Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
yaran brook and yoram hazoni this is
iran's third time on this podcast in
yoram's first time
euron brook is an objectivist
philosopher chairman of the iran
institute host of the euron brook show
and the co-author of free market
revolution and equal is unfair
yo ramazoni is a national conservatism
thinker chairman of the edmund burke
foundation that hosted the national
conservatism conference he's also the
host of the nat khan talk
and author of the virtue of nationalism
and an upcoming book called conservatism
a
rediscovery allow me to say a few words
about each part of the uh two word title
of this episode nationalism debate
first debate
i would like to have a few conversations
this year that are a kind of debate with
two or three people that hold differing
views on a particular topic but come to
the table with respect for each other
and a desire to learn and discover
something interesting together through
the empathetic exploration of the
tension between their ideas
this is not strictly a debate it is
simply a conversation
there's no structure
there's no winners
except of course just a bit of trash
talking to keep it fun
some of these topics will be very
difficult and i hope you can keep an
open mind and have patience with me
as kind of moderator who tries to bring
out the best in each person and the
ideas discussed
okay that's my comment on the word
debate now on to the word nationalism
this debate could have been called
nationalism versus individualism
or national conservatism versus
individualism or just conservatism
versus
individualism as we discuss in this
episode these words have slightly
different meanings depending on who you
ask this is especially true i think for
any word that ends in ism
i personally enjoy the discussion of the
meaning of such philosophical words i
don't think it's possible to arrive at a
perfect definition that everybody agrees
with
but the process of trying to do so for a
bit is interesting and productive at
least to me
as long as we don't get stuck there some
folks sometimes do in these
conversations
this is the lex friedman podcast to
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in the description and now here's my
conversation with yaran brooke and joram
i attended the excellent debate between
the two of you yesterday ut austin the
debate was between ideas of conservatism
represented by yoramazoni
and ideas of individualism represented
by yaran brook
let's start with the topics of the
debate you're on how do you define
conservatism maybe in the way you were
thinking about it yesterday
what to you are
some principles of conservatism
let me define it and then we can we can
get into principles if if you want when
i when i talk about political
conservatism i'm talking about uh a
political standpoint that
regards the recovery elaboration and
restoration of
tradition
as the key to maintaining a nation and
strengthening it through time
okay so this is something
that if you have time to talk about it
like we do on the show it's worth
emphasizing that conservatism uh is is
not like liberalism or marxism
liberalism and marxism are both
uh kind of universal theories and they
claim to be able to tell you
what's good for human beings at all
times in all places
and conservatism is a little bit
different because it's going to carry
different values
uh in every nation and every tribe you
know even every family you can say has
somewhat different values and the the
these loyalty groups they compete with
one another
that's the way human beings work so it's
deeply rooted in history of that
particular area of land well i wouldn't
necessarily say land you're right that
many forms of conservatism are tied to a
particular place so how does the
implementation of conservatism to you
differ
from the ideal of conservatism the
implementations you've seen of political
conservatism in the united states and
the rest of the world just to give some
context
because uh it's a loaded term like most
political terms
so when people think about conservative
in the united states they think about
the republican party
what can you kind of disambiguate some
of this what are we supposed to think
yeah that's a really important question
um usually the word conservative is
associated with
uh edmund burke and with the
uh with the the english common law
tradition
uh going back you know centuries and
centuries there's kind of a classical
english conservative tradition
that goes
uh fortescue hooker
uh coke selden
hale burke uh blackstone before burke um
if you take that kind of as a as a as a
benchmark and you compare it then you
can compare it to things like
uh the american federalist party at the
time of the the american founding is in
many respects very much
very much in keeping with that tradition
um
as you go forward
there's uh in
increasing mix of liberalism into
conservatism and i think i i think by
the time you get to the 1960s with uh
william buckley and frank meyer you know
the the jargon term is fusionism by the
time you get there
um
it's it's arguable that their
conservatism isn't very conservative
anymore that it's kind of a uh
a public liberalism mixed with a private
conservatism
so a lot of the debate that we have
today about you know what does the word
conservatism actually mean a lot of the
confusion comes from that comes from the
fact that
um that on on the one hand we have
people use use the term
i think properly historically to refer
to this this common law tradition of
which burke was a spokesman
but but there are lots of other people
who when they say conservatives they
just mean liberal
uh and um
i think that that's a big problem i mean
it's a it's a problem just to have an
intelligent debate as difficult when uh
when people are using the the the word
almost in too antithetical what would
you say the essential idea of
conservatism is time you mentioned your
father's a physicist so a lot of
physicists when they form models of the
universe
they don't consider time so everything
is
dealt with instantaneously a particle is
represented fully by its current state
velocity and position
you're saying
so you're arguing
um with with all of physics and and your
father as we always do uh that their
time matters
uh in conservatives that's the
fundamental element is the full history
matters and you cannot separate the
individual from the history from the
roots that they come from the parallel
in political theory
is
is what's called rationalism
i guess we'll probably talk about that
some
rationalism is kind of an instantaneous
timeless thing before i mentioned that
liberalism and various enlightenment
theories
they don't include time at all their
goal is to
say look there's such a thing as
universal human reason
all human beings if they're reason
properly will come to the same
conclusions
if that's true then it removes
the time consideration it removes
tradition and context because
everywhere where you are at any time you
ought to be able to use reason
and come to the same conclusions about
politics or morals so that's a that's a
theory like uh
immanuel kant or
john locke as an example hobbes is an
example
that kind of political theorizing
really does say
at a given instant we can
know pretty much everything that we need
to know at least the big things
uh and conservatism is the opposite it's
a it's a it's a traditionalist view
exactly as you say that uh that says
that history is crucial
so
iran
you say that uh history is interesting
but perhaps not crucial if in in the
context of individualism no i mean i
think i think there's a false dichotomy
he presented here and and that is that
one view holds that
uh you can derive any anything from a
particular historical path and a kind of
an empirical view
and if we know the history we know where
we should be tomorrow we know what what
where we should stand today and the the
other path is we ignore history we
ignore facts we know what's going on we
can derive from some
a priori axioms we can derive a truth
right now and both are false both of
those views in my view are false
and uh you know i'm rand and i i reject
uh uh both of those views and i think
the better thinkers of the enlightenment
did as well although they sometimes fall
into the trap of appearing like
rationalists and yom and i uh agree on
one thing and that is that kant is is is
one of uh
you know we've we've we've talked about
this in the past alex but we both hate
cons we both think kant is
is i at least think kant is probably the
the most destructive philosopher
uh since plato
uh who is pretty destructive himself but
um
and part of the problem is that kant
divorces reason from reality that is he
divorces reason from history he divorces
reason from experience because we don't
have direct experience of reality
according to cartwright we we're we're
removed from that direct experience but
i i view kant as the anti-enlightenment
that is i view khan's as the destroyer
of good enlightenment thinking and and
joram and
acknowledge a lot of um history of
philosophy people who do history of
philosophy if you can't as the
embodiment of the enlightenment that is
the the ultimate but but i i think
that's a mistake i think both russo
and kant uh fundamentally the goal the
mission in life is to destroy the
indictment
so my view is neither of those options
are the right option that is uh the true
reason based reason is not divorce from
reality it's quite the opposite reason
is a tool it's a faculty of identifying
and integrating
what it's identifying integrating the
facts of reality as
as as as we know them through
sense perception or through the study of
history through what actually happened
so it's the integration of those facts
it's the knowledge of that history and
then what we do is we abstract away
principles based on what's worked in the
past what hasn't worked in the past the
consequences of different ideas
different paths different actions we
abstract away principles that then can
be universal
not always we make mistakes right we can
come up with a universal principle it
sends out that it's not
but if we have the whole scope of human
history we can derive principles as we
do
in life as individuals we derive
principles that are then
truths that we can live by but you don't
do that by ignoring history you do that
by learning history by understanding
history by understanding in a sense
tradition and where it leads to and then
trying to do better and i think good
thinkers are constantly trying to do
better based on what they know about the
past and what they know about the
president what's the difference between
studying history
on a journey of reason
and tradition
so you mentioned that burke understood
that reason begins with inherited
tradition yesterday so what's the
difference between studying history but
then being free to go any way you want
and
tradition where it feels more
um not i don't want to say a negative
term like burden but it's uh
there's more of a momentum that forces
you to go the same way as your ancestors
it's the recognition that people are
wrong
often are wrong and parents
including your parents including your
your teachers including everybody
everybody is potentially wrong
and that that you can't accept anybody
just because they happen to come before
you uh that is you have to evaluate and
judge and you have to have a standard by
which they're valued and judged the
actions of those who came before you
whether they are
your parents whether they are the state
in which you happen to be born whether
they are
somebody on the other side of planet
earth
you can judge them if you have a
standard now my standard and i think the
right standard is human well-being that
is
that which is good for human beings
human beings uh you know is is the
standard by which we judge i can say
that certain periods of history were bad
they happened it's important to study
them it's important to understand what
they did that made them bad so we cannot
do that again and i can say certain
cultures certain periods in time were
good why because they promoted
human well-being and human flourishing
that's the standard then derive from
that okay what is it that made a
particular culture
good what is it that made that
particular culture
positive in terms of human well-being
and human flourishing what made this bad
and hopefully from that i can derive a
principle okay if i want human
flourishing and human well-being in the
future i want to be more like these guys
unless those guys i want to derive what
is the principle that will guide me in
the future that's i think how human
knowledge ultimately develops i think
people often make a mistake just
i'm not saying you're wrong but lots of
people you know don't actually read the
original sources and so what happens is
uh people will attack conservatives
assuming that conservatives think that
whatever comes from the past is right
and actually it's it it's very difficult
to find a thinker who actually says
something like that the the selden or
burke the big the the big conservative
theorists uh hooker they're they're all
people who
understand that the tradition
uh carries with it mistakes that were
made in the past
and uh and this is actually i think an
important part of of their empiricism
is that they see the search for truth as
something a society does by trial and
error and what that means is that in any
given moment
you have to be aware of the possibility
that things that you've inherited are
actually false and the job of the
political thinker or the jurist or the
the the philosopher
is not to dig in and say you know
whatever it is that we've inherited is
right
the the job is to look at uh the society
as a whole and say look we we have this
job of
first of all first of all conservation
just making sure that we don't lose good
things that we've had and and second
seeing if we can repair things in order
to
to improve them where it's necessary or
where it's possible
and that process is actually a creative
process this is a way in which i think
it is similar to euron's philosophy that
you take the inherited
uh tradition
and you look for way that you can shape
it in order to make it something uh
better than it was
that's that's a that's a baseline for
for what we call conservatism yes the
comments of the trial and error
the errors is uh you're proud of the
errors
it's a feature not a bug so the you
mentioned trial and error a few times
yesterday it's a really interesting kind
of idea
it's basically accepting that the
journey is going to have flaws as
opposed to saying
i mean the uh
the conclusion there is the current
system is flawed and it will always be
flawed
and you try to improve it when you
listen to iran talk there's much more of
optimism for the system being
perfect
now or potentially soon or could be
perfect and to me the way i heard it is
almost like
accepting that the system is flawed and
through trial and error will improve
and
uh euron says
no
we can have
a perfection now
that's why it sounds to me yeah yeah and
i think that's right i think the
difference is that
at some points just like in science i
think
one can stop the trial and error and say
i can now see a pattern here i i can see
you know that that certain actions lead
to bad consequences certain actions lead
to good consequences let me try to let
me try to abstract away what is it that
is good and what is it that are bad
and build a system around what is good
and and reject what is bad i i think
ultimately if you if you read the
founding fathers and whether we call
them conservatives individuals
what the founding fathers actually did
all of them i think is study history
they all did they all talk about history
they'll talk about examples of other
cultures whether it's
uh whether they go back to uh uh to the
republic in venice or back to the
ancient greeks so
they they studied these they they
learned lessons from them they they try
to figure out what has worked in the
past and what hasn't and tried to drive
principles now in my view
they got pretty close to what i would
consider
kind of an ideal
but they didn't get it completely right
and and here we sit 200 something years
after uh the declaration and after the
constitution i think we can look back
and say okay well what did they get
right what did they get wrong based on
how is it done and and where the flaws
and where the and we can improve on it
um i think we can get closer to
perfection um and uh and and based on
those kind of observations based on that
kind of abstraction that kind of
discovery of what is true just like
at some point you do the experiments you
do the trial and error and now you come
up with a scientific principle it it is
true that 100 years later you might
discover that hey i missed something
there's something uh
but to not
take the full lesson
to insist on incrementalism to insist on
we're just going to tinker with the
system instead of saying no there's
something really wrong
with having a king there's something
really wrong with
uh not having any representation or
whatever the the standard it needs to be
i in the name of we don't want to move
too fast i think is a mistake and the
problem with trial and error in
politics
is that
we're talking about human life right so
so there was a big
trial
around communism
and you know 100 million people paid the
price for the trial
i could have told them in advance as did
many people that it would not work there
are principles of human nature
principles of that we can study from
history principles about economics and
and other aspects well we know it's not
going to work you don't need to try it
again you know we've had communal
arrangements throughout history there
was an experiment with fascism and and
they've been experiments with all kinds
of political systems okay we we've done
them sad that we did them because many
of us knew they wouldn't work
we should learn the lesson and i think
that all of history now converges on one
lesson and that is what we need to do is
build systems that protect individual
freedom that is the core that's what
ultimately leads to human flourishing
and human success and and and human
achievement and to the extent that we
place anything above that individual
whether it's the state whether it's the
ethnicity whether it's the race whether
it's the bourgeois where it's whatever
it happens to be the class or whatever
whenever we place something above the
individual a consequence of negative
that's one of these principles that i
think we can derive from studying
two you know 3 000 years of civilization
uh and and
it's tragic i think because we're going
to keep experimenting sadly i i see it
right i'm not winning this battle uh i'm
losing the battle we're going to keep
experimenting with different forms of
collectivism we're going to keep paying
the price in human life
and in
missed opportunities for human
flourishing and human success and human
wealth and prosperity well look if we
let's take communism as a good example
none of the the major conservative
thinkers would say you know what's a
good idea a good idea would be to
experiment by
raising everything that we've inherited
and starting from scratch i mean that's
the conservative complaint or accusation
against uh uh rationalists i mean as
opposed to empiricism using rationalism
let's take you know let's take descartes
kind of as a as a benchmark you'll also
maybe define rationalism
yeah these are two terms that are in
philosophy especially in epistemology
they're often
uh compared to one another your own said
that it's an uh that it's a false
dichotomy and and maybe it is a bit
exaggerated but that doesn't mean it's
not useful for for conceptualizing the
the domain so
rationalist is somebody like descartes
who says
um
i'm going to set aside i'm going to try
to set aside everything i know
everything i've inherited i'm going to
start from scratch and he explicitly
says you know
in evaluating the the inheritance of the
past he explicitly says
you take a look at the histories that we
have they're not reliable you take a
look at the moral and the scientific
writings that we receive they're not
very good his baseline is to look
very critically at the past and say
look i'm evaluating it i i think all in
all it's just not worth very much
and so whatever i do
going
beginning from scratch is going to be
better as long as and he here's his
caveat this is as long as i'm proceeding
from
uh from self-evident
uh assumptions from self-evident
premises things that you can't argue
against i think therefore i am right and
then from there deducing what what he
calls infallible conclusions so that
model of self-evident premises to
infallible conclusions
i'm i'm calling that rationalism i think
that's kind of a kind of a standard you
know academic uh uh jargon term and it's
opposed to uh empiricism which is a a
thinker i i think in universities
usually the you know the empiricist is
uh is david yum and uh david young uh
will say
we can't learn anything the way that
descartes said i mean there is nothing
