The following is a conversation with Yoram Brook and Yoram Hazoni.

This is Yoram's third time on this podcast and Yoram's first time.

Yoram Brook is an Objectivist Philosopher, Chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, host of

the Yoram Brook Show, and the coauthor of Free Market Revolution and Equal is Unfair.

Yoram Hazoni is a National Conservatism thinker, Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation that

hosted the National Conservatism Conference.

He is also the host of the NatCon Talk and author of The Virtue of Nationalism and an

upcoming book called Conservatism, A Rediscovery.

Allow me to say a few words about each part of the two word title of this episode, Nationalism

Debate.

First Debate, I would like to have a few conversations this year that are a kind of debate with two

or three people that hold differing views on a particular topic but come to the table

with respect for each other and a desire to learn and discover something interesting together

through the empathetic exploration of the tension between their ideas.

This is not strictly a debate, it is simply a conversation.

There is no structure, there is no winners, except of course just a bit of trash talking

to keep it fun.

Some of these topics will be very difficult and I hope you can keep an open mind and have

patience with me as the kind of moderator who tries to bring out the best in each person

and the ideas discussed.

Okay that's my comment on the word Debate.

Now onto the word Nationalism.

This debate could have been called Nationalism versus Individualism or National Conservatism

versus Individualism or just Conservatism versus Individualism.

As we discussed in this episode, these words have slightly different meanings depending

on who you ask.

This is especially true, I think, for any word that ends in "-ism".

I personally enjoy the discussion of the meaning of such philosophical words.

I don't think it's possible to arrive at a perfect definition that everybody agrees with,

but the process of trying to do so for a bit is interesting and productive, at least to

me.

As long as we don't get stuck there, as some folks sometimes do in these conversations.

This is the Lex Readman Podcast, to support it please check out our sponsors in the description

and now here's my conversation with Yoram Brooke and Yoram Hosoni.

I attended the excellent debate between the two of you yesterday at UT Austin.

The debate was between ideas of Conservatism, represented by Yoram Hosoni, and ideas of

Individualism, represented by Yoram Brooke.

Let's start with the topics of the debate.

Yoram, how do you define Conservatism, maybe in the way you were thinking about it yesterday?

What to you are some principles of Conservatism?

Let me define it and then we can get into principles if you want.

When I talk about political Conservatism, I'm talking about a political standpoint that

regards the recovery, elaboration, and restoration of tradition as the key to maintaining a nation

and strengthening it through time.

This is something that if you have time to talk about it like we do on the show, it's

worth emphasizing that Conservatism is not like Liberalism or Marxism.

Liberalism and Marxism are both kind of universal theories and they claim to be able to tell

you what's good for human beings at all times in all places.

And Conservatism is a little bit different because it's going to carry different values

in every nation, in every tribe.

Even every family, you can say, has somewhat different values and these loyalty groups,

they compete with one another.

That's the way human beings work.

So it's deeply rooted in history of that particular area of land.

Well, I wouldn't necessarily say land, you're right that many forms of Conservatism are

tied to a particular place.

So how does the implementation of Conservatism to you differ from the ideal of Conservatism,

the implementations you've seen of political Conservatism in the United States and the

rest of the world?

Just to give some context, because it's a loaded term, like most political terms.

So when people think about conservative in the United States, they think about the Republican

Party, what, can you kind of disambiguate some of this, what are we supposed to think

about?

Yeah, that's a really important question.

Usually the word conservative is associated with Edmund Burke and with the English common

law tradition.

Going back centuries and centuries, there's kind of a classical English conservative tradition

that goes Fortescue, Hooker, Coke, Seldon, Hale, Burke, Blackstone before Burke.

If you take that kind of as a benchmark and you compare it, then you can compare it to

things like the American Federalist Party at the time of the American founding is in

many respects very much in keeping with that tradition.

As you go forward, there's an increasing mix of liberalism into conservatism.

I think by the time you get to the 1960s with William Buckley and Frank Meyer, the jargon

term is fusionism.

By the time you get there, it's arguable that their conservatism isn't very conservative

anymore, that it's kind of a public liberalism mixed with a private conservatism.

So a lot of the debate that we have today about what does the word conservatism actually

mean, a lot of the confusion comes from that, comes from the fact that on the one hand,

we have people who use the term, I think properly historically to refer to this common law tradition

of which Burke was a spokesman, but there are lots of other people who when they say

conservative, they just mean liberal.

I think that's a big problem.

It's a problem just to have an intelligent debate is difficult when people are using

the word almost too antithetical.

What would you say the essential idea of conservatism is time?

You mentioned your father's a physicist.

So a lot of physicists when they form models of the universe, they don't consider time.

So everything is dealt with instantaneously.

A particle is represented fully by its current state, velocity and position.

You're saying, so you're arguing with all of physics and your father, as we always do,

that their time matters in conservatism.

That's the fundamental element is the full history matters and you cannot separate the

individual from the history, from the roots that they come from.

The parallel in political theory is what's called rationalism.

I guess we'll probably talk about that some.

Rationalism is kind of an instantaneous, timeless thing.

Before I mentioned that liberalism and various enlightenment theories, they don't include

time at all.

Their goal is to say, look, there's such a thing as universal human reason.

All human beings, if they reason properly, will come to the same conclusions.

If that's true, then it removes the time consideration.

It removes tradition and context because everywhere where you are at any time, you ought to be

able to use reason and come to the same conclusions about politics or morals.

So that's a theory like Immanuel Kant or John Locke is an example, Hobbes is an example.

That kind of political theorizing really does say at a given instant, we can know pretty

much everything that we need to know, at least the big things.

And conservatism is the opposite.

It's a traditionalist view, exactly as you say, that says that history is crucial.

So you're on, you say that history is interesting, but perhaps not crucial if in the context

of individualism.

No, I mean, I think there's a false dichotomy he presented here, and that is that one view

holds that you can derive anything from a particular historical path and kind of an

empirical view.

And if we know the history, we know where we should be tomorrow.

We know where we should stand today.

And the other path is we ignore history, we ignore facts, we ignore what's going on.

We can derive from some a priori axioms, we can derive a truth right now.

And both are false.

Both of those views, in my view, are false.

And you know, Ayn Rand and I reject both of those views.

And I think the better thinkers of the Enlightenment did as well, although they sometimes fall

into the trap of appearing like rationalists.

And Jorm and I agree on one thing, and that is that Kant is one of, you know, we've talked

about this in the past, Alex, but we both hate Kant.

We both think Kant is, I at least think Kant is probably the most destructive philosopher

since Plato, who was pretty destructive himself.

And part of the problem is that Kant divorces reason from reality.

That is, he divorces reason from history.

He divorces reason from experience, because we don't have direct experience of reality

according to Kant, right?

We're removed from that direct experience.

But I view Kant as the anti Enlightenment, that is, I view Kant as the destroyer of good

Enlightenment thinking.

And I acknowledge a lot of history of philosophy, people who do history of philosophy view Kant

as the embodiment of the Enlightenment, that is the ultimate.

But I think that's a mistake.

I think both Rousseau and Kant are fundamentally the goal, the mission in life is to destroy

the Enlightenment.

So my view is neither of those options are the right option.

That is, the true reason based, reason is not divorced from reality.

It's quite the opposite.

Reason is a tool.

It's a faculty of identifying and integrating what?

It's identifying and integrating the facts of reality as we know them through sense perception

or through the study of history, through what actually happened.

So it's the integration of those facts.

It's the knowledge of that history.

And then what we do is we abstract away principles based on what's worked in the past, what hasn't

worked in the past, the consequences of different ideas, different past, different actions.

We abstract away principles that then can be universal.

Not always.

We make mistakes, right?

We can come up with a universal principle, it turns out it's not.

But if we have the whole scope of human history, we can derive principles as we do in life,

as individuals, we derive principles that are then truths that we can live by, but you

don't do that by ignoring history.

You do that by learning history, by understanding history, by understanding in a sense tradition

and where it leads to, and then trying to do better.

And I think good thinkers are constantly trying to do better based on what they know about

the past and what they know about the present.

What's the difference between studying history on a journey of reason and tradition?

So you mentioned that Burke understood that reason begins with an inherited tradition

yesterday.

So what's the difference between studying history, but then being free to go any way

you want and tradition where it feels more, I don't want to say a negative term like burden,

but there's more of a momentum that forces you to go the same way as your ancestors.

It's the recognition that people are wrong, often are wrong.

Including parents?

Including your parents, including your teachers, including everybody.

Everybody is potentially wrong, and that you can't accept anybody just because they happen

to come before you.

That is, you have to evaluate and judge, and you have to have a standard by which to evaluate

and judge the actions of those who came before you, whether they are your parents, whether

they are the state in which you happen to be born, whether they are somebody on the

other side of planet Earth.

You can judge them if you have a standard.

And my standard, and I think the right standard, is human well being.

That which is good for human beings, qua human beings, is the standard by which we judge.

I can say that certain periods of history were bad.

They happened.

It's important to study them.

It's important to understand what they did that made them bad so we cannot do that again.

And I can say certain cultures, certain periods in time were good.

Why?

Because they promoted human well being and human flourishing.

That's the standard.

To derive from that, okay, what is it that made a particular culture good?

What is it that made that particular culture positive in terms of human well being and

human flourishing?

What made this bad?

And hopefully from that, I can derive a principle.

Okay, if I want human flourishing and human well being in the future, I want to be more

like these guys and less like those guys.

I want to derive what is the principle that will guide me in the future.

That's I think how human knowledge ultimately develops.

I think people often make a mistake, I'm not saying your own, but lots of people don't

actually read the original sources and so what happens is people will attack conservatives

assuming that conservatives think that whatever comes from the past is right.

