Common misunderstandings of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged. You either love her or hate her!

But I read Atlas Shrugged without knowing that you were supposed to love her or hate her. I just knew that it was a title that kept popping up here and there, in a number of different contexts, and so eventually, I felt I had to read that book that so many people seemed to be talking about!

And my reaction was:

'Wow!... I've never looked at it this way before!... This woman is bright!'

Afterwards, when talking about this book, I discovered the strong emotional reactions people have to her. I also discovered how - as can be expected when feelings run hot! - most people had a rather incorrect idea of what she had actually said, and what she actually believed.

One common misunderstanding of her that I came across was this one:

"She claimed that rich people are some kind of altruistic, highly talented, good-hearted super-humans that if left alone will never do anything bad, but only use their talents and riches to improve the world."

This is not what she said.

Ayn Rand said that there are exactly TWO ways to become rich in this world. No more and no less. The first one is to be pretty much what was described above: Talented and productive. You produce some kind of value that people are prepared to pay for, willingly! They buy whatever you are producing, and feel that they have made a good purchase; that they got good value for their money. You get rich and they get satisfied. Everybody wins.

The second way to get rich, also the last way, since there are only two, is to loot somebody else who is productive. There are no other ways, she said! The value has to come from somewhere - it doesn't just fall from the sky or spring out of thin air. And so if you are rich, then either you produced that value or you stole it.

She also said that it's not necessary that the person you loot be richer than you, or as rich as you. She said there is also the Indian Maharaja: The only rich person in a country of poor. Because no matter how poor a population is, there is always enough to loot for ONE person to be rich! And she said the problem in our societies is that too many people want to be that Indian Maharaja. You often find them in politics. They don't care about the prosperity of society! They don't care if society plummets into utter despair! So long as they can steal enough from it to be rich, themselves. And the problem with this, of course, is that there can be only one Maharaja... So the only thing they will succeed at is to make society poorer, to the detriment of all. Everybody loses.

“When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims, then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.”

Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

 

 Another misunderstanding of Ayn Rand that I came across was this:

"She's such a hypocrite! She wrote 'The Virtue of Selfishness' only as a desperate attempt to justify why she didn't help her poor relatives back in Soviet, after she got rich in America."

Let me show you another quote from Atlas Shrugged:

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on."

 Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

Tell me: Can somebody who writes a quote like that be a hypocrite? No, I would say. Because a person who feels that a quote like that rings true wouldn't WANT to lie... It would be an act of self-abdication. Of making oneself the world's slave, condemned to trying to fake the kind of reality that the world approves of. Ayn Rand doesn't care what you approve of! She stands up for HER OWN beliefs.

The quote continues, in the book:

“There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”

This reveals even clearer how very strongly she feels about any kind of dishonesty or of bending the truth. But I intentionally put this separate from the lines before it, because I don't feel it fits the context! The lines before are a cool, logical reasoning - this is a sudden outburst of emotion! And as Virginia Wolf writes, in A Room of One's Own: "An angry writer is a bad writer". Ayn Rand is often a bad writer, because of her anger seeping through. She was, after all, an illegal refugee from the Soviet Union, and she is angry with her motherland, oh how angry she is!...

And I believe this is why most people love her! Not because they understand what she really meant with her philosophy, but because they share her anger towards communism and socialism! Because the villains in Rand's books do come out as very Soviet communist-like... That was the face of evil, to her. But when American Christian right-wing politicians expressed love for her philosophy, she protested! They were far too limiting of people's freedom for her. For one thing, she was sex positive, perhaps even polyamorous in her ideology, although those terms didn't exist at the time. She was also a staunch atheist and advocated abortion rights. American Christian Conservatives were, of course, far from this! Had she grown up in the USA instead of the Soviet Union, perhaps they would have been the paint that she painted her villains with? Who knows.

And had that been the case, the left-wing would have been the ones who loved her! Now, sharing a common enemy with her.

Ironic, though. Isn't it?

I warmly recommend you read the book. Not as a novel! It's not a great novel (although the story is also captivating), and you would have to put up with her anger, which gets rather bitter, at times... But in her good moments, Ayn Rand is, indeed, a very bright woman. She has some very clear thoughts, well worth reading for oneself, rather than through the lens of somebody else who either loves her or hates her, probably for the wrong reasons... 😏

The Poor and Fossil Fuels

I’m from Sweden, but I’ve spent a large number of years in Kenya, where I first came to work with biogas and do my share in saving the world. I now have two children with a Kenyan man. I hear them playing in the next room as I write this, here in beautiful Chaka, Nyeri, by the foot of Mount Kenya.