that's that self-evident and that
infallible so so
yum proposes
based on uh newton and and boyle and you
know the the the uh the the new physical
sciences so um proposes uh a science of
man and the science of man sounds an
awful lot like what euron just said
which is we're going to take a look at
human nature at the nature of societies
human nature we're going to try to
abstract towards
fixed principles for describing it human
societies we're going to try to do the
same thing and from there we get you
know for ex for example contemporary
economics
but we also get you know sociology and
anthropology which which cut in in a
different different direction so
um
that's rationalism versus empiricism can
i just say go ahead please yeah it just
i agree with that i think i think it's a
i think empiricism
the one thing i disagree is that i think
empiricism
rarely comes to these abstractions i
mean they they want more facts it's
always about
collecting more evidence in in the abs
but
this is where
you know i think i need so unusual and
where i i think
there's something new here right and and
that's a bold statement given the
history of philosophy but i think ayn
rand is
is something new and and and she so she
says yes
we agree about rationalism and it's
inherently wrong
empiricism has the problem of of okay
where does it lead it's it's
you never come to a conclusion you're
just accumulating evidence there's
something in addition there's a third
alternative which she is positing
which is
using empirical evidence not denying
empirical evidence
recognizing that are some axioms there's
some actions that we all uh at the base
of all of our knowledge that that are
starting points we're not rejecting
extrematic knowledge
and integrating those two and
identifying the fact that based on these
axioms and based on these empirical
evidence we can come to truths
just again like we do in science we have
certain axioms scientific axioms we have
certain experiments that we want and
then we can come to some identification
of a truth and that truth is always
going to be challenged by new
information by new knowledge but as long
as that's what we know that is the that
that is what true so truth is contextual
in the sense that it's contextual it's
based on
that knowledge uh that surrounds you so
for it to change if you get new facts
it's always it's always available to
change if the facts that you get and and
there really are i mean the the burden
of
of of changing what you've come to a
conclusion of truth is high so you'd
have to have real evidence that it's not
true but that happens all the time so it
happens at science right we discovered
that what we thought was true is not
true and and it can happen in politics
and ethics even more so than in science
because they're much
messier uh fields
but uh the idea is that you can come to
a truth but it's not just deductive uh
most truths are inductive
we learn from from obs observing reality
and and again coming to principles about
what works and what's not and here i
think this is
ein rand is different she she doesn't
fall into the and she's different in her
politics and she's different in her
epistemology she doesn't fall into the
conventional
view she's she's an opponent of hume and
she's an opponent of the cuts
she's certainly an opponent of kant's um
and uh and you know i i think she's
right right so if it's okay
can we walk back to uh criticism of
communism
you're both critics of communism
socialism
why did communism fail you started to
say
that
conservatives criticize it on the
basis of like rationalism that you're
throwing away the past you're starting
from scratch
is that the fundamental description of
why communism failed i think the
fundamental difference between
rationalists and empiricists is the
question of whether you're throwing away
the past
that's the argument and it cashes out as
a distinction between
abstract universal rationalist political
theories
and uh
empirical political theories empirical
political theories are are they're
always going to say something like
um
look uh
there are many different societies
we can say that some are better and some
are worse but the problem is that
you know that that there are many
different ways in which a society can be
better or worse
there's an ongoing competition and we're
learning on an ongoing basis what are
the ways in which societies can be
better and worse
that creates a kind of i'd say a mild
skepticism a moderate skepticism among
conservatives i don't think too many
conservatives have a problem looking at
the
at the soviet union which is brutal and
murderous ineffective and it's a it
economics totally ineffective you know
spiritually and then collapsed okay so
so so i think it's easier for us to look
at a system like that uh and say you
know what on earth what what should we
learn from that
but the main conservative tradition is
pretty tolerant of a diversity of
different kinds of society and is slow
to insist that france is so tyrannical
it just needs a revolution because
what's going to come after the
revolution is going to be much better
the assumption is that there's lots of
things that are
good about most societies and that a a
clean slate leads you to
to throw out all of the inherited things
that you don't even know how to notice
until they're gone could i actually play
devil's advocate here and address
something you've also said
can we as opposed to knowing the
empirical data of the 20th century that
communism presented can we go back to
the beginning of the 20th century
can you
empathize or steal man or put yourself
in a place
of the soviet union where the workers
are being disrespected
and
can you not see that the conservatives
could be pro-communism
or like communism is such a strongly
negative word in modern day political
discourse that you can't like you have
to put yourself
in the mind of
uh people who like red colors
who like
what it was it was
it's all about the branding i think
um just but also like the ideas of
solidarity
of nation of togetherness
of uh respect for fellow man i mean all
of these things that kind of communist
represents can you not see
that this idea
uh is actually uh
going along with conservatism it is in
some ways respecting the the deep ideals
of the past
but proposing a new way
to raise those ideals
implement those ideas in the system yes
i'm going to try to do it what you're
suggesting but historically we actually
have a more useful option i think for
both of our positions instead of you
know pretending that we like the actual
communists
we have conservative statesmen like
disraeli and bismarck who initiated
um
social legislation right the the the
uh the the first step to towards saying
uh look we're one nation we're
undergoing industrialization
that industrialization is
important and positive but it's also
doing
a lot of damage to a lot of people and
in particular it's doing damage not just
to individuals and families but it's
it's doing damage to the to the social
fabric the capacity of britain or german
to remain cohesive societies is being
harmed
and so it's these two conservative
statesmen israeli and bismarck who who
actually take the first steps
in order to legislate for you know for
what today we would consider to be
minimal social programs uh pensions and
disability insurance and those kinds of
things so for sure conservatives
do look at industrialization as a rapid
change and they say
we we do have to care about the nation
as a whole and we have to care about it
as a unity and and i assume that iran
will say
look that's the first step towards the
the catastrophe of communism but
before your own drives that nail into
the
let me try to make a distinction because
when you read marx
you're reading an intellectual
descendant of descartes
you're reading somebody who says
um
look
every society has
uh consists of oppressors and oppressed
right and and and that's an improvement
in some ways over liberal thinking
because at least he's seeing he's seeing
groups as a as a a real social
phenomenon but he says every society has
a oppressor class and oppressed class
there are different classes they're
different groups and whenever one is
stronger it exploits the ones that are
weaker
all right
that is the the foundation of a
revolutionary
political theory why because the moment
that you say that the only relationship
between
the stronger and the weaker is
exploitation
the moment that you say that then you're
pushed into the position and marx and
angle say this explicitly you're pushed
into the position we're saying when will
the exploitation end never until there's
a revolution what happens when there's a
revolution you eliminate the oppressor
class it's annihilationist i mean you
you can
immediately when you read it see why
it's different from from uh descartes or
bismarck because they're trying to keep
everybody you know somehow at peace with
one another and marx is saying there is
no peace that oppressor class has to be
annihilated and and then they go ahead
and do it and they and they and they
kill 100 million people so i i do think
that
despite the fact your question is is
good and right there are certain
similarities in concern but still i
think you can tell the difference
between that extra step of revolution to
you is where the problem comes like that
extra step of let's kill all the
oppressors
that's the problem right and then to you
you're on the whole step one is the
problem well it's all a problem b first
i don't view communism as um
something that radical in a sense that i
i think it it comes from a tradition of
collectivism i think it comes from a
tradition of looking at groups and and
measuring things in terms of groups it
comes from tradition where you expect
some people to be sacrificed for the
greater good of the of the whole
uh i i think it comes from a tradition
where
mysticism a revelation as as the source
of of truth
is accepted i view marx as
in some sense very christian i i i don't
think he's this radical rejecting i i
think he's just reformatting
christianity in a sense he's replacing
in a sense he's replacing god with the
proletarian
knowledge you know you have to you have
to get knowledge from somewhere so you
need the dictatorship of the palestinian
you need somebody the stalin the lenin
who who somehow communes with the spirit
the the spirit of the proletarian
there's no rationality not rationalism
there's no rationality in marx
there is a lot of mysticism and there is
a lot of
hand waving and there's a lot of
sacrifice and a lot of original sin in
the way he views humanity
side view marx as
as one more collectivists in in a whole
string of collectivists uh you know and
and i think i think the
the the bismarck in response which
bismarck i mean
i know less about israeli so i'll focus
on bismarck and bismarck is really
responding to political pressures from
the left and and and uh he's responding
to
the rise of of communism socialism
but what bismarck is doing he's uh
putting something alternative he's
presenting an alternative
to the proletarian as the standard by
which we should uh we should measure the
good
and this and and what he's replacing it
is the state he's replacing the
proletarian with the state and that has
exactly the same problems that is first
it requires sacrificing some to others
which which is what the welfare state
basically legitimizes
um it it places the state above all so
the state now becomes i think the
biggest evil of bismarck and i i
definitely view him as a negative force
in history is uh public education i mean
i mean the germans really
dig in on public education and really
develop it and really the american model
of public education is is
copying
the the german the prussian uh
bismarcking public education
real quick why
the public education is such a root of
moral evil for you well because it now
says that there's one uh standard and
that standard is determined by
government by by a bureaucracy by by uh
whatever the government deems as in the
national interest and bismarck's very
explicit about this he's training the
workers of the future uh you know they
they need to catch up and and you know
with england and other places and they
need to train the workers and there's
going to be a
he's going to train some people to be
the managerial class he's going to train
other people to be and he decides right
the the government the bureaucracy is
going to decide who's who and where they
go there's no individual choice there's
no individual uh is showing an ability
to break out of what what the government
has decided is their little box uh
there's very little freedom there's very
little
you know ultimately there's very little
competition there's very little
innovation and this is the problem we
have today in american education which
we can get to is there's no competition
and no innovation we have one
standard fit all and then we have
conflicts about what should be taught
and the conflicts now not pedagogical
they're not about what works and what
doesn't
nobody cares about that it's about
political agendas right it's about what
my group wants to be taught and what
that group wants to be taught rather
than actually discovering how do we get
kids to read i mean we all know how to
get kids to read but there's a political
agenda about not teaching phonics for
example so
a lot of schools don't teach phonics
even though the kids will never learn
how to read properly so it becomes
politics and i i don't believe politics
belongs in education i think education
is a product it's a service
and we know how to deliver products and
services really really efficiently at a
really really low price
at a really really high quality and
that's leaving it to the market to do
but your fundamental criticism is that
the state can use education
to uh further authoritarian aims well or
whatever the aims i mean think about the
conservative today critique of american
educational system it's dominated by the
left yeah what did you expect right if
you leave it if you leave it up to the
state to fund they're going to fund the
things that promote
state growth and state intervention and
the left is better at that it has been
better at that than the right and and
they now dominate our educational
institutions but look if we go back to
bismarck my problem is placing the state
above the individual so if if communism
places the the class above the
individual what matters is class
individuals are nothing they're cogs in
a machine
bismarck the certainly the german
tradition much more than the british
tradition or the american tradition the
german tradition is to place the state
above the individual i think that's
equally evil and and the outcome is
fascism and the outcome is the same the
outcome is the deaths of tens of
millions of people
when taken to to its ultimate conclusion
just like socialism the ultimate
conclusion of it is
uh communism uh uh you know nationalism
in that form kind of the smoking form
the ultimate conclusion is uh is uh
nazism or some form of fascism um
because
you don't care about the individual
individual doesn't matter i think this
is one of the differences
in the anglo you know anglo-american
tradition where the anglo-american
tradition even the conservatives
have always acknowledged and it goes
back to you
especially the conservatives yes the
conservatives were there first they they
acknowledged well you've you've defined
conservatives to include all the good
thinkers of the distant past and they're
all good thinkers we agree on that i'm
defining conservatism
the way that burke does i'm just
look this is a very simple observation
burke thinks when you open burke and you
actually read him he starts naming all
of these people who he's defending and
it's bizarre i'm sorry it's just in
intellectual sloppiness for people to be
publishing books called burke the first
conservative the founding conservatives
the founder i mean this is non-stop it's
it's a it's a view that says burke
reacts to the french revolution so
conservatism has no prior tradition it's
just reacting to the french revolution
and this is i mean this is this is just
uh absurd
questions yeah on conservatism are there
any conservatives that are embracing of
revolutions so are they ultimately
against
the concept of revolution yes burke
himself embraces the polish revolution
uh which takes place almost exactly at
the same time as the french revolution
and the argument's really interesting
because there's a common mistake is
assuming that burke and conservative
thinkers are always in favor of slow
change i i think that's that's also just
factually mistaken um
burke is against the french revolution
because he thinks that there are
actually
tried and true
uh things that work things that work for
human human flourishing and freedom
included as as a very important part of
human flourishing
um
he like many others takes the uh takes
the uh the british the english
constitution to be a a a model of
something that works you know so it has
a king it has various other things that
that you know maybe euron will say well
that that's a mistake but still
for centuries it's the leader in many
things that i think we can easily agree
are human flourishing and
burke says
look what's wrong with the french
revolution what's wrong with the french
revolution is that they is that they
have a system that has all sorts of
problems but they could they could be
repairing it
and instead what they're doing by over
by by overthrowing everything is they're
moving away from what we know is good
for for human beings then he looks at
the polish revolution and he says the
polls do the opposite the polls have a
non-functioning traditional constitution
it's it's too democratic it it's
impossible to get uh to to raise armies
and and and to defend the country
because because of the fact that every
nobleman has a veto
so the the polish revolution moves in
the direction of the british
constitution they repair their
constitution
through a quick a rapid revolution they
install a king along the model that
looks a lot like britain and burke
supports he says
this is a good revolution so it's it
it's not
um the
the need to quickly make a change in
order to save yourself that that's not
what conservatives are objecting to what
they're objecting to is
instead of looking at experience in
order to try to make a
slow or quick improvement a measured
improvement to achieve a particular goal
instead of doing that you say look the
whole thing has just been wrong and what
we've really got to do is annihilate a
certain part of the population and then
make completely new laws in a completely
new theory that that's what he's
objecting to that's the french
revolution and that then becomes you
know the model for for communist
revolutions and for me the i mean the
french revolution is clearly
a real evil and wrong but it's not that
it was a revolution and it's not that it
tried to change everything i mean let's
remember what was going on in france at
the time and people were starving and
the monarchy in particular was
completely detached completely detached
from the suffering of the people and
something needed to change
the the the unfortunate thing is that
that
the change was motivated by a a an
egalitarian philosophy not egalitarian
in a sense that i think the founding
fathers talked about it but in galilee
in a sense of real equality quality of
outcome uh motivated by a philosophy by
rousseau's philosophy and it inevitably
led you could tell that the ideas were
going to lead to this to massive
destruction and death and an
annihilation of a class
you can't annihilation is never an
option that is it
it's not true that a good revolution
never leads to mass death uh of just
whole groups of people because a good
revolution is about the sanctity of the
individual it's about preservation
liberty of the individual and and again
that that goes back to and and defense
revolution denies and russo denies
really that in civilization there is a
value and a thing called the individual
i think this is a good place
to have this discussion
the founding fathers of the united
states
are they
um
individualists or are they conservatives
so in this particular revolution that
founded this country at the core of
which are some
fascinating some powerful ideas
were those founding fathers were those
ideas coming from a place of
conservatism or did they put
primary value into the freedom and the
power of the individual what do you
think
there were both
i mean this is i this is something
that's a little bit difficult for
sometimes for for for americans i mean
even very educated americans they l they
they talk about the founding fathers as
though it's kind of like this this yeah
this this collective you know uh entity
with with a single brain and a single
single value system but i i think at the
time that's not the way they uh
not the way any of them saw it so
roughly there's two camps and they map
on to the rationalist versus
traditionalist empiricist dichotomy that
i proposed earlier and the um so on the