And actually, it's very difficult to find a thinker who actually says something like

that.

Seldon or Burke, the big conservative theorists hooker, they're all people who understand

that the tradition carries with it mistakes that were made in the past.

And this is actually I think an important part of their empiricism is that they see

the search for truth as something a society does by trial and error.

And what that means is that in any given moment, you have to be aware of the possibility that

things that you've inherited are actually false.

And the job of the political thinker or the jurist or the philosopher is not to dig in

and say whatever it is that we've inherited is right.

The job is to look at the society as a whole and say, look, we have this job of first of

all conservation, just making sure that we don't lose good things that we've had.

And second, seeing if we can repair things in order to improve them where it's necessary

or where it's possible.

And that process is actually a creative process.

This is a way in which I think it is similar to Jeroen's philosophy that you take the

inherited tradition and you look for a way that you can shape it in order to make it

something better than it was.

That's a baseline for what we call conservatism.

It's not, yeah.

Just a comment.

So the trial and error, the errors is, you're proud of the errors.

It's a feature, not a bug.

So you mentioned trial and error a few times yesterday, it's a really interesting kind

of idea.

It's basically accepting that the journey is going to have flaws as opposed to saying,

I mean, the conclusion there is the current system is flawed and it will always be flawed

and you try to improve it.

When you listen to your on talk, there's much more of an optimism for the system being perfect

now or potentially soon, or it could be perfect.

And to me, the way I heard it is almost like accepting that the system is flawed and through

trial and error will improve and Jeroen says, no, we can have a perfection now.

That's the way it sounds to me.

Yeah.

And I think that's right.

I think the difference is that at some point, just like in science, I think one can stop

the trial and error and say, I can now see a pattern here.

I can see that certain actions lead to bad consequences, certain actions lead to good

consequences.

Let me try to abstract away what is it that is good and what is it that is bad and build

a system around what is good and reject what is bad.

I think ultimately, if you read the founding fathers and whether we call them conservatives

or individuals, what the founding fathers actually did, all of them, I think, is study

history.

They all did.

They all talk about history.

They all talk about examples of other cultures, whether they go back to the Republic in Venice

or back to the ancient Greeks.

They studied these.

They learned lessons from them.

They try to figure out what has worked in the past and what hasn't and try to derive

principles.

They got pretty close to what I would consider kind of an ideal, but they didn't get it

completely right.

Here we sit 200 and something years after the Declaration and after the Constitution.

I think we can look back and say, okay, well, what did they get right?

What did they get wrong based on how is it done and where are the flaws and we can improve

on it.

I think we can get closer to perfection based on those kind of observations, based on that

kind of abstraction, that kind of discovery of what is true.

Just like at some point, you do the experiments, you do the trial and error, and now you come

up with a scientific principle.

It is true that 100 years later, you might discover that, hey, I missed something, there's

something, but to not take the full lesson, to insist on incrementalism, to insist on

we're just going to tinker with the system instead of saying, no, there's something really

wrong with having a king, there's something really wrong with not having any representation,

whatever the standard needs to be in the name of we don't want to move too fast, I think

is a mistake.

The problem with trial and error in politics is that we're talking about human life, right?

So there was a big trial around communism, and 100 million people paid the price for

the trial.

I could have told them in advance, as did many people, that it would not work.

There are principles of human nature, principles that we can study from history, principles

about economics and other aspects.

Well, we know it's not going to work.

You don't need to try it again.

We've had communal arrangements throughout history.

There was an experiment with fascism, and there have been experiments with all kinds

of political systems.

Okay, we've done them.

Sad that we did them, because many of us knew they wouldn't work.

We should learn the lesson, and I think that all of history now converges on one lesson,

and that is what we need to do is build systems that protect individual freedom.

That is the core.

That's what ultimately leads to human flourishing and human success and human achievement, and

to the extent that we place anything above that individual, whether it's the state, whether

it's the ethnicity, whether it's the race, whether it's the bourgeois, whatever it happens

to be, class or whatever, whenever we place something above the individual, the consequence

is negative.

That's one of these principles that I think we can derive from studying 3,000 years of

civilization.

It's tragic, I think, because we're going to keep experimenting, sadly.

I see it, right?

I'm not winning this battle.

I'm losing the battle.

We're going to keep experimenting with different forms of collectivism, and we're going to

keep paying the price in human life and in missed opportunities for human flourishing

and human success and human wealth and prosperity.

Let's take communism as a good example.

None of the major conservative thinkers would say, you know what's a good idea?

A good idea would be to experiment by raising everything that we've inherited and starting

from scratch.

I mean, that's the conservative complaint or accusation against rationalists as opposed

to empiricists.

I mean, using rationalism, let's take Descartes kind of as a benchmark.

Can you also maybe define rationalism?

Yeah.

These are two terms that are in philosophy, especially in epistemology.

They're often compared to one another.

Jeroen said that it's a false dichotomy, and maybe it is a bit exaggerated, but that doesn't

mean it's not useful for conceptualizing the domain.

So a rationalist is somebody like Descartes who says, I'm going to set aside, I'm going

to try to set aside everything I know, everything I've inherited, I'm going to start from scratch.

And he explicitly says, in evaluating the inheritance of the past, he explicitly says,

you take a look at the histories that we have, they're not reliable.

You take a look at the moral and the scientific writings that we receive, they're not very

good.

His baseline is to look very critically at the past and say, look, I'm evaluating it.

I think all in all, it's just not worth very much.

And so whatever I do, beginning from scratch, is going to be better as long as, and here's

his caveat, as long as I'm proceeding from self evident assumptions, from self evident

premises, things that you can't argue against.

I think, therefore, I am.

And then from there, deducing what he calls infallible conclusions.

So that model of self evident premises to infallible conclusions, I'm calling that rationalism,

I think that's kind of a standard academic jargon term.

And it's opposed to empiricism, which is a thinker, I think in universities, usually

the empiricist is David Hume.

And David Hume will say, we can't learn anything the way that Descartes said.

There is nothing that's that self evident and that infallible.

So Hume proposes, based on Newton and Boyle and the new physical sciences.

So Hume proposes a science of man.

And the science of man sounds an awful lot like what Yaron just said, which is we're

going to take a look at human nature, at the nature of societies.

Human nature, we're going to try to abstract towards fixed principles for describing it.

Human societies, we're going to try to do the same thing.

And from there, we get, for example, contemporary economics.

But we also get sociology and anthropology, which cut in a different direction.

So that's rationalism versus empiricism.

Can I just say?

Yeah, go ahead, please.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I think empiricism, the one thing I disagree is I think empiricism rarely comes to these

abstractions.

I mean, they want more facts.

It's always about collecting more evidence.

But this is where I think Ayn Rand is so unusual and where I think there's something new here.

And that's a bold statement given the history of philosophy.

But I think Ayn Rand is something new.

And so she says, yes, we agree about rationalism and that it's inherently wrong.

Empiricism has the problem of, OK, where does it lead?

You never come to a conclusion.

You're just accumulating evidence.

There's something in addition.

There's a third alternative, which she is positing, which is using empirical evidence,

not denying empirical evidence, recognizing that there are some axioms, there are some

axioms that we all, at the base of all of our knowledge, that are starting points.

We're not rejecting axiomatic knowledge.

And integrating those two and identifying the fact that based on these axioms and based

on these empirical evidence, we can come to truths.

Just again, like we do in science, we have certain axioms, scientific axioms, we have

certain experiments that we run, and then we can come to some identification of a truth.

And that truth is always going to be challenged by new information, by new knowledge.

But as long as that's what we know, that is what truth is.

So truth is contextual in the sense that it's contextual, it's based on that knowledge that

surrounds it.

It's always available to change if you get new facts.

Absolutely.

It's always available to change if the facts that you get, and they really are, I mean,

the burden of changing what you've come to a conclusion of truth is high, so you'd have

to have real evidence that it's not true, but that happens all the time.

So it happens in science, right?

We discovered that what we thought was true is not true, and it can happen in politics

and ethics even more so than in science because they're much messier fields.

But the idea is that you can come to a truth, but it's not just deductive.

Most truths are inductive.

We learn from observing reality and, again, coming to principles about what works and

what's not.

And here I think this is—Ayn Rand is different.

She doesn't fall into the—and she's different in her politics, and she's different in

her epistemology.

She doesn't fall into the conventional view.

She's an opponent of Hume, and she's an opponent of Descartes, and she's certainly

an opponent of Kant.

And I think she's right, right?

So—

If it's okay, can we walk back to criticism of communism?

You're both critics of communism and socialism.

Why did communism fail?

You started to say that conservatives criticize it on the basis of rationalism, that you're

throwing away the past.

You're starting from scratch.

Is that the fundamental description of why communism failed?

I think the fundamental difference between rationalists and empiricists is the question

of whether you're throwing away the past.

That's the argument.

And it cashes out as a distinction between abstract, universal, rationalist political

theories and empirical political theories.

Artificial political theories, they're always going to say something like, look, there are

many different societies.

We can say that some are better and some are worse, but the problem is that there are many

different ways in which a society can be better or worse.

There's an ongoing competition, and we're learning on an ongoing basis what are the

ways in which societies can be better and worse.

That creates a kind of, I'd say, a mild skepticism, a moderate skepticism among conservatives.

I don't think too many conservatives have a problem looking at the Soviet Union, which

is brutal and murderous, ineffective in its economics, totally ineffective spiritually,

and then collapsed.

Okay.

So I think it's easier for us to look at a system like that and say, what on earth?

What should we learn from that?

But the main conservative tradition is pretty tolerant of a diversity of different kinds

of society and is slow to insist that France is so tyrannical, it just needs a revolution

because what's going to come after the revolution is going to be much better.

