, Black lives also matter or black lives matter too. So, we need to reform various kinds of government institutions, particularly, in a more inclusive direction. 

Now, there also is, though, as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, a contradictory to that segment. I don’t know how many such sub-segments there are who are bringing to the Black Lives movement an explicitly exclusionary approach—which is to say that this is a movement for black people, and the philosophy we are bringing is one that is adversarial to other racial groups—that we don’t think that we can get along with those other racial groups, that we think that they are the cause of our problems. And what this subsection of Black Lives Matter seems more interested in is stoking adversarialism, is more interested in blaming other racial groups, and is perhaps trying to get special privileges for their particular group. 

Now, that’s my initial sense. And to the extent that Black Lives Matter includes both of those groups, those are in tension with each other: one is explicitly inclusive, the other is explicitly exclusive. The one is saying: There is such a thing as justice, there is such a thing as proper function of government, and we want the government to live up to these American standards. And they have every right, I think, to insist the government live up to those standards. The other is explicitly adversarial, and is cynical and jaded and seems more interested in undercutting what should be a legitimate governmental function. That’s an initial response.

JAG: Okay. Great. Well, another term that could have some help unpacking is the Woke culture. What does that mean? Where did it come from?

SH: That’s a much broader concept. It comes out of the Left politically. Interestingly on the Right politically too—if we can use these labels—they’re obviously Left and Right, both problematic. But on the Right, there’s the concept of the red pill, which comes from the movie The Matrix. So the idea then is that in some sense one is in a coma, perhaps a chemically induced coma. But if you take a pill, the red pill, then suddenly the coma goes away, you wake up, and you see reality as it really is. And everything is quite different. The Left version of this comes out of the “False Consciousness” tradition, to say that the way we are all raised is we are conditioned into a false narrative that says that America is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and justice and freedom for all, and so forth. But that is a fake cover story that has been conditioned into all of us. And what we need to do is raise our consciousness—and in some cases get slapped upside the head—so that we wake up and look around and realize that we really are oppressed. And that’s a kind of awakening, to see the world as it really is. So, woke is just a slang-y way of saying that I’ve woken up, and now I can really see that this childhood naïve story about what a wonderful culture we’re living in is false, and that one has become sensitized, and now buys into the narrative of oppression and exploitation.

JAG: Wow, I hadn’t thought of it that way in terms of contrasting the blue pill, red pill versus woke, but now I see the connections. 

So one of the things that enters into conversation, particularly when I talk to people that have a very different perspective than I, my family is definitely all on the left, my temple where I go to services are all very much on the left,and I always look for opportunities to share a different perspective, and also to let people know, hey, guess what, not everybody agrees—just some feedback. But one thing I hear when we talk about race, and this gets to the metaphysics and epistemology of reality, it’s common refrain is, you have your facts, I have my facts, you have your reality, I have my reality. Isn’t it possible to have a consensus on a shared reality? And are you seeing a disintegration not just of racial harmony, but this idea that we do have a reality, reality exists, “A is A” and we can use our minds to discover it?

SH: There’s a simplistic way in which that’s true—but there is also a more corrupt way in which I think you’re experiencing. If it’s adults who are saying things like that, then I suspect that it’s more likely the corrupt version of that. 

I mean, there’s one thing saying: You have your experience, and I have my experience, and you grew up on the farm, I grew up in the city, or you grew up in the mountains, and I grew up next to the sea, and so on. So we each have different lived experiences. But what all that means is that it takes more of an effort for us to understand where the other person is coming from. 

When we start talking about more significant experiences, say, people who have experienced a trauma of some sort—they were mugged and beaten, or they were raped. And it’s obviously true to say that if you have not suffered that traumatic experience then your awareness of the badness and the trauma is going to be more distant and more abstracted. All of that is perfectly fine. 

The corrupted version is... to say: Because people have these different experiences, there's no such thing as a common framework that we can understand... That kind of cognitive relatives is a corruption, it's a philosophical mistake.

But the corrupted version is—and this is where we get into philosophical territory fairly quickly—if we want to say: Because people have these different experiences, there is no such thing as a common framework that we can understand, an abstract set of principles that we can all come to agree on and validate, or that if I have had certain experiences when I was younger, you’ve had certain experiences when you were younger, that certain things are just closed off to the entire realm of being, an entire realm of value, and so forth. That kind of cognitive relativism is a corruption, it’s a philosophical mistake. And that leads to problems. 

