The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 305. How Marxism is Disguised as Woke Morality

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube.

00:01:12.700 I have today with me Dr. Yoram Hazoni.

00:01:16.240 We're going to talk about his new book. He's written a number of books.

00:01:19.600 We're going to talk about his new book, Conservatism, Rediscovery.

00:01:23.220 And I'm very much looking forward to that.

00:01:27.060 He's quite a scholar of conservative thought, political thought in general, and so I hope to learn a lot today

00:01:32.740 while I have the opportunity to sift through his knowledge.

00:01:37.500 Welcome, Yoram. It's good to see you.

00:01:39.900 Hello, Jordan. Good to see you.

00:01:43.560 So, let's talk about your book. Why a rediscovery?

00:01:47.300 I think most people at this point have figured out that we're undergoing some kind of cultural revolution.

00:01:55.560 And I think this hit a high point two years ago in 2020 when people started getting fired from prestigious academic positions

00:02:07.380 and media positions for holding, you know, regular liberal positions that people had had for decades.

00:02:13.940 And I wrote this book in order to try to make some order in this cultural revolution.

00:02:22.120 These woke neo-Marxists are obviously not liberals.

00:02:25.120 And it seems that the old liberalism doesn't have the fight and the firepower to be able to roll this back.

00:02:34.720 And the question I think everybody needs to be asking is, you know, what kind of a force would be strong enough to stop it?

00:02:41.380 Everybody talks about all the things that the left is doing wrong.

00:02:44.700 And, of course, that makes sense.

00:02:46.780 But if we're thinking about opposition to it, the question is what kind of force is going to be strong enough to stop it?

00:02:53.100 And I think to discuss that, you have to go into conservatism.

00:02:57.860 How would you characterize what's happening on the left, do you think?

00:03:02.100 I mean, what's the nature of this cultural revolution?

00:03:05.780 Since after World War II, I think both in America and across Europe, there was a kind of a consensus which, I mean, all the major political parties,

00:03:18.140 all the major cultural streams agreed on a kind of a liberal framework.

00:03:24.440 You can call it an enlightenment liberal framework.

00:03:26.880 The basic idea is that what you need to know about politics is that human beings are by nature free and equal,

00:03:36.000 that they take on moral obligations and political obligations on the basis of consent.

00:03:41.080 And that was assumed to be sufficient in order to guide the political world.

00:03:47.980 So there were disagreements within liberalism, progressive liberalism and libertarianism and classical liberalism.

00:03:56.760 But the basic framework held for 60 or 70 years.

00:04:01.020 And now, I think the most important thing to understand is that that liberalism, which, you know, in a lot of ways, it's very well-intentioned.

00:04:10.420 It's very, very noble, but it assumes that children, when they're being raised, that they don't need any kind of traditional guidance.

00:04:21.620 They don't need any kind of customary framework, what people call guardrails today, that are inherited and are consciously inculcated by parents, by churches, by schools.

00:04:38.060 The assumption was, and I think for many, many parents still is, for two generations, the assumption was you tell your kids when they're growing up,

00:04:46.400 look, whatever makes you feel good, whatever fulfills you, whatever it is that, you know, that gives you meaning in life, that's what you should do.

00:04:54.860 And the important thing is to be happy.

00:04:56.340 That sounds really nice.

00:04:57.540 But as, you know, as you know from your work and your studies, when you raise kids like that, a great many of them simply reach a kind of a dead end.

00:05:09.840 Whatever makes you feel good, well, they don't know what makes them feel good.

00:05:13.400 And into that vacuum steps in this woke neo-Marxist movement, which has answers.

00:05:24.440 It gives people answers.

00:05:25.460 And the surprise is that, you know, all of these mainstream liberals thought that if you just told kids, use your reason, think for yourselves, figure it out for yourselves, we trust you,

00:05:42.480 that everybody would sort of come to something normal.

00:05:44.840 But it turns out that that's not true.

00:05:46.400 When you tell all the young people for two generations, just think for yourselves, you know, whatever looks good to you,

00:05:52.820 it turns out that a great many of them are much more attracted to Marxism and some of them even to fascism than to the mainstream liberalism.

00:06:03.980 So that went on for two generations and now it's collapsed.

00:06:06.580 I mean, basically 2020 was the year that the hegemony of the mainstream liberal ideas came to an end.

00:06:16.740 There's still obviously lots of liberals running around.

00:06:19.160 But in terms of the assumptions of the society, right now we actually have this woke neo-Marxism seeking to impose a new hegemony.

00:06:28.480 And they're frighteningly close.

