back to indexNationalism Debate: Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony | Lex Fridman Podcast #256
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The following is a conversation with Yaron Brooke and Yoram Hozoni.
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This is Yaron's third time on this podcast and Yoram's first time.
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Yaron Brooke is an objectiveist philosopher, chairman of the Einrand Institute, host of
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the Yaron Brooke Show, and the coauthor of Free Market Revolution and Equal is Unfair.
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Yaron Hozoni is a national conservatism thinker, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation that
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hosted the National Conservatism Conference.
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He's also the host of the NatCon Talk and author of The Virtue of Nationalism and an
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upcoming book called Conservatism, A Rediscovery.
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Allow me to say a few words about each part of the two word title of this episode, Nationalism
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I would like to have a few conversations this year that are a kind of debate with two or
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three people that hold differing views on a particular topic, but come to the table with
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respect for each other and a desire to learn and discover something interesting together
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through the empathetic exploration of the tension between their ideas.
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This is not strictly a debate, it is simply a conversation.
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There's no structure, there's no winners, except of course just a bit of trash talking
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Some of these topics will be very difficult and I hope you can keep an open mind and have
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patience with me as kind of moderator who tries to bring out the best in each person
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and the ideas discussed.
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Okay, that's my comment on the word debate.
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Now onto the word nationalism.
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This debate could have been called nationalism versus individualism or national conservatism
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versus individualism or just conservatism versus individualism.
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As we discuss in this episode, these words have slightly different meanings depending
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This is especially true, I think, for any word that ends in ism.
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I personally enjoy the discussion of the meaning of such philosophical words.
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I don't think it's possible to arrive at a perfect definition that everybody agrees
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with, but the process of trying to do so for a bit is interesting and productive, at least
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to me, as long as we don't get stuck there as some folks sometimes do in these conversations.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation
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with Yaron Brooke and Yoram Hazoni.
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I attended the excellent debate between the two of you yesterday at UT Austin.
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The debate was between ideas of conservatism represented by Yoram Hazoni and ideas of individualism
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represented by Yaron Brooke.
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Let's start with the topics of the debate.
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Yoram, how do you define conservatism?
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Maybe in the way you were thinking about it yesterday.
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What do you are some principles of conservatism?
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Let me define it and then we can get into principles if you want.
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When I talk about political conservatism, I'm talking about a political standpoint that
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regards the recovery, elaboration, and restoration of tradition as the key to maintaining a nation
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and strengthening it through time.
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This is something that if you have time to talk about it like we do on the show, it's
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worth emphasizing that conservatism is not like liberalism or Marxism.
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And Marxism and Marxism are both universal theories and they claim to be able to tell
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you what's good for human beings at all times and all places.
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And conservatism is a little bit different because it's going to carry different values
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in every nation and every tribe.
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Even every family, you can say, has somewhat different values and these loyalty groups,
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they compete with one another.
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That's the way human beings work.
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So it's deeply rooted in history of that particular area of land.
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Well, I wouldn't necessarily say land.
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You're right that many forms of conservatism are tied to a particular place.
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So how does the implementation of conservatism to you differ from the ideal of conservatism?
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The implementations you've seen of political conservatism in the United States and the
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rest of the world, just to give some context, because it's a loaded term, like most political
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So when people think about conservative in the United States, they think about the Republican
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Can you kind of disambiguate some of this, what are we supposed to think about?
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Yeah, that's a really important question.
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Usually the word conservative is associated with Edmund Burke and with the English common
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Going back, you know, centuries and centuries, there's kind of a classical English conservative
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tradition that goes Fortescue, Hooker, Koch, Selden, Hale, Burke, Blackstone before Burke.
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If you take that kind of as a benchmark and you compare it, then you can compare it to
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things like the American Federalist Party at the time of the American founding is in
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many respects very much in keeping with that tradition.
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As you go forward, there's an increasing mix of liberalism and to conservatism.
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And I think by the time you get to the 1960s with William Buckley and Frank Meyer, you
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know, the jargon term is fusionism.
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By the time you get there, it's arguable that their conservatism isn't very conservative
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anymore, that it's kind of a public liberalism mixed with a private conservatism.
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So a lot of the debate that we have today about, you know, what does the word conservatism
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actually mean, a lot of the confusion comes from that, comes from the fact that on the
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one hand, we have people use the term, I think, properly historically to refer to this common
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law tradition of which Burke was a spokesman.
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But there are lots of other people who when they say conservative, they just mean liberal.
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And I think that that's a big problem.
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I mean, it's a problem just to have an intelligent debate is difficult when people are using the
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word almost too antithetical.
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What would you say the essential idea of conservatism is time?
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You mentioned your father's a physicist.
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So a lot of physicists, when they form models of the universe, they don't consider time.
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So everything is dealt with instantaneously.
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A particle is represented fully by its current state, velocity and position.
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You're saying, so you're arguing with all the physics and your father, as we always
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do, that their time matters in conservatives.
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That's the fundamental element is the full history matters.
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And you cannot separate the individual from the history, from the roots that they come
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The fundamental in political theory is what's called rationalism.
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I guess we'll probably talk about that some.
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Rationalism is kind of an instantaneous, timeless thing.
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Before I mentioned that liberalism and various enlightenment theories, they don't include
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Their goal is to say, look, there's such a thing as universal human reason.
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All human beings, if their reason properly will come to the same conclusions.
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If that's true, then it removes the time consideration.
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It removes tradition and context, because everywhere where you are at any time, you
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ought to be able to use reason and come to the same conclusions about politics or morals.
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So that's a theory like Immanuel Kant or John Locke as an example, Hobbes as an example.
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That kind of political theorizing really does say, at a given instant, we can know pretty
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much everything that we need to know, at least the big things.
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And conservatism is the opposite.
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It's a traditionalist view, exactly as you say, that says that history is crucial.
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So Iran, you say that history is interesting, but perhaps not crucial in the context of
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No, I mean, I think there's a false dichotomy he presented here, and that is that one of
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you holds that you can derive anything from a particular historical path and kind of an
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And if we know the history, we know where we should be tomorrow.
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We know where we should stand today.
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And the other path is we ignore history, we ignore facts, we ignore what's going on.
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We can derive from some a priori axioms, we can derive a truth right now.
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And both are false, both of those views in my view are false.
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And you know, I'm random, I reject both of those views.
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And I think the better thinkers of the Enlightenment did as well, although they sometimes fall
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into the trap of appearing like rationalists.
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And Jom and I agree on one thing, and that is that Kant is one of, you know, we've talked
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about this in the past, Alex, but we both hate Kant.
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We both think Kant is, I at least think Kant is probably the most destructive philosopher
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since Plato, who was pretty destructive himself.
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But and part of the problem is that Kant divorces reason from reality.
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That is, he divorces reason from history.
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He divorces reason from experience, because we don't have direct experience of reality
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according to Kant, right, we're removed from that direct experience.
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But I view Kant as the anti Enlightenment, that is, I view Kant as the destroyer of good
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Enlightenment thinking and Yoram, and I acknowledge a lot of history of philosophy of people who
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do history of philosophy view Kant as the embodiment of the Enlightenment, that is,
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But I think that's a mistake.
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I think both Housseau and Kant are fundamentally the goal, the mission in life is to destroy
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the Enlightenment.
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So my view is neither of those options are the right option.
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That is, the true reason based, reason is not divorced from reality.
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It's quite the opposite.
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It's a faculty of identifying and integrating what it's identifying and integrating the facts
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of reality as as as we know them through sense perception or through the study of history
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through what actually happened.
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So it's the integration of those facts.
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It's the knowledge of that history.
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And then what we do is we abstract away principles based on what's worked in the past, what hasn't
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worked in the past, the consequences of different ideas, different past, different actions.
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We abstract away principles that then can be universal.
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We make mistakes, right?
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We can come up with a universal principle.
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It turns out that it's not.
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But if we have the whole scope of human history, we can derive principles as we do in life
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as individuals, we derive principles that are then truths that we can live by.
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But you don't do that by ignoring history.
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You do that by learning history, by understanding history, by understanding, in a sense, tradition
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and what it leads to and then trying to do better.
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And I think good thinkers are constantly trying to do better based on what they know about
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the past and what they know about the present.
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What's the difference between studying history on a journey of reason and tradition?
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So you mentioned that Burke understood that reason begins with inherited tradition yesterday.
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So what's the difference between studying history, but then being free to go any way
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you want and tradition where it feels more, I don't want to say a negative term like burden,
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but there's more of a momentum that forces you to go the same way as your ancestors.
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It's the recognition that people are wrong, often are wrong.
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Ignorance, including your parents, including your teachers, including everybody.
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Everybody is potentially wrong and that you can't accept anybody just because they happen
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to come before you.
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That is, you have to evaluate and judge and you have to have a standard by which they
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evaluate and judge the actions of those who came before you, whether they are your parents,
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whether they are the state in which you happen to be born, whether they are somebody on the
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other side of planet Earth.
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You can judge them if you have a standard.
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And my standard and I think the right standard is human well being.
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That which is good for human beings, qua human beings is the standard by which we judge.
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I can say that certain periods of history were bad.
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It's important to study them.
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It's important to understand what they did that made them bad so we cannot do that again.
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And I can say certain cultures, certain periods in time were good.
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Because they promoted human well being and human flourishing.
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That's the standard.
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What is it that made a particular culture good?
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What is it that made that particular culture positive in terms of human well being and
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human flourishing?
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What made this bad?
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And hopefully from that, I can derive a principle.
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If I want human flourishing and human well being in the future, I want to be more like
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these guys and less like those guys.
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I want to derive what is the principle that will guide me in the future.
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That's I think how human knowledge ultimately develops.
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I think people often make a mistake, I'm not saying you're wrong, but lots of people don't
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actually read the original sources.
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And so what happens is people will attack conservatives, assuming that conservatives
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think that whatever comes from the past is right.
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And actually, it's very difficult to find a thinker who actually says something like
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The Seldiner Burke, the big conservative theorist, Hooker, they're all people who understand
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that the tradition carries with it mistakes that were made in the past.
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And this is actually, I think, an important part of their empiricism is that they see
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the search for truth as something a society does by trial and error.
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And what that means is that in any given moment, you have to be aware of the possibility that
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things that you've inherited are actually false.
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And the job of the political thinker or the jurist or the philosopher is not to dig in
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and say, whatever it is that we've inherited is right.
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The job is to look at the society as a whole and say, look, we have this job of, first
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of all, conservation, just making sure that we don't lose good things that we've had.
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And second, seeing if we can repair things in order to improve them where it's necessary
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or where it's possible.
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And that process is actually a creative process.
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This is a way in which I think it is similar to Yaron's philosophy, that you take the inherited
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tradition and you look for a way that you can shape it in order to make it something
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better than it was.
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That's a baseline for what we call conservatism itself.
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Just to comment, so the trial and error, you're proud of the errors.
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It's a feature, not a bug.
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So you mentioned trial and error a few times yesterday, it's a really interesting kind
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It's basically accepting that the journey is going to have flaws as opposed to saying,
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I mean, the conclusion there is the current system is flawed and it will always be flawed.
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And you try to improve it.
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When you listen to Yaron talk, there's much more of an optimism for the system being perfect
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now or potentially soon or it could be perfect.
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And to me, the way I heard it is almost like accepting that the system is flawed and through
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trial and error will improve.
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And Yaron says, no, we can have a perfection now.
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That's what it sounds to me.
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And I think that's right.
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I think the difference is that at some point, just like in science, I think, one can stop
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the trial and error and say, I can now see a pattern here, I can see that certain actions
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lead to bad consequences, certain actions lead to good consequences.
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Let me try to abstract away what is it that is good and what is it that is bad and build
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a system around what is good and reject what is bad.
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I think ultimately, if you read the Founding Fathers and whether we call them conservatives
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individuals, what the Founding Fathers actually did all of them, I think, is study history.
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They all talk about history.
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They all talk about examples of other cultures, whether they go back to the Republican venus
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or back to the ancient Greeks.
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They studied these.
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They learned lessons from them.
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They tried to figure out what has worked in the past and what hasn't and tried to do
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In my view, they got pretty close to what I would consider kind of an ideal, but they
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didn't get it completely right.
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Here we sit 200 something years after the Declaration and after the Constitution.
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I think we can look back and say, okay, well, what did they get right?
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What did they get wrong based on how is it done and where the flaws and we can improve
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I think we can get closer to perfection and based on those kind of observations, based
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on that kind of abstraction, that kind of discovery of what is true.
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Just like at some point, you do the experiments, you do the trial and error, and now you come
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up with a scientific principle.
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It is true that 100 years later, you might discover that, hey, I missed something.
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But to not take the full lesson, to insist on incrementalism, to insist on we're just
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going to tinker with the system, instead of saying, no, there's something really wrong
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with having a king.
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There's something really wrong with not having any representation or whatever the standard
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In the name of we don't want to move too fast, I think is a mistake.
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And the problem with trial and error in politics is that we're talking about human life.
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So there was a big trial around communism, and 100 million people paid the price for
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I could have told them in advance, as did many people, that it would not work.
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There are principles of human nature, principles that we can study from history, principles
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about economics and other aspects.
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What we know it's not going to work.
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You don't need to try it again.
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You've had communal arrangements throughout history.
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There's an experiment with fascism, and there have been experiments with all kinds of political
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Okay, we've done them.
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Sad that we did them, because many of us knew they wouldn't work.
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We should learn the lesson.
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And I think that all of history now converges on one lesson.
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And that is, what we need to do is build systems that protect individual freedom.
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That's what ultimately leads to human flourishing and human success and human achievement.
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And to the extent that we place anything above that individual, whether it's the state, whether
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it's the ethnicity, whether it's the race, whether it's the bourgeois, whether it's whatever
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it happens to be, a class or whatever, whenever we place something above the individual, the
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consequence of the negative, that's one of these principles that I think we can derive
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from studying, you know, 3,000 years of civilization.
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And it's tragic, I think, because we're going to keep experimenting, sadly.
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I'm not winning this battle.
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I'm losing the battle.
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We're going to keep experimenting with different forms of collectivism, and we're going to
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keep paying the price in human life and in missed opportunities for human flourishing
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and human success and human wealth and prosperity.
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Well, look, let's take communism as a good example.
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None of the major conservative thinkers would say, you know what's a good idea?
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A good idea would be to experiment by raising everything that we've inherited and starting
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I mean, that's the conservative complaint or accusation against rationalists, I mean,
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as opposed to empiricism, using rationalism, let's take Descartes kind of as a benchmark.
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Can you also maybe define rationalism?
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These are two terms that are in philosophy, especially in epistemology.
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They're often compared to one another.
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You're on said that it's a false dichotomy, and maybe it is a bit exaggerated, but that
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doesn't mean it's not useful for conceptualizing the domain.
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So rationalist is somebody like Descartes who says, I'm going to set aside, I'm going
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to try to set aside everything I know, everything I've inherited, I'm going to start from scratch.
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And he explicitly says, in evaluating the inheritance of the past, he explicitly says,
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you take a look at the histories that we have, they're not reliable.
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You take a look at the moral and the scientific writings that receive, they're not very good.
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His baseline is to look very critically at the past and say, look, I'm evaluating it.
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I think all in all, it's just not worth very much.
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And so whatever I do, beginning from scratch, is going to be better as long as, and here's
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his caveat, as long as I'm proceeding from self evident assumptions, from self evident
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premises, things that you can't argue against.
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I think therefore I am.
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And then from there, deducing what he calls infallible conclusions.
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So that model of self evident premises to infallible conclusions, I'm calling that rationalism,
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I think that's kind of a standard academic jargon term.
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And it's opposed to empiricism, which is a thinker, I think in universities usually,
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the empiricist is David Yume.
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And David Yume will say, we can't learn anything the way that Descartes, I mean, there is nothing
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that's that self evident and that infallible.
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So Yume proposes, based on Newton and Boyle and the new physical sciences.
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So Yume proposes a science of man.
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And the science of man sounds an awful lot like what you're on just said, which is we're
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going to take a look at human nature, at the nature of societies.
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Human nature, we're going to try to abstract towards fixed principles for describing it.
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Human societies, we're going to try to do the same thing.
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And from there we get, for example, contemporary economics, but we also get sociology and anthropology,
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which cut in a different direction.
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So that's rationalism versus empiricism.
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Yeah, go ahead, please.