Now, one version is a racial version of that. If we start from saying people of different races, that they are biologically born with different cognitive faculties, and that necessarily means they’re going to think about the world in different ways, well, that is an old-fashioned racism. And, perhaps 30 years ago, I would have said that that’s been thoroughly discredited, but it is unfortunately making a comeback, for some philosophical reasons. That also feeds into a kind of moral relativism that says not only do people think differently, they have different values. And then: People who think differently and have different values, there’s no way for them to communicate with each other on anything that’s important. And then: If there’s no way for them to communicate with each other, then why bother trying to communicate with each other if it’s just going to be an exercise in futility? And then, of course: If you have a different value framework from mine and those are in conflict with each other, then conflict resolution necessarily has to be not through discussion, not by the courts—it necessarily just becomes a matter of physical imposition and power. And so then you get a breakdown of civil society. 

Now, that’s a quick-and-dirty version of going from a strong cognitive relativism to a moral relativism to fighting it out in the streets, but that is partly where we are. When we are looking at the news and despairing at the large number of people who don’t seem open to saying that we should be able to talk about issues civilly online, around the water cooler at temple, or wherever. Or that, on more serious issues, we should be able to take it to the courts and expect that there’s going to be objective adjudication procedures in place. Or, to take politics, that politics will be a place where we peacefully argue about everything and put it to a vote and then have the argument again, four years later, that we’re going to be committed to the peaceful process. That seems to be broken down—and that points up the importance of the philosophical framework. And we have been living through a major philosophical shift over the course of the last generation.

JAG: So, speaking of philosophical shifts, Stephen Hicks, as many of you know, is the leading expert in America on postmodernism, as it applies to culture, as it applies to art, as it applies to politics and society. Don’t take my word for it, Jordan Peterson interviewed him all the time. He says this guy is the guy when it comes to understanding it. That’s why we’re doing our Pocket Guide to Postmodernism, which I had the opportunity to edit and look at. And just seeing it in that format and thinking about all of the forces, the philosophical forces that you laid out, and how they had these consequences. It seems to me that right now, we are seeing an acceleration in so many other areas, an acceleration in technological change, and acceleration in transitions to different kinds of education. Are you seeing an acceleration in the consequences or the results of postmodernism? Do you see what we’re going through right now as connected to some of the historical postmodernism that you’ve talked about?

SH: There definitely is acceleration of lots of cultural trends. And so, I think that part is right. I think it’s also the case that lots of things lie relatively dormant when there’s lots of activity under the surface, and then things reach a tipping point and lots of underground, almost cultural work then spills out, and things happen very quickly because of that groundwork having been inlaid. 

Yes, postmodernism is a major contributor to where we are right now. I don’t want to overemphasize postmodernism, because there are other cultural forces—there are lots of people in the United States and around the world who are traditional progressives or traditional leftists, who believe that they are being scientific and rational and they’re looking at the evidence and there really is such a thing as truth and justice, and equality is an absolute universal value when we should be fighting for it. And they believe in all of those things, not on postmodernist grounds, so we have the traditional debates with them about all those issues. 

But the new kid on the block—actually, now the not-so-new-kid-on-the-block in philosophical time—is postmodernism, and postmodernism is a skeptical, relativistic movement that brings a very strong adversarial stance toward all aspects of Western civilization, and even more broadly against civilization itself. If we go back to the 60s, 70s, and 80s, in the last century, when the famous intellectual names are people like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and the American, Richard Rorty, those typically are under the label of postmodernist. 

In postmodernism, we have a set of views that say reason is not competent to know reality. So it’s a strong skepticism, objectivity is a failed myth, we are all subjective—and that our subjectivity is not an individualistic one, that we are all born into cultural groups that shape us and mold us—that all of those cultural groups have different traditions and different languages and different frameworks—and they’re all in conflict with each other, so all we really are going to have is conflict at various levels—but we live in a culture that has these myths about objectivity and truth and freedom and equality and so forth—yet really those are just cover stories for powerful people who like to exploit us along various dimensions—so we need to stick it to the Man, to rise up in various revolutionary fashions, and overturn institutions and rip off the mask of the oppressor. 