one hand you have
real revolutionaries like uh jefferson
and payne these are the people who burke
was writing against these are the people
who supported the french revolution so
when you say real so when you say pain
you're referring to revolutionaries in a
bad way like this is a problem these are
people who will say
history up until now has has has been
you know like with with descartes but
applied to politics history up until now
has been
you know just a story of
ugliness foolishness stupidity and evil
and uh if you apply reason
we'll all come to
roughly we'll all come to the same
conclusions you know and pain writes a
book called the age of reason and the
age of reason is a a manifesto for
here is the answer to political and
moral problems throughout history we
have the answers and it's in the same
school as russo's uh the social con no
you you don't like that not at all oh i
thought it was like i think they're the
opposites okay so let me just throw in a
question on uh jefferson and payne
do you think
america would exist without those two
figures
so like uh how how important is spice
in the uh in the flavor of the dish
you're making i don't want to try to run
the counter factual i don't you know i
don't have confidence that i know the
answer to the question but it's so much
fun you know what i'm going to offer
something that i think is more fun more
fun than the counterfactual is
america had two revolutions not one okay
at first there is a revolution that is
strongly spiced
with
this kind this kind of rationalism
and then there's a ten year period after
the declaration of independence there's
a ten-year period under which america
has a constitution its first
constitution which today they call the
articles of the confederation but
there's a constitution from 1777
and that constitution is
based on in a lot of ways on the hottest
new ideas it has instead of the
traditional british system with a
division of powers between you know an
executive and a bicameral camera
legislature instead instead of that
traditional english
uh model which most of the states had as
their governments instead of that they
say no we're going to have uh one
uh elected body
okay and that body that congress it's
going to be the executive it's going to
be the legislative it's going to be it's
going to be everything and it's going to
run as a big committee these these are
the ideas of the french revolution you
get to actually see them implemented in
uh in pennsylvania in the pennsylvania
constitution and then and then later in
the national assembly in france it's a
disaster the thing doesn't work it's
completely made up it's not based on any
kind it's it's neither based on
historical experience nor is it based on
historical custom on what people are
used to and what what they succeed in
creating with this first constitution is
it's wonderfully rational but it's a
complete disaster it doesn't allow the
raising of taxes it doesn't allow the
mustering of troops it doesn't allow
giving orders to to soldiers to fight a
war
and if it if that had continued if that
had continued to be the the the
the american constitution america never
would have been an independent country
they aren't willing to do that
counter-factual
what happens uh during those years
where uh where
uh washington and jay and knox and
hamilton and morris there's like this
group of conservatives they're mostly
soldiers and lawyers other than
washington most of them are from you
know from northern cities and this group
is much more conservative
than uh than the uh than the tom paine
and and jefferson school you some some
historians some historians call them the
nationalist party
historically they give up the word
nationalism and they call themselves the
federalists but they're basically the
nationalist party what does that mean it
means on the one hand that their goal is
to create an independent nation
independent from britain but on the
other hand
they believe that that they already have
uh national
legal traditions the common law the the
forms of government that have been uh
imported from from britain and of course
christianity which they consider to be
you know part of their inheritance
this this pharaoh federalist party
is the conservative party
these are people who are extremely close
in in ideas to burke and these are
people who wrote the constitution of the
united states the second constitution
the second revolution in 1787
when washington leads the establishment
of a new constitution which you know
maybe technically legally it wasn't even
legal under the old constitution but it
was democratic and what it did is it
said we're going to take what we know
about
english government what we've learned by
pl applying english government in the
states we're going to create a national
government a unified national government
that's going to muster power in its
hands enough power to be able to do
things like
fighting wars to defend a unified people
those are conservatives now it it's
reasonable to say
well look there was no king so how
conservative could they be but i think
that's a reasonable question
but don't forget that the american
colonies the the english colonies in
america by that point had been around
for 150 years they had written
constitutions they had already adapted
for an entire century adapted the
english constitution to local conditions
where there's no aristocracy and there's
no king
you know i think you can see that as as
a positive thing on the other hand they
have slavery that's an innovation that
that's not english
so it's a little bit different from the
english constitution but those those men
are conservatives they make the the
minimum changes that they need for the
to the english constitution and and they
they largely replicate it which is why
the jeffersonians hated them so much
they call them apostates they say
they've betrayed
equality and liberty and fraternity by
adopting an english-style constitution
so i would imagine you're on you would
put emphasis of the success of the key
ideas at the founding of this country
elsewhere
at the at the freedom of the individual
so the yes the tradition of the british
empire i mean the one thing i agree with
yom is is is the fact that yes the
founding fathers were not a monolith i
mean they argued they debated they
disagreed they they wrote against each
other i mean jefferson and adams for
decades didn't even speak to each other
though they did make up uh and and had a
fascinating fascinating relationship you
and i are making up today
it's like the founding fathers
uh you know there's there's this massive
debate and and discussion
but i don't i don't agree with the
characterization of pain and jefferson i
don't think it's just to call them
rationalists because i don't think
they're rationalists people who've
looked at history at the problems in
history and and remember this is the
18th century and they
uh
were coming out of 100 years earlier
some of the bloodiest wars in all of
human history were happening in in in
europe uh
many of them over religion
um
you know they had seen what was going on
in in france and other countries where
people were with people who were
starving uh and where kings were
frolicking in in palaces in spite of
that
uh
they were very aware of the relative
freedom that the british tradition
uh had had given englishmen i think they
knew that they understood that
and i think they were building on that
they were taking the observation of the
past
and trying to come up with a more
perfect system
and i think they did and in that sense
i'm a huge fan of jefferson you know
they're two things that i'm i think
unfortunate about jefferson one is that
uh
he continued to hold slaves which is
which is which is uh very unfortunate
and the second is his is early support
for the french revolution which i think
is a massive mistake
uh and and i would be surprised uh if
you regretted it later in life given the
consequences but you know they were
trying to derive principles by which
they could establish a new state and yes
there was some uh there was pushed back
by by some and there was disagreements
and the in the constitution in the end
is is
to some extent a form of compromise it's
still one of the great documents of all
of human history political documents the
constitution uh although i think it's
inferior to the declaration i i'm i'm a
huge fan of the declaration and i think
one of the mistakes the conservatives
makes one of the
mistakes the supreme court makes and
american judiciary makes is
assuming the two documents are separate
i think lincoln is absolutely right you
can't understand the constitution
without understanding the declaration
the declaration would set the context
and what sets everything up for the
constitution individual rights are the
key concept there
and and and one of the challenges was
that some of the compromises and
and compromise is not necessarily
between groups but compromises that even
jefferson made and others made regarding
individual rights
set america on a path that uh we're
suffering from today uh and and uh i
mentioned three last night one was
slavery obviously there was a a horrific
compromise one that
american not just paid for with a civil
war six hundred thousand young men uh
died because of it but the suffering of
black slaves for all those years but
then the whole issue of racial tensions
in this country uh
for
for a century and to this day really uh
is a consequence of that initial
compromise who knows what would what the
counterfactual is in america
if if there's a civil war right at the
founding right because there would have
been a war no matter what but if it
happened in the late 18th century early
19th century rather than waiting until
to 1860s but then
second was um
jefferson's embrace of uh of public
education uh his founding of the
university of virginia which which i
think is is a great tragedy
and um which nobody agrees with me on so
so that's one of the areas where i'm
pretty radical and then they embrace
both by jefferson and by hamilton
uh for different reasons but embraced by
both of them of government role in the
economy and you know i'm i do finance so
i know a little bit about finance and
the debate between jefferson and
hamilton about banking is is is
fascinating but at the end of the day
both wanted a role for government in
banking they both didn't trust
uh jefferson didn't trust a big
financial interest hamilton wanted to
capture some of those financial issues
for the state and as a consequence
we set america on a path where
you know in my view regulation always
leads to more regulation there's never
never a case where regulation decreases
and we started out with a certain
regulatory body around banks and a
recognition it was okay to regulate the
economy so once we get into the late
19th century it's fine to regulate the
railroads it's fine to pass antitrust
laws it's fine to then continue on the
path to where we are today which is
heavy heavy heavy massive involvement of
governing every aspect
of our economy and really in every
aspect of our life because of education
so
i i think the country was founded on
certain mistakes and we haven't been
willing to
question those mistakes and in a sense
that we've only moved in the opposite
direction
and now america has become
whereas i think it was founded in the
idea of the primacy of the individual
the sanctity of the individual at least
as an idea even if not fully implemented
i think now that's completely lost i
don't think anybody
uh it really is an advocate out there
for individualism in politics or for
true freedom in politics we'll get to
individualism but let me ask the beatles
and the rolling stones question about
the declaration of independence in the
constitution what
well because it's like which document
beetles are all which document is more
important so it's obvious it's the
beatles right okay is it questions is
there even a question but let me then
even zoom in further and ask you to pick
your favorite song
so
what ideas in the constitution or the
declaration of independence do you think
are
the most important to the success of the
united states of america i'll answer the
question but before answering the
question i want a dissent from
registered descent from your runs is it
the public education is it which uh no
no actually
we're we're not so look we're not so far
apart on
on on public education i'm actually kind
of i'm actually kind of surprised that
you're so anti-bismarck because his
public school system was his national
public school system was created in
order to stick it to the church it was
the church that ran the schools before
then and okay so that's a different i'm
also sticking it to the church
but not when the alternative is the
nation right
this is no that's a free educational
system you know where freedom is in
education okay so so um i i want to
register a dissent about uh lincoln look
lincoln is an important figure and a
great man and he was presiding over a
country which at that point was pretty
jeffersonian in terms of its uh
self-perception he said what he needed
to say i'm not going to criticize him
but i don't accept the idea
that the the declaration of independence
which starts one revolution
is uh is of a peace with the
constitution the second constitution the
constitution of 1787 the nationalist
constitution
which is effectively a
counter-revolution
what happens is there is a revolution
it's based on certain principles there
are a lot it not exactly but in many
ways resemble the the the later
ideas of the french revolution and what
the federalist party does the national
nationalist conservative party does is a
counter-revolution to reinstate the old
english constitution so these documents
are
if you're willing to accept the evidence
of history they are in many respects
contrary to one another
and uh so if if i'm asked what's the
most important values that are handed
down by these documents i don't have an
objection to
uh you know to uh life liberty and
property all of which are really
important things i do have an objection
to the the to the pom po the pompous
overreach of uh these are self-evident
which is absurd they can't be
self-evident if they were self-evident
then somebody would have come up with
them you know like like 2 000 years
before it's not it's not self-evident
and and so so that's damaging i i like
the conservative preamble of the
constitution
which uh describes the purposes of the
of the national government that's being
established there there are are seven
purposes
uh a more perfect union which is the
prince of the principle of cohesion
justice
uh domestic peace
uh common defense the general welfare
which is is uh the welfare of the public
is a as a thing that's not only
individuals but there is such a thing as
a general welfare
liberty which we agree is absolutely
crucial and posterity the idea that the
purpose of the government is to be able
to sustain and grow
of this independent nation and not only
to guarantee rights no matter what
happens but you don't like the we hold
these truth to be self-evident so you're
definitely beatles guy you don't want
the you don't want the pompous
you don't need that right
look i just i think that that expression
self-evident truths it does tremendous
damage because it it it
instead of a moderate skepticism which
says
look we may not know everything it says
look we know everything here it is
here's what we know we know we don't
know everything no we
think
so so i you know i'll agree with you i
don't like self-evident i don't like
self-evident because he's absolutely
right it's not self-evident these are
massive achievements
these are massive achievements of of of
enlightened thinking of studying history
of understanding human nature of
deriving a truth from
3 000 years of star of historical
knowledge and a better understanding of
human nature and and and capacity is
using reason
in some ways better than any human
beings have in i mean founding fathers
giants historically in my view
because they came up with these truths i
do think they're truths but they're
certainly not self-evident i mean if
they were your arm is right they would
have discovered them thousands of years
earlier or or everybody would accept
them right i mean how many people today
think that those what they state in that
document is true
pretty much
you know five people i don't know it's
it's it's very it's very you're a
criticism of modern society it's it's
right there it's very very few people
recognize that if they were self-evident
bam everybody would have become a a you
know would have accepted the american
revolution as as truth and and that was
it a lot of work has to go into
understanding and describing and
convincing people about those truths but
but i i completely disagree with you all
i'm about
uh this idea or i'll i'll voice my
descent as as we said
history you're this official
about about a that this being two
different revolutions and and b that the
american revolution was had any
similarity to the french revolution
you know that jefferson and payne were
that they were in france
running a different race
they were waiting constantly i mean they
were in communication with madison there
was a lot of input going on i know and
jefferson's sitting there in paris
pulling his hair out because madison
madison has come under the influence of
these nationalists and he can't believe
it
the reality is that the difference
between the french revolution and and
the and the american revolution is is is
vast and it is a deep philosophical
difference and it's a difference that
expressed i think uh
between the differences that you know
joram
in his writings lumps who sew with locke
and with voltaire and with others and
and i think
i i think that's wrong i think russo is
very different than the others i think
again we're so as an anti-enlightenment
figure we're so is a is in many respects
hawkening back to a past an ancient past
and i think and i think a completely
distorted view of human nature of human
mind he rejects reason i mean rousseau
is on the premise that reason is the end
of humanity reason is the destruction of
humanity
reason is is how we get civilization and
civilization is awful because i i i
don't disagree we're only talking about
different texts
when i say i'm just talking about the
social contract yeah but the social
contract there's similarity between
others but he takes it in a completely
different direction and we agree social
context is a bad idea but i i it can't
have a contract that you don't actually
voluntarily accept but so is the french
revolution rousseau is
about destruction and mayhem and chaos
and anarchy
he is the spirit behind the french
revolution i think the american
revolution is a complete rejection of
rousseau uh i think jefferson is a
complete rejection of russo i don't
think jefferson is a fan of who so he is
a voltaire he certainly is a monastery
if you look at it and if you look at the
federalist papers the intellectual most
cited in the federalist papers i think
in terms of this the number of times the
site is montesquieu you know so i think
that the american revolution is an
individualistic revolution
it is a revolution about the rights of
the individual the french revolution is
a negation of the rights of the
individual it's a collectivistic
revolution it's it's not quite
the marxist revolution of the
proletarian but it it's defining people
in classes
and it's a rebellion against a certain
class and and yeah
kill them all right off with their heads
and it is a negation uh it's about
egalitarianism in the sense of equality
of outcome not in a sense of equality
before the law or equality of rights
which is the jeffersonian sense so i
think it's it's it's wrong to to lump
jefferson in
to the uh fraternity uh you know
egalitarian notion of of the french
which is far more similar to
to what ultimately became socialism and
and marxism
uh and and kind of that tradition it's
anti-individualistic
the french revolution is whereas the
american revolution the first one uh is
is individualistic it's all about
individual rights and and while there's
certain phrases in the declaration of
independence that i don't
agree with you know it's beautifully
written and it's a magnificent document
so it's hard for me to say i don't agree
who am i right these were these were
giants uh self-evident is one of them
you know i'm not particularly uh
crazy about endowed by the creator um
but i like the fact that it it's creator
and not god or not a specific creator
but just it kind of a more general thing
but putting those two ashes aside it's
the greatest political document in all
of human history in my view by far
nothing comes close it it is it is a
document that that identifies the core
principles
of
political tourism of truth that is the
role of government is to preserve and to
protect these rights these inalienable
rights and and that is so crucial that
these rights are inalienable that is a
majority can't vote them out uh you know
