I’ve received many responses to my post, “ARI Is Failing and Needs Our Help,” and I appreciate them all. Some have been private emails, and some have been comments under the post. The emails and comments have been thoughtful, illuminating, and respectful of the importance of this matter. People are deeply concerned about the state of ARI.
I won’t attempt to reply separately to everyone who has responded. But I want to address the general themes among the responses. (If you have messaged me, please accept this post as my reply.)
First, I’ll quote from a few responses to indicate the general substance and tone.
“I want an organization to preserve and promote Ayn Rand’s works, that should be [ARI’s] foremost mission.”
“It matters to me that you [CB] are supporting Leonard and bringing back to prominence his intellectual contribution from years past.”
“My take is that philosophy must be sold – and not told… Ayn Rand is the best salesman of her work, followed by Leonard Peikoff.”
“Their [ARI’s] numbers [statistics] are very insignificant, and they don’t even seem to have a clue that their viewership and engagement is embarrassing… I’m glad you’re bringing some of this information to light, and I hope ARI can, in the long run, reverse practices that have caused them to become ineffective.”
“I think that there is a conflict of interest with Yaron serving on the board of ARI and his promotion of his program YBS [Yaron Brook Show]. If I am a donor with limited resources to whom should I donate money? Is the Institute and YBS one and the same?”
“I’ve been an Objectivist since the early 80s and I would like to help.”
Some asked: What can I do? What can we do? What can be done? Those are good questions. I’ll answer with a few essentials.
- First, and above all, we must recognize and accept that, by objective measures, what ARI is doing is not working. (To his credit, Tal Tsfany, CEO, realized this when he first took over.) That is reality. No matter how unpleasant this fact is, it has to be faced, not ignored or evaded. (Businessmen on ARI’s Board have told me privately that ARI is not working, so this is known internally by at least some.)
- We must encourage ARI to thoughtfully explore new strategies. Research and find out what is successful and why it’s successful. Look at PragerU, Dave Rubin, Cato Institute, Foundation for Economic Education, Students for Liberty, and others for any information or guidance they can provide. Observe that a young Ryan Holiday (in his 20s) became a bestselling author popularizing the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. Stoicism! He has ten times the following of Yaron on his podcast. ARI and Yaron’s model is not working. Objectivism should be hundreds of times more influential.
- We must encourage ARI to market Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. No one sells Objectivism better. And if the Ayn Rand Institute is supposed to do anything, it is supposed to market her works and those of the Objectivist philosopher she endorsed. This is a large part of why ARI is failing: it’s not focused on Ayn Rand. Ryan Holiday constantly talks about Stoicism and Stoics. But at the Institute named after Ayn Rand—an Institute supposedly dedicated to promoting her work—more time, money, and effort go into promoting Yaron Brook and ARI’s nascent intellectuals.
In regard to that last point, I had a long conversation with a very senior, very accomplished Objectivist who has been a substantial supporter of ARI for many years. He spent an hour explaining his disappointments and criticisms. He asked me not to mention his name, and I’m not going to quote him directly. But I will relay the essence of what he said. He expressed something which has been disturbing to me, too. He said Yaron and others at ARI don’t talk about Ayn Rand very much. It’s the Ayn Rand Institute, yet its intellectuals hardly talk about Ayn Rand!
Years ago, when I toured the world several times with Yaron, I would sit in on his lectures. I observed that he rarely mentioned Ayn Rand. He never quoted her and never mentioned her books. I said, “Yaron, you’ve got to put up slides talking about Ayn Rand and the Ayn Rand Institute.” And I asked, “Where are her books? There should be a table of her books at the back of the lecture hall.” He told me it was too expensive to ship them to whichever country we were in. I said, “Dammit, we’ve got to have books here no matter what it costs. This is absurd; this is what we’re selling; we’ve got to have her books here.” I offered to pay for the shipping, and they started shipping her books to the lecture halls. (Today I believe—and hope—they continue doing this. I believe they also now create slides and talk to some extent about Ayn Rand and the Ayn Rand Institute. If so, these are welcome changes.)
Bluntly: It’s a crime. It’s the Ayn Rand Institute. Its representatives should be talking about Ayn Rand, holding up Ayn Rand’s books, explaining Ayn Rand’s ideas, teaching Ayn Rand’s philosophy. And because the foremost, master teacher of Objectivism is Leonard Peikoff, the Institute should be promoting his books and courses as well.
As I said in “ARI Is Failing and Needs Our Help,” we need a strong Ayn Rand Institute to promote Ayn Rand and advance Objectivism. I hope you will do what you can to help bring it about.
Should you stop donating to ARI? Not necessarily. I stopped, but I still contribute to Objectivism through the Objectivist Venture Fund/Prometheus Foundation. If you continue supporting ARI, however, I suggest you ask questions about how they spend your donation dollars, and ask for clear measurements and accountability.
