The 2010 Objectivist Conference was recently held in Las Vegas. I wanted to attend and meet all the wonderful philosophical people I have known so far only on the internet, but I didn’t go. The main reason I had to stay home was that I couldn’t interrupt my work on my iPhone apps. But there is a another reason: I hate Las Vegas.

You might wonder how an Objectivist could hate a place where people have freedoms they don’t have elsewhere. I certainly don’t object to the laxity of social laws and regulations that people enjoy there. Adults should have the right to gamble or pay for sex, if they want to. What I object to is the cultural normalization of Las Vegas. It brings out the worst in people, and its effects are no longer confined to the Mojave desert.

From the first time I heard about it, I hated the idea of Las Vegas. Then I bent over backwards to try to accept it — if that’s what people want, good for them, let them have it. After attending a seminar there, I have gone back to hating it. It took seeing that wretched place up close to make me realize that Las Vegas may seem okay in theory, but is horrible in practice.

Las Vegas somehow extended its ugly vibe across thousands of miles to the plane I was on before I even arrived. Such is the awful power of the place. While I was waiting to board my flight out of Cleveland, the Continental people announced that they needed volunteers to be bumped off the flight. Nobody offered himself, despite several increasingly pleading announcements. Then they sweetened the deal: they would give you a $350 travel voucher, you’d be put up in a hotel tonight, get dinner and breakfast, and travel first-class to Vegas first thing in the morning. I was at the counter in about two seconds.

What ended up happening is that they didn’t need me after all. So the ticket lady called me up and gave me a certificate for a free drink to thank me for volunteering.

Now, I have only flown commercially one time before the Las Vegas trip, and before that first flight on an airline, I had already been a pilot for five years. I was (and still am) not used to airline protocol, because I have always been the pilot-in-command of my own plane. I never had to wait in a security line, never had to have my stuff rifled through, never had to worry about being stuck in the middle seat, never had to refrain from bringing on board anything I wanted — including sharp things and firearms.

So when the drink cart came by, I held out my coupon and asked for a glass of milk. Because not only do I not drink alcohol and never have, but I was under the impression that anything off that little cart cost money. The airlines are charging for everything these days, right?

Well, the stewardess smiled and told me politely that I could have the milk and wouldn’t even have to give up my coupon. Which was great. But the guy next to me burst out laughing when he heard my order! He could barely contain himself. The stewardess admonished him to “be nice” and wheeled the cart to the next row. I asked the guy what was so funny about all this. “You gave up a chance for a FREE DRINK? What planet are you from?” he said.

I guess he never thought that I could value other things more than getting soused while I’m speeding through the air in a big metal tube, as per tradition. We’re going to this wonderland offering up bacchanalia, he was saying in effect, and if you don’t take it, you’re weird.

I was going to give away my drink coupon if I didn’t use it, but I flushed it down the vacu-toilet instead. Whoosh! I just saved someone a few brain cells.

Getting out of the airport was a nightmare. My plane landed shortly before 10 pm. I walked into the hotel lobby at 12:30 am.

There were so… many… people. Everywhere. I had to wait in a big amorphous blob of people just to get on a tram to get to the main terminal. Then, I had to wait in a huge line for a taxi. By the time I got to the hotel, it had been two and a half hours. And I didn’t even have any checked baggage to wait for.

Guess how long it took to check in? Forty-five minutes. That’s right. The check-in line was forty-five minutes long at 12:30 am.

I reserved and paid extra for a room on a high floor so I could be away from the hubbub. They told me that they didn’t have the room I reserved. Whatever. I’m tired, just give me a room, as long as it’s non-smoking. The clerk said it was, smiled and handed over my key.

Not only had the room been smoked in, but it was located on the third floor, above a nightclub or something where the loud music rattled any hotel furnishings that weren’t bolted down.

I tried to ignore it and sleep. I didn’t want to be irate at 1:30 in the morning. But I couldn’t help myself.