revelation can't vote them out th this
is this is what is required for human
liberty and human freedom the the right
that is the the sanction the freedom to
act on your own behalf to act based on
your own judgment as and as long as
you're not
you know interfering with other people's
rights you are free to do so that is
such a profound truth
and that to me is the is the is is the
essence of political philosophy that's
the beginning you know and and it's it's
based on just just uh not to fall into
you i'm gonna say uh it's a rationalist
it's based on a whole history of what
happens when we negate that it's based
on
looking at england and seeing to the
extent that they practiced a respect for
individual liberty of property of of of
freedom good things happened so let's
take that all the way let's not
compromise on that let's let's be
consistent with the good and reject the
bad and when england goes away distance
itself from the rights of man from the
idea of of a right to property and so on
bad things happen and when they go
through let's go all in and i'm i'm all
in on on the right to life liberty
property in the pursuit of happiness and
i think the idea pursuit of happiness is
profound because it's a moral statement
it's a statement that says that
sanctions and and and says that
ultimately people should be allowed to
make their own judgments and and live
their lives as they see fit based on how
they
view happiness they might be right that
might be wrong but we're not going to
dictate what happiness entails and
dictate to people how they should live
their lives we're going to let them
let them figure that out so it has this
self-interested moral code kind of
embedded in it so i think it's a it's a
beautiful statement so i think the
declaration is key and i i i think there
was an experiment and the experiment was
post
uh in that period of of uh before the
constitution where the experiment was
let's let the states let's have a kind
of a loose confederation uh let's just
the states experiment with with setting
up their own constitutions and role of
government and we won't have any kind of
unity and i think what they realized
and i think even jefferson realized is
that that was not workable because
many of the states were starting to
significantly violate rights there was
nothing to unify there was nothing to
really protect the vision of the
declaration
you needed to establish a nation which
is what the constitution does it
establishes a nation
but the purpose of that
was
to put everybody under one set
of laws that protected rights the the
the focus was still on the protection of
rights and i agree with six of the seven
of the principles right i i and i and
which did disagree with the common
warfare which which the general which
you're going to worry
i think in the way the founders
understood it i think i probably agreed
with it but it's such an ambiguous i'm
sure you don't maybe don't maybe but
just can you state the general welfare
principle well the idea that part of the
world of government is to secure the
general wealth look it's something
look this is something we we didn't get
to in the debate we really should have
is the question of whether there is such
a thing as a a common good or a public
interest or a national interest or a
general welfare do these words do these
terms mean anything other than the good
of all of the individuals in the country
that that's an important yeah so so
that's right so that's why so i object
to it because i think it's too easy to
interpret it as so i interpret it as
well what's good for the you know a
general a group a common uh uh
people or just collection of individuals
so what's good for the individual is
good for the common welfare but i
understand that that is a that's
something that is hard for people to
grasp and and not the common
understanding so i was i i would have
skipped the general welfare in order to
avoid the fact that now the general
office includes
the government telling you
what gender you should be assigned to so
so i would have i would have wanted to
have skipped that completely um so i
think the the constitution is pretty
consistent with the the declaration with
a few exceptions the general welfare but
you know
perfection is is a difficult thing to
find particularly for me right
politically
but it's it's a magnificent document the
constitution it doesn't quite rise to
the level i think of the declaration but
it's a magnificent document
because
you know and this is the difference i
think between the english constitution
here's here's what i see is the
difference
the difference is that the the
constitution is written in the context
of why do we have a separation of powers
for example we have a separation of
powers in order to make sure that the
government only does what the government
is supposed to do and what is the
government supposed to do well
fundamentally it's supposed to protect
rights i mean all of those seven or at
least six of the seven about protecting
rights they're about protecting us from
foreign invaders about protecting uh you
know peace within the country
they're about preserving this protection
of rights and why do we have this
separation to so so that we make sure
that no one of those
entities the executive or the
legislature judicial can violate rights
because there's always somebody looking
over their shoulder there's always
somebody who can veto their power but
there's a purpose to it and that purpose
is clearly
uh signified and characterized and
that's why i think the bill of rights
was written in order to
add to the clarification of what exactly
we mean what is the purpose the purpose
is to preserve rights
um and that's why we need to to
elaborate with those rights and and
madison's objection to the bill of
rights was to say not that he objected
to having a
protection of rights
but to listing them because he was
worried that other rights that were not
listed would not be and his worry was
completely justified because that's
exactly what's happened it's like the
only reason we have free speech in
america we've got it in writing as a
first amendment if we didn't have any
writing it would have been gone a long
time ago and the reason we don't have
for example the freedom to negotiate uh
a a a contract uh you know independent
government regulation is there was that
was not listed as a right uh in the bill
even though i think it's clearly covered
under the constitution and certainly
under the declaration so there was a
massive mistake done in the bill of
rights they tried to
cover it with the ninth amendment but it
never really stuck uh this idea that the
non-enumerated rights that that are
still in place so i don't see it as a
second revolution i think it's it's a
it's a it's a fix
to a flaw that happened it's a fix that
uh allowed
the expansion of the protection of
rights
to all states
by creating a national entity to protect
those rights and that's what ultimately
led
to the to slavery going away uh
you know under the under the initial uh
the initial agreement slavey would have
been there in perpetuity because states
were sovereign in in a way that under
the new constitution they were not and
in a sense the constitution sets in
motion
the declaration and then the
constitution said emotion
the the civil war the civil war has to
happen because at the end of the day you
cannot have some states with a massive
violation of rights what's more of a
violation of rights and slavery and some
states that recognize it's not
it it if it inevitably leads to the
civil war euron was just saying that you
know other than the general welfare
these principles are about individual
liberties i i i think i just don't think
you can read it that way the first
stated purpose of the constitution of
is in order to form a more perfect union
a more perfect union it would what it
it's describing a characteristic of the
whole it is not a characteristic of any
individual if you look at how the
individuals are doing you don't know
whether whether their union is more or
less perfect right so what they're doing
is they're they're looking they're
looking at the condition in which uh in
in order to be able to fight the battle
of yorktown they have to somebody has to
write a personal check in order to be
able to move armies a more perfect union
is a more cohesive union it's the
ability to get
all of these different individuals to do
one focused thing when it's needed
necessary to do it
well it's it's more than that right so i
agree with that
but for what purpose
that is f and this is why i you know
this is why it's so hard with these
historical documents because there's a
there's a context and there's a thinking
that they can't write everything down
right which is sad because i wish they
had
what's the purpose of a more perfect
union the purpose of the more perfect
war union is to preserve the liberty of
the individuals within that union now
how do you know how because because if
you look what's the rest so what is the
common defense the common defenses is to
protect us from foreign invaders who
would now disrupt what the rest of the
constitution is all about all of the
constitution is written in a way as to
preserve find ways to limit the war the
ability of government to violate the
rights of individuals that
the the the beauty of this constitution
and again its connection to the
declaration and and tradition right what
came before it what came before it was a
was a document which they all respected
which was the declaration which set the
context for this and now the union is
there in order to provide for the common
defense great because we know that
foreign invaders can violate our rights
that's what war is about
to to protect us from peace to establish
peace and justice within the country
that's based on law the rule of law and
and again uh uh
individual liberty so
to me when you read the founders when
you read the federalist papers when you
read what they wrote
what they're trying to do is figure out
the right kind of political system the
right kind of
structure
to be able to preserve these liberties
and and not all of them had a
from my perspective perfect
understanding what those liberties
entailed but they were all even the
conservatives that you call
conservatives we're all in generally in
agreement about the importance of
individual liberty and imports of
individuals of course because almost all
of these rights are traditional english
rights they exist in the english bill of
rights in the english petition of right
in the existence of course
all of these are trying to perfect that
they're trying to take the british
system and perfect it and what but you
you keep leaving out that that they want
to be like england in that they want to
have an independent nation an
independent nation is not a collection
of individual liberties an independent
nation the first sentence of the
declaration of independence is the
declaration that there is a collective
right that we as a people are breaking
the bonds within other people and we're
going to take our place our equal
station among the nations of the earth
that for what purpose the purpose is to
protect individual rights and there's no
collective right
your argument is completely circular
you're not allowing the possibility that
there could be that there could be
great and decent men that you and i both
admire who wanted the independence of
their nation not not because that would
give individuals liberty but because the
independence of their nation was itself
a great good so we clearly disagree on
this because i i don't think the
independence of the nation is a good in
of itself because it's and this is what
they think it was i don't think they did
i and this is why they tried so hard not
to break from england and and why many
of them when many of them uh
struggled really really struggled with
with having a revolution because england
was pretty good right english was the
england was the best and this is where i
you know we should get to the
universality of these things because i i
do think england was the best and
universally and and and absolutely was
the best system out there and what they
were
they struggled to break from england
because they didn't view
the value of having a nation as the
primary but what they identified in
england is certain flaws in the system
that created situations in which their
rights were being violated so they
figured the our only option in order to
secure these rights is to break away
from england and secure nation now i am
not an anarchist as
i believe you need nations
you need nations to secure those rights
that is the rights are not you can't
secure those rights without having a
nation but the nation is just a means to
an end the end is the rights and i think
that's how the founders understood it
and that's why they created this kind of
country
i think this is a good place to ask
about common welfare and cohesion
let me uh
say what john don wrote
that quote no man is an island entire of
itself
every man is a piece of the continent a
part of the main
he went on
any man's death diminishes me because i
am involved in mankind and therefore
never send to know for whom the bell
tolls
it tolls for thee
so
let's talk about individualism
and cohesion
not just the political level but at a
philosophical level for the human
condition
what is central what is the role
of other humans
in our lives what's the importance of
cohesion this is something you've talked
about
so iran said that the the beauty of the
founding documents is that they create a
cohesive union that protects
the individual freedoms
but you have spoken about the value of
the union
the common welfare
the cohesion in itself
so can you maybe elaborate on
what is the role of cohesion and the
collective not to use that term but
multiple humans together connected
in the human condition sure i keep
getting the feeling that euron and i are
actually having an a disagreement about
empirical reality because i think that
enlightenment rationalist political
thought
features the individual
it features the state
uh there isn't really a nation other
than the the nation the people is as a
collective is created by the state and
when the state disappears then the
collective disappears now i think that
when conservatives
of all stripes
look at this kind of thinking that
there's the individuals and then there's
the state
and there really isn't anything else
when they look at that
they say
even before you get to consequences it's
a terrible theory because when we try to
understand any field of inquiry any
domain any subject area when you try to
understand it we try to come up with a
small number of
uh of concepts
and of relations among the concepts
which is supposed to be able to to uh to
explain to illuminate
as much as possible
the important things they're taking
place in the domain
and conservatives look at this
individuals and the state and they say
you're missing most of what's going on
in politics
also in in in personal human relations
as well
but
it it just doesn't look like a
description of human beings it looks
like a completely artificial thing and
then conservatives say well look if i
went to adopt this artificial thing then
the consequences are horrific because
you're not describing reality
so a conservative reality
uh begins with
um
with an empirical view of what you know
what are human beings like and and
the first thing you notice about human
beings or at least the first thing i
think conservatives notice is that
they're sticky is that they clump they
turn into groups and you take any
arbitrary collection of
human beings and set them to a task or
even just leave them alone
and they they quickly form into groups
and those groups are always structured
as hierarchies this is this competition
within the hierarchy who's you know
who's going to be the leader who's going
to be number two but
there are everywhere you look in human
societies
universally
there are groups the groups compete and
they're high and they're structured
internally as hierarchies and then
they're internal competitions for who
leads the different groups
and when we think about scientific
explanation we allow that there are
there are different levels of
explanation
that you know a macroscopic object like
a table it doesn't have properties that
are that you know that can be directly
derived from the properties of you know
the atoms or the molecules or the the
microfibers that make up the table
and and and that's understood that
there's what you know
academic philosophers call emergent
properties that when you get up to the
level of the table it has properties
like you know that you can't put your
fist through it which you can't
necessarily know just by looking at the
atoms alone
and i think conservatives say the same
thing is true for political theory for
social theory
that looking at an individual human
being and thinking about what does that
individual human being
need which euron does very eloquently in
his in his writings
but that doesn't tell you what the
characteristics are of this
hierarchically structured group as soon
as you have that it has its own
qualities so an example the question of
what holds these groups together and and
we need to answer that question
i i try to answer it by by saying
there's such a thing as mutual loyalty
mutual loyalty is shorthand for
human beings individuals have the
capacity to include another individual
within their self within within their
conception of their self when two people
do it
it it creates a
a bond like a like a bond between two
two atoms creates a molecule that
doesn't mean that they lose their
individuality they
within the group they they may still
continue competing with one another but
that doesn't mean that there isn't in
reality a bond and that real bond is is
the stuff of which uh political events
and political
history are made is the the coming
together the cohesion and the
dissolution of of of these bonded
loyalty groups that's the reality of of
politics
and so when i hear these discussions
about individuals in the state
i feel like we're missing most of the
reality and in order to understand the
political reality
we need to understand
what makes human beings coherent to
groups what makes them dissolve what
makes the groups come apart and and end
up creating civil wars and that kind of
thing i think we also need to know um
what
in practice um rival groups do come
together and and bond i mean basically
when we think about uh democratic
society we're talking about different
different groups we can call them tribes
or you can come up with a different name
but but different different tribal
groupings with different views they come
together to form a nation
and they're able to do that even though
you know often they they hate each other
you know like
like we were talking about the the
american revolution and often they hate
each other and nevertheless they're able
to come together why how
and that leads us into questions like
how does
honor the giving of honor by one group
to another
how does that increase the
the mutual loyalty between groups that
that are still competing with one
another
all of these questions i think we have
to answer them in order to be able to
talk about politics and uh and and i i
think the reason the first reason why
why one should approach politics as a
conservative rather than as an
individual just because it gives us
gives us these these theoretical tools
to be able to talk about reality which
we don't have as long as we keep within
the individual's framework as as you're
talking the metaphor that's popping up
in my mind and this is also something
that uh bothers me with theoretical
physics
the metaphor is
there's some sense in which there's
things called theories of everything
where you try to uh describe the basic
laws of physics how they interact
together and once you do you have a
sense that you understand all of reality
in in a sense you do and that to me when
you that to me is understanding the
individual like how the individual
behaves in this world but then you're
saying that they're hey hey you're also
forgetting chemistry biology how all of
that actually comes together the
stickiness
uh the stickiness of molecules and how
they build different systems and they
some systems can kill each other some
systems can flourish some can make
pancakes and bananas and some can make
poison and all those kinds of things and
we need to be able to we need to
consider
the the full
stack
of things that are constructed from the
fundamental basics
um and uh i guess iran you're saying
that no you
you're just like the theoretical
physicist it all starts at the bot like
if you need to preserve the fundamentals
of reality
uh which is the individual like the the
basic atom
of human society is the individual to
you so yes so the the basic unit the
basic model unit the basic ethical unit
in society is the individual and yeah of
course we form groups
and and you can't understand history
unless you understand group formation
and group motivation and
