If you’re one of the many people who have asked us to take down the concepts in Atlas Shrugged, which argues that we’re a fundamentally selfish species, this episode is for you! If you’re not one of those people, well, this episode is ALSO for you! Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has infused the idea of prosociality (the desire to help others) into his new book, Atlas Hugged, and he joins us to explain why Atlas Hugged is a better predictor of how people act than Atlas Shrugged.
David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. His books include This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution and the recently published Atlas Hugged.
Twitter: @David_S_Wilson
Show us some love by leaving a rating or a review! RateThisPodcast.com/pitchforkeconomics
Ayn Rand Meets Her Match: David Sloan Wilson Fights Fiction with Fiction: https://evonomics.com/rand-meets-david-sloan-wilson-atlas-hugged/
Get Atlas Hugged for free: https://atlashugged.world/
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Nick Hanauer:
David Sloan Wilson has written basically a rebuttal to Atlas Shrugged called Atlas Hugged.
David Sloan Wilson:
And just imagine what it would be like if that novel succeeded to the degree of Rand’s novel and just became a fictional cosmology. What if it had the impact of Atlas Shrugged? Just think about that.
David Goldstein:
You mean millions of people just following its philosophy without thinking it through, because that’s…
Speaker 4:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why,
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer founder of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures. So Nick, you’re only a few years older than me and for a late boomers like us, when we were in high school, there was this book that you just had to read, people told us, I couldn’t get through it, but did you read Atlas Shrugged?
Nick Hanauer:
I did read Atlas Shrugged. My dad recommended that I read it when I was in high school. I must have been 16, 17. My dad was a very intellectual person and had read basically every book, but he thought it was an important book to read, but also he dismissed it as nonsense. But he just said, “Look dude, you got to read this because everybody does.” And I do remember reading it and having it. I was a little bit puzzled by it, but it’s been so long that… What is interesting is that for a particular personality type, people who came out of the womb as sort of selfish and non-empathetic, boy, did it speak to them. It was like, “Oh, you mean the more dickish I am, the better off everyone else will be? Awesome.”
David Goldstein:
You’re describing teenagers. I mean, come on. This is this by the way, is why this appeals to 16, 17-year olds.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m also describing lots of investment bankers.
David Goldstein:
Okay.
Nick Hanauer:
And software entrepreneurs and-
David Goldstein:
Oh my god, yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
And look, Atlas Shrugged was a way to package up the most potent and appealing ideas in sort of neoclassical economics and neo-liberalism, and it was a very effective way to get the word out and to persuade people that these ideas were both true and morally valid, I guess, and helped propel the neoliberal movement along. I believe even Milton Friedman required his associates to read it.
David Goldstein:
They were close friends. He was part of her salon as was former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan. So big fans of Ayn Rand, knew her personally. And the importance of this terrible little book, and I say that because really as a work of fiction, as a piece of art, it’s not very good, but it’s incredibly influential. And it speaks to one of the themes that we’ve touched on since the very beginning of the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Nick, and that is the importance of narrative, not just in shaping the way we understand the world, but in reshaping the world itself through that reflective process. What we believe about the world actually changes how we interact with it and ends up changing the world, which influences what we believe about the world. And this book has played an ousized role in creating a lot of the problems we’re living through today.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And today on our podcast, we get to visit with our old friend, David Sloan Wilson, the evolutionary biologist who has written basically a rebuttal to Atlas Shrugged called Atlas Hugged. And the reason David’s book is consequential, is it, I think it more accurately reflects both what people are really like and what the true sources of prosperity and stability are in human societies, which is altruism and reciprocity, and cooperation. So with that, let’s chat with David.
David Sloan Wilson:
My name is David Sloan Wilson. I’m an evolutionist and I’m plugging my newest book, my first novel, Atlas Hugged.
Nick Hanauer:
I’ve known you a long time. Goldie has known you a long time. We’ve certainly known of you for an even longer time, but no one ever knew that you were the spawn of a great novelist. We had no idea.