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Yeah, I agree with that.
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I think empiricism, the one thing I disagree is I think empiricism rarely comes to these
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I mean, they want more facts, it's always about collecting more evidence.
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But this is where I think Ayn Rand is so unusual and where I think there's something new here.
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And that's a bold statement given the history of philosophy, but I think Ayn Rand is something
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And so she says, yes, we agree about rationalism and it's inherently wrong.
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Algorithm has the problem of, okay, where does it lead, it's you never come to a conclusion,
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you're just accumulating evidence.
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There's something in addition, there's a third alternative, which she is positing,
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which is using empirical evidence, not denying empirical evidence, recognizing that there
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are some axioms, there's some axioms that we all, at the base of all of our knowledge
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that are starting points, we're not rejecting axiomatic knowledge.
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And integrating those two and identifying the fact that based on these axioms and based
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on these empirical evidence, we can come to truths.
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Just again, like we do in science, we have certain axiom, scientific axioms, we have
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certain experiments that we run, and then we can come to some identification of a truth.
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And that truth is always going to be challenged by new information, by new knowledge.
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But as long as that's what we know, that is what truth is.
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The truth is contextual, in the sense that it's contextual, it's based on that knowledge
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that surrounds it.
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And so it's for it to change if you get new facts to data.
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It's always available to change if the facts that you get, and they really are, I mean,
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the burden of changing what you've come to a conclusion of truth is high, so you'd have
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to have real evidence that it's not true.
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But that happens all the time.
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So it happens in science, right?
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We discover that what we thought was true is not true, and it can happen in politics
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and ethics even more so than in science, because they're much messier fields.
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But the idea is that you can come to a truth, but it's not just deductive.
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Most truths are inductive.
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We learn from observing reality, and again, coming to principles about what works and
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And here I think this is, Ayn Rand is different.
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She doesn't fall into the, and she's different in her politics, and she's different in her
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epistemology, she doesn't fall into the conventional view.
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She's an opponent of human, she's an opponent of the courts, and she's certainly an opponent
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And I think she's right, right?
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So if it's okay, can we walk back to criticism of communism?
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You're both critics of communism and socialism.
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Why did communism fail?
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You started to say that conservatives criticize it on a basis of rationalism that you're throwing
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You're starting from scratch.
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Is that the fundamental description of why communism failed?
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I think the fundamental difference between rationalists and empiricists is the question
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of whether you're throwing away the past.
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That's the argument, and it caches out as a distinction between abstract universal rationalist
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political theories and empirical political theories.
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Empirical political theories, they're always going to say something like, look, there are
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many different societies.
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We can say that some are better and some are worse, but the problem is that there are many
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different ways in which a society can be better or worse.
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There's an ongoing competition.
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And we're learning on an ongoing basis what are the ways in which societies can be better
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That creates a kind of, I'd say, a mild skepticism, a moderate skepticism among conservatives.
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I don't think too many conservatives have a problem looking at the Soviet Union, which
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is brutal and murderous, ineffective in its economics, totally ineffective spiritually,
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and then collapsed.
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So, I think it's easier for us to look at a system like that and say, what on earth?
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What should we learn from that?
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But the main conservative tradition is pretty tolerant of a diversity of different kinds
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of society and is slow to insist that France is so tyrannical, it just needs a revolution
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because what's going to come after the revolution is going to be much better.
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The assumption is that there's lots of things that are good about most societies and that
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a clean slate leads you to throw out all of the inherited things that you don't even
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know how to notice until they're gone.
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Could I actually play those advocates here and address something you've also said?
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Can we, as opposed to knowing the empirical data of the 20th century that communism presented,
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can we go back to the beginning of the 20th century?
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Can you empathize or steal man or put yourself in a place of the Soviet Union where the workers
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are being disrespected?
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Can you not see that the conservatives could be pro communism?
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Communism is such a strongly negative word in modern day political discourse that you
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can't, you have to put yourself in the mind of people who like red colors, who like, who
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It was, it's all about the branding, I think, just, but also like the ideas of solidarity,
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of nation, of togetherness, of respect for fellow man, I mean, all of these things that
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kind of communism represents.
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Can you not see that this idea is actually going along with conservatism?
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It is in some ways respecting the deep ideals of the past, but proposing a new way to raise
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those ideals, implement those ideals in the system.
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Yes, I'm going to try to do what you're suggesting, but historically, we actually have a more
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useful option, I think, for both of our positions.
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Instead of pretending that we like the actual communists, we have conservative statesmen
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like Disraeli and Bismarck who initiated social legislation, right, the first step towards
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saying, look, we're one nation, we're undergoing industrialization.
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That industrialization is important and positive, but it's also doing a lot of damage to a lot
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In particular, it's doing damage not just to individuals and families, but it's doing
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damage to the social fabric, the capacity of Britain or German to remain cohesive societies
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It's these two conservative statesmen, Disraeli and Bismarck, who actually take the first
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steps in order to legislate for what today we would consider to be minimal social programs,
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pensions and disability insurance and those kinds of things.
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For sure, conservatives do look at industrialization as a rapid change, and they say, we do have
link |
to care about the nation as a whole and we have to care about it as a unity, and I assume
link |
that Euron will say, look, that's the first step towards the catastrophe of communism,
link |
but before Euron drives that nail into the car, let me try to make a distinction, because
link |
when you read Marx, you're reading an intellectual descendant of Descartes.
link |
You're reading somebody who says, look, every society consists of oppressors and oppressed.
link |
That's an improvement in some ways over liberal thinking, because at least he's seeing groups
link |
as a real social phenomenon, but he says every society has a oppressor class and oppressed
link |
They're different classes, they're different groups, and whenever one is stronger, it exploits
link |
the ones that are weaker.
link |
That is the foundation of a revolutionary political theory.
link |
Because the moment that you say that the only relationship between the stronger and the
link |
weaker is exploitation, the moment that you say that, then you're pushed into the position
link |
and Marx and Engels say this explicitly.
link |
You're pushed into the position where you're saying, when will the exploitation end?
link |
Never until there's a revolution.
link |
What happens when there's a revolution?
link |
You eliminate the oppressor class.
link |
It's annihilationist.
link |
You can immediately, when you read it, see why it's different from Descartes or Bismarck,
link |
because they're trying to keep everybody somehow at peace with one another, and Marx is saying,
link |
there is no peace.
link |
That oppressor class has to be annihilated, and then they go ahead and do it, and they
link |
kill a hundred million people.
link |
I do think that, despite the fact your question is good and right, there are certain similarities
link |
and concern, but still, I think you can tell the difference between those.
link |
That extra step of revolution to you is where the problem comes.
link |
That extra step of let's kill all the oppressors, that's the problem.
link |
And then to you, Iran, the whole step one is the problem.
link |
Well, it's all a problem.
link |
First, I don't view communism as something that radical in a sense that I think it comes
link |
from a tradition of collectivism.
link |
I think it comes from a tradition of looking at groups and measuring things in terms of
link |
It comes from a tradition where you expect some people to be sacrificed for the greater
link |
good of the whole.
link |
I think it comes from a tradition where mysticism or revelation as the source of truth is accepted.
link |
I view Marx as, in some sense, very Christian.
link |
I don't think he's this radical rejecting, I think he's just reformatting Christianity
link |
He's replacing, in a sense, he's replacing God with the Poletarian knowledge.
link |
You have to get knowledge from somewhere, so you need the dictatorship of the Poletarian.
link |
You need somebody, the Stalin, the Lenin, who somehow communes with the spirit of the
link |
There's no rationality, not rationalism.
link |
There's no rationality in Marx.
link |
There is a lot of mysticism and there is a lot of hand waving and there's a lot of sacrifice
link |
and a lot of original sin in the way he views humanity.
link |
I view Marx as one more collectivist in a whole string of collectivists.
link |
I think the Bismarckian response, which Bismarck, I know less about Israelis, so I'll focus
link |
I mean, Bismarck is really responding to political pressures from the left and he's
link |
responding to the rise of communism, socialism.
link |
What Bismarck is doing, he's putting something alternative, he's presenting an alternative
link |
to the Poletarian as the standard by which we should method the good and what he's replacing
link |
He's replacing the Poletarian with the state and that has exactly the same problems.
link |
That is first, it requires sacrificing some to others, which is what the welfare state
link |
basically legitimizes.
link |
It places the state above all, so the state now becomes, I think, the biggest evil of
link |
Bismarck and I definitely view him as a negative force in history is public education.
link |
The Germans really dig in on public education and really develop it and really the American
link |
model of public education is copying the German, the Prussian, Bismarckian public education.
link |
Can you speak to that real quick, why the public education is such a root of moral evil
link |
Well, because it now says that there's one standard and that standard is determined by
link |
government, by bureaucracy, by whatever the government deems is in the national interest
link |
and Bismarck's very explicit about this.
link |
He's training the workers of the future.
link |
They need to catch up with England and other places and they need to train the workers
link |
and he's going to train some people to be the managerial class, he's going to train
link |
other people to be, and he decides, right, that the government, the bureaucracy is going
link |
to decide who's who and where they go, there's no individual choice, there's no individual
link |
showing inability to break out of what the government has decided is their little box,
link |
there's very little freedom, there's very little, you know, ultimately there's very
link |
little competition, there's very little innovation and this is the problem we have today in American
link |
education which we can get to, is there's no competition and no innovation?
link |
We have one standard fit all and then we have conflicts about what should be taught and
link |
the conflict's now not pedagogical, they're not about what works and what doesn't.
link |
Nobody cares about that.
link |
It's about political agendas, right, it's about what my group wants to be taught and
link |
what that group wants to be taught, rather than actually discovering how do we get kids
link |
I mean, we all know how to get kids to read but there's a political agenda about not
link |
teaching phonics, for example.
link |
So a lot of schools don't teach phonics even though the kids will never learn how to read
link |
So it becomes politics and I don't believe politics belongs in education.
link |
I think education is a product, it's a service and we know how to deliver products and services
link |
really, really efficiently at a really, really low price at a really, really high quality
link |
and that's leaving it to the market to do.
link |
But your fundamental criticism is that the state can use education to furthers authoritarian
link |
Well, or whatever the aims, I mean think about the conservative today, critique of American
link |
educational system, it's dominated by the left.
link |
Yeah, what did you expect?
link |
If you leave it up to the state to fund, they're going to fund the things that promote
link |
state growth and state intervention and the left is better at that.
link |
It has been better at that than the right and they now dominate our educational institutions.
link |
But look, if we go back to Bismarck, my problem is placing the state above the individual.
link |
So if communism places the class above the individual, what matters is class, individuals
link |
are nothing, they're cogs in a machine.
link |
Bismarck, certainly the German tradition, much more than the British tradition or the
link |
American tradition, the German tradition is to place the state above the individual.
link |
I think that's equally evil and the outcome is fascism and the outcome is the same.
link |
The outcome is the deaths of tens of millions of people when taken to its ultimate conclusion.
link |
Just like socialism, the ultimate conclusion of it is communism, nationalism in that form,
link |
kind of the Bismarckian form, the ultimate conclusion is Nazism or some form of fascism.
link |
Because you don't care about the individual, the individual doesn't matter.
link |
I think this is one of the differences in the Anglo American tradition, where the Anglo
link |
American tradition, even the conservatives, have always acknowledged and goes back to
link |
Especially the conservatives.
link |
The conservatives were there first.
link |
They acknowledged.
link |
Well, you've defined conservatives to include all the good thinkers of the distant past and
link |
they're all good thinkers.
link |
I'm defining conservatism the way that Burke does.
link |
And just look, this is a very simple observation.
link |
Burke thinks when you open Burke and you actually read him, he starts naming all of these people
link |
who he's defending.
link |
I'm sorry, it's just intellectual sloppiness for people to be publishing books called Burke,
link |
the first conservative, the founding conservative, the founding... I mean, this is nonstop.
link |
It's a view that says Burke reacts to the French Revolution.
link |
So conservatism has no prior tradition, it's just reacting to the French Revolution.
link |
And this is just absurd.
link |
Can I ask a quick question on conservatism?
link |
Are there any conservatives that are embracing of revolutions?
link |
So are they ultimately against the concept of revolution?
link |
Yes, Burke himself embraces the Polish Revolution, which takes place almost exactly at the same
link |
time as the French Revolution.
link |
And the argument's really interesting because there's a common mistake is assuming that
link |
Burke and conservative thinkers are always in favor of slow change.
link |
I think that's also just factually mistaken.
link |
Burke is against the French Revolution because he thinks that there are actually tried and
link |
true things that work, things that work for human flourishing and freedom included as
link |
a very important part of human flourishing.
link |
He like many others takes the English Constitution to be a model of something that works.
link |
So it has a king, it has various other things that maybe your own will say, well, that's
link |
a mistake, but still for centuries it's the leader in many things that I think we can
link |
easily agree are human flourishing.
link |
And Burke says, look, what's wrong with the French Revolution?
link |
What's wrong with the French Revolution is that they have a system that has all sorts
link |
of problems, but they could be repairing it.
link |
And instead what they're doing by overthrowing everything is they're moving away from what
link |
we know is good for human beings.
link |
Then he looks at the Polish Revolution and he says, the Poles do the opposite.
link |
The Poles have a nonfunctioning traditional constitution.
link |
It's too democratic.
link |
It's impossible to raise armies and to defend the country because of the fact that every
link |
nobleman has a veto.
link |
So the Polish Revolution moves in the direction of the British Constitution.
link |
They repair their constitution through a quick, a rapid revolution.
link |
They install a king along the model that looks a lot like Britain.
link |
And Burke supports, he says, this is a good revolution.
link |
So it's not the need to quickly make a change in order to save yourself.
link |
That's not what conservatives are objecting to.
link |
What they're objecting to is instead of looking at experience in order to try to make a slow
link |
or quick improvement, a measured improvement to achieve a particular goal, instead of doing
link |
that, you say, look, the whole thing has just been wrong.
link |
And what we've really got to do is annihilate a certain part of the population and then
link |
make completely new laws and a completely new theory.
link |
That's what he's objecting to.
link |
That's the French Revolution.
link |
And that then becomes the model for communist revolutions.
link |
And for me, the French Revolution is clearly a real evil and wrong, but it's not that
link |
it was a revolution and it's not that it tried to change everything.
link |
I mean, let's remember what was going on in France at the time, and people were starving.
link |
And the monarchy in particular was completely detached, completely detached from the suffering
link |
And something needed to change.
link |
The unfortunate thing is that the change was motivated by an egalitarian philosophy,
link |
not egalitarian in the sense that I think the funny fathers talked about it, but egalitarian
link |
in the sense of real equality, equality of outcome, motivated by a philosophy by Rousseau's
link |
And inevitably led, you could tell that the ideas were going to lead to this, to massive
link |
destruction and death and annihilation of a class.
link |
You can't, annihilation is never an option.
link |
That is, it's not true that a good revolution never leads to mass death of just whole groups
link |
of people because a good revolution is about the sanctity of the individual.
link |
It's about preservation, liberty of the individual.
link |
And again, that goes back to, and the French Revolution denies, and Rousseau denies really
link |
that in civilization there is a value and a thing called the individual.
link |
I think this is a good place to have this discussion.
link |
The founding fathers of the United States, are they individualists or are they conservatives?
link |
So in this particular revolution that founded this country, at the core of which are some
link |
fascinating, some powerful ideas, were those founding fathers, were those ideas coming
link |
from a place of conservatism, or did they put primary value into the freedom and the
link |
power of the individual?
link |
What do you think?
link |
I mean, this is something that's a little bit difficult for sometimes for Americans.
link |
I mean, even very educated Americans, they talk about the founding fathers as though it's
link |
kind of like this collective entity with a single brain and a single value system.
link |
But I think at the time, that's not the way they, not the way any of them saw it.
link |
So roughly there's two camps, and they map onto the rationalist versus traditionalist
link |
empiricist dichotomy that I proposed earlier.
link |
And so on the one hand, you have real revolutionaries like Jefferson and Payne.
link |
These are the people who Burke was writing against.
link |
These are the people who supported the French Revolution.
link |
So when you say real, so when you say paying, you're referring to revolutionaries in a bad
link |
Like this is a problem.
link |
These are people who will say history up until now has been with Descartes, but applied
link |
History up until now has been just a story of ugliness, foolishness, stupidity, and evil.
link |
And if you apply reason, we'll all come to roughly, we'll all come to the same conclusions.