and i have a view about what kind of
groups should be formed
uh and and politically from a political
perspective voluntary ones ones in which
we we join when we want to join and we
can leave when we want to leave and uh
ones that help us and clearly groups
help us
pursue
whatever it is our goal is ultimately so
so in the pursuit of happiness there are
lots of groups that one wants the form
whether it's marriage whether it's
businesses whether it's sports teams
whether it's lots of there's lots of
different groups to fund
but the question is what is the standard
of well-being is it the standard well
being some
algorithm that maximizes the well-being
of a group you know some utilitarian
function
you know is it
uh
is it
something that's inherent in the group
that we can measure
as goodness and to help with individuals
within as long as we can get that that
the group to function well we don't
really care about where the individuals
at so to me
the the the the goal of creating groups
is the well-being of the individual and
that's why it needs to be voluntary and
that's why there has to be a way out of
of those sometimes it's costly it's not
a cheap out that's why you should really
think about what groups you you you and
this you know on an issue that's very
controversial
maybe we can discuss maybe not this is
why to me immigration is so important
right open immigration or free
immigration is because that's another
group that i would like people to be
able to voluntarily choose both in and
out and and i'd like to see people be
able to go and join that group that
you know that they believe will allow
for the pursuit of happiness but let me
say that you know
that's a description of an idea what i'm
just saying right i recognize that
that's not the reality in which we live
i recognize that that's not a reality in
which history history
you know recognizing that such a that
the individual exists in a sense
philosophically is a massive achievement
right uh
you know human beings however they
evolved clearly we started out in in a
in a tribal context in which the
individual did matter we followed the
leader the competition was for power
power over the group and and and
dictates how the group should work uh
you know it the the history of human
beings is a history of gaining knowledge
and part of the knowledge is
the value of an individual and you can
see that in in in religion you can see
that in philosophy you can see that uh
through the evolution and then
you know uh
we we evolved from tribes into nations
and then
empires and conflicts between nations
and conflict within empires and we tried
a lot of different things if you will i
don't think we always did on purpose but
uh we kind of did different philosophies
different sets of ideas drove us towards
different
collectives different groupings and and
different ways in which to structure
and after i don't know 3000 years of
kind of known history uh this history
before that but we don't know much about
it 3000 years of known history you can
sit back and evaluate
and and i think that's what that's what
is done in the enlightenment and and and
you sit back and suddenly we can do it
today we can sit back and evaluate what
promotes human flourishing and what
doesn't and what do we mean by human
flourishing human who's who's
flourishing
well individual human beings now
since i don't believe in a zero-sum
world and the world is not zero summit
we can see that it's it's empirically
possible to show that the world is not a
zero-sum game my fl human flourishing
doesn't come at your expense so i i you
know i can show that a system that
promotes my flourishing will probably
promote your flourishing as well and
promotes the general welfare in that
sense because it promotes
individuals
flourishing and we can we can look at
all these
examples of how we evolved and what
leads to bloodshed and what doesn't and
and and what promotes this ability to
flourish as an individual again an
achievement the idea of individual
flourishing
and then we can think about how to
create a political system around that a
political system
that recognizes and allows for the
formation of groups but just under the
principle of voluntary so you can't be
forced to join a group you you can't be
cursed into forming a group
um other than the fact that you're born
in a particular place in a particular
you know that in a sense but that's not
force that's there's a difference
between metaphysics and between choices
so this is something that came up in the
debate that yoram said that not all
human relations are voluntary and you
kind of emphasize that a lot of
where we are is not voluntary we're
grounded we're connected in so much so
how how can a human be free
in the way you're describing individual
be free if
uh some part of who we are is not
voluntary some part of who we are is
other people well because what do we
mean by freedom freedom doesn't mean
and the negation of the laws of physics
right freedom doesn't mean uh ignoring
um
freedom means the the ability within the
scope of what's available for you to
choose being able to choose those things
um so
in in
in a political context vita means uh uh
you know the negate the the absence of
coercion uh so once you're an adult
uh you know you almost says you're born
with a particular into a particular
religious context absolutely but once
you're an adult i think it's incumbent
on you to evaluate that religious
context and and and look at different
religions or non-religion or whatever
and choose your philosophy of life
choose your values choose how you want
to live your life that's the freedom the
freedom is
one one system says uh
you're either cursed by the state of
course by the group occurs by society
around you to follow a particular path
or your
your uh
the expectation is the demand is the the
pressure is to conform to a particular
path and my view is no you you should be
in a position to be able to choose your
path and and that choice means you look
around
you you you evaluate you evaluate
history based on knowledge based on on
all of these things and you choose what
that path would be that's
fundamentally what what freedom means
yes you cannot choose your parents but
of course not no nobody would claim that
that's what's in the scope of what is
possible i think that i think the
coercion freedom
dichotomy
these are too few concepts coercion and
freedom it's too simplistic to be able
to describe what we're actually dealing
with
the traditional
anglo-conservative view
is
that
society has to be
it has to be ordered it has to be
disciplined
and
there are two choices for how it can can
be ordered
one is that a people is uh by its own
traditions you would say voluntarily but
these are mostly inherited traditions by
its own traditions
it is uh it it is ordered for example
people just in general will not go into
somebody else's yard because that that's
the custom here is we don't go into
somebody else's yard without their
permission and so fortescue we're
talking about you know 500 years ago
already so fortiscue says that the
genius of the english people is that our
government can be mild and apply very
little coercion because the people are
so disciplined now when he says the
people are so disciplined what he's
saying is is that
that our art
our nation our tribes we have strong
traditions which channel people you know
through through tools of being honored
and dishonored now
that's a reality that exists in every
society and it's it's not captured by
your distinction between coercion and
lack of coercion when it when when i'm
going to be dishonored if if i don't if
i don't care for for from from my aging
mother i'm not being coerced like the
state comes and puts a gun to my head i
but but i am being pressured
i'm given guidelines but i'm saying
that's wrong and i'm saying that's
dangerous because
because that could easily be used
for bad tradition
but that's what's the standard by which
we evaluate what a good tradition is
about you you're the english you're
getting to the standard too wait wait
you're getting to the standard too fast
first i want to know factually is it
true that all societies work like this
because if it's true that all societies
work like this then saying saying we
should be free from it is is just a
fantasy
so a i don't think all societies work
like this i think much of what happened
in america post-founding in the 19th
century didn't work like that i think
that's the genius of america and i think
what happened during the 19th century in
the industrial revolution what happened
in in in the 19th century to some extent
globally but certainly in the united
states didn't work that way it broke
tradition i think i think all innovation
breaks tradition and i think that's what
the genius of of this country is and and
the post-enlightenment
uh world is
uh i think pre that tradition they work
that way and then the question is that
people understand why they do what they
do
that is i don't want people doing what i
think is right
just because i think it's right and i've
i you know and i've created a society in
which yeah
yeah okay
you know somebody founded this country
in a particular way so we're just gonna
follow i want people to understand what
they're doing so i want people to have a
respect for property not because it's a
tradition but because they understand
the value of a respect for property um i
i want people not to murder one another
not because there's a commandment that
shall not murder but because they have
an understanding of why murdering is bad
and wrong and and bad for them and bad
for the kind of world that they want to
live in that's and i think that's what
we achieve through enlightenment through
education through through in and where
we don't treat people just as a a blob
tribe that just follows orders but we
now treat individuals as capable of
thinking for themselves capable for
discovering truth capable of of of
figuring out their own values and and
that's the big break between and this is
why you know this is the break i think
that the declaration represents
the break between society that is based
on tradition following commandments
following rules
because they are the rules because they
are the commandments and a society where
individuals understand those rules
understand yes it's now become a
tradition let's say to respect
individual right to respect property
rights but it's they're not following it
because it's a tradition they're
following it because they understand
what it is about it that that that makes
it good so that's the world i think that
that we were on the process of evolving
towards
and that is what got destroyed in the
20th century and and
certainly disappeared today and i think
that's the great tragedy is that we're
evolving to a place where people
understood
the values the rep
that represent and of course the the
danger with tradition is
it
i mean we'll agree right it's it's it's
yeah it's it's okay to kill the jew
right or it's okay to steal people's
property if there are a certain color
okay to enslave those are all traditions
and yet
once you stop and say but what are they
based on what's or is this right is this
just
based on some moral law
no it's not there's something wrong here
we can't achieve happiness and success
if we follow these you're talking about
reason and tradition but i think i would
love to sort of linger on the on the
stickiness of humans that you described
uh so you kind of said this primary the
individuals is primary i know as a great
invention but to me it's not at all
obvious
that somehow
that
uh the invention that humans have been
practicing for a
very long time of the stickiness
of uh
of community of family
of love
it's that's that's not obvious to me
that's that's
not also fundamental to human
flourishing and should be celebrated
and protected
now the i suppose the argument you're
making is uh when you start to let
the state
define what the stickiness how the
stickiness looks between humans so
you're really like the voluntary aspect
but i just want to
sort of the the the observation is
humans seem to
be pretty happy when they form
communities uh uh however you define
that it's a romantic partnership family
communities some communities people
people are miserable in other
communities so the nature of the
community matters right we know this we
know that that some bondings are not
healthy and not good for the individuals
involved and they don't thrive
um so i i absolutely i mean i'm a lover
not a fighter right so i'm a huge
believer in love
the whole philosophy i think is
is a love-based philosophy i fight in
order to love right so it's it's love is
love is at the core of all of this and
it's it's it's it's a love of of life
it's a love of of the world out there
and it's a love of other people because
they represent a value to you
so the stickiness is there it's it's you
know my point is a it should be chosen
it should be consciously chosen and and
this is i'm put aside the state forget
the state for a minute forget forget cos
and forget all that
what i would encourage individuals to do
and this is where you know i'm i'm not
primarily a political for you know
interested in politics although
i sent to talk most about that i'm
primarily interested in human beings and
how they live in a sense in morality and
what i would urge individuals to do
is to think about their relationships to
choose the best relationships possible
but to seek out great relationships
because other human beings are an
immense value to us
and and
you know when i write
you know maybe you don't quoted this or
not but i write that
you know about the trade principle and
trading
you know it's easy and and obvious to
think of it as a materialistic kind of
thing you know i get you know uh i i do
the chose this day and my wife does the
chose the other day we're trading but
trading is much more subtle than that
and much more can be much more spiritual
than that it's about
the the the the the trading in in
emotions it's about it's about the the
way one uh sees each other what one gets
from one another i think friendship is a
form of trade now i know that that seems
to make it material but i don't i don't
think it's of trade as a material thing
but friendship is incredibly important
in life love is incredibly important in
life
you know
having having a group of friends is
incredibly important all of these are
sticky and important okay how can i try
to be eloquent on this so
if you give people freedom
if you give people politics yeah well
not politics relations relations uh
relationships so
this is interesting because we have an
interesting dynamic going on here in
terms of beliefs they're differing and
so there's interesting overlaps but
there's a worry if you look at human
history and you study the lessons of
history and you look at modern society
if you give people freedom in terms of
stickiness and human relations and so on
full
like if you not give people freedom
emphasize
freedom as the highest ideal
you start getting more tender online
dating the stickiness dissolves just
like in chemistry you start to have a
gas versus a liquid right that that's
the way so you have to what you have to
study
what actually happens if you emphasize
that
the stickiness the bonds of humans
is holding you back the exercise of
voluntary choice
is the highest ideal
the danger of that is for that to be
implemented or interpreted in certain
kinds of ways by us flawed humans that
are not i mean you could say we're
perfectly reasonable and rational we can
think through all of our decisions but
really i mean especially you're young
you get horny you make decisions that
are
suboptimal perhaps so the the point is
you have to look at reality
of when you emphasize different things
so when you when you talk about what is
the ideal life what is the ideal
relations you have to also think like
what are you emphasizing i think you
both agree on what's important uh that
community can be important that freedom
is important but what are you
emphasizing and you're really
emphasizing the individual and
you're emphasizing uh your arm you're
emphasizing
more
of the community of the family of the
stickiness of the nation
well look i don't want to deny the place
of the individual i i think that
uh
that
there really is a very great
change in civilization
when the books of moses
announced that
the individual is created in the image
of god
that that's a step that's
as far as we know without pr precedent
before that in history
and uh to a very large degree i mean one
of the kind of unspoken
uh things going on is that that uh
euron and i really do agree on all sorts
of things i i think in part because
because we're we're both jewish and he
said you just say you're on his mo
basically moses yesterday
no i said he was channeling moses but
that's still in my book you know that
that's still pretty pretty that's a
compliment that's pretty good
that
for me that's a compliment we'll talk
about this a little bit just for the
listener just so they
they know iran amongst many things we'll
talk about the virtue of nationalism but
uh
you're also a religious scholar of sorts
or at least uh leverage
the bible for much not much but some of
the wisdom in your life
look the way that euron looks at
enlightenment or maybe at ayn rand that
that that's that's the way that i see
the uh hebrew scripture and and the
tradition that comes from it uh it has
the same kind of place in my life and i
i just
i don't know how much we want to
want to explore it but i i i think that
uh that
the agreement that we do have about the
positive value of
the creative individual the positive
value of the individual's um desire to
improve the world and and and and
in my book that means
including his or her desire to improve
his family his his his tribe his
congregation his nation
but but it still comes from this kind of
for you know what your own calls
selfishness
the the desire to make things better for
yourself
in hebrew bible and in judaism
that just is a positive thing of course
it can be taken too far but it just is
positive and it doesn't carry these
kinds of
uh you know you should turn the other
cheek you should give away your cloak
you should love your enemy these kinds
of christian tropes do not exist in
judaism and so it just i i like
listening to your iran's i do feel like
he goes too far on various things but
but i also hear you know underneath that
i can sort of you know hear hear the the
the jewish current and the resistance to
you know to
uh to things that
about christianity the jews often find
can ask you a question there
uh can you make
an argument for turn the other cheek
no i i tend to
i guess you would equate that with
altruism
i tend to uh injustice
it's unjustified now that you all right
um
okay so yourself if you're turning
another cheek it's it's a lack of love
lack of self-respect well let me push
back on that because i'm uh i i like
turn the other cheek um especially on
twitter
uh
so
i like i i like block the offender on
twitter
no what
uh so twitter aside is more like your
you um
you're investing in the long-term
version of yourself versus the short
term
so that that's the way i think about it
it's like the energy you put on to the
world the turning out of the cheek
philosophy allows you to walk through
the fire gracefully
in some sense i mean perhaps you would
reframe that as not a
uh then that that's not being altruistic
or whatever but
there there is something pragmatic about
that kind of approach to life uh
disciplining yourself so that you become
a better version of yourself i mean i i
not not only do we agree but you know i
think i think every religious and
philosophical tradition probably has a
version of that even even kant who we
join together in finding to be terrible
even kant makes that distinction between
the short-term interest and long-term
interest so i
i i think that's universal i don't know
of anybody who's really disagreeing
about that the thing that we were
talking about a couple of minutes ago
before we got onto this tangent is the
relationship between the the
individual who is in the image of god
and and is of of
uh
a value as an individual
nevertheless there's this question about
what
what is what is good for that person
and and and also what makes them happy
i'm not sure that those are exactly the
same things but they're they're they're
both certainly uh relevant and
important
and um i i i feel like i mean i think
we're beginning to uncover this
empirical disagreement about what it is
that's good for the individual and what
it is that makes them happy and i'll go
back to something i raised um i i raised
in the debate which is uh this uh this
theory of durkheim that now has been uh
popularized by
uh by jordan peterson but um
durkheim argues that
that
the
he's writing a book on suicide he's
trying to understand what what brings
individuals to suicide and he coins this
term anomi
lack of law
and the argument is that
uh that
individuals
basically are
healthy and happy
