Written and directed by Curry Barker
Starring Cooper Tomlinson and Inde Navarette
Distributed by Focus Features (United States)
Running time: 109 minutes
Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, sexual content, pervasive language, and brief graphic nudity.

Obsession (2025) follows Bear Bailey (Michael Johnston), an introverted, hopeless romantic who faces severe anxiety trying to confess his love to his good friend, Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarette).

In the opening shots, the cold palette and absence of characters close to Bear emphasize his unhappiness in his isolation. Characters in the background are blurry but still perceptible, suggesting that human connection is constantly in the back of Bear’s mind but always out of reach. This loneliness is underscored when his cat, Sandy, dies; she had been the only other occupant of the one-bedroom home he inherited from his grandmother.

His infatuation with Nikki seems sweet on the surface. But during his speech to his best friend, Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), in which he practices what he will say to her as he confesses his feelings, it’s clear that he loves what Nikki provides for him rather than Nikki herself.

Pretending to talk to Nikki, he says, “You were the only person who was nice to me when I moved here.” This suggests that Bear has experienced social ostracization and exclusion before, and this line explains in part his intense nervousness and anxiety about talking to Nikki, who is supposed to be his friend. It also suggests that Bear views himself as an outsider. Instead of this being a singular experience that he has grown or learned from, it is now a facet of his personality, and he views Nikki’s acceptance of him as an outsider as a reason to believe that they could be happy together romantically.

After a phone call with Nikki during which she complains about losing her crystal necklace, he goes to a crystal shop to buy her another. This will be his in; by replacing something she cherished, he will be able to say the thing he cannot with words—that he loves and cares for her.

But when he gets to the crystal shop, he is instead enchanted by a small children’s toy called the One Wish Willow, which grants the user one wish if he breaks the stick in half. It is unclear why Bear decides to pick this toy over the necklace. It has no significance for Nikki other than that it would be a present from her friend Bear. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the intimacy of replacing a necklace was too explicit a confession for Bear, so he went for a less obvious option in case Nikki said no. This choice reveals something about Bear’s character: He abandons his logic for his emotion. His fear of rejection is understandable, but he makes an incomprehensible choice. Giving Nikki the necklace would surely communicate his feelings better than giving her the One Wish Willow, which says absolutely nothing on its face. He has more of a chance of being rejected by giving her the One Wish Willow because it is not personal to Nikki and therefore does not convey the message that he understands her and cares for her.

This abandonment of logic for the sake of emotional security is a consistent feature of this story, which not only diverts Bear away from a path of clarity and reason but is also the driving mechanism through which Nikki is subjected to torture.

After several excruciating tries to draw Nikki away from their friends for a personal talk at trivia night, Bear settles for driving her home. In the car, their conversation suggests closeness but is stilted by silences that should be filled with Bear’s confessions. Instead, he keeps quiet, pushing himself to talk but always doing so to change the topic, much to his own frustration.

After Nikki eventually gets out of the car and walks toward her door, Bear realizes that he forgot to give her the One Wish Willow. Knowing that even if he had, he wouldn’t have said what he really feels, he instead breaks the stick and says the words to himself, “I wish Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone else in the world.”

What follows is completely unexpected. The wish has a horrific effect on Nikki’s life. Her body is taken over by an extremely violent and obsessive entity. She lies that her dad has cancer to invoke sympathy from Bear, so he stays with her all the time. She digs up his dead cat and makes a shrine to her on Bear’s kitchen floor to show her devotion to him. She brutally kills her best friend, with whom she suspects Bear is having an affair, by smashing her face into her steering wheel. The real Nikki is buried in her own body, and we see fleeting glimpses of her when she suddenly recoils from Bear’s touch, screaming in agony and disorientation.

As audience members, we must admit that Bear had no way to know that his wish would cause this. For the first quarter of the film, he suspects that his wish has worked, but he resists accepting that because of the impossibility. But we get periodic glimpses that the real Nikki is trapped inside her own mind—and Bear sees them. Even if he could not accept that his wish had worked, Nikki’s actions are in line with someone experiencing a psychotic break. After digging up the cat, Nikki makes Bear lunch for work. When he bites into the strange, discolored meat, he realizes that she has cut up his cat and fed it to him. A picture of the two of them is taped to the inside of the lunchbox lid; Bear is circled with the words “you,” and Nikki is circled with the words “not me.” So why does he spend so much of the film trying to find ways to contain this new Nikki so they could have the relationship he has always dreamed of?

We can sympathize with Bear for rejecting a conclusion that seems inconceivable. His entire worldview must change to accept that Nikki’s body has been hijacked due to his wish. Previously, he believed that he lived in a world governed by reason, but he now knows that he lives in a world where dark magic can affect the lives of innocent, unassuming citizens. This is also hard to accept because it means that Nikki is powerless to stop it. Bear has forced Nikki into a state of waking torture in which she has become a prisoner inside her own body with absolutely no hope of breaking out.

In a state of intense bewilderment, Bear goes back to the crystal shop for answers, where he is told, rather candidly, that the only way to free Nikki from this agony is to kill himself. If he dies, the wish will die with him, and Nikki will be free; otherwise, Nikki will live like this forever, in an endless state of powerless servitude.

The film has presented us with an unwinnable ultimatum, which can reasonably evoke sympathy from the audience. Only one solution exists, which requires the biggest loss any human being can suffer. However, it is made clear through the consistent presentations of Nikki’s agony that this is a necessary action. In the final scenes, as Bear debates whether to overdose on pills to end his torment, the film is faster paced, manic, evoking the feeling that Bear is running out of time before something even worse happens, and we cannot help but hope for his death to prevent it. His life taken to save Nikki’s is not a sacrifice, because a life in which he has wreaked such havoc on an undeserving Nikki is not a life worth living. Forcing someone into servitude is a catastrophic violation of individual rights, and morally it must be met with forfeiture of the criminal’s own rights, even if the full effects were unintended. What removes or diminishes our sympathy for Bear is how long it takes him to recognize the fact that he has done something wrong and therefore, should be punished. Even if Bear didn’t know what his wish would entail when he first made it, his decision to accept someone else’s enslavement as long as it serves his desires is evil.

One of the most basic virtues we can exercise is choosing to think rationally and to evaluate the world around us. Therefore, wilfully inducing inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment is a source of evil. Bear spends much of the film ignoring that which he knows is true: Nikki is behaving significantly out of character in a way that puts her life and the lives of others in danger. He lies to his friends and himself, trying to convince them that Nikki is fine, that they love each other so she seems different. When no one believes him, he regurgitates her lie about her dad dying to explain her drastic change, even though he knows it is untrue and makes no sense considering their distant relationship. He isolates her further by telling Ian that nothing is wrong with her, even when Ian identifies her behavior as beyond abnormal and suggests that Bear might be taking advantage of her in her time of crisis.

In the dead of night, the real Nikki manages to break through to talk to Bear, saying that the entity inside of her is sleeping. She begs Bear to kill her, emphasizing that this experience is agonizing and terrifying. Instead of empathizing with her and recognizing his own mistakes, he demands to know what’s so bad about being with him that she would rather be dead. She tries to reply that she has never been with him, but he cuts her off by storming out of the room.

Although Bear, to some degree, is a victim of circumstance, his callousness and complete disregard for Nikki’s experience is truly evil. He had no way to know that his wish would induce such a horrific experience for everyone involved. But when he identified his wish as directly responsible, he should have taken the necessary steps to remedy it. He should not have continued to puppet her around, treating her more like an object than a person. One of the most horrifying and graphic scenes is when he has sex with her; the camera zooms in on her blank expression, absent and disassociated from her own body, as Nikki makes placid sounds of enjoyment.

Even if it is unintended, subjecting someone to involuntary servitude is one of the most heinous acts a person can commit, and there is properly a legal requirement to take away some of the criminal’s own rights in response. But Bear being arrested and thrown in prison would not have freed Nikki. The only way Bear could free Nikki was to take his own life or to take hers. But taking hers would have been immoral to the highest degree because she did nothing wrong.

We can feel sympathy for Bear that he is left without options, but logic and reality demand recognition. His decision to ignore Nikki’s predicament is evil; by doing so, Bear willingly ignores his ability to think by pretending he doesn’t understand the circumstances, which only serves to prolong Nikki’s servitude to him.

Bear’s death is a catharsis for the audience. The audience and Bear are the only ones who know that Nikki is trapped inside of her own body because of the wish. We see Nikki, charismatic and confident before Bear subjects her to this torture. Then we see her in the final scene, screaming yet paralyzed by shock, and we know Bear had to die—anything else would not have delivered the retribution Nikki deserved. Obsession horrifically shows the evils of this action, dealt with justly through the ending.

We can feel sorry for Bear that he had to take his own life while recognizing it is the only thing a sane person could do—because he’d doomed Nikki to a fate worse than death.

Achieving a happy, fulfilling life depends on recognizing that your values, choices, and actions are within your control. This week, Maddox Locher details how he took charge of his thinking and life choices in “How I Renounced Religion and Embraced a Life of Reason” (adapted from his talk at LevelUp 2025). Also, I interview life coach Daria Ermolenko about how to “get in the driving seat of your life” by discovering and understanding the nature and causes of your emotions.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

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Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a live talk and has been lightly edited. It retains the cadence and idiosyncrasies of an oral presentation.

Religion taught me how to lie before I knew what honesty is.

I still remember sitting in my Sunday school class when I was about ten years old. The teacher asked the class, “How has God been working in your life?” I heard a variety of responses. One girl said that she had run into a friend at the grocery store. This friend hadn’t been going to church for a long time, and the girl said that God had “placed” her friend at the grocery store so that she could evangelize to her and bring her back to church. There was a boy in the class who also gave a similar story of God “working” in his life. He said that his mother came across a Bible verse that really helped them both through a difficult time. His grandmother had recently passed away, and this verse helped them cope with their grief. He claimed that God “placed” that verse there. As I sat there and listened to these stories, I couldn’t help but wonder: Weren’t these just happy accidents?

I didn’t see how God was working in their lives—I simply saw people acting in the same ways they always had. What would it say about their choices if God were determining their actions? What would it mean if the mother was “pushed” to read the Bible that day? Would it have made any difference if she had found the Bible verse? Also, would her grief, on some level, be ordained by God, too? On the other hand, if the girl’s friend was “placed” at the grocery store by God, what does that say about her friend’s “choices?”

In other words: Do our actions have any meaning at all if we’re not choosing them?

This train of thought was interrupted when the teacher turned to me and asked, “Maddox, how has God been working in your life?” I sat frozen for a bit because I wasn’t sure how to answer.

But I felt compelled to give an answer because, in the church, it was looked down upon to openly doubt or to say, “Well, I don’t really know. I don’t really see how God is working.” I felt as if I had to make up an example because I desperately wanted to fit in—I wanted to conform for comfort. So, I did.

I lied that day. I decided to tell the entire class that I, too, saw God working in my life. I told them that I dropped my Bible on the ground, and it opened on the perfect story to help me through a difficult time, too (I wasn’t very original).

When I shared this, I was rewarded. My teacher affirmed me by saying, “Good job, Maddox. Thanks for sharing that great story. I’m glad to see that God’s working in your life, too.” I had so many experiences like this in which I was thinking something different from what everyone else seemed to be thinking, but I didn’t trust my own thoughts. I conformed because, like many people, I liked to be liked, and I disliked being disliked.

I grew up in the church and went to Christian private school from the ages of four to fourteen. During that time, I was completely immersed in Christianity. I went to “science” class, and I was taught creationism. I attended two services weekly: one on Wednesday and one on Sunday. I also was on sports teams and attended all sorts of other classes—but all baked Christian tenets into what otherwise would be normal activities and subjects.

Christianity was in every area of my life. One time, when I was on the soccer team at my middle school, the teacher told us that anything we achieved on the soccer field was ultimately God’s doing because he’s the one who created us—he gave me my body, and when I scored a goal, it was for the Lord.

So, when I scored a goal or did anything that I felt proud of, I convinced myself that I shouldn’t be proud of it. I discredited my own achievements. I belittled myself so that I could “serve God” by giving him credit for everything “I” did—and this pattern was common in many things I did.

All my achievements were ultimately “justified” if they served God—which often meant serving other people. I went on a mission trip to Houston when I was about sixteen years old. The goal of the trip was to go into poor neighborhoods to give away food, hand out Bibles, and share our testimonies (our stories of how we became Christian).

We were basically put into a child labor camp in the scorching heat. My first tasks were to paint a church wall and give away food. I remember another task pretty vividly: My pastors asked me to knock on people’s front doors in an attempt to give them food and to share my testimony. I wondered why I believed in Christianity in the first place. I started calling myself a Christian in first grade under the guidance of my teacher. I still remember that day vividly: I broke down in tears along with much of the first-grade class because I felt so guilty for being a “sinner.”

My teacher had great power to prime us emotionally to believe anything. But when I went to a stranger’s door, I wasn’t sure how to persuade anyone to believe in Christianity. It had always been an emotional thing for me; I had never considered that I had never embraced Christianity on a rational basis. I had adopted Christianity partly because I was mimicking other children—and all of us were obeying adults who told us what to believe.

At first, I was scared to go up to a stranger’s door. But I also felt guilty not doing it because I saw everyone else going up to doors and knocking.

I felt that I was supposed to because, if I didn’t, what kind of Christian would I be? Eventually, the guilt motivated me to knock on a door. A lady opened it, and after a few minutes of conversation, she revealed that she believed in Allah.

This was a curveball that I hadn’t expected. I didn’t know how to respond. How was I supposed to explain that her faith was wrong? I had no idea what to do. So, I said “OK, have a nice day. Bye.”

In essence, I was taught that I was supposed to serve God—not myself. If I didn’t, then I was guilty and would be sent to hell.

Similar “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situations recurred throughout my childhood. During my final year of high school, our local government shut down our school to “slow the spread” of COVID-19. As a result, we went remote for the last two months of the year. I remember thinking, Oh, this is great. I can just go home and play video games! Many of my teachers didn’t know what to do. So, I went home and did the minimum coursework necessary to pass my final year of school. Once summer arrived, I fell into a deep depression because I lacked purpose.

During this time, I sensed on some level that something important was either wrong with or missing from my life. On one hand, I resented others setting my schedule and determining my priorities, but on the other, I saw the importance of having some structure in my life. I decided that I needed more structure—but on my own terms.

I considered going into the military; both my parents had been in the air force. If I went, I could learn how to become a radio operator or learn another skill on the military’s dime. But the military didn’t appeal to me because I would have to sign away years of my life.

Another option was college. College is very expensive, although the idea was interesting. I could jump into subjects such as engineering or video game development. But I didn’t want to go into student debt or spend three to four years on a degree program, especially considering that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life yet.

I sat on my hands until my mother reminded me of Praxis, an online college alternative. Its goal is to help young people build meaningful careers rather than merely find jobs that pay the bills. This really interested me because its website guaranteed a satisfying, well-paying job or your money back. Praxis, which was both shorter and cheaper than college, seemed like a good option. I decided to take the leap.

In Praxis, I learned all sorts of skills. I learned how to manage my time more effectively, maintain a sound financial budget, and improve my communication skills. I also did “value identification exercises” in which I asked myself questions aimed at discovering what I wanted out of life and what actions I would have to take to achieve those values. Through these exercises, I realized that many of the things I spent my time on weren’t things I wanted to value; I prioritized them because other people said I had to.

Right before beginning the job-hunt portion of Praxis, I attended an adviser call. She gave me a simple, very helpful piece of advice: “In order to grow, you have to work hard; you have to do difficult things.” This made sense to me; any time I’d grown, it was always difficult. After providing this advice, she asked me, “Maddox, what is the thing that comes immediately to mind that you see as difficult and that you think you should do?” What came to my mind was sales.

At the time, I was considering a few career options, but sales scared me because I feared getting rejected by prospective customers, most of whom were adults well into their careers. Who was I to try to persuade them? I knew that if I wanted to be someone who could persuade and trade with others effectively, I needed to keep building communication skills. I got a sales job at a software company.

I’m telling you all this because Praxis helped me stop simply accepting the premises I was holding because someone else had told me to. I began examining Christianity as thoroughly as I was my career.

However, I want to emphasize that, at this point, I was only beginning to question Christianity, and only in certain respects. I wasn’t yet questioning the truth of Christianity—only my understanding of it. I thought that I could become better at persuading others of its value if I could first persuade myself in clear and powerful language. To learn how to do that, I went to a class at my church on how to argue “logically” for Christianity.

The teacher of that class affirmed what I already suspected: “In order to convince somebody else, you first have to convince yourself.” I felt that Christianity was true—that was the whole reason I was in this class. But when I reflected on how I knew it was true, I realized that I didn’t.

I began to ask more questions, such as: How can I know anything is true? How is knowledge possible? What even is truth? Where does it come from? Why are some people certain and others uncertain?

Although it wasn’t the teacher’s intention, I began to slowly whittle away at my faith. Due to this class, I decided to temporarily suspend my belief in Christianity. I still felt emotional attachment to Christianity, but I strongly wanted to learn to defend it rationally, and to do that (I thought), I would have to approach Christianity as if I were a nonbeliever.

This experience reignited my dormant passion for discovering truth. From a young age, I wanted to learn truths about the world, but my Christian community often squashed my inquisitive tendencies. They said that the “truth” of the Bible was all I needed.

With my mind primed to look for the nature and source of truth, I found myself drawn in 2021 to a conference called TOS-Con (now called LevelUp). I came across a variety of helpful ideas and articles at and after this event. One article fundamentally transformed my views on a subject I had never thought about before: “Reason vs. Mysticism: Truth and Consequences” by Craig Biddle. It shows how reason and faith are two opposing and incompatible ways of attempting to gain knowledge. By thinking about this article, I realized that I had been trying to go by faith when it came to Christianity, but in many other areas of my life, I was going by reason. I determined that if I were to accept Christianity, I would need to be able to ground it in reality using reason.

As I learned from novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, “Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.”1 For example, we know that gravity exists. If we hold a ball at arm’s length and let go of it, it will fall to the ground. We see countless other objects obeying the law of gravity every day. With this knowledge, we can assume that anything we let go of on Earth that is heavier than air will fall to the ground. If we then see a magician appearing to levitate, we know he must be counteracting the force of gravity somehow. Perhaps he has a well-hidden wire system, or he is relying on an optical illusion. These answers fit our knowledge of reality—we know that whatever he is doing, it’s not “supernatural”; it’s part of the same reality that we understand through reason. If we see something that doesn’t fit that understanding, we know we’re either mistaken in what we think we’re seeing or missing a piece of knowledge about reality—and we can set about finding out what we need to resolve the conflict. Reason helps us spot the holes in our thinking and form an integrated, noncontradictory view of reality.

On the other hand, there’s faith. Faith is the acceptance of an idea as true without evidence or in direct contradiction to evidence. For example, I used to believe in young earth creationism, the idea that God created the world in six days about six thousand to ten thousand years ago. But young earth creationism contradicts many facts. The fossil record alone—which includes fossils from millions of years ago—demonstrates that the age of the Earth is much older than six to ten thousand years old. Faith requires accepting such contradictory claims as these or rejecting perceptually available evidence.

