With Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein adaptation recently hitting movie theaters and streaming services, it’s worth revisiting Mary Shelley’s classic gothic novel (originally published in 1818 as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus) and a persistent misunderstanding of the story’s meaning.^[1]

The idea that “man is the real monster” has long been a popular takeaway from the novel, as evidenced in countless published essays and public discussions about its cultural impact. This interpretation, prevalent as it may be, is not only mistaken but morally insidious; it excuses violence and damns human achievement.

The classic tale depicts the young science student Victor Frankenstein creating a sentient humanoid being by assembling organic matter and galvanizing it into life before later fleeing from it in horror. The creature, left to its own devices, teaches itself to read and speak (displaying outstanding levels of intelligence and eloquence) before experiencing rejection by humankind due to its grotesque appearance. It subsequently responds to this rejection by murdering innocent people, including women and children.

Despite this, critics have often claimed that the creature’s creator, Victor, is himself more monstrous than his creation. Numerous essays on education sites claim “the real monster in this novel is, in fact, Dr. Victor Frankenstein himself . . . an unnatural, hostile, and selfish being whose rejection of his creation led to his and his family’s demise.”^[2] Several online memes carry variations of the phrase “Intelligence is knowing Frankenstein isn’t the monster. Wisdom is knowing Frankenstein is the monster.”^[3] Professor Nick Groom (editor of an Oxford University Press edition of the novel) has pointed out that “there’s been a gradual shift. . . . for years Victor Frankenstein’s creation was known as the Monster, then critics seemed to identify him as a victim and called him the Creature. That fits more with students’ sensibilities today.”^[4]

Setting aside for a moment the question of the novel’s theme, which is more nuanced than many people realize, attitudes like the one above should be vociferously challenged wherever they appear.

Victor does commit acts of cowardice and evades moral responsibility. The neglect he displays toward a problem of his own creation is a major moral failing; and in line with all the conventions of a classic tragedy, this moral failing turns out to be his fatal flaw. But to suggest that this flaw makes someone worse than a child killer is bizarre.

The rejection experienced by the creature isn’t insignificant, either. His craving for connection and companionship with others is one of the most humanizing aspects of his arc, and many readers have empathized with the emotional wounds he suffers from being rejected in part because of his physical appearance. The creature recounts such sorrows to his creator after they become reacquainted in the novel’s second part: “Everywhere I see bliss from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend” (103).^[5]

However, the monster’s emotional anguish soon gives way to vengeful thoughts: “I am miserable and they shall share my wretchedness. . . . there was none among the myriads of men who existed who would pity or assist me. Should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No. From that moment, I declared everlasting war against the species” (103, 138).

To be fair to the creature in the novel, he is not human despite having many human characteristics and faculties. However, his violent, terroristic vengeance in response to spurned affection has modern, real-life parallels in some respects. In 2014, twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger murdered six people in a killing spree in Isla Vista, California, having first created a 137-page manifesto and a YouTube video outlining his intention to “punish” women for his lack of success in finding a romantic or sexual partner. Rodger became something of a “heroic” martyr on certain online “incel” forums among young men who expressed similarly violent sentiments regarding their own experiences of rejection.^[6] Sections from Frankenstein’s monster’s monologue to his creator could almost read as a 19th-century version of Rodger’s manifesto:

It was a portrait of a most lovely woman. . . . For a few moments I gazed with delight on her dark eyes fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips. But presently my rage returned. . . . I only wonder that at that moment instead of venting my sensations and exclamations into agony, I did not rush among mankind and perish in the attempt to destroy them. . . . Not I, but she, shall suffer. The murder I have committed because I am forever robbed of all that she could give me—she shall atone. (144–45)

However, whereas Rodger’s actions were universally detested and condemned by all but a fringe community of online extremists, Frankenstein’s monster remains an object of unqualified sympathy in the world of literary criticism.

Of course, one is a fictional example, whereas the other concerns real human lives destroyed by a real-life monster. One of the benefits of fiction is that it allows us to explore complex moral questions more freely than is often possible in real life. But we might also consider the antihuman element that is so common among popular interpretations of Frankenstein.

The titular scientist, as mentioned above, is clearly guilty of cowardice and recklessness, which ultimately derails his life. But who is the character of Victor Frankenstein beyond these flaws? Rational readers of the novel will discover in its titular narrator a devoted son, fiancé, and friend who cares deeply about his loved ones; and perhaps more importantly for our purposes, a man of unprecedented genius who is responsible for what, in the world of the novel’s setting, could only be considered the greatest scientific breakthrough of all time: the creation of conscious life.