when they find their place in uh in a
hierarchy within a loyalty group in a
certain place in a hierarchy they
compete and struggle in order to rise in
the hierarchy but they know
where they are they know who they are
the kids today like to say they know
what their identity is
because they associate themselves
their self expands to take on you know
the leadership the different layers the
past and the future of this this
particular hierarchy and i completely
agree with iran that some of these
hierarchies are are pernicious and
oppressive
and and terrible and some of them are
better
what what we might disagree about is
that that you can find um human beings
who are are capable of
becoming healthy and happy
off by themselves without participating
in in in this kind of structure the
minute that you accept if you accept
that this is empirical reality but human
beings it it's it's an iron law you
can't you can't do anything you you can
tell you human beings that they can be
free of all constraints all you want and
you can get them to do
things that that as you say dissolve
dissolve their pl they can have contempt
for hierarchies they can say i'm not
gonna i'm not gonna serve the man i'm
gonna you know i i'm just gonna burn
them all down you can you can
get them to say all get kids to say all
these things you can get them either to
be marxists who are
were actively trying to overthrow and
destroy the existing hierarchies or you
can make them some kind of liberal where
they basically pretend the hierarchies
don't exist they just act like that that
they're not there
in both cases and it's not coincidence
that that's what universities teach is
your choice is either marxist revolution
or liberal ignoring of the hierarchies
in both cases what you've done is you've
eliminated the possibility that the
young person will be able to
find his or her
place in a way that allows them to grow
and exercise their their their their
love their drive their their creativity
in order to to advance something
constructive you've eliminated it and
you've put the burden on them
you know kind of a niche burden to uh to
just be the fountain of all values
yourself
which you know maybe some people can do
it
but almost no one can do it and i think
that's empirically true and so i i think
by telling them
about their freedom rather than telling
them about how
about the the need to join into some
some
uh traditionalist hierarchy that can be
good and healthy for them
i think we're destroying them i think
we're destroying this generation and the
last one and the next euron is the
burden of freedom destroying mankind
what freedom i mean uh
how many people are indeed free the the
look the problem is that we we were
caught up on political concepts
and we we've
we're moving into uh uh ethical issues
and and
i i don't think it's right to tell
people
you're free go do whatever the hell you
want
just just use your emotions you know
just just go where you want to go
you know in the spur of the moment think
short term don't think long term or
don't think why think
one has to provide moral guidance
and and and morality here is crucial and
crucially important
and part of taking responsibility for
your own life is establishing a moral
framework
for your life and and what does it mean
to live a good life i mean that's much
more important in a sense
of a question and it is
it is my belief that people can do that
they can find and choose the values
necessary to achieve a good life but
they need guidance they need guidance
this is why religion evolved in my view
because people need guidance so so so
that says you know i had called religion
a primitive foreign philosophy it was
the original philosophy that provided
people with some guidance about what to
do and what not to do and
secular philosophy is supposed to do the
same and the problem is
that i think religion and
99 of secular philosophy give people bad
advice
about what to do and therefore they do
bad stuff and and some of that sometimes
uh you know because uh uh when they do
good stuff it gets reinforced that we
survive in spite of that but uh ideas
like kant and hegel and and mocks and so
on give young people awful advice about
how to live and what to do and as a
consequence really bad stuff happens and
the world in which we exist today which
we agree
there's a lot of
pathologies to it a lot of bad stuff
going on in my views going the wrong way
in my view a product
of of of a set of ideas uh you know on
the one hand i think i think
christian ideas on the other hand i
think secular philosophical ideas that
have driven this country and the world
more generally in a really really bad
direction and this is why the this is
why what i do what i do because i think
at the core of it the only way to change
it
is not to impose a new set of ideas from
the top because i i worry about who's
going to be doing the imposition plus i
don't believe you can you can force
people to be good
it's to challenge the ideas it's the
question the ideas it's to present an
alternative view of morality an
alternative a set of moral principles an
alternative ultimately an alternative
view of political principles but it has
to start with morality if you don't and
and my morality centered on the
individual and what the individual
should do with his life in order to
attain a good life uh i i believe that
leads to happiness but but but the good
life
that's why it's good right the the the
goal is survival and thriving and
flourishing and and happiness ultimately
but politics is a servant of that in the
end it's it's not an end in itself
so the real issue is
you know you ask before what is the
value of relationship
there's enormous value in relationship
because we get values from other people
we don't produce all our values we don't
produce all our spiritual values
and we don't produce all our material
values other people
on a massive
benefit to us because they produce
values we can't there's a massive
division of labor in terms of values not
just in economics but also in philosophy
and elsewhere
it's why we have teachers it's why we
have moral teachers small teachers are
important to help guide us towards a
good life not all of us are philosophers
but what i do
demand if you will of individuals this
is where i put a burden on people right
understand what you're doing
right
you know don't embrace a moral teaching
because it was tradition don't embrace
them all teaching because your parents
embrace that don't embrace them all
teaching just because your teachers are
teaching it
challenge it think about it embrace it
because you
embrace it you might be wrong you might
embrace the wrong one but take moral
responsibility take responsibility over
your life by
evaluating testing challenging
what you have received and choosing
what your
what what you're going to pursue and i i
acknowledge empirically that most people
don't do that
and uh and and and this is why
intellectual leadership is so important
uh this is why you want to get peop you
want the voices in a culture to be good
voices so that those people who don't
think for themselves
land up being followers but they end up
being followers of somebody good versus
followers of somebody bad
but
for the thinkers in the world out there
who i think are the people who count who
the people who shape society
no no
wait a minute not not count in a sense
that you can dismiss the lives of others
and you know because i'm you know
obviously i'm anti-coercion and
anti-violence
but
yes
i don't want to sound like plato but in
the sense that they're the ones who
shape who land of shaping the world
they're the ones who land up shaping how
how they will be
i want those people to make choices
about their values and not to just
accept them based on traditional base
the commandment or based on
where they happen to grow up and and in
that sense again
you know i i do and this is this is an
interesting
point where i we disagree but i'm not
exactly sure what joram's position is i
do believe in universal values that is
there are things that are good and there
are things that are evil and and i think
we'd agree on that and and there are
systems we agree that that communism and
fascism are evil well i think we should
be able to agree that some things some
political systems are good and maybe
there's this middle ground where
uh we both think that they're
not particularly bad but not
particularly good and you all might
think that better than i think they are
but if we can agree and this is good and
this is evil right then the systems that
tend towards the good are good and the
system to tend towards the evil or evil
and and but that's universal right you
know i i look at places like uh uh south
korea japan uh asia you know cultures
that are very very different in many
respects in the west and yet when they
adopt
certain
uh western ideas right uh about freedom
about liberty about individualism i mean
the japanese constitution because
macarthur forced it in there has the
pursuit of happiness in the constitution
not because they chose it because he put
it in it but they to some extent adopted
that and and they're they're successful
they're successful places today those
societies in asia that didn't adopt
these values are not successful
societies today euron
japan has a has a birth rate of what is
it one point no 1.1 1.2
children per woman i mean look
there
there are some things
there are some places where you give
people freedom this is also biblical
right the idea that
everyone did what's right in his own
eyes
okay right this is a a refl refrain in
the book of judges and and and and the
bible is not an anti-freedom book i mean
there's many many look i i don't know
let's talk no we're not fine we will get
there okay
he's gonna go okay look just as an
asterisk i'm not asking you because you
know because the bible is such a great
authoritarian but it it's not that at
all my
in my in in my view if uh if you want to
know where you know
where where this uh the what you call
the the sanctity of property where does
the sanctity of property comes from it
comes from the ten commandments it comes
from moses saying i haven't taken
anything from anyone it comes from
samuel saying i haven't taken anything
from anyone it's the condemnation of
have of the unjust kings who steal the
property of
of their of their subjects so so i'm not
so i i'm property and freedom i i think
there's great basis for for it in in in
the bible but right now i i'm focusing
on on on this other question which is
what happens when everyone does what's
right in his own eyes that's the book of
judges and that's that's this civil war
uh moral corruption theft idolatry uh
murder uh rape i mean there's that
that's what what happens when everyone
everyone does whatever is writing isn't
organized
well no it's what that that's what it
says in the text i'm not okay so when i
look at
you're right there are things that i
think are objectively true i think it's
really hard to get people to agree agree
to them
almost impossible but when i look at a
country which is uh is
approaching
uh one birth per
woman in other words half of the minimum
necessary for for replacement
you can say whatever you want whatever
you want about immigration we can have
that discussion but the point is that
when when when your values are such that
you're not even capable of of doing the
most basic techniques that human beings
need in order to be able to propagate
themselves and their values and the way
they see things then i look you're
you're finished you can't say that so
you you can't if i implied that japan is
an ideal society i i take that back
but no but
let's think
we should talk about hierarchy yeah but
uh just just to clarify do you
how do you explain uh the situation in
japan is it the decrease in value in
family like some of them
um just expand on that like how do you
explain that situation
you're saying that that society is in
trouble in a certain way can you kind of
describe the nature of that trouble i'm
saying that when
the individual is part of a social
group this can be a family a
congregation a community a tribe a
nation
when the individual
feels that the things that are happening
to the society are things that are
happening to him or to her and i want to
emphasize this is not the standard view
of collectivism that you know that
mussolini will mussolini will say you
know the glory of the individual is in
totally immersing himself in you know in
in the organic whole
that's not what i'm saying i'm saying
that human beings
have and are
both they enter into a society to which
they are loyal and they compete
with one another within
in the terms that that society allows
competition but also sometimes by
bending the rules and by shaping them
and by by changing them
what what you see in many societies
certainly throughout the liberal west
but also in countries that have been
affected by the liberal west by
industrialization and ideas of
individualism
what you see is a collapse of a
willingness of the individual to look at
what the what is what is needed by the
whole
and to uh to make choices that are um
that are as th your own would call them
selfish because it's a because the
purpose of them is is self-expression
competition self-assertion moving up in
the hierarchy a achieving achieving um
honor or wealth
in order to do those things but but
when you stop being able to to look at
the framework of a particular society
and identify with it
you lose
that
you cease to understand what it is that
you need to do
not not every single person but i'm
talking about society wide so there are
few individuals who are just going to
have a fantastic time and live the kind
of life that euron is describing and the
great majority they stop being willing
to take risks they stop being willing to
get married they stop being willing to
have children they stop being willing to
start companies they stop being willing
to put themselves out to do great things
because the guide rails that told them
what what kinds of things and the the
social feedback that honored them when
they did things like getting married and
having children they've been crushed and
what have they been crushed by they've
been crushed by the the the false view
that if you tell the individual be free
make all your own decisions that they
will then be free and make all their own
decisions they don't they just stop they
stop being human
that's powerful so do you want to
respond to that yes
so i don't think anybody should have
children
if the goal is the goal
this there's a good uh there's a good
tweet clip that
clip that
children for the goal of um
perpetuating their nation or
expanding their society or for some
think they'd make people
parents if that was the goal the the
purpose of doing it
i i think people should have children
because they want to embrace that
challenge that that that
beauty
that experience that amazing very very
hard very very difficult
experience in life it's it's a it's
about being able to project the long
term but also being able to enjoy and
love the creation of another human being
that process of creation it is a
beautiful self-interested thing and by
the way not everybody should have
children
i think way too many people have
children you know there's some awful
parents out there that i wish
uh would stop i mean there are you know
life is precious and life of suffering
is sad it's sad to see people suffer and
a lot of people are born into situations
and abort born into parents that that
destroy their capacity to ever live a
good life and that's that's a tragic and
and sad thing and uh so
so i don't measure um the health of a
society
uh in how many children they're having
or a health of a couple whether they
have children or not those are
individual choices some people
make a choice not to have children which
is completely rational and consistent
with their values and
now when you look at a society overall i
do think having children not having
children is a reflection of something i
think it's a reflection of a certain
optimism about the future i think it's a
reflection of thinking long term versus
short-term i think a short-term society
doesn't have children people don't have
children there because
children are long-term investment
they they require real planning and real
effort and real thinking about the
long-term but those are all issues and
again we're confusing or
or mixing
when i say japan look how well japan has
done i i don't mean the specific
japanese people and how many kids
they're having and what kind of life
they're having you know in terms of
these kind of particulars
but think about the alternatives japan
faces if you look around the the options
right that they face
they tried empire uh they tried
nationalistic empire didn't turn out too
well for them or anybody who they
interacted with they could have become
north korea
we we know how that turned out we know
what that is they could have been
cambodia if you've ever been to cambodia
and seen the kind of poverty and and yes
maybe cambodia's have lots of children
but god i'd rather be in japan any day
than than have children in in the kind
of poverty and horrific uh circumstances
they have but in the context of the
available
um regimes that that were possible post
world war ii for the for the japanese
ten-based name-based one that generally
led to prosperity
to freedom to individuals pursuing
values not perfectly because they didn't
implement the philosophical foundation
the mall foundation that i would like to
to have this still being impacted by
kantian hegelian whatever philosophy
that's out there in the west that's
destroying the better part so you give
people freedom now what do they do with
it and if they have a bad philosophy
they're going to do bad things with that
freedom right you you tell people to do
whatever they choose to do but if they
have bad ideas they will choose to do
bad things
so it is true that the primacy of
morality and the primacy of philosophy
has to be recognized it's it's not the
primacy of politics and indeed you don't
get free societies unless you have some
elements of decent philosophy but
you can get free societies with a rotten
philosophy but they don't they don't
stay free for very long don't understand
how can it be a decent philosophy if it
doesn't care about posterity if it does
it if
you're willing to say
i'm i'm offering guidance i think you
should live as a traitor all
relationships should be voluntary those
are those are interesting things but the
moment that it comes to posterity to the
future to there being a future let's say
that there were a society that lived the
way you know in general according to
your view let's say there was such a
society how can you not care whether
that society is capable of passing it on
to the next generation or not but the
way to pass it on to the next generation
is through ideas and not through uh
through having children having children
is an individual choice that some people
are going to make and some people are
not but the fundamental that preserves
what the good life
what does that even mean
if
if if every generation from now on your
your your society that was good at a
certain point has half as many people in
it it's going to
very quickly it's just going to be
overrun everyone back home
what do you mean over anybody are we
just totally ahistorical if you're the
spartans and you have all of these you
know like like warrior values but you
stop having children you get overrun you
get defeated in the case of spotter
that's a good thing not a bad thing but
i get my point you have to have the
ability to have enough children to
create enough wealth and enough power
enough strength who makes these kind of
conclusions and decisions about how many
you make it as an individual and you
decide that you know what we're not
talking about we're talking about what
kind of intellectual cultural religious
inheritance you give your children yes
all right
and those are the ideas that i get
and those ideas are going to perpetuate
because they're good ideas if they're
bad they're not going to perpetuate they
can be
they can't be good ideas if they don't
produce future generations what are you
talking about why would they not produce
future generations i mean as i look at
every liberal every liberal society on
earth but i'm not
in the democratic collapse is not a
single liberal society on earth tonight
that i'm willing to defend but
because they're not living by okay so
okay so they're not acceptable okay so
they have an assemblage
i am a semblance of a political i know a
system that is a little bit like what i
would like far from what i would i know
but they certainly don't have a moral
foundation i believe that people who
have the right moral foundation most of
them not all of them but most of them
will have children most of them will
continue into the future most of them
will fight for a future but not because
they care what happens in 200 years but
because they care about their lifetime
and part of having fun and enjoying
one's lifetime is having kids is