As I learned more about epistemology (the study of human knowledge), I learned more about what reason and faith are—and how we properly validate our understanding of the nature of each. Regarding more and more issues, I began to ask myself, “Am I going by faith or by reason?” In asking this question, I realized that the vast majority of my religious beliefs could only be accepted on faith.

I realized that I couldn’t use faith to confirm Christianity’s truth because if faith is a valid means of knowledge, then anything goes.2 Recall the Muslim lady I mentioned earlier: We believed in different gods and mutually exclusive religious ideas, and we both believed via faith.

For example: Faith doesn’t solve the problem that under Christianity, Jesus is considered the immortal son of God; and under Islam, Jesus is considered a mortal prophet. Jesus can’t be both immortal and mortal. Faith, if valid, justifies not only contradictions such as this without any evidence—it permits belief in anything without evidence.

These ideas helped me clarify my approach to seeking truth and figure out whether Christianity was true. At this point, Christianity still seemed to have a vestige of value: It seemed to preach great ethics.

Rand’s ideas about morality, alongside my newfound understanding of reason versus faith, helped me begin to deconstruct my Christianity. Morality is a code of values that we use to guide our choices and actions; on this much, Rand and Christianity generally agree. However, Rand identified a crucial element of morality that Christianity explicitly rejects: The purpose of an individual’s life is his own happiness on Earth. Morality can either be rational, irrational, or some mixture of both. In other words: There can be aspects of a moral code that are life-serving and others that are not.

By studying Rand’s ethics, I learned that there are different kinds of moral codes. For most of my life, I had been accepting a kind of morality that I didn’t even know I was accepting. This was the morality of altruism—more specifically, religious altruism. Altruism literally means “otherism.” It’s the idea that being moral requires sacrificing yourself to others. In my case, it meant sacrificing for God. Rand validly criticized altruism; she pointed out that there are no rational reasons we should sacrifice ourselves for others. I tried finding reasons to sacrifice, but I couldn’t. I didn’t see, for example, why I should become a missionary just because God said so.

Rand also clarified the concept of selfishness as the rational alternative to altruism. She called her morality “rational egoism.” Egoism gets a bad rap; many people assume that egoism necessarily advocates preying on others and sacrificing them to yourself to “benefit” in the immediate moment. There are some people whose ethical codes amount to this, but this isn’t what Rand advocates. She condemned such behavior because it violates rights or otherwise destroys the conditions on which human life depends. She pointed out that preying on others is actually selfless—it harms and destroys the self in addition to harming others. It is much more profitable (in every sense of the word) to be kind and generous to others by default unless a specific person’s actions warrant different treatment.3

If I hurt someone (except in self-defense or defense of others) or steal from him without just cause, there are many negative consequences for both of us. The police might catch me and put me in prison. Psychologically, I would be tormented. I’d forever have to wonder, Will I get caught? Moreover, if I don’t respect rights, why should anyone respect mine? Such behavior would damage my self-esteem, too. How could I respect myself if I do disgraceful things?

Rand advocated rational self-interest (“rational” is redundant once we truly understand what self-interest is and why, but this is a topic for another day). This requires looking at all the relevant facts of reality, and it requires integrating all such facts into a noncontradictory code of ethics.

In part, morality is a matter of surviving. If we don’t have water, food, or air, then we will wither away physically. Morally, we must achieve these values—if we want to continue to exist. Morality is also a matter of thriving. If we don’t have good friendships or meaningful work, we’ll wither away emotionally and psychologically. Morally, we must achieve such kinds of spiritually fulfilling values—if we want to live life to the fullest.

With my newfound understanding of epistemology and ethics, I went to my pastors hoping to understand why they believed everything the Bible said. Like a curious three-year-old, I asked them “why” repeatedly. One time, we discussed the “virtue” of unconditional love. I didn’t understand how loving somebody who isn’t deserving of it could be just. Doesn’t justice involve giving people what they deserve, including love? You should reward the good for being good, and you should not reward bad people for being bad, right?

They answered, in part, by saying that God justifies unconditional love. He loves us no matter what we do. I wasn’t satisfied; how does God justify this? Such a question always received the same kind of response: “Sorry, but God’s ways are higher than our ways. There’s just no way of knowing why he says some of the things he does. You just need to have faith, Maddox.”

What this meant was: “You need to give up your mind. You need to stop looking at reality and obey God without questioning and without understanding. You need to blindly accept.” But this was not acceptable to me. I realized that my pastors weren’t the moral authorities I’d once thought they were. In fact, God wasn’t the authority I thought he was. I became seriously disillusioned with Christianity. Everyone at church held values that I no longer saw as values. When I went to church, it felt like everyone knew I was doubting my faith and was no longer a Christian.

I didn’t renounce Christianity overnight. Despite knowing that Christianity didn’t make sense, I kept flip-flopping between it and this “scary” thing called atheism. I didn’t want to call myself an atheist—in fact, I called myself agnostic for a long time because it was easier to say, “I’m on the fence.” But there is no “fence” when all you have is a binary choice: Believe or don’t. I became a de facto atheist, even if I wasn’t yet ready to accept the label.

I continued to outwardly deny this. Because I was afraid to say otherwise, I kept telling other Christians that I still believed. I was worried that others would consider me immoral for being an atheist. Part of me still sought their nods of approval, but I now knew that others’ approval doesn’t change reality.

Religion reinforces and requires dishonesty. In the first story I shared with you, my teacher encouraged me to lie. She encouraged me to give a certain kind of answer to her question regardless of whether that answer had any correspondence to reality. The fact is: There’s no evidence for God—or him “working” in our lives.

Second, embracing religion produces a lot of guilt, shame, and fear. I was afraid that if I questioned Christianity or told people in my religious community what I thought, they wouldn’t accept me. So, I lied. Being part of the community was comfortable and familiar even if it was intermingled with fear, shame, and guilt.

Third, embracing religion requires sacrificing one’s life to God—which means giving up one’s highest and most precious value in exchange for something that doesn’t even exist. There is no worse trade—but it is required of a serious Christian.

On the other hand, embracing reason offered many good things. First, reason is our only means of discovering what is true. Using it, we can identify whether an idea is supported by facts or not. If it is, it may be true. If it is not, it can’t rationally be accepted as true.

Embracing reason has also helped me build my self-esteem. Even if we are worthy of respect and capable, we can’t know that except by reason.

Embracing reason also put me in direct control of my choices. When I fully accepted that I am capable of knowing things, I put myself firmly in the driver’s seat—and ejected God through the roof.

Given these two basic alternatives—faith or reason—what was I going to choose? I had been trying to “get serious” about Christianity, but every conclusion I came to via reason showed me that Christianity doesn’t make sense.

I ultimately chose reason.

I was finally freed from religion. I felt as though I could think for the first time.

Let me tell you a bit about what my life has been like since embracing reason.

Embracing reason has helped me be more at peace. I feel like I’m no longer in conflict with myself—I can be content. Before, I would experience conflicts between what “God wanted” and what I wanted. Such conflicts would discourage me from acting and put me into analysis paralysis. After embracing and acting consistently from reason, I no longer experience such conflicts.

Embracing reason also enabled me to see and achieve the ultimate goal of my life: to live it. I learned that I have only one life and that I should make it the best it can possibly be.

Embracing reason also led me to become a part of a team that I love to work with at Objective Standard Institute. They embrace reason. I think we’re doing so much good by spreading ideas that help others to do the same.

By acting independently using reason, I’ve met many new friends, colleagues, and people interested in the same ideas and hobbies as I am—the kind of people who expand one’s view of the world. I would never have been open to building relationships with these kinds of people before; as a Christian, I would have immediately judged them negatively.

When I was a Christian, I thought I knew the truth. Instead, dogma was stopping me from connecting with beautiful people. Not anymore. By embracing reason, I became more open to alternate perspectives.

I also had new experiences. For example, I performed in a musical called Fiddler on the Roof as a Russian dancer and a Jewish bottle dancer. Ironically, this is a somewhat religious play. I signed up for it because (a) it’s fun to dance and (b) I didn’t want to be afraid of religion anymore.

I want to leave you all with this: Embrace reason, be honest, and serve yourself.

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Daria Ermolenko is a life coach specializing in relationships and happiness. She holds a master’s degree in psychology and manages the quality of teacher training provision at the University of Buckingham. She also writes and speaks on psychology and happiness. In this discussion, she describes her approach to coaching, which is based on reason, free will, and examining one’s ideas, feelings, and premises.

Thomas F. Walker: Thanks for joining me. Why did you decide to get into psychology and coaching?

Daria Ermolenko: Although my qualifications are in psychology, it’s important to stress that I’m a coach, not a professional psychologist. I decided to specialize in coaching because I think it’s important to think about life in ways that have a demonstrable practical benefit for human flourishing.

In psychology, we sometimes present models for people to consider that are oversimplified and out of date. The newest research in neuroscience certainly hasn’t landed in psychology yet. I think a lot of the assumptions psychologists make about the brain are completely mistaken. But if we know that a certain psychological approach leads to flourishing, such as the Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement (PERMA) approach, why wouldn’t we try to use it to help people? Coaching is a practical way of bringing psychological research into people’s lives.

Walker: Do you have an example of how psychology hasn’t caught up to neuroscience?

Ermolenko: If you read the latest research in neuroscience, the idea that very distinct areas of the brain are responsible for certain functions is essentially untrue. It’s partially true sometimes, but if you read studies on people who have certain areas of the brain removed or damaged and how their brains adapt, and all the research on neuroplasticity, the brain is capable of essentially reassigning other areas to keep certain functions going. But if you open many of the psychology textbooks that people are using today in universities, it won’t reflect that realization. Many of these books are ten or more years old, and a lot of their content simply isn’t accurate anymore because we know so much more about the brain. In many cases, the evidence is accumulating in the opposite direction to the models that were developed by the founding fathers of psychology.

Walker: Psychology is the newest science essentially, and it does seem like it’s still in its infancy. It’s also heavily influenced by philosophy. The philosophic premises you accept, whether you accept a deterministic premise or a behaviorist premise affect your approach to it. How much would you say your philosophic ideas influence how you approach coaching and training?

Ermolenko: Well, if I were in a university exam, I would say that my philosophic approaches aren’t influencing the way that I coach clients at all, because the established thinking is that they shouldn’t affect my choice of approach. The idea is that you want to be as curious as possible—you want to study all the different fields of psychology in as much depth as you can because you want to have the choice when working with a client as to what might help him or her best. I might think that cognitive behavioral therapy approaches are too rigid, but if I’m working with someone who prefers that rigidity, who’s asking for it essentially, then that’s what I might use. Other people are more artistically inclined, more curious, more philosophic, so with them you might apply a bit more of a mix of things—you might invite them to consider a character from a novel or something abstract as a model for habit formation or behavior change. I think the idea is to know as much as you can and to be creative.

I would say that my philosophic beliefs do influence my coaching where that’s in the best interest of the client—for example, my belief in free will. That’s very controversial. But also my beliefs more specifically on the matters at hand in a particular client’s scenario do influence how I coach. That’s why we have what’s called the “chemistry session” at the start of the coaching relationship, in which we ask ourselves, “Do I have beliefs that would prevent me from working with this client with integrity?” If yes, I say, “I’m not the best person to help you. I’ll refer you to a colleague because I don’t believe that the outcome you want is in your best interest, and I can’t in good conscience help you achieve it.”

Walker: It seems to me that without free will, coaching and psychology become meaningless anyway because you can’t change anything.

I saw a psychodynamic therapist for a while, and I eventually noticed that we had a fundamental incompatibility because he had this nonjudgmental attitude almost as an axiom wherein psychology is only about understanding who you are without judgment. He would resist my efforts to try to judge and change my own behavior, ideas, and feelings. Would you say you encourage clients to question and judge themselves and treat ideas, emotions, and premises as things that can be actively shaped and controlled by people making choices?

Ermolenko: Absolutely, I believe that wholeheartedly. I wish people believed that if you don’t believe in free will, why engage in the process of therapy or coaching?

I definitely think that people can shape their feelings. People can shape how their feelings develop in response to certain stimuli and triggers, which is essentially one of the biggest parts of coaching. This is another area wherein the latest research doesn’t map on to certain schools of thought in psychology. For example, people who believe that we shouldn’t challenge feelings have a mistaken view of how feelings arise. They think feelings simply exist, that we are compelled to follow them. But if you understand that sometimes feelings arise from something as simple as the fact that the temperature of your body has changed by half a degree, and suddenly in a situation in which you would usually be very calm you’re now angry—if you’re conscious of how your feelings arise, you stop seeing them as uncontrollable.

All of what I do is about challenging people’s feelings and challenging the origins of their behavior, thoughts, and impulses, and trying to shape those in line with how they’re motivated to live. That’s the point of it all. Believing that you are in the driver’s seat of your life, able to shape it, able to shape everything that goes along with it, to me is fundamental. It’s the life force that propels you because if you believe you’re passive in all of this, then why be curious? Why develop your brain? Why do anything, essentially?

Walker: You’ve hit on another philosophic premise there, which is mind-body integration. Not only do our physical sensations affect our moods, but our moods affect our bodies as well. We hold tension in our muscles. I’ve dealt with that a lot. Would you say that treating the mind as though it’s some kind of floating entity separate from physical reality is a premise that often comes up in coaching and psychology as well?

Ermolenko: I think so, but again, it depends on what the point is. If the point is to develop or disabuse yourself of certain beliefs, then treating the mind as a separate floating entity might be helpful to that particular end in a delimited way. However, if that’s the only framework you have, and you’re refusing to engage with basic science, that’s not going to work. For example, this often comes up in debates about treating depression, such as when somebody is not engaging with the basic ways to live well. If someone isn’t eating healthily, exercising, or going outside every day, then there’s no point going any further. Those are core physical ingredients that impact how the neurons in your brain interact with each other. You need a combination of everything. I think whatever issue makes logical sense to address in the moment is what professionals with integrity should address.

Walker: You ended up focusing on relationships specifically in your work. How important would you say relationships are to a person’s overall ability to flourish? Do you think they’re something we need for our happiness, or is it particular to each individual whether he or she needs a romantic partner, a big group of friends, close family connections, that kind of thing?

Ermolenko: I think so, based on what the research says and what I’ve observed with my clients: The importance of the specific number of connections you have varies in relation to people’s personalities. Clearly, some people are extroverted, and some are more introverted, but your perception of the extent to which you are succeeding in that domain is quite crucial. For example, if you want a romantic partner but you don’t have one, your opinion of your own well-being will be lower than someone who is accepting of the fact that these things take time, and you need to find the right person. It’s the expectation versus reality. At the same time, people who live longer, people who are healthier in old age, are the ones who have close, loving relationships. But I think there are individual differences, and clearly some people are self-sufficient and comfortable—if they find like-minded people they’re happy, but if they don’t, they almost would prefer to simply be self-sufficient. It’s all about identifying and managing each person’s expectations.

Walker: It sounds as though self-esteem’s the key concept here because, on the one hand, if a person’s struggling with self-esteem, he can become very dependent on other people for validation. That apparent “need” of having lots of friends or a partner can be an expression of something that’s missing internally. How does self-esteem enter into the question of how to coach people on relationships? Do you see relationships as key to self-esteem, or do you think self-esteem needs to be right first before a person starts trying to sort out his or her relationships?

Ermolenko: I think somebody’s self-esteem should ideally exist independently of his or her romantic relationships, because then you’re entering into relationships for the right reasons. I do a lot of work on self-esteem. I mainly try to point out to clients the long-term cost of relying on external validation for self-esteem, which is that they usually end up in mediocre relationships that they’re not happy with because they’ve received what they felt they needed in the immediate term, which is validation. But perhaps that real connection, that mutual respect, isn’t there. If you have low self-esteem and you’re relying on external validation, the way you come across to your partner is also influenced by that. You come across differently from somebody who is self-sufficient and would be able to be resilient should his or her partner leave. So, I think self-esteem is crucial, especially for people trying to find their path in this whole relationship game. If you’re trying to be comfortable walking in the light of the truth and identifying where perhaps things are suboptimal and need to change, then the higher your self-esteem, the more likely you are to make the right choice.

Walker: Do you find that all this is true for non-romantic relationships, such as friendships, as well?

Ermolenko: Because friendships and other relationships form earlier in life than romantic relationships, I think it’s actually much more the case with friendships. I work with certain clients exclusively on friendships, identifying, for example, what the problem is with simply telling somebody that you don’t want to go for a drink. To me, that’s really difficult to understand, so I have to be curious and ask things such as, “Why is it difficult to tell somebody exactly what you want?” Then the low self-esteem comes up, the childhood experiences, being left out at school, all that stuff that needs working through. Because we generally have more friends than we do romantic partners, the potential for self-esteem to be eroded further is even higher if you’re relying on validation from friends. In such cases, you’re inevitably going to be led to some sort of lowest common denominator there if you don’t have your own confidence and your own clear path in life and you’re merely relying on other people to pivot you wherever they wish to.

Walker: It’s almost a stereotype in psychology that everything goes back to your relationship with your mother or your father. How often do you find that that actually is a big element in why somebody’s not finding happiness in romance or in friendships?

Ermolenko: I do find that sometimes. I don’t find it as often as pop psychology suggests, but what I find is that the way people interact with their parents as an adult influences or is related to the way they interact with other adults. It’s almost like a formula, which obviously harks back to childhood. I’m interested to know why grown-up young adults who are otherwise successful and self-sufficient struggle to interact with their parents in a productive way, even when there’s been no severe childhood trauma or pathology. When they have unhealthy interactions with parents—when they lie or evade certain things to protect their parents’ opinions of them, for example—that then maps on to how they see themselves in the world as a partner, as a friend, as a colleague. I think parents are really important, and changing the way you interact with parents when you grow up is a good idea from what I’ve observed so far.

Walker: If you could give one piece of advice to a reader who’s getting started thinking about their relationships and life choices, what would it be?

Ermolenko: I would say that the easiest thing for the average person to grasp is that relationships are no different than any other domain. Because romantic relationships are carried out with one person at a time, they have considerable weight in someone’s life. Nowadays, people generally feel that they can have a variety of careers. They can pivot easily. I don’t think anyone’s worried that they have to stay in the same job forever anymore. It’s the same with friends—people can switch friendship groups or simply move. But I think with romantic relationships, we spend so much of our youth waiting to find that good relationship that’s going to carry on, and when we find a relationship of any kind, we almost want to put it into that category regardless of whether it truly fits.

Most of the work I do with clients is disabusing them of the notion that they should stay in a relationship that’s mediocre, one in which there’s loads of compromise. They would describe it as hard work, for example, when there’s underlying resentment but nothing’s radically wrong—most people would consider that to be a good relationship. But I have to explain to them that that mediocrity, that lack of self-actualization you feel, the lack of respect you feel for each other on a deep, mental level—that is enough for that relationship not to be healthy, because you’re engaging in it to the detriment of all other opportunities in a way that you’re not with friends or family or colleagues. So, the idea is to spot that mediocrity and analyze it and ask, “Why are you content in a situation in which you don’t want to invest in the relationship? In which it’s not driven by a positive impulse, but it’s a burden?” I investigate that and try to give people the tools they need to feel confident enough to walk away from situations like that so they can find ones in which they’re flourishing.