link |
And Payne writes a book called The Age of Reason, and The Age of Reason is a manifesto
link |
for here is the answer to political and moral problems throughout history.
link |
We have the answers.
link |
And it's in the same school as Rousseau's, the social, no, you don't like that?
link |
Well, I thought it was.
link |
I think they're the opposites.
link |
So let me just throw in a question on Jefferson and Payne, do you think America would exist
link |
without those two figures?
link |
So like, how important is spice in the, in the flavor of the dish you're making?
link |
I don't want to try to run the counterfactual, you know, I don't have confidence that I know
link |
the answer to the question, but it's so much fun.
link |
You know what, I'm going to offer something that I think is more fun.
link |
More fun than the counterfactual is America had two revolutions, not one, okay?
link |
At first, there is a revolution that is strongly spiced with this kind, this kind of rationalism.
link |
And then there's a 10 year period after the Declaration of Independence.
link |
There's a 10 year period under which America has a constitution, its first constitution,
link |
which today they call the Articles of the Confederation.
link |
But there's a constitution from 1777.
link |
And that constitution is based on, in a lot of ways, on the hottest new ideas.
link |
It has, instead of the traditional British system with a division of powers between,
link |
you know, an executive and a bicameral legislature, instead of that traditional English model,
link |
which most of the states had as their governments, instead of that they say, no, we're going
link |
to have one elected body, okay, and that body, that Congress, it's going to be the executive.
link |
It's going to be the legislative.
link |
It's going to be everything, and it's going to run as a big committee.
link |
These are the ideas of the French Revolution.
link |
You get to actually see them implemented in Pennsylvania, in the Pennsylvania Constitution,
link |
and then later in the National Assembly in France.
link |
The thing doesn't work.
link |
It's completely made up.
link |
It's not based on any kind.
link |
It's neither based on historical experience, nor is it based on historical custom on what
link |
people are used to.
link |
And what they succeed in creating with this first constitution is it's wonderfully rational,
link |
but it's a complete disaster.
link |
It doesn't allow the raising of taxes.
link |
It doesn't allow the mustering of troops.
link |
It doesn't allow giving orders to soldiers to fight a war.
link |
And if that had continued, if that had continued to be the American constitution, America never
link |
would have been an independent country.
link |
There I'm willing to do that counterfactual.
link |
What happens during those years where Washington and Jay and Knox and Hamilton and Morris,
link |
there's this group of conservatives.
link |
They're mostly soldiers and lawyers.
link |
Other than Washington, most of them are from northern cities.
link |
And this group is much more conservative than the Tom Payne and Jefferson School.
link |
Some historians call them the nationalist party.
link |
Historically, they give up the word nationalism and they call themselves the federalists,
link |
but they're basically the nationalist party.
link |
What does that mean?
link |
It means, on the one hand, that their goal is to create an independent nation, independent
link |
On the other hand, they believe that they already have national legal traditions, the
link |
common law, the forms of government that have been imported from Britain, and of course,
link |
Christianity, which they consider to be part of their inheritance.
link |
This federalist party is the conservative party.
link |
These are people who are extremely close in ideas to Burke.
link |
And these are people who wrote the Constitution of the United States.
link |
The second constitution, the second revolution in 1787, when Washington leads the establishment
link |
of a new constitution, which may be technically legally, it wasn't even legal under the old
link |
constitution, but it was democratic.
link |
And what it did is it said, we're going to take what we know about English government,
link |
what we've learned by applying English government in the States, we're going to create a national
link |
government, a unified national government that's going to muster power in its hands,
link |
enough power to be able to do things like fighting wars to defend a unified people.
link |
Those are conservatives.
link |
Now, it's reasonable to say, well, look, there was no king, so how conservative could
link |
But I think that's a reasonable question.
link |
But don't forget that the American colonies, the English colonies in America by that point
link |
had been around for 150 years.
link |
They had written constitutions, they had already adapted for an entire century, adapted the
link |
English constitution to local conditions where there's no aristocracy and there's no king.
link |
I think you can see that as a positive thing.
link |
On the other hand, they have slavery, that's an innovation, that's not English.
link |
So it's a little bit different from the English constitution, but those men are conservatives.
link |
They make the minimum changes that they need to the English constitution and they largely
link |
replicate it, which is why the Jeffersonians hated them so much.
link |
They call them apostates.
link |
They say they've betrayed equality and liberty and fraternity by adopting an English style
link |
So, I would imagine, Aaron, you would put emphasis on the success of the key ideas at
link |
the founding of this country elsewhere, at the freedom of the individual.
link |
So it's supposed to the tradition of the British Empire.
link |
The one thing I agree with you on is the fact that, yes, the founding fathers were not a
link |
I mean, they argued, they debated, they disagreed, they wrote against each other.
link |
And Jefferson and Adams for decades didn't even speak to each other, though they did
link |
make up and had a fascinating relationship.
link |
You and I are making up, too.
link |
It's like the founding fathers.
link |
You know, there's this massive debate and discussion, but I don't agree with the characterization
link |
of pain and Jefferson.
link |
I don't think it's just to call them rationalists because I don't think they're rationalists.
link |
People who've looked at history, at the problems in history, and remember this is the 18th
link |
century, and they were coming out of 100 years earlier, some of the bloodiest wars in all
link |
of human history were happening in Europe, many of them over religion.
link |
You know, they had seen what was going on in France and other countries where people
link |
were starving and where kings were frolicking in palaces in spite of that.
link |
They were very aware of the relative freedom that the British tradition had given Englishmen.
link |
I think they knew that, they understood that.
link |
And I think they were building on that.
link |
They were taking the observation of the past and trying to come up with a more perfect
link |
And I think they did.
link |
And in that sense, I'm a huge fan of Jefferson.
link |
You know, there are two things that I think are unfortunate about Jefferson.
link |
One is that he continued to hold slaves, which is very unfortunate.
link |
And the second is his early support for the French Revolution, which I think is a massive
link |
mistake, and that would be surprised if you regretted it later in life, given the consequences.
link |
But you know, they were trying to derive principles by which they could establish a new state.
link |
And yes, there was pushback by some, and there was disagreement, and the constitution in
link |
the end is, to some extent, a form of compromise.
link |
It's still one of the great documents of all of human history, the constitution, although
link |
I think it's inferior to the declaration.
link |
I'm a huge fan of the declaration.
link |
And I think one of the mistakes the conservatives makes, one of the mistakes the Supreme Court
link |
makes and American judiciary makes is assuming the two documents are separate.
link |
I think Lincoln is actually right.
link |
You can't understand the constitution without understanding the declaration, the declaration
link |
and what set the context and what sets everything up for the constitution.
link |
Individual rights are the key concept there.
link |
And one of the challenges was that some of the compromises, and compromises not necessarily
link |
between groups, but compromises that even Jefferson made and others made regarding individual
link |
rights, set America on a path that we're suffering from today.
link |
And I mentioned three last night.
link |
Obviously, there was a horrific compromise, one that American not just paid for with a
link |
600,000 young men died because of it.
link |
But the suffering of black slaves for all those years, but then the whole issue of racial
link |
tensions in this country for a century to this day, really, is a consequence of that
link |
initial compromise.
link |
Who knows what the counterfactual is in America.
link |
Because there's a civil war right at the founding, right, because there would have been a war
link |
But if it happened in the late 18th century, early 19th century, rather than waiting until
link |
But then second was Jefferson's embrace of public education, his founding of the University
link |
of Virginia, which I think is a great tragedy, which nobody agrees with me on.
link |
So that's one of the areas where I'm pretty radical.
link |
And then they embrace, both by Jefferson and by Hamilton, for different reasons.
link |
But they're embraced by both of them, of government role in the economy.
link |
And I do finance, so I know a little bit about finance.
link |
And the debate between Jefferson and Hamilton about banking is fascinating.
link |
But at the end of the day, both wanted a role for government in banking.
link |
They both didn't trust, Jefferson didn't trust big financial interests, Hamilton wanted
link |
to capture some of those financial issues for the state.
link |
And as a consequence, we set America on a path where, in my view, regulation always leads
link |
to more regulation.
link |
There's never a case where regulation decreases.
link |
And we started out with a certain regulatory body around banks and a recognition that was
link |
okay to regulate the economy.
link |
So once we get into the late 19th century, it's fine to regulate the railroads.
link |
It's fine to pass antitrust laws.
link |
It's fine to then continue on the path of where we are today, which is heavy, heavy,
link |
massive involvement of government in every aspect of our economy and really in every
link |
aspect of our life because of education.
link |
So I think the country was founded on certain mistakes and we haven't been willing to question
link |
those mistakes and in a sense that we've only moved in the opposite direction.
link |
And now America has become, whereas I think it was founded on the idea of the primacy
link |
of the individual, the sanctity of the individual, at least as an idea, even if not fully implemented,
link |
I think now that's completely lost.
link |
I don't think anybody really is an advocate out there for individualism in politics or
link |
for true freedom in politics.
link |
We'll get to individuals.
link |
But let me ask the Beatles and the Rolling Stones question about the Declaration of
link |
Independence and the Constitution.
link |
Well, because it's like which document, Beatles are all in which document is more important
link |
It's obviously the Beatles, right?
link |
Is this a question?
link |
Is there even a question?
link |
I'm going to zoom in further and ask you to pick your favorite song.
link |
So what ideas in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence do you think are
link |
the most important to the success of the United States of America?
link |
I'll answer the question, but before answering the question, I want to dissent from, register
link |
and dissent from your runs.
link |
Is it the public education?
link |
Actually, we're not so, look, we're not so far apart on public education.
link |
I'm actually kind of surprised that you're so anti Bismarck because his public school
link |
system was, his national public school system was created in order to stick it to the church.
link |
It was the church that ran the schools before then, and okay, but so that's a different
link |
I'm over sticking it to the church.
link |
Any opportunity, but not how in the alternative is the nation?
link |
I'd rather see free educational system with freedom as in education.
link |
So I want to register a dissent about Lincoln.
link |
Look, Lincoln is an important figure and a great man, and he was presiding over a country,
link |
which at that point was pretty Jeffersonian in terms of its self perception.
link |
He said what he needed to say.
link |
I'm not going to criticize him, but I don't accept the idea that the Declaration of Independence,
link |
which starts one revolution, is of a piece with the Second Constitution, the Constitution
link |
of 1787, the Nationalist Constitution, which is effectively a counterrevolution.
link |
What happens is there is a revolution.
link |
It's based on certain principles.
link |
There are a lot... Not exactly, but in many ways resemble the later ideas of the French
link |
And what the Federalist Party does, the Nationalist Conservative Party does, is a counterrevolution
link |
to reinstate the Old English Constitution.
link |
So these documents are, if you're willing to accept the evidence of history, they are
link |
in many respects contrary to one another.
link |
And so if I'm asked what's the most important values that are handed down by these documents,
link |
I don't have an objection to life, liberty, and property, all of which are really important
link |
I don't have an objection to the pompous overreach of, these are self evident, which
link |
They can't be self evident.
link |
If they were self evident, then somebody would have come up with them like 2,000 years
link |
It's not self evident, and so that's damaging.
link |
I like the conservative preamble of the Constitution, which describes the purposes of the national
link |
government that's being established.
link |
There are seven purposes, a more perfect union, which is the principle of cohesion, justice,
link |
domestic peace, common defense, the general welfare, which is the welfare of the public
link |
as a thing that's not only individuals, but there is such a thing as a general welfare,
link |
liberty, which we agree is absolutely crucial, and posterity, the idea that the purpose of
link |
the government is to be able to sustain and grow of this independent nation, and not only
link |
to guarantee rights no matter what happens.
link |
But you don't like the, we hold these truths to be self evident, so you definitely beat
link |
You don't want the pompous, you don't need that revolutionary strength.
link |
I think that that expression, self evident truths, it does tremendous damage because
link |
instead of a moderate skepticism, which says, look, we may not know everything.
link |
It says, look, we know everything.
link |
Here's what we know.
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We don't know everything, but we think.
link |
So I'll agree with you on them.
link |
I don't like self evident.
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I don't like self evident because he's absolutely right.
link |
It's not self evident.
link |
These are massive achievements.
link |
These are massive achievements of enlightened thinking, of studying history, of understanding
link |
human nature, of deriving a truth from 3,000 years of historical knowledge and a better
link |
understanding of human nature and the capacity.
link |
It's using reason in some ways better than any human beings have in, I mean, the founding
link |
fathers giants historically, in my view, because they came up with these truths.
link |
I do think they're truths, but they're certainly not self evident.
link |
I mean, if they were your arm is right, they would have discovered them thousands of years
link |
earlier or everybody would accept them, right?
link |
I mean, how many people today think that what they state in the document is true?
link |
Pretty much five people, I don't know.
link |
That's your criticism of modern society, yes, we'll get there.
link |
It's very, very few people recognize it.
link |
If they were self evident, bam, everybody would have accepted the American Revolution
link |
as truth and that was it.
link |
A lot of work has to go into understanding and describing and convincing people about
link |
those truths, but I completely disagree with your arm about this idea or I'll voice my
link |
dissent as we said about...
link |
Register your official dissent.
link |
About A, this being two different revolutions and B, that the American Revolution was at
link |
any similarity to the French Revolution.
link |
You know that Jefferson and Payne were...
link |
They were in France, running a different revolution.
link |
But they were waiting constantly, I mean, they were in communication with Madison.
link |
There was a lot of input going on.
link |
I know and Jefferson sitting there in Paris pulling his hair out because Madison has come
link |
under the influence of these nationalists and he can't believe it.
link |
The reality is that the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution
link |
is vast and it is a deep philosophical difference and it's a difference that expressed, I think,
link |
between the differences.
link |
So your arm, in his writings, lumps Rousseau with Locke and with Voltaire and with others
link |
and I think that's wrong.
link |
I think Rousseau is very different than the others.
link |
I think, again, Rousseau is an anti enlightenment figure.
link |
Rousseau is in many respects, harkening back to a past, an ancient past and I think a completely
link |
distorted view of human nature, of human mind.
link |
He rejects reason.
link |
I mean, Rousseau is on the premise that reason is the end of humanity, reason is the destruction
link |
Reason is how we get civilization and civilization is awful because...
link |
We're only talking about different texts.
link |
When I say, I'm just talking about the social contract.
link |
Yeah, but the social contract, there's similarity between others but he takes it in a completely
link |
different direction and we agree social contract is a bad idea.
link |
But you can have a contract that you don't actually voluntarily accept.
link |
But Rousseau is the French Revolution.
link |
Rousseau is about destruction and mayhem and chaos and Anarchy.
link |
He is the spirit behind the French Revolution.
link |
I think the American Revolution is a complete rejection of Rousseau.
link |
I think Jefferson is a complete rejection of Rousseau.
link |
I don't think Jefferson is a fan of Rousseau.
link |
He is of Voltaire and he certainly is of Montesquieu.
link |
If you look at the Federalist papers, the intellectual most cited in the Federalist
link |
papers, I think in terms of just the number of times inside, is Montesquieu.
link |
So I think that the American Revolution is an individualistic revolution.
link |
It is a revolution about the rights of the individual.
link |
The French Revolution is an negation of the rights of the individual.
link |
It's a collectivistic revolution.
link |
It's not quite the Marxist Revolution of the proletarian, but it's defining people
link |
in classes and it's a rebellion against a certain class and yeah, kill them all, right?
link |
Off with their heads.
link |
And it is an negation, it's about egalitarianism in the sense of equality of outcome, not in
link |
a sense of equality before the law or equality of rights, which is the Jeffersonian sense.
link |
So I think it's wrong to lump Jefferson in to the fraternity, egalitarian notion of
link |
the French, which is far more similar to what ultimately became socialism and Marxism and
link |
kind of that tradition.
link |
It's antiindividualistic, the French Revolution is, whereas the American Revolution, the first
link |
one, is individualistic.
link |
It's all about individual rights and while there's certain phrases in the Declaration
link |
of Independence that I don't agree with, it's beautifully written and it's a magnificent
link |
document, so it's hard for me to say I don't agree, who am I, right?
link |
These were giants, self evident is one of them.
link |
I'm not particularly crazy about endowed by the creator, but I like the fact that it's
link |
creator and not God or not a specific creator, but just kind of a more general thing.
link |
But putting those two ashes aside, it's the greatest political document in all of human
link |
history in my view by far.