projecting into the future are you
really gonna tell me that the people
have children because it's fun they're
fun when they're four years old they're
not fun when they're when they're 15. no
when they're 15 they're not funny
they're not just not funny look you
don't do learning so much today you
don't you you don't do this for fun
marriage also you don't do for fun there
are times that are fun and there are
times they're not fun
it's not exactly the talent but you
certainly do it for you do it for
happiness you do it for fulfillment you
do it as a challenge you do it for
making
for making your life better for making
your life interesting for making your
life challenging for embracing
you know
part of it is fun part of it is hard
work but you do it because it's
it it's it makes your life a better life
it's very interesting so empirically
speaking if you dissolve the cultural
backbone where everybody comes up like
the background
the moral ideas that everybody is raised
with if you dissolve that and if you
truly emphasize the individual
uh i think
joram is saying it's
going to naturally lead to the
dissolution of marriage and all these
concepts i think so you're not i think
so like everything or basically saying
you're not going to choose some of these
things you're not you're going to more
and more
choose the short-term optimization
versus the long-term optimization
beyond your own life like posterity so
so i don't think about posterity i don't
know what posterity means right i can
project into my children's life
maybe when i have grandchildren at the
grandchildren but it ends there i i
can't project 300 years in the future
it's ridiculous to try to think about
300 years into the future things change
so much and and and that's the founding
fathers that's the conservative founding
father well no i i don't think i think
they set up a system i think the whole
idea was to set up a system i'm just it
was self-perpetuating
that would it would if
people lived up to it right no no would
perpetuate the subject no systems are
self-perpetuating things rise and fall
and it's they don't necessarily focus i
don't believe in that let me speak jared
for a second
the great the great individuals
in societies are the people who have
seen the decline understood it and
provided resources in order to redirect
and bring it back up you can't agree to
that
i i don't see it that way at all yes i
want people out there to rebel against
conventional morality i think
conventional morality is destructive to
their own lives and broadly to posterity
because i think it's unsustainable it's
not good and this goes to i think
conventional morality is christian
morality is a morality that's been
secularized through christian lens and i
think it's destructive but i don't want
them to dump that and not replace it
with something
i want
and i think it's necessary and essential
for people to have a moral code and to
have a a moral code
reality is
a set of guidelines to live your life it
is a set of values that did to to to
guide you to help you identify what is
good
you're saying
central to this morality that people
should have is reason yes okay
you're not saying other things you're
basically saying reason will arrive a
lot of things why are you so sure that
reason is so important there's nothing
else no hold on a second but like it
seems like obvious to you
so first of all humans have limited
cognitive capacity so even to assume we
the reason can actually function that
well from an artificial intelligence
researcher perspective
uh it seems there's a whole discussion
about whether there is such a thing as
artificial intelligence whether whether
that is what it is but um but see here's
the thing i mean you're very confident
about this particular thing but not
about other aspects of human nature that
seems to be obviously present so yes uh
almost
uh human relations love connection
between us so i it's very possible to
argue that all of the accomplishments of
reason would not exist without the
connection of other humans there is of
course that's true it's not obvious
though it's possible that reason is a
property of the collective of multiple
people interacting with each other when
you look at the greatest inventions of
human history some people tell that
story by individual inventors
you could argue that's true some people
say that it's
it's a bunch of people in the room
together the idea is bubbling and if
you're saying
individual is primary and they have the
full power and the capacity to make
choices
i don't know if that's necessarily
obviously so there's a straw manning
going on here yeah my position right yep
of course my favorite thing to do
i'm you don't do it and you do it more
politely than anybody else i know when
you do it of course we all stand on the
shoulders of giants of course invention
and science is collaborative uh not
always not not not a hundred percent uh
newton stood on the on the shoulders of
giants i don't know how collaborative he
was he wasn't exactly known as a
bubbling up and and testing ideas out
with other people but this is a
metaphysical fact you can't eat for me
there's no collective stomach you can't
eat for me
you know you can provide me with food
but i need to do the eating you can't
think for me
you can help stimulate my thought
you can challenge my thinking you can
add to it
but in the end of the day only i can
either do my thinking or not do my
thinking but i need to think but you can
think all by yourself alone but what
does that mean all by yourself right can
can i think on a desert island yes i can
think on a desert line
can i can i think as big and as broad
and as deep as i can
in in uh uh aristotle's i see him of
course not i i'm a much better thinker
and aristotle i see him or in or or in
any kind of situation like this where
you're going to challenge me and i have
to come back and i have to think deeply
about what it is you said and why i'm
not communicating very effectively and
why why you're not understanding me
of course now you're causing me to think
much more deeply and to challenge me but
it's still true that i have to think i
if i don't think for myself who's going
to think for me right so
so this is why
um i'm not a philosopher
i'm certainly not an original thinker in
that sense i you know i recognize the
fact that they're geniuses that are much
smarter than me whether it's aristotle
line rand or people that inspire me i
study their work i try to understand it
to the best of my ability but i don't
take it as
gospel i take it as
you know this is something i need to
figure out i need to learn it i need to
understand it because it's good for my
life it's important to me
but i have to do the thinking it won't
be mine
it it'll behind manage but it won't be
mine unless i've done the thinking to
integrate it into my soul into my
consciousness into my mind but it's
still true that i have to think for
myself not on a desert island i you know
and i i i now regret ever using a desert
island in in in the book as an example
because you know because uh uh
we've achieved something there
there is progress
because
clearly the truth is because clearly it
was misunderstood
i didn't make myself clear enough in in
the book in terms of what i meant but um
you know i
i do not advocate for thinking alone in
a dark room not engaging with reality
not studying history not knowing about
the world or on a desert island not
interacting with you're a collectivist
no i'm a trader so i i enjoy what we're
doing right now because you're
challenging me you make me a better
thinker uh it's interesting you know the
fact that
a lot of people are going to watch this
plays into it as well but i would
probably
enjoy engaging with you in conversation
recording so yeah there you go i i would
enjoy engaging with you with your in
conversation even if it wasn't being
recorded and even if it was because
uh you know that kind of conversation
makes me better there's some people who
i wouldn't there's some people who who
make it worse right that you want to
walk that you walk away from the
conversation because because they're
harmful to you and this is where choice
comes in it's i want to be able to
choose who i engage with i don't always
have that choice because
as a public intellectual you go in front
of audiences you don't always choose who
it is but you want to choose who you
engage with and who you don't you want
to choose the forum in which you engage
and how you engage and the standard for
me is reason there is no understanding
so you asked a deep question to start
off why reason right
because
that's where the values come from that's
the only tool we have to discover truth
yes you know reason is something that it
doesn't guarantee truth it doesn't
guarantee they're always right it's
fallible
but it's all we have it's the tool in
which we evaluate the world around us
and we come to conclusions about it
there is there just isn't other two
emotions
emotions are uh are not tools of
cognition consciousness is a tool
emotion like love all of these things
are ways to experience the world to say
that reason is the best tool but there's
a difference between experiencing the
world
and and evaluating the world in terms of
what is true
as a scientist i appreciate the value of
reason and emotions and love
are consequences they're not primary
emotions are consequences of conclusions
you've come to your emotions will change
very quickly relatively speaking when
your evaluations of a situation will
change different people can see exactly
the same scene and have completely
different emotions because they're
bringing different value systems and
they're bringing different thoughts to
the process maybe love is primary but
let me ask uh love is the same thing you
can fall out of love with somebody why
because you learn something new because
you've discovered something new about
the person now you don't love them the
wrong podcast to bring up love we'll
talk forever about it so uh
you wrote the book the virtue of
nationalism
contrasting nation states with empires
and with global governance like united
nations and so on so uh you argue that
nationalism uniquely provides the quote
the collective right of a free people to
rule themselves so continuing our
conversation
why is this particular
collection of humans we call a nation
a uniquely powerful way to preserve the
freedom of a people to have people rule
themselves
before i say anything on the subject i
should emphasize that i'm not a
rationalist i'm an empiricist and i'm
i'm i'm offering what
uh
what i think is a valid observation of
of human history i i don't have some
kind of deductive framework for proving
that you know that the nation is the
best and empirically we know something
about the way systems of national states
work and about the way empires work and
the way tribal societies work uh what we
don't know is uh you know
is it possible to invent something else
or i mean there's a lot of things we
don't know here
so
with the caveat that i'm i'm making an
empirical observation the basic argument
is
human beings form collectives naturally
loyalty groups
and
for most of human history and prehistory
as far as as as we know human beings
lived in tribal societies tribal
societies or societies um in in in which
there's
um
uh constant friction and constant
warfare
among very small groups among among
families and clans
and we reach a turning point in human
history with the invention of
large-scale agriculture which allows the
creation of vast wealth it allows the
establishment of standing armies instead
of militias you know
sargon of akkad says
i can pay five thousand men to do
nothing other than to drill in the arts
of war and then i'm gonna send them out
to conquer the neighboring city-states
and there you have empire
the bible which is the source of our
our image our conception of a world of
of independent nations that are not
constantly trying to conquer one another
the sort the source of that is the bible
and the the uh the biblical world is is
one in which
uh
israel and and and and various other
small nations are are trying to create
to to to to fight for their independence
against
world empires against empires babylonian
assyrian persian egyptian which aspire
to rule the world
my my claim is fundamentally
twofold it's it it it's moral
that whenever you conquer a foreign
nation you're murdering and you're
stealing you're you're you're destroying
you you as as your own would say you
you're using force to to to
to to cause people to submit so so
there is something in uh in in the
prophets that rebels against this uh
ongoing atrocity and carnage of trying
to take over the whole world
and um and and there's a a prudential
practical argument which is that the
world is governed best
when there are multiple nations when
when they're free to experiment and
chart their own courses that means they
they they have their their own route to
god they have their own
[Music]
moralities they have their own forms of
economy and government and what tends to
happen in history is that
when something is successful when
something looks like when people a
different nation looks at and say well
those people are they're flourishing
they're succeeding then it's it's
imitated and you know in in the way that
you know the dutch invented the stock
market and and the english said look
that makes them them powerful so so
we'll we'll adopt it so that there's
endless examples of that so that's the
argument for it the argument is is um
since since we don't know
a priori deductively from self-evident
principles what is best
it it's best to have a world in which
people are trying different things so a
quick question because the word
nationalism sometimes is presented in a
negative light in connection to
uh the nationalism of nazi germany for
example
so
so you're looking empirically
at a world of nations that respect each
other i use the word nationalism the way
that i inherited it in my tradition yes
which is it's a principled standpoint
that says that the world is governed
best
when
uh many nations are able to be
independent and charge their own course
that's nationals as far as the nazis
hitler's an imperialist he hated nation
states his whole theory if you pick up
i i don't recommend doing this but if
you if you do actually reading it right
now mine conference right if you do read
mineconf then you'll see that he says
explicitly that the goal is for germany
to be
the the lord of the earth and mistress
of the globe and he detests the idea of
the independent nation state because he
sees it as weak and effete he might as
well have said it's jewish so let me ask
from the individual perspective
for nationalism
what do you make of the value of the
love of country
the reason i connect that so
i i personally
uh what would you say a patriot i i love
the love of country or i am suscept or
the in iranian way i enjoy
i in a
love is a good word but what do we find
well i love a lot of things but i'm
saying this particular love is a little
bit contentious which is loving your
country
that's an interesting love that some
people are a little uncomfortable with
uh even when especially when that love
you know i grew up in the soviet union
to say you you know i you you just love
the country it represents a certain
thing to you and it's not you don't
think like philosophically like i was
marching around with with like marks
under my arm or something like that it's
just loving
uh community
at the level of nation it's very
interesting i don't know if that's an
artifact of the past
that we're going to have to strip away
i don't know if i was just raised in
that kind of community but i appreciate
that
my i guess
the thing i'm torn about
is that love of country
that i have in my heart that i now love
america and i consider myself an
american
that would have easily if i was born
earlier been used by stalin
and i would have proudly died on the
battlefield i would have probably died
if i was in nazi germany as a german and
i would proudly die as an american are
you sure about these things yes
that's interesting no i think about this
a lot it's interesting to run
a radical counter factual and be sure of
the answer i mean i'm not sure i mean
but i think about this a lot because
obviously i'm really interested in
history and i put my this is the way i
think about most situations as i
empathize i really try to do hard work
of placing myself in that moment
and thinking through it i'm just okay i
just know myself psychologically what
what i'm susceptible to
uh that's a negative way to phrase it
but what i would love doing
and so i'm just saying my question is um
is the love of nation
a useful
or a powerful moral
sort of from a moral philosophy
perspective uh a good thing
i think it is a good thing but before we
ask whether it's a good thing i think
it's it's worth asking whether there's
any way to live without it
the idea of national independence
of a world or a continent which
politically is governed by multiple
independent national states that is a
political theory somebody came up with
that you know in the bible or elsewhere
some someone came up with this idea and
sold it and a lot of people like it
but the nation
is not an invention it it
every place in human history that we
have any record of
there are nations
and
so
the the the
the fact of
people creating families families
creating an alliance
of
of uh of of clans clans creating
alliances of tribes tribes creating
alliances of uh
and
an alliance that becomes the nation
we see that everywhere in human history
everywhere we look
and the love of a group of tribes that
have come together in order to fight
opponents that are trying to destroy
your way of life and you know and this
steal your land and and and and harm
your women and children
the the the love of
uh of
uh the leadership that brings it
together here this is
you know a george washington type figure
or an alfred the great type figure or or
or saul the biblical saul somebody who
has the the wisdom the daring to unite
the tribes overcome their their you know
their their internal
uh uh mutual hatreds and grievances and
rally them around uh a set of ideas a
language a tradition uh a a a a an
identity as people say today that love
is eradicable from human beings maybe
we'll have brave new world people will
take drugs in order to get rid of it the
problem is that could be leveraged by
authoritarian regime yes but that's true
of everything it's like saying you know
you can have children and you can teach
them to be evil you you can make a lot
of money you can use it for evil you you
can have a gun for self-defense but you
can use it for evil come on we just
that's that's that's human that's being
human but you guys are making love this
primary which i don't think it is there
are lots of people
i know there are lots of people in the
world out there who don't love their
nation because their nation is not worth
loving that is love is conditional it's
not unconditional love is conditioned on
the value that's presented to you you
know so i i lived through this
experience in my own life right i was i
grew up in a in a in in israel
at a time uh of of everything was geared
towards
patriotism and in the state
uh i i would say i was trained to to
when i saw a grenade to jump on it
because that was
you know every song and every story and
everything was about
the state is everything and you should
sacrifice and you know when the flag
went up i got teary-eyed i mean
i bought into it completely
um and at some point i rejected that and
i changed and i changed my alliance and
i i rejected my love of israel it's not
that i don't love it anymore but it's
certainly not my top love and it's
certainly i'm certainly not looking for
the grenade to jump on and i'm
volunteering to go fight the war there
and and i i fell in love from a distance
with with with the idea of america
i i love the idea of america more than i
love america right and and i could see
myself falling in love out of love with
america given where it's heading right
it's it's not automatic it's it's it's
conditioned on what it is that it
represents and what it is what value it
represents
uh for me uh you know and and i think
that's that's always the case with love
uh you know it's not true
that children have to love their parents
that's the ideal and and hopefully most
children love their parents because
their parents but some children fall out
of love with their parents because their
parents don't deserve their love
uh and and the same with this is the
same with the other way around i think i
think parents are capable of not loving
their children okay so it's it's love is
a is a conditional thing it's not
automatic but but let me let me point
out an agreement with let me say
something when you agree you're trying
to bribe me with an agreement okay
right mostly i like to talk to your own
about his ideas and i don't want to talk
about ein rand but i want to say
something just
just one one thing about iron ranch uh
