Yaron Brook to Speak in Salida, Colorado

[dianahsieh]

Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, will give two lectures in Salida, Colorado on July 29 and 30. (Salida is about 3 hours from Denver; it's not the same as Sedalia, where Paul and I live.) From the web page:

Thursday, July 29 - 7:00 pm

"Capitalism without Guilt: The Moral Case for Freedom"

Friday, July 30 - 7:00 pm

"Woodstock's Legacy: The rise of Environmentalism and the Religious Right"

The lectures will be held at the SteamPlant Theater.

Dr. Yaron Brook is a prominent advocate for Objectivism, the philosophy of novelist Ayn Rand. As president of the Ayn Rand Institute, an educational organization based in Irvine, California, he is interviewed frequently in the media and has appeared regularly on the Fox Business Network to debate and discuss current economic and financial news from the Objectivist viewpoint.

"Capitalism without Guilt: The Moral Case for Freedom"

In Thursday's lecture, Brook focuses on capitalism's undisputed record of wealth generation, noting that it has always functioned under a cloud of moral suspicion. In a culture that venerates Mother Teresa as a paragon of virtue, businessmen sit in stoic silence while their pursuit of profits is denounced as selfish greed. Society tells businessmen to sacrifice, to serve others, to "give back"-- counting on their acceptance of self-interest as a moral crime, with chronic guilt its penance. It is time America heard the moral case for laissez-faire capitalism.

"Woodstock's Legacy: The rise of Environmentalism and the Religious Right"

In Friday's lecture, Brook will discuss how, in 1969, Ayn Rand examined the cultural significance of two high-profile, but very different events: Woodstock and the Apollo 11 launch. In her lecture, "Apollo and Dionysus," Rand showed how philosophical ideas play out in a culture. She showed why these two events were a product of a long-standing philosophical dichotomy, reason versus emotion. In this talk, Yaron Brook considers how these two opposing forces, reason and emotionalism, have manifested themselves in American culture in the ensuing decades.

I plan to attend both lectures, along with some other people from Front Range Objectivism. We're going to make a fun trip of it, likely with some hiking!

Cross-posted from Metablog