Walker: I find that a lot of people, especially in older generations such as Generation X and higher, tend to settle and compromise with somebody who’s clearly not their ideal. Do you find that people are so driven to find a partner that they will not wait and will choose security, stability, and validation over taking the time to find somebody who’s right for you? Which, if you’re an interesting and complex person, often requires looking overseas, looking in specific places; it requires being really patient and willing to search. You’re not going to find that person in your office, which I think a lot of people expect to.

Ermolenko: Yes, absolutely. It’s almost as if we may as well not be in the twenty-first century because people really do settle so quickly. Even though they don’t make things official quickly, and the social norms have changed, it may as well still be like it was in the past. The story I often hear (and, of course, the people I talk to have relationships that are mainly suboptimal because otherwise they wouldn’t come to a relationship coach, so you have to take what I say with a pinch of salt) is, “If there’s no reason not to, I will take the next step. If there’s no reason not to go on the second date, I’ll go on the second date. If there’s no reason not to make things official, I will.” There’s this passivity. Rather than it being a conscious choice to move toward something that they value, they’re thinking, “Well, I should be in a relationship, and there’s nothing wrong with this one. We only argue every night, but that’s OK because everyone else does that; my friend Sally and her partner do that, too.” But that’s merely because she wants to believe that she’s also in the right. People validate each other in this wrongness, and I’m trying to fight against it as best I can and equip people with self-esteem. They need to be able to exist outside of the romantic relationship realm until there’s a reason to enter it, rather than the other way around—this mindset of having a relationship at all costs. Why would you want a mediocre relationship even if there’s nothing badly wrong with it? Why would you not want the best relationship you can have? I think my job is to equip people with the understanding that they can have the best relationship possible to them, but they can’t do that if they’re not in it for the right reasons.

Walker: If people are interested in finding out more about what you do, where can they find you?

Ermolenko: People can find me on Life Coach Directory and on my website, dariaermolenko.com. I offer relationship coaching based on rationality, tailored to your personal needs and situation. I always have a consultation session, and if I’m not the right person to help you, I will let you know straight away. The idea is that I will challenge your thinking. I will challenge your assumptions and beliefs. I will challenge all the advice your friends have given you before you’ve come to me, and I will try to work with you to put you on a path on which you are flourishing and in a relationship that’s fulfilling, that you are fully actively engaged in rather than passively going through the motions and simply settling. Ultimately, I try to put people in the driver’s seat of their personal lives.

Walker: Thank you very much.

As a frequent flier in both Europe and America, I’ve enjoyed both the extremely low fares available in Europe and the higher standard of service often provided by American carriers. That we can’t have both in either market is the fault of government, according to Michael O’Leary, CEO of Europe’s largest airline, Ryanair. In this week’s new article, I celebrate O’Leary for his willingness to name and shame government for its role in holding back aviation competition.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

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“I support and subscribe to The Objective Standard because I find the articles to be carefully well done, fully analytic, and thoroughly interesting.” —Doug

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In 1994, a small, upstart Irish airline had been struggling to compete with the powerful duopoly of British Airways and Aer Lingus on routes between the United Kingdom and Ireland for ten years. It had a small fleet of elderly planes and growing debts. It had successfully drawn passengers away from the larger carriers by undercutting their prices, but its operating costs were outstripping its revenues. Its name was Ryanair.1

Enter entrepreneur Michael O’Leary. Taking inspiration from the successful U.S. budget airline Southwest, he transformed the small company, implementing an approach not seen before in Europe: He slashed Ryanair’s operating costs by removing all the “frills”—business-class cabins, complimentary food and drinks, inflight magazines—effectively turning its planes into flying commuter buses. He also standardized the company’s fleet on a single aircraft type, massively cutting maintenance and training costs.2

Since then, O’Leary has grown Ryanair into Europe’s largest airline. Between March 2025 and March 2026, it carried 208.4 million passengers on 647 aircraft to more than 200 destinations, generating an eyewatering profit of €2.26 billion.3 Its remarkable success has inspired others, with Europe’s low-cost carriers (primarily Ryanair, EasyJet, and WizzAir) now accounting for around 40 percent of all flights on the continent.4

Ryanair has achieved all this while slashing passenger fares to some of the lowest available anywhere in the world. Its prices typically start around €14.99 ($17.36) for a one-way ticket and go as low as €5 during sales.5 This is far cheaper than the fares that O’Leary’s inspiration, Southwest, offers on U.S. domestic flights, which typically start around $59.6 Newer U.S. budget carriers have taken inspiration from Ryanair, including Frontier and the recently collapsed Spirit Airlines, but none has been able to fully replicate its ultra-low-cost model in the U.S. market.

O’Leary is often asked whether Ryanair has any interest in expanding into the U.S. domestic market or other markets such as transatlantic routes, the Middle East, Africa, or Asia. His recent answer to this question at the 2026 Norges Bank Investment Conference shines a light on why U.S. budget airlines have struggled to replicate his success in the American market:

We work very well in Europe because we have pretty much incompetent competition in Europe, like Lufthansa, Air France/KLM . . . The U.S. airlines are a bit more aggressive; they are much stronger and much more well-embedded. . . .

The only good thing about Europe is it is a deregulated market for air travel. So, thankfully I get very little government interference. The minute I go outside of Europe, to the Middle East, to Asia, to the U.S., it is hugely government regulated. [Air travel in] the States is already reasonably well-run, although it’s quite expensive. [Operating there] wouldn’t work, and it would undermine Ryanair.7

O’Leary deserves kudos for pointing to government interference as the key barrier to improving the quality of air travel around the world. In the United States, regulations have caused the high fares that would make Ryanair’s model unviable and draw the company’s resources away from Europe, whereas in Europe, past and present government control of airlines has created a market in which challengers can outcompete them easily, as O’Leary says:

[European national airlines] are all useless. Government-owned, heavily regulated, hugely government-subsidized. All the [legacy carriers] are running around at the moment trying to get bailouts. . . . It’s not a hypercompetitive industry. . . . So, all I have to be is modestly competitive to be better than the rest of the competition in Europe, but that’s not setting the bar very high.8

Imagine the improvements that would be possible in a market that combined the best of both worlds—the better management of established U.S. airlines with the less-regulated market of Europe. O’Leary has no time for the way governments hamper business and restrict freedom, and he’s not afraid to make his derision public. Indeed, O’Leary credits his willingness to speak and act in accordance with his honest views as a factor in Ryanair’s success:

The advantage of not being overly sensitive about my reputation or our image or being culturally popular is that we’re ruthlessly low cost, and that gives us huge freedom to chase those kinds of cost-saving measures or to reinvent the way we drive the airlines, and then ultimately all the other morons will follow us along. The American airlines have just discovered charging for bags 15–20 years after we started doing it. Now they’re trying to do it as a way of gaining revenue whereas we did it not as a way of generating revenue but as a way of eliminating cost.9

Michael O’Leary deserves credit for his unabashed honesty in calling out government regulations for the way they constrain business and make us all worse off. His clarity on this issue, his willingness to say what he thinks without concern for others’ reactions, and his integrity in running his business in line with his ideas should be an inspiration to all.

Welcome to the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard, the rational alternative to conservatism and regressivism.

When we navigate relationships, even with the moral clarity of an integrated, rational philosophy, determining the best course of action can be difficult. We need to fully understand both others and ourselves. One thing that can help enormously is actively engaging with well-crafted stories that show and contrast characters grasping and failing to grasp their emotions and motives—and the consequences for their lives. In “Seeing People Clearly: Lessons from Jane Austen,” Angelica Werth describes and demonstrates how one of literature’s greatest authors depicts these processes and how we can apply her insights to our own lives.

Art movements are often also philosophic movements. A powerful example of this is the little-known pre-Soviet Russian poetry school known as Acmeism. In “The Morning of Acmeism: The Forgotten School of Reality-Affirming Poetry,” Objective Standard Institute junior fellow Georgy Sinitsky details this movement and the brief expression of rationality it represented in the bleak history of Russian thought.

Rational philosophy is, by its nature, absolute—it is grounded in and expressive of the facts of reality. But whereas many think of absolute principles as restrictive, Craig Biddle argues in “The Liberating Absolutism of Objectivism” that this absolutism actually frees us from the tyrannical whims of subjectivism to understand and uphold principles that empower us to live our best lives.

Next, in part two of “Understanding the Declaration of Independence,” Timothy Sandefur continues his exploration of the ideas that underpinned the American founding, observing the timeless principles that apply as much in any era as they did in 1776.

To the extent that entrepreneurs are free from coercion, they will be able to innovate. I demonstrate this fact in “Project Sunrise: The Future of Intercontinental Travel,” detailing the impressive achievement of Airbus and Qantas in developing the longest-range passenger jet ever built. I also note how much further advanced aviation might be if it were not for past and present government meddling in the industry.

Then, in “The Volunteers Who Turned Failed Transport Links into Thriving Tourist Attractions,” I celebrate the passionate individuals who, in the stifling environment of widespread nationalization and industrial decline of 1950s Britain, set out to acquire and restore railway lines that today serve as an immersive educational experience of what life and industry were like in decades past, as well as offering opportunities for film, training, research, and more.

Kicking off our reviews for this issue, in “Angel Down Makes a Mockery of Pulitzer Prize’s Celebration of Excellence,” Angelica Werth examines this deeply flawed book, which rejects the conceptual nature of literature in favor of giving an emotional impression—as though the two must necessarily be opposed.

While books that reject meaning and clarity are awarded Pulitzers, movies either lacking in moral themes or possessing frighteningly dangerous ones are widely praised by critics and adored by the public. In “Nolan’s Odyssey (2026) Fails on All Levels: As an Adaptation, as a Film, and as a Story,” Tim White shows why Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s classic is more an insult than a tribute to the ancient epic. Meanwhile, in “Odysseus and the Limits of Ancient Heroism,” John Devlin recognizes the importance of the original work as the pioneer of heroism in literature while highlighting how the mysticism of ancient Greek culture undermined its otherwise heroic theme.

Then White highlights another example of morally bankrupt movies attracting widespread praise in “Citizen Vigilante Is Exactly What It Looks Like—and That’s Not a Good Thing.” His examination of the film explores many aspects of its story and the ethical premises it exhibits, while Robert Bidinotto’s “I Write Vigilante Thrillers—But Citizen Vigilante Disgusts Me” focuses on the nature of vigilante protagonists and offers a contrast to show how they can be heroic when written properly.

Rounding off this issue, in “Mickey 17: The Importance of Valuing Life—Especially Your Own,” Ava Scott-Nadal thoughtfully evaluates the film, which uses a creative science-fiction setting to explore how easily respect for individual lives can be lost and why we should always value human life and uphold our right to our own.

That’s it for this issue—I hope you enjoy the articles and reviews. If so, be sure to recommend and share them with friends on social media, in conversation, and especially on Substack. If you have a Substack publication of your own, please recommend The Objective Standard on your home page (see “recommendations” on your dashboard). And if you’ve not yet subscribed to the journal for people of reason, head over to TheObjectiveStandard.com and become a subscriber or upgrade your subscription today.

Thank you for your business and support,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor
The Objective Standard

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Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a live talk and has been lightly edited. It retains the cadence and idiosyncrasies of an oral presentation.

Imagine that you have a crush on somebody and you have reason to believe that this person likes you back. Then you’re at a bar or a dance and you see him or her dancing with somebody else. What would you do? Or if you’ve been in this situation, what did you do?

Believe it or not, this is a situation that Jane Austen wrote about. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg; we all have to deal with many kinds of complex situations within relationships. At different times in our lives, we all have to make decisions about romantic relationships: Do we start a romantic relationship? Do we end one? We’ve all found ourselves in tricky conflicts with friends and had to resolve arguments. At times, we’ve had to negotiate better ways to communicate with our parents and siblings, and so on.

In order to equip ourselves for these inevitable and often painful situations, there are a few key things we can do. We can look to philosophy, which explores the fundamental nature of human beings, how we know what we know, and how we should act. We can look to psychology and learn about patterns of behavior, thought, and emotions and how we can influence them. But what people don’t often think about is that we can also look to great fiction—which dramatizes both. Or as Austen put it, novels can contain “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties.”1

All good fiction includes conflict, which is fundamentally a clash of values. Two or more parties want things they’re willing to strive for—and they cannot both have them. (Occasionally, one character has an internal clash, or one “party” is actually a challenge posed by nature, but two or more parties is more common.) Great fiction also contains vivid characters, and many of these are archetypes: a particular kind of person who serves a certain plot function but whom you’ve probably also encountered in real life. Austen was especially good at showing archetypes in a subtle way, depicting how they fared and what they did in different situations and different kinds of relationships. But she also went deeper than that, and that’s why we’re going to talk about her work today.

Before we go any further, I want to say that fiction is something that is enjoyable in and of itself. We read a great novel and love it because it’s fun. Additionally, the digging a little deeper we’re going to do here is part of the enjoyment of fiction. The learning that we can do by thinking about characters, understanding them, and evaluating them adds to the enjoyment. This is because fiction can help us grasp essential truths on a fundamental level by connecting them to our emotions—by giving us a reason to care.

To contextualize Austen’s work, it helps to have a bit of background. She was born in 1775 and died mysteriously in 1817. She was the daughter of a preacher and part of a large family. She began writing from an early age, about twelve, beginning with humorous short stories and vignettes. When she initially began to publish novels, she did so anonymously. They were published as “by a lady.” That being said, there’s a lot we don’t know about her life. She didn’t keep a diary, or if she did, we don’t have it. There were no biographies of her written during her life. And the first biography wasn’t written for over half a century after her death by a nephew who didn’t know her that well.2 Nor do all of her letters survive; we have some, but her sister burned some. So, there’s a lot we don’t know. What we do know is what’s in her published works, particularly her main six novels. These are the four that she published during her lifetime (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma) and the two that her family published shortly after her death (Persuasion and Northanger Abbey).

Within these novels we see some pretty consistent characteristics. Austen is often noted for her wit; she liked to look at what’s absurd in the archetypes she employed, in their relationships, and in the social norms of her time and poke a bit of fun at them. For example, she absolutely detested people with authority who neglected the responsibilities that came with that authority, or even worse, abused it. We can see this is in the clergymen in her novels. The less important clergymen are lazy or hypocritical, but the important ones are always absurd. And they’re absurd in the same way: They’re pompous, self-important, and arrogant. They’re written for laughs, so we get to giggle at the fact that the person is this way, rather than being infuriated with them.

But Austen’s appeal goes deeper than that. In all of her novels, there are moral lessons. There is the development of timeless virtues, and this is why it’s still worth talking about them two hundred years after they were written, when a lot of the social norms she was criticizing are gone or significantly faded. We’ll get into these lessons in more depth, but a lot of them are around things such as justice and honesty. In order for her heroines to learn these lessons, they need to gain some kind of knowledge. Usually this is both internal knowledge about themselves and external knowledge about other people and the world around them. One of the fun things about Austen is that she actually gives us most of this information if we are attentive enough to pick up on it before the heroines do. It’s subtle.

However, possibly my favorite thing about Austen is that she creates a benevolent universe. All of her heroines get happy endings, but it’s not automatic, and it’s not guaranteed; they don’t know they will get them. They have to earn them. They have to develop their characters. These earned happy endings provide us with motivation along with an exploration of what the relevant virtues and principles look like when applied. We’re going to look at this from a few different angles.

Ideas Shape Choices

First, we must recognize that ideas shape choices. By ideas, I mean your core beliefs about human nature, what constitutes a good life, and what you expect from other people. It was common in Austen’s time for writers to think about their moral ideas and how they could explicitly promote those principles in their novels, or even to write novels in order to propagandize. Marilyn Butler, a preeminent Austen scholar, argues that what makes Austen stand out from her contemporaries, and one of the reasons that she is more influential than they, is that she showed us her characters’ ideas rather than telling us. Many of her contemporaries had their characters declare their philosophies in speeches or in letters. Occasionally in Austen we get a conversation, a snippet, or a sentence or two of this, but mostly we see who they are. They show us in their actions, their words, their topics of conversation, and how they speak about those topics. Austen was praised for her development of a variety of idiolects; each of her characters sounds different for a reason.3

She shows her characters’ ideas in a lot of ways, but I want to take one example. For this, we need to start with her intellectual context. As I mentioned, Austen was born in the late 18th century and started writing in the early 19th century. At this time, rationalism was giving way to romanticism in philosophy. The entirety of these philosophies goes beyond the scope of this discussion, but here are some relevant points. Rationalism emphasizes the use of reason over and detached from experience and emotion. It is often associated with sciences and things that are constructed by human beings. Romanticism is the opposite; it emphasizes the importance of emotion over reason, and it’s associated with nature and with the arts.

Austen examined these two schools in Sense and Sensibility. This title may sound a bit odd to a modern ear, but “sensibility” in her time meant something more like sentimentality or emotionalism. This is the only novel in which Austen had two heroines, sisters, one of whom represents sense and rationalism and the other sensibility and romanticism. Throughout this novel, she puts them in similar situations so we can see how they respond differently and what the results of those behaviors are. Along the way, they both go through different arcs.

Recall the imagined scenario in which your crush is talking to somebody else with evident interest. Austen puts both of the sisters in this situation, and we’ll see how they respond differently—according to their ideas about what is important and what constitutes a good life.

Marianne is our romantic; she’s not merely somebody who feels things strongly, but somebody who indulges her emotions as a matter of principle. She believes that to be a good person is to be emotional. She judges people by how passionate they are. When she goes to a ball and sees the gentleman she’s interested in, and who she thought was interested in her, with another lady, Austen tells us, “Her face was crimsoned over, and she exclaimed, in a voice of the greatest emotion, ‘Good God! Willoughby, what is the meaning of this? Have you not received my letters? Will you not shake hands with me?’”4 For Marianne, wearing her heart on her sleeve is a badge of honor. It would never occur to her to not say what she’s thinking or feeling, no matter how public the context or serious the consequences.

By contrast, we have her sister Elinor. Elinor wants to be rational, she wants to do the practical thing, she wants to do what she thinks is right—at the cost of ignoring her own emotions entirely. She shoves them down, suppresses them, trying to never make them somebody else’s problem but also not dealing with them herself. She finds herself in a similar situation to Marianne’s. She’s at home when the gentleman in whom she is interested comes to visit, as does another lady who is attached to him. Elinor thinks she ought to leave them alone;

she soon afterwards felt herself so heroically disposed as to determine, under pretence of fetching Marianne, to leave the others by themselves; and she really did it, and that in the handsomest manner, for she loitered away several minutes on the landing-place, with the most high-minded fortitude, before she went to her sister.5

Elinor is martyring herself because she refuses to acknowledge the reality and validity of her emotions.

Consider yourself in this scenario. What would you do in their places? Would you be more like Marianne and express your emotions clearly and vocally, regardless of who’s around? Would you be more like Elinor and shove them down and try to pretend they’re not there? Or something else? And why? What is it about your view of life and human nature that pushes you in that direction?

The “why” question is important because this kind of self-knowledge is essential to how we grow, which Marianne learns. She finds herself in a dire situation, and she realizes through reflection that it’s not only her actions that led her there but the beliefs that drove her actions. The most relevant idea is that being passionate and expressing her emotions is always right, without questioning them or thinking about the context of the situation and whether it was appropriate to express her emotions in that way.