David Sloan Wilson:
Well, my dad was a very famous novelist of his day and that day was the same era as Ayn Rand. And so her novel Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 and my dad’s most famous novels, The Man the Gray Flannel Suit and A Summer Place were published in 1955 and 1957. And they’re still discussed today as basically putting his finger on the generation, the corporate army that formed after World War II and changing sexual morals during the same period. So when I grew up, my dad was a household word. The movies had Gregory Peck, and Troy Donahue, and Sandra Dee and so they were major blockbuster movies. And imagine what that was like for a skinny little kid growing up with just a completely larger than life dad. I did become a scientist to escape his shadow, but at the same time I retained that sort of novelistic urge to understand the human condition.
And the moment I saw that evolutionary theory that could be used to study the human condition, I could do that through the lens of a theory rather than through the lens of my personal experience, then I was just drawn to these themes of altruism and prosociality and so on, as my scientific subject matter and loved to write. And so I wrote nonfiction and people tell me that my non-fiction books are very story-like. So I imported some of my dad’s talents into that, but writing a novel, oh man, I have to tell you that was just for me, this homecoming that’s hard to describe what intense and positive experience it was.
Nick Hanauer:
So for our listeners who either have not read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, or who read it when they were 16, can you outline both storyline and the dominant narrative of that very important book?
David Sloan Wilson:
Yeah. So let’s just do the storyline. It focuses on a brilliant engineer named John Galt. The phrase, who is John Galt is I think the first sentence of the book. And he is basically… And Ayn Rand’s characters were about the heroic individual, that there’s a special class of men, always men, that are the doers of the world and then everyone else is a moocher and a parasite and they don’t understand that the source of their welfare are these doers. And so John Galt claims to be able to create an engine that runs off of static electricity, claims to provide an inexhaustible source of clean energy. He reminds me a little bit of Elon Musk, basically. No task too audacious, anything can be done, but he ends up leaving, going on strike. And he starts a strike of doers, which brings a society to a halt is the thumbnail sketch of Atlas Shrugged. And so it was the embodiment of the, sort of the heroic individual who pushes against all odds. What would either of you like to add to that?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I mean, that story is the origin story of sort of neoliberal trickle-down memes like the job creators, right?
David Sloan Wilson:
Yeah.
David Goldstein:
Makers and takers.
Nick Hanauer:
Makers and takers. Of course, the story is as old as humanity and Plato had sort of a human typography that mashed that of gold, silver, and bronze people. But Ayn Rand version is very neoliberal in the sense that it’s very economic and according to her and her acolytes, they’re the good people that number just a few, and they’re almost always white men, and everybody else needs to bow down to them. And anything that’s good for them, is good for the society and anything that’s good for anyone else, will drag the society down, will harm the very people it’s intended to help.
David Sloan Wilson:
Well, it’s very much free markets. Anything of value can be represented as a dollar value and so the way to provide value is to provide what people are most willing to pay for. And so the market basically becomes the new morality substitutes for all of the conventional virtues. The word give was banned from the vocabulary of the utopian community founded by John Galt. So yeah, this has become the sort of the Bible of the free market thinking. And yet at the same time, I think it’s important to stress that if Ayn Rand never existed, that individualistic mentality would still be just as strong. On the one hand, she was hugely influential, but on the other hand, the tradition of individualism that she gave voice to is the dominant tradition of the last 70 years and would exist just as strongly if Ayn Rand never existed. So it’s important that the target of our critique needs to be individualism in all its forms, not just Ayn Rand’s particular novel.
Nick Hanauer:
Right. And so you were inspired to create-
David Sloan Wilson:
By you.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. It was at 2000, it was at 2011. We were at Duke doing a conference on evolution and economics.