We have lived through a major cultural shift over the course of the last generation, and the fact is that it’s spilling out into other cultural institutions and into the streets—I do think that postmodernism is a major form of it. 

That cartoon version of postmodernism, as I have just presented, became enormously influential in the universities and trained a whole generation of professors and others who went on to become journalists and lawyers and teachers. So we have lived through a major cultural shift over the course of the last generation, and the fact is that it’s spilling out into other cultural institutions and into the streets—I do think that postmodernism is a major form of it. 

Now, I want to say that it’s not classic postmodernism because I think classic postmodernism, if I can use that label, is a skeptical position that says there are no such things as true stories about the world. And an immediate reaction—if you think there are no true stories about the world, if instead all we have is our subjective narratives—then your immediate position is to say: Well, I can’t say that my viewpoint is any better than your viewpoint, or that my values are any better than anybody else’s values. And that seems to push in the direction of a kind of tolerance, or a kind of live-and-let-live, you do your own thing, and so forth. 

What postmodernism teaches me is that I should then just make a subjective commitment... and roll my sleeves up and be prepared for the bare-knuckle fight out there.

But what typically happens—and this partly becomes a psychological point—is that very few people can live with a radical relativism and radical skepticism—they want to have meaning in their life, they want to be committed to something—and so what typically, they will have, as the second phase is to say: Okay, maybe about my values, I can’t give you a good case for why they are true or objective. But they are my values, damn it. And I want to make a difference in the world. So what postmodernism teaches me is that I should then just make a subjective commitment to whatever I happen to believe and take it to the streets or to whatever forum I have, and roll my sleeves up and be prepared for the bare-knuckle fight out there. So, people will find meaning through a subjective, adversarial take-it-to-the-streets commitment, rather than just saying: Well, I guess I just have to put up with everybody just believing their own thing.

JAG: All right, we’re going to get to some audience questions, including some that were submitted in advance. Thank you very much. One was a couple of questions from Phil [C.] on the lockdowns and the proposition that more lives and futures are going to be destroyed by the mandatory lockdowns and closings of businesses than could or will be by the virus itself? I know you’re not an epidemiologist, but you’re probably looking at some numbers.

SH: Yes. Well, I think the point of the question, the most important part of that question, is first to recognize that there are trade-offs. One of the problems we had early on was people saying, Here’s a health threat—and that just blocked out all other considerations and led to a knee-jerk reaction to do whatever it takes to deal with the health threat—and not to worry at all about civil liberties, not to worry at all about economic consequences, and so on. 

So the point of the question, then, is to say that the threat to civil liberties and the threat to people’s economic livelihoods are real. And there are particularly people who are more vulnerable. We have to tally those costs. If we’re going to do good public policy, we always should be doing cost-benefit calculations. And as better data comes in, and we’re a little calmer, we should be basing our public policy on much better cost-benefit calculations. 

But you’re right, I’m not an epidemiologist, so I’m not going to do crystal-ball gazing here. Yet it strikes me that more than just epidemiology, we will need political scientists to tally up the civil liberties costs, and we need a lot of economists to tally up the economic costs. I think we’re going to need also a lot of sociologists and psychologists because there are a lot of psychological-depression costs, an increased number of suicides, increased number of domestic battery—things that happen when you coop people up for extended periods of times—and all of those are real costs. So what the final numbers are going to turn out to be, I have no idea, but that’s an important project.

JAG: 42:50 All right, well, getting that definitely trade-off is important. Having perspective is important. Being fact-based is important and not sacrificing others to ourselves or sacrificing ourselves to others is important. Perhaps more on a purely philosophical basis, this didn’t come in for this question, but I mentioned those Instagram takeovers that I do and I can’t get to all of the questions, but there was one that I thought right up your alley, his handle is Luis Romero. And he asked, “Is Cultural Marxism a real thing? Where are the greatest dangers? And how can we fight against it?” Maybe Stephen for the rest of us, you could just start with what is Cultural Marxism?

SH: Oh, my goodness, how much time do I have?