I first came to Kenya in 2005, 27 years old, as a part of my master project for Chalmers University of Technology. They had allowed me to start my master project early because of how very motivated I was. Once here, it immediately started changing my perspectives. Since then, it’s like a whole new universe has opened up in my mind… I really recommend it to anyone! For the first time, I could look at my own Western culture from the outside, and that’s the only way you can really see it. “I can imagine fish have no word for ‘water’”, as Terry Pratchett had a character say, in his book Small Gods. One major thing that I thus came to realize about my culture is this:

We have forgotten that money means lives!

In Sweden, we look down on money as something filthy and corrupting, I came to see. To us, it’s a matter of how many cars you can have, and how often you can buy a new mobile phone. Things to brag about to your neighbors, making them jealous. But “money can’t buy you happiness”, we say. I once told a Swede that in Kenya, they truly believe that it can, and the Swede annoyed me a bit by expressing ridicule for the silly Kenyans… But who is silly, really? Because for the great majority of people in the world, money is not about cars and mobile phones!... It’s about how long you live, and how many children you lose.

On Our World in Data, you can see an amazing animated map of how life expectancy has changed in the world over time, all the way back from 1543 (although it was only the UK that apparently collected such data at that time). The color codes start from 20 – 30 years, and amazingly, as late as the 1950s, several countries in especially Africa were still in this category! Many more were in the 30 – 40 years category, as were both Sweden and the US back in the 1800s:

Here is a chart with some of the countries, as well as the world:

We can see that the US was a good half century before the world in surpassing a life expectancy of 50 years. Then, Japan caught up with them and surpassed them, despite their disastrous dip of the atomic bombs in WW2. India and Kenya are slightly behind the average but coming strongly. Kenya has a tragic recession from what I assume is HIV/AIDS starting in 1991, and when I first came here in 2005, life expectancy was still below 55 years, which I remember shocked me and grieved me. Little did I imagine what a remarkable recovery she was to make in the one and a half decades that followed!

The interesting thing about this chart is that, apart from the blows from such things as the atomic bombs and HIV/AIDS, it could almost have been a chart over CO₂ emissions, couldn’t it? The two look almost the same! Rising at almost the same time, in almost the same rate…

Our World in Data also has a report called:

The world’s energy problem
Without cheap, safe, low-carbon energy sources at scale we are stuck between the alternatives of high greenhouse gas emissions and energy poverty

Here is a quote from the summary:

“The energy problem that receives most attention is the link between energy access and greenhouse gas emissions. But the world has another global energy problem that is just as big: hundreds of millions of people lack access to sufficient energy entirely, with terrible consequences to themselves and the environment.”

Here is one of the graphs from the report, showing the correlation between CO₂ emissions and GDP:

And here is a part of another image, showing the link between GDP and Life Expectancy, as well as with Child Mortality:

GDP on the x axis, Life expectancy and Child mortality on the respective y axis.
From: https://ourworldindata.org/worlds-energy-problem?country= part of the 4th graphic from the top.

The correlation is quite undeniable, isn’t it?

But when talking with especially the Green Party members in Sweden, where I have many friends since I was a member there myself for 18 years, they often categorically deny that the burning of fossil fuels has had anything to do with this extraordinary and unprecedented boom in life-length seen in the past few hundred years. They say that it’s the discovery of penicillin and other modern medicine that is behind most of it. But tell me, how would that explain the above differences between the countries then? Isn’t penicillin equally discovered in Kenya as it is in the US, yet Kenyans still live 15 years shorter? Why do 21 countries still have a life expectancy below 60 years, and why are almost all of them in Africa? The bottom record is held by Central African Republic, with a life expectancy of only 51 years.