link |
Nothing comes close, it is a document that identifies the core principles of political
link |
tourism of truth, that is the will of government is to preserve and to protect these rights,
link |
these inalienable rights and that is so crucial that these rights are inalienable, that is
link |
a majority can't vote them out, a revelation can't vote them out, this is what is required
link |
for human liberty and human freedom, the right that is the sanction, the freedom to act on
link |
your own behalf, to act based on your own judgment and as long as you're not interfering
link |
with other people's rights, you are free to do so.
link |
That is such a profound truth and that to me is the essence of political philosophy,
link |
that's the beginning and it's based on, just to not fall into, Yoram's going to say it's
link |
a rationalist, it's based on a whole history of what happens when we negate that, it's
link |
based on looking at England and seeing to the extent that they practiced a respect for
link |
individual liberty, a property of freedom, good things happened.
link |
So let's take that all the way, let's not compromise on that, let's be consistent with
link |
the good and reject the bad and when England goes away, distanced itself from the rights
link |
of man, from the idea of a right to property and so on, bad things happen and when they
link |
go to, let's go all in and I'm all in on the right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit
link |
of happiness and I think the idea of pursuit of happiness is profound because it's a moral
link |
statement, it's a statement that says that sanctions and says that ultimately people
link |
should be allowed to make their own judgments and live their lives as they see fit based
link |
on how they view happiness, they might be right, they might be wrong but we're not going
link |
to dictate what happiness entails and dictate to people how they should live their lives,
link |
we're going to let them, let them figure that out so it has this self interested moral code
link |
kind of embedded in it so I think it's a beautiful statement.
link |
So I think the declaration is key and I think there was an experiment and the experiment
link |
was proposed in that period of before the Constitution where the experiment was let's
link |
let the states, let's have a kind of a loose confederation, let's say the state's experiment
link |
with setting up their own constitutions and all the government and we won't have any kind
link |
of unity and I think what they realized and I think even Jefferson realized is that that
link |
was not workable because many of the states were starting to significantly violate rights,
link |
there was nothing to unify, there was nothing to really protect the vision of the declaration,
link |
you needed to establish a nation which is what the Constitution does, it establishes
link |
a nation but the purpose of that was to put everybody under one set of laws that protected
link |
rights, the focus was still on the protection of rights and I agree with six of the seven
link |
of the principles.
link |
Which did disagree with?
link |
The common warfare, which the general warfare, which I worry about, right?
link |
I think in the way the founders understood it, I think I probably agreed with it but
link |
it's such an ambiguous...
link |
I'm sure you don't agree.
link |
Maybe I don't, maybe I don't.
link |
Can you state the general warfare principle?
link |
Well the idea that part of the world of government is to secure the general warfare is something...
link |
This is something, we didn't get to it in the debate, we really should have, is the question
link |
of whether there is such a thing as a common good or a public interest or a national interest
link |
or a general welfare, do these words, do these terms mean anything other than the good of
link |
all of the individuals in the country, that's an important...
link |
Yeah, so that's right, so that's why...
link |
So I object to it because I think it's too easy to interpret it as.
link |
So I interpret it as, well, what's good for a general, a group, a common, people are just
link |
a collection of individuals, so what's good for the individual is good for the common
link |
welfare but I understand that that is something that is hard for people to grasp and not the
link |
common understanding.
link |
So I would have skipped the general welfare in order to avoid the fact that now the general
link |
warfare includes the government telling you what gender you should be assigned, so I would
link |
have wanted to have skipped that completely.
link |
So I think the constitution is consistent with the declaration, with a few exceptions
link |
to general warfare but perfection is a difficult thing to find, particularly for me politically.
link |
But it's a magnificent document, the constitution, it doesn't quite rise to the level I think
link |
of the declaration but it's a magnificent document because, you know, and this is the
link |
difference I think between the English constitution, here's what I see as the difference.
link |
The difference is that the constitution is written in the context of, why do we have
link |
a separation of powers, for example?
link |
We have a separation of powers in order to make sure that the government only does what
link |
the government is supposed to do and what is the government supposed to do?
link |
Well, fundamentally, it's supposed to protect rights, I mean, all of those seven or at least
link |
six of the seven are about protecting rights, they're about protecting us from foreign invaders,
link |
they're about protecting, you know, peace within the country, they're about preserving
link |
this protection of rights and why do we have this separation so that we make sure that
link |
no one of those entities, the executive or the legislature, judicial can violate rights
link |
because there's always somebody looking over their shoulder, there's always somebody who
link |
can veto their power, but there's a purpose to it and that purpose is clearly signified
link |
and characterized and that's why I think the Bill of Rights was written in order to add
link |
to the clarification of what exactly we mean, what is the purpose, the purpose is to preserve
link |
rights and that's why we need to elaborate what those rights and Madison's objection
link |
to the Bill of Rights was to say, not that he objected to having protection of rights,
link |
but to listing them because he was worried that other rights that were not listed would
link |
not be and his worry was completely justified because it's exactly what's happened.
link |
That's like the only reason we have free speech in America is we've got it in writing as a
link |
First Amendment, if we didn't have any writing, it would have been gone a long time ago and
link |
the reason we don't have, for example, the freedom to negotiate a contract, you know,
link |
independent government regulation is there was, that was not listed as a right in the
link |
bill even though I think it's clearly covered under the Constitution and certainly under
link |
So there was a massive stake down in the Bill of Rights, they tried to cover it with the
link |
Ninth Amendment but it never really stuck, this idea that non enumerated rights that
link |
are still in place.
link |
So I don't see this as a second revolution, I think it's a fix to a flaw that happened,
link |
it's a fix that allowed the expansion of the protection of rights to all states by creating
link |
a national entity to protect those rights and that's what ultimately led to the slavery
link |
You know, under the initial agreement, slavery would have been there in perpetuity because
link |
states were sovereign in a way that under the new constitution they were not and in
link |
a sense the Constitution sets in motion, the Declaration and then the Constitution
link |
set in motion, the Civil War, the Civil War has to happen because at the end of the day
link |
you cannot have some states with a massive violation of rights, what's more of a violation
link |
of rights and slavery and some states that recognize it's not inevitably leads to the
link |
You're almost just saying that other than the general welfare, these principles are
link |
about individual liberties, I just don't think you can read it that way.
link |
The first stated purpose of the Constitution of 1787 is in order to form a more perfect
link |
A more perfect union, it's describing a characteristic of the whole, it is not a characteristic of
link |
If you look at how the individuals are doing, you don't know whether their union is more
link |
So what they're doing is they're looking at the condition in which in order to be able
link |
to fight the battle of Yorktown, somebody has to write a personal check in order to be able
link |
A more perfect union is a more cohesive union.
link |
It's the ability to get all of these different individuals to do one focused thing when it's
link |
needed necessary to do it.
link |
Well, it's more than that.
link |
So I agree with that.
link |
But for what purpose?
link |
That is, and this is why it's so hard with these historical documents because there's
link |
a context and there's a thinking that they can't write everything down, which is sad
link |
because I wish they had.
link |
What's the purpose of a more perfect union?
link |
The purpose of the more perfect union is to preserve the liberty of the individuals within
link |
How do you know that?
link |
Because if you look, what's the rest?
link |
So what is the common defense?
link |
The common defense is to protect us from foreign invaders who would now disrupt what the rest
link |
of the Constitution is all about.
link |
All of the Constitution is written in a way as to preserve, find ways to limit the ability
link |
of government to violate the rights of individuals.
link |
The beauty of this Constitution, and again, it's connection to the Declaration and tradition.
link |
What came before it?
link |
What came before it was a document, which they all respected, which was the Declaration,
link |
which set the context for this.
link |
And now the union is there in order to provide for the common defense, great, because we
link |
know that foreign invaders can violate our rights, that's what war is about.
link |
To protect us from peace, to establish peace and justice within the country, that's based
link |
on law, the rule of law, and again, individual liberty.
link |
So to me, when you read the founders, when you read the federalist papers, when you read
link |
what they wrote, what they're trying to do is figure out the right kind of political
link |
system, the right kind of structure to be able to preserve these liberties.
link |
And not all of them had a, from my perspective, a perfect understanding what those liberties
link |
But they were all, even the conservatives that you call conservatives, were all in generally
link |
in agreement about the importance of individual liberty and the importance of individual liberty.
link |
Of course, because almost all of these rights are traditional English rights, they exist
link |
in the English Bill of Rights, in the English Petition of Rights, they exist in force.
link |
Of course, of course.
link |
All of these are traditional.
link |
What they're trying to do is to perfect that.
link |
They're trying to take the British system and perfect it.
link |
But you keep leaving out that they want to be like England in that they want to have
link |
an independent nation.
link |
An independent nation is not a collection of individual liberties.
link |
An independent nation, the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence is the declaration
link |
that there is a collective right, that we as a people are breaking the bonds with another
link |
people, and we're going to take our place, our equal station, among the nations of the
link |
The purpose is to protect individual rights.
link |
And there's no collective right.
link |
No, your argument is completely circular.
link |
You're not allowing the possibility that there could be great and decent men that you and
link |
I both admire who wanted the independence of their nation, not because that would give
link |
individuals liberty, but because the independence of their nation was itself a great good.
link |
So we clearly disagree on this, because I don't think the independence of the nation
link |
is a good in and of itself.
link |
But do they think it was?
link |
I don't think they did.
link |
And this is why they tried so hard not to break from England and why many of them struggled,
link |
really, really struggled with having a revolution, because England was pretty good, right?
link |
England was the best, and this is where we should get to the universality of these things,
link |
because I do think England was the best, universally and absolutely was the best system out there.
link |
And what they struggled to break from England, because they didn't view the value of having
link |
a nation as the primate, but what they identified in England is certain flaws in the system
link |
that created situations in which their rights were being violated.
link |
So they figured the only option in order to secure these rights is to break away from
link |
England and secure a nation.
link |
Now, I am not an anarchist, as Michael Malik says, because we've discussed it.
link |
I believe you need nations.
link |
You need nations to secure those rights.
link |
That is, the rights are not...
link |
You can't secure those rights without having a nation, but the nation is just a means to
link |
The end is the rights.
link |
And I think that's how the founders understood it, and that's why they created this kind
link |
I think this is a good place to ask about common welfare and cohesion.
link |
Let me say what John Donne wrote, that, quote, no man is an island entire of itself.
link |
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
link |
He went on, any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore
link |
never sent to know for whom the bell tolls.
link |
It tolls for thee.
link |
So let's talk about individualism and cohesion.
link |
Not just at the political level, but at a philosophical level for the human condition.
link |
What is the role of other humans in our lives?
link |
What's the importance of cohesion?
link |
This is something you've talked about.
link |
So Iran said that the beauty of the founding documents is that they create a cohesive union
link |
that protects the individual freedoms.
link |
But you have spoken about the value of the union, the common welfare, the cohesion in
link |
So can you maybe elaborate on what is the role of cohesion and the collective, not to
link |
use that term, but multiple humans together connected in the human condition?
link |
I keep getting the feeling that Iran and I are actually having a disagreement about empirical
link |
reality, because I think that Enlightenment rationalist political thought features the
link |
It features the state.
link |
There isn't really a nation other than the nation the people is as a collective is created
link |
And when the state disappears, then the collective disappears.
link |
Now, I think that when conservatives of all stripes look at this kind of thinking, that
link |
there's the individuals and then there's the state, and there really isn't anything else.
link |
When they look at that, they say, even before you get to consequences, it's a terrible
link |
theory because when we try to understand any field of inquiry, any domain, any subject
link |
area, when you try to understand it, we try to come up with a small number of concepts
link |
and of relations among the concepts, which is supposed to be able to explain, to illuminate
link |
as much as possible the important things that are taking place in the domain.
link |
And conservatives look at this individuals and the state and they say, you're missing
link |
most of what's going on in politics, also in personally human relations as well.
link |
But it just doesn't look like a description of human beings.
link |
It looks like a completely artificial thing.
link |
And then conservatives say, well, look, once you adopt this artificial thing, then the
link |
consequences are horrific because you're not describing reality.
link |
So a conservative reality begins with an empirical view of what are human beings like.
link |
And the first thing you notice about human beings, or at least the first thing I think
link |
conservatives notice, is that they're sticky, is that they clump, they turn into groups
link |
and you take any arbitrary collection of human beings and set them to a task or even just
link |
leave them alone and they quickly form into groups and those groups are always structured
link |
This is this competition within the hierarchy who's going to be the leader, who's going
link |
to be number two, but there are everywhere you look in human societies, universally,
link |
there are groups, the groups compete, and they're structured internally as hierarchies
link |
and then there are internal competitions for who leads the different groups.
link |
And when we think about scientific explanation, we allow that there are different levels of
link |
explanation, that a macroscopic object like a table, it doesn't have properties that
link |
can be directly derived from the properties of the atoms or the molecules or the microfibers
link |
that make up the table.
link |
And that's understood that there's what academic philosophers call emergent properties, that
link |
when you get up to the level of the table, it has properties like that you can't put
link |
your fist through it, which you can't necessarily know just by looking at the atoms alone.
link |
And I think conservatives say the same thing is true for political theory, for social theory,
link |
that looking at an individual human being and thinking about what does that individual
link |
human being need, which Euron does very eloquently in his writings.
link |
But that doesn't tell you what the characteristics are of this hierarchically structured group.
link |
As soon as you have that, it has its own qualities.
link |
So an example, the question of what holds these groups together.
link |
And we need to answer that question.
link |
I try to answer it by saying there's such a thing as mutual loyalty.
link |
Mutual loyalty is shorthand for human beings, individuals have the capacity to include another
link |
individual within their self, within their conception of their self.
link |
When two people do it, it creates a bond, like a bond between two atoms creates a molecule.
link |
That doesn't mean that they lose their individuality.
link |
Even in the group, they may still continue competing with one another, but that doesn't
link |
mean that there isn't in reality a bond and that real bond is the stuff of which political
link |
events and political history are made, is that the coming together, the cohesion and
link |
the dissolution of these bonded loyalty groups, that's the reality of politics.
link |
And so when I hear these discussions about individuals in the state, I feel like we're
link |
missing most of the reality.
link |
And in order to understand the political reality, we need to understand what makes human beings
link |
coherent to groups, what makes them dissolve, what makes the groups come apart and end up
link |
creating civil wars and that kind of thing.
link |
I think we also need to know, in practice, rival groups do come together and bond.
link |
I mean, basically, when we think about democratic society, we're talking about different groups,
link |
we can call them tribes or you can come up with a different name, but different tribal
link |
groupings with different views, they come together to form a nation and they're able
link |
to do that even though often they hate each other, like we were talking about the American
link |
Revolution and often they hate each other.
link |
And nevertheless, they're able to come together, why, how?
link |
And that leads us into questions like, how does the giving of honor by one group to another,
link |
how does that increase the mutual loyalty between groups that are still competing with
link |
All of these questions, I think we have to answer them in order to be able to talk about
link |
politics and I think the reason, the first reason why one should approach politics as
link |
a conservative rather than as an individualist is because it gives us these theoretical tools
link |
to be able to talk about reality, which we don't have as long as we keep within the
link |
individualist framework.
link |
As you're talking, the metaphor that's popping up into my mind and this is also something
link |
that bothers me with theoretical physics.
link |
The metaphor is there's some sense in which there's things called theories of everything.
link |
We try to describe the basic laws of physics, how they interact together.
link |
And once you do, you have a sense that you understand all of reality in a sense you do.
link |
And that to me is understanding the individual, like how the individual behaves in this world.
link |
But then you're saying that, hey, hey, you're also forgetting chemistry, biology, how all
link |
of that actually comes together, the stickiness, the stickiness of molecules and how they build
link |
different systems and some systems can kill each other, some systems can flourish, some
link |
can make pancakes and bananas and some can make poison and all those kinds of things
link |
and we need to be able to, we need to consider the full stack of things that are constructed
link |
from the fundamental basics.
link |
And I guess you're on, you're saying that no, you're just like the theoretical physicist.
link |
It all starts at the bottom, like if you need to preserve the fundamentals of reality, which
link |
is the individual, like the basic atom of human society is the individual to you.