According to many literary conventions, he must be punished specifically for this last sin. For one thing, pride has been a capital offense since antiquity. In the Romantic literary movement with which Shelley and her contemporaries were associated, there was also a prevalent Rousseauian suspicion of technology and modernity, as seen in William Blake’s famous “dark Satanic mills,” for example. In keeping with the attitudes of its time, Frankenstein is a warning against self-confident scientific carelessness, unbridled ambition, and man “playing god.”

There is enduring value to be found in cautionary tales about moral cowardice, foolhardiness, and irrationality—all of which Victor Frankenstein is guilty of. But we should be wary about damning achievement, ambition, and purpose—especially if this leads people to sympathize with real-life monsters. Perhaps defending Elliot Rodger is a bit beyond the pale for such people—he was a violent misogynist, after all—but there are more “politically correct” means of sympathizing with the monstrous. Think of the violence committed against Salman Rushdie, or United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, or the October 7 victims. You don’t have to look far to find people who, if not explicitly defending the attackers in these and similar cases, nonetheless say, “I understand where they’re coming from.” Like Frankenstein’s monster, these perpetrators are framed as victims of circumstance, pushed to their limits until, understandably, they snap.

Stories like Frankenstein need to be read through a pro-human lens if we want to celebrate humans rather than monsters. This is why we need to emphasize the fact that Victor Frankenstein’s sin was not his scientific ambition but his failure to pursue it rationally and to take full accountability for the resulting consequences. Of course, if Victor had taken full accountability for his creation, perhaps the story would have looked more like a celebration of human triumph rather than a punishment of hubris. Modern literary convention might damn Victor, but readers should take care to unpack the novel’s characters with nuance and to judge them accordingly.

Frankenstein is a cautionary tale, but it cautions against moral cowardice, not human potential. The real monster is not the creative potential of the human mind—it’s the kind of ideological culture that vilifies human achievement while excusing unjustified violence.

^[1]Tim White, “Frankenstein, Directed by Guillermo del Toro (Review),” TOS Blog, November 6, 2025, https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/p/frankenstein-directed-by-guillermo.

^[2] Anna O’Malley, “Frankenstein: The True Monster,” Owlcation, December 25, 2023, https://owlcation.com/humanities/frankenstein-invention-vs-inventor.

^[3] “9GAG Post,” 9GAG, https://9gag.com/gag/a9P0PB0 (accessed October 21, 2025).

^[4] Chris Smyth, “Frankenstein’s Monster? He Was Stitched Up, Say Millennials,” The Times, March 5, 2018, https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/frankensteins-monster-he-was-stitched-up-say-millennials-ddmvcrpxg.

^[5] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin Classics, 2003).

^[6] “Incel” means “involuntary celibate.” The term is used to describe people who supposedly are “forced” to remain celibate, as though they are entitled to sex or romance.

Legal scholars who cherry pick American history to ignore the American Revolution aren’t making an accidental oversight

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As William F. Buckley’s 100th birthday nears, conservatives will pretend that he was a man of principle, civility, dignity, honor.

He was not.

Buckley was cowardly, dishonest, unjust, and racist.

Set aside the trivia that he occasionally challenged communists. So do fascists, theocrats, and anarchists. Saying “down with communism” is not what matters in the moral-political sphere. What matters is being able and willing to defend freedom and capitalism on solid moral and philosophic ground.

Who showed the world how to do that? Ayn Rand did.

How did Buckley treat Rand—the one philosopher in all of history who identified the objective moral foundation for individual rights? He treated her horribly. He misrepresented her ideas, mocked the straw men he fabricated, and made this the MO of his magazine, National Review.1

Why? Because Rand required evidence in support of the ideas she accepted as true; consequently, she was an atheist. And Buckley couldn’t countenance an atheist—no matter her virtues—because his parents, priests, and fraternity brothers would disapprove.2

Among other acts of injustice against Rand, in National Review, which he edited from 1955 to 1990, Buckley published a patently dishonest “review” of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. As I wrote in “How Conservatives Begat Trump,” this “review” was penned by ex-communist Whittaker Chambers.

The reason for the scare quotes around the word review in the previous sentence is that it was not a review but a lie. A big lie. Indeed, it was and remains an unsurpassed (although often aspired to) model of intellectual dishonesty, injustice, malice.

The screed claimed, among myriad additional lies, that “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”

To those who have read Atlas, that one claim is sufficient to convey the jaw-dropping depths of dishonesty involved in the so-called review. For those who haven’t read Atlas, I’ll indicate briefly, without spoiling the plot of the novel, how obscenely dishonest this claim and the entire review it represents are.

