movements

Judging Viewpoints by Their Fundamentals by Peter Schwartz

How do we judge viewpoints — political movements, ideologies, philosophies — that seem to contain mixtures of good and bad ideas? How do we determine whether any specific element of a broader framework is good or bad? This talk discusses a range of viewpoints, from environmentalism to religion to Black Lives Matter, and examines the means by which their concrete positions should be assessed. It explains how to identify the fundamental of any systematic viewpoint, and how that must shape our judgment of those concrete positions.

Recorded live on July 7, 2022 as part of the Objectivist Summer Conference.

Climate, Energy and the Environmentalist Movement by Keith Lockitch

Today, climate change is viewed in our culture as a crisis of unprecedented scale that is uniquely threatening and intractable. Yet if we explore the history of the environmentalist movement, we find a pattern of forecasting similar environmental catastrophes that failed to materialize. What is it about environmentalism that gives rise to this pattern of ailed predictions, and what lessons can we draw from them about today’s concerns related to climate and energy?

Recorded live at OCON on June 25, 2020.