Meeting Father Rahl: An Interview with Terry Goodkind, Part II

By David Craddock

David Craddock: I'd like to talk to you about your personal philosophy: Objectivism. What led you to become an Objectivist?

Terry Goodkind: Ayn Rand is the inventor of the Objectivist philosophy. I consider her the greatest thinker since Aristotle. She made advances in the world of philosophy that no one since Aristotle has made. Her thinking on concept formation is truly groundbreaking and explains so much about philosophy that's never been explained before. I'm much more fascinated by her non-objective writing on philosophy than on her fiction. Her fiction is kind of a way to popularize her ideas, to put them in a story form, like I was talking about, how sitting around a campfire, you passed around your tribe's philosophy to the younger generation.

Her books like Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology are just incredibly ground-breaking, profound works on understanding how the human mind works. Objectivism is her philosophy, and it's always been my philosophy, too, but when I discovered Ayn Rand, she was able to put things into concepts that made them easier for me to integrate my own thinking.

Ayn Rand said, “My philosophy, in essence is the concept of Man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” Reality, A=A, is necessary to the pursuit of life. When you're designing an airplane, you have to use the facts of reality to make the airplane fly. You can't decide, “I wish if I designed a wing this other way, it would keep the plane aloft.” Your wishes aren't going to be fulfilled, and reality will bite you when you try to fly the airplane. So to achieve happiness in your life, to achieve your goals, you must use the true nature of reality. It was Francis Bacon [English philosopher] who said, “Nature to be commanded must first be obeyed.” You have to be able to use truth to achieve your goals. You're not going to ever achieve them by hoping that success will come to you; you need to use reality to accomplish goals.

I'm an Objectivist, and I have a lot of Objectivist thinking through Richard [Rahl]. I'm not trying to teach Objectivism in books; these [the Sword of Truth books] are just fun stories. The main characters are Richard and Kahlan. They think like I do because they're my heroes. They are people I admire and look up to, and I have them reflect the kind of thinking that, to me, is heroic thinking. So while I use Objectivist principles in the stories I'm telling, that's not my purpose. My purpose is to tell a fun story, not to be a philosophy teacher.

DC: Actually, it was your views expressed primarily through Richard, Kahlan, and Nicci that persuaded me to look further into the philosophy of Objectivism.

TG: I'm glad to hear that. You cannot separate philosophy from art. Every brushstroke, every word, every piece of clay that you sculpt, is driven by your philosophy. If you have a philosophy of mankind as decrepit and evil, you have medieval art, where you show mankind as this ulcerous, ineffectual creature. When you view mankind as noble and heroic, you have reached [art]. The philosophy of a culture as a whole drives art, and an artist individually drives what he does.

If you believe in heroic individuals, you write about heroic individuals. If you think that life is purposeless and meaningless, you write stories like that—and your books are meaningless and pointless, and miserable. That's the problem: too many authors are selected to be published who believe that life is meaningless and miserable, and we have too many miserable, meaningless forms of entertainment out there. That's why people are turning away from reading and turning instead to things where they don't have to endure that kind of misery—sports and video games. [laughs]

DC: While I do enjoy video games, it has always saddened me that the arrival of a new game, or a new movie, or some sort of new-fangled form of entertainment causes consumers to line up around city blocks in anticipation, but literature no longer has that effect, at least not in comparison to other mediums.

TG: Absolutely, I completely agree. I don't think that it's a good thing, and I don't think that it's necessarily worthwhile, I'm just trying to explain that it's [sports and video games] the last vestige of winning and losing that [people] are allowed to engage in. In life, everything is tried to be made into a zero sum game, like playing soccer, where a tie can be a goal of the game, or maybe a game where no one is allowed to win because someone would feel bad. It's too bad that people are driven to those things, it's too bad that people can't find [victory] in other things; they're driven to movies, and TV, and sports.

DC: Back on the subject of Objectivism, I've always had some difficulty in fully understanding it, because it seems riddled with contradictions, something I don't believe can exist. Objectivism states that I have the right to pursue my own happiness, but not at the expense of someone else's; that also works vice versa.