To put it in yet another way, here is a screenshot from an excellent presentation called “200 Years of Global Change” by Hans Rosling, the famous Swedish “statistician entertainer”, at the IPCC’s release of their 2013 report AR5, in Stockholm:

Video: “Hans Rosling – 200 years of global change”, Stockholm, Sept 28, 2013, https://youtu.be/grZSxoLPqXI

He shows the population from the poorest billion on the left to the richest billion on the right. Then, underneath, he has put how much energy each billion utilize in a year, and of what kind. The black blocks are fossil carbon fuels, coal, oil etc. Purple is nuclear energy, green is biofuels and orange is solar and wind power. “The halo of the rich”, as Rosling commented when placing this tiny little block on top of the richest billion’s stack. Over the energy blocks, Rosling then places seven white blocks symbolizing the seven million children under the age of 5 dying each year. (I can console you that this number has gone down significantly since then. It’s now “only” around 5.5 million per year (although even this number puts the <3 million COVID-19 deaths in a new perspective, doesn’t it?).) As you can see, the child deaths make a curve exactly mirroring the energy consumption curve. Rosling’s comment, at timestamp 16:24 in the video is:

“If you burn coal, you save children. Did you hear?... You burn coal – you save children.”

His words, not mine. Worth noting is that the late Hans Rosling was a firm believer that climate change was a major threat to humanity, and his presentation starts with him praising the new IPCC report. He thus draws this conclusion about the use of fossil fuels and child deaths very much in spite of his personal conviction on climate change, not in line with it. These are the best conclusions, since if at all he is biased, his bias would be directed the other way and thus couldn’t be the cause of this conclusion, as is otherwise so very common in the world.

Just the other week, one of my Green Party friends posted on Facebook a link to some article claiming that the combustion of oil was behind some 20% of all deaths in the world. I commented that this was a greatly unfair way of putting it, as the same oil had also saved so many especially children’s lives, and expanded our life expectancy so much. In fact, how many of those people that the oil allegedly killed would have even been alive at that time, if it hadn’t been for that same oil? How many would have died decades earlier, or not even been born, as their parents would have died before the age of 5? The poster found this too dumb to even respond to (he later revealed), but another Green Party friend of ours picked up the ball and said you can’t reason that way. It wasn’t the oil in itself that saved all those people, it was just the energy. If the energy had come from some other source, the positive effects would have still happened, but without the negative effects that the oil brings.

And of course, I had no objections to this! If the energy had come from some other source, the positive effects would have still happened. But first of all, this does not take away the fact that it still was the oil (and the coal and the gas) that did bring about these positive effects, in the real scenario that actually happened. The “other energy source” scenario is interesting but hypothetical. It didn’t happen that way. So to fairly gauge the effects of fossil fuels on human health, we must evaluate the different aspects by themselves: How much energy do they bring? How easily accessible is the energy? How much does it cost? How practical is it to handle? How clean is it? And how many lives does a certain amount of accessible, cheap and easy-to-handle energy save? How many lives does the pollution take? I haven’t made careful calculations on this, but just looking at the charts above, as well as Rosling’s presentation, it is clear without a shadow of a doubt to me that fossil fuels have saved a great many more lives than they have taken, and that they still do. If you burn coal, you save children.

(It’s funny to remember what a novel thought this was to me, when some probably right-wing sympathizer first pointed it out to me some two decades ago… He said that most things had actually become better and better in the world in the 1900s. Poverty had reduced and health and life-length improved, etc. So how bad could the oil be?... I almost doubted this, at first! In my world-view, people were living shorter and shorter because of environmental destruction and pollution, and they were becoming poorer and poorer because of oppression and inequality in the world… This was the impression I had gotten from my leftist and environmentalist parents and friends. But I looked into the data, and slowly, little by little, I came to accept it. I still want to limit pollution mind you! Especially since much of it accumulates. Thus with time, the bad effects increase more than the good effects. But I had to change my perspective that industrialism was an almost pure evil, to that it was actually an immense and almost pure blessing.)

My second objection to the “other energy source” scenario must be that even if we could go back in time, say, and with our current knowledge about the dirtiness of oil and other carbon fuels try some alternative energy source, it is far from certain that this would even work. The Green Party friend promoted wind power as a great alternative “more reliable than nuclear energy” etc (which he justified in a very funny way). Well, Elsa* has already, in other parts of this book, talked about wind power and its environmental and health problems. In the context of poverty and life-length however, the most important aspect of it is probably that it fluctuates all the time. Every hour and every day, the output from wind power is different from another hour and another day, not just for the single plant but also for all of Sweden, for example. This is, of course, an impossible situation for any kind of industry. Thus, industrialization could definitely not have happened the way it did, with just swapping fossil fuels for wind power! For industrialization to be able to work on wind power alone, we would need techniques for energy storage and power transmission over large distances for smoothing of the fluctuations, that even today are not invented.