David Sloan Wilson:
And it was at that workshop that you or Eric said, “Well, Ayn Rand was so successful at promulgating this through fiction. Somebody should be writing a followup to Atlas Shrugged.” And the novelist within me said, “Yeah, that’s right. It will be called Atlas Hugged. The protagonist will be the grandson of John Galt whose father, John Galt II is a rational limbo character. And Ayn Rand, I’ll transport her into my novel. She’ll be Ayn Rant, she’ll be John Galt’s sweet grandmother.” And it was off from all from there. The plot line just emerged right there in that meeting. But a lot of water has gone under the bridge, 10 years worth. And I’d really like to think a little bit about what has changed, how much progress has been made, and how much progress remains to be made.
Nick Hanauer:
So I think some things have changed. It never been, I think, more clear why neoclassical economics is a failure and in many ways has had a super corrosive effect on human societies and equally clear what the alternative is. And at the center of that alternative is understanding human economies in human societies is evolutionary systems that can evolve in prosocial productive ways, but also can evolve in antisocial and nonproductive way.
David Goldstein:
I would say I’d divide, what has changed, what has progressed, what has evolved, we’ll use that word, into two categories. One is the science, if you can use that word about economics. What we know, we know a lot more about human behavior, we know a lot more about economic policies and how they really interact in the real world, minimum wage being a great example of that. There’s just a lot more evidence that orthodox economics is wrong about things. But the other thing that I, and I think this gets back to your book, David, that has changed is the narrative has evolved a lot over the past, just the past six years that I’ve been heavily involved, certainly over the past 10. And that’s one of the things that’s exciting to me about seeing your book. There’s no stronger form of narrative than fiction, and we haven’t had that on our side.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And so just take us through the plot line of your book, Atlas Hugged.
David Sloan Wilson:
Atlas Hunter begins with a freely altered version of Atlas Shrugged. There was a John Galt I. He did claim to be able to create a static electricity machine, but of course that was a folly. He couldn’t do it. He did form a utopian community, which fell apart immediately. And Ayn Rant joined that community and she developed a cosmology, which although everything else John Galt I tried was a failure, Ayn Rant’s better than real cosmology was a survivor that had been propagated around the world by a famous speech, which itself was a hoax on the airways. And then they had a child and that child became basically a collaborator with Ayn Rant and he built her objectivist philosophy into a social media empire. And then John Galt III rebelled against all of that.
Well, John Galt II got married to someone who became disenchanted with the movement right off. And she managed to divorce John Galt II and steal 10% of his wealth, which passed to John Galt III who then grew up expecting that some great thing was expected of him and that he was going to challenge his father’s evil empire. So there’s a dash of Star Wars here with the son rebelling against the evil father. And so where to go from here, and so he discovered his evolution as a secret of life. And I’m amused by that because secret of life is a sort of a catch phrase that people use is if you can go to some wise man in a cave, and he’ll tell you the secret of life.
But when you think of evolutionary theory as the secret of life and one that can actually be used in everyday life to guide our policies, then there’s a nice double meaning there. And so to make a long story short, he actually succeeds in catalyzing the process of cultural evolution and bringing about a worldwide transformation in 100 days. And just imagine what it would be like if that novel succeeded to the degree of Rand’s novel and just became a fictional cosmology for our time to match… What if it had the impact of Atlas Shrugged? Just think about that.
David Goldstein:
You mean millions of people just following its philosophy without thinking it through? Because that’s…
David Sloan Wilson:
Okay. I’ll take that. Surely, why not.
David Goldstein:
Well, let’s talk about that. The reason for writing this book, the importance of narrative, and the importance of using fiction to transmit a narrative. We’ve always worked in our office with the idea that politics is downstream of culture. And so if you can talk a little bit about why narrative is so important.
David Sloan Wilson:
Absolutely. And this gets evolutionary real fast. My former student, Jonathan Gottschall wrote a book called The Storyteller Animal, how stories make as human.
David Goldstein:
Fantastic book, by the way.