The assumption is that there's lots of things that are good about most societies and that

a clean slate leads you to throw out all of the inherited things that you don't even know

how to notice until they're gone.

LW.

Could I actually play devil's advocate here and address something you also said?

Can we, as opposed to knowing the empirical data of the 20th century that communism presented,

can we go back to the beginning of the 20th century?

Can you empathize or steel man or put yourself in a place of the Soviet Union where the workers

are being disrespected?

And can you not see that the conservatives could be pro communism?

Communism is such a strongly negative word in modern day political discourse that you

have to put yourself in the mind of people who like red colors, it's all about the branding,

I think, but also like the ideas of solidarity, of nation, of togetherness, of respect for

fellow man.

I mean, all of these things that communism represents, can you not see that this idea

is actually going along with conservatism?

It is in some ways respecting the deep ideals of the past, but proposing a new way to raise

those ideals, implement those ideals in the system.

Yes, I'm going to try to do what you're suggesting, but historically we actually have a more

useful option, I think, for both of our positions.

Instead of pretending that we like the actual communists, we have conservative statesmen

like Disraeli and Bismarck who initiated social legislation.

The first step towards saying, look, we're one nation, we're undergoing industrialization,

that industrialization is important and positive, but it's also doing a lot of damage to a lot

of people.

And in particular, it's doing damage not just to individuals and families, but it's doing

damage to the social fabric, the capacity of Britain or German to remain cohesive societies

is being harmed.

And so it's these two conservative statesmen, Disraeli and Bismarck, who actually take the

first steps in order to legislate for what today we would consider to be minimal social

programs, pensions and disability insurance and those kinds of things.

So for sure, conservatives do look at industrialization as a rapid change and they say, we do have

to care about the nation as a whole and we have to care about it as a unit.

And I assume that your own will say, look, that's the first step towards the catastrophe

of communism.

But before your own drives that nail into the coffin, let me try to make a distinction

because when you read Marx, you're reading an intellectual descendant of Descartes.

You're reading somebody who says, look, every society consists of oppressors and oppressed.

And that's an improvement in some ways over liberal thinking because at least he's seeing

groups as a real social phenomenon.

But he says, every society has an oppressor class and oppressed class.

They're different classes, they're different groups, and whenever one is stronger, it exploits

the ones that are weaker.

That is the foundation of a revolutionary political theory.

Why?

Because the moment that you say that the only relationship between the stronger and the

weaker is exploitation.

The moment that you say that, then you're pushed into the position and Marx and Engels

say this explicitly, you're pushed into the position.

We're saying, when will the exploitation end?

Never until there's a revolution.

What happens when there's a revolution?

You eliminate the oppressor class.

It's annihilationist.

I mean, you can immediately when you read it, see why it's different from Descartes

or Bismarck because they're trying to keep everybody somehow at peace with one another.

And Marx is saying, there is no peace.

That oppressor class has to be annihilated.

And then they go ahead and do it, and they kill 100 million people.

So I do think that despite the fact your question is good and right, there are certain similarities

and concern, but still I think you can tell the difference.

That extra step of revolution to you is where the problem comes.

That extra step of let's kill all the oppressors, that's the problem.

And then to you, the whole step one is the problem.

Well, it's all a problem.

First I don't view communism as something that radical in a sense that I think it comes

from a tradition of collectivism.

I think it comes from a tradition of looking at groups and measuring things in terms of

groups.

It comes from tradition where you expect some people to be sacrificed for the greater good

of the whole.

I think it comes from a tradition where mysticism or revelation as the source of truth is accepted.

I view Marx as in some sense very Christian.

I don't think he's this radical rejecting, I think he's just reformatting Christianity

in a sense.

In a sense he's replacing God with the proletarian.

Knowledge you have to get knowledge from somewhere, so you need the dictatorship of the proletarian,

you need somebody, the Stalin, the Lenin who somehow communes with the spirit, the spirit

of the proletarian.

There's no rationality, not rationalism, there's no rationality in Marx.

There is a lot of mysticism and there is a lot of hand waving and there's a lot of sacrifice

and a lot of original sin in the way he views humanity.

So I view Marx as one more collectivist in a whole string of collectivists.

And I think the Bismarckian response, I know less about Disraeli so I'll focus on Bismarck,

and Bismarck is really responding to political pressures from the left and he's responding

to the rise of communism, socialism, but what Bismarck is doing, he's putting something

alternative, he's presenting an alternative to the proletarian as the standard by which

we should measure the good.

And what he's replacing it as the state, he's replacing the proletarian with the state,

and that has exactly the same problems.

That is first it requires sacrificing some to others, which is what the welfare state

basically legitimizes.

It places the state above all, so the state now becomes I think the biggest evil of Bismarck

and I definitely view him as a negative force in history, is public education.

I mean the Germans really dig in on public education, really develop it, and really the

American model of public education is copying the German, the Prussian Bismarckian public

education.

Can you speak to that real quick, why the public education is such a root of moral evil

for you?

Well because it now says that there's one standard and that standard is determined by

government, by a bureaucracy, by whatever the government deems is in the national interest,

and Bismarck is very explicit about this.

He's training the workers of the future, they need to catch up with England and other places

and they need to train the workers and he's going to train some people to be the managerial

classes, he's going to train other people to be – and he decides, right, the government,

the bureaucracy is going to decide who's who and where they go.

There's no individual choice, there's no individual showing an ability to break out of what the

government has decided is their little box, there's very little freedom, there's very

little – you know, ultimately there's very little competition, there's very little

innovation, and this is the problem we have today in American education, which we can

get to, is there's no competition and no innovation.

We have one standard, fit all, and then we have conflicts about what should be taught,

and the conflicts now are not pedagogical, they're not about what works and what doesn't.

Nobody cares about that.

It's about political agendas, right, it's about what my group wants to be taught and

what that group wants to be taught, rather than actually discovering how do we get kids

to read?

I mean, we all know how to get kids to read, but there's a political agenda around not

teaching phonics, for example.

So a lot of schools don't teach phonics, even though the kids will never learn how

to read properly.

So it becomes politics, and I don't believe politics belongs in education.

I think education is a product, it's a service, and we know how to deliver products and services

really, really efficiently at a really, really low price at a really, really high quality,

and that's leaving it to the market to do.

But your fundamental criticism is that the state can use education to further its authoritarian

aims.

Well, or whatever the aims – I mean, think about the conservative today critique of American

educational system, right, it's dominated by the left.

Yeah, what did you expect, right?

If you leave it up to the state to fund, they're going to fund the things that promote state

growth and state intervention, and the left is better at that.

It has been better at that than the right, and they now dominate our educational institutions.

But look, if we go back to Bismarck, my problem is placing the state above the individual.

So if communism places the class above the individual, what matters is class, individuals,

and nothing, they're cogs in a machine.

Bismarck, certainly the German tradition much more than the British tradition or the American

tradition, the German tradition is to place the state above the individual.

I think that's equally evil, and the outcome is fascism, and the outcome is the same.

The outcome is the deaths of tens of millions of people when taken to its ultimate conclusion.

Just like socialism, the ultimate conclusion of it is communism, you know, nationalism

in that form, kind of the Bismarckian form, the ultimate conclusion is Nazism or some

form of fascism.

Because you don't care about the individual, the individual doesn't matter.

I think this is one of the differences in the Anglo, you know, Anglo American tradition

where the Anglo American tradition, even the conservatives, have always acknowledged and

it goes back to...

Especially the conservatives.

Yes.

Well...

The conservatives were there first.

They acknowledged.

Well, you've defined conservatives to include all the good thinkers of the distant past,

and they're all good thinkers.

We agree on that.

I'm defining conservatism the way that Burke does.

I'm just...

Look, this is a very simple observation.

Burke thinks, when you open Burke and you actually read him, he starts naming all of

these people who he's defending.

And it's bizarre, I'm sorry, it's just intellectual sloppiness for people to be publishing books

called Burke, The First Conservative, The Founding Conservative, The Found...

I mean, this is nonstop, it's a view that says Burke reacts to the French Revolution,

so conservatism has no prior tradition, it's just reacting to the French Revolution.

And this is...

I mean, this is just absurd.

Can I ask a quick question on conservatism?

Are there any conservatives that are embracing of revolutions?

So are they ultimately against the concept of revolution?

Yes, Burke himself embraces the Polish Revolution, which takes place almost exactly at the same

time as the French Revolution.

And the argument is really interesting because there's a common mistake is assuming that

Burke and conservative thinkers are always in favor of slow change.

I think that's also just factually mistaken.

Burke is against the French Revolution because he thinks that there are actually tried and

true things that work, things that work for human flourishing and freedom included as

a very important part of human flourishing.

He like many others takes the English constitution to be a model of something that works.

So it has a king, it has various other things that maybe your own will say, well, that's

a mistake, but still for centuries, it's the leader in many things that I think we can

easily agree are human flourishing.

And Burke says, look, what's wrong with the French Revolution?

What's wrong with the French Revolution is that they have a system that has all sorts

of problems, but they could be repairing it.

And instead what they're doing by overthrowing everything is they're moving away from what

we know is good for human beings.

Then he looks at the Polish Revolution and he says, the Poles do the opposite.

The Poles have a nonfunctioning traditional constitution.

It's too democratic.

It's impossible to raise armies and to defend the country because of the fact that every

nobleman has a veto.

So the Polish Revolution moves in the direction of the British constitution.

They repair their constitution through a quick, a rapid revolution.

They install a king along the model that looks a lot like Britain and Burke supports it.

He says, this is a good revolution.

So it's not the need to quickly make a change in order to save yourself.

That's not what conservatives are objecting to.