link |
So yes, so the basic unit, the basic model unit, the basic ethical unit in society is
link |
And yeah, of course we form groups and you can't understand history unless you understand
link |
group formation and group motivation and I have a view about what kind of groups should
link |
be formed and politically from a political perspective, voluntary ones, ones in which
link |
we join when we want to join and we can leave when we want to leave and ones that help us
link |
and clearly groups help us pursue whatever it is a goal is ultimately so in the pursuit
link |
of happiness, there are lots of groups that one wants to form, whether it's marriage,
link |
whether it's businesses, whether it's sports teams, whether it's lots of, there are lots
link |
of different groups on the phone, but the question is what is the standard of well being?
link |
Is it the standard well being some algorithm that maximizes the well being of a group,
link |
you know, some utilitarian function, you know, is it something that's inherent in the group
link |
that we can measure as goodness and to help with the individuals within as long as we
link |
can get that, that the group to function well, we don't really care about where the individuals
link |
So to me, the goal of creating groups is the well being of the individual and that's why
link |
it needs to be voluntary and that's why there has to be a way out of those.
link |
Sometimes it's costly, it's not a cheap out, that's why you should really think about what
link |
groups you, and this, you know, on an issue that's very controversial, maybe we can discuss,
link |
This is why to me immigration is so important, right?
link |
Immigration or free immigration is because that's another group that I would like people
link |
to be able to voluntarily choose both in and out and I'd like to see people be able to
link |
go and join that group that, you know, that they believe will allow for the pursuit of
link |
But let me say that, you know, that's a description of an ideal, what I'm just saying, right?
link |
I recognize that that's not the reality in which we live.
link |
I recognize that that's not the reality in which history, history, you know, recognizing
link |
that such that the individual exists in a sense philosophically is a massive achievement,
link |
You know, human beings, however they evolved, clearly we started out in a tribal context
link |
in which individual did matter.
link |
We followed the leader, the competition was for power, power over the group and dictates
link |
how the group should work.
link |
You know, the history of human beings is a history of gaining knowledge and part of
link |
the knowledge is the value of an individual and you can see that in religion.
link |
You can see that in philosophy.
link |
You can see that through the evolution and then, you know, we evolved from tribes into
link |
nations and then empires and conflicts between nations and conflicts in empires and we tried
link |
a lot of different things, if you will.
link |
I don't think we always did it on purpose, but we kind of did different philosophies,
link |
different sets of ideas drove us towards different collectives, different groupings and different
link |
ways in which to structure.
link |
And after, I don't know, 3,000 years of kind of known history, this history before that
link |
but we don't know much about it, 3,000 years of known history, you can sit back and evaluate.
link |
And I think that's what is done in the Enlightenment and you sit back and suddenly we can do it
link |
We can sit back and evaluate what promotes human flourishing and what doesn't and what
link |
do we mean by human flourishing, who's flourishing?
link |
Well individual human beings.
link |
Now since I don't believe in a zero sum world and the world is not zero sum, we can see
link |
It's empirically possible to show that the world is not a zero sum game.
link |
My flourishing doesn't come at your expense.
link |
So I can show that a system that promotes my flourishing will probably promote your flourishing
link |
as well and promotes the general welfare in that sense because it promotes individuals
link |
We can look at all these examples of how we evolved and what leads to bloodshed and what
link |
doesn't and what promotes this ability to flourish as an individual, again, an achievement,
link |
the idea of individual flourishing.
link |
And then we can think about how to create a political system around that, a political
link |
system that recognizes and allows for the formation of groups but just under the principle
link |
You can't be forced to join a group.
link |
You can't be cursed into forming a group other than the fact that you're born in a particular
link |
place and a particular, you know, that in a sense.
link |
But that's not forced.
link |
There's a difference between metaphysics and between choices.
link |
So this is something that came up in the debate that Yoram said that not all human relations
link |
And you kind of emphasize that a lot of where we are is not voluntary.
link |
We're connected in so much.
link |
So how can a human be free in the way you're describing an individual be free if some part
link |
of who we are is not voluntary, some part of who we are as other people?
link |
Well, because what do we mean by freedom?
link |
Freedom doesn't mean an negation of the laws of physics, right?
link |
Freedom doesn't mean ignoring.
link |
Freedom means the ability within the scope of what's available for you to choose being
link |
able to choose those things.
link |
So in a political context, freedom means, you know, the absence of coercion.
link |
So once you're an adult, you know, Yoram says you're born with a particular interparticular
link |
religious context.
link |
But once you're an adult, I think it's incumbent on you to evaluate that religious context and
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look at different religions or nonreligion or whatever and choose your philosophy of
link |
Choose your values.
link |
Either you want to live your life.
link |
That's the freedom.
link |
The freedom is one system says you're either cursed by the state or cursed by the group
link |
or cursed by society around you to follow a particular path or the expectation is the
link |
demand is, the pressure is to conform to a particular path.
link |
And my view is, no, you should be in a position to be able to choose your path.
link |
And that choice means you look around, you evaluate, you evaluate your history based
link |
on knowledge based on all of these things and you choose what that path would be.
link |
That's fundamentally what freedom means.
link |
Yes, you cannot choose your parents, but of course not.
link |
Nobody would claim that that's within the scope of what is possible.
link |
I think the coercion freedom dichotomy, these are too few concepts, coercion and freedom.
link |
It's too simplistic to be able to describe what we're actually dealing with.
link |
The traditional Anglo conservative view is that society has to be, it has to be ordered,
link |
it has to be disciplined.
link |
And there are two choices for how it can be ordered.
link |
One is that a people is by its own traditions, you would say voluntarily, but these are mostly
link |
inherited traditions by its own traditions, it is ordered.
link |
For example, people just in general will not go into somebody else's yard because that's
link |
the custom here is we don't go into somebody else's yard without their permission.
link |
And so Fortescue, we're talking about 500 years ago already.
link |
So Fortescue says that the genius of the English people is that our government can be mild
link |
and apply very little coercion because the people are so disciplined.
link |
When he says the people are so disciplined, what he's saying is that our nation, our tribes,
link |
we have strong traditions which channel people through tools of being honored and dishonored.
link |
Now that's a reality that exists in every society and it's not captured by your distinction
link |
between coercion and lack of coercion.
link |
When I'm going to be dishonored, if I don't care for my aging mother, I'm not being coerced
link |
like the state comes and puts a gun to my head, but I am being pressured and given guidelines.
link |
But I'm saying that's wrong and I'm saying that's dangerous because that could easily
link |
be used for bad traditions.
link |
But what's the standard by which we evaluate what a good tradition is about tradition?
link |
You're getting to the standard too fast.
link |
You're getting to the standard too fast.
link |
First I want to know factually, is it true that all societies work like this because
link |
if it's true that all societies work like this, then saying we should be free from it
link |
is just a fantasy.
link |
So I don't think all societies work like this.
link |
I think much of what happened in America post founding in the 19th century didn't work like
link |
I think that's the genius of America.
link |
And I think what happened during the 19th century in the Industrial Revolution, what
link |
happened in the 19th century to some extent globally, but certainly in the United States
link |
didn't work that way.
link |
It broke tradition.
link |
I think all innovation breaks tradition and I think that's what the genius of this country
link |
is and the post enlightenment world is.
link |
I think pre that tradition, they work that way.
link |
And then the question is, do people understand why they do what they do?
link |
That is, I don't want people doing what I think is right.
link |
Just because I think it's right and I've created a society in which, yeah, okay, somebody
link |
founded this country in a particular way, so we're just going to follow.
link |
I want people to understand what they're doing.
link |
So I want people to have a respect for property, not because it's a tradition, but because
link |
they understand the value of a respect for property.
link |
I want people not to murder one another, not because there's a commandment, but because
link |
they have an understanding of why murdering is bad and wrong and bad for them and bad
link |
for the kind of world that they want to live in.
link |
And I think that's what we achieve through enlightenment, through education and where
link |
we don't treat people just as a blob, a tribe that just follows orders.
link |
But we now treat individuals as capable of thinking for themselves, capable for discovering
link |
truths capable of figuring out their own values.
link |
And that's the big break between, and this is why, you know, this is the break I think
link |
that the Declaration represents, the break between society that is based on tradition,
link |
following commandments, following rules, because they are the rules, because they are the commandments,
link |
and a society where individuals understand those rules, understand, yes, it's now become
link |
a tradition, let's say, to respect individual rights, to respect property rights.
link |
But they're not following it because it's a tradition, they're following it because
link |
they understand what it is about it that makes it good.
link |
So that's the world I think that we were on the process of evolving towards, and that
link |
is what got destroyed in the 20th century and has certainly disappeared today.
link |
And I think that's a great tragedy is that we're evolving to a place where people understood
link |
the values that represent, and of course, the danger with tradition is, I mean, well
link |
I agree, right, it's, yeah, it's okay to kill the Jew, right, or it's okay to steal people's
link |
property if there are a certain color of it, or it's okay to enslave, those are all traditions.
link |
And yet, once you stop and say, but what are they based on?
link |
Is this just based on some moral law?
link |
No, it's not, there's something wrong here, we can't achieve happiness and success if
link |
You're talking about reason and tradition, but I think I would love to sort of linger
link |
on the stickiness of humans that you described.
link |
So you kind of said that it's primary, the individuals, it's primary, and that was a
link |
great invention, but to me it's not at all obvious that somehow that the invention that
link |
humans have been practicing for a very long time of the stickiness, of community, of family,
link |
of love, that's not obvious to me, that's not also fundamental to human flourishing and
link |
should be celebrated and protected.
link |
Now, I suppose the argument you're making is when you start to let the state define
link |
what the stickiness, how the stickiness looks between humans, so you're really like the
link |
voluntary aspect, but I just want to sort of, the observation is humans seem to be pretty
link |
happy when they form communities, however you define that.
link |
So romantic partnership, family.
link |
Some communities, people are miserable in other communities, so the nature of the community
link |
We know this, we know that some bondings are not healthy and not good for the individuals
link |
involved and they don't thrive, so I absolutely, I mean, I'm a lover, not a fighter, right?
link |
I'm a huge believer in love, the whole philosophy I think is a love based philosophy.
link |
I fight in order to love, right?
link |
So love is at the core of all of this, and it's a love of life, it's a love of the world
link |
out there and it's a love of other people because they represent a value to you.
link |
So the stickiness is there, it's, you know, my point is A, it should be chosen, it should
link |
be consciously chosen, and this is, put aside the state, forget the state for a minute, forget
link |
coercion, forget all that.
link |
What I would encourage individuals to do, and this is where, you know, I'm not primarily
link |
a political, you know, interested in politics, although I tend to talk most about that, I'm
link |
primarily interested in human beings and how they live in a sense in morality, and what
link |
I would urge individuals to do is to think about their relationships, to choose the best
link |
relationships possible, but to seek out great relationships because other human beings are
link |
an immense value to us.
link |
And you know, when I write, you know, maybe you've encoded this or not, but I write that,
link |
you know, about the trade of principle and trading, you know, it's easy and obvious to
link |
think of it as a materialistic kind of thing.
link |
You know, I get, you know, I do the choice this day and my wife does the choice the other
link |
day and we're trading, but trading is much more subtle than that, and much more, can
link |
be much more spiritual than that.
link |
It's about the trading in emotions, it's about the way one sees each other, it's what one
link |
gets from one another.
link |
I think friendship is a form of trade, now I know that that seems to make it material,
link |
but I don't think it's of trade as a material thing, but friendship is incredibly important
link |
Love is incredibly important in life.
link |
You know, having a group of friends is incredibly important, like all of these are sticky and
link |
How can I try to be eloquent on this?
link |
So if you give people freedom, if you give people, well, not politics, relations, relationships.
link |
So this is interesting because we have an interesting dynamic going on here in terms
link |
It's different and there was an interesting overlaps, but there's a worry, if you look
link |
at human history and you study the lessons of history and you look at modern society,
link |
if you give people freedom in terms of stickiness and human relations and so on, if you not
link |
give people freedom, emphasize freedom as the highest ideal, you start getting more
link |
tender online dating, the stickiness dissolves just like in chemistry.
link |
You start to have a gas versus a liquid, right?
link |
So you have to study what actually happens.
link |
If you emphasize that the stickiness, the bonds of humans is holding you back, the exercise
link |
of voluntary choice is the highest ideal.
link |
The danger of that is for that to be implemented or interpreted in certain kinds of ways by
link |
us flawed humans that are not, I mean, you could say we're perfectly reasonable and rational.
link |
We can think through all of our decisions, but really, I mean, especially when you're
link |
young, you get horny, you make decisions that are suboptimal perhaps.
link |
So the point is you have to look at reality of when you emphasize different things.
link |
So when you talk about what is the ideal life, what is the ideal relations, you have to also
link |
think like, what are you emphasizing?
link |
I think you both agree on what's important, that community can be important, that freedom
link |
is important, but what are you emphasizing and you're really emphasizing the individual
link |
and you're emphasizing your arm, you're emphasizing more of the community, of the family, of the
link |
stickiness of the nation.
link |
Well, look, I don't want to deny the place of the individual.
link |
I think that there really is a very great change in civilization when the books of Moses
link |
announce that the individual is created in the image of God.
link |
That's a step that's as far as we know without precedent before that in history.
link |
And to a very large degree, I mean, one of the unspoken things going on is that Yaron
link |
and I really do agree on all sorts of things, I think in part because we're both Jewish.
link |
You just say Yaron is basically Moses yesterday.
link |
No, I said he was channeling Moses, but that's still in my book, you know, that's still pretty
link |
Oh, that's a compliment.
link |
For me, that's a compliment.
link |
And we'll talk about this a little bit just for the listeners so they know Yaron, amongst
link |
many things, we'll talk about the virtue of nationalism, but you're also a religious
link |
scholar of sorts or at least leverage the Bible for not much, but some of the wisdom
link |
Look, the way that Yaron looks at enlightenment or maybe at Ein Rand, that's the way that
link |
I see the Hebrew scripture and the tradition that comes from it.
link |
It has the same kind of place in my life.
link |
And I just, I don't know how much we want to explore it, but I think that the agreement
link |
that we do have about the positive value of the creative individual, the positive value
link |
of the individual's desire to improve the world, and in my book that means including
link |
his or her desire to improve his family, his tribe, his congregation, his nation, but it
link |
still comes from this kind of, you know, what Yaron calls selfishness, the desire to make
link |
things better for yourself.
link |
And in Hebrew Bible and in Judaism, that just is a positive thing.
link |
Of course, it can be taken too far, but it just is positive.
link |
And it doesn't carry these kinds of, you know, you should turn the other cheek, you should
link |
give away your cloak, you should love your enemy.
link |
These kinds of Christian tropes do not exist in Judaism.
link |
And so it just, I like listening to Yaron's, I do feel like he goes too far on various
link |
things, but I also hear, you know, underneath that I can sort of, you know, hear the Jewish
link |
current and the resistance to, you know, to things that, about Christianity, the Jews
link |
Can I ask you a question there?
link |
Can you make an argument for turning the other cheek?
link |
I tend to, I guess you would equate that with altruism.
link |
It's unjust to turn the other cheek.
link |
You don't give yourself if you're turning the other cheek.
link |
It's a lack of love, lack of self respect.
link |
Well, let me push back on that because I like turning the other cheek, especially on Twitter.
link |
I like, I like block the offender on Twitter.
link |
No, what, so Twitter aside is more like you're, you're investing in the long term version
link |
of yourself versus the short term.
link |
So that's the way I think about it is like the energy you put onto the world, the turning
link |
other cheek philosophy allows you to walk through the fire gracefully.
link |
I mean, perhaps you would reframe that as not a, then that that's not being altruistic
link |
or whatever, but there is something pragmatic about that kind of approach to life.
link |
Disciplining yourself so that you become a better version of yourself.
link |
I mean, not only do we agree, but I think every religious and philosophical tradition
link |
probably has a version of that, even Kant, who we joined together in finding to be terrible.
link |
Even Kant makes that distinction between the short term interest and the long term interest.
link |
So I think that's universal.
link |
I don't know of anybody who's really disagreeing about that.
link |
The thing that we were talking about a couple of minutes ago before we got onto this tangent
link |
is the relationship between the individual who is in the image of God and is of value
link |
Nevertheless, there's this question about what is good for that person and also what
link |
I know that those are exactly the same things, but they're both certainly relevant and important.
link |
And I feel like, I mean, I think we're beginning to uncover this empirical disagreement about
link |
what it is that's good for the individual and what it is that makes him happy.
