Nationalism Debate: Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony | Lex Fridman Podcast #256
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 support it please check out our sponsors 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 1787 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 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 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 description 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