The LEGO Movie Theory of Life
I'm turning "The Prophet of Causation" into a book, and I could use your help.
Last year, I gave a course titled, “The Prophet of Causation,” which was my way of crowdfunding preliminary work on a book presenting Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism from the perspective of one central idea—the law of cause and effect—and how it underlies and explains every aspect of the philosophy.
The course worked even better than I had hoped, producing about 60,000 words of detailed lecture notes and helping me figure out all sorts of new angles on Ayn Rand’s philosophy.
The next stage is to turn those notes into a finished book, a process that, in amongst my other responsibilities, will take one to two years of further research, elaboration, editing, and polishing. I’ve gotten some support from The Atlas Society to work on this, but I would also like to ask my regular subscribers and readers to help out.
Being able to write about philosophy is, alas, something of a luxury. In many ways, nothing in the world could be more important than basic philosophical ideas—yet as far as I can tell, there is nothing that has less immediate commercial value. Most people need good philosophical ideas—you can see the wreckage from their absence all around us—but they don’t know that they need them, so they won’t pay for them. My solution to that problem is to find the people who do know the value of these ideas, and to ask for your support.
In effect, your support will buy some of my time away from politics—but behind our current political problems, as important as they are, is the larger task of moral reform and cultural change. And that did not begin and will not end with an election.
Below is a draft of the preface to the new book, explaining the basic impetus behind it and why it is particularly needed now.
If this motivates you, there are two ways to support this project. One is to sign up as a subscriber to the Prophet of Causation newsletter, which gets you access to all the recordings and materials for the existing lectures—plus new notes on the philosophical ideas I’m working on and access to drafts of the finished chapters as I write them.
Substack doesn’t have a good way to provide a one-time subscription, so the workaround I have adopted is to make the monthly and annual subscription rate the same, and when you sign up, I’ll go in and change it to a lifetime subscription—which in practice means you get access to everything I’m working on for the next two years as I finish this project.
If you want to provide more support—and every bit will help me finish this project sooner—you can sign up as a Founding Member, which will get you a special acknowledgement in the final book. Or you can donate to support the book project via Paypal here.
Marketing people say it’s best to prime the reader with a suggested amount, so how about, say, $100? But the Paypal link is totally customizable, so you can give less—or more!—depending on the level of your interest and what you can afford. (Or you can do things the old-fashioned way and send a check to The Tracinski Letter at PO Box 6997, Charlottesville, VA 22906.)
I think this will be a useful and important book that will make a big difference: a shorter overview of Objectivism built around a memorable central idea and presented in a way that ties in to the big questions and dilemmas of our era.
Check out the preface.
Preface: The Lego Movie Theory of Life
Many people today proclaim themselves to be lost.
There is widespread discussion of a “meaning crisis,” in which we have lost the old mythologies that used to hand down to us our basic ideas about the nature of the world and our proper role in life. In a recently published poll, people who describe their religious beliefs as “nothing in particular”—a combination of atheists, agnostics, and those who have simply drifted away from established religion—have become the largest and fastest growing group in America, at nearly a third of the population.
But if people have lost the guidance of tradition, it is not clear whether they have found new ideas to replace the old ones.
Into this void has rushed a proliferation of would-be gurus offering “rules for life” and trying to herd bewildered young people into an artificially reconstructed version of the traditional roles. They have been followed by politicians who eagerly offer us a way to find meaning in our lives by agitating for a social cause, though the “cause” often ends up beginning and ending with adulation for the politician himself.
In short, we have a greater capacity than ever before to do anything we want—but no idea what to do.
The writer Aaron Ross Powell has come with an intriguing analogy for this dilemma. He imagines a child with an interest in building LEGO sets.
Imagine that for your birthday, two different relatives each give you some LEGO building blocks. Your uncle picked out a set that builds a cool car. But before wrapping it, he opened the package, took out the pieces, assembled them according to the directions, and then glued the finished car together. Thus your gift from him is a LEGO car, but only ever that.
Your aunt picks out the same LEGO set, but before giving it to you, she opens the package, takes out just the bricks, tosses those into a new bag, and then throws out the box (with the picture of the car), as well as the instructions. Thus your gift from her is a pile of LEGOs you can do whatever you want with, but without a sense of what they’re supposed to build, or how to build it.
He then posits another relative who gives you the same LEGO set with its instruction book, who reminds you that you can build the car exactly as the instructions indicate—but also that LEGOs are intended to be used creatively, so you can modify the design or build something new if you like.