link |
And I'll go back to something I raised in the debate, which is this theory of Durkheim
link |
that now has been popularized by Jordan Peterson, but Durkheim argues that he's writing a book
link |
He's trying to understand what brings individuals to suicide.
link |
And he coins this term, anomi, lack of law.
link |
And the argument is that individuals basically are healthy and happy when they find their
link |
place in a hierarchy.
link |
Within a loyalty group in a certain place in a hierarchy, they compete and struggle in
link |
order to rise in the hierarchy, but they know where they are.
link |
They know who they are.
link |
The kids today like to say they know what their identity is because they associate themselves.
link |
Their self expands to take on the leadership, the different layers, the past and the future
link |
of this particular hierarchy.
link |
And I completely agree with you, Iran, that some of these hierarchies are pernicious and
link |
oppressive and terrible, and some of them are better.
link |
What we might disagree about is that you can find human beings who are capable of becoming
link |
healthy and happy off by themselves without participating in this kind of structure.
link |
The minute that you accept, if you accept, that this is empirical reality about human
link |
beings, it's an iron law.
link |
You can't do anything.
link |
You can tell human beings that they can be free of all constraints, all you want, and
link |
you can get them to do things that, as you say, dissolve their place.
link |
They can have contempt for hierarchies.
link |
They can say, I'm not going to serve the man.
link |
I'm just going to burn them all down.
link |
You can get kids to say all of these things.
link |
You can get them either to be Marxists who are actively trying to overthrow and destroy
link |
the existing hierarchies, or you can make them some kind of liberal where they basically
link |
pretend the hierarchies don't exist.
link |
They just act like they're not there.
link |
In both cases, and it's not a coincidence that that's what universities teach, is your
link |
choice is either Marxist revolution or liberal ignoring of the hierarchies.
link |
In both cases, what you've done is you've eliminated the possibility that the young
link |
person will be able to find his or her place in a way that allows them to grow and exercise
link |
their love, their drive, their creativity in order to advance something constructive.
link |
You've eliminated it, and you've put the burden on them, a kind of a Nietzschean burden to
link |
just be the fountain of all values yourself, which maybe some people can do it, but almost
link |
And I think that's empirically true.
link |
And so I think by telling them about their freedom rather than telling them about the
link |
need to join into some traditionalist hierarchy that can be good and healthy for them, I think
link |
we're destroying them.
link |
I think we're destroying this generation, and the last one, and the next.
link |
Jaron is the burden of freedom, destroying mankind.
link |
I mean, how many people are indeed free?
link |
Look, the problem is that we're caught up on political concepts, and we're moving
link |
into ethical issues.
link |
And I don't think it's right to tell people, you're free, go do whatever the hell you want.
link |
Just use your emotions, just go where you want to go in the spur of the moment.
link |
Think short term, don't think long term, or don't think, why think?
link |
One has to provide moral guidance, and morality here is crucial and crucially important.
link |
And part of taking responsibility for your own life is establishing a moral framework
link |
for your life, and what does it mean to live a good life?
link |
I mean, that's much more important in a sense of a question, and it is my belief that people
link |
They can find and choose the values necessary to achieve a good life, but they need guidance.
link |
They need guidance.
link |
This is why religion evolved in my view, because people need guidance.
link |
So I had called religion a primitive form of philosophy.
link |
It was the original philosophy that provided people with some guidance about what to do
link |
and what not to do.
link |
And secular philosophy is supposed to do the same, and the problem is that I think religion
link |
and 99% of secular philosophy give people bad advice about what to do, and therefore
link |
they do bad stuff, and sometimes because when they do good stuff, it gets reinforced that
link |
we survive in spite of that, but ideas like Kant and Hegel and Marx and so on give young
link |
people awful advice about how to live and what to do, and as a consequence, really bad
link |
And the world in which we exist today, which we agree, there are a lot of pathologies to
link |
There are a lot of bad stuff going on.
link |
In my view, it's going the wrong way, in my view, a product of a set of ideas.
link |
On the one hand, I think Christian ideas, on the other hand, I think secular philosophical
link |
ideas that have driven this country and the world more generally in a really, really bad
link |
And this is why I do what I do, because I think at the core of it, the only way to
link |
change it is not to impose a new set of ideas from the top, because I worry about who's
link |
going to be doing the imposition, plus I don't believe you can force people to be good.
link |
It's to challenge the ideas, it's to question the ideas, it's to present an alternative
link |
view of morality, an alternative set of moral principles, and ultimately an alternative
link |
view of political principles.
link |
But it has to start with morality.
link |
If you don't, and my morality is centered on the individual and what the individual should
link |
do with his life in order to attain a good life.
link |
I believe that leads to happiness, but the good life, that's why it's good, right?
link |
The goal is survival and thriving and flourishing and happiness ultimately.
link |
But politics is a servant of that in the end.
link |
It's not an end in itself.
link |
So the real issue is, you asked before, what is the value of relationship?
link |
There's an almost value in relationship, because we get values from other people.
link |
We don't produce all our values.
link |
We don't produce all our spiritual values.
link |
And we don't produce all our material values.
link |
Other people, on a massive benefit to us, because they produce values, we can't, there's
link |
a massive division of labor in terms of values, not just in economics, but also in philosophy
link |
It's why we have teachers, it's why we have moral teachers, moral teachers are important
link |
to help guide us towards a good life, not all of us are philosophers.
link |
But what I do demand, if you will, of individuals, this is where I put a burden on people, right?
link |
Understand what you're doing, right?
link |
You know, don't embrace a moral teaching because it was tradition.
link |
Don't embrace a moral teaching because your parents embraced it.
link |
Don't embrace a moral teaching just because your teachers are teaching it.
link |
Embrace it because you embrace it.
link |
You might be wrong.
link |
You might embrace the wrong one, but take moral responsibility.
link |
Take responsibility over your life by evaluating, testing, challenging what you have received
link |
and choosing what you're going to pursue.
link |
And I acknowledge empirically that most people don't do that, and this is why intellectual
link |
leadership is so important.
link |
This is why you want to get, you want the voices in a culture to be good voices so that
link |
those people who don't think for themselves land up being followers, but they end up being
link |
followers of somebody good versus followers of somebody bad.
link |
But for the thinkers in the world out there, who I think are the people who count, who
link |
the people who shape society, boy.
link |
No, no, shape society.
link |
Not count in a sense that you can dismiss the lives of others because obviously I'm
link |
anti coercion and anti violence.
link |
They sound like Plato.
link |
I don't want to sound like Plato, but in a sense that they're the ones who end up shaping
link |
They're the ones who end up shaping how the world is.
link |
I want those people to make choices about their values and not to just accept them based
link |
on tradition or based on the commandment or based on where they happen to grow up.
link |
And in that sense, again, I do, and this is an interesting point where we disagree, but
link |
I'm not exactly sure what your own position is.
link |
I do believe in universal values.
link |
That is, there are things that are good and there are things that are evil.
link |
And I think we'd agree on that and there are systems.
link |
We agree that communism and fascism are evil.
link |
Well, I think we should be able to agree that some political systems are good.
link |
And maybe there's this middle ground where we both think that they're not particularly
link |
bad but not particularly good and you all might think they're better than I think they
link |
But if we can agree, and this is good and this is evil, then the systems that tend towards
link |
the good are good and the systems that tend towards evil are evil.
link |
But that's universal.
link |
I look at places like South Korea, Japan, Asia, cultures that are very, very different
link |
in many respects in the West.
link |
And yet when they adopt certain Western ideas about freedom, about liberty, about individualism,
link |
I mean, the Japanese constitution because MacArthur forced it in there, has the pursuit
link |
of happiness in the constitution.
link |
Not because they chose it because he put it in there, but they to some extent adopted
link |
that and they're successful, they're successful places today.
link |
Those societies in Asia that didn't adopt these values are not successful societies
link |
Japan has a birth rate of, what is it, 1.1, 1.2 children per woman.
link |
I mean, look, there are some things, there are some places where you give people freedom.
link |
This is also biblical.
link |
The idea that everyone did what's right in his own eyes.
link |
This is a refrain in the book of Judges.
link |
And the Bible is not an anti freedom book.
link |
I mean, there's many, many, look, I don't, no, we're not fine.
link |
Oh, he's going to guide us.
link |
Okay, look, just as an asterisk, I'm not asking you because the Bible is such a great authoritarian
link |
It's not that at all, in my view, if you want to know where this, what you call the sanctity
link |
of property, where does the sanctity of property comes from?
link |
It comes from the Ten Commandments, it comes from Moses saying, I haven't taken anything
link |
It comes from Samuel saying, I haven't taken anything from anyone.
link |
It's the condemnation of Chav, of the unjust kings who steal the property of their subjects.
link |
So, property and freedom, I think there's great basis for it in the Bible.
link |
But right now, I'm focusing on this other question, which is, what happens when everyone
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does what's right in his own eyes?
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That's the book of Judges, and that's this civil war, moral corruption, theft, idolatry,
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murder, rape, I mean, that's what happens when everyone does whatever's right in his
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Well, no, that's what it says in the text, I'm not okay.
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So, when I look at, you're right, there are things that I think are objectively true.
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I think it's really hard to get people to agree to them, almost impossible.
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But when I look at a country which is approaching one birth per woman, in other words, half
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of the minimum necessary for replacement.
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You can say whatever you want, whatever you want about immigration, we can have that discussion.
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But the point is that when your values are such that you're not even capable of doing
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the most basic techniques that human beings need in order to be able to propagate themselves
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and their values and the way they see things, then, look, you're finished, you can't say
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So, if I implied that Japan is an ideal society, I take that back.
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No, I just think we're in trouble, and we're in trouble.
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It's his show, man.
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We enter into his hierarchy.
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We should talk about hierarchy.
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Just to clarify, how do you explain the situation in Japan?
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Is it the decrease in value in family, like some of them?
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Just expand on that.
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How do you explain that situation?
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You're saying that that society is in trouble in a certain way.
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Can you describe the nature of that trouble?
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I'm saying that when the individual is part of a social group, this can be a family, a
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congregation, a community, a tribe, a nation, when the individual feels that the things
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that are happening to the society are things that are happening to him or to her.
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And I want to emphasize this is not the standard view of collectivism that Mussolini will say,
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the glory of the individual is in totally immersing himself in the organic whole.
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That's not what I'm saying.
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I'm saying that human beings have and are both.
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They enter into a society to which they are loyal and they compete with one another in
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the terms that that society allows competition, but also sometimes by bending the rules and
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by shaping them and by changing them.
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What you see in many societies, certainly throughout the liberal West, but also in countries
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that have been affected by the liberal West, by industrialization and ideas of individualism,
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what you see is a collapse of a willingness of the individual to look at what is needed
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by the whole and to make choices that are, as Jorn would call them selfish, because the
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purpose of them is self expression, competition, self assertion, moving up in the hierarchy,
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achieving honor or wealth in order to do those things.
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But when you stop being able to look at the framework of a particular society and identify
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with it, you cease to understand what it is that you need to do.
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Not every single person, but I'm talking about society wide.
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So there are few individuals who are just going to have a fantastic time and live the
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kind of life that Jorn is describing.
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And the great majority, they stop being willing to take risks.
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They stop being willing to get married.
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They stop being willing to have children.
link |
They stop being willing to start companies.
link |
They stop being willing to put themselves out to do great things because the guide rails
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that told them what kinds of things and the social feedback that honored them when they
link |
did things like getting married and having children, they've been crushed.
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And what have they been crushed by?
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They've been crushed by the false view that if you tell the individual, be free, make all
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your own decisions, that they will then be free and make all their own decisions.
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They stop being human.
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So do you want to respond to that?
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So I don't think anybody should have children.
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If the goal, there's a good, there's a good tweet clip that you can make, I think anybody
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should have children for the goal of perpetuating their nation or expanding their society or
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for some, I think they'd make horrible parents if that was the goal, the purpose of doing
link |
I think people should have children because they want to embrace that challenge, that
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beauty, that experience, that amazing, very, very hard, very, very difficult experience
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It's about being able to project a long term, but also being able to enjoy and love the
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creation of another human being, that process of creation.
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It is a beautiful, self interested thing.
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And by the way, not everybody should have children.
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I think way too many people have children.
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There's some awful parents out there that I wish would stop.
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I mean, life is precious and life of suffering is sad.
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It's sad to see people suffer and a lot of people are born into situations and are born
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into parents that destroy their capacity to ever live a good life and that's a tragic
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So I don't measure the health of a society in how many children they're having or a health
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of a couple of whether they have children or not.
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Those are individual choices.
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Some people make a choice not to have children, which is completely rational and consistent
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with their values.
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Now when you look at a society overall, I do think having children and not having children
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is a reflection of something.
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I think it's a reflection of a certain optimism about the future.
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I think it's a reflection of thinking long term versus short term.
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I think a short term society doesn't have children.
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People don't have children there because children are long term investment.
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They require real planning and real effort and real thinking about the long term.
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But those are moral issues.
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And again, we're confusing or mixing.
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When I say Japan, look how well Japan has done.
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I don't mean the specific Japanese people and how many kids they're having and what
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kind of life they're having in terms of these kind of particulars.
link |
But think about the alternatives Japan faces if you look around the options that they face.
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They tried empire.
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They tried nationalistic empire.
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It didn't turn out too well for them or anybody who they interacted with.
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They could have become North Korea.
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We know how that turned out.
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We know what that is.
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They could have been Cambodia if you've ever been to Cambodia and seen the kind of poverty.
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And yes, maybe Cambodia has lots of children.
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And God, I'd rather be in Japan any day than have children in the kind of poverty and horrific
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circumstances they have.
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But in the context of the available regimes that were possible, post World War II for
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the Japanese to embrace, they embraced one that generally led to prosperity, to freedom,
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to individuals pursuing values.
link |
Not perfectly because they didn't implement the philosophical foundation, the moral foundation
link |
that I would like them to have.
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It's still being impacted by Kantian, Hegelian, whatever philosophy that's out there in the
link |
West that's destroying the better parts.
link |
So you give people freedom.
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Now what do they do with it?
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And if they have a bad philosophy, they're going to do bad things with that freedom.
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You tell people to do whatever they choose to do.
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But if they have bad ideas, they will choose to do bad things.
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So it is true that the primacy of morality and the primacy of philosophy has to be recognized.
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It's not the primacy of politics.
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And indeed, you don't get free societies unless you have some elements of decent philosophy.
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But you can get free societies with a rotten philosophy, but they don't stay free for very
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I don't understand how can it be a decent philosophy if it doesn't care about posterity?
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If you're willing to say, I'm offering guidance, I think you should live as a trader.
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All relationships should be voluntary.
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Those are interesting things.
link |
But the moment that it comes to posterity, to the future, to there being a future, let's
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say that there were a society that lived the way in general, according to your view.
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Let's say there was such a society.
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How can you not care whether that society is capable of passing it on to the next generation
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How can you pass it on to the next generation through ideas and not through having children,
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having children is an individual choice that some people are going to make and some people
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But they're fundamental that preserves the good life.
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What does that even mean if every generation from now on, your society that was good at
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a certain point, has half as many people in it, it's going to very quickly, it's just
link |
going to be overrun.
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What do you mean overrun by whom?
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Are we just totally ahistorical if you're the Spartans?
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And you have all of these warrior values, but you stop having children, you get overrun,
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Well, in the case of Sparta, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
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That's not my point.
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You have to have the ability to have enough children to create enough wealth and enough
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power, enough strength.
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Who makes these conclusions and decisions about how many you make it as an individual
link |
and you decide that you go to church?
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We're not talking about what kind of intellectual, cultural, religious inheritance you give
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And those are the ideas that I give my children.
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And those ideas are going to perpetuate because they're good ideas.
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If they're bad ideas.
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No, they're not going to perpetuate.
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They can't be good ideas if they don't produce future generations.
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What are you talking about?
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Why would they not produce future generations?
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I mean, as I said.
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Because look at every liberal society on earth is in a democratic collapse.
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There's not a single liberal society on earth that I'm willing to defend because they're
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So they've not accepted my ideas.
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So they have a semblance of a political system that is a little bit like what I would
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like far from what I would I know, but they certainly don't have a moral foundation.
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I believe that people who have the right moral foundation, most of them, not all of them,
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but most of them will have children.
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Most of them will continue into the future.
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Most of them will fight for a future, but not because they care what happens in 200
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years, but because they care about their lifetime and part of having fun and enjoying one's
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lifetime is having kids is projecting into the future.