00:06:29.720 So it seems to me that you could make a case that classic liberalism worked because it was running on stored cultural capital in some sense,

00:06:41.540 is that when the institutions that you're speaking about were more or less intact,

00:06:47.500 so that would be church, let's say, family, stable, monogamous, heterosexual marriages, and civic society,

00:07:00.240 membership in clubs and that sort of thing.

00:07:02.280 When all that was functioning, then in principle it was possible to treat people like they were autonomous, reasonable individuals.

00:07:09.960 Because you had already laid the groundwork for something approximating a shared ethos.

00:07:14.800 But as that evaporated, because people became more atomistic and hedonistic,

00:07:20.340 then the shared ethos started to deteriorate and other idea sets became more attractive.

00:07:27.520 Does that seem approximately correct?

00:07:30.260 I think that's exactly right.

00:07:32.080 I would just add the loyalty to a national framework, to a nation.

00:07:38.940 So basically, if people are raised with loyalties to family, to a congregation, to a community, and then to a larger nation,

00:07:51.960 then they know something about where they are.

00:07:55.820 You know, they can criticize.

00:07:57.760 They can argue about, you know, how are we going to organize these loyalties?

00:08:02.100 How can we improve things?

00:08:03.160 But exactly as you said, if they don't grow up with those things, if those things are no longer clear

00:08:10.280 because the cultural capital, as you say, is running down, the inheritance is basically being spent.

00:08:19.080 And once that inheritance is gone, then there are no limits.

00:08:24.220 There is no framework.

00:08:25.620 There's no common sense.

00:08:26.860 I mean, what we call common sense is always the common sense of a particular nation or community or family.

00:08:35.100 And once those things have broken down, there is no common sense.

00:08:38.580 And people actually are willing to consider, you know, just about any crazy, evil thing.

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00:10:24.660 So, I've been thinking a fair bit about the potential contribution of, I would say, clinical and counseling psychologists to this mess.

00:10:36.540 Because there was a tremendous emphasis, probably throughout the whole hundred-year course of the development, say, of clinical psychology and clinical psychiatry, on sanity as something, in some real sense, internal to the individual.

00:10:54.580 And so, you can see that, I would say, in its most stellar exemplars in the humanist psychologists of the 1960s, and it kind of figures that that would occur in the 1960s.

00:11:09.300 That you were sane and capable of psychological well-being if you were well-constituted psychologically.

00:11:18.740 But, I've been thinking more recently that that's not a very useful model of sanity, because it downplays the social embeddedness that characterizes people who are psychologically stable and therefore capable of happiness.

00:11:39.540 If you're stable, you're not anxious, you're not completely ridden with negative emotion.

00:11:44.760 That doesn't necessarily mean you're happy, but if you do a careful analysis of what people mean when they say they want to be happy, what they really mean is they don't want to be miserable.

00:11:55.100 And happiness is like the icing on the cake, but they definitely don't want to be anxious and frustrated and disappointed and in pain and confused and aimless and all of that.

00:12:03.640 And so, it isn't obvious to me at all that it's possible to be psychologically intact in isolation.

00:12:13.000 I think the most potent proof of that is that even hardened criminals, anti-social types, find being in solitary confinement almost intolerable.

00:12:26.400 And so, if that's the case, you might ask, well, what exactly is social being doing for us?

00:12:32.380 And if you're married, you have someone who's somewhat different than you to keep you in check constantly, like married couples are throwing back and forth information to each other about how to regulate the relationship and themselves nonstop.

00:12:48.460 That's pretty much all of what communication consists of.

00:12:51.280 And then, if you have children or your parents, your siblings, let's say that immediate family, the same thing is happening, is that people are monitoring one another and providing each other with feedback about how to behave and how to think.

00:13:06.060 And then that's nested inside a civic community and that's nested inside a state or a province and then that's nested inside a country.

00:13:12.940 And sanity seems to be something like, and maybe all of that's nested inside some religious presuppositions, it's the harmony between all those levels that seems to be essentially what constitutes sanity, rather than something that's formally internal.

00:13:33.140 Like, maybe your internal structure reflects that external harmony and that's, like, in a fractal manner, in a holographic manner, and that's what sanity constitutes.

00:13:42.000 And I would say that the liberal emphasis on, say, self-actualization and on the atomistic self as the center of the world has deluded itself into thinking that any of that's possible without an intact hierarchy of social structures surrounding the individual.

00:14:01.360 That seems to me to be the weakness, the fundamental weakness on the psychological front of, even of classic liberalism.

00:14:08.500 I think that's exactly right.

00:14:10.560 And I think that you were already speaking pretty much to this in your earlier work when you were telling young people, look, you need to find your place within some kind of social hierarchy.