Call this the “LEGO Movie” theory of life, after the 2014 film by that name, which had a similar theme. Traditional religion, in this analogy, is the LEGO car that comes glued together: a set of beliefs and a role in life, delivered pre-assembled and adopted without question or change. The bag of undifferentiated LEGOs is the idea that humans have no definite identity, that everything is subjective, and thus that guidance or principles are unnecessary.
The limit of this analogy is that the real third alternative is not exactly an instruction book—not a set of narrowly concrete set of rules or instructions. What we need are broad principles. What we need is an intellectual perspective that will help us to understand the world, to understand human nature, and help us discover the basis for making our own decisions about what to make out of our lives.
I think the essential framework for what we need is already available, though in a form that is not widely appreciated as such. It is the philosophy of Objectivism developed by the 20th-Century author Ayn Rand. She developed her ideas in the process of writing best-selling works of fiction, The Fountainhead in 1943 and Atlas Shrugged in 1957, that took on themes of conformity and tradition versus rationality and individualism—precisely the issues we are still grappling with. When she wrote into the mouth of her hero in The Fountainhead the idea that “every man creates his meaning and form and goal,” she was anticipating the dilemma that has since come more fully into the open.
Yet she also wrote in a specific historical context, primarily the Cold War ideological contest between capitalism and socialism, and this has caused her ideas to be associated too narrowly with that context. Many dismiss her merely as a political polemicist, as the “goddess of the market,” as a figure of “the right,” and even (against her own wishes) as a conservative.
None of these capture what Ayn Rand was really doing and why it is important.
Part of my goal in this book is to clear away some of that misleading context so readers can get to the actual, essential message of the Objectivist philosophy. I also wanted to fill something of a gap in the existing literature: an absence of relatively short books presenting the Objectivist philosophy in an easily understandable form and in a way that connects it to the cultural context of the 21st Century.
In setting out to write this, I did not intend to add anything to the philosophy of Objectivism as Ayn Rand stated it, though any attempt to explain another person’s ideas raises the prospect—I should say the opportunity—of saying something new about them. That is definitely the case here. I have often found it valuable to draw out new implications or to add new detail to an idea that is mostly implicit in Ayn Rand’s original formulation.
But the main innovation in this book is the perspective in which I present her philosophy. This project grew out of my previous collection of essays on the literary and philosophical themes and historical context of Atlas Shrugged. My attempt to understand Ayn Rand’s magnum opus led me to look for one simple idea that serves as a basic organizing principle to illuminate her whole philosophy. That’s when I realized that the best way to understand her philosophy is to view her as “the prophet of causation,” playing off her own description of the rational man as a “disciple of causation.”
The religious overtones are meant ironically, both by her and by me, though I would point out that in its original etymology, the word for “prophet” just meant “messenger” or “spokesman.” Ayn Rand was a messenger explaining to us the meaning of the law of cause and effect and its implications for our understanding of the world and how we live in it.
Causation is the central and distinctive theme of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, the idea that will help us grasp and connect every aspect of her ideas, from her view of the universe to her view of the mind to her ethics and on through to her ideas on art and politics. Objectivism is a philosophy of causation, from beginning to end.
This also gives us a helpful perspective on how to use her ideas and their relevance to our own lives and today’s culture. The ancients viewed philosophy, not just as a set of abstract theories, but as a way of life. Ayn Rand talks about the rational man as a “disciple of causation,” someone who has internalized and incorporated the law of cause and effect into his life and thinking and action.
This book will explain what that means and why we need it.
This preface gives you an idea of how I am framing this new overview of Objectivism.
I hope you found the LEGO Movie theory of life as interesting as I do. For me, it has the benefit of reflecting the concrete reality of the last ten years of my life, as a father of two boys with a love for LEGOs. Interestingly, I did a little poking around about the history of LEGOs, and found that the first LEGO bricks were developed in 1949, but they required another decade of refinement and improvement, specifically aimed at giving them the versatility required for the kind of creative play I describe above. This means that the modern LEGO brick was patented in January of 1958—just a few months after the publication of Atlas Shrugged.
It is not so much a coincidence as it is exactly what you would expect in an era when the issue of individual creativity and initiative was at the forefront of everyone’s minds and was being grappled with by everyone from novelists and philosophers to toymakers.
The passage above is just a brief preface. I’ll be publishing the finished book a chapter at a time, as I complete them, along with the occasional outtakes and notes on interesting material—things like this—as I feel the need to develop them in the process of writing.
Please consider subscribing or offering your support for this project.