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Are you really going to tell me that people have children because it's fun?
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They're fun when they're four years old.
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They're not fun when they're when they're 15.
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No, when they're 15, they're not fun.
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No, they're just not fun.
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Look, you don't do this.
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I'm learning so much today.
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You don't do you don't do this for fun.
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You do marriage also.
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You don't do for fun.
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There are times that are fun and there are times that are not fun.
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Look, it's not exactly the right way, but you certainly do it for you do it for happiness.
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You do it for fulfillment.
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You do it as a challenge.
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You do it for making for making your life better, for making your life interesting, for
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making your life challenging, for embracing, you know, part of it is fun, part of it is
link |
hard work, but you do it because it's it makes your life a better life.
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It's very interesting.
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So empirically speaking, if you dissolve the cultural backbone where everybody comes up
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like the background, the moral ideas that everybody is raised with, if you dissolve
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that and if you truly emphasize the individual, I think Yoram is saying it's going to naturally
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lead to the dissolution of marriage and all of these concepts.
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So you're not so like everything or basically saying you're not going to choose some of
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You're not you're going to more and more choose the short term optimization versus the long
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term optimization beyond your own life like posterity.
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So so I don't think about posterity.
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I don't know what posterity means, right?
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I can project into my children's life.
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Maybe when I have grandchildren, the grandchildren, but it ends there.
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I can't project 300 years in the future.
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It's ridiculous to try to think about 300 years into the future.
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Things change so much and that's the founding fathers.
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That's the conservative founding fathers.
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Well, no, I don't think I think they set up a system.
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I think the whole idea was to set up a system that was self perpetuating that would it would
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if people lived up to it, right, no, no, would perpetuate the no systems are self perpetuating
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things rise and fall and it's they don't necessarily I don't believe in that.
link |
Let me speak to your heart for a second.
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The great the great individuals in societies are the people who have seen the decline understood
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it and provided resources in order to redirect and bring it back up.
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You can't agree to that.
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I don't see it that way at all.
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Yes, I want people out there to rebel against conventional morality.
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I think conventional morality is destructive to their own lives and broadly to posterity
link |
because I think it's unsustainable.
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And this goes to, I think, conventional morality.
link |
Christian morality is a morality that's been secularized through Christian lens.
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And I think it's destructive, but I don't want them to dump that and not replace it
link |
with something I want.
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And I think it's necessary and essential for people to have a moral code and to have
link |
a moral core core morality is a set of guidelines to live your life.
link |
It is a set of values that to guide you to help you identify what is good for you, what
link |
Hold on a second, you're saying central to this morality that people should have is
link |
You're not saying other things.
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You're basically saying reason will arrive a lot of things.
link |
Why are you so sure that reason is so important?
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There's nothing else.
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No, hold on a second, but it seems like obvious to you.
link |
So first of all, humans have limited cognitive capacity.
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So even to assume the reason can actually function that well from an artificial intelligence
link |
researcher perspective.
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There's a whole discussion about whether there is such a thing as artificial intelligence,
link |
whether that is what it is.
link |
But see, there's a thing.
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I mean, you're very confident about this particular thing, but not about other aspects of human
link |
nature that seems to be obviously present.
link |
So yes, almost human relations, love, connection between us.
link |
So it's very possible to argue that all of the accomplishments of reason would not exist
link |
without the connection of other humans.
link |
But that's, of course, that's true.
link |
It's not obvious though.
link |
It's possible that reason is a property of the collective of multiple people interacting
link |
When you look at the greatest inventions of human history, some people tell that story
link |
by individual inventors.
link |
You could argue that's true.
link |
Some people say that it's a bunch of people in a room together.
link |
The idea is bubbling.
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And if you're saying individual is primary and they have the full power and the capacity
link |
to make choices, I don't know if that's necessarily obvious.
link |
So there's a straw manning going on here of my position, right?
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My favorite thing to do.
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You don't do it and you do it more politely than anybody else I know when you do it.
link |
Of course, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
link |
Of course, invention and science is collaborative, not always, not 100%, Newton stood on the
link |
shoulders of giants.
link |
I don't know how collaborative he was.
link |
He wasn't exactly known as a bubbling up and testing ideas out with other people.
link |
But this is a metaphysical fact.
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You can't eat for me.
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There's no collective stomach.
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You can't eat for me.
link |
You know, you can provide me with food, but I need to do the eating.
link |
You can't think for me.
link |
You can help stimulate my thought.
link |
You can challenge my thinking.
link |
You can add to it.
link |
But in the end of the day, only I can either do my thinking or not do my thinking, but
link |
But you can think all by yourself alone.
link |
What does that mean all by yourself, right?
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Can I think on a desert island?
link |
Yes, I can think on a desert island.
link |
Can I think as big and as broad and as deep as I can in Aristotle's Lyceum?
link |
I'm a much better thinker in Aristotle's Lyceum or in any kind of situation like this
link |
where you're going to challenge me and I have to come back and I have to think deeply
link |
about what it is you said and why I'm not communicating very effectively and why you're
link |
not understanding me.
link |
Of course, now you're causing me to think much more deeply and to challenge me.
link |
But it's still true that I have to think.
link |
And if I don't think for myself, who's going to think for me, right?
link |
So this is why I'm not a philosopher.
link |
I'm certainly not an original thinker in that sense.
link |
I recognize the fact that they're geniuses that are much smarter than me, whether it's
link |
Aristotle or Iron Rand or people that inspire me.
link |
I study their work.
link |
I try to understand it to the best of my ability.
link |
But I don't take it as gospel.
link |
I take it as this is something I need to figure out.
link |
I need to learn it.
link |
I need to understand it because it's good for my life.
link |
It's important to me.
link |
But I have to do the thinking.
link |
It'll be Iron Rand's.
link |
But it won't be mine unless I've done the thinking to integrate it into my soul, into
link |
my consciousness, into my mind.
link |
But it's still true that I have to think for myself, not on a desert island.
link |
And I now regret ever using a desert island in the book as an example because...
link |
We've achieved something there.
link |
There is progress.
link |
We're moving as progress towards truth is taking place.
link |
And clearly it was misunderstood, I didn't make myself clear enough in the book in terms
link |
But I do not advocate for thinking alone in a dark room, not engaging with reality,
link |
not studying history, not knowing about the world, or on a desert island not interacting
link |
with other collectivists.
link |
No, I'm a traitor.
link |
So I enjoy what we're doing right now because you're challenging me.
link |
You make me a better thinker.
link |
It's interesting, you know, the fact that a lot of people are going to watch this, plays
link |
But I would probably enjoy engaging with you in conversation.
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It's not even recording.
link |
Yeah, there you go.
link |
I would enjoy engaging with you, with your own in conversation, even if it wasn't being
link |
recorded, and even if it was because, you know, that kind of conversation makes me better.
link |
There's some people who I wouldn't.
link |
There's some people who make it worse, right, that you want to walk away from the conversation
link |
because they're harmful to you.
link |
And this is where choice comes in.
link |
And I want to be able to choose who I engage with.
link |
I don't always have that choice because, as a public intellectual, you go in front of
link |
audiences, you don't always choose who it is.
link |
But you want to choose who you engage with and who you don't.
link |
You want to choose the forum in which you engage and how you engage.
link |
And the standard for me is reason.
link |
There is no other standard.
link |
So you ask the deep question to start off.
link |
Why reason, right?
link |
Because that's where the values come from.
link |
That's the only tool we have to discover truth.
link |
Yes, you know, reason is something that it doesn't guarantee truth.
link |
It doesn't guarantee the world is right.
link |
But it's all we have.
link |
It's the tool in which we evaluate the world around us, and we come to conclusions about
link |
There just isn't other tool, emotions.
link |
Emotions are not tools of cognition.
link |
Consciousness is a tool, emotion, like love.
link |
All of these things are ways to experience the world to say that reason is the best tool.
link |
But there's a difference between experiencing the world and evaluating the world in terms
link |
of what is truth or what is not.
link |
As a scientist, I appreciate the value of reason.
link |
And emotions and love are consequences.
link |
They're not primary.
link |
Emotions are consequences of conclusions you've come to.
link |
Your emotions will change very quickly, relatively speaking, when your evaluations of a situation
link |
Even people can see exactly the same scene and have completely different emotions because
link |
they're bringing different value systems and they're bringing different thoughts to the
link |
Maybe love is primary.
link |
Love is the same thing.
link |
You can fall out of love with somebody.
link |
Because you learn something new because you've discovered something new about the person.
link |
Now you don't love them anymore.
link |
It's the wrong part.
link |
It has to bring up love.
link |
We'll talk forever about it.
link |
You wrote the book, The Virtue of Nationalism, contrasting nation states with empires and
link |
with global governance like United Nations and so on.
link |
So you argue that nationalism uniquely provides the quote, the collective right of a free
link |
people to rule themselves.
link |
So continuing our conversation, why is this particular collection of humans, we call
link |
a nation, a uniquely powerful way to preserve the freedom of the people, to have people
link |
Before I say anything on the subject, I should emphasize that I'm not a rationalist.
link |
I'm an empiricist and I'm offering what I think is a valid observation of human history.
link |
I don't have some kind of deductive framework for proving that the nation is the best.
link |
And empirically, we know something about the way systems of national states work and about
link |
the way empires work and the way tribal societies work.
link |
What we don't know is, is it possible to invent something else or there's a lot of things
link |
we don't know here.
link |
So with the caveat that I'm making an empirical observation, the basic argument is human beings
link |
form collectives naturally, loyalty groups.
link |
And for most of human history and prehistory, as far as we know, human beings lived in tribal
link |
societies, tribal societies or societies in which there's constant friction and constant
link |
warfare among very small groups, among families and clans.
link |
And we reach a turning point in human history with the invention of large scale agriculture,
link |
which allows the creation of vast wealth.
link |
It allows the establishment of standing armies instead of militias.
link |
You know, Sargon of Akkad says, I can pay 5,000 men to do nothing other than to drill
link |
in the arts of war.
link |
And then I'm going to send them out to conquer the neighboring city states.
link |
And there you have empire, the Bible, which is the source of our image, our conception
link |
of a world of independent nations that are not constantly trying to conquer one another.
link |
The source of that is the Bible and the biblical world is one in which Israel and various other
link |
small nations are trying to fight for their independence against world empires, against
link |
empires Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, which aspire to rule the world.
link |
My claim is fundamentally twofold.
link |
It's moral that whenever you conquer a foreign nation, you're murdering and you're stealing,
link |
you're destroying, as your own would say, you're using force to cause people to submit.
link |
So there is something in the prophets that rebels against this ongoing atrocity and carnage
link |
of trying to take over the whole world.
link |
And there's a prudential practical argument, which is that the world is governed best when
link |
there are multiple nations, when they're free to experiment and chart their own courses.
link |
That means they have their own root to God, they have their own moralities, they have
link |
their own forms of economy and government.
link |
And what tends to happen in history is that when something is successful, when something
link |
looks like, when people, a different nation looks at it and say, wow, those people are,
link |
they're flourishing, they're succeeding, then it's imitated.
link |
And in the way that the Dutch invented the stock market, and the English said, look,
link |
that makes them powerful, so we'll adopt it.
link |
So there's endless examples of that.
link |
So that's the argument for it.
link |
The argument is, since we don't know a priori deductively from self evident principles,
link |
what is best, it's best to have a world in which people are trying different things.
link |
So quick question, because the word nationalism sometimes is presented in negative light in
link |
connection to the nationalism of Nazi Germany, for example.
link |
So you're looking empirically at a world of nations that respect each other.
link |
I use the word nationalism the way that I inherited it in my tradition, which is, it's
link |
a principled standpoint that says that the world is governed best when many nations are
link |
able to be independent and chart their own course.
link |
As far as the Nazis, Hitler's an imperialist.
link |
He hated nation states.
link |
His whole theory, if you pick up, I don't recommend doing this.
link |
I'm actually reading it right now, mind comfortable.
link |
If you do read mind comfortable, then you'll see that he says explicitly that the goal
link |
is for Germany to be the Lord of the Earth and mistress of the globe.
link |
And he detests the idea of the independent nation state because he sees it as weak and
link |
He might as well have said it's Jewish.
link |
So let me ask, from the individual perspective, for nationalism, what do you mean?
link |
Make of the value of the love of country.
link |
The reason I connect that, so I personally, what would you say, a patriot, I love the
link |
love of country or I am, or how should, in a Randian way, I enjoy, I in a self interest
link |
Love is a good word.
link |
Well, I love a lot of things, but I'm saying this particular love is a little bit contentious,
link |
which is loving your country.
link |
That's an interesting love that some people are a little uncomfortable with.
link |
Even when, especially when that love, I grew up in the Soviet Union to say, you just love
link |
It represents a certain thing to you and it's not, you don't think like philosophically,
link |
like I was marching around with like marks under my arm or something like that.
link |
It's just loving community at the level of nation.
link |
That's very interesting.
link |
I don't know if that's an artifact of the past that we're going to have to strip away.
link |
I don't know if I was just raised in that kind of community, but I appreciate that.
link |
I guess the thing I'm torn about is that love of country that I have in my heart, that
link |
I now love America and I consider myself an American.
link |
That would have easily, if I was born earlier, been used by Stalin and I would have proudly
link |
died on the battlefield.
link |
I would have proudly died if I was in Nazi Germany as a German and I would proudly dies
link |
Are you sure about these things?
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That's interesting.
link |
No, I think about this a lot.
link |
It's interesting to run a radical counterfactual and be sure of the answer.
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I mean, not sure, but I think about this a lot because obviously I'm really interested
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in history and I put my, this is the way I think about most situations as I empathize.
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I really tried to do hard work of placing myself in that moment and thinking through
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I'm just, okay, I just know myself psychologically what I'm susceptible to.
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That's a negative phrase it, but what I would love doing and so I'm just saying, my question
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is the love of nation, a useful or a powerful moral philosophy perspective, a good thing.
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I think it is a good thing, but before we ask whether it's a good thing, I think it's
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worth asking whether there's any way to live without it.
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The idea of national independence of a world or a continent which politically is governed
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by multiple independent national states.
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That is a political theory.
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Somebody came up with that in the Bible or elsewhere.
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Someone came up with this idea and sold it and a lot of people like it, but the nation
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is not an invention.
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Every place in human history that we have any record of, there are nations.
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The fact of people creating families, families creating an alliance of clans, clans creating
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alliances of tribes, tribes creating alliances and alliances that becomes the nation.
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We see that everywhere in human history, everywhere we look and the love of a group
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of tribes that have come together in order to fight opponents that are trying to destroy
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your way of life and steal your land and harm your women and children.
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The love of the leadership that brings it together here, this is a George Washington
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type figure or an Alfred the Great type figure or Saul, the biblical Saul.
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He who has the wisdom, the daring to unite the tribes, overcome their internal mutual
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hatreds and grievances and rally them around a set of ideas, a language, a tradition, an
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identity as people say today.
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That love is eradicable from human beings.
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Maybe we'll have brave new world people will take drugs in order to get rid of it.
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The problem is that could be leveraged by authoritarian regime.
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Yes, but that's true of everything.
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You can have children and you can teach them to be evil.
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You can make a lot of money, you can use it for evil.
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You can have a gun for self defense, but you can use it for evil.
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Come on, that's human, that's being human.
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You guys are making love this primary, which I don't think it is.
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There are lots of people in the world who don't love their nation because their nation
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is not worth loving.
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That is, love is conditional, it's not unconditional.
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Love is conditioned on the value that's presented to you.
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I lived through this experience in my own life.
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I grew up in Israel at a time of everything was geared towards patriotism and the state.
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I would say I was trained when I saw a grenade to jump on it because that was every song
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and every story and everything was about the state is everything and you should sacrifice.
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You know, when the flag went up, I got teary eyed.
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I bought into it completely and at some point I rejected that and I changed and I changed
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my alliance and I rejected my love of Israel.
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It's not that I don't love it anymore, but it's certainly not my top love and I'm certainly
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not looking for the grenade to jump on and I'm volunteering to go fight the war there.
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I fell in love from a distance with the idea of America.
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I love the idea of America more than I love America and I could see myself falling out
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of love with America given where it's heading.
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It's not automatic.
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It's conditioned on what it is that it represents and what value it represents for me.
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I think that's always the case with love.
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It's not true that children have to love their parents.