00:14:26.420 And this is actually the extension of your earlier argument.

00:14:32.580 I mean, both of us are drawing on Durkheim's insight that, look, if you want to know what is it that leads people to suicide, then it's anomie.

00:14:44.100 And what is that?

00:14:44.620 That's the lack of a directional sense, a set of guardrails, which comes from those nested hierarchies that you are describing.

00:14:56.220 If the individual, none of this means that an individual can't, you know, if he or she is unhappy, can't look for a different place in a different hierarchy.

00:15:06.060 But the point is that wherever they end up, if they're going to be motivated and directed and feel like their life has meaning and purpose and direction, it's going to be because they have found their place in a hierarchy that works for them.

00:15:21.240 And liberalism simply doesn't touch on this central human need.

00:15:29.360 By the way, the Marxists are pretty much aware of this.

00:15:32.920 They do think in terms of hierarchies, of course, their goal is to destroy them, but at least they can see them.

00:15:38.440 Whereas the liberals are always thinking kind of in terms of flatland, that, you know, by the time you're 18 or 20, then you're equal to everybody.

00:15:46.980 And the assumption is that everything's level.

00:15:50.040 But the truth is nothing is level.

00:15:52.600 There are always hierarchies.

00:15:54.520 And people feel good when they found the right place in such a hierarchy.

00:15:59.560 By the way, that means that they have something to aspire to, to move up in the hierarchy.

00:16:04.440 They have some idea of where they're going in life.

00:16:08.720 Yeah, well, you talked about, you just spoke of guardrails and direction, and that seems about right to me.

00:16:13.900 I mean, when I worked as a clinician and I was trying to understand what made for a good life, let's say, when I was dealing with people who were depressed,

00:16:22.040 because, well, often they didn't have the necessary guardrails or direction, and that was part of the reason they were depressed.

00:16:29.640 I mean, depression is complicated, and there's many reasons for it.

00:16:32.280 But it does seem to me to be an incontrovertible truth, and I think that my audiences have responded very well to this proposition,

00:16:42.700 that almost all the meaning that you find in your life that isn't merely a consequence of a narrow and short-sighted hedonism

00:16:54.120 is found in the service you provide to the people who are in your social networks.

00:17:02.880 And that would be, first of all, obviously, your intimate relationship and your family,

00:17:07.800 and then in the hierarchical nested structures that are outside of that, if you're fortunate enough to have them.

00:17:16.740 And the guardrails are that there are codes of behavior that are necessary to abide by

00:17:26.880 that constitute adhering to the principles of all those social relationships,

00:17:31.880 and the direction is whatever the joint venture that you're embarking on with others is directed towards.

00:17:39.280 And I don't see that you do have any structure or purpose in your life in the absence of those things.

00:17:46.440 I mean, if you strip someone of their, let's say, embeddedness within an educational institution

00:17:51.760 or within a job or a career, you strip them of their family, you strip them of all their civic responsibility,

00:17:57.420 I suppose perhaps they have their creative endeavors if they happen to be creative people.

00:18:03.720 But even then, they have to be interacting with other people to communicate about their creative endeavors

00:18:09.600 or to monetize them.

00:18:10.940 And without that, there's, well, there really is nothing.

00:18:14.100 And we also know, too, that statistical studies of language usage have indicated pretty clearly

00:18:21.320 that thoughts about yourself are indistinguishable from negative emotion.

00:18:28.060 That's how heavily tinged they are with negative emotion.

00:18:30.900 As soon as you become self-conscious, as soon as you start thinking about yourself,

00:18:34.480 you're instantly anxious and miserable.

00:18:37.960 They're the same thing.

00:18:40.080 And so, okay.

00:18:41.780 And so then on the Marxist front, because we talked about the collapse of liberalism,

00:18:46.060 the fact that liberalism, in some sense, is an empty concept in the absence of these underlying practices

00:18:53.740 and customs, let's say, that are actually embodied, that you actually act out.

00:18:58.300 They're not conceptual, precisely.

00:19:00.600 The Marxists, I think, have an advantage over the liberals.

00:19:03.960 And maybe this is one of the things that accounts for the attractiveness of Marxism to young people,

00:19:08.720 is that the Marxists, at least, they have an attitude towards guardrails, which is destroy them.

00:19:17.100 But they also provide a direction, right?

00:19:19.640 And the direction is essentially a revolutionary direction.

00:19:23.200 It combines a critique of hierarchy, concentrating on the idea that hierarchies are intrinsically pathological.

00:19:32.920 But then it also provides direction and group membership.