I will translate this pic... but anyway, it's a graph by the Swedish Power Grid showing the production of wind power in Sweden for two recent winters.

But let us leave the past: Could we transition to a renewable-energy based industrialism from this day forward? And could those countries that are still hustling on a life expectancy of some 50, 60 years do the rest of their much desired life-length expansion and child death reduction based on these new energy sources? Well, we would hope so, wouldn’t we. But fact remains that these techniques are not there yet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing my best to spread the biogas technology here in Kenya! This already has the potential of saving many lives here in a short time. Just the smoke from cooking fires with firewood and charcoal is estimated to kill some 22,000 Kenyans every year, many of whom are children. (COVID-19 has now killed around 2,000 Kenyans as of 28 March 2021, just as a comparison. The population is 50 million.) Biogas burns without smoke or soot and is thus harmless for the lungs. It also gives an excellent organic fertilizer which preserves the soil, and since it takes much less time to maintain the digester than the collection of firewood takes, it can give especially women the chance to find some form of income, thus reducing poverty. Solar panels are also big here, especially in such remote areas where no power grid is expected in yet another 10 or so years. This helps children study in the evenings – another very important factor for reducing poverty. And money means lives, as we recall.

But all of this is still on a low level of development. What really boosts GDP and thus life length is large-scale industrialism, and as stated, this cannot yet be achieved on solar and wind power, and certainly not on biogas, since there just isn’t enough feed material around to produce enough biogas for this. Biogas is great for household solutions and small businesses, but not a solution for industry. Millions of brilliant engineers are out there right now working on solutions for a future industry based on renewable energy, but let’s face it:

With every year that industrialism and economic growth delays, children die. Young and middle-aged people die.



I’m a stout environmentalist. I love nature and I care for the world. I changed my entire life once to save it, when moving from Sweden to Kenya. But our ambitions to save the world should not be based on lies. Don’t tell me that the combustion of oil takes more lives than it saves, when this is not true. Don’t tell me it’s a piece of cake; we can just do it all on renewable energy instead, when the necessary techniques for this, despite our best efforts, are not yet invented.

And we may never invent them. It is possible that the golden age for humanity has already passed. When we finally do run out of fossil fuels (and rare metals and other finite materials that we use), it is possible that our industries will be less economical and efficient all over, and that life will be harder and shorter again as a result. We may never reach the era of Star Trek, and whatever we might want to believe in this regard is irrelevant. In the meantime, let us boldly look with open eyes at what we do know. Which is that fossil fuels save more lives than they take, certainly before we factor in climate change. So many of my friends and former political colleagues – as well as celebrity Greta Thunberg – talk as if it is just sheer stupidity that stops people from simply ending the use of fossil fuels, right now! Greta pronounces the words “money” and “economic growth” in her speech to the UN as if they were the dirtiest words she knows. (But at least she refuses to believe that her audience is evil, which is sweet of her!) Well, here’s the news for Greta and all of her Western World followers:

People are neither evil, nor stupid. They just want to live, that’s all. And fossil fuels save lives. Look no further: This is the reason why it is so hard to give up fossil fuels, even though most leaders now say they want to. Even if we believe that climate change might lead to disasters some time in a distant future – which I personally don’t – it would still be extremely hard for the people alive today to want to sacrifice their own lives, and the lives of their own children right now, for the sake of some other children some time in the future.

It would help us all if my fellow environmentalists would follow in Hans Rosling’s admirable footsteps and just accept this, the tremendous upside of the fossil fuels. Without necessarily giving up their criticism of them in other respects! From there, we could start discussing the best way forwards. A discussion based on reality, not on some hypothetical alternative scenario that may sound ever so pleasant, but which isn’t real.

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* Elsa Widding. This text is going to be a chapter in her book, The Climate Circus, which I'm currently translating.

A small bubble of peace and harmony

A guy in Kenya once said to me:
"Over there in Sweden, everybody must be happy all the time!", and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry... How perplexed he looked when I told him about our suicide rates*, and about how many of us that are stressed out or more or less depressed!
"Why?!", he asked. But how should I know. I had never seen such happy and peaceful people before I came to this poor land, so I guess I had assumed that unhappiness was normal...!

