Leonard Peikoff: That leads me to the other part of your question: how can you convince people, and create conviction? I would say that you can create only one kind of conviction, if you’re talking about a rational audience. It’s the conviction of your skill.

You could not convince a rational audience that you have supernatural powers, that you could suspend the laws of gravity, or that you could make two objects occupy the same space simultaneously.

Because they’ll go back to the fact that they can’t explain it, and that means simply, “I don’t know the explanation. Maybe I’ll never know how he does it.”

No rational person would ever think that what a magician performs is more than a trick. You have to go by facts and the conclusions of logic and science. Over the centuries, a tremendous number of incredulous, unthinking people who go by matters of desire rather than fact… Hundreds of thousands who quote seeing “miracles,” and it’s all nonsense. It’s all motivated by emotion. And I wouldn’t even say that these people have a conviction. They just have the mood of the moment.

You have to ask, is that the kind of audience you want?

Being a magician, you are a rare commodity as a mystery-monger. But if you’re claiming supernatural powers, you have to put yourself up against Buddha and Moses and all the rest of them. To me, that would be a desecration for you, with your talent.

SC: In the forward to Atlas Shrugged, there is an Ayn Rand letter that states: “In a book of fiction the purpose is to create, for myself, the kind of world I want to live in while I am creating it; then as a secondary consequence, to let others enjoy this world, if, and to the extend that they can.”

This passage “spoke” to me, because I’ve attempted to create a world that I allow others to enter during my shows. I wonder, did Ayn Rand feel that she accomplished this goal? I wonder if Ayn Rand thought that people changed their world view after having read her works.

LP: Ayn Rand certainly believed that she created a world that others can enter, and enjoy. Any form of art, at is essence, is able to create a different universe.  It’s a universe that, in some way, slants things differently than the way you actually observe them. It picks out what’s important, and features it. It conveys what is important to the artist, and all the accidental elements of life are removed. Only the meaningful is put in.

Art does create a world that others may enter.

In order to answer your question as to whether people change their world view based on having read her works, I’ll have to give you a complex answer.

First of all, if you asked her readers, hundreds of thousands would say that her books absolutely transformed their lives, changed their views, changed and revolutionized their personal lives. But while this may have an effect on them because it touched on an emotion, I don’t know how long it will last.

There are two different issues here. One is philosophy, and the other is sense of life. With philosophy, we mean your explicit views on questions regarding the nature of the universe. Of man, free will, god, knowledge, values, etc.

Now a philosophical novel like hers can absolutely change your philosophy, if you become convinced that your own ideas are wrong.  And I know any number of cases where the reader went in skeptical or ignorant, and came out gung-ho, thinking, “She’s absolutely right. I’ve changed my views completely.”

A different issue is a thing we call the sense of life. And that is a feeling about life and the world and other people, that everyone has in some form emotionally, since the time that they were young. But this sense of life is not particularly articulated in words by them.

Most people have one un-articulated sense of life, and then if they discover a philosophy, their ideas will be compatible with it. But for some people, there is an opposition between the two. That is to say that they acquired certain feelings about life, without knowing it, and those feelings become really important to them. And then they subscribe to a philosophy that is incompatible with their feelings. The result is a life-long agonizing conflict that they can’t really explain.  For people like that, a novel can help them reappraise their philosophy. But if you have a sense of life that is antagonistic to the author’s, then the novel can’t overcome that.

So I would say that under certain circumstances, people could change their world view but changing their philosophy depends on what kind of sense of life they bring to the novel.

As far as your comment about creating a different world that others can enter during your show, I know that a magician doesn’t have supernatural powers so I entered your world and was thoroughly engaged, but not because I was in some other world. It was still, for me, New York and business as usual.

Click HERE for Part 3 of Leonard Peikoff interview