00:19:36.080 And so that's pretty compelling in the absence of any structure, say,

00:19:41.920 which, at least in principle, is what would be offered by the classic liberals.

00:19:46.640 Right.

00:19:47.220 But notice that, you know, I mean, this issue goes all the way back to Marx.

00:19:51.960 Notice that the theory is that hierarchical structures and competition between groups

00:20:01.660 always means that there's going to be oppression.

00:20:03.360 And the goal is always to overthrow the dominant hierarchy.

00:20:08.660 But notice that Marx doesn't answer the question of what's going to come after the revolution.

00:20:15.640 And he's incredibly vague about it.

00:20:17.460 And this continues to this day, which is that the unspoken truth here is that these woke neo-Marxists

00:20:26.660 are masters at creating tight hierarchical structures that people can fit into.

00:20:32.980 I mean, that's the reason that people get sucked into this woke thing.

00:20:39.780 They sound so much like robots.

00:20:42.040 And they're constantly repeating, you know, precisely the new thing that they're supposed to be saying.

00:20:48.200 And the reason for this is because their own hierarchical structures that they are creating

00:20:56.680 are of the, you know, the tightest and most disciplined kinds.

00:21:02.340 So, I mean, there is, I think you can, I think a lot of people sense this,

00:21:07.980 that there's a terrible hypocrisy in the whole woke thing,

00:21:13.280 in that the claim is that they're, you know, they're bringing social justice

00:21:17.960 by overthrowing existing social structures, existing hierarchies.

00:21:22.720 But they themselves are imposing precisely the same thing that they are claiming that they're going to destroy.

00:21:27.900 No, no, no, they're imposing something worse.

00:21:29.800 I mean, this is something that's very, very striking historically.

00:21:34.820 So, let's take the Marxist position apart.

00:21:39.260 The first oversimplification is that there is a hierarchy instead of a multiplicity of hierarchies.

00:21:47.360 Because in any reasonably functioning modern society, there are innumerable hierarchies.

00:21:54.980 And part of the reason that we can live without being too crushed by hierarchical differences

00:22:02.140 because, as you said before, you can move from one hierarchy to another.

00:22:06.480 And that might be something as straightforward as changing jobs.

00:22:11.060 Not that that's particularly easy, but it's not impossible.

00:22:13.880 And so, if you can't find a place in one economic structure, microstructure,

00:22:18.680 then you can find a place in another.

00:22:20.060 And I think one of the real antidotes to rigid, uniform, monolithic hierarchy

00:22:28.360 is a provision of multiple games.

00:22:31.000 And I think modern societies do a very good job of that.

00:22:34.460 And so, the idea that there's one hierarchy,

00:22:38.420 although you could rank order people by wealth, I suppose,

00:22:41.200 but the idea that there's one hierarchy is preposterous.

00:22:44.060 Except under Marxist rule, in which case everything does tend to collapse into a single hierarchy

00:22:50.540 that's absolutely monolithic and totalitarian beyond belief.

00:22:55.080 And that just happened time and time again.

00:22:57.020 So, you have to presume that there's some fundamental flaw in the Marxist formulation.

00:23:03.060 And maybe the flaw is something like,

00:23:04.920 look, you have to accept a moderate amount of hierarchical structuring.

00:23:10.300 And you have to hope it doesn't get too lopsided so that only a few have everything

00:23:15.400 and everyone else has nothing.

00:23:16.900 That's a pathological situation.

00:23:18.920 Although it's not only a consequence of, say, Western economic structures.

00:23:24.440 That is a human universal, that proclivity, or natural universal,

00:23:28.900 that power law distribution problem.

00:23:31.200 Now, if you criticize hierarchy to such a degree that you want to destroy all of it,

00:23:36.460 then all that you do is instantly produce something approximating the most tyrannical hierarchy

00:23:42.080 you can possibly imagine.

00:23:43.340 Because you destroy the differentiated structures.

00:23:46.580 It's exactly what happened in the Soviet Union and China.

00:23:49.100 You destroy all the intermediary, distributed, multiplicitous structures,

00:23:55.460 and you replace that with tyrant and peasants.

00:23:58.960 That's true.

00:24:00.040 But, you know, let me push back just a little bit.

00:24:03.440 Because I think that a healthy society is one that certainly has a competition

00:24:11.480 of, you know, multiple tribes, maybe different religions.

00:24:16.600 I think these things are probably more important to people.

00:24:19.120 People's identities are more tied to regional, ethnic, religious groups

00:24:25.720 than they are to, you know, to what job they have.

00:24:29.140 And so what I meant about, you know, when I said that people can change is that,

00:24:36.380 look, it's always possible if you don't like your nation to move to a different nation.

