Objectivism Down Under

Mr. Perigo is a radio and print journalist in New Zealand. One of New Zealand's leading radio and television current affairs interviewers, he recently started his own radio network, Radio Liberty, and publishes The Free Radical. This excerpt is taken from his talk at the "Meeting of Minds" seminar hosted by the Institute in San Francisco, November 11, 1995.

My talk this afternoon . . . will tell a story. A story whose outcome is as yet uncertain. A story in which Objectivism has played a significant part. A story within a story whose outcome is also as yet uncertain.

It is the story of a radio network run by an Objectivist in a country reformed by Hayekians, run by pragmatists, and populated by socialists. So you can see why the outcome is uncertain. But it's also a story illustrative of Ayn Rand's metaphor of the underground stream, flowing through the country, breaking out in sudden springs that shoot to the surface at random in unpredictable places. It is the story of Radio Liberty in New Zealand.

Now let me try to be a good Objectivist and establish the story's context. New Zealand is a tiny, two-island nation in the South Pacific. Its total land mass is roughly comparable in size to that of California.

New Zealand is not Australia. Nor is it part of Australia, even though a lot of Americans seem to think that it is. A is A, New Zealand is New Zealand; it cannot be Australia at the same time and in the same respect.

Between Australia and New Zealand are the Tasman Sea and a lot of rivalry. New Zealanders like to say that the difference between Australia and yogurt is that yogurt involves a culture. Australians used to like to say that New Zealand is a land of three million people and 60 million sheep, and it's very difficult to tell them apart.

Well, it's less easy to make that jibe stick these days because New Zealand has been revolutionized by market reforms that have reduced the number of sheep, increased the number of people, and made the difference between them more discernible.

Now up until 1984, New Zealand, in the words of one of its reforming prime ministers, David Lange, resembled a Polish shipyard in the way it was run. Decades of economic interventionism had delivered stagnation, inflation, unemployment, and virtual bankruptcy. The heavy hand of government was omnipresent. We could not import goods without an import license from the government. We could not take or send money out of the country without the government's permission. If we joined the workforce, we had to join a union. Shops and businesses, with few exceptions, were not allowed to open at night or during weekends. Overseas visitors would say, "I arrived in New Zealand over the weekend, but it was closed."

If we preferred margarine to butter, we had to get a doctor's prescription in order to be permitted to buy it. Taxation was at crippling levels, in order to support a network of subsidies to a network of industries, mainly the farming industry, producing things the world didn't want, and to support a burgeoning welfare state. The government was committed to providing a retirement income to people 60 years of age and over, equivalent to 80 percent of the average weekly wage out of taxation. A benefit introduced 10 years earlier for solo mothers had seen the number of claimants rise from 700 when it was introduced to about 100,000. Education, health, forestry, telecommunications, broadcasting, rail and air transport, the postal services, electricity generation, and other energy projects, were all run by the government, usually at a loss, with little or no competition from the private sector permitted. Notwithstanding personal income tax levels as high as 66 cents on the dollar, and a raft of indirect taxes of around 40 percent on the retail price of a lot of goods, the government's budget was severely in deficit. The prime minister at the time, Sir Robert Muldoon, brushed aside concerns about this profligacy by saying, "Most people wouldn't know a deficit if they fell over one."

Inflation roared away as the government overspent. Mr. Muldoon's response was to impose a wage, price, rent, and interest rate freeze in 1982, which in 1984 had been only partially lifted. When a carpet manufacturer raised its prices in violation of the freeze, Mr. Muldoon's response was to say, "If some smart aleck tries to beat the system, then we'll use the weapons provided by the system to beat him. . . ."

Government-Dominated Broadcasting

Now at this time, 1984, the New Zealand broadcasting system was almost completely dominated by the state. No private involvement in television was permitted, and there were few private radio stations. The government had grudgingly allowed some, after a few brave souls in Aukland had broadcast illegally from a boat and achieved hero status. There was a national, state-run radio network, on which no commercials were permitted, and a network of state-run local stations on which commercials were permitted. So if you wanted to work in broadcasting at all, it was almost impossible to avoid being employed by the state.

Now the noncommercial network was known as the National Program, not to be confused with the National Party. It was a hotbed of incipient political correctness. . . .

The National Program's programming was a mixture of nondescript music. . . and news and current affairs with a decided left-wing bias. Devil's advocacy was supposedly its cardinal journalistic value: pull apart the position of the person you are interviewing. But the devil was almost always a socialist, demanding to know of politicians why the government wasn't doing more to solve this or that problem, why it wasn't spending more taxpayers' money on x, y, or z.