David Sloan Wilson:
It is a fantastic book. And it has to do with the fact that we’re such a symbolic species. If we want to get scientificy about it, we can talk about such things as dual inheritance theory and stuff like that. But what it really means is that because we’re human, our symbolic meaning systems are very much like our genes. And so each and every person is a collection of genes, we call that their genotype. Their genes influence everything you can measure about them, we call that their phenotype. So you have your genotype-phenotype relationship, but then because we’re humans, we also have our meaning systems. Let’s call it our symbotype and that symbotype influences everything we do. The very same phenotype is influenced by our genes and our symbotypes and our genotypes interact with each other, not only through evolutionary time, but also in our lifetimes, for example, by up-regulating and down-regulating our genetic expressions.
And so you could really think about what we have in our heads as formative of what we do, like our genes, usually conveyed in stories. So what we think matters and in the form of narrative, most of the time. There’s something about a story that can be much more impactful in how you think than in just intellectual discourse.
David Goldstein:
And so this may be is why neoclassical economics has been so influential because it’s essentially a fiction.
David Sloan Wilson:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, I mean, and it has been weaponized into a set of memes and narratives that have been enormously persuasive and have shaped the culture. And I want to bring the conversation back to economics and why this is so consequential for economics and the shape of human societies, because what neoclassical economics and neoliberalism and Atlas Shrugged taught the culture was that selfishness was the cause of prosperity, right? That’s the main message. That humans are reliably selfish creatures and it is that selfishness that is the cause of the prosperity you see around you, and by extension the people who are most selfish, like the character John Galt, are the most prosperity creating folks in the society and should be taken seriously and worshiped effectively. And the thing is, is that we now know with this essentially scientific certainty, that that is actually not what human beings are intrinsically like at all, that we evolved over millions of years to be altruistic cooperators, mostly, other regarding, reciprocal, and intuitively moral. And thus it is broad scale cooperation that is the source of prosperity in human societies.
That is the indispensable sort of human economic characteristic. And all of that reminds me of our favorite David Sloan Wilson quote, which I think is really worth surfacing in this conversation because it speaks to the tension between selfishness and cooperation, which is that selfishness beats altruism within groups and altruistic groups beat selfish groups, everything else is commentary. And I think that… I think that you did write a book which is a response, David, to this sort of a narrative of selfishness and individualism, but you’re you’re not making a collectivist argument either. Right?
David Sloan Wilson:
Absolutely not. And I think that that’s one of the important points that has to be made. And when we toggle back and forth between the fictional world and the real world, now we’re in the real world. I say there’s two things that don’t work. One is pure laissez-faire because it’s just not true that everyone pursuing their self interest benefits the common good, but the other thing that never works is centralized planning. And so it’s very important is to say that every socialist experiment that’s been tried, not only at the national scale, but also at the scale of business and command and control top down, centralized planning doesn’t work. Why? Because the world is too complex to be understood by any group of experts. And so centralized planning doesn’t work, pure laissez-faire doesn’t work. What does work? Not just something down the middle, but actually an explicit process of cultural evolution in which we have systemic goals in mind, we orient variation around the target of selection, and then we identify and replicate best practices. We have to be basically consciously evolving our future, it’s the only way that we can go about doing it.
Nick Hanauer:
What I’m trying to do, and I think it’s important to do for our listeners, is try to connect in a more explicit way why understanding an economy or a human society as an evolutionary system is so essential to understanding how we should organize policy to maximize welfare. One of the big questions that we get in our podcast a lot is that often our listeners are super confused about our enthusiasm for markets and capitalism, which they see as having been super harmful to lots and lots of people on lots of and lots of things and the planet and everything else. And the answer is evolution because properly organized markets are a super effective evolutionary system for solving human problems. And if the target of selection is right, then we create prosocial solutions that actually improve people’s lives and we minimize the harm that we do in the process. And that’s the best way of organizing a human society yet invented. And it beats the crap out of any forum of statism or central planning. And so that’s why it’s important.