MORE ISSUES OF STRATEGY AND TACTICS
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Most of ARI’s existing projects are quite valuable, but here are some improvement idea (I already mentioned the process issue of feedback encouragement):
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1. PRIORITIZING A WIDER AUDIENCE: Explain to us to what extent you plan to ramp up Outreach as opposed to just Inreach. ( “Inreach” is when your articles and posts are written for and finding an audience primarily among those who are already converted as opposed to having no exposure to Objectivism or who may have only read a novel. “Outreach” is when you’re tailoring your presentation to a much wider audience or aggressively trying to reach the general public with your message. For example, the now abandoned project from a couple decades ago to regularly submit op-eds to all the major U.S. metropolitan newspapers. )
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2. WRITTEN MATERIAL: In tandem with number one, put out a greater percentage of your weekly or monthly material in written form which will connect with readers not just viewers or listeners … instead of the current weighting toward YouTube – podcast – radio – webinar – oral lecture material.
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The reason is that you only change a culture deeply by reaching the profoundly intellectual who are those who heavily engage with ideas in written form.
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3. HUMANITIES BACKGROUND: Train rising OAC intellectuals not just in philosophy and writing, but in the supporting areas of ‘core knowledge’. Such as a grounding in history and literature. (Someone who has a Ph.D in philosophy or a background in a technical subject but who also reads regularly in the humanities and the whole history of western civilization – ancient to modern has a broader knowledge base and can think of and present more examples and write in a more vivid and rich way.)
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4. BROADER TOPICS: Based on number three, once you have people with sufficient breadth, produce more content along the lines of the original Objectivist newsletter and magazine or Peikoff’s courses. Each of those had a much wider range of topics. They were so repeatedly concentrated on one branch of philosophy or culture namely (i) politics, or on (ii) ‘current events’ type issues, or so heavily on (iii) the negative ‘horror file’ aspects in the culture.
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Instead offer a more sustained focus on positives that people are desperate for in today’s world and are hard to find…. Focus on offering inspiration, advice, personal growth, skills building, and lessons from history.
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Building a cathedral rather than torpedoing an outhouse.
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— Phil C.
I think Charles Tew’s point about ARI being badly managed and appeasing the moral mainstream by trying to fit Objectivism into leftist movements is on point.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XYHgWFxPxrw
To capture the attention of “new minds”, the essay contests were created. In the beginning (30+ years ago?) they were very successful and the essays were wonderful.
It is my understanding that today, thanks to the utter collapse of the public education system, the responses are of very low quality and next to meaningless.
The adoption of Objectivism does require a certain type of mind that has developed enough to begin to understand it, to see the value in one’s life.
The question then becomes….is the potential audience shrinking? In the USA? the world? If so, the strategy must be adopted that recognizes this phenomenon.
In my opinion acting as if Ayn Rand is the infallible source of all philosophical truth in depth and breadth and supporting what is uncomfortably reminiscent of apostolic succession is what making ARI untenable and greatly slowing the spread of Ayn Rand’s brilliant achievement of a living thinking for oneself philosophy for living on this Earth. ARI has done too much in-fighting and purging. It seems to be continuing. Objectivism has been presented as a harsh talmudic head trip meting out justice to all seeming heresy. That has turned off even some of the most adoring fans who would love to see objectivism spread across societies and help it do so. ARI has made a philosophy of grounded self interest and rationality into something close to to a cult.
We don’t need AIR. We just need to keep AR books available. What we need is new objectivist activists with charisma going viral.
I think the biggest problem with expanding the reach of Objectivism is inherent: it bucks the tide of thousands of years of Judeo-Christian entrenchment. It appeals to a subset of the people that reject those religions, or are open to rejecting them. Then it says that you have to live by reason, for yourself, embracing freedom. Each one of those slices the addressable market further.
You can either appeal to that addressable market and live off a tiny, glacially-growing population or you can try to reach out more broadly by not slicing off various segments. TJS and NBI went the former route (though NBI benefitted from having a charismatic founder/spokeswoman drumming up business); ARI, TOS, and TAS have gone the latter way, each making different compromises hoping to find elusive growth. Each has also faced serious cultural headwinds because of the nature of their “product.”
I don’t know how to achieve market fit or “cross the chasm.” I’m not even sure that’s possible in the short- to medium-term. I’m not entirely sold that it’s desirable since Objectivism’s winning must be organic—there are no shortcuts to making it stick. Robert Tracinski has a notion of “Independent Objectivism” that certainly appeals to the likes of me.
I will share one personal story from my time as an ARI staffer that confirms Carl’s point about how ARI is failing.