She realizes that she’s able to correct her ideas and then her behavior. It’s an interesting kind of climax, a realization, but it’s one we see over and over again in Austen. As Butler put it, “her plots are a movement from ignorance to knowledge, culminating in a moment of intelligent discernment.”6 But the obstacles to that intelligent discernment, that knowledge, vary dramatically from novel to novel.

Self-Deception

Pride and Prejudice centers around self-deception, particularly in a heroine who believes herself a very good judge of character. In fact, the working title for the novel was First Impressions. The protagonist is Lizzy Bennet, who misjudges two key characters in the novel.

First, we have Mr. Wickham—a walking red flag. From the very beginning, he flirts with Lizzy, charms her, talks to her family kindly, and opens up. He talks to her about his past and how he’s been wronged by the other character. He’s open and amiable, so she overlooks the facts that he’s shared far more than is appropriate given their relationship and that he doesn’t do the things he said he was going to do. She also overlooks the fact that she doesn’t have the evidence to judge the claim that the other character had, in fact, wronged him.

The other character, Mr. Darcy, is quite offensive on their first meeting. He says something negative about Lizzy’s looks within her hearing. He’s generally standoffish and arrogant to everyone. Later, he starts to be more polite and behave like a gentleman, even correcting others’ rudeness toward her. But he’s still distant and reserved. He waves away any potential inadequacy on his part by saying he’s not good at making conversation with people.

There comes a situation in which Lizzy makes clear to him her disapproval—that she thinks that Mr. Darcy is a bad person because of what he supposedly did to Mr. Wickham as well as another reason. Mr. Darcy initially is angry, but he decides to explain himself, unintentionally creating a test for her. Mr. Darcy writes Lizzy a letter in which he sets forth his side of the story.

At first, she doesn’t want to believe it. She had thought herself a good judge of character; how could she be so wrong about two people? But she’s honest. She stops and thinks. She goes through the letter a couple of times. She asks herself whether what she’s reading makes sense with what she knows of each of the two men. She asks whether Darcy would have given her the kind of information that he gave her if it were not true. Over a couple of pages, Austen spells out the process of introspection and the realizations Lizzy has. Here is one sentence of it: “Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned.”7

Through Lizzy’s realization, she’s identifying her emotions, past and present, and how she deceived herself through them. Note how active this language is: “courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away.” This isn’t something that simply happened. Lizzy actively chose to ignore evidence, to ignore her sister’s warning, to ignore the red flags in Mr. Wickham and the positive things she was seeing about Mr. Darcy. She “drove reason away”—it was an active thing that she chose. The good news is that she can now choose differently. She can choose to look for more evidence, to act more civilly toward Mr. Darcy, and to reassess herself.

She thinks, “Till this moment I never knew myself.”8 She had not realized that her emotions could lead her astray in that way, but now she does. We already know that when we face tough decisions, we are shaping ourselves through what we decide. But we can also learn about ourselves if we choose to turn the spotlight inward and ask, How did we come to these conclusions? Why are we thinking what we’re thinking? Why do we want this? Why do we feel this way? If we ask those questions, we start to understand ourselves on a much deeper level.

We also are able to understand others better because we can see where our own emotions, misconceptions, hasty judgments, and insufficiently evidenced evaluations could be leading us astray. This is a pattern we see throughout Austen’s work: All her novels involve the characters gaining some kind of knowledge about themselves and about each other, and through this they come to better understand one another.

Better Understanding Others

We can learn from the processes, challenges, and triumphs of her characters and apply these lessons to our own lives to better understand the people around us. How? The following strategies are all things that we see Austen’s characters doing, that we can do as we read fiction, and that we can do with people in our own lives.

The first strategy is to think of yourself like a detective. In recent years, publishers have released several novels based on Austen’s works in which the author turns the heroine into a detective solving a murder or other mystery. The reason this works so well is because Austen depicted her female characters as detectives, trying to figure out the moral stature of the people around them so they can make the most important decision in the life of a woman in Regency England, which is whom to marry. A heroine has to put together different clues, and she can go wrong if, like Lizzy, she ignores some things that she really ought not to ignore.

In detective stories, very often the detective comes to a wrong conclusion initially. He has some evidence, but he puts it together wrongly. He thinks that he knows more than he does and creates a narrative that sounds compelling but is, in fact, incorrect. We see this throughout Austen’s novels, such as with Lizzy in regard to Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham.

If we’re actively reading fiction, we’re doing the same thing all the time. We want to figure out who the villain is, what’s behind the secret plot, or who the murderer is before the detective or hero does. We can also do this with people in our own lives. When we’re getting to know somebody or considering a relationship, we can look at the clues we have. We can ask ourselves what we know about his character, what we’ve seen from him, what makes sense as an explanation for his behavior, and whether we even know enough to come to a conclusion yet.

The next strategy is projection. I’m sure your parents have told you at some point to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. This is something that we do very naturally when we read fiction. In fact, the parts of our brains that we use when we’re imagining ourselves in the future are active when we’re reading fiction.9 But we can do this more deliberately. We can imagine we’re Marianne in Sense and Sensibility and ask ourselves what we would do in her situation, how we would feel. Austen’s characters encourage each other to do this, too. Lizzy’s friend encourages her to put herself in the shoes of her sister’s suitor to understand how he must be feeling at this moment so she can better advise her sister.

But sometimes it’s really hard to relate to people. Sometimes we cannot understand their thinking, and we cannot feel as they would feel. They’re simply too different from us; we wouldn’t behave in that way. Or maybe it’s even worse—maybe we’ve judged that this person is immoral, so we don’t want to feel like they would feel. We don’t want to imagine ourselves as a bad person.

In that case, we can employ “strategic empathy.” This is a strategy used by military analysts, because when you’re trying to figure out what to do in a war, it’s dangerous to feel as the enemy feels. But you still have to know how to handle them; you’ve got to figure out how to adapt your strategies for the situation. This is a whole field, but there are two important questions to consider: How does this person or group see themselves? And how do they see the situation? You don’t need to feel as they feel—only to understand where they’re coming from.

We see this, too, in Austen’s fiction. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor, the rationalist, is confronted with a malicious character. She could never feel as this lady feels. She would never treat somebody the way this woman is treating other people. But by understanding how the other woman sees herself and how she sees the situation, Elinor knows how to handle her. She knows what to tell her and what not to tell her, how to frame things, and therefore how to get through the situation better.

The last point is not so much a strategy as a pitfall to avoid: assumed similarity, also known as excessive self-reference. We all have the most experience with ourselves; we spend more time with ourselves than we do with any other human being. The result is that we tend to assume that other people are like us. But other people are not like us in many ways. We can go wrong if we assume that their motivations, thinking, and emotions are like our own when we don’t have evidence for that.

In Emma, a mentor warns Emma against this. She says, “do not pretend, with your sweet temper, to understand a bad one, or to lay down rules for it: you must let it go its own way.”10 There are many characters in Austen’s fiction, mostly minor characters who are written for laughs, who do this frequently, such as Mr. Woodhouse in Emma and Lady Catherine De Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. These people assume that others will think as they do, but in such a dramatic way that it’s funny.

But we also see it from the main characters. Part of the reason Marianne from Sense and Sensibility is so shocked and hurt at the ball is because she would never do what Willoughby has done. She values authenticity and the genuineness of emotion so much that to profess a feeling she didn’t fully feel and couldn’t fully commit to is unthinkable to her.

The above are merely a few examples that give us a step on the right path to figuring out how to apply the lessons Austen is offering us. But why should we?

First, Austen argues for moral growth. All of her characters develop some aspect of virtue throughout their respective stories; they all go through a character arc, and more specifically, a growth arc. A growth arc is when a character faces challenges and has to transform herself—to undergo realizations and change in some fundamental way—in order to meet a challenge. By thinking about these challenges and how the characters transform and meet them in fiction, we can more profitably ask ourselves: Where could I have, or have I had, a growth arc in my life?

If you look back at your own achievements and understand what you’ve overcome, that can add to your self-confidence—and it’s also a way of continually improving in the future. Maybe you’re facing challenges right now; maybe you will in the next year. How can you become a better person in order to meet that challenge or through meeting that challenge? Lizzy, for instance, becomes more honest and more just through better understanding herself and how she’s misjudged Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham. She develops those specific virtues. Austen, like Aristotle, does not conceive of virtue as a thing you achieve once and then you’re done. It’s not a finish line. Virtue is an active condition. It’s something we have to continually maintain; it’s the working state of the soul. Accordingly, in Austen’s fiction, we often see that, after her realization, the heroine has to put it to work multiple times. Lizzy has to encounter and talk to Mr. Darcy multiple times before the end of the story.

The reason it’s believable that her characters have these growth arcs and come to these conclusions and develop these virtues is because they are fundamentally truth seekers. This is an aspect of honesty. If it really, deeply matters to you what is true about a situation, what is true about a person’s character, or what was said or done in a given situation, the act of searching for the truth already puts you in a better place. What we see in Austen’s stories is that the characters who go through these growth arcs and develop these virtues are looking for the truth, and they end up with better relationships. They end up with good romantic relationships, and many of them also end up with better friendships and better family relationships, both in the sense of getting rid of some that are not good for them and in the sense of improving the ones they have. This is the happy ending I referred to earlier.

This makes sense. If we’re constantly working to better understand ourselves, better understand other people, be more honest, be more just, and grasp the truth, we’re going to have better relationships.

Flatterers versus Challengers

We see this clearly in Emma. Its protagonist, Emma Woodhouse, is spoiled, high status, privileged, and accountable to no one. Emma is often considered Austen’s most tightly plotted novel, and there’s a lot going on in it, so I will narrow down this discussion to two basic choices: choice of romantic partner and choice of friend.

Early on, Emma is drawn to people I call flatterers. These are the people who tell Emma only what she wants to hear—things that superficially feel good in the moment and puff up her ego. One flatterer, Frank Churchill, flirts with her. Another is Harriet Smith, who is lower status than Emma, poorer than Emma, younger than Emma, and less independent and strong-minded than Emma. She looks up to Emma for advice on virtually everything from buying ribbons to whom she should marry. Emma doesn’t think badly of these people; she wants the best for them. She takes on Harriet as a pet project to try to help her along in life. She doesn’t question why Frank would be flirting with her; she merely enjoys the attention and flirts back. But this leads her to disastrously misjudge the people around her because she’s not questioning her thinking. Both characters encourage her in whatever whim, fantasy, or misunderstanding she comes up with.

By contrast, there are the challengers—people who tell you what you need to hear, not always what you want to hear. The gentleman she ends up married to is described early in the novel as being “one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them.”11

Not all challengers are confrontational or blunt, however. You can also challenge the people around you simply through how you act, which is what we see with Jane Fairfax, the woman Emma ends up becoming friends with. Jane is on a similar social level to Emma, but she’s significantly more accomplished in the kinds of skills that ladies were expected to have in that era—things such as drawing and playing the piano. Emma is smart, but she has no patience and she is the opposite of diligent, so she never really develops these skills. From early in the novel, Emma has a vague dislike for Jane and doesn’t understand why, and she doesn’t stop to ask why either. One character comments that it’s because Emma “saw in [Jane] the really accomplished young woman, which she wanted to be thought herself.”12 By the time Emma starts to better understand her own emotions and realize what evidence she’s overlooked, which includes how she feels about all of these characters, she realizes that Jane is somebody who’s going to inspire her to be her best.

These are the kinds of friends and partners who are valuable and whom we should cherish—even though sometimes it’s more difficult in the moment because they may tell us that they think we’re wrong. As Butler puts it, “Emma makes mistakes in the first instance because, like all other human beings, she is fallible. She also makes more than she need, because for much of the novel she underrates the need for objective self-criticism.”13

Austen reportedly wrote in a letter that Emma is a heroine who nobody but herself would much like.14 But many of us do like Emma because we relate to the kinds of errors that she makes and how she learns to correct them. What do we learn from Emma? Similar to Lizzy Bennet, we learn the importance of understanding your emotions and how they’re influencing your judgment, including emotions you didn’t know you had or you didn’t know the reason for. For example, it’s not nice to dislike somebody who has done nothing wrong to you, as Emma dislikes Jane. So, most of us wouldn’t want to spend too much time thinking about that, and Emma doesn’t. But when she does, she can be much more just to Jane, and she gets a good friend out of the bargain.

Emma, like Lizzy Bennet, also misunderstands her own strengths. Lizzy thinks she’s a much better judge of character than she is. Emma thinks that she would be a great matchmaker. (Spoiler alert: She is not.) Understanding your own strengths and weaknesses enables you to better address many things in your life. Studies have been done on self-esteem showing that people who have high self-esteem are pretty accurate in their assessment of their abilities; they don’t think themselves better than they are.15 They know where their strengths and weaknesses are, which Emma eventually learns.

Emma also learns to avoid the assumed similarity problem; other people’s motivations may not be what yours would be. Part of why she misguides Harriet, despite genuinely wanting the best for her, is because she doesn’t understand what Harriet wants or respect her agency. Emma doesn’t understand why Frank would flirt with her if he wasn’t actually interested in her. She doesn’t understand why other people act as they do because she assumes that their motivations would be the same as hers.

She also doesn’t think about the fact that good intentions aren’t always enough. She genuinely wants what’s best for Harriet. But without taking into account what Harriet wants, Harriet’s context, and the fact that Harriet needs to make her own decisions, she’s going to make Harriet’s life worse—as, initially, she does.

The Pattern

We see a clear pattern across Austen’s novels. We start with a setup; we learn the financial and family situation of the heroine and a bit about her personality. Then something changes; usually the heroine moves or other people move to where she lives. In this new context, she has to judge people, usually at least two people. She judges wrongly, usually in at least two cases. She makes some kind of mistake that leads her to behave unjustly and in a way that’s not good for her in the long run or the people around her.

Then she has that moment of intelligent discernment, the realization. In each case, she has to make the choice to take that seriously, as we saw with Lizzy’s letter. And she does. She has a moment of reflection and realizes what’s gone wrong and then adjusts her behavior. This often takes a couple of tries. In most of Austen’s novels, the heroine is put in a situation in which she has to put her new knowledge to work at least two or three times. Austen did not believe (with Socrates) that knowing what is right is enough. You still have to put it into action.

It’s helpful to look at our own lives through this lens. We all know our own situations; we know who we are and what our lives are like. We all have faced changes and complexity in our lives. We all have made errors of judgment. What have been the triggers through which you realized that you were wrong? What kind of reflections did you go through in those moments? Or perhaps you’re now facing complexity or the prospect of change in your life. You can be on the lookout for these kinds of errors. You can start to understand what kind of reflection is going to turn them into a moment of growth for you rather than letting it only be pain or challenge or complexity. Hopefully, that will lead you to a happier ending.

Key Takeaways

Ideas shape choices—what we believe about ourselves, other people, and what a good life is will affect how we behave. The more explicitly we understand that, the easier it’s going to be to correct errors and to correct our course if we’ve gone wrong, as we saw with Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.

To do this, introspection is essential. Without it, we risk leading ourselves astray, misunderstanding our emotions, and losing sight of how they are affecting our thinking. If we want to be more just and honest, like Lizzy and Emma, we have to understand why we don’t want to pay attention to some kinds of evidence—why we don’t want to look at that feeling or think about that person. We have to ask ourselves those difficult questions. If we do, then we continue to develop the active condition of virtue. We keep moving in the right direction. And if we do that, we’ll see improvements in our relationships. Sometimes that means that some relationships end, but others can shift and develop a new dynamic that is healthier and better for both people.

We see with Marianne and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility that, as both of them learn from each other, they end up treating each other better. Austen’s fiction, in general, offers us this benevolence—this world in which hard work, serious introspection, and challenging oneself always lead to a good outcome. And that’s the reassurance we sometimes need when we’re in moments of difficulty. Her novels offer an exploration of different aspects of virtue that we may not have considered. We know that we should treat people as they deserve to be treated. But what does that look like? In real life, it’s complicated and messy, so examining it from different perspectives can be valuable.

Austen was a keen observer of how people think, interact, and talk. By reading her novels, we get clear explorations and examinations of both a person’s internal world and the external world, as well as how those things mesh. Art is an end in itself. We can simply enjoy reading Austen’s fiction because it’s funny, because her characters are vivid, or because we love the happy endings. But the more thoughtfully we engage with it, even only the aspects I’ve elaborated, the more it enriches us.

I hope I’ve convinced you to go read or reread Austen. But if I haven’t, or if you’ve tried and really didn’t enjoy it, here are some books, different in genre, era, and scope, that I would recommend if your goal is to better understand yourself and human nature and thereby improve your relationships. All of these books, to different extents, involve characters who learn to deal with and understand people who have different motives, different backgrounds, and different goals from themselves.

In Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, that is the main character’s whole arc. He wants to understand the principle behind a certain kind of person who thinks differently from him. In doing so, he’s able to improve his career and his relationships.

A related lesson is that of learning to work with those who are deeply different from yourself—not just understand them, but form alliances and build something together. We see this in Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, a dystopian sci-fi trilogy in which the character has to bring together people from entirely different planets in order to effectively rebel against tyranny.

The costs of misunderstanding others can be deep. It can cause not only a lot of guilt and shame for ourselves, but also serious consequences for others if we misunderstand them and don’t realize that we didn’t have enough evidence for the evaluations we drew. We see that in books such as Atonement by Ian McEwan and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.

Thoughtful authors, such as Jane Austen, draw on observation and project principles that can help us thrive. Equipped with this knowledge, go forth, read more, and learn about yourself and other people.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Editor’s note: This article is the second part of a serialized republication of a chapter from Timothy Sandefur’s book Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence, by permission of the Cato Institute. The first part was published in the Summer 2026 issue and the third will appear in the Winter 2026 issue.

The Grievances

Having set out the major premise—that a ruler who violates the principles of justice and seeks to destroy individual liberty is unworthy of allegiance—Jefferson proceeded to the minor premise: the list of incidents that proved George III had violated his subjects’ trust. In framing this list, Jefferson employed the wording he had prepared for the new Virginia constitution, as well as the list of complaints from his Summary View. To these were added grievances from other publications, such as the 1772 Boston Pamphlet. After the committee of five submitted its draft to Congress for editing, the delegates spent two days revising this list. As finally adopted on July 4, the Declaration began:

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

As soon as the Declaration was made public, critics began complaining that its list of grievances was so broadly worded that it was hard to determine which exact actions the colonists were referring to. But Congress had good reason for avoiding specifics. Countless other resolutions had already listed the laws Americans objected to; the First Congress had even provided citations so people could look them up. To do so again would bog down the Declaration and invite critics to dispute every jot and tittle. The time for such quibbling had passed.

Still, modern readers are sometimes puzzled about which “wholesome” laws the crown blocked. To begin with, colonists objected to the fact that all of their legislation was subject to a London veto. In some cases, kings had ordered colonial governors to reject entire categories of laws. The colonies were not allowed to grant divorces, for example, without royal approval.1 Governors were commanded to block bills to tax European imports or to pay colonial lobbyists in London.2 Worse, the home government had for decades barred the colonies from printing their own money. This created a chronic cash shortage, which forced Americans to barter or use complicated accounting devices to pay their bills, often at a financial loss. This policy of starving the colonists of cash could have cruel consequences in an age when debt was punishable by imprisonment.