David Sloan Wilson:
I affirm that. And so it’s very affirmative to an enlightened capitalist mindset. The way I would play that back would be to say that if positive cultural revolution is going to take place, all kinds of changes are required. And those changes are a form of competition, better practices have to replace worst practices and it has to happen faster than ever before. Where do those new ideas come from? Well, let it be entrepreneurial, let it be inclusive. Let the ideas come from everywhere. But as long as we restructure markets too so that’s basically where all that entrepreneurial energy flows in the direction now, then that’s what we’ve done. That’s what we mean by a target of selection. And when we talk about orienting variation around the target, we’re talking about letting a thousand flowers bloom and let the ideas come from everywhere.
So those three ingredients, selection, variation, and replication, that’s what needs to be done, but the amount of work that’s required in order to do it at a large scale and ultimately it must be the planetary scale, that’s another implication, is that the system has to be the whole planetary system. Anything less will create problems of the scale.
David Goldstein:
This conversation raises a question for me, David. And I’m wondering if in writing a novel, you struggled with what I see is a narrative asymmetry between our view of how the world works and the objectivist neoliberal neoclassical view. Neoclassical economics, the orthodox economics, is actually really straight forward and simple. It presents the market as this tool for transubstantiating selfishness into the common good, self-interest into the common. And that is a very simple story. And it’s also really compelling because it’s like, “Oh, I can be self-interested and it’s good for people, that it’s easy. I don’t have to sacrifice anything. I can just be as individualistic as I want.” Whereas the prosocial view of the world, it’s a lot more complex. I’m just wondering how you went about… It’s one thing to critique Ayn Rand’s construction of the world, I’m wondering how you went about taking your scientific view of how society and the economy worked and putting it into a story.
David Sloan Wilson:
Well, let me push back on some of them. For one thing, economics is anything but simple. If you actually take an economics course, it’s bewildering. And so there’s a simple narrative that you could make out of greed is good, but think of all the other powerful narratives, the more conventional narratives such as Christianity, which managed to be compelling and then to basically to inculcate prosociality and altruism. In the actual novel, John Galt III goes to college and he figures he’s got to take economics in order to combat his father’s evil empire. He flunks that course. And so he feels deeply fraudulent and then he has to hit rock bottom before he takes Howard Head’s Secret of Life course. And Howard head just makes everything clear in a single lecture. Variation, selection, replication, what’s so hard to understand? And he pulls out this instant expertise on the first day of class.
And so John Galt III feels saved because at lasts he has a theory that makes sense of the world from day one. And the idea that evolution provides a transcendent knowledge, a point that I communicated my non-fiction books. I mean, this is true. I mean, that’s why Thomas Huxley said “How stupid are we not to have thought of that.” There’s actually a toolkit, that’s so simple that anyone can master it and provides the instant expertise that enabled Darwin from day one to make sense of everything that he turned his eyes upon, including the human condition. So I can almost turn the tables on that and say that we have the simple narrative. We have the intuitive narrative once we are able to construct it.
Nick Hanauer:
Ayn Rand, her goal in writing that book, it feels like, was to leave the reader with a very particular conception of what an ideal form of human behavior was, what you should be like as a person. If you had to summarize how you think someone should behave going through life and in the world, how do you characterize that? And I just want to underscore that her view was perfect individualism, pure selfishness. You’re actually not arguing for pure altruism, you’re arguing for something more nuanced, but what is it? How would you describe it?
David Sloan Wilson:
Well, I describe it with a stack of symbols that is on the cover of the book and it also in real life would describe it as multilevel selection. But in the book, in the novel, there is a symbolic representation of the true objectivist movement is a stack of symbols with the earth on top, underneath that is the American flag, underneath that there is a circle, and underneath that there is a dot. And so the earth of course stands for a whole earth ethic. First and foremost, we should be regarding ourselves as human beings and citizens of the earth. That should be the primary social identity. Now that doesn’t make other identities go away, not by any means. The dot at the bottom is the individual. That’s not the least of it, that’s in some ways the most of it, the whole system is to make individuals thriving.