In 2018, when PBS contacted me to discuss Atlas Shrugged on their Great American Reads program, I notified ARI management. I mentioned that this was an excellent opportunity to promote Rand’s magnum opus, since this was a massive, world-wide public poll to vote for the best novel. ARI took no immediate action, but The Objective Standard promoted the event and urged readers to vote daily, four months before the contest ended.
https://theobjectivestandard.com/2018/06/vote-atlas-shrugged-great-american-read-contest/
Four months later, right around the same time the Atlas Shrugged episode aired, ARI was consumed with the promotion of Elan Journo’s book on the Palestine/Israel conflict. Only a few days before voting for Atlas Shrugged ended did they promote the contest. Thanks to a late surge in voting, the novel made it to the top 20.
How often do Objectivists speak on national television about Atlas Shrugged? Don’t you think ARI would celebrate this rare event? Apparently not, if that same employee also writes for TOS and speaks at TOS-Con.
Aside from my closest co-workers on the marketing and development teams, I never heard a word from other ARI staffers, employees, or board members about the PBS appearance. Meanwhile, TOS published a congratulations with a link to the 3-minute segment.
https://theobjectivestandard.com/2018/10/today-is-the-last-day-to-vote-for-atlas-shrugged-in-the-great-american-read-contest/
This was one of the reasons why I resigned from the Ayn Rand Institute. I support the Objective Standard Institute.
How can you represent the Ayn Rand Institute and not mention Ayn Rand that much and what she stood for and have her books available!
Surely the idea of the speech is to get the foot in the door and the book to seal the deal. Make them pay a small fee and they will feel like they have invested and even more likely to read it.
I’ve become very weary of charities since the internet exposed so much of the information around them.
People give millions to Cancer Research UK and the UK government even more so. Yet, I never here of their major breakthroughs.
I read about tax payer money going to ex-politicians who now are the CEO of charities receiving huge salaries whilst their charity receives multiple millions from tax payers via government.
The whole issue of charity seems so corrupt. This is not to say that ARI are doing anything wrong but I feel there are very few charities that are judged on performance and this is a huge problem. It’s easy to take the money and switch off. Your criticism should be welcome by ARI. Good criticism can keep you lean and mean, punching above your weight and in today’s culture, you have to if you want to spread the ideas of liberty.
Carl
ARI’s problem is it cant sell because it doesn’t understand how what it sells differs from what Miss Rand wrote. The problem comes from what you have not mentioned: ARI’s product is not Ayn Rand’s works but Harry Binswanger’s conception of them; particularly his view of consciousness. Ghate’s recent attacks on science are in support of Harry’s view of consciousness which directly contradicts enormous current research in many fields showing human consciousness is a property only of humans. Harry forces Ghate to treat consciousness as a property of goal directed behavior which is a property of life. Harry claims plants are conscious. Try defending that in public. That is not what Miss Rand held at all. So there is the conflict which being unresolved shows up as an ugly contradiction between Objectivism and science and Objectivism loses that battle. What is needed is to get the ARI product to show its power to make sense of the world as shown by science; because Objectivism explains the world as it is not as Harry wishes it to be. Until the Board and you recognize the intellectual contradiction Harry forces on ARI and resolve it the product will fall into being just another billionaire blog instead of the greatest intellectual achievement since Aristotle uniting philosophy and science.
Bill Altenburg
Where does Binswanger claim that plants are conscious?
Dear Mr. Barney,
As regards your posting, “ARI is Failing”, my view of “Objectivism” has never been predicated on its popularity or acceptance by any sort of group or organization. Further, Ms. Rand’s thinking was and remains too radical for it to be remotely considered part our present cultural scene. Since my introduction to it by Dr. Alan Gotthelf in the ’60’s I have witnessed a steady erosion of rationally based values across the spectrum of intellectual disciplines. Dr. Harry Binswanger, another of my teachers, continues to participate in programs promoting Objectivist principles, but is a lone figure in this respect. It is my hope that ultimately, though not in our lifetimes, a new generation of thinkers will rediscover & implement Ms. Rand’s philosophy in their work and daily lives. This delay may seem frustrating, but in reality a philosophy so contrary & demanding such absolute consistency isn’t easy to implement – much like trying to alter the course of a ultra large crude carrier against a strong cross current. That said, I yet want to say “thanks” for your efforts to effect this course correction; it is those like yourself who will help make it happen.
I enjoyed this post.
It relieves my loneliness.
I don’t consider Yaron Brook an “expert”, let alone an _objective_ supporter of Objectivism after his comment on the David Parks show re the social welfare-state. He said about 20 mins in: “Ayn Rand never said ‘Existence is identity’…”. It’s in Galt’s speech: “I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity and consciousness is identification”.
Yaron Brook is _unreliable_ as an Objectivist.
Meant David Pakman Show!
Sorry…
Jordan Peterson confronts two leading spokesmen from ARI on the problem of universals and then follows up with the is-ought problem. An excellent opportunity for anyone familiar with Ayn Rand – or so you would imagine.
https://youtu.be/PRHaropPZCc?t=3488