JAG: Oh, Stephen, you got—we’re going to do this again—a few minutes because we got a lot of great coverage.

SH: The quick-and-dirty version is that Cultural Marxism is a thing. It’s a real phenomenon, and it is a danger. The quick genealogy would be to start with classical Marxism in the 1800s. And that’s the Marxism formulated primarily by Marx and his colleague, Friedrich Engels. 

Fairly quickly, by the end of the 19th century into the early 20th century, there’s lots of smart people who buy into classical Marxism, but recognize that it has problems. Yet they are committed to Marxism. And so what they do is introduce some significant changes to Marxism, but nonetheless retain most of the bases of Marxism. So, I think it’s fair to say, second-, third-, fourth-generation, you had Neo-Marxisms. Leninism is an example of that. Marxism-Leninism is a neo-Marxism. 

Cultural Marxism is a generalization on the Marxist themes to say there are many interacting elements of culture, but it’s still broadly speaking Marxism.

But then there was a school of thinkers—after World War One but before World War Two—who wanted to argue that we need to make some more fundamental changes. There’s elements of the Marxist framework that are right—the determinism, the idea that we live in an oppressive society, that capitalism is exploitative, and so forth. All of that is correct. But Marx is wrong in making economics fundamental, that there are other cultural forces, aside from economics, which we have to understand in contemporary society. So, we should understand that it’s not just economic oppression, but also family oppression, also racial oppression, also sexist oppression, and so forth. Or it’s also human beings oppressing and exploiting the environment. So if we’re really going to understand how sick our society is, we can’t just be mono-maniacally focusing on economic issues the way classical Marxism is. Cultural Marxism is a generalization on the Marxist themes to say there are many interacting elements of culture, but it’s still broadly speaking Marxism. That is the most important movement prior to World War Two. 

But then after the pause of World War Two, we get into the 1950s. And we start thinking about everything again. The old Left, which had been dominated by classical Marxism, is widely seen as problematic. And then we have the shift to the New Left, that we’re all familiar with from the 1960s. And Cultural Marxism was probably the most important framework of the New Left. But of course, things have moved on, there are still cultural Marxists around. But it’s not the only version. And I’m not even sure it’s the most important version of Leftism anymore.

JAG: All right, we have a lot of really great questions. And seeing the themes of some of them, I wanted to also remind people that if you are not already signed up for a newsletter, where we give you updates on what is happening in the waterfall section of The Atlas Society site, where Stephen has curated a lot of really spectacular content, to be signed up for the newsletter if you enjoy conversations like this. We also have the Atlas Intellectuals, where Stephen also makes an appearance when he can. That’s really for more of a deep dive into these ideas. And one of the themes, I believe, of an upcoming waterfall campaign is reparations, right? That is one of the questions: “What is your perspective, Professor Hicks, on reparations, a claim that current society must repay current racial minorities for wrongs done in the past?” 

SH: My view is: Absolutely not. Reparations comes out of a kind of tradition of justice. Justice is absolutely important. If an individual wrongs another individual, they owe restitution or reparation to that individual. If an institution, a business institution, a government institution, engages in an injustice, that institution does owe reparation, and so forth. But reparation needs to be understood in an individualistic framework: it’s individuals who are harmed, and those harms are not transferable to other individuals. So in this case, we would say: Slavery was a great injustice of many individuals and some institutions against many other individuals. I’d say the bottom line is that, unfortunately, all of the individuals who participated in it are dead. Reparations are just not possible to people who suffered from slavery: there is no way to give restitution to those individuals and from the people who perpetrated the injustice, who would properly be required to pay the restitution. They’re not around to do so. 

The idea, though, that somehow through your group membership, many generations later, you have become a victim—that is just rank collectivism of the worst sort.

So, the idea, though, that somehow through your group membership, many generations later, you have become a victim—that is just rank collectivism of the worst sort. I don’t think there’s anybody alive who deserves restitution for historical slavery, because you know, unless you’re actually a slave or were a slave, you don’t deserve the restitution. 

But it’s also important to focus on the other side of the equation, that there’s a great injustice in making people who did not participate in slavery pay for something that they did not engage in. 

