1 - Founder’s MessageDear ACO Members, I am told that I have been slightly intense this month. This is apparently the polite description for sending messages at unreasonable hours, discussing fundraising with anyone foolish enough to make eye contact, reorganising plans several times in a day, and treating the remaining balance of the We the Living premiere fund as a personal enemy. In my defence, it has worked. August has been the month in which ACO started to look rather less like an interesting idea and rather more like an organisation capable of doing things. The largest development, by some margin, has been We the Living. We have secured the Australian commercial screening rights to the restored film and are now working towards a major Melbourne premiere, with the restoration’s producer Duncan Scott attending in person to introduce the film and take questions afterwards. From there, our intention is to take the film around Australia in 2027, including Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. This is a rather improbable position for an organisation as young as ours to find itself in. It has also required money. This month we launched our $10,000 fundraising campaign for the premiere. At the beginning, $10,000 looked rather large. It looks considerably smaller now. We have raised more than $6,000, overwhelmingly by approaching people directly and explaining what we are trying to accomplish. Yaron Brook has generously promoted the project on his show - four times! Behind the scenes, we have also been developing the practical machinery required for the premiere: venue arrangements, promotion, ticketing, fundraising, logistics and plans for what comes afterwards. There is still roughly $4,000 to raise. I would quite like to stop thinking about that number. So, naturally, we are going to raise it. We have also continued building ACO itself. Our team has been meeting regularly and dividing responsibility for fundraising, marketing, cinema negotiations, design and promotion. We are gradually developing the systems required to turn a geographically scattered collection of Australian Objectivists into something capable of coordinated action. That last point matters to me. For a long time, Australian Objectivism has consisted principally of individuals and small groups. There have been intelligent people, occasional events and plenty of enthusiasm, but relatively little permanent infrastructure connecting them. ACO is intended to change that. I want an Australian Objectivist who has an idea, a useful skill, money to contribute, a speaker to recommend, an event he wants to organise or simply an afternoon to volunteer to have somewhere obvious to go. We are beginning to build that somewhere. There has also been plenty of intellectual work. We released my podcast with Dr Alex Silverman on Baruch Spinoza, looking at his extraordinary life, excommunication, philosophy and relationship to the later Enlightenment. We have continued our regular Objectivist activities and discussions, while increasingly thinking about how our intellectual content can reach well beyond the people already familiar with Rand. And we are thinking further ahead. We are developing new relationships and exploring opportunities that could considerably expand what ACO is capable of doing. Some of those conversations are still sufficiently early that I will resist my natural temptation to announce them prematurely. The We the Living premiere itself is increasingly being conceived not as a single Melbourne event, but as the beginning of something national. That distinction is important. It would be very easy to run a pleasant discussion group every month, send a newsletter, declare ACO a success and continue indefinitely. I have no interest in doing that. The standard I care about is whether we are producing results that would not otherwise exist. Did someone encounter Objectivism because of us? Did an event happen because we organised it? Did we create connections between people who can subsequently accomplish more together? Did we make Objectivism more visible, more intellectually serious and more culturally consequential in Australia? By that standard, August has been our most consequential month yet. We have a film. We have the rights. We have a producer willing to fly across the world to present it. We have a growing team. We have raised most of the money required to make the premiere happen. And we have several potentially significant opportunities now developing behind the scenes. Now we have to step up our efforts. If the last month has demonstrated anything, it is that surprisingly ambitious things become possible once enough people stop discussing whether they would be possible and start making phone calls. More next month. Maxim Bishev
Founder | Australian Centre for Objectivism
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