But Jefferson had another, more important class of legislation in mind: the king forbade the colonists from adopting laws restricting the importation of slaves. The colonies—especially Virginia—had repeatedly tried to ban or restrict slave imports, only to be overridden by London. To Jefferson and other anti-slavery Patriots, restricting the slave trade offered a potential first step toward eliminating slavery itself. But the imperial government made clear that it would not allow Americans to hurt the Royal Africa Company’s bottom line. London had overridden efforts by Pennsylvania in 1712, South Carolina in 1760, New Jersey in 1763, and Virginia in 1710, 1727, and 1766 to ban or restrict slave imports—and in 1770, King George had ordered all colonial governors “upon pain of our highest displeasure” to veto “any laws whatever . . . by which the importation of slaves shall be in any respect prohibited or obstructed.”3 Thus, as Jefferson complained in the Summary View, George III preferred “the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs”—that is, British slave-catchers—“to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, [which were] deeply wounded by this infamous practice.”4

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

The veto meant bills passed by American legislatures had to be shipped to England for review, and, if approved, sent back before going into effect. This took months even if the king’s officers acted quickly. In practice, however, it often took much longer. In 1770, for example, Virginia lawmakers passed a bill to prevent horse stealing; the Board of Trade in London did not get around to approving it until March 1773.5 One New Jersey bill went eight years before being reviewed. A South Carolina law adopted in 1696 was blocked in 1734.6 A New Hampshire statute passed in 1718 was not reviewed until 1769—and then it was vetoed.7 London also required colonial bills to contain “suspending clauses,” postponing implementation until royal approval could be obtained.8 The delays and disruptions caused by this protracted process and the potential of after-the-fact vetoes, rendered colonial lawmaking a frustrating, insulting, and often futile process.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

After the French and Indian War ended in 1763, the British government grew increasingly uncomfortable with the American colonies’ rapid expansion. Westward movement in particular seemed to threaten London’s hegemony, because the larger the population, and the more distant from the imperial capital, the more independent-minded Americans would become. “We ought rather to obstruct than encourage” westward movement, wrote one London intellectual, because otherwise “an army of an hundred thousand” would “not be able to control” the colonists, “whose hearts glow with the flame of liberty.”9 The government accordingly began discouraging emigration to America—nullifying colonial offers to pay travel costs for immigrants or to give them free land.10 It also sought to prevent the colonies from reapportioning their legislatures to accommodate people who moved west.

Population growth radically distorted the apportionment of these legislatures. In Pennsylvania, for example, the ratio went from one representative for every 336 adult white males in 1730 to one representative for every 1,301 in 1770.11 Yet the colonies, especially Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and New Hampshire, were forbidden from taking steps to give frontier towns their own representatives.12 In North Carolina alone, the Colonial Office vetoed thirteen bills providing for the creation of new townships, in order to prevent additional representatives from being added to the colony’s legislature.13

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

This grievance did not appear in Jefferson’s initial draft and was probably added at Adams’s urging. In 1770, he had participated in a months-long dispute with Governor Hutchinson over the Governor’s order that Massachusetts’ legislature relocate from Boston to Cambridge. Four years later, Hutchinson’s successor, General Thomas Gage, moved it again, this time to Salem. But even worse was the situation in South Carolina, royal governor Greville Montagu twice dissolved the colonial legislature, then ordered it to meet in Beaufort instead of Charleston—and then moved it back, all for the express purpose of preventing his political opponents from attending. Such ploys—which doubtless brought to mind the schemes of the Stuart monarchs (especially Charles II, who in 1681 moved Parliament from London to Oxford, because its residents were more supportive of the monarchy)—had no other purpose than to subvert the constitution by silencing the people’s representatives.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

Practically all the colonies had their legislatures closed, at least temporarily, by royal governors seeking to silence opposition to London’s authority. Representatives in Virginia and Massachusetts were repeatedly sent home for passing resolutions against unconstitutional taxes and regulations, and Parliament had adopted laws permanently closing the legislatures of New York and Massachusetts. Westminster viewed these actions as unremarkable, because it saw colonial assemblies as subordinate institutions. But to the colonists, who thought their legislatures were miniature parliaments, they were outrageous violations of political autonomy.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

This accusation drew a subtle but suggestive parallel between George III and the much-detested Stuart kings, who reigned from 1603 until being overthrown in 1688. Attempting to rule without Parliament was widely viewed as among the Stuarts’ worst offenses; one that justified the English Civil War. Now, King George’s subordinates had repeatedly shut down colonial legislatures, then delayed reopening them for so long as to render it impossible to conduct business. The Massachusetts legislature was closed indefinitely. Virginia’s Governor, Lord Dunmore, had prorogued that colony’s legislature in August 1774 and only called them back into session when forced to, nearly a year later. North Carolina’s governor dissolved the legislature, then fled the colony. In South Carolina, a furious dispute between the governor and the assembly led to so many closures that the colonial legislature adopted no laws at all after February 1771.14

Colonists had responded to these closures by establishing unofficial “conventions” to operate in place of their legislatures, but British authorities refused to acknowledge the conventions’ legitimacy. The Declaration justified them by declaring that the lawmaking power is “incapable of annihilation” because it belongs inherently to the people. If Parliament closed a legislature, “the people at large” were free to establish new ones.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

Americans knew immigration was key to economic and social growth. “In Europe,” wrote Jefferson, “the object is to make the most of their land, labor being abundant,” whereas in America, the goal was “to make the most of our labor, land being abundant.”15 The same logic, however, made Britain increasingly suspicious of immigrants. The 1660 Navigation Act expressly barred anyone not English-born from working as a merchant, or from commanding a trading vessel.16 Even ships purchased in the colonies from foreigners were subjected to heavy tariffs.17 Meanwhile, the lack of a uniform naturalization policy led to frustrating inconsistencies. Naturalization in one colony was not valid in other colonies.18

Colonies resorted to naturalizing people on a case-by-case basis, but London then instructed America’s royal governors not to sign any naturalization laws. The empire cracked down still more in the mid-1770s, banning colonial governors from approving naturalizations “upon any pretense whatsoever.”19 It also barred non-naturalized foreigners from owning land in the colonies. This tended to reinforce London’s autocratic rule, since voting rights depended on property ownership. The government followed that up by prohibiting colonies from giving away land to newcomers, as they had done for years in hopes of attracting immigrants. From now on, Parliament said, colonial governments had to sell land to the highest bidder—and sell it with a new tax requirement attached.20

Even that wasn’t enough for some. In May 1774, Governor Dunmore urged the Colonial Office to make sure only “men of credit and ability” bought property on the frontier, because the west was “becoming the asylum” of “disorderly and unruly people . . . who, carrying with them an abhorrence of all authority and control, establish themselves in defiance of both and become the continual plague and embarrassment of every government.”21 Parliament, in short, was using its control over land titles as a choke-chain on America’s rapidly growing population.

He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries.

In his first draft, Jefferson accused the king of “suffer[ing] the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these colonies” by “refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers,” but Congress moderated his language.22 The courts had indeed ceased to operate in Virginia and Massachusetts—in Virginia because Dunmore dissolved the legislature before it adopted legislation to fund the courts, and in Massachusetts because jurymen refused to proceed under a system in which judges were paid directly by the king.

North Carolina courts were also closed, thanks to a years-long dispute regarding laws that enabled American lenders to “attach” the assets of English borrowers who failed to pay their bills. The right to seize assets from British debtors was crucial to American businessmen, who had no other practical way to recover from defaulting borrowers located across the sea. But in 1772, London officials forbade the colony’s legislature from authorizing this practice. Thus when lawmakers defiantly included a foreign-attachments provision in a bill to reform their legal system, royal governor Josiah Martin blocked it. The legislators responded by refusing to establish a court system without the attachment power. It was unfair, they argued, that imperial officials let New York and Pennsylvania adopt foreign-attachment laws, but not North Carolina. An impasse ensued, and North Carolina’s judiciary closed in 1773, not to reopen until the Revolution ended.

These were just some of the many clashes between Britain and the colonies over the organization of their judicial systems. The king had also disallowed the creation of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court unless the legislature narrowed its jurisdiction, blocked New York from empowering justices of the peace to decide cases involving less than £5 in damages, and vetoed a Virginia law that would have barred appeals of lawsuits involving fewer than £10.23 He blocked efforts by Pennsylvania, New York, and both Carolinas to provide judges with lifetime terms, and in 1761, instructed colonial governors to veto all such bills in the future.24 The empire wanted judges to answer to London, not to Americans.

Judicial independence was crucial to the Americans, especially to John Adams, who thought it essential to constitutional government. When London announced plans to pay judges’ salaries directly, he had maintained that this would make it impossible for Americans to obtain justice when challenging the government in court. Judges would inevitably fall prey to a “base servility of spirit” toward their paymasters and engage in “sordid, nauseous, and impious adulations to [their] superiors” rather than deciding cases neutrally.25 Adams would have had little patience for those who today claim that judicial review (the power of a court to declare a law unconstitutional) was an invention of the nineteenth century, or who assert that this practice is undemocratic, and that courts should be “restrained” instead of “active.” In his view, a vigilant and independent judiciary was indispensable to the rule of law and the preservation of liberty.

He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

The biblical metaphor of “swarms” had become common in America by 1776, to describe the way London was sending over agents to live off of the Americans like locusts devouring the crops of Old Testament farmers. To be governed like conquered foreigners doomed to labor for London’s enrichment, rather than for themselves, was the opposite of the American ideal of personal independence. But former Governor Hutchinson ridiculed this image in his pamphlet responding to the Declaration. He argued that no more than 30 or 40 such “officers” had been sent to America—that is, members of the American Customs Board and their subordinates—and that this was hardly enough to seriously burden the taxpayers.

Hutchinson was ignoring the fact that by “officers,” the Declaration’s authors were referring to the entire cadre of enforcers dispatched by England, which included thousands of soldiers, sailors, and inspectors, all of whom stood to profit from taxes and customs restrictions that the colonists considered unjust. Parliament had also adopted the Mutiny and Quartering Acts which forced colonists to house and supply these troops, who were stationed in America to spy on them. Parliament’s plan to pay governors, judges, and other bureaucrats with taxes taken from colonists—instead of leaving such decisions to local representatives—also meant that virtually every clerk, deputy, hanger-on, and bureaucrat would be paid with substance eaten out of the unconsenting people of America. There seemed no reason to doubt that the swarms of “pensioners” and “parasites” would grow.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.

Jefferson had in mind the military occupation of Boston that began in 1768, but Whitehall had determined to maintain a permanent military presence in North America long before that. Following the French and Indian War, it stationed thousands of troops in the west (supplied and quartered at the colonists’ expense), ostensibly to protect Americans from French incursions or Native American uprisings, but also to block westward migration. Then, during the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, London had sent thousands more soldiers to Massachusetts, New York, and other colonies, and there they remained. This army—answerable exclusively to London—first served to menace the Americans and then, when Thomas Gage was made military governor, it became the official government, transforming the colony into a military autocracy.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.

General Gage’s appointment as governor, with instructions empowering him to force civilian officials to assist him, meant all government in Massachusetts was effectively run by the army. Gage had implemented martial law, and Governor Dunmore had proclaimed martial law in Virginia, too, as did the governors of Quebec and Nova Scotia. They claimed the Mutiny Acts justified their actions, but one patriot pointed out, that only made things worse, because those statutes contained “no provision for securing the obedience of the military to the civil power, on which the preservation of our constitution depends.”26

The legality of these proclamations was doubtful. It was unclear at the time, whether the principle of martial law was even acknowledged in British jurisprudence.27 Blackstone and others said it was, but only when civilian authorities were incapable of operating.28 And that was not the case. Although Dunmore and Gage claimed that civilian rule had collapsed in their colonies, that wasn’t true. The Virginia House of Burgesses had tried to meet, in fact, only to be prevented by Dunmore’s refusal to come to the capital in Williamsburg. As for Massachusetts, Gage’s presence was the source of disorder.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

By Daniel Kraus
New York: Atria Books, 2026
294 pp., $10.99 (Kindle)

Angel Down won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for fiction—and yet the book is poison to its readers’ lives and minds. The Pulitzer Prizes—long considered some of the most prestigious awards in the United States—are supposed to celebrate “excellence in the arts and letters,” and in the past they did. But to call this year’s selection an example of excellence is to make a mockery of the term.

This year’s celebrated work of fiction follows Bagger, a preacher’s son who was drafted from a life of petty crime into the infantry in World War I. He manipulates others to avoid any risk to himself until his desire to protect Arno, a young brother-in-arms, leads him on a dangerous mission into no-man’s-land, where they find a beautiful, silent woman trapped in barbed wire. As they carry her across the hazardous terrain, she silently helps them in myriad impossible ways, and they start to realize that she isn’t an ordinary woman. Bagger concludes that she must be something supernatural: an angel, shot down by the monstrous weapons of the Great War.

Although this story premise is interesting, it would be a mistake to imagine that reading the book is like being taken on a fascinating journey accompanied by vividly drawn characters whose exploits are detailed in delightful language. Instead, what the Pulitzer website describes as “a breathless novel of World War I, a stylistic tour-de-force” is, in fact, a work written without any periods.1 It’s supposed to be a single sentence, though the author uses commas and other punctuation marks (including question marks and exclamation points within dialogue), as well as paragraph and chapter breaks, liberally—and often wrongly. The reader is sometimes able to guess where a sentence ought to end or what a rambling block of nonsense might be meant to convey, but it is not the reader’s job to guess what the writer might have meant or should have written.

A person can only hold so many items in his conscious mind at any one time. The divisions of sentences, paragraphs, sections, and chapters in a well-structured piece of writing enable him to integrate the units it contains into something comprehensible and relatable to some aspect of his knowledge and experience. Kraus’s refusal to group his concepts into sentences that each convey a single idea not only obfuscates what precisely his ideas are, but it represents a rejection of clarity and meaning as such.

An artist must select which elements of reality he wishes to re-create in his work, and groundbreaking art often requires the creation of original techniques for doing so. But if the “techniques” disregard the way the human mind works, such art cannot be said to be good for human life—which means that it is not good, full stop. As philosopher Leonard Peikoff put it, such art “is addressed to man as he does not perceive and cannot think.”2

Fiction may be fantastical and stretch the bounds of our imagination, but it is not strangeness for its own sake—it is an entertaining way to explore or portray something that matters deeply to its creator (and hopefully, to its audience). It conveys its values in ways that reflect and reinforce their significance to human beings. Ignoring a basic rule of grammar, whose purpose is to enhance and expand the functioning of its readers’ minds, is the opposite of the function of fiction. To deliberately hinder the conveyance of clarity and meaning, as Kraus does through his style, is to reject them wholesale.

The author attempts to frame this as a legitimate stylistic choice in the following passage:

Bagger, already weighed down in mud and blood, further heavies in the dreary certainty that the shriek won’t ever end, just like the war won’t ever end, like the carnage won’t ever end, it’s a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself to form a terrible black wheel that, sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave (6)

Obviously, Kraus wished the experience of reading the book to parallel one aspect of being in a war. As a brief section contrasting with the rest of an otherwise clear, well-written work, this could be effective. However, that is not the case here; Kraus wrote the book entirely in this formless manner that undermines meaning by rejecting clarity.

Grammar, properly understood, is not a set of arbitrary dictates handed down through the centuries but a set of principles that facilitate the clear conveyance of ideas, even complex ones. As education expert Michael S. Rose put it,

What [the self-styled grammar] revolutionaries fail to understand is that grammar is not a constraint upon expression but its very possibility. The irony that shadows their rebellion is that in casting off the supposed chains of grammatical structure, they have not liberated thought but confined it to a smaller, meaner province, where clarity is impossible and precision unknown.3

Good writing, which employs grammar properly, enables us to integrate a great many concepts and thus expand the scope of our thinking drastically. Good fiction writing sometimes includes breaking grammatical principles if doing so serves a purpose within the story that can’t be served by adhering to them, such as (in some cases) indicating a character’s fragmented or tortured state of mind. But this is not what Angel Down does; its author placed the desire to convey an emotional impression over the use of reason (as though the two must necessarily be opposed)—and the result is not brilliant insight but dreary muddiness.

Through Angel Down, Kraus rejects the conceptual nature of literature—the fact that the medium depends on the ability of its audience to retain and categorize vast quantities of information through concepts stored and used via words. He is, in effect, attempting to construct a shrine to his moral ideas (if one takes him to believe what he writes) or to earn prestige (if one is being cynical) using materials that he either does not understand or holds in contempt.

The book’s style contradicts the requirements of human communication, and it hazily conveys a moral ideal that contradicts the requirements of human life. After rescuing the seemingly wounded woman from the battlefield, Bagger and his fellow soldiers start to recognize her power. As they do, three of them try to forcibly claim her to serve their own desires: One wants sex; another, vengeful destruction; the last, fame and fortune. All consider her a means to their ends, not a being with her own agency—and as a result, she brings all three of them to untimely deaths. Through the angel’s supernatural retribution, the book condemns acting as though others exist to serve you.

The book attempts to contrast this attitude with Bagger’s disposition toward the angel. “‘Each of the others wanted something particular from the person they imagined me to be,’” she observes (253). “‘But what do you want?,’ and Bagger doesn’t have to think, ‘All I wanted was to protect you,’ he gasps through sobs, ‘like [my father] protected me’” (254). Bagger’s father, a preacher, had taught him that the moral ideal is to serve others selflessly. As such, Bagger works to grasp what the angel wants from him and to act accordingly. He submits to her authority, not based on evidence that she’s earned any, but because of his emotional connection to her as both a manifestation of the religion he never quite rejected and as the supposed embodiment of the purity and innocence toward which he feels an obligation. He follows her even as he is filled with revulsion and horror at the idea of a divine conscience (God) that could allow such a gruesome war to continue. He concludes that she wants him to become a pacifistic automaton who abjectly accepts the guilt of other men’s sins and “serves” others by immolating himself:

what men have represented till now, the slavering instinct to conquer, a momentum unstoppable unless some hero jams the hardest detritus he can find into the machine he helped create, break the cogs and overheat the engine, and accept being burned alive in the resulting explosion, thereby inspiring everyone else toward heroism, too, the same self-sacrifice of Mr. and Mrs. Bagger, which might graduate into blanket nonviolence, an impossible dream (263)

This, according to the book, is our choice: force others to serve our own ends, which is obviously evil; or blindly serve others, following the dictates of a supposed authority even when it doesn’t make sense to you. “The angel tried to get Bagger to save anything other than himself, to make it a habit, and do so without throwing more gas into the furnace,” the narrator ham-fistedly concludes (264). And this is how Bagger acts in the dramatic final scenes of the book—not out of moral clarity but out of a desire to do what the angel wants him to do.