00:24:41.320 If you don't like your religion, you can convert to a different religion.

00:24:44.460 But the bottom line is that big structures, macro structures,

00:24:53.940 like the hierarchy that constitutes a nation,

00:25:02.100 those are the things that are missing, I think, from the liberal picture.

00:25:07.660 Of course, a healthy nation, and here I would insert the word conservative,

00:25:13.720 is that the difference between a Marxist view of the hierarchical power structures

00:25:23.780 within a nation and a conservative view is that a conservative says,

00:25:28.460 look, there's always going to be groups that are more powerful than others.

00:25:32.520 There's no such thing as no hierarchy.

00:25:34.420 There's always going to be a competition among groups,

00:25:36.880 and some groups are going to be more powerful than others,

00:25:39.420 you know, like the Anglo-Saxon Protestant grouping within the United States

00:25:47.200 for most of its history.

00:25:49.040 And so there are going to be groups that are more powerful than others.

00:25:51.800 But that doesn't mean that the most powerful groups have to oppress the other groups.

00:25:56.860 In a conservative society, there's an ongoing negotiation among the different groups.

00:26:04.840 You know, there's a jostling and a competition.

00:26:07.220 Just like in family life, you know, there's a constant bickering and jostling

00:26:12.300 among children for, you know, for position.

00:26:15.400 And even between a husband and wife, the reason husbands and wives bicker is,

00:26:20.520 you know, the reason they squabble is because there's a constant, you know,

00:26:25.300 trying to find a place where you feel like you're being properly honored.

00:26:31.000 You feel like you're being properly respected.

00:26:33.460 And in a traditional conservative society,

00:26:38.260 what's going on is that you inherit certain ways of structuring things,

00:26:43.600 and then you can adjust them, you can try to correct them.

00:26:47.460 But the goal of the conservative society is to have a distribution of honors,

00:26:53.460 a distribution of justices, you know, of what people get

00:26:58.660 and where they get placed within the society.

00:27:01.260 And that distribution, the conservatives claim,

00:27:04.080 it doesn't always have to be evil, like the Marxists say.

00:27:06.760 It doesn't always have to be oppressive.

00:27:08.380 You can have a situation in which the more powerful groups

00:27:12.480 understand that they have a responsibility to the weaker groups.

00:27:15.980 And you can argue about exactly what that is.

00:27:18.320 But a mutually beneficial conservative society

00:27:22.840 is one in which the different groups get things

00:27:27.520 out of the collaboration, out of the mutual loyalty.

00:27:31.800 It's not just the strong get things and the weak get crushed.

00:27:34.880 But everybody gets things.

00:27:36.140 And I think that a lot of what conservatives are reacting to

00:27:41.260 when they, you know, when they see what the Marxists are trying to build

00:27:45.040 is that, you know, you're trying to grab everything for your group.

00:27:49.040 Whereas a traditional conservative society says,

00:27:51.520 no, the just balance of honors among the different groups,

00:27:57.600 that's what makes people feel good.

00:27:59.300 That's what makes people loyal to the system.

00:28:01.760 Otherwise, there is no loyalty to the system.

00:28:03.700 There's just oppression.

00:28:04.480 Yeah, well, the Marxists also have the advantage that

00:28:08.160 I would say of two, they have a twofold advantage.

00:28:12.720 First of all, they can appeal to envy.

00:28:14.580 And they're unbelievably good at that.

00:28:16.240 I mean, I think the fundamental motivating force of Marxism is envy.

00:28:21.200 Now, it'd be a close race between that and desire for untrammeled power.

00:28:25.800 But we could certainly start with envy.

00:28:27.560 And it's very easy for people to be envious of anyone

00:28:30.780 who has more of anything than they do.

00:28:32.760 And one of the things that I've really been struck by on the left

00:28:36.820 is the constant presupposition that if someone has more than me,

00:28:42.880 they got it because they're using power in an oppressive way.

00:28:47.260 It's always the cutoff between the oppressor and the oppressed

00:28:49.900 is whatever status I happen to have as a left-wing intellectual.

00:28:54.860 Because I got what I have honestly and through hard work and diligence.

00:28:59.360 But anybody who has more than me obviously took it from the people

00:29:02.960 who are lesser than them.

00:29:05.540 And so that's definitely an appeal to envy.

00:29:08.660 But there's something underneath that, I think, that is more powerful,

00:29:11.840 which is that, and this is a criticism that conservatism is susceptible to,

00:29:17.560 is that hierarchies do tend to degenerate in the direction of arbitrary power

00:29:23.340 when they degenerate.

00:29:24.640 And every hierarchy is degenerate to some degree, right?

