In this 1969 lecture delivered at Boston’s Ford Hall Forum, Ayn Rand contrasts two prominent events from that summer’s news: the Apollo 11 moon landing and the Woodstock music festival. Using the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as symbols of “the fundamental conflict of our age” — reason versus irrational emotion — Rand explores the mindsets of participants, commentators and spectators in search of the two events’ philosophical causes and meaning.

In the Q&A session following the lecture, Rand expands on the subject matter of the lecture and also addresses such topics as the legalization of marijuana and other drugs, the “space race” and reasons for going to the moon, the morality of the Vietnam War and the war’s protesters, Rand’s view of her purpose in life, and government controls on pollution.

This essay was originally published in the December 1969 and January 1970 issues of The Objectivist and later anthologized in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971) and Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1999). A lecture version was delivered in November 1969 at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston.

The audio lecture lasts 44 minutes, followed by a 17-minute Q&A.

On July 16, 1969, one million people, from all over the country, converged on Cape Kennedy, Florida, to witness the launching of Apollo 11 that carried astronauts to the moon.

On August 15, 300,000 people, from all over the country, converged on Bethel, New York, near the town of Woodstock, to witness a rock music festival.

These two events were news, not philosophical theory. These were facts of our actual existence, the kinds of facts — according to both modern philosophers and practical businessmen — that philosophy has nothing to do with.

Per our agreement with publishers, to make room for other Ayn Rand non-fiction content, this essay has been temporarily removed, but will return in due course.

About the Author

Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand created and defined her philosophy, Objectivism, in the pages of her best-selling novels, particularly The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and in a series of nonfiction books that address a wide range of fundamental issues in philosophy. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in Tsarist St. Petersburg in 1905, Rand witnessed the Russian Revolution as a teenager and promptly condemned communism as immoral for sacrificing the individual to the collective. In 1926, shortly after graduating from the University of Leningrad, she fled to America, adopting the pen name Ayn Rand to shield her family from possible persecution once her anti-communism became well known. In Hollywood, she wrote scenarios for famous director Cecil B. DeMille and met her future husband on a movie set, but the couple struggled financially for years. Then came a string of writing successes: a Broadway play, followed by her first novel, We the Living (1936), then a novella called Anthem (1938), and later her first best seller, the story of a fiercely independent architect named Howard Roark in The Fountainhead (1943). All these works of fiction feature gripping stories and exalted, egoistic, this-worldly heroes. In writing Atlas Shrugged (1957) — the story of a man who said he would stop the motor of the world, and did — Rand had to define fully her new philosophy of reason, rational self-interest, and laissez-faire capitalism. Thereafter, and until her death in 1982, Rand amplified and explicated her “philosophy for living on earth” in a stream of books whose theoretical essays and cultural commentaries cover important topics across the five major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics and esthetics.
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