What they're objecting to is instead of looking at experience in order to try to make a slow

or quick improvement, a measured improvement to achieve a particular goal, instead of doing

that, you say, look, the whole thing has just been wrong.

And what we've really got to do is annihilate a certain part of the population and then

make completely new laws and a completely new theory.

That's what he's objecting to.

That's the French Revolution.

And that then becomes the model for communist revolutions.

And for me, I mean, the French Revolution is clearly a real evil and wrong, but it's

not that it was a revolution and it's not that it tried to change everything.

I mean, let's remember what was going on in France at the time and people were starving

and the monarchy in particular was completely detached, completely detached from the suffering

of the people and something needed to change.

The unfortunate thing is that the change was motivated by an egalitarian philosophy, not

egalitarian in the sense that I think the Fauny Fathers talked about, but egalitarian

in the sense of real equality, equality of outcome, motivated by a philosophy, by Rousseau's

philosophy, and inevitably led, you could tell that the ideas were going to lead to

this, to massive destruction and death and the annihilation of a class.

You can't, annihilation is never an option.

That is, it's not true that a good revolution never leads to mass death of just whole groups

of people because a good revolution is about the sanctity of the individual.

It's about preservation, liberty of the individual.

And again, that goes back to, and the French Revolution denies and Rousseau denies really

that in civilization there is a value in a thing called the individual.

I think this is a good place to have this discussion.

The Fauny Fathers of the United States, are they individualists or are they conservatives?

So in this particular revolution that founded this country, at the core of which are some

fascinating, some powerful ideas, were those founding fathers, were those ideas coming

from a place of conservatism or did they put primary value into the freedom and the power

of the individual?

What do you think?

There were both.

I mean, this is something that's a little bit difficult sometimes for Americans, I mean,

very educated Americans, they talk about the founding fathers as though it's kind of like

this collective entity with a single brain and a single value system.

But I think at the time that's not the way any of them saw it.

So roughly there's two camps and they map onto the rationalist versus traditionalist

empiricist dichotomy that I proposed earlier.

So on the one hand, you have real revolutionaries like Jefferson and Paine.

These are the people who Burke was writing against.

These are the people who supported the French Revolution.

So when you say real, so when you say Paine, you're referring to revolutionaries in a bad

way, like this is a problem.

These are people who will say history up until now has been, with Descartes, but applied

to politics.

History up until now has been just a story of ugliness, foolishness, stupidity, and evil.

And if you apply reason, we'll all come to the same conclusions.

Paine writes a book called The Age of Reason, and The Age of Reason is a manifesto for here

is the answer to political and moral problems throughout history.

We have the answers.

And it's in the same school as Rousseau's The Social Continent.

You don't like that?

Not at all.

Well, I thought it was the opposite.

I think they're the opposite.

Okay, so let me...

Just to throw in a quick question on Jefferson and Paine, do you think America would exist

without those two figures?

So like how important is spice in the flavor of the dish you're making?

I don't want to try to run the counterfactual, I don't have confidence that I know the answer

to the question.

But it's so much fun.

You know what?

I'm going to offer something that I think is more fun.

More fun than the counterfactual is America had two revolutions, not one, okay?

At first, there is a revolution that is strongly spiced with this kind of rationalism.

And then there's a 10 year period after the Declaration of Independence.

There's a 10 year period under which America has a constitution.

This first constitution, which today they call the Articles of the Confederation, but

there's a constitution from 1777.

And that constitution is based on, in a lot of ways, on the hottest new ideas.

It has, instead of the traditional British system with a division of powers between an

executive and a bicameral legislature, instead of that traditional English model, which most

of the states had as their governments, instead of that, they say, no, we're going to have

one elected body, okay, and that body, that Congress, it's going to be the executive,

it's going to be the legislative, it's going to be everything, and it's going to run as

a big committee.

These are the ideas of the French Revolution.

You get to actually see them implemented in Pennsylvania, in the Pennsylvania Constitution,

and then later in the National Assembly in France.

It's a disaster.

The thing doesn't work.

It's completely made up.

It's neither based on historical experience, nor is it based on historical custom, on what

people are used to.

And what they succeed in creating with this first constitution is it's wonderfully rational,

but it's a complete disaster.

It doesn't allow the raising of taxes.

It doesn't allow the mustering of troops.

It doesn't allow giving orders to soldiers to fight a war.

And if that had continued, if that had continued to be the American Constitution, America never

would have been an independent country.

There I'm willing to do that counterfactual.

What happens during those years where Washington and Jay and Knox and Hamilton and Morris,

there's like this group of conservatives, they're mostly soldiers and lawyers.

This is in Washington, most of them are from northern cities.

And this group is much more conservative than the Tom Paine and Jefferson School.

Some historians call them the Nationalist Party.

Historically, they give up the word nationalism and they call themselves the Federalists,

but they're basically the Nationalist Party.

What does that mean?

It means on the one hand that their goal is to create an independent nation, independent

from Britain.

But on the other hand, they believe that they already have national legal traditions, the

common law, the forms of government that have been imported from Britain, and of course

Christianity, which they consider to be part of their inheritance.

This Federalist Party is the conservative party.

These are people who are extremely close in ideas to Burke.

And these are people who wrote the Constitution of the United States, the second constitution,

the second revolution in 1787, when Washington leads the establishment of a new constitution,

which maybe technically legally, it wasn't even legal under the old constitution, but

it was democratic.

And what it did is it said, we're going to take what we know about English government,

what we've learned by applying English government in the states, we're going to create a national

government, a unified national government, that's going to muster power in its hands,

enough power to be able to do things like fighting wars to defend a unified people.

Those are conservatives.

Now it's reasonable to say, well, look, there was no king, so how conservative could they

be?

But I think that's a reasonable question.

But don't forget that the American colonies, the English colonies in America by that point

had been around for 150 years.

They had written constitutions, they had already adapted for an entire century, adapted the

English constitution to local conditions where there's no aristocracy and there's no king.

I think you can see that as a positive thing.

On the other hand, they have slavery, that's an innovation, that's not English.

So it's a little bit different from the English constitution, but those men are conservatives.

They make the minimum changes that they need to the English constitution and they largely

replicate it, which is why the Jeffersonians hated them so much.

They call them apostates.

They say they've betrayed equality and liberty and fraternity by adopting an English style

constitution.

So I would imagine, Yaron, you would put emphasis of the success of the key ideas at the founding

of this country elsewhere, at the freedom of the individual as opposed to the tradition

of the British empire.

The one thing I agree with, Yaron, is the fact that yes, the founding fathers were not

a monolith.

They argued, they debated, they disagreed, they wrote against each other.

Jefferson and Adams for decades didn't even speak to each other, though they did make

up and had a fascinating relationship after.

You and I are making up too.

There you go.

It's like the founding fathers.

You know, there's this massive debate and discussion, but I don't agree with the characterization

of Paine and Jefferson.

I don't think it's just to call them rationalists because I don't think they're rationalists.

People who've looked at history, at the problems in history, and remember this is the 18th

century and they were coming out of a hundred years earlier, some of the bloodiest wars

in all of human history were happening in Europe, many of them over religion.

You know, they had seen what was going on in France and other countries where people

were starving and where kings were frolicking in palaces in spite of that.

They were very aware of the relative freedom that the British tradition had given Englishmen.

I think they knew that, they understood that, and I think they were building on that.

They were taking the observation of the past and trying to come up with a more perfect

system, and I think they did.

In that sense, I'm a huge fan of Jefferson.

You know, there are two things that I think are unfortunate about Jefferson.

One is that he continued to hold slaves, which is very unfortunate.

The second is early support for the French Revolution, which I think is a massive mistake

and I wouldn't be surprised if he regretted it later in life, given the consequences.

But they were trying to derive principles by which they could establish a new state,

and yes, there was pushback by some and there was disagreement, and the Constitution in

the end is to some extent a form of compromise, it's still one of the great documents of

all of human history, political documents, the Constitution, although I think it's

inferior to the Declaration.

I'm a huge fan of the Declaration and I think one of the mistakes the conservatives makes,

one of the mistakes the Supreme Court makes and American judiciary makes is assuming the

two documents are separate.

I think Lincoln is absolutely right, you can't understand the Constitution without understanding

the Declaration, the Declaration of what set the context and what sets everything up for

the Constitution.

Individual rights are the key concept there, and one of the challenges was that some of

the compromises, and compromise is not necessarily between groups, but compromises that even

Jefferson made and others made regarding individual rights, set America on a path that we're

suffering from today.

I mentioned three last night, one was slavery, obviously that was a horrific compromise,

one that America not just paid for with the Civil War, 600,000 young men died because

of it, but the suffering of black slaves for all those years.

But then the whole issue of racial tensions in this country for a century and to this

day really is a consequence of that initial compromise, who knows what the counterfactual

is in America if there's a Civil War right at the founding, because there would have

been a war no matter what, but if it had happened in the late 18th century, early 19th century,

rather than waiting till 1860s, but then second was Jefferson's embrace of public education,

his founding of the University of Virginia, which I think is a great tragedy, which nobody

agrees with me on, so that's one of the areas where I'm pretty radical.

And then they embrace, both by Jefferson and by Hamilton, for different reasons, but an

embrace by both of them of government role in the economy.

And I do finance, so I know a little bit about finance, and the debate between Jefferson

and Hamilton about banking is fascinating, but at the end of the day, both wanted a role

for government in banking, they both didn't trust, Jefferson didn't trust big financial

interests, Hamilton wanted to capture some of those financial interests for the state,

and as a consequence, we set America on a path where, in my view, regulation always

leads to more regulation, there's never a case where regulation decreases, and we started

out with a certain regulatory body around banks, and a recognition that it was okay

to regulate the economy, so once we get into the late 19th century, it's fine to regulate

the railroads, it's fine to pass antitrust laws, it's fine to then continue on the path

of where we are today, which is heavy, heavy, heavy, massive involvement of government in

every aspect of our economy, and really in every aspect of our life, because of education.