Yet it seems that in any given scenario, someone's happiness will always be sacrificed for another person's.

TG: You have no right to anyone else's life. So, you have no right, for example, to rob someone. That's their life, you have no right to, say, kill them. If you choose to sacrifice, if you see someone drowning in a river and you decide to jump in and try to save them at the risk of your own life, that's perfectly fine — but you shouldn't be required to sacrifice yourself. 'Required sacrifice' is another term for 'slavery'. When you're required to sacrifice for others, that's saying that your life has no value except to serve others. Who's deciding whose life is worth more than yours? That's the state, or religion, and they're saying that you have no value as an individual; your only value is to sacrifice yourself [for the greater good].

DC: So if I see you drowning in a river, I can choose to jump in and try to save you, but I don't have to?

TG: Yes, exactly.

DC: But that's where I grow confused. If I choose not to save you, aren't I sacrificing your happiness for mine?

TG: Well, the person has no obligation to sacrifice or risk their life [to save someone]. It's not their responsibility to save you. If you volunteer for a search and rescue duty, and that's your job, then you've taken on that responsibility. But as an individual just walking along, you could lose your life jumping into the river. You don't have to sacrifice your life to save someone else's.

But, these thought experiments are kind of distracting questions. These situations will never happen in your life for the most part. What people [religion and state] try to do is, they try to take those examples and say “You should help another person” and then they bring that down to the real issue of what they want: for you to sacrifice your life for other people, sometimes in other ways [than death]. For example, some people want you to give up your income to give to other people who don't have the ability or desire to, and that's the real practical application: collectivism. With a collectivist sort of mentality — I don't believe in that.

DC: But is it considered a sacrifice of someone's happiness if I allow them to die?

TG: You're not sacrificing their happiness if they drown, because you're not the one who threw them in the river. If you are the one who threw them in the river, then yeah [you sacrificed their happiness]. People are dying all over the world every day, all the time. It's not your job to save them. By not jumping into the river, you're not causing [them to die].

You have to make a judgment on your own abilities. If you can jump into the river and you're a really good swimmer, then you're going to feel more of an obligation to [try to save them]. But if you're afraid of the water, it's going to be a true, sincere risk to your life…why should you sacrifice your life to save this person? You're not the one who threw them into the water. You're not obligated to give your life away to save that person.

DC: So it does all come down to choice. Even if I'm a very capable swimmer but don't want to risk dying, that's okay?

TG: Yes. See, you're getting into really esoteric areas of philosophy, and the problem is, collectivists use those arguments to take you off track. They use extreme examples that are never going to happen in your life to cause you, on a daily basis, to sacrifice your own happiness, your future, because of some example that's concocted. The real question is, are you, on a daily basis, going to sacrifice your happiness, your existence, for other people? And why are those other people more important than you?

This is the only life you're going to have. Every moment that goes by, you're never going to have back again. When you sacrifice part of your life, you're exchanging it for something. For example, if you give your time to you children, it's because you value your children. You've chosen to give that time to something that brings value to your life, that brings a reward to your existence. If you like ice cream and you decide to sacrifice your time to drive to an ice cream shop, it's because the value of that ice cream is worthwhile to you. You've made a trade: part of your existence toward something you value.

Every moment that goes by, you're never going to have back again. When you sacrifice part of your life, you're exchanging it for something. For example, if you give your time to your children, it's because you value your children.

The successful pursuit of values is essential to the continuation of life. In your life, the values you pursue enable you to continue to exist. The value of a job is so that you can have money to have shelter, clothes, and food… those are necessary for your survival. If someone says to you, “We're taking away the money you've earned to give to someone else,” they are taking a value away from you that threatens your survival, because that [the money] is what you have given part of your life to achieve in order to continue your existence. Another person has no right to say, “We're going to sacrifice you so that this other person can live.” Why is this other person's life more valuable than yours? Who are they to decide what happens to your existence?