00:29:28.400 Because there's a bit of corruption in everything.

00:29:30.780 And so then the Marxists can point to the corruption,

00:29:33.380 especially if they're appealing to young people.

00:29:35.400 And they can say, well, look at that person in that position of authority

00:29:39.020 and the awful things they did that were oppressive and improper.

00:29:44.880 Obviously, everyone who holds any position of authority

00:29:48.580 is corrupt in some fundamental way.

00:29:51.020 And then obviously the whole system is corrupt.

00:29:54.260 And that's, given that that critique of corruption has warrant in some sense,

00:30:01.520 it's not easy to differentiate and to say, no, look, guys,

00:30:05.320 you've got to think this through, is that human institutions aren't perfect.

00:30:09.720 And you have to be awake all the time to make sure they don't degenerate entirely.

00:30:14.560 But that doesn't mean that they're fundamentally corrupt,

00:30:17.900 which is the claim, for example, that America was predicated on a positive view towards slavery.

00:30:27.200 It's like, well, obviously, when America was founded, slavery was thriving.

00:30:34.620 And so there was this pro-slavery ethos that was part and parcel of the American project at that point.

00:30:40.720 But the fundamental drive of the system and all of the traditions upon which it was founded

00:30:47.940 was that all men are created equal, men and women are created equal before God.

00:30:53.260 And that was the principle that eventually won out.

00:30:57.060 And it's hard to teach young people, I think, to separate the wheat from the chaff

00:31:02.060 when it's so easy just to throw everything out, especially if there's no immediate consequences,

00:31:05.720 especially when you're lauded for doing so and all your idiot teachers are telling you

00:31:10.780 that's the right thing to do.

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00:32:19.300 Right, agreed.

00:32:24.760 Look, the reason that I bothered with the historical chapters in the conservatism book

00:32:33.560 is because I think there's a widespread misunderstanding about conservative thinkers,

00:32:44.000 about Fortescue and Selden and Burke, and for that matter, you know, Washington and Adams and Hamilton.

00:32:50.660 There's kind of this assumption that if you're conservative,

00:32:54.640 then you just think that whatever exists is fine and it doesn't need to be repaired.

00:32:59.560 When you actually read these sophisticated conservative thinkers,

00:33:03.660 what you find is that none of them think this.

00:33:06.260 The actual view is something much more like what you were describing,

00:33:12.100 that there's corruption in everything, but more than that,

00:33:15.580 every good system decays.

00:33:18.360 Every good system runs down.

00:33:20.020 This is an integral part.

00:33:21.680 You just see this over and over again in Anglo-American conservative thinkers is every system runs down.

00:33:30.300 Every system decays.

00:33:32.000 And that's just the way human societies are.

00:33:35.140 So the principal job of the conservative is not to hold on tight to whatever exists.

00:33:42.700 It's to look for restoration.

00:33:45.420 It's to identify what has become corrupt and decayed and to look for a model either earlier in history

00:33:55.200 or sometimes even just, you know, looking at the neighbors the way that, you know,

00:34:00.280 during the Polish Revolution, they looked to the British Constitution for a model.

00:34:08.800 And so the word restoration, it's a lot like the word repentance.

00:34:14.720 It's a restoration is kind of a national political repentance where you look at something and you say,

00:34:22.060 look, this is decayed.

00:34:23.940 We've gone off course.

00:34:26.020 Or there is an inherited evil that, you know, can no longer be tolerated and we have to fix it.

00:34:31.740 And the conservative's job is to find a way to make that repair while strengthening the entire system as a whole.

00:34:42.360 So, I mean, the example of slavery, I think, is always on a lot of people's minds and I think for good reasons.

00:34:48.900 But important to notice that Britain succeeded in eliminating slavery on the basis of the common law in the 1770s without a revolution, without a civil war.

00:35:05.820 And what happened is that Lord Mansfield looked at the, you know, the integration of the mercantile law over the previous century into the common law.

00:35:17.360 And in a lot of ways, that was very good.

00:35:19.580 That's what made it possible for, you know, for Britain in a lot of ways to become a modern economy.

00:35:27.500 But the idea that human beings could be bought and sold as slaves was imported into the common law by the mercantile law less than, you know, at the end of the 1600s.

00:35:40.200 And at a certain point, the jurists, the judges in Britain looked at this and said, what's happening is we are corrupting ourselves.

00:35:53.080 We're corrupting our tradition by allowing this institution of slavery to be brought into our country.

00:36:00.000 And they eliminated it on the basis of British tradition, the English tradition.

00:36:05.220 They said English common law does not uphold slavery.