So I think the country was founded on certain mistakes, and we haven't been willing to

question those mistakes, and in a sense that we've only moved in the opposite direction,

and now America's become, whereas I think it was founded on the idea of the primacy

of the individual, the sanctity of the individual, at least as an idea, even if not fully implemented,

I think now that's completely lost, I don't think anybody really is an advocate out there

for individualism in politics, or for true freedom in politics.

We'll get to individualism, but let me ask the Beatles and the Rolling Stones question

about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Rolling Stones.

Well, because it's like which document, Beatles or Rolling Stones, which document is more

important?

It's obviously the Beatles, right?

Okay.

Is there a question here?

Is there even a question?

But let me then even zoom in further and ask you to pick your favorite song.

So what ideas in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence do you think are the most

important to the success of the United States of America?

I'll answer the question, but before answering the question, I want to register a dissent

from your own.

Is it the public education?

Is it which?

No, no, no.

Actually, look, we're not so far apart on public education.

I'm actually kind of surprised that you're so anti Bismarck because his public school

system, his national public school system was created in order to stick it to the church.

It was the church that ran the schools before then, and so that's a different...

I'm all for sticking it to the church, any opportunity, but not when the alternative

is the nation.

I'd rather see a free educational system where freedom is in education.

Okay.

So I want to register a dissent about Lincoln.

Look, Lincoln is an important figure and a great man, and he was presiding over a country,

which at that point was pretty Jeffersonian in terms of its self perception.

He said what he needed to say.

I'm not going to criticize him, but I don't accept the idea that the Declaration of Independence,

which starts one revolution, is of a piece with the second constitution, the constitution

of 1787, the nationalist constitution, which is effectively a counter revolution.

What happens is there is a revolution.

It's based on certain principles.

There are a lot...

Not exactly, but in many ways resembles the later ideas of the French Revolution.

And what the Federalist Party does, the Nationalist Conservative Party does, is a counter revolution

to reinstate the Old English Constitution.

So these documents are, if you're willing to accept the evidence of history, they are

in many respects contrary to one another.

And so if I'm asked what's the most important values that are handed down by these documents,

I don't have an objection to life, liberty, and property, all of which are really important

things.

I do have an objection to the pompous overreach of these are self evident, which is absurd.

They can't be self evident.

If they were self evident, then somebody would have come up with them like 2,000 years before.

It's not self evident.

So that's damaging.

I like the conservative preamble of the constitution, which describes the purposes of the national

government that's being established.

There are seven purposes, a more perfect union, which is the principle of cohesion, justice,

domestic peace, common defense, the general welfare, which is the welfare of the public

as a thing that's not only individuals, but there is such a thing as a general welfare,

liberty, which we agree is absolutely crucial, and posterity, the idea that the purpose of

the government is to be able to sustain and grow this independent nation, and not only

to guarantee rights no matter what happens.

You don't like the, we hold these truths to be self evident, so you're definitely a Beatles

guy.

You don't want the pompous, you don't need that revolutionary strength.

Look, I think that that expression, self evident truths, it does tremendous damage because instead

of a moderate skepticism, which says, look, we may not know everything, it says, look,

we know everything.

Here it is.

Here's what we know.

We know.

Here's what we think.

So, you know, I'll agree with you all.

I don't like self evident.

I don't like self evident because he's absolutely right.

It's not self evident.

These are massive achievements.

These are massive achievements of enlightened thinking, of studying history, of understanding

human nature, of deriving a truth from 3,000 years of historical knowledge and a better

understanding of human nature and a capacity.

It's using reason in some ways better than any human beings have.

I mean, the founding fathers are giants historically, in my view, because they came up with these

truths.

I do think they're truths, but they're certainly not self evident.

I mean, if they were, your arm is right.

They would have discovered them thousands of years earlier or everybody would accept

them, right?

I mean, how many people today think that those, what they state in that document is true?

Pretty much, you know, five people.

I don't know.

It's very, it's very, your criticism of modern society, yes, we'll get there.

It's very, very few people recognize that if they were self evident, bam, everybody

would have become, you know, would have accepted the American Revolution as truth and that

was it.

A lot of work has to go into understanding and describing and convincing people about

those truths.

But I completely disagree with your arm about this idea or I'll voice my dissent, as we

said.

I disagree with your official dissent.

About A, that this being two different revolutions and B, that the American Revolution had any

similarity to the French Revolution.

You know that Jefferson and Payne, they were in France running a different revolution.

I know, but they were waiting constantly.

I mean, they were in communication with Madison, there was a lot of input going on.

I know, and Jefferson's sitting there in Paris pulling his hair out because Madison has come

under the influence of these nationalists and he can't believe it.

The reality is that the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution

is vast and it is a deep philosophical difference and it's a difference that expressed, I think,

between the differences.

You know, Joram, in his writings, lumps Rousseau with Locke and with Voltaire and with others

and I think that's wrong.

I think Rousseau is very different than the others.

I think, again, Rousseau is an anti enlightenment figure, Rousseau is in many respects hearkening

back to a past, an ancient past and I think a completely distorted view of human nature,

of human mind.

He rejects reason.

I mean, Rousseau is on the premise that reason is the end of humanity, reason is the destruction

of humanity, reason is how we get civilization and civilization is awful because –

I don't disagree.

We're only talking about different texts.

When I say Rousseau, I'm just talking about the social contract.

Yeah, but the social contract, there's similarity between others, but he takes it in a completely

different direction and we agree social contract is a bad idea, but you can't have a contract

that you don't actually voluntarily accept, but Rousseau is the French Revolution.

Rousseau is about destruction and mayhem and chaos and anarchy.

He is the spirit behind the French Revolution.

I think the American Revolution is a complete rejection of Rousseau.

I think Jefferson is a complete rejection of Rousseau.

I don't think Jefferson is a fan of Rousseau.

He is of Voltaire and he certainly is of Montesquieu.

If you look at the Federalist Papers, the intellectual most cited in the Federalist

Papers I think in terms of just the number of times it's cited is Montesquieu.

So I think that the American Revolution is an individualistic revolution.

It is a revolution about the rights of the individual.

The French Revolution is a negation of the rights of the individual.

It's a collectivistic revolution.

It's not quite the Marxist revolution of the proletarian, but it's defining people in classes

and it's a rebellion against a certain class and yeah, kill them all, right?

Off with their heads.

It is a negation.

It's about egalitarianism in the sense of equality of outcome, not in a sense of equality

before the law or equality of rights, which is the Jeffersonian sense.

I think it's wrong to lump Jefferson in to the fraternity egalitarian notion of the French,

which is far more similar to what ultimately became socialism and Marxism and that tradition.

It's anti individualistic, the French Revolution is, whereas the American Revolution, the first

one, is individualistic.

It's all about individual rights and while there's certain phrases in the Declaration

of Independence that I don't agree with, it's beautifully written and it's a magnificent

document, so it's hard for me to say I don't agree, but who am I?

These were giants, self evident is one of them.

I'm not particularly crazy about Endowed by the Creator, but I like the fact that it's

creator and not God or not a specific creator, but just a more general thing.

But putting those two ashes aside, it's the greatest political document in all of human

history in my view by far.

Nothing comes close.

It is a document that identifies the core principles of political truism, of truth.

That is, the role of government is to preserve and to protect these rights, these inalienable

rights and that is so crucial that these rights are inalienable.

That is, a majority can't vote them out, a revelation can't vote them out.

This is what is required for human liberty and human freedom, the right that is the sanction,

the freedom to act on your own behalf, to act based on your own judgment and as long

as you're not interfering with other people's rights, you are free to do so.

That is such a profound truth and that to me is the essence of political philosophy.

That's the beginning and it's based on, just not to fall into, Yolam's going to say it's

a rationalist, it's based on a whole history of what happens when we negate that.

It's based on looking at England and seeing to the extent that they practiced a respect

for individual liberty, of property, of freedom, good things happened.

So let's take that all the way.

Let's not compromise on that.

Let's be consistent with the good and reject the bad and when England goes away, distance

itself from the rights of man, from the idea of a right to property and so on, bad things

happen and when they go to it, let's go all in and I'm all in on the right to life, liberty,

property and the pursuit of happiness.

And I think the idea of pursuit of happiness is profound because it's a moral statement.

It's a statement that says that sanctions and says that ultimately people should be

allowed to make their own judgments and live their lives as they see fit based on how they

view happiness.

They might be right, they might be wrong, but we're not going to dictate what happiness

entails and dictate to people how they should live their lives.

We're going to let them figure that out.

So it has this self interested moral code kind of embedded in it.

So I think it's a beautiful statement.

So I think the declaration is key and I think there was an experiment.

An experiment was proposed in that period before the Constitution where the experiment

was let's let the states, let's have a kind of a loose confederation, let's let the states

experiment with setting up their own constitutions and rule of government and we won't have any

kind of unity.

And I think what they realized, and I think even Jefferson realized, is that that was

not workable because many of the states were starting to significantly violate rights.

There was nothing to unify, there was nothing to really protect the vision of the declaration.

You needed to establish a nation, which is what the Constitution does, it establishes

a nation.

But the purpose of that was to put everybody under one set of laws that protected rights.

The focus was still on the protection of rights and I agree with six of the seven of the principles.

Which did this group?

The common welfare, the general welfare, which I'm worried about, right?

I think in the way the founders understood it, I think I probably agreed with it.

But it's such an ambiguous—

I'm sure you don't agree.