There's no such thing as “the common good”. It's not “common”, it's about individuals. Every action, every sacrifice is imposed, is on the behalf of other individuals. You don't have the right to demand that another person sacrifice their existence. Where are you going to draw the line? Once you give the authority of your existence over to a church, or a government, or a state, you've given them the authority to divvy up your life. They can say, “He can afford to give up 10 percent of what I earn to help other people.” If you want to, fine, but why should that be imposed upon you by someone else? Don't forget, that person can decide tomorrow to say, “Your continued existence is detrimental to other people's existence. You're harming the environment, you're using too many resources we're going to have you put to death.”

Nothing and no one has the right to take your life. Intellectual property is also a part of the value you have created.

All of the effort you put into creating a living belongs to you; it doesn't belong to anyone else, and there's nothing that can change that. That's the problem: certain people are driven by the hatred of mankind. Human beings are the only species that can hate their own existence. There are people who are driven by hatred. It comes from indoctrination in the form of religion that might tell you to blow yourself up so you can kill other people, it comes from misunderstanding the purpose of your own existence. What happens is, philosophy becomes corrupted by people treating philosophy like a smorgasbord. They say, "Well, I believe this part, but I also believe this." You can't go to a philosophical smorgasbord and pick out what you want; reality is what it is.

What people do is, they ascribe values to things. A tree is a value to human beings for a variety of reasons: because it makes oxygen, because you can turn it into a piano, because you can burn it in the fireplace to keep warm. So a tree has value to a human being, but a tree does not have value intrinsically, in the absence of human beings. You can't ascribe values to things that are nonhuman. You can't say that a rock in and of itself, without human beings has value. Value for what? It has a value if a human being needs a rock to build a foundation for a house, but it can't have a value independent of mankind.

Nature cannot have a value independent of mankind, and this is what the environmental movement has become: a religion. They've ascribed value to nature absent mankind. They've ascribed value to nature, and so what happens is, whatever you do to harm nature, people say, "You've harmed this good thing, that makes mankind bad." They're using that line of philosophy to hate mankind, because mankind is detrimental to nature. They've turned nature into a religion, making into something that is holy without reality. If nature has value, it's for how mankind can use it. It's incumbent upon human beings to respect nature for their own rational self-interests.

For example, poisoning a river is bad not because it hurts nature, because nature has no value in and of itself. It's bad because it [poisoning the river] hurts mankind. You poison the river and other people are going to get poisoned, and then you're infringing on their right to exist. You want clean air because you need clean air to breathe, to live longer. Respect for the environment should be based on mankind's [needs].

That's in part what I'm writing about [in the Sword of Truth series]: the struggle between humans who are driven by a love of life, and people driven by a hatred of life. Sure, there are bad things about life, but that's the purpose of struggling: to change those things, to make them better. That's what I've tried to show through the books: that you can be better, you can rise up and live a life, but there are people who are mindlessly devoted to hatred, to the destruction of life, and they use any excuse to justify their own hatred, and that's all it is: hatred for their own existence, for their own inability to live their own life. The things they come up with, like sacrificing for the greater good, are just ways of lowering the standard of everyone's life.

DC: In addition to Objectivism, faith is another theme in your books. The Imperial Order uses faith as an excuse to rape, pillage, and murder. They don't care what happens in the mortal world because, according to them, eternal rewards await them in the afterlife.

Do you view faith as the antithesis of reason? Because there are religious people who use their faith for good, and then there are those who fly planes into buildings.

TG: Faith is merely the excuse for force. Faith cannot be supported by reality, it has to be supported by force. Faith is the precursor to force. You start out with some lovely story, and when people don't believe it, you end up having to kill them. You kill the people who refuse to believe so that you can ensure the continuation of the faith.

If someone has faith that every star they see in the night sky is the soul of some saint, they can believe that, that can be their faith, and they don't have to go out and kill someone to make them believe it. But if you want to force other people to believe that, you can try to coerce them into believing it, try to force them into believing it. If your faith is strong enough and you feel that your credibility relies on forcing people to believe that [your faith], then you end up with a mass inquisition. It depends on the individual's need to believe in that faith. The more they need to have that faith be real to them, the more they need to have others believe it.

