evil

The Evil of Self-Sacrifice by Aaron Smith

May 4, 2022 arilive_user Podcast 35:48 0 Comments

Everyone knows that altruism — selfless sacrifice for the sake of others — is the essence of virtue, right? But what if, like the concept “selfishness,” our understanding of the true meaning of “altruism” and “sacrifice” is completely mistaken? What if these ideas are actually destructive and harmful? From Ayn Rand’s perspective, our whole way of thinking about morality needs to be radically rethought.

Recorded at AynRandCon – Europe in London on April 2, 2022.

The Nature of Evil by Gregory Salmieri

January 19, 2022 arilive_user Podcast 01:31:27 0 Comments

A theme in Ayn Rand’s fiction is that the failure to understand evil is a source of error and unhappiness for good people. Drawing on the Objectivist corpus this talk will explore the nature of evil, including: the ways in which actions, motives, ideas and people can be evil; the respects in which evil is and is not important; and how understanding evil can help us to appreciate the good and to foster the best in ourselves and others. Recorded live as part of The Objectivist Conference on September 01, 2021.

Is Selfishness the Root of All Evil? by Keith Lockitch

August 28, 2019 arilive_user Podcast 1:01:48 0 Comments
If there is one thing that almost everyone agrees on today, it’s that selfishness is bad. From day one, we’ve been told, “don’t be selfish” or “selfishness is the root of all evil.”
 
But what if the way we think about selfishness is completely wrong?
 
What if our conventional understanding of what it means to be selfish is totally confused—and it’s not just that we’re mistaken, but we’re mistaken in a way that actually makes it harder for us to achieve a happy, fulfilling life and a better world?
 
Throughout history, various thinkers have challenged us to rethink conventional wisdom. Copernicus and Galileo challenged our view of a motionless earth. Darwin challenged our understanding of how all of life’s species developed.

Ayn Rand, the writer and philosopher famous for her bestselling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, was a thinker who challenged our conventional wisdom about morality.
 
She was a moral revolutionary in the same way that Galileo and Darwin were scientific revolutionaries.

Join Keith Lockitch and explore Ayn Rand’s moral revolution. He’ll be addressing one of life’s big questions: Is selfishness the root of all evil?