Maybe I don't.

Can you state the general welfare principle?

Well the idea that part of the role of government is to secure the general welfare is something—

This is something we didn't get to in the debate, we really should have, is the question

of whether there is such a thing as a common good or a public interest or a national interest

or a general welfare, do these words, do these terms mean anything other than the good of

all of the individuals in the country?

That's an important—

Yeah, so that's right, so that's why I object to it because I think it's too easy

to interpret it as.

So I interpret it as, well, what's good for a general, a group, a common people, it's

a good collection of individuals, so what's good for the individual is good for the common

welfare, but I understand that that's something that is hard for people to grasp and not the

common understanding.

So I would have skipped the general welfare in order to avoid the fact that now the general

welfare includes the government telling you what gender you should be assigned, so I would

have wanted to have skipped that completely.

So I think the Constitution is completely consistent with the Declaration with a few

exceptions of general welfare, but perfection is a difficult thing to find, particularly

for me politically, but it's a magnificent document, the Constitution.

It doesn't quite rise to the level, I think, of the Declaration, but it's a magnificent

document because—and this is the difference, I think, between the English Constitution.

Here's what I see as the difference.

The difference is that the Constitution is written in the context of why do we have a

separation of powers, for example?

We have a separation of powers in order to make sure that the government only does what

the government is supposed to do, and what is the government supposed to do?

Well, fundamentally, it's supposed to protect rights.

I mean, all of those seven, or at least six of the seven, are about protecting rights.

They're about protecting us from foreign invaders.

They're about protecting peace within the country.

They're about preserving this protection of rights, and why do we have this separation

so that we make sure that no one of those entities, the executive or the legislature,

the judicial, can violate rights because there's always somebody looking over their shoulder.

There's always somebody who can veto their power, but there's a purpose to it, and that

purpose is clearly signified and characterized, and that's why I think the Bill of Rights

was written, in order to add to the clarification of what exactly we mean.

What is the purpose?

The purpose is to preserve rights, and that's why we need to elaborate what those rights

are.

And Madison's objection to the Bill of Rights was to say not that he objected to having

protection of rights, but to listing them because he was worried that other rights that

were not listed would not be, and his worry was completely justified because it's exactly

what's happened.

It's like, the only reason we have free speech in America is because we've got it in writing

as a First Amendment.

If we didn't have it in writing, it would have been gone a long time ago, and the reason

we don't have, for example, the freedom to negotiate a contract, you know, independent

government regulation, that was not listed as a right in the Bill, even though I think

it's clearly covered under the Constitution and certainly under the Declaration.

So there was a massive mistake done in the Bill of Rights.

They tried to cover it with the Ninth Amendment, but it never really stuck, this idea that

nonenumerated rights that are still in place.

So I don't see it as a second revolution.

I think it's a fix to a flaw that happened.

It's a fix that allowed the expansion of the protection of rights to all states by creating

a national entity to protect those rights, and that's what ultimately led to slavery

going away.

You know, under the initial agreement, slavery would have been there in perpetuity because

states were sovereign in a way that under the new Constitution they were not, and in

a sense, the Constitution sets in motion, the Declaration and then the Constitution

set in motion, the Civil War.

The Civil War has to happen because at the end of the day, you cannot have some states

with a massive violation of rights, what's more of a violation of rights than slavery,

and some states that recognize it's not, it inevitably leads to the Civil War.

Yaron was just saying that, you know, other than the general welfare, these principles

are about individual liberties.

I just don't think you can read it that way.

The first stated purpose of the Constitution of 1787 is in order to form a more perfect

union.

A more perfect union, it's describing a characteristic of the whole, it is not a characteristic of

any individual.

If you look at how the individuals are doing, you don't know whether their union is more

or less perfect.

So what they're doing is they're looking at the condition in which in order to be able

to fight the battle of Yorktown, somebody has to write a personal check in order to

be able to move armies.

A more perfect union is a more cohesive union, it's the ability to get all of these different

individuals to do one focused thing when it's necessary to do it.

Well it's more than that, right, so I agree with that, but for what purpose?

That is, and this is why, you know, this is why it's so hard with these historical documents

because there's a context and there's a thinking that they can't write everything down, right,

which is sad because I wish they had.

What's the purpose of a more perfect union?

The purpose of the more perfect union is to preserve the liberty of the individuals within

that union.

Well how do you know?

Because if you look, what's the rest?

So what is the common defense?

The common defense is to protect us from foreign invaders who would now disrupt what the rest

of the Constitution is all about.

All of the Constitution is written in a way as to preserve, find ways to limit the ability

of government to violate the rights of individuals.

The beauty of this Constitution, and again, it's connection to the Declaration and tradition,

right?

What came before it?

What came before it was a document, which they all respected, which was the Declaration,

which set the context for this.

And now the union is there in order to provide for the common defense, great, because we

know that foreign invaders can violate our rights, that's what war is about.

To protect us from peace, to establish peace and justice within the country, that's based

on law, the rule of law, and again, individual liberty.

So to me, when you read the Founders, when you read the Federalist Papers, when you read

what they wrote, what they're trying to do is figure out the right kind of political

system, the right kind of structure to be able to preserve these liberties, and not

all of them had, from my perspective, a perfect understanding of what those liberties entailed,

but they were all, even the conservatives that you call conservatives, were all in generally

in agreement about the importance of individual liberty and the importance of individual liberty.

Of course, because almost all of these rights are traditional English rights, they exist

in the English Bill of Rights, in the English Petition of Rights, they exist in force.

All of these are traditional.

And what they're trying to do is perfect that.

They're trying to take the British system and perfect it.

But you keep leaving out that they want to be like England in that they want to have

an independent nation.

An independent nation is not a collection of individual liberties.

An independent nation, the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence is the

declaration that there is a collective right, that we as a people are breaking the bonds

with another people, and we're going to take our place, our equal station, among the nations

of the earth.

But for what purpose?

The purpose is to protect individual rights.

And there's no collective right.

Your argument is completely circular.

You're not allowing the possibility that there could be great and decent men that you and

I both admire who wanted the independence of their nation, not because that would give

individuals liberty, but because the independence of their nation was itself a great good.

So we clearly disagree on this, because I don't think the independence of the nation

is a good in and of itself, because it's –

But did they think it was?

I don't think they did.

And this is why they tried so hard not to break from England, and why many of them struggled,

really, really struggled with having a revolution, because England was pretty good, right?

England was the best.

And this is where we should get to the universality of these things, because I do think England

was the best, and universally and absolutely was the best system out there.

And they struggled to break from England, because they didn't view the value of having

a nation as the primary.

But what they identified in England is certain flaws in the system that created situations

in which their rights were being violated.

So they figured the only option in order to secure these rights is to break away from

England and secure a nation.

Now, I am not an anarchist, as Michael Malice is, because we've discussed it.

I believe you need nations.

You need nations to secure those rights.

That is, the rights are not – you can't secure those rights without having a nation.

But the nation is just a means to an end.

The end is the rights, and I think that's how the founders understood it, and that's

why they created this kind of country.

I think this is a good place to ask about common welfare and cohesion.

Let me say what John Donne wrote that, quote, no man is an island entire of itself.

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

He went on, any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore

never sent to know for whom the bell tolls.

It tolls for thee.

So let's talk about individualism and cohesion, not just at the political level, but at a

philosophical level for the human condition.

What is central?

What is the role of other humans in our lives?

What's the importance of cohesion?

This is something you've talked about.

So Aaron said that the beauty of the founding documents is that they create a cohesive union

that protects the individual freedoms, but you have spoken about the value of the union,

the common welfare, the cohesion in itself.

So can you maybe elaborate on what is the role of cohesion and the collective, not to

use that term, but multiple humans together connected in the human condition?

Sure, I keep getting the feeling that Yaron and I are actually having a disagreement about

empirical reality, because I think that enlightenment rationalist political thought features the

individual, it features the state.

There isn't really a nation other than the nation, the people as a collective is created

by the state, and when the state disappears, then the collective disappears.

Now, I think that when conservatives of all stripes look at this kind of thinking, that

there's the individuals and then there's the state, and there really isn't anything else.

When they look at that, they say, even before you get to consequences, it's a terrible theory

because when we try to understand any field of inquiry, any domain, any subject area,

when you try to understand it, we try to come up with a small number of concepts and of

relations among the concepts, which is supposed to be able to explain, to illuminate as much

as possible the important things that are taking place in the domain.

And conservatives look at this, individuals and the state, and they say, you're missing

most of what's going on in politics, also in personal human relations as well.

But it just doesn't look like a description of human beings, it looks like a completely

artificial thing.

And then conservatives say, well, look, once you adopt this artificial thing, then the

consequences are horrific because you're not describing reality.

So a conservative reality begins with an empirical view of what are human beings like, and the

first thing you notice about human beings, or at least the first thing I think conservatives

notice is that they're sticky, is that they clump, they turn into groups.

And you take any arbitrary collection of human beings and set them to a task, or even just

leave them alone, and they quickly form into groups and those groups are always structured

as hierarchies.

This is this competition within the hierarchy, who's going to be the leader, who's going

to be number two.

But everywhere you look in human societies, universally, there are groups, the groups

compete and they're structured internally as hierarchies, and then there are internal

competitions for who leads the different groups.

And when we think about scientific explanation, we allow that there are different levels of

explanation that a macroscopic object like a table, it doesn't have properties that can

be directly derived from the properties of the atoms or the molecules or the microfibers

that make up the table.

And that's understood, that there's what academic philosophers call emergent properties,

that when you get up to the level of the table, it has properties like that you can't put

your fist through it, which you can't necessarily know just by looking at the atoms alone.

