I am among those who think well of the human character generally.
—Thomas Jefferson

How can you be so optimistic? You speak of ideas growing exponentially. I see relativism growing geometrically, not reason. I've long since given up. There's no data that things are improving, but one need only pick up today's newspaper to see that things are deteriorating.
—Grumpy in Glumsville

You need to subscribe to a better newspaper! The evidence for improvement is all around you. It just doesn't get reported as it deserves, so you have to consciously and deliberately seek it out or you will remain ignorant of it. No data that things are improving? Pick your field.

Politics? I'm reading columns daily in mass-market newspapers that I'd have been delighted to publish in the low-circulation capitalist newsletter that I edited in the 70s. Nobody any longer believes that central planning by government is the road to economic progress—almost literally not one single human being. Socialism as an ideal is dead, dead, dead! Deregulation and decontrol have been underway since the late 70s, beginning under Carter in the U.S. and under Thatcher in the U.K. The Soviet Union imploded, and the new President of Russia has Atlas Shrugged on his personal bookshelf. Two Canadian provinces (Alberta and Ontario) have halted their statist slides so abruptly that the reforms are being called revolutions. Their reduction of government is decisive enough to show up as a decrease of government spending (as a fraction of GDP). The architects of these revolutions have forged with the Reform Party of Canada the instrument (the Canadian Alliance) to carry the revolution to the federal level. The Reform Party was built from scratch in fewer than 15 years.

Science? The old orthodoxies are crumbling, washed away by a new rational philosophy and the glorious freedom of communication provided by the Internet. That relativistic bugbear, the lightspeed limit, has fallen to experiment. A growing army of fresh thinkers is disassembling quantum mechanics. Halton Arp's astronomical observations have imploded the Big Bang universe. The human genome is mapped. Sober, respectable scientists are predicting 1200-year human lifespans within the next hundred years, in time to do some good for many of us now living.

Philosophy? Religion placidly continues its 1000-year-old vanishing act; philosophy is resurgent. Scan the web. Ideas that were deemed so radical 30 years ago that they were only mentioned in hushed tones to small groups are plastered across the worldwide web. My firm, Quackgrass Press, is a part of this trend. You don't see the ideas of reason growing? The revenues of the Ayn Rand Institute have risen more than 12-fold in 15 years—implying a doubling time of about four years if the growth were exponential, as seems likely. Take ARI's growth as an index of Objectivism's growing influence, and project it forward 40 years. That is, project ten doublings, which is near-as-never-mind a factor of 1000. How many people deeply influenced by Objectivism would you guess that there are today: one million?, 5 million?, 10 million? Multiply your guess by a factor of 1,000, take a firm grasp of your understanding of the world-transforming power of philosophy.

The world of 2040 will resemble today's world about the way the 19th Century resembled the Dark Ages. (A full dress Fisher-Pry analysis would modify this calculation, but not enough to matter.) We stand at the eve of a century that will make the stupendous achievements of the 19th Century look like the unfocused dabbling of kiddies in a sandbox. You hadn't noticed? That's because you've been looking at the wrong things. Perhaps that's because you've made the common error of believing that objectivity is "facing unpleasant facts." It is not. Objectivity means seeking out objectively important facts. (See my "Focus on existence" http://www.quackgrass.com/focus/html)

The most important facts in the human world are the values and actions of good men, for they don't merely add up; they compound. Every life-enhancing end becomes a means to further life-enhancing ends; valuing is a positive feedback process. It's loaded with exponentials. The excellent not only becomes the permanent (as Aristotle observed anciently), it grows like a weed. You ignore the best at your peril.

Do I hear you mutter that the bad guys nevertheless keep on getting worse? You're damned right they do! They get ever more absurd, obscure, and obscene, and thus ever more feeble and irrelevant. Project that trend! So you've long since given up? That's a shame. Not for the rest of us—we'll do OK!—but for you. You've only got one life. You can waste it by staring blankly at the world through dark glasses—perhaps for hundreds of years—or you can correct your focus and thrive.

This article originally appeared in The Objective American.

Michael Miller is an engineer and Objectivist filosofer with thirty years of experience. He had been a member of Boycott Alberta Medicare in 1969 and of the Association to Defend Property Rights from 1973 on. He writes in-depth filosofical theory at his publication, Quackgrass Press, which can be accessed at http://www.quackgrass.com.