Bagger’s “arc” is to move from one side of a false dichotomy to another. He begins as a con man and coward who wants others to serve him at the cost of their own well-being and ends up serving others at the cost of his. Both options require sacrifice; the only difference is whose. This ancient false dichotomy is destructive to individuals and to relationships. There is one difference between the book and real life: The angel has unlimited power. She can create miracles. Only the existence of a supernatural element makes Bagger’s choices possible. If he were to choose to be a pacifist in the midst of a real war, he would face real consequences. If he were to blindly follow edicts that didn’t make sense to him, he would ruin relationships and risk injury, even death. However, because a supernatural power guides him in the book, he escapes the consequences of his own actions in a way that could never happen in reality.

The supposedly humanity-loving moral ideal he comes to accept is revealed to be exactly the opposite when one considers the implications of Bagger’s character and the angel’s: Both deny the significance of the individual. Bagger comes to hold that morality can only be achieved by rejecting the judgment of his mind—the faculty by which each person makes the choices that form his character, identity, and life. Bagger submits himself instead to the authority of the angel, who never even receives a name. She is not supposed to be an individual but a “concentration of virtue.” Yet she has the characteristics of an individual—the ability to make choices, to reason, to feel—because this is the only way a being with agency—let alone virtue—can exist. We interact, we collaborate, we find others to be incalculably valuable to our well-being—but we are fundamentally separate and distinct from one another.

Only by recognizing this fact can we come to respect each other’s rights and agency, and only through doing that can we form mutually beneficial relationships. Such relationships are ubiquitous in real life. An employer who treats his employee well and an employee who does his work well have a mutually beneficial relationship. A marriage in which both partners contribute meaningfully to the physical and spiritual needs of each other is a mutually beneficial relationship. A friendship in which both people enjoy camaraderie, encouragement, and the discussion of shared interests is a mutually beneficial relationship.

In Angel Down, we see examples of relationships that are emphatically not mutually beneficial, such as those between the angel and the soldiers who attempt to exploit her, and the one in which Bagger disregards his own mind and life to follow the angel’s judgment. Only one relationship seems on the surface to be mutually beneficial: that between the angel and the youngest soldier, Arno. “Arno’s an orphan, a sad little pauper straight out of Dickens, and though the kid’s never explicitly said he fibbed his way into the Army to procure a family, it doesn’t take a genius to see it” (59). The angel appears to each of the men as whomever he most wants to see, and “from the moment the angel reached the trench, Arno was snuggling into her like the mother he always wanted” (188). Arno tries to protect the angel because she offers him a real, spiritual benefit. If she were a real woman, this might have been mutually beneficial: She gets protection; he gets nurturing and comfort. But the angel is manipulating Arno because she cannot die; therefore, she does not need his protection.4

In a novel of any literary merit, characters like Arno generally are meant to serve a specific purpose: They are morally innocent victims of systems or philosophies they don’t understand but likely would resist if they did, and thus they evoke our pity. In Angel Down, however, Arno is an innocent victim of the author’s lack of moral clarity. He is robbed of agency; his fate depends on the decisions of others (whose fates at least have some connection to their actions). Clearly, the author doesn’t know what mutually beneficial relationships are or how to portray them but found Arno too useful to omit; he is not a person but the object of pity who first softens Bagger’s hardened heart.

In Angel Down, form and content are united in their disregard of human nature. A book that relies on supernatural elements to enforce its moral false dichotomy presented through a style that flouts the requirements of the human mind cannot be regarded as “excellent” by any rational standard. Art that subtly conveys its meaning can be deeply satisfying to a thoughtful reader; nonsense masquerading as creative form should not be mistaken for art.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Objectivism is often misrepresented as a rigid set of ideas issued by Ayn Rand that you must accept and uphold to be a “good Objectivist.” In other words, the assertion goes, the absolutism of Objectivism is like the dogmatism of religion: doctrinaire, restrictive, confining.

But it is not. And understanding the difference is essential to understanding Objectivism.

Objectivism is indeed a philosophy of absolutes. It is a system of black-and-white principles. It is also reality-based, non-dogmatic, and profoundly liberating. Its life-serving nature lies in the integration of these facts.

Objectivism identifies absolutes about the nature of reality, man’s means of knowledge, the requirements of human life, the source and nature of rights, and the moral purpose of government. Its principles are black and white because reality is black and white: Things are what they are; they’re not what they’re not. An idea is either supported by evidence and logic or it isn’t. An action either serves your life or it doesn’t. A law or policy either prohibits coercion and thus protects individual rights or it doesn’t. And so on.

Objectivism recognizes and upholds such absolutes, but it does not call for you to accept them on faith or because some authority said so. Rather, Objectivism calls for you to look at reality for yourself, to use your own mind, and to draw firsthand conclusions. If an idea doesn’t make sense to you, if you don’t see how it is supported by facts and logic, then, according to Objectivism, you should not accept it as true. This is an aspect of the Objectivist principle of independence: the recognition of the fact that to understand reality and succeed in life, you must use your own mind and live by your own judgment.

This principle, too, is an absolute: If you want to understand the world and your needs, you must perceive reality with your own senses and integrate your observations using your own reasoning mind. Of course, you can learn from other people. You can read or listen to what they say, consider their arguments, observe their actions, and relate what they say or do to what you know to be true. But the fact remains that to understand an idea, theory, or subject, you must rely ultimately on your own observations and logic. You must establish and maintain a primary orientation toward the facts as you see them, not toward the views or opinions of other people.

Because of this particular absolutism, Objectivism is profoundly liberating. It does not issue commandments or “categorical imperatives” from on high for you to obey. Rather, it identifies observation-based principles of the if-then variety, such as: If you want to understand reality, then you must observe reality and think. If you want to live and flourish, then you must think and act accordingly. If you want to live in a social system that enables human flourishing, then you must learn the nature of such a system and work to establish and maintain it. Such principles are not dogmas. They are recognitions of the law of cause and effect. And they do not restrict or confine you. They free you.

Specifically, they free you from the subjectivist nonsense that reality is whatever you want it to be (personal subjectivism) or whatever some collective says it is (social subjectivism)—and from the religious nonsense that reality is whatever some “divine consciousness” wills it to be (supernatural subjectivism). Objectivism acknowledges that reality exists and is what it is independently of any consciousness or consensus, that the function of the mind is not to create reality but to comprehend it, and that the mind is an attribute of the individual, not a collective or an alleged God.

When you use your mind to understand, uphold, and act in accordance with black-and-white, reality-based principles, you do not restrict yourself from acting in ways that could support or improve your life. Rather, you identify the range of actions that can do so. You exclude from practical consideration the kinds of actions that lie outside that range. Thus, you enable yourself to act in a fully life-supporting, fully self-interested manner as a matter of principle.

What could be more liberating than that?

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Those of us who frequently fly between continents know the stress and hassle of spending hours on a plane, only to have to get off and get on another one to complete the journey. For passengers travelling between Europe or the Americas and Australia, the trip often involves two long-haul flights back-to-back. But aviation innovators are working to change that. Although Boom Supersonic’s plans to halve the time such journeys will take are still a decade or so away from implementation, Airbus and Qantas have just demonstrated the viability of an interim solution: a plane capable of making the 10,000-mile journey in one go. In my new article, I celebrate these heroes of aviation innovation.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

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This Week’s Anniversaries

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On July 28, 2026, a brand-new Airbus A350 broke the record for the longest uninterrupted flight by a commercial jet: twenty-four hours and twenty-four minutes. The 14,338-mile flight from Melbourne, Australia, to Toulouse, France, demonstrated the viability of Project Sunrise, a joint effort by Airbus and Australian airline Qantas to establish direct flights between Australian cities and destinations that were previously unreachable without a layover. The airline plans to fly in 2027 from Sydney and Melbourne to London, Paris, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Cape Town.1

Previously, the aircraft had flown from Toulouse (Airbus’s manufacturing base) to Melbourne on July 23 on a 10,500-mile route east over central Asia, demonstrating that the aircraft can fly nonstop from Europe to Australia. The longer return flight also flew east, transiting both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the United States, and Canada. In two flights, the plane circumnavigated the globe and demonstrated that it can reach any American or European destination from Australia in a single flight. With a full load of passengers and cargo it can fly a little more than eleven thousand miles, enough to reach Spain or eastern Canada from Melbourne.2

Although spending more than twenty hours on a plane is arduous, it represents a saving of approximately four hours compared to an average layover journey—significant for busy business travelers. It also saves the airline (and, therefore, customers) from paying navigation, landing, handling, security, and other fees—and taxes—at the layover location. Despite these savings, the flight is still more expensive to operate than a layover flight due to the eighteen tons of fuel the plane carries at takeoff and the need to carry two shifts of flight and cabin crew on board for the whole journey. To achieve these long flights, the aircraft must also have fewer passenger seats to reduce its weight. For these reasons, Qantas is banking on passengers paying a premium for the comfort and convenience the flights will offer, charging about 30 percent more for a ticket than the layover option.

Some are dismissing Project Sunrise as a merely expensive indulgence for the wealthy, but this is untrue: Early adopters provide vital funding to drive innovation that ultimately benefits everyone (a principle that can be seen in all kinds of fields, from cars to smartphones). In the days when a jet needed four engines to cross the Atlantic, transatlantic flights cost as much as a family car—but those high-price tickets helped fund development of three- and two-engine jets that made the trip more affordable.3 That process was greatly delayed by regulations prohibiting two-engine jets from crossing the ocean for a long time, and laws that prevented competition among businesses also contributed to the high prices. For example, the Bermuda I and II regulations forbade airlines from undercutting each other’s fares and limited the number of services each airline could provide.4 Despite these artificial constraints, the market still enabled manufacturers to produce a generation of more-efficient transatlantic planes, such as the Airbus A300, the capabilities of which encouraged regulators to relax the two-engine restrictions.5

The Airbus A350 is undeniably a marvel of modern engineering. In addition to the record-breaking range of the Project Sunrise aircraft, which is Qantas’s A350-1000ULR (ultra-long range) variant, all variants of the A350 boast a number of other innovations. Their Active Load Alleviation and Fly-By-Wire systems constantly input data from the plane’s sensors into the flight computers, which make tiny adjustments to stabilize the flight and prevent adjustments that might lead to excessive stress or a loss of flight stability. This keeps the aircraft’s flight safer and more stable, even in harsh wind conditions, than human pilots can.6 Their takeoff and fault monitoring systems detect component failures and system anomalies long before they threaten aircraft functions.7 Most impressively, their pioneering carbon fiber construction increases the aircraft’s ability to endure high-stress conditions from intense crosswinds to fire—a point well demonstrated in the January 2024 accident at Tokyo Haneda Airport, during which the A350 protected its passengers from a raging inferno long enough for all 379 to safely escape following a head-on, high-speed collision with another plane.8 Had any other aircraft type been involved, the crash likely would have been a mass-casualty disaster. (Five of the six people on the other aircraft were killed in the crash.)9

The A350 is, in many respects, the pinnacle of traditional jet airliner development. Virtually no greater time saving on flights of this length is possible until supersonic flight becomes commercially viable because subsonic passenger jets cannot get closer to the speed of sound than they already do without the airflow over the wing exceeding it.10 Just as regulations slowed development of the twin-engine, long-haul jets that preceded the A350, the progress of supersonic aviation has been strangled by the recently lifted restrictions on its use over land.11 Until supersonic aircraft catch up that lost time, the A350 represents a new era in super-long-haul travel. Alongside its unique extra fuel tanks in the center rear of the aircraft, the A350 also boasts adaptations designed to improve the passenger experience in-flight, including a wellness area for exercise and relaxation and enhanced cooling systems for keeping food fresh on board. Airbus is working with Singapore Airlines on adapting its A350-900 fleet into a lighter-weight, shorter-fuselage ULR variant, and it is continuing to develop the A350-1000URL design through Project Sunrise Evolution.12

If these projects are successful and Airbus can continue making the design more efficient and affordable, the A350 could deliver the fastest, most comfortable ultra-long-haul flights for all kinds of passengers across the globe. This kind of innovation enhances people’s lives in myriad ways, making it easier for people to visit overseas family and friends, discover new places and cultures, meet new people, and build new personal and professional relationships. Moreover, it empowers businesses to more easily and efficiently move goods across borders, opening up opportunities and breaking down the barriers between nations. This is what makes the aviation industry and the people who deliver and progress it worthy of celebrating: the way their hard work and constant pursuit of knowledge and achievement enhance human life.

Project Sunrise is not merely a luxury indulgence but rather a turning point in aviation history. It represents the pinnacle of traditional jet travel, and it should spawn a global network of affordable ultra-long-distance flights in the coming years and decades. That will be a tremendous improvement for passengers in Australia and other remote countries that should make their journeys more bearable until supersonic jets finally return. Airbus and Qantas deserve praise for their remarkable achievement, which, if conditions are favorable, will be the sunrise of a new era for aviation.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey is taking theaters by storm, rapidly approaching a worldwide box-office gross of $1 billion. Although the film is undeniably impressive on a technical level, its success is concerning on a fundamental level: Most viewers seem unaware of the ideas it expresses—or fails to.

At the same time, many concerned about Europe’s migration crisis are rushing to praise Citizen Vigilante, a film with a moral message that will horrify any sane mind. In his new reviews of both movies, Tim White examines their stories, showing why they fail to convey the kind of life-enhancing themes we need in our culture today.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

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Written and directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Running time: 173 minutes
Rated R for graphic violence, language, and brief nudity

There have been a great many translations of The Odyssey spanning hundreds of years, although the same half dozen or so tend to top the list of those most highly regarded by credible critics and literary scholars. Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation—not one of them—served as director Christopher Nolan’s primary inspiration for the film (he also wrote the screenplay).1 In a glowing review of Wilson’s translation, Annalisa Quinn of NPR wrote:

Wilson’s project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup—the Christianizing (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms—to reveal something fresh and clean. . . . Though it’s silly to ascribe too much to her gender rather than her skill, Wilson does have a certain double sensibility that often translates male grandeur with a female half-smile.2

As if this weren’t a clear enough signal of the cancerous identity politics in Nolan’s film, the opening shot is a close-up of a black man presented—with unflinching seriousness—as a 12th-century BC Greek speaking to a room full of other 12th-century BC “Greeks” who are, in fact, primarily Asians, Indians, and other Africans.3

Here we go again.

Only Odysseus’s quest itself is grander in scope than the catastrophic failure of Nolan’s film. Its redeeming qualities are nearly nonexistent, and it fails not only as an adaptation of one of the greatest stories of all time but also as a film, and these two failure modes often overlap considerably.

The Odyssey is widely regarded as one of the greatest stories of all time, not because it’s old. It has been lauded for thousands of years because it is one of the best known examples of long-form storytelling, and storytelling has one fundamental purpose: to depict the human condition and enrich human lives. The essential task of a storyteller is to convey meaning—that is, to engage deeply with ideas and values that always have been and always will be central to human life. This is what Nolan’s film utterly fails to do and indeed does not even attempt.

This starts to become evident during an early scene depicting Odysseus’s encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus, a one-eyed giant who can speak in the original poem but does not speak in this scene. Nolan’s decision to render Polyphemus mute here is not a minor change—it entirely misses and negates the purpose of the scene. In the original text, the cyclops encounter is the first of Odysseus’s major postwar adventures that he recounts to the Phaeacians (and the reader). This was not an arbitrary choice on Homer’s part. The reason the cyclops encounter is shown first is because its purpose is to convey, in part and in fundamental terms, what sort of man Odysseus is—and he reveals his character through a verbal battle of wits with Polyphemus, who displays near-human intelligence.

In the poem, Odysseus’s men are trapped in Polyphemus’s cave when he blocks the entrance with a humongous boulder. The men move to attack the creature, but Odysseus orders them to stand down—and he reaffirms the order even after Polyphemus brutally kills and eats several of the soldiers. Odysseus’s remaining men question the order but nonetheless follow it, trusting his judgment even though they do not yet understand it. Odysseus engages Polyphemus in conversation and witty banter, amusing the cyclops until he falls asleep. Odysseus then explains to his men that, if they kill the creature, they will be trapped forever in the cave because the stone blocking the entrance is far too heavy for them to move. They cannot fight their way out of the deathtrap—they must think their way out.

Over several days, Odysseus—who cleverly has told Polyphemus that his name is “Nobody”—lulls Polyphemus into complacency with more banter and flattery until the beast drinks too much wine (at Odysseus’s encouragement) and falls into a deep sleep. This allows Odysseus and his men to carry out the preparations for their escape plan—preparations that are loud and would have woken the cyclops had he not been drunk. When they are ready, they sharpen a large wooden stake and drive it into Polyphemus’s eye, blinding and enraging him. The cyclops gropes around for the men, but they are hiding among his sheep. When the giant eventually unseals the cave entrance to let the sheep out to graze, he feels each sheep as it passes by, still searching for the treacherous men who blinded him. Odysseus, having anticipated this, has already told his men to crawl out of the cave under the sheep, maintaining their disguise. As they board their ship, Polyphemus gives chase, shouting to his brethren cyclops and to his father, Poseidon, that “‘Nobody’ has blinded me.” Once Odysseus and his men are safely away from the shore, he cannot resist revealing his true name to Polyphemus, shouting “Tell [Poseidon] Odysseus, raider of cities, took your eye: Laertes’ son, whose home’s on Ithaca!”4 Although Odysseus is remarkably smart, he nonetheless sometimes does stupid things; this is, in part, what makes him an interesting and relatable character. (Revealing one’s identity to the god of the sea after blinding his son is quite foolhardy when one needs to cross the sea to get home; Poseidon then proceeds to severely complicate the remainder of Odysseus’s journey.)

Nolan’s portrayal of this scene conveys none of this meaning. Polyphemus is mute, so there is no dialogue between him and Odysseus at all. Odysseus does point out to his men that slaying the creature will trap them in the cave, but this is framed as an almost accidental realization rather than the reasoned observation of a clever man who has been paying close attention to his surroundings all along. In the poem (and in the well-done, albeit hokey 1997 television miniseries), the tension of this scene comes from the duel of minds between hero and monster, wherein a single intellectual stumble or overstated word of praise could spell doom for the wayward sailors homesick for wives whose embraces they’ve forgotten and sons they’ve never met.

Nolan replaces this crucial dramatic tension with boilerplate slasher film tactics, substituting darkness and loud noises for the battle of wits in a clumsy horror scene that clashes tonally with the rest of the film. As in the poem, Odysseus taunts the beast by revealing his name as the men flee to safety—but because we did not first see his intelligence, his courage, and the depth of his concern for his men, he comes across more like a cocky braggart than a flawed hero. Throughout the rest of the film, Nolan continues to portray Odysseus as alternately rude and stupid while spending comparatively little time on his good qualities—and Matt Damon’s consistently phoned-in performance shows us an Odysseus whose two primary emotions are mild confusion and boredom. (I feel compelled to point out that Damon is a much better actor than this, and he deserved a vastly better script.)

The scene featuring the witch Circe is similarly butchered. Odysseus’s men, nearly mad with hunger, encounter a lone woman while foraging in the wilderness and demand food from her. Although they don’t threaten or harm her, they are unnecessarily aggressive, and she agrees to share her food with them. While they are eating, she gleefully turns them into pigs using her magic.

When Odysseus later confronts Circe, Nolan’s version of her is revealed to be another instance of modern Hollywood’s sexism:

Odysseus: You turned my men into pigs.