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That's the ideal and hopefully most children love their parents because some children fall
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out of love with their parents because their parents don't deserve their love.
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And the same with the other way around.
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I think parents are capable of not loving their children.
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So love is a conditional thing.
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It's not automatic.
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But let me point out an agreement with you.
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Let me say something about an agreement.
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You're trying to bribe me with an agreement to soften the blow, right?
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Mostly I like to talk to you around about his ideas and I don't want to talk about
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But I want to say something.
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Just one thing about Ayn Rand.
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All my kids read Ayn Rand's books.
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My father read The Fountainhead.
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We know Ayn Rand and I'll tell you it is incredibly difficult reading for me.
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It's painful to read.
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Why is it painful?
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Not because I disagree with the view of trading and business and the creativity of it and
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I mean, that stuff moves me and I do admire it.
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But to read a book that's a thousand pages long in which nobody is having children.
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Nobody is having a stable marriage.
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No one is running an admirable government that's fighting for a just cause anywhere, anywhere.
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I feel like it's focusing on one aspect of what it is to be human and to flourish.
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Everything else is just erased and thrown out as though it's just not part of reality.
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And I'm scared, I'm scared of what happens to teenagers who hormonally are in any case.
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No, that's their program to pull away from their parents and experiment with things.
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They're biologically programmed to do that.
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And you give them a book which says, look, you don't have to have a family.
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You don't have to raise children.
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You don't have to have a country.
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You don't have to fight for anything.
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All you have to do is assert yourself in trade.
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I think it's destructive because it's not realistic.
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It's just not real.
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But I got none of that from Mindrend.
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I got none of that from Mindrend.
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The books were not about a family.
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You could write a book in an Iron Man style about where people have a family.
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But the goal, the purpose, it's a novel.
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It's a novel which is delimited with a particular story.
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There's one family in Gold's Gulch, and there's a little passage about raising children and
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the value of that, because it's not core to what she is writing about.
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But that doesn't exclude it.
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When I read it, I read it at Leshrug when I was 16, and I read it over the years several
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It never occurred to me, oh, Iron Man's anti family, I shouldn't have a family.
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That thought never came into my mind.
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I always wanted to have children.
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I continued to want to have children.
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I thought of it a little differently.
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I thought of how I would find a partner a little bit differently.
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I thought about what I would look for in a partner differently, but not that I wouldn't
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want to get married.
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One question I have is what effect it has on society outside of you.
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For example, you mentioned love should be conditional.
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Whether you like it or not, it is.
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You might pretend that it isn't, but it's always conditional.
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Let me try to say something and see if it makes any sense.
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Could there be things that are true, like love is conditional, as always conditional,
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that if you say it often, it has a negative effect on society?
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For example, maybe I'm just a romantic, but good luck saying love is conditional to a
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You could, I would argue, en masse that would deteriorate the quality of relationships.
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If you remind the partner of that truth that is universal, I mean, okay, maybe it's just
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I'll just speak to myself.
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It's like there is a certain romantic notion of unconditional love.
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It's part of why you have so many destructive marriages.
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So you say that's a problem.
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Yes, it's a real problem because, yes, you all talked about honoring your spouse and
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there's a real truth there and I respect that.
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Yes, you have to do certain things.
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Love is not, you marry somebody and there's a real attitude out there in the culture.
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You marry somebody and okay, now we're just going to cruise.
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It's just Hollywood, that's the Hollywood marriage.
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Like all values, it's work.
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It's something you have to reignite every day.
link |
You have to, the challenges, the real disagreements, the things you fight about, you disagree about.
link |
And there's real, if it's a value, you work it out.
link |
You struggle through it.
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And sometimes you struggle through it and you come to a conclusion that this is not
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going to work and you dissolve a marriage and I'm all for dissolving after really, really
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fighting for it because if it's an important value and if you fell in love with this person
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for a reason, then that's something worth fighting for.
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I have a feeling that Hollywood goes the other way, but it's not this cruising along and
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everything is easy, no human relationship is like that, not friendship, not love, not
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raising children, not being a child, they require work and they require thinking and
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they require creating the conditions to thrive and that's the sense in which it's conditional.
link |
You have to work at it and it's very easy not to do the work and it's very easy to drift
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away and I think most people don't do the work, most people take it and generally in
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life, the only place people seem to work is at work and then they take the rest of their
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life as I'm going to cruise.
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And yet every aspect of your life, the art you choose, the friends you choose, the lovers
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you choose, all require real thinking and real work to be successful at them.
link |
None of them are just there because there is no such thing as just the intrinsic.
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Right, I agree with all of that.
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I was going to say before that the rabbis have this sort of shocking expression, the
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pain of raising children.
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And I find when I speak to audiences about relationships, I find that in general, and
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this is cross cultural, different countries, different religious backgrounds, that in general
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young people do not know that the only way to make a marriage work is through a lot of
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pain and overcoming.
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They don't know that raising children involves a great deal of pain.
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They don't know that caring for and helping your parents approach the end of their lives
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causes a great deal of pain.
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And everything is kind of this sketchy, very sketchy, glimpsy kind of, and I mentioned
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in Hollywood just because everything is made to look easy, except there's kind of a funny
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breakdown of something, but then maybe there's a divorce, they shoot one another, so then
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they should get divorced.
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But the reality of how hard it is to do and how heroic it is to do it and then overcome
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and then actually in the end achieve something, create something, that it's almost not discussed.
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And so to me, it's just not surprising that if there's no parallel to Ayn Rand about the
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heroic saving of a marriage that was on the rocks, how does it actually happen?
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So it's a good point you're making, but something just came to me that I've never thought of
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So that's always good.
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This is where conversation is good.
link |
Look, take the Talmud in the Bible.
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I can't remember how many years after the Bible, the Talmud is written, how long of a period
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it's written, how many people participating in writing it.
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Ayn Rand was one individual.
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She wrote a series of books in philosophy, which I think are true, but they're the beginning.
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There is a lot of work to be done to apply this.
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So hopefully there will be one of her students who writes a book on relationships.
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And there'll be somebody who writes a book on developing a political theory in greater
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detail and develop her ethics.
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She's got a few writings on ethics, and it's in the novels, but there's a lot of work
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to be done, fleshing it out.
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What does it mean?
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So to say Ayn Rand didn't do everything is a truism.
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She didn't do everything.
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And this amazing philosophical foundation that allows us to take those principles and
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to apply them to all these realms of human life.
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And she does it on a scope that few philosophers in human history have done, because she goes
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from metaphysics all the way to aesthetics, hitting the key.
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And she's an original thinker on each one of those things.
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And she might be right, she might be wrong on certain aspects of it.
link |
Always happy to have a debate about where she's wrong and where she's not.
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But there's a lot of work to be done, right?
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And if there were objectivists out there who presented as, okay, human knowledge is over
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because Ayn Rand wrote these books, that's absurd, right?
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There's huge amount of work to be done in applying these particular ideas, just like
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they was for any philosophy.
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Take these ideas and now apply them to all these realms in human experience that flesh
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it out and make it.
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And one of the reasons I don't think objectivism is taken off is because there's all this
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work still to be done that allows it to be relatable to people and every aspect of them.
link |
Let me ask a hard question here.
link |
Can I say what I agreed with you all month?
link |
It's a big transition.
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Here, this is the clip.
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I mean, I agree about nations.
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So I don't like the term nationalism because I fear what happens when you put an ism at
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A nation is a good thing and having a diversity of nations in a sense, it's a good thing.
link |
And in this sense, I don't think one can come up.
link |
So look, I said, I hold, that the ideal nation is a nation that protects individual rights.
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How do you do that?
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What are the details?
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How do we define property rights exactly in an internet world?
link |
There's going to be disagreement, rational, reasonable disagreement.
link |
They're going to be, in my future, in the 300 years from now, in my ideas of one finally,
link |
there will be multiple nations trying to apply the principle of applying individual rights
link |
and they'll do it differently.
link |
One of the benefits of federalism is that while you have a national government, there
link |
are certain issues that you relegate to states and they can try different things and learn
link |
because there is a huge value in empirical knowledge comes there.
link |
You can't just deuce it all and figure it all out, you have to experiment.
link |
So I hate the idea of a one world government because experimentation is gone and if you
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make a mistake, everybody suffers.
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I like the idea and then I like the idea of people being able to choose where they live.
link |
But this notion of experimentation, I think is crucial, but you need a principle.
link |
You need a principle.
link |
I don't like the idea of nations if all the nations are going to be bad.
link |
If all the nations are going to be horrible, then I don't like it.
link |
What I like is a variety of nations all practicing basically good ideas and then we try to figure
link |
out, okay, what works better than other things and what is sustainable and what is not.
link |
Given how many difficult aspects of history and society we talked about, let me ask a
link |
hard question of both of you.
link |
What gives you hope about the future?
link |
So we've been describing reasons to maybe not have hope.
link |
What gives you hope when you look at the world?
link |
What gives you hope that in 200 years and 300 years and 500 years, like the founders
link |
look into the future, that human civilization will be all right.
link |
And more than that, it would flourish.
link |
Two things for me.
link |
So in the very long run, good ideas win out.
link |
I think in the very long run, you can go through a dark ages, but you come out of a dark ages.
link |
The good and the just does win in the end, even if it is bloody and difficult and hard
link |
So while I am quite pessimistic, unfortunately, about the short run, I'm ultimately optimistic
link |
that in the long run, good ideas win and they're justified.
link |
And I think the fundamental behind that is, I think, is that I'm fundamentally positive
link |
about human nature.
link |
I think human beings can think they're capable of reasoning, they're capable of figuring
link |
out the truth, they're capable of learning from experience, they don't always do it.
link |
It's an achievement to do it, but over time they do.
link |
And if you create the right circumstances, they will.
link |
And when things get bad enough, they look for way out, they look at maybe at history,
link |
if the history is available to them, maybe at just learning from what's around them to
link |
find better ways of doing things and that reinforces itself.
link |
But human beings are an amazing creature, right?
link |
We're just amazing in our capacity to be creative, in our capacity to think, in our capacity
link |
to love, in our capacity to change our environment, to fit our needs and to fit our requirements
link |
for survival and to learn and to grow and to progress.
link |
And you know, so again, long term, I think all that wins out, short term, in any point
link |
in history, short term, it doesn't, right now it doesn't look too good.
link |
Well, as usual, I moved by what Yaron says and I hear scripture.
link |
And the source for Yaron's hope is the book of Exodus, which is the first place in human
link |
history where we are presented with the possibility that an enslaved people that's being persecuted
link |
and murdered and living under the worst possible regime can free itself and have a shot at
link |
a life of independence and worth.
link |
And it's another inherited Jewish idea in the tradition.
link |
The way that we express this is by saying that there is a God who judges.
link |
The Israelis in Egypt were enslaved for hundreds of years, according to the Exodus story, hundreds
link |
of years before God wakes up and hears them.
link |
And he doesn't do anything until Moses kills the oppressor and goes out into the desert.
link |
So I think it's pretty realistic that, you know, there's a God that God judges and acts,
link |
but probably, you know, often not for a very, very long time and not until there's a human
link |
being who gets up and says enough, I know that today people don't want to read the Bible.
link |
They don't like reading the Bible.
link |
I always hear in my ear this cry of the prophet Jeremiah who saw his nation destroyed and
link |
his people exiled.
link |
And he says, in God's name, he says, he's not my word like fire, like the hammer that
link |
shatters rock, my word is like fire, like the hammer that shatters rock.
link |
And this is actually, this is the traditional way of saying something like what Yaron is
link |
saying, that it may take a long, long time, but there is a truth and it has its own strength
link |
and it will in the end shatter the things that are opposing it.
link |
That's our traditional hope.
link |
We grew up like that.
link |
And you know, so I do have hope, I see the trends, the trends are terrible right now
link |
and it's frightening and it's hard, but we are terrible at saying the future.
link |
And it is very possible that an unexpected turn of events is going to appear, you know,
link |
maybe soon, maybe much later and the possibility of a redemption is there.
link |
Let me ask, given that long arc of history, given that you do study the Bible, what is
link |
the meaning of this whole thing?
link |
What's the meaning of life?
link |
Well, that's beautiful.
link |
I think that the meaning of life is in part what Yaron touches on when he says that productive
link |
work, labor, creativity is at the heart of what it is to be human.
link |
I just think that there are some more arenas and maybe we even agree with a lot of them.
link |
And I on a lot of them, to be human is to inherit a world which is imperfect, terribly
link |
imperfect, imperfect in many ways.
link |
And God created it that way.
link |
He created a world which is terribly lacking and he created us with the ability to stand
link |
up and to say, I can change the direction of this.
link |
I can do something to change the direction of this.
link |
I can take the time and the abilities that are given to me to be a partner with God in
link |
creating the world.
link |
It's not going to stay the way it was before me.
link |
It'll be something different, maybe a little bit, maybe a lot, but that is the heart, that
link |
is the key, that is the meaningful life is to be a partner with God in creating the world
link |
so that it is moving that much more in the right direction rather than the way we found.
link |
So Nudge, even if a little bit, the direction of the world, while you're on, you've actually
link |
been talking and you program about life quite a bit.
link |
So let me ask the same question and I never tire you asking this question.
link |
What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
link |
I mean, I don't believe in God, so God doesn't play a role in my view of the meaning of life.
link |
I think the meaning of life is to live.
link |
I like to say to live with a capital L. It's to embrace it and I agree with your arm in
link |
We're born into a world and as human beings, one of the things that makes us very different
link |
than other animals is our capacity to change that world.
link |
We can actually go out there and change the world around us.
link |
We can change it materially through production and through...
link |
We can change it spiritually through changing the ideas of people.
link |
We can change the direction to which humanity works.
link |
We can create a little universe.
link |
I think part of the joy of creating a family is to create a little universe.
link |
We're creating a little world around us that's part of the joy and there is joy in family
link |
is to make it all about difficulty and hard work.
link |
Part of the idea of getting married is to create a little world in which you and your
link |
spouse are creating something that didn't exist before and building something, building
link |
But it's really to live.
link |
I mean, one of the things that I see and that saddens me is wasted lives.
link |
It's people who just cruise through life.
link |
They get born in a particular place, they never challenge it, they never question.
link |
They just, you know, they live, die and nothing really happened.
link |
Nothing really changed.
link |
They didn't produce.
link |
They didn't make anything of their life and produce here again, in the largest sense.
link |
So to me, it's an every aspect of life.
link |
As you know, because you've listened to my show, I love art, I love aesthetics.
link |
I love the experience of great art.
link |
I love relationships.
link |
I like that aspect of it.
link |
And I think people are shallow in so many parts of their lives, which saddens me.
link |
I mean, if you had 8 billion people on this planet, even if it never grew, even if we
link |
just stayed at 8 billion, but the 8 billion all lived fully, wow.
link |
I mean, what an amazing place this would be.
link |
What an amazing experience we would have.
link |
So to me, that is, the meaning is just make the most of, you have a short period of time
link |
Experience it fully and challenge yourself and push yourself.
link |
And let me just say something about optimism, you know, one source of hope for me in the
link |
world in which we live right now.
link |
Is that there are people who do that, at least in certain realms of their lives, right?
link |
And I'm inspired, and I know a lot of people don't like me for this, but I'm inspired,
link |
for example, by Silicon Valley, in spite of all the political disagreements I have with
link |
them and all of that.
link |
I'm inspired by people inventing new technologies and building.
link |
I'm inspired by the people you talk to about artificial intelligence and about new ideas
link |
and about pushing the boundaries of science.
link |
Those things are exciting and it's terrific to see a world that I think generally is in
link |
decline yet that these pockets in which people are still creating new ventures and new ideas
link |
and new things, that inspires me and gives me hope that that is not dead, that in spite
link |
of the decay that's in our culture, there's still pockets where that spirit of being
link |
human is still alive and well.
link |
Yeah, they inspire me as well.
link |
Yeah, and they truly live with the capital L and maybe I can do on a star.
link |
Maybe you can also put a little bit of love with the capital L out there as well.
link |
Yoram, you knew I would end it that way, wouldn't you?
link |
Yoram, thank you so much.
link |
This is a huge honor.
link |
I really enjoyed the debate yesterday.
link |
I really enjoyed the conversation today that you spent your valuable time with me.
link |
Thank you so much.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Yoram Brooke and Yoram Hozoni.
link |
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words from Edmund Burke.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.