But why? Why aren't we happy all the time? I don't know. But I'm now going to present a theory to you: I think it could have something to do with living inside a small bubble of peace and harmony, and outside that bubble is a cold, stormy ocean, where people perish in anguish, and we know it. And no decent human being can live with that knowledge, without it disturbing your peace of mind!

Moreover, the evil outside has tentacles into the bubble, so you can never forget! Every now and again we learn that the clothes we are wearing were sown by children who suffered in appalling conditions. That the cotton was sprayed with poison, which killed some people in India. The bananas claimed lives in Nicaragua. On TV we see commercial adds with smiling brown children being saved by the rich people's offerings. Saved from death and horrendous suffering, we must presume. And then there are refugees. More and more refugees come from the Land Outside and want in, inside our bubble, away from the anguish. But we send them back. Then they kill themselves, they faint, they collapse, the children fall into coma. But we have to, because we would never manage to take in everybody who wants to! The ocean of anguish is so huge, and our bubble so small. It would burst. And we would all plummet into the ocean.

I believe that much in our society can be derived from this world view, and from the fear born from it. The fear that your bubble will burst. Why don't we buy more fairtrade for example? Aren't we the world's wealthiest population, our consumption setting new records every year, it's not as if we can't afford it! But a fairtrade label guarantees that the laborers were fairly paid, a statement that presupposes that they were NOT fairly paid for all the other products that we buy. To shop fairtrade thus entails an acknowledgement of the Land Outside, the Ocean of Anguish, and our peace of mind depends on that we never think about this.

Or like this new party, the Swedendemocrats, say: "We have to take care of our own problems first! It's not right to the people who come here to let them in, when we are not able to offer them the service they deserve, since we have such severe economic problems ourselves!". Right. Poor us. Poor wealthiest population in the world for having such a shortage!... But they don't dare to look at it that way, don't dare to see how much, much better off we are than the refugees, because they are terrified that the bubble will burst! And that we'll end up like them!

Charity galas. The sale of indulgences. The purchase of some clean conscience for a small percent of your income, but as I wrote in Every note is a vote, we simultaneously uphold the suffering with the other 99 percent.



The worst thing is that we're wrong. The world view is incorrect. We SHOULD pity ourselves, the stressed out, unhappy and scared ones. The happy people are found in the Land Outside, among the poor ones. They suffer too, sure they do, but they are not as unhappy as we are. And so it is sad that we must uphold this unfair world order, through our consumption and our politics, when in fact we could solve everything, their problems and ours, by just shopping fairtrade! And in the meantime... In the meantime we ought to open up our borders. With this I mean: Free immigration. And nothing less.

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*When I wrote the Swedish original of this text, Africa largely lacked suicide data, and those countries that had been mapped were in the lowest category. I now see that almost all countries have been mapped, and that Kenya is actually worse than Sweden in that respect!... They are in the highest category, while Sweden is in the second highest. I however don't wish to change my argument at this point, since I've understood that in Kenya people kill themselves out of economic despair rather than unhappiness. So.

Our greatest security threat - the USA

Image from: http://www.roguestatesman.com/

Me: The US is the greatest threat against our security. Yes or no?

Them: No

Me: I had a hunch you would say that. But what else would it be?

Them: Russia, if we are to point out a certain country. Otherwise I would say poverty and social conflicts in Sweden, Europe and the Middle East. But it also depends on how you define security.

Me: If we skip Russia for one moment...

You are aware that the food produced today is enough to feed all people on the earth, right? The reason why people still go hungry is that it's being wasted with by the rich. And who is the greatest waster? Exactly: The US

Our future poverty will be caused by a ruined/depleted planet. Who is the greatest environment destroyer? The US

Who is the greatest obstacle against peace in the Middle East? Who has been blocking every single UN convention against Israel, that didn't dutifully mention that 'Palestine is guilty too'? Who has consequently taken Israel's side, regardless of what baffling assaults and crimes against international law they commit? Of course: The US

...Now if we would pay a little revisit to Russia, at least it would be a lot easier for the rest of us to put pressure on Russia to disarm and join peaceful methods, if our greatest buddy the US wouldn't be so stubborn that THEY of course be allowed to use whatever violence and undemocratic, unlawful methods they want... This goes of course for all traditional US opposition. All the talk about international law and human rights become pure hipocrisy to them, so long as we simultaneously allow the US to go on ravaging like they do.

Q.E.D. - Which was to be proven!