It took more than fifteen minutes just to get through to the front desk. I explained that I deserved to have the room I reserved. I complained that I wasn’t in Vegas to party but to attend a seminar. I complained to whatever uncaring functionary they put on the phone until I was told to go to the front desk to pick up my new room key.

By the way, a manager told me that none of their rooms are non-smoking, no matter what their website said. Their rooms are “smoking optional”. What spin! Why isn’t she working for the President?

I had to wait half an hour to pick up that room key. At 2 am there was still a monster of a line at the front desk (which should really be called the back desk, because you have to walk through the damn casino to get there). And the room I ended up in? It was exactly the kind of room I had reserved in the first place. Which the liars told me they had run out of.

The next morning I woke up, took the wimpiest, lowest low-flow shower I’ve ever had, and headed for the monorail station. Some of the same gamblers were still there where I remembered them, in situ. You can’t really say they were merely seated. I think they grow out of damp casino floors and creep up the rungs of those high chairs and attach themselves like vines.

I made it to the Monorail station. Guess what? It was closed. I was a half-hour early. And they call Vegas the 24-hour city!

A brief interlude here. The Monorail was the one part of Las Vegas I actually liked. I am a huge transportation nut and a fan of futurism. I am the proud owner of a Disney World Monorail Co-Pilot’s License (signed by Mickey Mouse!) and I can’t tell you how many times I have watched Walt Disney’s last film, where he lays out what were his real plans for all that property in Florida. EPCOT was going to be a futuristic city where real people lived, not a warmed-over World’s Fair. Also, I was pleased to see monorail switch track at work for the first time in Las Vegas.

Back to the pain and suffering. On my second night, it took several phone calls and at least two members of the security staff to calm down the drunken revelers keeping me up at 3 am. They say that Vegas isn’t just for partying, but also for conventions and even families. Really? The party atmosphere permeated everything. Even if that’s not what you’re about, it’s hard to ignore. And everywhere you go, someone wants to hustle you or lie to you.

It’s interesting to me that when you create a playground for adults where they can really let loose and do what they want, most of them get right down to the business of smoking, drinking, gambling, and dabbling in promiscuity. It’s as if every vice is also somehow the epitome of the human experience. I just don’t get it. “We’re here in Las Vegas! Let’s have a great time by doing all the worst things!”

I’ll relate just one more story, because everything else in Vegas had the same tinge of rottenness to it. I ate my breakfast at the same hotel buffet every morning. It was described as one of the better ones in town. The first morning, I paid my money and they gave me a ticket and I waited for a seat. The second morning, before I could take my ticket, the lady plunked a little blue bottle on top of it. I cocked my head and said, “What?”

“It comes with the meal,” she said. It was alcohol. With breakfast.

Bewildered, I told her that she could have it, and she snatched it away. “Are you sure you’re 21?” she asked. This might have been a genuine question, because I have a youthful appearance. But it also reveals the tacit assumption around here that if you refuse to participate in numbing your brain, you must be weird — or underage.

On the flight home, I got stuck in a row where two frat boys yammered on for hours about why the Orioles sucked so much but the Pirates were okay, maybe, but why do they think that blah blah blah is worth $20 million and blah blah blah the Yankees are Satan incarnate… No surprise there. A city with artificial architecture, artificial values, and artificial boobs attracts artificial people. Yeah, I realize I was on the flight too. But I felt out of place the whole time, even among my plane-mates.

So what’s my beef with Las Vegas? I had a bad trip, sure, but why not live and let live? Some people enjoy the place, so shouldn’t I lay off them?

No way. Having set foot in that dump, I now see what it’s really about.

Las Vegas is about sickness and lying. Lying to oneself. I tried to convince myself that gambling, like anything else, is a legitimate activity that consenting adults can engage in.