Circe: No—they are pigs. I only removed their disguises and showed them for what they are. They came to me with empty bellies and hot blood.5

Odysseus: Did they touch you?

Circe: They would have.

Odysseus never challenges Circe’s presumption about his men and resolves the situation by simply threatening to kill Circe’s sister if she doesn’t remove the curse.

In the original poem, there isn’t so much as a vague hint that Circe is a misandrist hellbent on punishing all men for their supposed inherent wickedness, nor is there any indication that Odysseus’s men treat her poorly; in fact, it is Circe who offers to help them, and they graciously accept her offer. She is portrayed as a mysterious and explicitly nonhuman creature, although she takes a human form and outwardly acts human in some ways. In fact, the sexual aggressor in the original text is not Odysseus nor any of his men but Circe; she uses both magic and seduction to lure unsuspecting men into her trap. Odysseus, aided by Hermes, counters Circe’s magic with mystical herbs, and although he does sleep with her, he does so not out of lust but in acquiescence to her demand and on the condition that she remove the curse she has placed on his men.6

Par for the course for Hollywood in 2026, Nolan’s version of this scene inverts Odysseus from a virtuous, clear-thinking man who is explicitly not ruled by his sexual urges into an apologist for horny thieves. One point of the original scene—which Nolan also misses or ignores—is that appearances can be dangerously deceiving, and that Odysseus is greater than most men in his ability to see the truth behind clever deceptions. Another idea central to the original version of this scene is that courage is virtuous in part because not all threats to our values can be fully understood; Circe’s nature and motives are mysterious to Odysseus, which frightens him greatly, but he nevertheless confronts her because he would rather die in the attempt to free his men than leave them to their fate.

In Nolan’s film, the cyclops scene, the Circe scene, and many others are oddly short but feel much longer because they are not enjoyable or interesting to watch. The 173-minute film feels both frantically rushed and exhaustingly slow at the same time, which also traces back to Nolan’s fundamental misunderstanding of (and disrespect for) the source material. The original poem is only slightly longer than the average novel, but it would be somewhat misleading to say “only” without qualification because the structure of an epic poem is so different from that of a novel. In general, epic poems are primarily descriptive; they summarize long, complex events in a few lines or stanzas with little exposition of motive or mechanism, leaving it to the reader to infer or imagine these elements.7 This is why an epic poem typically covers tremendously more narrative ground than a novel or short story of comparable length; the latter two, by virtue of their different structures, spend much more time on the “why” and “how” of the events shown therein.

In practice, this means that adapting an epic poem to film requires much more screen time than adapting a similar-length novel unless one is willing to massively abridge the original text—at which point the resulting film becomes not an adaptation but a different story that is, at most, loosely based on the original. Nolan’s film feels both rushed and plodding because it merely “checks off” each major scene without seeking to understand what it means or why it should be included at all. As a result, we get something that is less like a coherent, narratively driven film and more like a three-hour museum tour led by an overcaffeinated guide who started the tour an hour late. We don’t understand how Odysseus defeated the cyclops or what (if anything) he learned from the experience; we see five minutes of whispering and a brief skirmish, and then the film moves on. We don’t understand how he survives his encounter with Circe or how he changes as a result of it, if he does; we see five minutes of a bored man halfheartedly arguing with an angry woman who hates men for no clear reason, and then the film moves on. There are so many scenes in the movie, and most of them are so shallow, that the end result is an increasingly familiar one in movies today: a film that manages to say nothing despite speaking for a very long time.

I also must address Nolan’s frankly disgusting willingness to submit to the overt racism and sexism that have infiltrated so many Hollywood productions since the mid-2010s. The opening scene is far from the only one in which the actors’ sex, race, or ethnicity is wielded as a club clearly intended to “deconstruct” “white” or “male-dominated” stories. For example, there is no defensible argument to be made that Lupita Nyong’o was cast as Helen of Troy for either her acting ability or her resemblance to the character; only in the loosest sense of the word “acting” does she do any acting at all during her two or three minutes of screen time, and she couldn’t bear any less resemblance to an ancient Greek woman. The decision to cast a sub-Saharan African woman as Helen of Troy was made for one reason only, and everyone knows that reason, including those who pretend not to know: to “subvert” the “racist” assumptions of “white” audiences. Only slightly less ridiculous are the myriad scenes (at least six) in which Odysseus’s African, Indian, and Asian soldiers loudly proclaim to one another: “We are Greeks.”

Particularly offensive is the casting of Elliot Page as Sinon (a character who is not in The Odyssey at all; he is essentially a disposable extra in Virgil’s Aeneid, written centuries after Homer’s death).8 Page is five foot one and barely one hundred pounds. This alone should disqualify any male actor from playing a Greek soldier in any serious adaptation of The Odyssey—but Page is not a male, and no amount of surgery can make her look like a Greek soldier. The film pointedly ignores these facts, most glaringly when showing a shot of Page immediately after a shot of the (actual) boy who plays a pubescent version of the character in an earlier scene. Nolan extends the farce still further, rewriting Sinon from a remarkably unremarkable side character into “the greatest and bravest man I’ve ever known” (Odysseus’s words). Just as Sinon is blatantly claimed to be something he irrefutably is not, so too is Page—and the prevailing moral code of modern Hollywood dictates that no one is allowed to point out any of this.

Most of the other actors in the film deliver performances just as underwhelming as Page’s. Damon comes across as being there primarily for the paycheck, Tom Holland alternates between overacting and underacting (mostly the latter), and John Leguizamo—who is supposed to be playing a Greek servant—doesn’t even try to mask his extremely New York accent. The only notable exception is Anne Hathaway, who does what she can with the poorly written script and occasionally manages to breathe some life into otherwise yawn-inducing scenes, but she can only do so much. The film is, for the most part, similarly boring to look at; many scenes are underlit nearly to the point of complete obscurity, and most are dominated by dark blue, dark brown, or dark yellow filters. This, too, is typical of Nolan; most of his films are overwhelmingly dark in both color and lighting.

Nolan’s film is deeply flawed in many more ways, but unlike him, I will refrain from trying to cram more onto the page than the format can support. Even in my most charitable interpretation, there is almost nothing positive to say about the film, the final lines of which are possibly the least self-aware lines of dialogue ever written:

Penelope: Why will the stories [of us] always be sung?

Odysseus: Because songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.

Perhaps Nolan should try his hand at pop songwriting—because if this is the caliber of narrative writing that he thinks should be memorialized through the ages, then it’s time for him to put away his storytelling pen for good.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

All behavior can be traced back to instincts. When justice is denied, instincts turn to vengeance. —Anonymous

This made-up, sophomoric quote is the first thing that appears on-screen in Citizen Vigilante. Like the movie itself, it might at first appear profound, but it foreshadows one of the movie’s two terminally diseased premises: the alleged moral supremacy of “instinct” (i.e., unthinking emotionalism) over reasoned thought.

We need spend only a few sentences on the movie’s almost total lack of artistic merit. Writer/director Uwe Boll intentionally makes bad movies and has openly admitted that he’s a terrible filmmaker.1 Citizen Vigilante is poorly written, poorly cast, poorly acted, poorly filmed, poorly scored, and poorly edited. None of this should be hard to believe for anyone who has seen any of Boll’s other films—but these criticisms, severe as they are, aren’t important here. Most important is what Citizen Vigilante’s generally positive reception says about the quality of thought, discourse, and art in the modern world.

Citizen Vigilante isn’t merely a bad movie. Boll has made dozens of those; a few are entertaining because of their sheer badness, and most can cause no harm beyond wasting a few hours of your time. Citizen Vigilante is a different, much worse kind of bad movie: the kind that tries and fails to take a moral stand against a severe, real-world problem—and then proceeds to dump jet fuel on the fire from a bucket labeled “water.”

The titular vigilante is Michael Sanders (Armie Hammer), whose name is never spoken aloud and only briefly seen in print once. (Boll’s intent in making the protagonist nearly anonymous seems to be to show him as someone with whom all of us should identify or sympathize; “anonymity as relatability” is a common device in vigilante stories.) Sanders takes it upon himself to fix Europe’s failing justice system—as though “Europe’s failing justice system” were a singular monolith—by torturing and murdering people who deserve it, according to his own blatantly whimsical and emotionalistic judgment. The movie doesn’t even specify the country in which it takes place; Boll only tells us that it’s set in Europe.2

In real life, some parts of Europe have been increasingly plagued by violent attacks similar to those depicted in the movie, and these attacks often are committed by migrants like those against whom Sanders retaliates.3 America has also been rocked by many high-profile cases of senseless violence committed by illegal immigrants in recent years, including those of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and twelve-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray.4

However, Boll’s film opens not by asking serious, carefully formulated questions about what justice requires in such cases but by reveling in the violence itself, which is almost always shown in gory, over-the-top detail. Within the first three minutes, an unnamed and presumably illegal African migrant stabs an innocent woman in front of her son for no discernible reason. Shortly after that, Muslim immigrants gang-rape a teenage girl and try to defend themselves by saying that the act was morally permissible under the teachings of Islam. Similarly graphic scenes comprise much of the rest of the film, and they clearly are intended to anger the viewer into accepting (or further entrenching) the premise that “outsiders are bad”—not to make him think.

Rational, good people are and should be enraged at the individuals who have committed such crimes in real life. Just as important, rational, good people don’t morally judge any individual on the basis of anything other than that individual’s words and actions—and they understand that morally judging others is not always necessary or appropriate. Codes of values, on the other hand, are and must be subject to moral judgment because they are volitional—people choose to create them, choose to accept them, and choose to act on them—and because the ideas and values on which people act have direct impacts on human well-being. Groups of people can be morally judged wholesale only insofar as membership in a particular group is both volitional and necessarily constitutes a moral issue; not all volitional choices are moral issues, but all moral issues are matters of volitional choice. This is why we can—and must—pass moral judgment on all Nazis, all rapists, and all murderers but cannot legitimately judge all men, all white people, or all immigrants.

Citizen Vigilante never attempts to make any of these distinctions. Within the first ten minutes, it becomes clear that the movie either cannot or will not define its terms; the phrase “illegal migrants” (and often just “migrants”) is consistently used as a synonym for “violent criminals,” and the words “rights” and “individual” are never used at all. This refusal (or, more likely, inability) to be precise about whom the film regards as enemies of human well-being not only enables but necessitates all the equivocation, conceptual unclarity, and moral whitewashing that follows.

The first dozen violent migrants we see in the film come across as glaringly exaggerated in their ethnic diversity: two African men, a generic (non-native) Western European woman, an ambiguously Eastern European man, a handful of vaguely Middle Eastern gangsters, one man who might be some kind of Asian, and two whose countries of origin are impossible to guess—Boll’s point clearly being that they’re “not from around here.” Sanders witnesses them all harass, rob, rape, and/or assault innocent locals—and the first instance we see of his “justice” is when he uses a gun to threaten a young man who gets on a bus without buying a ticket.

Some of Citizen Vigilante’s defenders are quick to claim that Sanders is not a racist or xenophobe but a staunch individualist because he punishes only violent criminals irrespective of their race, ethnicity, or migrant status.5 One of several problems with that claim is that it is not what happens in the movie. Sanders does punish some people who are shown to have seriously harmed others without cause—but he also “punishes” hundreds of presumably innocent people, most of whom are shown (or strongly implied) to be migrants.

Boll’s writing is so heavy-handed as to elicit eye rolls, as in a scene in which Sanders tells the manager of a property management company he owns, “Give me the addresses [of everyone who is late on rent], and I’ll have my people sort it out.” Worse than the clumsy dialogue is Sanders’s moral “reasoning”; it quickly becomes clear that by “sort it out” he means “use violence.” Sanders regards all his low-income tenants as criminals at worst or lazy losers at best—he says so explicitly several times throughout this scene—and he is particularly disdainful of those who are both poor and foreign. When the manager protests and points out that the police will intervene, Sanders blithely says, “Our lawyers will have something to say about that,” implying that his lawyers can somehow protect him from legitimate criminal charges of assault and conspiracy—and that the government would be morally wrong to file such charges.

As Sanders is leaving the room at the end of this scene, he stares pointedly at his employees—most of whom are of retirement age—and says, “It smells like a nursing home in here. Let’s get some fresh blood.” According to Boll, noble vigilantes don’t stop at threatening and “punishing” presumably innocent people based on race or income—old people are fair game, too.

As if mass assault and age discrimination weren’t bad enough, Sanders later kidnaps a judge who knowingly set violent criminals free—and murders several innocent people solely to demonstrate a meaningless anecdote to the captive judge, whom Sanders is about to kill anyway. While driving, with the judge in the passenger seat, Sanders says, “Human beings are such sheep. When you push them to the limit, they will obey the law, even if their own lives are in danger. Here—I’ll show you.” He then deliberately swerves into oncoming traffic, causing a random car in the opposite lane to run off the road and violently crash at high speed. He casually continues his sermon: “Did you see what happened? That car, when we went into their lane, instead of just crossing the line and breaking the law and going into our lane—they went into a ditch and most likely died.”

According to Boll, to the tens of thousands of people who have rated Citizen Vigilante four or five stars on IMDB or Amazon, and to the thousands more who are singing its praises on social media (including Elon Musk), Sanders is the sort of hero we need.6

Not once does Citizen Vigilante even accidentally imply the only premise that is morally correct with respect to immigration: People (including citizens, immigrants, travelers, and everyone else) who respect individual rights should be welcome in civilized countries, and those who do not should not.7 In fact, one of the most shocking things about the movie is the perfect consistency with which it avoids even a tangential connection to a proper moral stance (i.e., one derived from and consistent with individual rights). Instead, it frames the central conflict as, in part, “us against them,” with “us” being “those who were born in this particular geographic area” and “them” being “those who were born somewhere else.”

This is pure tribalism of the worst and most morally offensive kind. Such an attitude may not constitute racism or xenophobia in every case, but it often does, and it embodies exactly the same underlying premise: Individuals are to be judged not by their actions, character, or chosen beliefs but by some unchosen—therefore, morally irrelevant—characteristic that they happen to possess by sheer accident of birth or circumstance.

Another serious problem with this movie is its utterly unearned confidence in its dismissal of the moral validity of the rule of law. An incompetent Interpol investigator named Henry (Costas Mandylor) halfheartedly chases Sanders and serves as a one-dimensional caricature. “We have the law for a reason,” he says in one scene. “We cannot have vigilantes running around doing their own thing, you know? That’s why I’m here. We don’t want society to collapse.” This is the only reason viewers are ever given as to why Sanders’s actions might not be praiseworthy. Every other law enforcement official in the film is depicted as not merely incompetent but outright stupid to the point of comical absurdity, such as when the generic “European” equivalent of a SWAT team obligingly stand in front of the world’s most obvious trap and allow themselves to be gunned down by the vigilante—and then a second team does the same—and then a third. By the time this happens, yet another of Citizen Vigilante’s many blatant equivocations is on full display: “Some people in the justice system aren’t doing their jobs; therefore, everyone in the justice system is morally complicit and impossibly stupid; therefore, the vigilante is morally free to murder anyone who tries to stop him.”

By this point in the movie, superficially different forms of the same idea have surfaced at least a dozen times, forming a clear and sinister pattern. All immigrants are dangerous because some violent criminals are in the “immigrant” group. All late-paying tenants in the “poor” group are lazy freeloaders. All employees who are in the “old people” group must be underperforming—because they’re old. All police, judges, and politicians deserve death because they belong to the “naive idiots who still believe in the rule of law” group. Any given motorist on the road can be justly murdered on whim—because everyone except Sanders belongs to the “sheep” group.

This is pure collectivism—which has been Citizen Vigilante’s basic moral premise all along. Collectivism is not merely discussing people in terms of groups that share certain characteristics, nor is it equivalent to generalization or even stereotyping.8 Collectivism is the view—whether implicit or explicit—that the group (any group), not the individual, is the unit of moral or political concern. From any form of this view, it necessarily and immediately follows that individual rights either don’t exist or can be freely revoked so long as those individuals belong to some group that some person (or some other group) finds distasteful or inconvenient. Collectivism is the basic moral premise held in common by (to name but a few) the Nazis who murdered eleven million biologically or ethnically “inferior” individuals during World War II; the communists who executed three million individuals under Pol Pot explicitly for the crime of standing out from the group in any way (including simply by wearing glasses); the other communists who tortured, starved, and shot twenty million “dissenting” individuals under Lenin and Stalin; and the other, other communists who starved fifty million individuals to death in the name of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.”

Sanders is no Hitler, Pol Pot, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao in terms of magnitude—but he is precisely their ideological soulmate. Just as these dictators and countless others believed that eliminating entire classes of individuals was merely the price to be paid for what they considered to be the improvement of society, Sanders believes himself justified in killing anyone who stands in the way of his vision of a better world. Sanders views himself as a wolf with unlimited license to prey on any number of sheep, but he is like a wolf in only one way: He acts on animal instinct rather than reasoned thought.

Citizen Vigilante’s basic concept of justice is that it is whatever you feel it is—so long as you are sufficiently outraged by people or things you feel are bad. In one of Sanders’s many tiresome monologues, he tells us explicitly what he (and by extension, Boll) feels justice is when he visits a rape victim in the hospital:

Sanders: The men who did this to you—what do you want to happen to them?

Victim: I want them to go to jail for the rest of their lives.

Sanders: And they might. Of course, we won’t know until the end of a trial, and that could take years. And of course, you’ll have to participate in that trial, telling the story of what those men did to you over and over in a room full of people who are going to call you a liar and try to poke holes in every detail of your story. We’ll also have to get lucky with the judgment; you never know how those things are going to turn out. And during that long, expensive trial, we have to hope and pray that the men who did this to you don’t do the same exact thing to somebody else. Is that the justice that you want?

Victim: No.

Sanders: Do you want justice?

Victim: Yes.

According to Sanders, an objective trial in which all the facts of a case are scrutinized carefully by dozens of people is not justice—nor is a public legal process intended to minimize the chances of imprisoning or executing innocent people—nor is a rigorous standard of epistemic hygiene and logical coherence. Rather, justice requires (or at least allows) the victim to sanction the murder of someone who may or may not be her attacker, at the hands of a stranger whose rationality and objectivity she can’t possibly gauge, at the risk of spending the rest of her life in prison for being a knowing accomplice or accessory to murder—all in the name of blindly emoting about what “feels” just while refusing to do any thinking about what justice requires.

Intelligent, interesting, worthwhile vigilante films point out real problems in the justice system while taking care to separate the clearly guilty, the plausibly guilty, and the presumed innocent. Such films then proceed to pose questions such as: What is justice? How do we know? How do we punish evil without becoming evil ourselves? What’s the cost of getting any of these answers wrong?

Citizen Vigilante is not intelligent, interesting, or worthwhile. Whereas other films such as The Brave One (2007) and Law Abiding Citizen (2009) take the issue of vigilantism seriously by encouraging the viewer to think carefully about it, Citizen Vigilante gestures vaguely in the direction of a real and serious problem, critically botches the diagnosis, and prescribes a catastrophically wrong treatment. This cycle of fundamental misdiagnosis followed by “solutions” that make the problem worse is increasingly common with respect to many real-world issues today; and as certain societal problems grow more severe, more and more people draw collectivistic lines in the sand, refusing to consider any view put forth by anyone not from “their side.” (I’ve provided a few examples throughout this article, but if you’re so inclined, simply search for both positive and negative reviews of the movie and assess the quality of the discourse yourself.)