00:36:09.420 A person who is enslaved in England is always enslaved unfairly.

00:36:14.060 Now, the interesting thing is that the Americans, an important part of the Federalist Party's platform during the American Revolution was the bringing the English common law in as the law of the new national federal government.

00:36:34.500 Jefferson opposed it, but the Federalist Party, the conservatives, they thought that they needed this common law inheritance.

00:36:44.560 And America, in fact, does still have that common law inheritance until this day.

00:36:49.380 Now, why is it that if the English could get rid of slavery, you know, without this abstract declaration that, you know, that all men are created equal, why is it that the Americans couldn't do it?

00:37:07.900 And I think part of this is an optical illusion.

00:37:11.460 I think that the Americans could have done it, but the strength of liberalism in America's founding and, you know, going forward comes from the fact that while Washington and his party were genuine conservatives, the American Constitution of 1787 is basically, in many respects, a restoration of the British Constitution.

00:37:39.660 That's what Washington, that's what Washington and his party stood for.

00:37:43.340 Jefferson and his party, Tom Paine, these really were Enlightenment liberal radicals.

00:37:50.800 And Jefferson is famous for saying things like, repeatedly, that one generation is a foreign country to the preceding generations, meaning that each generation owes nothing to the past.

00:38:05.700 Each generation receives nothing from the past that can't be simply overthrown and revised.

00:38:12.240 And I think this brings us to, you know, to the heart of what we're facing today.

00:38:17.940 You know, I just read a very interesting scientific paper that's oddly relevant to this.

00:38:25.500 It's really revolutionary.

00:38:26.760 I think it was published in Nature.

00:38:28.140 And it showed, no, there's this idea that's common currency among evolutionary biologists that mutations are entirely random.

00:38:42.560 And this turns out not to exactly be true.

00:38:45.920 And so, there's a hierarchy of genetic stability.

00:38:51.400 And the older the genes are that code for the properties of a given organism, the more likely those genes are to be restored to their original condition if a mutation does occur by DNA repair mechanisms.

00:39:10.280 Right.

00:39:12.280 So, the reason I think this is so relevant is you imagine that the presumptions that make up our society and stabilize them have a hierarchical structure.

00:39:23.820 And some of them are old and deep.

00:39:25.660 And one of the oldest and deepest would be the idea that men and women alike are made in the image of God.

00:39:31.860 And so, that's a very fundamental proposition.

00:39:37.460 And then you might say that, well, the more fundamental a proposition is, the more other propositions depend on it.

00:39:44.260 And then you might say, it's those most fundamental propositions that have to be transmitted from generation to generation.

00:39:52.580 The more peripheral propositions, which are newer, and they would be akin to newer genetic variations in a given organism, the more they're free to vary because not so many things depend on them.

00:40:04.600 And they should vary because their fundamental nature is still up in the air in some sense.

00:40:11.340 But there's a hierarchy of presumptions.

00:40:13.540 And the deeper the presumption, the less it should be amenable to change.

00:40:18.940 I think that can be worked out on the conservative side.

00:40:24.100 I think so.

00:40:25.640 I mean, I think you're describing exactly what I'm describing just from another field.

00:40:30.600 By the way, there's this really fascinating passage in Hayek, in Friedrich Hayek, who, you know, a great economist and liberal thinker from the middle of the last century.

00:40:45.220 He argues that there's a – that the emergence of the picture of science as an evolutionary process by trial and error is the transference of the old common law idea of the law as evolutionary, the constitution as evolutionary.

00:41:06.960 The transfer of that was completely natural, you know, for English and Scottish thinkers who knew that the law was supposedly evolved this way to begin thinking in the same way about science as trial and error.

00:41:22.840 And, you know, that obviously could easily have inspired Darwin as well.

00:41:30.140 Well, then, we could think about English common law the same way.

00:41:34.360 So, English common law – tell me if I've got any of the details of this wrong – but basically, under the English system, the presumption is human beings have all the rights there are intrinsically.

00:41:45.820 And then, when people come together and have a dispute, the dispute has to be adjudicated.

00:41:53.100 And once it's adjudicated, that becomes a common law principle.

00:41:57.100 And then, those principles are supposed to be bound by precedent.

00:42:01.120 And so, then, the presuppositions in English common law that have the most precedent are the most fundamental.

00:42:07.760 And so, it's an incrementally transforming structure, but it's also hierarchically structured.

00:42:12.940 And it differs from, let's say, the French civil code.

00:42:16.120 It certainly differs from systems of thought like Marxism, which are all rational creations and imposed from the top down.

00:42:24.040 And so, English common law did have this bottom-up nature, which gives it, well, I would say, in some sense, a preeminent status among legal codes around the world.