For example, take the need for people to help others, to contribute some of their income to help the welfare of other Americans. That's their faith, so they create the income tax system. If you're not willing to go along with their faith and go along with the greater good, then they come with guns and take you to jail. They are willing to use force to enforce that faith. So, Americans are, in essence, sacrificing part of their life into slavery to others. That faith is enforced by guns and jails. We're not willingly giving them part of our income; people don't like paying taxes, and justifiably so, because they're sacrificing part of their life to other people. It's this concept of sacrificing for the greater good, and that faith is being enforced by a government who has guns and jails.

You can happily pay your taxes and say "There's no force involved, I'm paying my taxes." But you better believe that if you don't, they'll be happy to come and take [your tax money] from you.

DC: So you consider that to be like tithing in a church? Being instructed to donate a certain percentage of your income, for example?

TG: Right, and if you don't do it, then you become increasingly urged to do it, either through lectures or having people turn away from you and regard you as stingy, having people talk behind your back and how you're not doing your part. There are so many subtle and not-so-subtle ways that faith is enforced. The church that believes that you should tithe may never actually come and take it from you at gunpoint like the government will, but they have their own ways of enforcing their faith like telling you you're going to burn in hell [laughs].

DC: Given your philosophical views, what is your opinion on the War on Terror?

TG: There is no such thing as a “War on Terror.” This is another example of philosophy corrupting action. You can't have a war on a name. “Hate crime” is another one of those things: either it's a crime, or it's not. Either someone is doing something wrong, or they're not. We're not having a war on terror, we're having a war on Islamic fundamentalism. We're afraid to name the enemy, and in [that fear], we give them strength. When you can't name the enemy, you've already lost. When you're afraid to see who it is you're fighting, you've already lost.

Take, for example, what we're doing in Iraq. The basic thing we're trying to do is enforce democracy. Democracy is a free-floating concept. There's no goodness [inherent] in democracy. Gang rape is democracy in action. Why should we enforce democracy? Why should we have Americans die so [Iraq] can elect a government who wants to kill us? It's stupid. Force should be used by a government just like it should be used by an individual: to prevent someone else from harm. That's the only valid, moral, ethical purpose of force: to protect your life.

We have Americans dying over there to enforce democracy so that [Iraq] can vote to kill us. It's absurd. There's nothing holy about democracy. The sidetrack of adopting slogans like “making the world safe for democracy”… it's a free-floating concept; there's nothing good [inherent in] democracy. Democracy can be good if it's supported by other ethical values; justice, for example, and not hurting other people. But we're not enforcing a moral form of democracy; we're just supporting the idea of democracy in general, and there's nothing more about democracy in and of itself.

The war on terror is merely theatrics to convince the American people that something is being done. All you have to do is go to an airport to see how philosophy has caused a breakdown in effective action. Airport security is pure theatrics to convince people that something is being done, and it ignores the reality of the nature of the threat. We have [security] people searching obvious non-threats because they don't want to be seen as profiling. When you're looking for a burglar, and the burglar is two-foot-ten, and you put out an APB for that burglar, that's not profiling, it's a description of the subject. The authorities should know who they're fighting.

When you say you're fighting terror, there's no such thing as “terror” as an enemy. You're doing gang rape on 80 year-old Swedish grandmothers because you're afraid to say that the enemy are Middle Eastern men. This distraction, this forced equality, is ignoring reality. Philosophy is at the cause of this because they're ignoring reality in order to adopt meaningless principles. The philosophy is going to get us all killed.

In World War II, in Japan, there were no deaths of Americans by insurgents, and the reason [for that] is because America, at that time, had the courage to crush those who were enforcing evil ideas. We may have had to kill a lot of people, but it was the only way to crush those evil ideas. And because we crushed those evil ideas, an entire culture in Japan grew up to create a great, noble, free people who have become an engine of freedom and an engine of economy in the world.