An Oddball Named Lindsay Perigo

Now the National Program's news and current affairs flagship was a program called Morning Report, broadcast nationwide each weekday morning from seven till eight o'clock. It was the National Program's pride and joy, the jewel in its crown, listened to by politicians and bureaucrats, movers and shakers, anyone who was anyone on the cocktail party circuit. It had two anchormen, one of whom was an oddball named Lindsay Perigo, who was decidedly peculiar.

When he first joined broadcasting, Lindsay Perigo's socialist pedigree was impeccable. His grandfather had been General Secretary of the New Zealand Communist Party in the 1930s, and he, Lindsay, had kept the family flame brightly burning. He was not at all out of place on the National Program, even if his anti-Christian views were slightly discomfiting. He was, actually, its hottest property, and supposedly had a golden future to look forward to.

Then, something strange happened.

Perigo encountered some weird Russian writer, and became weird himself. His views turned 180 degrees. His behavior became a matter of grave concern among his colleagues. When Ayn Rand died, he wrote a tribute to her in the newspapers. He spent a vacation at an oddball gathering in America, organized by an alien cult called the Thomas Jefferson School. He would proselytize to anyone who cared to listen, and anyone who didn't.

He was a worry.

Back then, in 1984, in spite of his insanity, Perigo was kept on Morning Report, his colleagues and employers treating him rather as they would a wayward pet. The unspoken deal was, "You can keep the job, but don't let your insanity affect the way you do it."

However, then he was asked to launch a new, three-minute commentary spot called Opinion on the National Program, to be broadcast a little later in the morning at 10:30. So he went to his bosses and said, "Are you sure you want me to do this? You know the sort of thing I'm likely to say."

"Oh, that's all right," they said. "We want the spot to be provocative."

So the project went ahead, and Lindsay Perigo went on air for the first time with a full-on statement of his own beliefs. What you're about to hear is a recording of that. Completely unremarkable and superficial though it may sound to this audience now, try to imagine the impression it might have made in the context that I've described.

The Common Denominator

In this talk, I want to say things you have not heard on this program before. I want to offer an antidote to the poison that is repeatedly dispensed on this network in programs like Morning Comment and Faith for Today. The message of these programs reflects the influence of 2000 years of Christianity. It also constitutes the link that ties Christianity to other forms of mysticism and to fascism and communism, or any variant of political collectivism.

That link—the common denominator, if you like—is the proposition that a man's life is not his own; it belongs to someone else. To God, to the church, to the state, to the majority—to any one or all of them. He lives by their grace, in conformity with their dictates; his body, his mind, and his possessions are at their disposal to be sacrificed, if necessary, for their edification.

"This is the poison I'm talking about. Its name is altruism. Its essence: that a man's life is not his own."

The Christian church affirmed this proposition eloquently and compellingly over many centuries when it stretched its heretics on racks, mutilated them with thumbscrews, burned them at the stake. Muslims in Iran affirm it today when they bury people in the ground up to their necks and rain stones onto their heads until they are dead. (Small stones, so that they don't die too quickly.) The thugs in the Kremlin affirm it when they consign people to labor camps or psychiatric institutions for daring to think dissident thoughts. East German border guards affirmed it the other day when they shot a man attempting to escape across the border in a bulldozer. The South African government has a special name for it: apartheid. Some black African governments are often so busy murdering people that they have no time to worry about a name for it.

This government affirms it with the consummate skill of an experienced practitioner. In stymieing Skybus [a fledgling private airline], in bankrupting boat manufacturers with a vicious sales tax, in the sheer brazen effrontery of the prime minister's declaration that certain products of other peoples' enterprise are crying out to be taxed. In the legalized piracy that goes under the name of "inflation-proof bonds." In tolerating compulsory unionism. In posturing as guardians of morality, telling women when they may and may not have abortions, homosexual men that they may not be homosexual.

A man's life is not his own.

This is the vile potion poisoning the bloodstream of civilization. It defies reality. It defies the objective fact that a man's life is his own. That each human being is an individual entity with his own mind, and his own capacity to choose how he shall live his life. That this, his nature as a volitional being, requires that he be free to exercise that choice, constrained only by the necessity to respect that freedom in others.

This was the objective reality recognized by the Founding Fathers in the American Declaration of Independence, when they spoke of man's "inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This is the objective reality of the core of the philosophy of Objectivism formulated by Ayn Rand. Validating and glorifying man the sovereign individual, not the sacrificial animal. Rational self-interest, not abject self-abasement. Life here on earth, not in a nonexistent hereafter. Limited constitutional government, not rampant power-lust. Laissez-faire capitalism, not the cannibalistic jungle of collectivism.

Validating and glorifying these things as it does, this is the antidote to the poison of altruism. I commend it to your attention.