And I think conservatives say the same thing is true for political theory, for social theory,

that looking at an individual human being and thinking about what does that individual

human being need, which Jeroen does very eloquently in his writings.

But that doesn't tell you what the characteristics are of this hierarchically structured group.

As soon as you have that, it has its own qualities.

So an example, the question of what holds these groups together, and we need to answer

that question.

I try to answer it by saying there's such a thing as mutual loyalty.

Mutual loyalty is shorthand for human beings, individuals have the capacity to include another

individual within their self, within their conception of their self.

When two people do it, it creates a bond, like a bond between two atoms creates a molecule.

That doesn't mean that they lose their individuality.

Within the group, they may still continue competing with one another.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't, in reality, a bond, and that real bond is the

stuff of which political events and political history are made, is the coming together,

the cohesion and the dissolution of these bonded loyalty groups.

That's the reality of politics.

And so when I hear these discussions about individuals in the state, I feel like we're

missing most of the reality, and in order to understand the political reality, we need

to understand what makes human beings coherent to groups, what makes them dissolve, what

makes the groups come apart and end up creating civil wars and that kind of thing.

I think we also need to know, in practice, rival groups do come together and bond.

I mean, basically, when we think about democratic society, we're talking about different groups,

we can call them tribes, or you can come up with a different name, but different tribal

groupings with different views, they come together to form a nation, and they're able

to do that, even though often they hate each other, like we were talking about the American

Revolution, and often they hate each other, and nevertheless, they're able to come together.

Why?

How?

And that leads us into questions like, how does honor, the giving of honor by one group

to another, how does that increase the mutual loyalty between groups that are still competing

with one another?

All of these questions, I think we have to answer them in order to be able to talk about

politics.

And I think the reason, the first reason why one should approach politics as a conservative

rather than as an individualist is because it gives us these theoretical tools to be

able to talk about reality, which we don't have as long as we keep within the individualist

framework.

As we're talking, the metaphor that's popping up into my mind, and this is also something

that bothers me with theoretical physics, the metaphor is there's some sense in which

this thing's called theories of everything, where you try to describe the basic laws of

physics, how they interact together, and once you do, you have a sense that you understand

all of reality.

In a sense, you do.

And that to me, that to me is understanding the individual, like how the individual behaves

in this world.

But then you're saying that they're, hey, hey, you're also forgetting chemistry, biology,

how all of that actually comes together, the stickiness, the stickiness of molecules and

how they build different systems and they, some systems can kill each other, some systems

can flourish, some can make pancakes and bananas and some can make poison and all those kinds

of things that we need to be able to, we need to consider the full stack of things that

are constructed from the fundamental basics.

And I guess, Yaron, you're saying that, no, you're just like the theoretical physicist,

it all starts at the bottom, like if you need to preserve the fundamentals of reality, which

is the individual, like the basic atom of human society is the individual, do you?

So yes, so the basic unit, the basic moral unit, the basic ethical unit in society is

the individual.

And yeah, of course we form groups and you can't understand history unless you understand

group formation and group motivation and I have a view about what kind of groups should

be formed and politically, from a political perspective, voluntary ones, ones in which

we join when we want to join and we can leave when we want to leave and ones that help us

and clearly groups help us pursue whatever it is a goal is ultimately.

So in the pursuit of happiness, there are lots of groups that one wants to form, whether

it's marriage, whether it's businesses, whether it's sports teams, there are lots of different

groups one wants to form, but the question is what is the standard of well being?

Is it the standard of well being some algorithm that maximizes the well being of a group,

some utilitarian function?

Is it something that's inherent in the group that we can measure as goodness and to help

with individuals within as long as we can get the group to function well, we don't really

care about where the individuals are.

So to me, the goal of creating groups is the well being of the individual and that's why

it needs to be voluntary and that's why there has to be a way out of those.

Sometimes it's costly, it's not a cheap out, that's why you should really think about what

groups you and this on an issue that's very controversial, maybe we can discuss, maybe

not.

To me, immigration is so important, open immigration or free immigration is because that's another

group that I would like people to be able to voluntarily choose both in and out and

I'd like to see people be able to go and join that group that they believe will allow for

the pursuit of happiness.

But let me say that that's a description of an ideal, what I'm just saying.

I recognize that that's not the reality in which we live.

I recognize that that's not the reality in which history.

Recognizing that the individual exists in a sense, philosophically, is a massive achievement.

Human beings, however they evolved, clearly we started out in a tribal context in which

the individual didn't matter.

We followed the leader, the competition was for power, power over the group and dictates

how the group should work.

The history of human beings is a history of gaining knowledge and part of the knowledge

is the value of an individual.

You can see that in religion, you can see that in philosophy, you can see that through

the evolution.

We evolved from tribes into nations and then empires and conflicts between nations and

conflicts between empires.

We tried a lot of different things, if you will.

I don't think we always did it on purpose, but different philosophies, different sets

of ideas drove us towards different collectives, different groupings, and different ways in

which to structure.

After 3,000 years of known history, there's history before that, but we don't know much

about it, 3,000 years of known history, you can sit back and evaluate.

I think that's what is done in the Enlightenment.

You sit back, and certainly we can do it today, we can sit back and evaluate.

What promotes human flourishing and what doesn't?

What do we mean by human flourishing?

Who's flourishing?

Well, individual human beings.

Now, since I don't believe in a zero sum world, and the world is not zero sum, we can see

that, it's empirically possible to show that the world is not a zero sum game, my flourishing

doesn't come at your expense, so I can show that a system that promotes my flourishing

probably promotes your flourishing as well and promotes the general welfare in that sense

because it promotes individuals flourishing, and we can look at all these examples of how

we evolved and what leads to bloodshed and what doesn't and what promotes this ability

to flourish as an individual, again, an achievement, the idea of individual flourishing, and then

we can think about how to create a political system around that, a political system that

recognizes and allows for the formation of groups, but just under the principle of voluntary.

You can't be forced to join a group, you can't be coerced into forming a group other than

the fact that you're born in a particular place, in a particular, you know, that in

a sense, but that's not forced, there's a difference between metaphysics and between

choices.

So this is something that came up in the debate that Yoram said that not all human relations

are voluntary, and you kind of emphasized that a lot of where we are is not voluntary.

We're grounded, we're connected in so much.

So how can a human be free in the way you're describing, individual be free if some part

of who we are is not voluntary, some part of who we are is other people?

Well because what do we mean by freedom?

Freedom doesn't mean the negation of the laws of physics, right?

Freedom doesn't mean ignoring, freedom means the ability within the scope of what's available

for you to choose, being able to choose those things.

So in a political context, freedom means, you know, the absence of coercion.

So once you're an adult, you know, Yoram says you're born into a particular religious

context, absolutely, but once you're an adult, I think it's incumbent on you to evaluate

that religious context and look at different religions or nonreligion or whatever and choose

your philosophy of life, choose your values, choose how you want to live your life.

That's the freedom.

The freedom is, one system says you're either coerced by the state or coerced by the group

or coerced by society around you to follow a particular path, or the expectation is,

the demand is, the pressure is to conform to a particular path, and my view is, no,

you should be in a position to be able to choose your path, and that choice means you

look around, you evaluate, you evaluate based on history, based on knowledge, based on all

of these things, and you choose what that path would be.

That's fundamentally what freedom means.

Yes, you cannot choose your parents, but of course not.

Nobody would claim that that's within the scope of what is possible.

I think the coercion freedom dichotomy, these are too few concepts, coercion and freedom.

It's too simplistic to be able to describe what we're actually dealing with.

The traditional Anglo conservative view is that society has to be, it has to be ordered,

it has to be disciplined, and there are two choices for how it can be ordered.

One is that a people is, by its own traditions, you would say voluntarily, but these are mostly

inherited traditions, by its own traditions, it is ordered.

For example, people just in general will not go into somebody else's yard, because that's

the custom here, is we don't go into somebody else's yard without their permission.

Fortescue, we're talking about 500 years ago already, Fortescue says that the genius of

the English people is that our government can be mild and apply very little coercion,

because the people are so disciplined.

When he says the people are so disciplined, what he's saying is that our nation, our tribes,

we have strong traditions which channel people through tools of being honored and dishonored.

That's a reality that exists in every society, and it's not captured by your distinction

between coercion and lack of coercion.

When I'm going to be dishonored if I don't care for my aging mother, I'm not being coerced

like the state comes and puts a gun to my head, but I am being pressured and given guidelines.

I'm saying that's wrong, and I'm saying that's dangerous, because that could easily be used

for bad traditions.

No, of course it is.

What's the standard by which we evaluate what a good tradition is and what a bad tradition

is?

It's the English.

You're getting to the standard too fast.

Wait, wait.

You're getting to the standard too fast.

But first I want to know, factually, is it true that all societies work like this?

Because if it's true that all societies work like this, then saying we should be free from

it is just a fantasy.

No.

A, I don't think all societies work like this.

I think much of what happened in America post founding in the 19th century didn't work like

that.

I think that's the genius of America, and I think what happened during the 19th century

in the Industrial Revolution, what happened in the 19th century to some extent globally

but certainly in the United States didn't work that way.

It broke tradition.

I think all innovation breaks tradition, and I think that's what the genius of this country

is and the post enlightenment world is.

I think pre that tradition, they work that way.

And then the question is, do people understand why they do what they do?

That is, I don't want people doing what I think is right just because I think it's right

and I've created a society in which somebody founded this country in a particular way,

so we're just going to follow.

I want people to understand what they're doing.

So I want people to have a respect for property, not because it's a tradition, but because

they understand the value of a respect for property.

I want people not to murder one another, not because there's a commandment, thou shall

not murder, but because they have an understanding of why murdering is bad and wrong and bad

for them and bad for the kind of world that they want to live in.

