OCON 2025 - The Application of an Idea

Value Creation

To celebrate Independence week with hundreds of people who are American in spirit, there was no better place than the Summer Objectivist Conference in Boston last week. And in this series of five brief essays, I will bring home some of those ideas for their direct application. In reverse sequence of their presentation on the main stage will be Saving the Enlightenment, Revolutionary Constitutionalism, Spreading Objectivism, Independence from Altruism and Conceiving Values.

Of course, it is first necessary to conceive the concept of values – and Greg Salmieri understands that as well as anyone. To paraphrase, all living organisms will act to gain and keep values and it is values that sustain an organism’s life, but there’s more. Life and values are codependent variables in this complex system and should be revered as a unified whole.

Students of Objectivism know this, but it is always a challenge to identify and resist the forces that try to separate life and values. To assist, Greg explained three general stages for conceiving values.

With animal life, the value is the activity – not the need it satisfies. Programmed with automated responses and instinctual behavior, plant and animal life are generally engaged in activity for their unique life-sustaining needs. In contrast, the human challenge becomes socioeconomic behavior that is nothing more than activity for the sake of activity.

Next, for your survival, everyone must “grasp the designing process of building a life.” To help conceptualize that, Greg quoted psychologist Gena Gorlin: “extending yourself through time.” However, we live in a culture with a high time preference that relies on “higher authority” to achieve results. How does this infect our personal decisions?

Ultimately, Greg recommends that we become engaged with “building a self-sustaining system for life over time.” Easier said than done. In a division of labor socioeconomic system that produces abundant wealth, it is easy to become a parasite and rely on opportunists to scavenge the productive among us.

It is also easy to sanction that activity if we lose sight of long-term goals and engage in activity for the sake of activity. In fact, there are dozens of examples in economics and finance that we readily accept. The alternative is to become a radical for capitalism at the most personal level. Or as Greg began the talk, “Objectivism is about mental activity.”

And to help throw off the arbitrary activity, Part I of The Moneyball Method is titled Intervention. For defining values and beginning the design, Part II is titled Resolution. And for a self-sustaining life of meaning and purpose, Part III is titled Redemption. To learn more, please click this link:

https://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Method-Middle-Class-Manifesto-Objective/dp/1696009111/