But the way to do that is for individuals to form into groups, and a very essential message both in the book and in real life is the small group as a fundamental unit of human society. Large-scale society must be multi-cellular and the cell is not the individual, it’s the small, purposeful and appropriately structured group. And I think that’s one of the biggest differences between individualism in all of its forms and multi-level selection theory is the identification of the small purposeful group as a fundamental unit. That is something we can do right away as to reconstitute that level of human society.
And then what the American flag represents is all our current institutions of all kinds that are needed in order to translate global policy. What’s good for the globe has to be translated into what’s good for the nation, cities, and so on. And so that’s the total conception, which is… I mean, I’m trying to ask, is that more complicated than what economics is telling us? I don’t know but since the individualistic economics failed, it’s not really material. The main question is can this multi-level view be communicated in a way which is compelling? And if I did my job as a storyteller, then it has.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, listen, it has been so great to catch up. Oh, we always have to ask our final question, which is, Goldie?
David Goldstein:
Why do you do this work?
David Sloan Wilson:
No. I mean, the prosocial impulse, that’s part of it. That’s a good way to end you guys, because I think that the idea that we’re all fundamentally selfish of course, is the idea that we’re combating. And when you think that prosociality, the desire to help others and all of us can be as deeply rooted as the desire just to do well for oneself. So I’m motivated prosocially, I’m an empath. So what gets me out of that is the idea that there actually is a way to make this world better. There is a path you might say, and that is as motivating for me as any religious belief that I know. What I want to do is I want to create a cosmology and a meaning system, which it is a motivational as any other belief system that’s out there. But in this case, motivates the correct behaviors because it’s science driven.
Nick Hanauer:
I love it. It’s fantastic answer, actually. Well, David, thank you so much for being with us and can’t wait for the next book.
David Sloan Wilson:
Thank you. Actually, don’t wait for that. Just read the one I just wrote and then gifted, not sold. Available only on AtlasHugged.world and all proceeds going, anything you wish to give in return goes to support my nonprofit Prosocial World, where we attempt to implement all of this in the real world.
Nick Hanauer:
That was a wide ranging interview. But if I had to sum it up, I just think that the thing about Atlas Shrugged, the novel and Ayn Rand’s view of the world, and certainly Milton Friedman’s view of the world, and Alan Greenspan’s view of the world, and they don’t see it as an evolutionary system. They see it as this sort of mechanical hierarchical system that have at the center, the doers or the makers or the job creators or whatever it is, individuals rather than-
David Goldstein:
Individuals, right? As Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no society, there’s just individuals and families.”
Nick Hanauer:
Families, right? And that’s just objectively false. That’s just not how human societies operate. And that view does not explain where prosperity, stability, and security come from. And David’s novel, particularly for people who have not wasted their time as we have studying the very technical particulars of all of this, it’s a great way to explore these issues and get an intuitive sense for what’s right and what’s wrong.
David Goldstein:
When you look at these two books in comparison, when you look at Ayn Rand’s philosophy as it’s presented in Atlas Shrugged and her other books, it basically just champions the individual is the fundamental unit of human society. Whereas in David’s evolutionary philosophy and as he represented in Atlas Hugged, it’s that prosocial view that basically looks at the group as the fundamental unit of human society. And the thing that’s really important is that, whereas Ayn Rand pulled her view of the world out of the broader cultural milieu in which she was raised and which she found herself, David’s pulling this out of actual science, that this is how we evolved. We evolved to exist and thrive within small groups of no more than 100, 150 individuals, often quite smaller than that, and as a species that could not survive on the individual level. It wasn’t just thriving within the group, it was the only way we survived because we’re actually not that rugged of an animal. We don’t compete well with lions one-on-one, but as a group, we do quite well.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
David Goldstein:
And also competing with other groups of humans.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And it is remarkable how durable the myth of the rugged individual is given how objectively obvious it is that no individual on their own can survive, much less thrive. So anyway, fun conversation. David has always, he’s such a smart and interesting person, and hopefully he’ll write some more fun books for us to talk about. So in the next episode of Pitchfork Economics, we get to talk to our old friend, Andrew Yang, about his thoughts on economics and otherwise.
Speaker 4:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.