And I think that's what we achieve through enlightenment, through education, and where

we don't treat people just as a blob, a tribe that just follows orders, but we now treat

individuals as capable of thinking for themselves, capable for discovering truth, capable of

figuring out their own values, and that's the big break between.

And this is the break, I think, that the Declaration represents, the break between society that

is based on tradition, following commandments, following rules, because they are the rules,

because they are the commandments, and a society where individuals understand those rules,

understand.

Yes, it's now become a tradition, let's say, to respect individual rights, to respect

property rights, but they're not following it because it's a tradition.

They're following it because they understand what it is about it that makes it good.

So that's the world, I think, that we were on the process of evolving towards, and that

is what got destroyed in the 20th century and has certainly disappeared today.

And I think that's the great tragedy, is that we're evolving to a place where people understood

the values that represent it.

Of course, the danger with tradition is, I mean, we'll agree, right?

Yeah, it's okay to kill the Jew, right?

Or it's okay to steal people's property if they're of a certain color, or it's okay to

enslave.

Those are all traditions.

And yet, once you stop and say, but what are they based on?

Is this right?

Is this just, based on some moral law?

No, it's not.

There's something wrong here.

We can't achieve happiness and success if we follow these rules.

You're talking about reason and tradition, but I think I would love to sort of linger

on the stickiness of humans that you describe.

So you kind of said this primary, the individuals, is primary and that was a great invention.

But to me, it's not at all obvious that somehow, that the invention that humans have been practicing

for a very long time of the stickiness of community, of family, of love, that's not

obvious to me, that's not also fundamental to human flourishing and should be celebrated

and protected.

Of course it is.

Now, I suppose the argument you're making is when you start to let the state define

what the stickiness, how the stickiness looks between humans, so you're really like the

voluntary aspect.

But I just want to sort of, the observation is, humans seem to be pretty happy when they

form communities, however you define that.

So romantic partnership, family.

Some communities.

Some communities.

People are miserable in other communities.

So the nature of the community matters, right?

We know this.

We know that some bondings are not healthy and not good for the individuals involved

and they don't thrive.

So I absolutely, I mean, I'm a lover, not a fighter, right?

I'm a huge believer in love.

The whole philosophy I think is a love based philosophy.

I fight in order to love, right?

So love is at the core of all of this and it's a love of life.

It's a love of the world out there and it's a love of other people because they represent

a value to you.

So the stickiness is there, it's, you know, my point is A, it should be chosen.

It should be consciously chosen and this is, put aside the state.

Forget the state for a minute.

Forget coercion.

Forget all that.

What I would encourage individuals to do, and this is where, you know, I'm not primarily

a political, you know, interested in politics, although I tend to talk most about that.

I'm primarily interested in human beings and how they live in a sense in morality.

And what I would urge individuals to do is to think about their relationships, to choose

the best relationships possible, but to seek out great relationships because other human

beings are an immense value to us.

And you know, when I write, you know, maybe you won't quote this or not, but when I write

that, you know, about the trade of principle and trading, you know, it's easy and obvious

to think of it as a materialistic kind of thing.

You know, I get, you know, I do the chores this day and my wife does the chores the other

day and we're trading.

But trading is much more subtle than that and much more, can be much more spiritual

than that.

It's about the trading in emotions.

It's about the way one sees each other, it's what one gets from one another.

I think friendship is a form of trade.

Now I know that that seems to make it material, but I don't think of trade as a material

thing.

Friendship is incredibly important in life.

Love is incredibly important in life.

You know, having a group of friends is incredibly important in life.

All of these are sticky and important.

Okay.

How can I try to be eloquent on this?

So if you give people freedom, if you give people, well, not politics, relations, relationships.

So this is interesting because we have an interesting dynamic going on here in terms

of beliefs, they're differing and there was interesting overlaps, but there's a worry.

If you look at human history and you study the lessons of history and you look at modern

society, if you give people freedom in terms of stickiness and human relations and so on

full, like if you not give people freedom, emphasize freedom as the highest ideal.

You start getting more tender online dating, the stickiness dissolves just like in chemistry.

You start to have a gas versus a liquid, right?

That's the worry.

So you have to study what actually happens.

If you emphasize that the stickiness, the bonds of humans is holding you back, the exercise

of voluntary choice is the highest ideal, the danger of that is for that to be implemented

or interpreted in certain kinds of ways by us flawed humans that are not, I mean, you

could say we're perfectly reasonable and rational, we can think through all of our decisions,

but really, I mean, especially you're young, you get horny, you make decisions that are

suboptimal perhaps.

So the point is you have to look at reality of when you emphasize different things.

So when you talk about what is the ideal life, what is the ideal relations, you have to also

think like, what are you emphasizing?

I think you both agree on what's important, that community can be important, that freedom

is important, but what are you emphasizing and you're really emphasizing the individual

and you're emphasizing, Yoram, you're emphasizing more of the community, of the family, of the

stickiness of the nation.

Well, look, I don't want to deny the place of the individual.

I think that there really is a very great change in civilization when the books of Moses

announce that the individual is created in the image of God.

That's a step that's, as far as we know, without precedent before that in history, and to a

very large degree, I mean, one of the kind of unspoken things going on is that Yoram

and I really do agree on all sorts of things, I think in part because we're both Jewish.

You did say Yoram is basically Moses, yes sir.

No, I said he was channeling Moses, but that's still, in my book, that's still pretty impressive.

No, that's a compliment, I took it as one.

For me, that's a compliment.

And we'll talk about this a little bit just for the listeners, just so they know, Yoram,

amongst many things, we'll talk about the virtue of nationalism, but you're also a religious

scholar of sorts, or at least leverage the Bible for much, not much, but some of the

wisdom in your life.

Look, the way that Yoram looks at enlightenment, or maybe at Ayn Rand, that's the way that

I see the Hebrew scripture and the tradition that comes from it.

It has the same kind of place in my life, and I just, I don't know how much we want

to explore it, but I think that the agreement that we do have about the positive value of

the creative individual, the positive value of the individual's desire to improve the

world, and in my book that means including his or her desire to improve his family, his

tribe, his congregation, his nation, but it still comes from this kind of, what Yoram

calls selfishness, the desire to make things better for yourself.

In Hebrew Bible and in Judaism, that just is a positive thing.

Of course, it can be taken too far, but it just is positive, and it doesn't carry these

kinds of, you should turn the other cheek, you should give away your cloak, you should

love your enemy, these kinds of Christian tropes do not exist in Judaism, and so it

just, I like listening to Yoram, I do feel like he goes too far on various things, but

I also hear underneath it, I can sort of hear the Jewish current and the resistance to things

about Christianity that Jews often find.

Okay, I'll ask you a question there.

Can you make an argument for turn the other cheek?

No.

I tend to, I guess you would equate that with altruism.

I tend to.

Unjustice.

It's unjust to turn the other cheek.

I agree.

Okay.

You don't love yourself if you're turning the other cheek, it's a lack of love, lack

of self respect.

Well, let me push back on that, because I like turn the other cheek, especially on Twitter.

So I like block the offender on Twitter.

No, so Twitter aside is more like you're investing in the long term version of yourself versus

the short term.

So that's the way I think about it, is like the energy you put onto the world.

The turn the other cheek philosophy allows you to walk through the fire gracefully.

It's some sense.

I mean, perhaps you would reframe that as not, then that's not being altruistic or whatever,

but there is something pragmatic about that kind of approach to life.

Disciplining yourself so that you become a better version of yourself.

I mean, not only do we agree, but I think every religious and philosophical tradition

probably has a version of that, even Kant, who we joined together in finding to be terrible.

Even Kant makes that distinction between the short term interest and the long term interest.

So I think that's universal.

I don't know of anybody who's really disagreeing about that.

The thing that we were talking about a couple of minutes ago before we got onto this tangent

is the relationship between the individual who is in the image of God and is of value

as an individual.

Nevertheless, there's this question about what is good for that person and also what

makes him happy.

I'm not sure that those are exactly the same things, but they're both certainly relevant

and important.

And I feel like, I mean, I think we're beginning to uncover this empirical disagreement about

what it is that's good for the individual and what it is that makes them happy.

And I'll go back to something I raised in the debate, which is this theory of Durkheim

that now has been popularized by Jordan Peterson.

Durkheim argues that he's writing a book on suicide, he's trying to understand what

brings individuals to suicide, and he coins this term, anomie, lack of law.

And the argument is that individuals basically are healthy and happy when they find their

place in a hierarchy.

Within a loyalty group in a certain place in a hierarchy, they compete and struggle

in order to rise in the hierarchy, but they know where they are.

They know who they are.

The kids today like to say they know what their identity is because they associate themselves.

Their self expands to take on the leadership, the different layers, the past and the future

of this particular hierarchy.

And I completely agree with you, Ron, that some of these hierarchies are pernicious and

oppressive and terrible, and some of them are better.

What we might disagree about is that you can find human beings who are capable of becoming

healthy and happy off by themselves without participating in this kind of structure.

The minute that you accept, if you accept, that this is empirical reality about human

beings, it's an iron law, you can't do anything.

You can tell human beings that they can be free of all constraints, all you want, and

you can get them to do things that, as you say, they can have contempt for hierarchies.

They can say, I'm not going to serve the man, I'm just going to burn them all down.

You can get kids to say all of these things.

You can get them either to be Marxists who are actively trying to overthrow and destroy

the existing hierarchies, or you can make them some kind of liberal where they basically

pretend the hierarchies don't exist, they just act like they're not there.

In both cases, and it's not a coincidence that that's what universities teach is your

choice is either Marxist revolution or liberal ignoring of the hierarchies.