No, it is not. It is depraved. Do you know what great lengths we go to to portray gambling as a normal activity? They want you to believe that it’s just fun, fun, fun for adults who play responsibly. It is incredibly dishonest. People are plied with alcohol, which maybe casinos couldn’t even function without, to make the wallet surgery painless. Everywhere you look is a new titillation. Blinking lights, blinking machines, blinking boobs. It is overwhelmingly clear that casinos are designed to suppress the normal, rational mental functioning of a human being. Gambling is not fun, it is not letting loose. It is not “gaming.” People who gamble are not “players” or “gamers” having fun. They are zombies pissing away their paychecks and nothing more.

Gambling is not a productive activity. Now, there’s nothing wrong with engaging in unproductive activities simply for pleasure, as long as it’s not the sole purpose of your life. But gambling is different. There is always the hope of making money by it. No matter how much a gambler swears up and down that he’s just out there having “fun”, you know if there wasn’t the chance of a big payoff, they wouldn’t be sweating in the desert. If you think that I’m wrong and that you yourself can enjoy gambling rationally and responsibly, then let me ask you: would you go spend $100 or $500 or $5000 at a casino if you knew in advance that you would never win, not even once on the way down to zero? Of course not! What the hell kind of fun is that? The allure of gambling is the irrational hope of beating the odds and getting lucky in a system that is plainly stacked against you. You’d be better off taking whatever you want to spend in Las Vegas and doing random stock picking. Or buying some crap property. Or even investing in a friend’s restaurant. Trying to get rich any of those other ways requires you do research and stay on top of the markets, find something useful to do with your real estate, or learn a tough business. Success in those fields does not involve luck. It does not involve hoping for unearned, unworked for riches. It may be risky, but it requires thought and action. Gambling requires nothing but a warm body and stupid hope.

The spirit of Las Vegas is no longer confined to Clark County, Nevada. Decades ago, decent people frowned upon the debauchery in that little desert town. Gambling was a disreputable activity done on the margins of society, operated by gangsters. In the seventies and eighties, the State Lotteries oozed out of our legislatures. Then in the nineties, the normalization of gambling really picked up steam as Indian casinos opened in almost every state. No longer do you have to travel all the way to Vegas to get wasted and go broke. Now you can do it at home! Vegas itself has mushroomed into a huge city supported by what is now a huge industry, a far cry from Bugsy Siegel’s lame attempt at running a legitimate business in a practically uninhabitable place.

Since gambling has been normalized in America, so has its ethos: that you can, in fact, get something for nothing. Of course it’s a lie, because if you really could get something for nothing, every casino would go bankrupt. It’s a lie that people like to believe, and the State actually encourages because it brings in extra tax revenue. Those in power believe it themselves and now we have a government operating on the same principle as Las Vegas. We’re spending massive amounts of money we don’t have now and don’t have a chance in hell of getting in the future to placate voters just until the next election cycle. California or Illinois or one of the many desperate, bankrupt States recently borrowed against 20 years worth of parking meter revenue to pay for just one year’s worth of some piddling social program. And when next year comes, who knows if they’ll still have any resources to exhaust? Sacrificing the long-term to the short term, and the dream of effortless riches — the spirit of Las Vegas is now the American M.O. The Strip has descended to Main Street.

As destructive and irrational as it is, the government has no right to ban or regulate gambling, except where it crosses the line into fraud (and I have to wonder, could a casino be an inherently fraudulent institution, like a ponzi scheme?) Normal society should look down upon gambling, and it should be relegated once again to the margins of society by custom. It will never go away, and we’d be fooling ourselves to think that since it will never go away, we should embrace and extend Las Vegas, like the Romans co-opting Christianity.

If you still don’t understand why I hate Las Vegas, let me leave you with a scene I witnessed on the last day of my trip. A mother emerges from the dark enclave of a smoky casino floor, the gigantic blank box called the MGM Grand, with two small children clutching her hands. As they step around a drunkard who has collapsed onto the pavement, a prostitution service shoves a catalog of call girls in their faces. You tell me if this is what humanity should aspire to.

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