all my kids all my kids
read ayn rand's books my father read the
fountainhead i don't know like you know
like
we we know ein rand and um
i'll tell you it is incredibly difficult
reading for me it's it's it's painful
it's painful to read why is it painful
not because i disagree with the
with with the view of of trading and
business and the creativity of it and
and you know and and reardon metal i
mean you know that stuff that stuff uh
moves me and and and and and i i do
admire it
but
to read you know a book that's a
thousand pages long in which
nobody nobody is having children nobody
is having a stable marriage no one is
running a uh an admirable government
that's fighting for a just cause
anywhere anywhere euron i it i feel i
just i feel like like
it's focusing on one aspect of what it
is to be human and to flourish and that
everything else is just erased and
thrown out as though it's just not part
of reality and i'm scared i'm scared of
what happens to to to teenagers who
hormonally or in any case know that
that's their they're programmed to to uh
to pull away from their parents and
experiment with things they're
they're biologically programmed to do
that
and you give them a book which says
look
you you don't you don't have to have a
family you don't have to raise children
you don't have to have a country you
don't have to fight for anything all you
have to do is
assert yourself and trade
i i i think it's destructive because
it's not realistic it's just not real
but i got none of that for mine rent
i got none of that from my man you know
the the the books were not about a
family uh you could write a book in in
iron man style about
where where people have a family but
the goal the purpose it's a novel it's
not it's a novel which is delimited with
a particular story there's one family in
goat gulch and there's a little passage
about raising children and the value of
that uh because it's not core to what
she is writing about but that doesn't
exclude it i ne when i read i read i
read out of struggle when i was 16 and i
read it over over the years uh several
times more it never occurred to me oh
ain't man's anti-family i shouldn't have
a family it that that thought never came
into my mind i i always wanted to have
children i continued to want to have
children
i thought of it a little differently i
thought of how i would find a partner a
little bit differently i thought about
what i would look for in a partner
differently but not that i wouldn't want
to get married the question i i have is
what effect has in society so outside of
you so for example you mentioned love
should be conditional i think well it is
whether you like it or not it is you
might pretend that it isn't but it's
always conditional well let me try to
say something and see if it makes any
sense so could there be things that are
true like love is conditional is always
conditional that if you say it often
it has a negative effect on society so
for example
i mean uh so maybe i'm just a romantic
but good luck saying love is conditional
to a romantic partner
i mean you could
i would argue on mass
that would uh deteriorate the quality of
relationships
uh if you remind the partner of that
truth
that is universal like you have to the
the i mean okay maybe it's just me i'll
just speak to myself it's like there's a
certain romantic notion of unconditional
love it's part of why
you have so many destructive marriages
it's it's part of why you say that's a
problem yes it's it's a real problem
because because
yes there is a you are talked about
honoring your spouse and and there's a
real truth there and i i i respect that
yes
you have to do certain things love is
not you marry somebody and there's a
real attitude out there in the culture
you marry somebody and okay now we're
gonna we're just gonna cruise it's just
right hollywood that's that's the
hollywood map you know marriage is work
it it it it's like all values it's work
it it's something you have to reignite
every day you have to you have to the
challenges the real disagreements the
the the the the things you you fight
about you disagree about and and there's
real if it's a value you work it out you
you you you struggle through it you you
and and sometimes you struggle through
it you come to a conclusion nah this is
not gonna work and and you dissolve a
marriage and i'm i'm all for dissolving
after
really really fighting for it because if
it's an important value and if you fell
in love with this person for a reason
then that's something worth fighting for
i have a feeling that hollywood goes the
other way but it's not this cruising
along and everything everything is easy
no human relationship is like that
enough friendship not love not not not
not raising children not being a child
um you know they require work and and
they require thinking and they require
creating the conditions
to thrive and that's the sense in which
it's it's conditional you you have to
look at it
and it it's in in
it's very easy
not to do the work and it's very easy to
drift away and i think most people don't
do the work most people take it and
generally in life they the only place
people seem to work is at work
and then they take the rest of their
life as i'm gonna cruise
and yet every aspect of your life the
art you choose
the friends you choose the lovers you
choose
all require real thinking and real work
to be successful at them none of them
are just
just there because there is no such
thing as just the intrinsic right i
agree with all of that i was going to
say before that the rabbis have this uh
sort of shocking expression
the pain of raising
raising children and uh
i i find when i speak to audiences about
relationships i find that that in
general and this is a this is
cross-cultural it's for different
countries different religious
backgrounds that in general
young people
do not know that the only way to make a
marriage work is through a lot of pain
and overcoming they don't know that
raising children involves a great deal
of pain they don't know that caring for
and helping your parents approach the
end of their lives causes a great deal
of pain and and
everything is kind of this sketchy you
know very very sketchy glimpsy kind of
and i i mentioned hollywood just because
it it it everything is is made to look
easy except you know there's kind of a
funny breakdown of something but then it
you know maybe there's a divorce they
you know they shoot one another so
that's so then they should get divorced
but
but the the reality of
of how hard it is to do
and
how heroic it is to to do it and then
overcome and then actually in the end
achieve something create something that
that was really
it's almost it's almost not it's almost
not discussed and and so i look to me
it's just not surprising that
if if there's no parallel to ein rand
about you know the the the heroic saving
of a marriage that was on the rocks how
does it actually happen
so
it's a good point you're making an in
but
something just came to me that i've
never thought of before so that's always
good this is where conversation is good
look
take the talmud and and and by i can't
remember how many years after the bible
talmud is written how many over how how
long of a period it's written how many
people participating in writing it
ein rand was one individual
she wrote a series of books in
philosophy which i think
are true and and but they're the
beginning
there's a lot of work to be done
it's it to apply this so
uh hopefully there will be one of her
students who writes a book on
relationships
and there'll be a a a a somebody who
writes a book on on developing a
political theory in greater detail and
and develop her ethics she's got like
she's got she's got a few writings on
ethics and it's in the novels but but
there's a lot of work to be done
fleshing it out what does it mean how do
you
so to to say iron man didn't do
everything
is a truism she didn't do everything
okay so what but she laid this amazing
philosophical foundation that allows us
to take those principles and to apply
them to all these realms of human life
and she does it on a scope that few
philosophers in human history have done
because she goes from metaphysics all
the way to aesthetics hitting the key
and she's an original think on each one
of those things
and
she might be right she might be wrong on
certain aspects of it
always happy to have a debate about
whether where she's wrong or where she's
not but there's a lot of work to be done
right it's not like and if if there were
objectivists out there who presented as
okay human knowledge is over because
iron man wrote these books that's absurd
right this huge amount of work to be
done in applying these particular ideas
just like they was for any philosophy
take these ideas and now apply them to
all these realms and human experience
that flesh it out and make it and one of
the reasons i don't think objectivism
has taken off is because there's all
this work still to be done that allows
it to be relatable to to people in every
aspect of them let me ask a hard
question here we've we've got we've
taken can i say what i agreed with you
all sure sure this is good it's a good
transition here this is the clip this is
this is the clip i mean i agree about
nations so i i don't like the term
nationalism because i i i fear what
happens when you put in ism at the end
of any anywhere anything yes but but the
nation is is a good thing then and and
having a diversity of nations in a sense
it's a good thing and in this sense
in this sense i don't think one can come
up so look i i i said i hold that the
ideal nation is a nation that protects
individual rights
how do you do that
what are the details how do we define
property rights exactly in an internet
world
there's going to be disagreement
rational reasonable disagreement they're
going to be in in my
future in the 300 years from now when my
ideas have won finally right there will
be multiple nations trying to apply the
principle of applying individual rights
and they'll do it differently one of the
one of the benefits of federalism
is that while you have a national
government there are certain issues that
you relegate to states and they can try
different things and learn because there
is a huge value in the empirical
knowledge comes the you can't just
deduce it all and figure it all out you
have to experiment so i do
i hate the idea of a one world na one
world government because
experimentation is gone and if you make
a mistake everybody suffers
i like the idea and then i like the idea
of people being able to to choose
where they live but but this notion of
experimentation i think is crucial but
you need a principle
this is you need a principle so i don't
like the idea of nations if all the
nations are going to be
bad right if all the nations are going
to be horrible then i don't like it what
i like is a variety of nations all
practicing
basically good ideas
and then we try to figure out okay what
works better than other things and and
and what is sustainable and what is not
given
how many difficult aspects of
history and society we've talked about
let me ask a hard question of both of
you
breathe up until now yeah
what gives you hope about the future
so we've been describing um
reasons to maybe not have hope
what gives you hope when you look at the
world
what gives you hope that in 200 years
and 300 years and 500 years like the the
founders look into the future
that
human civilization will be all right and
and more than that it would flourish two
things for me
one is history so in the very long run
good ideas went out
i think in the very long run you can go
through dark ages but you come out of
the dark ages
um
you know the the the the the good and
the just does win in the end even if it
is bloody and difficult and and hard to
get there so while i am quite
pessimistic unfortunately about the
short run i'm ultimately optimistic that
that in the long run good ideas win and
and they're justified and and and i
think the fundamental
behind that is
i i think is is that i'm fundamentally
positive about human nature i i think
human beings
um can think uh they're capable of
reasoning
they're capable of figuring out the
truth they're capable of learning from
experience they don't always do it it's
an achievement to do it
but over time they do
and and if you create the right
circumstances they will and when things
get bad enough they look
for way out they look at maybe at
history if the history is available to
them maybe at just
learning from the
from from what's around them to find
better ways of doing things and that
reinforces itself but human beings are
an amazing
creature right we're just amazing in our
capacity to be creative in our capacity
to think in a capacity to love and that
capacity to change our environment to
fit our needs and to fit our
requirements for survival
and to learn and to grow and to progress
and uh
you know so so again long term i think
all that wins out short-term in any
point in history short-term um
it doesn't right now it doesn't look too
good
what about you yeah well
as usual i i moved by by what euron says
and i and uh and i hear scripture and uh
the the source for euron's
hope
um
is
uh the book of exodus
which is the first place in human
history where
we we are presented with the possibility
that an enslaved people that's being
persecuted and murdered and living under
the worst possible regime
can free itself
and have a shot a life of independence
and worth
and it's another inherited jewish idea
in the in in the tradition
um
the way that we
express this is by saying
um that that there is a god who judges
the the the israelites in egypt were
were enslaved for hundreds of years
according to the exodus story hundreds
of years before god wakes up and
and and and hears them and and he
doesn't do anything until until you know
moses uh uh kills the oppressor and and
and goes out into the desert so
um so i i think it's
pretty realistic that you know there's a
god that god judges and acts but
probably you know often not for a very
very long time and not until there's
there's a human being who who gets up
and says enough
i know that today people don't want to
read the bible they don't like reading
the bible but i always hear in my ear uh
this uh
uh cry of the prophet
jeremiah who saw his his nation
destroyed and and these people exiled
and he says um
in in god's name he says he's not my
word
like fire
like the hammer that shatters rock a
petition
my word is like fire like the hammers
that shatters rock
and this is actually this is the
traditional way of saying something like
what you're on is saying that it may
take a long long time but that but there
there is a truth and it has its own
strength and it will
in the end
shatter the things that are opposing it
that's
that's our traditional hope we
we grow up like that
and um
[Music]
you know so so i i do have hope i i see
the trends the trends are terrible right
now
and uh and
and and and it's frightening and it's
hard but we are terrible at seeing the
future and it is very possible that an
unexpected turn of events is going to
appear
you know maybe soon maybe much later and
uh the possibility of
uh of a redemption
um is there
let me ask given that long arc of
history given that you do study the
bible
what is
the meaning of this whole thing what's
the meaning of life
wow that's beautiful i think that the
meaning of of life is
uh
is in part
um what euron touches on when when he
says that
uh that um
the productive work labor creativity is
is at the heart of what it is to be
human
i i
i just think that there there are
some more arenas and maybe we even agree
with a lot of them and i i on a lot of
them
to be human is to
inherit a world which is imperfect
terribly imperfect and perfect in many
ways
and uh and and god created it
that way he created a world which is
terribly lacking
and he created us with the ability to
stand up and to say
i can change the direction of this i can
do something to change the direction of
this i can
take the time and the abilities that are
given to me to be a partner with god in
creating the world it's not going to
stay the way it was before me it'll be
something
different
maybe a little bit maybe a lot but
that's that is that is the heart that is
the key that is the meaningful life is
to be a partner with god in creating the
world so that it is
moving that much more in the right
direction rather than
the way we found so nudge even if a
little bit the direction of the world
well uh you're you're on uh
you've actually been talking on your
program about life quite a bit uh so let
me ask the same question
and i i never tire you asking this
question
what do you think is the is the meaning
of the soul well i mean i don't believe
in god so it god doesn't play a role in
in my view of of the meaning of life i i
think the meaning of life is to live
i like to say to live with a capital l
it's to embrace it and and
agree with your arm in a sense you were
born into a world and as human beings
one of the things that makes us very
different than other animals is our
capacity to change that world
we can actually go out there and change
the world around us we can change it
materially through production and
through we can change it spiritually
through changing the ideas of of people
we can we can change the direction into
which humanity works we can um we can
create a little universe part of
that i think part of the joy of creating
a family is to create a little universe
right we're creating a little world uh
around us that's part of the the joy
and there is joy and family that's uh
make it all about uh difficulty and hard
work i agree i agree you know but part
of the part of the the idea of getting
married is is to create a little world
in which you and your spouse are
creating something that didn't exist
before and and and building something
building a universe but it's really to
live i mean one of the things that
i i see and and that saddens me is is
wasted lives
it's people who just
just cruise through life they just they
just they get bored they get born in a
particular place they never challenge it
they never question
they just
you know they live die and nothing
really happened nothing really changed
they didn't produce they didn't make
anything of their life and produce here
again in the in their largest sense
so to me it's it's and every aspect of
life you know as you know because you've
listened to my show i love art i love
aesthetics i love the experience of
great art
you know i love relationships i you know
i i love producing i'm you know i like
business i like that that aspect of it
um and and i think i think people people
are shallow in in so many parts of their
lives which saddens me i mean if we if
you had eight billion people on this
planet
even if it never grew even if we just
stayed at 8 billion but the 8 billion
all lived
fully wow i mean
what an amazing place this would be what
an amazing experience we would have so
so to me that is the meaning is just
make the most you have a short period of
time on earth
and that's it this is it and and live it
experience it fully and and challenge
yourself and push yourself and and let
me just say something about optimism
about you know one source of hope for me
in the world in which we live right now
is that there are people who do that at
least in certain realms of of their
lives right and and i'm inspired
and and i know a lot of people don't
like me for this but i'm inspired for
example by silicon valley in spite of
all the political disagreements i have
with them and all of that i'm inspired
by people
inventing new technologies and building
i'm inspired by by the people you talk
to about artificial intelligence and
about about new ideas and about pushing
the boundaries of science those things
are exciting and it's it's terrific to
see a world that i think generally is in
decline yet that these pockets in which
people are still creating new uh new
ventures and new ideas and new things
that that inspires me and it gives me
hope that that is not dead that in spite
of the decay that's in our culture
there's still pockets where
that spirit of being human is still is
still alive and well yeah they inspire
me as well yeah and they truly live with
the capital l and maybe i can do an uh
star maybe you can also put a little bit
of love with the capital l out there as
well
uh euron
you know i would end it that way
wouldn't you uh you're on your arm thank
you so much this is a huge honor i
really enjoyed the debate yesterday i
really enjoyed the conversation today
that you spend your valuable time with
me just means a lot thank you so much
this is amazing
thanks for listening to this
conversation with yaran brook and joram
hazoni to support this podcast please
check out our sponsors in the
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and now let me leave you with some words
from edmund burke
the only thing necessary for the triumph
of evil is for good men to do nothing
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you