You either crush evil or you don't. If you allow evil to co-exist with you, it's only going to grow. We're allowing evil to grow. We're too timid to attack evil, and make no mistake, the Islamic world wants to kill us, and sooner or later, an atomic bomb is going to go off in the United States because we don't even have the courage to name the enemy.

DC: You make an excellent point. I've always believed that we're attacking a word, a phrase, more than anything or anyone else.

TG: Yes, exactly. It's this philosophy that they've adapted from a derivative of Kantian philosophy, and this is what's taught at a lot of our universities. The basic premise is that we can't know reality, because every person sees the world through their own eyes, and they're ill-equipped to discern reality. What you see is different than what I see, and our eyes are what tell us what's real. Because we each see things differently, none of us are able to judge what's real and what's not real, and because we can't tell what's real, we can't know what reality is, and [if that's the case] it means that we can't know right from wrong, and that means that none of us can judge what's right and what's wrong.

Therefore, all culture is morally equivalent, because we're [none of us] equipped to judge right and wrong. Moral equivalency is the root cause of guys standing at airline gates, date raping Swedish grandmothers. No culture is better or worse than the other culture; all beliefs are equal, and that's not true. That's a failure to recognize the nature of reality. In World War II, we realized that the Nazis and the Japanese were devoted to evil ideas that were aimed at the destruction of mankind, and we crushed those evil ideas so that they couldn't come here and kill us.

Today, we're unwilling to crush those people who want to kill us, and by using [phrases like] “War on Terror”, it's our way of saying, “Well, we can't name the enemy because all cultures are equal,” so we can't say “It's Islamic fundamentalism that wants to kill us” because all cultures are morally equivalent. It's that derivative of Kantian philosophy that causes people to hold those beliefs, and those beliefs will eventually result in our destruction. People can't survive if they can't recognize evil.

If we can't name the enemy, how are we going to fight them? We end up frisking people at the airport and missing the real threat, because all that is, is a show for the American public so that they think that something is being done. Meanwhile, real terrorists know how to get around those things; they know how to get jobs as baggage handlers, and get onto the planes and plant bombs, and all these other things. We're diverting attention from the real problem by coming up with all these theatrics. What they're trying to do is criminalize individuals rather than name the philosophies that are responsible for those beliefs.

In a way, the Sword of Truth series has been my way of railing against the stupidity of which way the world is going. In the great sweep of history, mankind goes between nobility and darkness. You see the nobility of the Greek civilization, the renaissance—those kinds of time periods where great motivations of mankind are put toward the betterment of mankind. And then you see other points in history, such as the Dark Ages, where mankind slid into a perverse thinking. I view the world in those great arcs of history, and the great movement of that pendulum between nobility and darkness—and I see the world today on the decline into darkness. I believe we're on the brink of another dark age. The Sword of Truth series is a wake-up call for people to pay attention to what's going on.

I don't know if those great movements of history can be halted. I think that the war on terror is just one minor indication of the many, many corrupt ways of thinking that are leading us into this next Dark Age.

DC: Mr. Goodkind, thank you so much for this interview.

TG: Thank you. I've always felt that, for me, writing novels is my noblest ambition; it's what I've always wanted to do. It's a fun thing, to tell stories that inspire people in so many different ways and on so many different levels. Every book has a theme, and the theme of the Sword of Truth series is, your life is your own; rise up and live it. That I inspire people to do that, to me, is the most gratifying thing because I touch people's lives.

That's how valuable stories are: you can touch lives, you can make connections, and...what a cool job, to be able to do something that wakes people up and hopefully helps them make their own lives happier. What could be better than that?

This interview originally appeared at Fantasy Book Critic on December 10, 2007. It is reprinted here with kind permission. Due to length and space constraints, it was split into two parts for Prometheus; Part I appeared in Volume 26, Number 2 and discussed at length Goodkind's Sword of Truth novels, some of which have been nominated for the Prometheus Award.