Me: Do you approve that I use this sms exchange in a blog text? :)

Them: Sure, without the mentioning of my name...

Me: I wasn't planning to use your name. :)

Me: Btw: The US COULD use their enormous superiority in power to STOP all violence! (Instead of legitimizing it, like they do. Not to mention how they legitimize unlawful detention, executions and of course torture.) They could go into every armed conflict and interrupt it! Force the parts to the negotiation table!

Now I wouldn't exactly want a particular country to have that role. I would much rather see a more democratic world police. Like the UN. Preferably even more democratic than that - an organisation where the people rule rather than nations - but by all means, the UN is a lot better than none! And then we ask ourselves: Who is the greatest blocker of the UN? Naturally... the US! I have a report about all the ways in which they have obstructed the work of the ICC for example, linked to somewhere in my blog. (see sources by the end of this text, editor's note)

Violence is the greatest threat to our security. Law and justice is our shield against the violence. Violence gives birth to violence, and thus the US is the greatest birth-giver of violence, both by their use and by their legitimization of large quantities of violence. Simultaneously they are, without a doubt, the greatest blocker of international law.

(Even all conflicts in Africa can in one way or another be linked back to the US, even though Europe (and Russia) have our dirty fingers deep into that honeypot too...)

Me: It would feel even better i you said: "Right! You've got a point there actually!"...

Them: Of course you've got a point! But it doesn't feel like you really hit the nail, still. "All conflicts in Africa"... "without a doubt, the greatest blocker"... Hmmm! :-\

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They resists! :) They always does. But please read the Wikipedia-article: United States and the United Nations, and hopefully you will still find e.g. these quotes:

"since 1989 the U.S. government has dissented against security council resolutions on 12 occasions out of 17 total instances when a permanent member vetoed. Of these 12 occasions, only two related to issues other than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

"Since 1985 the U.S. Congress has refused to authorize payment of the U.S. dues, in order to force UN compliance with U.S. wishes, as well as a reduction in the U.S. assessment."

(The above quoted article has a lot of [citation needed] but still.)

Also I'd very much invite you to read the book Sveriges Afrikanska krig (Sweden's African wars) by the journalist Bengt Nilsson, which deals mostly with how Sweden, through its foreign aid, keeps never-ending wars alive in Africa. But in a passage it also describes how the battle between socialism and capitalism has made external entities (Sweden, Russia, the US,...) become 'supporters' of a kind, of certain regimes or guerrilla movements in Africa, providing them with weapons and aid, so that socialism/capitalism will prevail. "The idea of 'The Righteous War'", he writes. Of course it is also of importance that Africa has rich natural resources, such as gold, diamonds, rain-forest, a good climate for coffee and tea etc, and those whose "team" wins has therefore a lot to gain for themselves. It's a bit of 'the tragedy of the commons': If we don't do it, somebody else will, and takes home the reward.



Hear my words: If we are to have a positive development in the world, we have to formulate our goals accordingly! Foreign aid, as well as military interventions, must be based on objective, quantitative premises, such as basic human rights. US interventions to allegedly protect human rights (e.g. against Saddam Hussein, or the Syrian gas attack) have no effect on the matter, since they are not consistent. We all know that at the same time they allow Israel to commit as bad assaults as Hussein, if not worse! The conclusion must be that there is no point in respecting human rights. Instead it's much better to remain friendly with the US. Or to manage to stand up to them. Then this is the world we get.

It is us, the people, who have to be consistent with what we want. If we want human rights, then this is what we have to support, always! If instead we want power for ourselves and/or the US, and we don't care what assaults and murders are found in our rear water... well, then we can just continue like today.

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Sources and further reading:
Wikipedia - United States and the United Nations (quoted in the text)
Wikipedia - United States withdrawal from the United NationsSvenska Freds - Review of Sveriges Afrikanska krig (I disagree with Svenska Freds here! Interrupt all foreign aid to countries that violate human rights, and of course take it up again when these human rights are again being met. THEN it's highly likely that these human rights will suddenly start to be met...! There is no excuse for "at least doing something" if your "something" does harm instead of good.)
Sofia Haraldsson, Lund's university - Internationella brottmålsdomstolen – en garanti för rättvisa? (mentioned in the text) Treating all the ways in which the US has obstructed the work of ICC, among others. 

Image from: http://lonestonerevolution.blogspot.se/2006/02/whats-so-bad-about-democracy.html