Now I want to say something about statutes of limitations, not so much as a legal principle, but as a moral principle and a psychological health principle. There’s a good reason why in the legal system, they will say, if an injustice has occurred and after a certain number of years have gone by, the healthiest thing to do is just to say: We’re going to let it go, just get it out of your system, move on, get on with your life. So, we have successfully eliminated slavery many, many years ago, and the vast majority of people right now are horrified by the idea of slavery. I don’t think there’s anybody now who actually believes in it. In contemporary America, the vast majority of people weren’t even around at the time. So it’s a non-issue. 

I think the only issue that’s the appropriate issue is a historical issue, you could go back and make sure that the historical record is accurate. You’re naming the names of the people who were the victims, naming the names of the people who were advocates, and making sure we learn the historical lesson so that we don’t repeat it.

JAG: Great. We have maybe about 10 more minutes and way more questions, that we’re going to be able to get to, but one that has come in here is from John Vinson: “While no rational person would support racism, would you accept the idea that a person has the right to be racist or in support of the idea that a person has the right to hold any idea? So I mean, do people have the right to believe horrible ideas?”

SH: Well, I would say you don’t have the cognitive right. You don’t have the moral right to hold obviously primitive and repulsive ideas like racist ideas. But I think you do have the legal right to do so. Yes, just like you have the idea to believe lots of repugnant things like all sorts of religions that believe women should be second-class citizens, or all sorts of economic systems like socialism that don’t respect entrepreneurs and people who create enormous amounts of wealth. All of those, I think are atavistic, primitive beliefs—but people have a legal right to do so. 

The best way to deal with repugnant false ideas is let them be out there so that we are aware of them and we can counter them.

Now, I think, in the case of racism, since it is such an easily confrontable belief, I really don’t understand why people are afraid of it. In my experience, I can count on one hand the number of racist things I’ve heard in my life. You might argue that I live in a kind of bubble. But the racists are pretty much underground, and they don’t really have good arguments. The best way to deal with repugnant false ideas is let them be out there so that we are aware of them and we can counter them. And we can continue in the process of ongoing cultural education by having better arguments and better facts to point out against the ideas that we think are false.

JAG: All right, we’re going to get to a couple of more questions. One, “Professor Hicks, both COVID and Black Lives Matter are seen as an overreach on civil liberties? Both seem opposite of the philosophy of Ayn Rand, how much duty do we own any? And?” 

SH: I’m sorry, how much duty do we owe?

JAG: Do we own? I guess, how much duty do we own? Any?

SH: Okay, I think I understood the first part of the question about overreach. Well, yes, I think that’s true. I think there also was underreach. Many of us underestimated the problem and didn’t react quickly enough. Some of us overreacted to the problem, and so forth. I think that’s normal anytime there’s a disaster or some sort of new threat that goes along. My view, especially with respect to COVID, in particular, is to try to take from the last six or eight months as much of a learning experience as we can, because there is going to be a COVID 27 or a COVID 36 or whatever comes along at some point in the future. And hopefully we’ll then have enough individual and institutional memory around at that point to remember what happened last time, so we don’t underreach or overreach as much the next time.

JAG: 55:31 That’s a positive perspective. There’s another part of the question which I think I can handle: What is this group— I guess you mean The Atlas Societydoing to constructively enact our legislators, becoming citizens using our . . . ?” Anyway, our society is a philosophy organization. There are a lot of groups that are working on policy reforms, legislative reforms, justice reforms, but in the ecosphere of the liberty space, we have a particular focus on philosophy, right, wrong, good and evil; in particular, Objectivist philosophy that was created by Ayn Rand. And our focus is also in presenting it creatively, visually, using new technologies with graphic novels and pocket guides and different social media formats to engage young people. So, not everybody can do everything, and everything, I think Adam Smith said it best in the Wealth of Nations, comes from a division of labor. And that’s what we are doing.

Last question, I thought it touched me, in particular, was—and I’ll see, some of these questions are a little long, so I’ll see if I can summarize it. But the question was that voicing an opinion that differs even slightly from the consensus can result in termination, cancellation, ostracism. So should one play the game of just kind of going along, or taking a principled stand, damn the consequences, justice? Howard Roark and John Galt did fleeing and struggling and obscurity. Does the context of having a spouse, children, or aging parents change that calculus? I know you hear that a lot from students, too. 