Atlas is a story about the role of reason in human life—about the fact that the individual’s reasoning mind is his only means of knowledge and his basic means of living—about the principle that each individual is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others—and about the principle that being moral consists in using one’s mind to pursue one’s life-serving values while respecting the rights of others to do the same.

Among the countless ways in which these ideas are vividly depicted and illustrated in Rand’s thousand-page novel, the heroes of Atlas take an oath, which they all uphold unwaveringly: “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

As part of their commitment to living by this oath, the heroes call for a government that does one thing and one thing only: protects the rights of all individuals by banning physical force and fraud from social relationships so that everyone can act on his own judgment, produce goods and services, trade them with others by mutual consent to mutual advantage, and flourish in a land of liberty.

Also as part of their commitment to living by the principle that no one should ever sacrifice or be sacrificed for anyone, the heroes in Atlas, time and again, refuse to cooperate with government officials or unscrupulous businessmen who seek to violate anyone’s rights for any reason in any way whatsoever.

From this book, the reviewer for National Review heard a voice commanding: “To a gas chamber—go”?

He did not. He lied.

He lied to discredit Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. He lied to stop people from reading her work or taking her ideas seriously. And William F. Buckley and the editorial staff at National Review not only published this big lie and stood by it in 1957; they also have republished it repeatedly since then, most recently just a few years ago.

Following this initial conservative big lie about Rand’s ideas, similarly malicious treatments of Rand and her philosophy became the modus operandi of the leaders of the conservative movement. To this day, with few exceptions (Ted Cruz being one), if conservative leaders don’t ignore Rand’s ideas (as Dennis Prager, Jay Cost, and Matt Walsh do), they misrepresent her ideas (as Daniel Flynn, Roger Scruton, Anthony Daniels, Andrew Klavan, Bill Whittle, and countless others do).

With their commitment to ignoring or maligning Rand and her philosophy of rational egoism, individual rights, and laissez-faire capitalism, leaders of the conservative movement have decisively severed themselves and their movement from any affiliation with the one philosophy that could support freedom, capitalism, and the American republic.3

Unfortunately, that was not the only manifestation of Buckley’s dishonesty and injustice. Among other consequences of these vices, Buckley was a racist.

In his editorial “Why the South Must Prevail” (National Review, August 24, 1957), Buckley argued for coercive, governmental segregation of blacks and whites in the South. As he put it:

The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? sic The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. . . .

National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

So, in the same year that Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged—a hymn to individualism and individual rights—William F. Buckley published a collectivist screed claiming that whites are “the advanced race” and contemplating when it is “worth” using violence to keep blacks in their place.

Yet conservatives lie about Rand and celebrate Buckley.

That speaks volumes.

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"Capitalism ... has been, blamed for various ills, from poverty and income inequality to pollution, inflation, child labour, and war. ... Capitalism is misunderstood because it is often confused with today’s mixed economy that combines varying degrees of economic freedom and statism. Statism gives the government unlimited power that it uses to tax, regulate, and subsidize individuals and businesses and to hand out favors (government contracts, lower tax rates, subsidies) to companies that make political contributions and do the government’s bidding.

"Because of this confusion, people blame capitalism for problems caused by the mixed economy and statism in particular.

"Consider poverty and income equality. Poverty is most persistent in countries where the government deters wealth creation through high levels of market controls, taxation, and corruption that constrain economic growth, entrepreneurship, job opportunities, and people’s ability to work themselves out of poverty and improve their incomes. The same can be said of child labour (a consequence of poverty), inflation (caused by government manipulation of the money supply, not by business seeking to maximise profits in a free market), and war (caused by government invasion of another country).

"Capitalism does not cause the problems it is blamed for but provides solutions by safeguarding freedom. ...

"In Ayn Rand’s definition, “capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.” In such a system, the government’s role is limited to protecting individual freedom ... by deterring and punishing the initiation of physical force against others ... Under capitalism, the only way to get others to collaborate is through persuasion and voluntary trade.

"Although pure laissez-faire capitalism has never fully existed ... some historical periods and countries have approximated capitalism ... [Northern] America during the 19th century (the longest uninterrupted period of peace); England, France, and other European countries during the Enlightenment (that brought about the Industrial Revolution); Hong Kong (before China’s takeover); and smaller countries like Estonia (that liberalised their economies after the collapse of the Soviet Union).

"Capitalism is good for people and their environment because it produces and protects freedom, the social condition that human flourishing requires. ... [C]apitalism did not create today’s problems but has helped solve or reduce them. ...

"If we want human flourishing to increase, we must not reject and banish capitalism but embrace and defend it ... "

~ Jaana Woiceshyn from her post 'Should we end capitalism?'