Citizen Vigilante embodies exactly this kind of deeply ignorant arrogance, smugly asserting its own righteousness while refusing to consider that its basic premises may be wrong. This sort of movie is the last thing we need more of today. What we need—what we desperately need—is more reasoned, careful, good-faith discussion between people who are motivated not by a desire to destroy their ideological enemies at all costs but by a desire to discover and rationally validate objective standards of morality, of justice, and of everything else that human life requires.9 Citizen Vigilante claims to be a movie about righting wrongs, but the only reason to watch it is to look for everything it gets wrong—so that you can get those answers right. To avoid sliding irreversibly into the dystopian nightmare depicted in the film, we must start by taking the factual requirements of human life seriously, by clarifying our own thinking according to a rigorously evidence-based standard of objectivity, by dramatically raising the bars of both art and discourse, and by taking commensurate action in both politics and education—one mind at a time.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Christopher Nolan’s movie adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey is taking movie theaters by storm. That’s directing a lot of attention at the original work and the movie’s differences from it. Many of those differences are down to the cultural context that gave rise to the original story—a context that imbued it not only with heroism but also mysticism. In “Odysseus and the Limits of Ancient Heroism,” John Devlin shows how that mystical context undermines the story’s heroism, while also paying tribute to the story’s important role in pioneering the concept of a rational, heroic protagonist.

Those of us who have been deeply affected by Ayn Rand’s ideas struggle to imagine what the world would have been like had she not been able to escape Russia in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. Although thankfully she did, many others did not. Among them may have been countless great minds who could have contributed to philosophy, art, and more. This week, in his first article for TOS, Georgy Sinitsky profiles a group of poets who, despite the mystical, collectivist nature of Russian culture at this time, briefly created a remarkably reality-oriented school of art in opposition to all that prevailed around them. Perhaps, had their movement not been snuffed out by the repression of communism, they might have affected the course of 20th century culture much more significantly.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

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Homer’s Odyssey is an epic story with an epic protagonist—Odysseus is not simply a skilled warrior but also a thinker, a trickster, and an “obstinate, cunning and irrepressible intriguer.”1

Although this is a deeply heroic work that pioneered the idea of centering a story on a rational, proactive character, it also depends upon a premise fundamentally opposed to the conditions that make heroism possible. It is set in a universe where the attainment of goals and values doesn’t ultimately depend on one’s choices but upon the decrees and interventions of Olympian deities.

In many respects Odysseus is a prototype of a romantic hero of literature. Romantic narratives are characterized by larger-than-life characters, purposeful action, and value-driven plots, all of which are exemplified in Odysseus’s arduous striving and overcoming of monstrous obstacles to return home to his family. We see his courage, perseverance, and intelligence during his journey’s most memorable moments: when he devises the wooden horse plot that leads to the downfall of Troy; his quick-witted plan to evade the seductive snare of the sirens; and when he outwits the Cyclops Polyphemus—where, assessing that killing the giant outright would trap him and his men in the cave, Odysseus devises a plan to intoxicate their foe, blind him, and lead his men to escape beneath a herd of sheep. Each of these episodes revolves around Odysseus using reason to overcome ordeals and move closer to his main goal—to return home. But the emotional response the reader feels in these moments is somewhat dampened when we are reminded of Homer’s fundamental view of man and of existence.2

The problem with the Homeric universe is not that gods and monsters exist—good art can have fantastical, mythical elements so long as its theme is rational and thereby life-serving. The problem is that the gods limit Odysseus’s efficacy, which undermines his achievements. We repeatedly see Odysseus act to achieve his goals, but whether his actions matter is largely determined by the whims of the gods. His favor with the goddess Athena, in particular, becomes the deciding factor of his fate on multiple occasions. His escape from Calypso’s island after seven years of captivity is due solely to divine command following Athena’s petition to Zeus. His subsequent survival of Poseidon’s storm is made possible only by the interventions of Athena and her fellow goddess Leucothea. Upon finally returning to his homeland of Ithaca, his victory over the parasitic suitors is again made possible thanks to the divine intervention of Athena and Zeus. None of this detracts from Odysseus’s capacity to think, act, and strive in pursuit of his goals (in fact, these attributes somewhat influence his favor with Athena). But instead of directly earning every victory himself, his actions are constantly subsidized by the interference of divine forces. For heroic storytelling to be effective, the hero’s actions need to be the primary driver of the story. From a reader’s perspective, wouldn’t his victories be greater—and more heroic—if they depended solely on his own strength of body and mind?

Difficult obstacles reinforce this storytelling principle, and these could even take the form of intervening gods—provided they remain obstacles, such as the hostile Poseidon in The Odyssey. The problem arises when such intervening gods become the final causal explanation of unfolding events. In romantic storytelling, the hero overcomes adversity through volitional action, but in deterministic storytelling, he overcomes adversity because “destiny” dictates it. The Odyssey, which mixes both styles, is impactful to the extent that it’s romantic and undermined to the extent that it’s deterministic.

None of the above should be viewed as an attack on Homer; he wrote this in an age before formal philosophy—before explicit conceptions of volition, individual rights, and reason as man’s absolute guide. Despite the dominance of mysticism in Archaic Greece, Homer captured the dramatic cogency of human greatness at a time when nobody had formulated its philosophic explanation. One might say that he discovered the hero before the philosophy of heroism.

Despite its flaws, The Odyssey often feels like a story of human efficacy. Homer constantly dramatizes choice, particularly regarding Odysseus’s unique skill in scheming his way out of dangerous situations. It’s these moments that drive the story forward most climactically, and one of the reasons it has endured for millennia. The decisions, the disguises, the scheming, and the action—not the divine meddling—remain the most imperishable factors behind the story’s enduring emotional power.

This heroic spirit eventually would require a different philosophy—one in which the hero’s choices and actions are the primary causes of his own achievements. There would be stormy sailing ahead before mankind found that philosophy, but Homer’s Odyssey gave this heroic spirit its bearings and set the course for it to pursue its destination.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Osip Mandelstam’s “The Morning of Acmeism” (1913) is a brief yet ambitious manifesto attempting to articulate the aesthetic principles of one of the most distinctive poetic movements of early-twentieth-century Russia. Acmeism—its name derived from the Greek akmē, meaning the highest point, prime, or moment of full flowering—unfortunately remains largely unfamiliar to Western readers, even to those interested in literature. But anyone concerned with the nature of language, with the role of form in art, or with the possibility of a reality-oriented aesthetics will find value in this movement.

Mandelstam’s work does not present a systematic argument; rather, it offers a series of compressed reflections on the nature of poetry, the role of words within poetry, and the relationship between artistic form and reality. Its brevity is deceptive: Within a few pages, Mandelstam sketches a theory that is at once beautiful and implicitly philosophic.

The meaning and value of Acmeism cannot be deeply understood apart from its historical context. Russia, as Russian-born philosopher Ayn Rand once characterized it, was “the ugliest and, incidentally, most mystical country on earth.”1 Recent events have led many to agree with her. Although Russia occasionally shared certain cultural and political developments with Western Europe, it never experienced either a renaissance or a full enlightenment. Despite intermittent attempts by individual Russian rulers to “open a window to Europe,” the country remained largely untouched by the intellectual revolutions that shaped the modern West.2 It was an autocratic and deeply mystical society.

However, several significant people in the history of art were born in this environment. This is not because oppression produces creativity—it does not. Control, censorship, and prohibition restrain people’s creative potential, but some resist. And in that resistance, many cultivate and embody certain qualities—clarity, conviction, the desire to create—that enable them to oppose the dominant forces of their time.

Russian culture, particularly from the late eighteenth century onward, developed in constant tension with the culture of Western Europe. Without that influence, the intellectual culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia could not have emerged in the form it did. The Russian intelligentsia did not arise in isolation; it arose through engagement with ideas that already had been forged elsewhere.

Within this framework, some Russian thinkers and artists gradually came to recognize the backwardness of their own culture—and to define themselves in opposition to it. But opposition alone is not enough. One cannot fight effectively against something without knowing what one is fighting for. A vague sense of alternative possibilities may suffice to initiate resistance; a clear and positive vision is far rarer—and necessary for lasting change.

It is in this tension between Russian culture and its Western influences that the Silver Age of Russian culture was born. This period, beginning in the final decades of the nineteenth century and ending in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, was marked by an extraordinary flourishing of artistic activity, particularly in poetry. Its dominant literary movement was Symbolism.3

Originating in France in the second half of the nineteenth century and formally articulated in Jean Moréas’s 1886 “Symbolist Manifesto,” Symbolism was said to be grounded in a specific premise: The world we perceive with our senses is not self-sufficient but points beyond itself to a realm of “primordial Ideas.” The task of poetry, therefore, is not to name but to suggest; not to define but to evoke the hidden correspondences that link sensory appearances to a deeper realm of meaning.4

In Russia, Symbolism developed somewhat later, in the 1890s. Initially an adaptation of the French model, it soon acquired a more explicitly philosophic dimension. Russian Symbolism transformed the poetic gesture of suggestion into a metaphysical project: Poetry became a means not merely of indicating ideas but of accessing a supposed higher, nonmaterial realm. Figures such as Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Alexander Blok, and Andrei Bely exemplify this development.5

But not all artists of Russia’s Silver Age accepted this direction.

Acmeism emerged in Russia between 1910 and 1912 as a conscious break with Symbolism and its fundamental way of viewing the world. Its institutional center was the “Guild of Poets,” founded in St. Petersburg by Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky. The movement’s theoretical articulation came in 1912–1913, most notably in Mandelstam’s “The Morning of Acmeism” and Gumilev’s “The Heritage of Symbolism and Acmeism.”

Against the Symbolist tendency to dissolve the poetic word into vague suggestion, Acmeism affirmed clarity, concreteness, and form. Words, for the Acmeists, must have a definite meaning grounded in reality; they must not evaporate into an endless chain of subjective associations. This theoretical advance enabled Acemists to produce a body of poetry marked by precision, balance, and a profound respect for language.

Because poetry cannot be translated from one language to another without loss—its sound, rhythm, and internal structure are inseparable from its meaning—it is difficult to convey the full aesthetic achievement of the Acmeists in another language. What can be examined, however, are the principles that made that achievement possible.

These principles, despite their strength, did not secure the movement a lasting cultural position in Russia. There were two reasons for this. The first was political: The Soviet regime did not merely oppose the spirit of Acmeism; it destroyed its representatives. The second was philosophic: Acmeism, for all its insights, rested on unresolved contradictions.

The Acmeists themselves did not consider their relationship to Symbolism purely antagonistic. Gumilev explicitly wrote that a new movement must inherit the achievements of its predecessor.6 And on the level of technique, Acmeism owes much to Symbolism. But at the level of fundamentals, the break is decisive. Symbolism, both in France and in Russia, was grounded in a fundamentally mystical view of reality. Acmeism, by contrast, moved toward a realist orientation.

This is most evident in Mandelstam’s manifesto “The Morning of Acmeism.” He begins by insisting that the value of a work lies not in the artist’s worldview but in the work itself. The worldview is a means, not an end. This anticipates a crucial principle: The value of art lies in the work itself—or, stated negatively, art is not the means to any didactic end. Mandelstam continues: “To exist is the highest pride of the artist. He desires no other paradise than being. . . . The modest outward appearance of a work of art often deceives us as to the monstrously condensed reality it contains.”7

This idea of a “condensed reality,” which Mandelstam does not develop or clarify, seems within the context of his writing to refer to the artist’s selective re-creation of reality through his art—its concretization.8 In addition to art “condensing” reality by concretizing it, the word itself is likewise “condensed” in poetry, because, for Mandelstam, it is not a mere vehicle of meaning.

In ordinary speech, a word functions as a sign conveying thought; from this arises the habit of treating its logical meaning as its “content,” whereas sound, rhythm, and structure are considered secondary. Mandelstam rejects this division in poetry. In Acmeism, the poetic word is not a detachable container of content but an integral form. Meaning—or, as Mandelstam calls it, logos—stands on an equal footing with sound and rhythm. The mature poetic word is neither a transparent carrier of meaning nor an empty play of sounds but a stable, “vertical” form in which meaning, sound, and structure become inseparable. It is this unity to which the poet must aspire in his craft.9 As Gumilev wrote:

While valuing the Symbolists for having revealed to us the importance of the symbol in art, we do not agree to sacrifice other modes of poetic effect to it and seek their full coordination. . . . It is more difficult to be an Acmeist than a Symbolist, just as it is more difficult to build a cathedral than a tower.10

Mandelstam develops this architectural metaphor into one of the central images of Acmeism:

Acmeism is for those who, possessed by the spirit of building, do not faintheartedly renounce their own weight, but gladly accept it in order to awaken and use the architecturally dormant forces within it. . . . What madman would agree to build if he did not believe in the reality of the material whose resistance he must overcome? In the hands of the architect, a cobblestone turns into substance, and he was not born to build for whom the sound of the chisel breaking stone is not a metaphysical proof.11

The poet works not with arbitrary signs but with real material—the word in its wholeness. Here one finds an idea close to a principle originally captured by Francis Bacon: Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. Likewise, to achieve aesthetic zenith in poetry, one must accept the word as material in all its specificity and submit to its nature.

Mandelstam continues:

The Symbolists were poor homebodies; they loved travel, but they felt ill at ease in the cage of their own organism and in that world-cage which Kant built with the help of his categories. . . . What would you say of an ungrateful guest who lives at his host’s expense, makes use of his hospitality, yet inwardly despises him and thinks only of how to outwit him? . . . That is why the architect must be a good homebody, whereas the Symbolists were poor builders.12

His attitude toward “that world-cage which Kant built” is not entirely clear. Both Kant and the Symbolists despised the hospitable host—reality—wishing to “outwit” it by calling it merely “phenomenal” and holding that some other, “noumenal” reality lay beyond it. But Mandelstam’s complaint, it seems, amounted merely to this: that the Symbolists were not content with describing the phenomenal world but hopelessly strove to pass beyond its limits. Be that as it may, Mandelstam argues that the architect, with whom he compares the Acmeist poet, must love reality and the material it provides for creation and must respect their identity in his work. This is brilliantly right.

The following passage is, in essence, the most beautiful expression of the positive side of Acmeism—of what is distinctly Acmeist in it rather than merely inherited from Symbolism:

A=A: What a beautiful poetic theme. Symbolism languished, grew bored with the law of identity; Acmeism makes it its slogan and offers it in place of the dubious a realibus ad realiora [from the real to the more real]. The capacity for wonder is the poet’s chief virtue. But how can one fail to marvel at the most fruitful of laws—the law of identity? Whoever is filled with reverent wonder before this law is undoubtedly a poet. Thus, by recognizing the sovereignty of the law of identity, poetry receives all that exists into lifelong feudal possession, without conditions or limitations. Logic is the kingdom of surprise. To think logically means to be in continual astonishment. We have come to love the music of proof. Logical connection is for us not a little song about a siskin, but a symphony with organ and singing, so difficult and inspired that the conductor must strain all his powers to keep the performers obedient. To prove, and to prove to the end: to take anything in art on faith is unworthy of the artist—easy and dull.

We do not fly; we rise only to those towers that we ourselves can build.13

Here everything speaks for itself, and the only comment I can offer is: yes.

At its highest point, Mandelstam’s manifesto affirms a view of poetry grounded in reality, clarity, and the integrity of the word. He even identified Gothic architecture as the material analog of this ideal, describing the Middle Ages as marked by a “noble mixture of rationality and mysticism.” Yet this formulation reveals a tension. The same thinker who celebrated the law of identity and the “music of proof” did not fully abandon the language of mysticism and so could not fully escape its consequences. The realist impulse of Acmeism is genuine—but not consistently sustained.

This inconsistency points to the first reason that the movement failed to establish itself as a durable cultural force: a lack of philosophic integration. The Acmeists moved beyond Symbolism but didn’t do so decisively. The realist metaphysics implicit in Mandelstam’s essay was never fully articulated or defended.

This limitation becomes clearer in Nikolai Gumilev’s “The Heritage of Symbolism and Acmeism,” wherein he writes:

Russian Symbolism directed its main forces toward the realm of the unknown. . . . And it has the right to ask the movement that comes to replace it . . . what relation it bears to the unknowable. The first thing Acmeism can answer under such interrogation is that the unknowable . . . cannot be known. The second is that all attempts in that direction are unchaste. All the beauty, all the sacred significance of the stars lies in the fact that they are infinitely distant from the earth and will not come closer through any successes of aviation. . . .

To remember always the unknowable, but not to insult one’s thought of it with more or less probable guesses—such is the principle of Acmeism. . . . Of course . . . the beautiful lady Theology will remain on her throne, but the Acmeists do not wish either to lower her to the level of literature or to raise literature into her diamond-cold realm.14

Gumilev rejected the Symbolists’ attempts to penetrate the unknown—but not the notion of the unknowable itself. His argument rested on restraint, not on rejection. The “infinitely distant stars” he invoked have, in fact, come closer—through the achievements of human reason. The unknowable should be rejected not because it cannot be known but because it does not exist. In a universe governed by the law of identity, there is, in principle, nothing unknowable. By failing to fully embrace this implication, the Acmeists never escaped what Mandelstam himself called “that world-cage which Kant built.”15

The second reason Acmeism failed to establish itself as a durable cultural force was political. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the communist regime subordinated literature to ideological goals, culminating in the doctrine of socialist realism. A movement committed to the autonomy of form and the integrity of language could not survive under such conditions. Its representatives paid with their lives: Gumilev was executed, his wife and fellow Acmeist Anna Akhmatova was silenced and persecuted, and Osip Mandelstam died in a labor camp. Acmeism was not merely eclipsed—it was destroyed.

And yet, its legacy endures. The Acmeists knew what they opposed, and they grasped—if only partially—what they sought: poetry of clarity, form, and fidelity to reality. Their failure was not one of intention but of integration. For that reason, their work remains both a genuine achievement and an unfinished project.

I would like to close with a poem by Mandelstam—a poet who marveled at the law of identity and believed, despite everything, in the future of his country and of world culture:

Let the names of flowery cities
Caress the ear with fleeting glory —
It is not Rome the city that’s immortal,
But man’s presence in the universe.

Kings try to get man in their power,
Priests find excuses for their wars,
And yet without him hearths and altars
Like wretched rubble are beneath contempt.16

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Ayn Rand once observed that art is the barometer of the culture. The values expressed in our most popular movies, TV shows, novels, and so forth tell us the values that are widely accepted in our societies. With that in mind, the huge popularity of Citizen Vigilante—a film that promotes senseless violence without a semblance of justice—among people who regard themselves as defenders of Western civilization is alarming. In his new article on the film’s significance, Robert Bidinotto shows in detail how it reflects a culture in which conservatives and leftists alike are abandoning objective principles.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

New This Week

From the Archive

This Week’s Anniversaries

“I believe that the work TOS is doing is imperative to the future of our nation and those who support reason around the world.” —Miguel

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