SH: That’s a hard question. And a perennial question. I think the bottom line is, you have to be yourself. You have to know what you stand for, what your values are, why you believe them. And you have to be willing to stick up for yourself and fight for yourself. Otherwise, if you sell your soul in piecemeal ways, you won’t like yourself, and you’re not going to achieve your values, anyway. 

But it is a perennial problem that when you live in a society with other people who have different beliefs and different values—some of them will try to put you through hell and impose whatever social costs they can on you to try to get you to sell yourself out and shut down your beliefs and your values. So how do you handle that problem? 

When you enter into a social context, you choose your friends carefully. Choose your workplace carefully. And don’t hang out with, in any circumstance, people who are going to be unfair and impose these kinds of costs upon you. It should be a bottom line for rational, civil, decent people to understand that people can have differences of opinions, particularly on complicated issues.

Well, I think there are a couple of things I would say. One is, when you enter into a social context, you choose your friends carefully. Choose your workplace carefully. And don’t hang out with, in any circumstance, people who are going to be unfair and impose these kinds of costs upon you. It should be a bottom line for rational, civil, decent people to understand that people can have differences of opinions, particularly on complicated issues. And that the way we are going to sort these things out socially is through rational, civil discussion. So if you’re dealing with people in your social circle, who are not committed to that, find a way to disengage with those people. 

Another thing is that that’s often hard to do, particularly if you are committed to a certain career. In a large institution, for example, or if you’re a public figure, you don’t get to pick and choose as easily. Then I think the important thing is to establish your reputation as a certain kind of person. So, if the first thing that people know about you is that you’re intelligent, you’re decent, you are civil, you are good at what you do—and that’s their baseline assessment of who you are—when they then realize that you have beliefs that are alien to theirs, and perhaps even offensive, they will cut you some slack. And they will be much more willing to get along with you. 

But if you come across initially as a jerk who’s just announcing weird beliefs, then it’s not going to go so well for you. 

The other thing I would say is: To the extent that your platform, at work or if you’re a public figure, is a public one and other people are watching—you will have a lot of initially silent support. When we have more conformist cultures where there’s a lot of pressure on people to toe a party line, it is the more courageous people who are willing to stand up when needed. We need more of those people to stand up and make a reasoned case for whatever it is that they believe in. Otherwise, the conformists are just going to prevail. And then we end up in an authoritarian circumstance. 

But you will, to the extent that you do have a reasoned case and you are making it courageously, you will have a lot more support than you initially think that you have. And you will also encourage other people to stand up. That’s how you will create a counter-movement.

JAG: That’s a beautiful answer. And I would also say, you have to know your values to know what’s important to you. And then to organize those in terms of what is the most important to you, what is less important to you, and to strive to act with integrity to live your values, even though there may be a kind of short-term cost to it, note the long-term yield is enormous in terms of getting a reputation as somebody who has integrity, who stands for what they believe. And I guess I would close, first of all, by thanking you so much. That was a real pleasure. Great questions. And thanking everyone who joined us. 

Also, just to mention, this is relevant to the last question. In terms of there are different kinds of people right now, in these crises that we have, there are people who are trying to oppose what you believe in, and there are people who are fighting for what you believe in. And there are those that are helping those who are fighting for what you believe in. And so, it’s pretty clear what our position is at The Atlas Society, what we are fighting for, if you are not in a position where you feel like you can come out and speak publicly, and fight for these ideas that you believe in, then help us, support us in making that argument and making that fight. And there’s a variety of ways in which you can do that. 

I want to thank Stephen and the rest of our team. I want others that are watching this to understand that Stephen is donating 20% of his salary to The Atlas Society. As every other member of the team, we all early on, took voluntary pay cuts to make sure that we could continue to let this kind of programming or publications or videos or social media continue. So, if you believe in what we’re doing, if you like this interview, if you like the kind of content that Stephen is so meticulously putting together and the waterfall, then consider supporting it and supporting our work. We did not take government bailouts. That is an example of what I consider living in consonance with your values. We did not need it, because we have people like you out there that can help. Thank you, everyone. 

Thank you so much, Professor Hicks, and see everybody next time.

SH: Thanks again.