Some Notes About Tomorrow
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Recorded in 1992, Dr. Leonard Peikoff reflects on the causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He explores why common accounts provide an insufficient answer because they do not grasp the philosophic causes. He projects that the bad philosophy that permeates Russian culture will prevent the country from adopting free political and economic institutions.
Study Guide
This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download a printable PDF version below.
| Why is there broad agreement that the world had changed in 1992? |
| What was the event that precipitated the belief that everything is different? |
| Why did the failure of Marxism in Soviet Russia not mark a deep historical change? |
| How did Marxist collectivism fail where Christianity continued on? |
| What two factors outlasted Marxism in Russia that undermine freedom? |
| What ethical approach undermined worldly success in the Soviet bloc? |
| What philosophic premises will allow and demand that dictatorship follow the end of communism? |
| Why is the West unable to help the Eastern bloc to adopt freedom? |
| Why has American business faltered so much in the face of Japanese competition? |
| What is the fundamental cause of American decline? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:07:26 | My question regards to the concepts of “evil” and “immoral.” Is it possible for an action to be evil and not immoral (or vice versa), and what is the precise relationship between the concepts? |
| 1:08:41 | I heard that you recently taught Objectivism to first-graders. I would have liked to have asked you about teaching Objectivism to first-graders, but I will ask you something else. Suppose you have parents with mixed premises or who are highly Kantian, but they still have their child whom they love very much. How would you sell Objectivism to them? Is it possible to sell Objectivism to such people, and how would you do it? |
| 1:13:12 | I agree with you that adopting a protectionist system in this country is not the proper response to the Japanese building a better product. But my question for you is: How do we respond to Japanese protectionism? What is the appropriate American response? |
| 1:14:34 | Would you care to comment on the following presidential candidates for the following parties in the following years? Ross Perot, 1992, Republican or Independent; H. Norman Schwarzkopf, 1996, Republican or Democrat; Pete DuPont, 1996, Republican |
| 1:20:33 | Now that the socialist movement in this country seems to have fizzled, it seems like the environmentalist movement is what’s taking its place. What do you see the future of this movement being? |
| 1:23:45 | You raised an interesting question in your lecture about the possibility of a nation like the former Soviet Union ever embracing capitalism considering the breadth of its current intellectual decay… there is still primarily a widespread epistemologically mystical view of the universe in the Soviet Union. But wasn’t this also true in Japan in 1945, and yet in two generations they were outstripping the West? Is there therefore not some reason for optimism? |
| 1:26:03 | I’ve heard it said that free will is limited, and I was wondering in what respect this is true. |
| 1:27:21 | I appreciated your comments very much on the fall of communism in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Can you comment on the prognosis for the fall of communism in American universities? |
| 1:28:51 | Is there any effort to send Objectivist material to Russia and Eastern Europe? |
| 1:29:35 | With respect to America and the election this fall, isn’t there a serious danger that the Republicans might interpret a defeat as, in fact, a call to become more liberal and more statist and that they have to go the Democratic route to get the votes? |
| 1:30:43 | Since it’s now okay for Objectivists to engage in public intellectual discourse with some libertarians, such as talk show host David Brudnoy, as you stated on his show Friday night, how can a rational student of Objectivism determine which libertarians are okay to talk with? |