00:42:33.700 It's a remarkable body of work.

00:42:38.500 Yep, it is.

00:42:39.440 Let me just add – I think your description is apt.

00:42:42.180 Let me just add a couple of points to that.

00:42:45.940 One of them is that the common law is a development coming down the centuries of biblical law.

00:42:57.480 If you go back to the earliest formulations of legal codes in Britain, a lot of it is taken literally, explicitly, directly from law codes in Hebrew scripture.

00:43:10.700 And a second point that's important is that what you're describing, the jostling among individuals, which then create cases that set precedence, that also happens at the constitutional level.

00:43:27.120 Not only at the level of individuals competing with one another for rights.

00:43:34.120 But also, if you look at Magna Carta and the petition of rights and the English Bill of Rights, and then after that, the American Bill of Rights.

00:43:45.760 If you look at that as an ongoing jostling between the executive, which, you know, originally the king, and the legislature, which was originally the nobles.

00:44:02.200 And what you see is exactly this kind of trial and error to find the right balance, which goes on for – literally goes on for a thousand years.

00:44:14.760 And the constitution that the Americans in 1787 took upon themselves, if you compare it to the earlier English petition of rights and Bill of Rights, you'll see that virtually all of the rights that appear in the American constitution are actually things that were already worked out.

00:44:40.460 Right, right.

00:44:41.020 Over centuries, over centuries, in this trial and error effort to find the right balance in England.

00:44:48.520 So, this means Jefferson is wrong because he didn't, in the manner that you described, that each successive generation is a foreign territory compared to the previous.

00:45:04.680 Because he's not taking into account the hierarchical nature, hierarchical nature of fundamental social presuppositions.

00:45:13.980 And so, he might be correct on the fringe and the periphery, but at the core, he's wrong.

00:45:19.440 And the case that you're making is that, while you have the American constitutional axioms, let's say, including – expanded to include the Bill of Rights, but that's grounded in English common law.

00:45:34.260 And that's a consequence of centuries of trial and error.

00:45:40.700 And it's not, you know, it's trial and error in a very particular way.

00:45:44.440 Because imagine that you and I have a dispute and we – 300 years ago – and we go in front of an English court.

00:45:51.340 The court has to rule in relationship to the dispute in a manner that's commensurate with all previous rulings of that broad type.

00:46:02.840 And then the rulings have to be consistent enough with grounded human intuitions of what constitutes a just settlement.

00:46:11.300 So that when the settlement is handed down, the parties involved actually find it acceptable enough not to degenerate into murder.

00:46:19.740 That's super well said.

00:46:24.540 I think that's exactly the point.

00:46:27.860 And if you now want to ask, let's say that we go with Jefferson for a moment and we say, actually, you know, using reason, like we can just come up with what the right answer is in the 1700s.

00:46:45.400 We don't need the, you know, 800 years of trial and error before that.

00:46:50.080 If you go with Jefferson, where you end up is with a view that says, look, I exercised reason.

00:46:57.220 I don't need tradition because I can exercise reason.

00:47:00.620 I don't need an inheritance of ideas and principles and precedents because I can just use reason.

00:47:07.100 If you go in that direction, what happens is that even though your intentions are liberal and not Marxist, your intention is just to allow people to be free of previous generations, that's all, to think for themselves.

00:47:21.700 If you do that, then what you will come up with is something that it runs down, it actively, aggressively runs down the inheritance of common sense and precedents and intuitions that people have gotten.

00:47:40.840 Well, what is this logic?

00:47:43.600 What is this reason that the liberals are stressing precisely?

00:47:47.780 I mean, if you investigate that from a psychological perspective, I mean, you could think about it as the application of pure logic, but that's foolish because people just aren't that logical and very few people are trained to think logically in any case.

00:48:03.380 And then with regards to reason itself, unless you're a radical empiricist and you believe that the pathway forward and the guardrails are self-evident as a consequence of exposure to the facts, which is naive beyond belief, then your reason is an empty concept.

00:48:24.100 Because, I mean, if we're reasoning with language, which would be the most reasonable way of reasoning, because you can communicate with other people that way, every single bloody word you use was crafted by other people.

00:48:39.280 Every phrase has a history.

00:48:41.220 Every sentence is a fragment of a philosophical tradition.

00:48:45.620 And then every profound idea is very unlikely to be original.

00:48:50.240 And so the very tools of reason itself are established by, not only by tradition, but by an unbelievably profound hierarchical consensus.

00:49:00.320 Because you and I couldn't even speak unless almost everything we said to each other was comprehensible because of our shared set of assumptions.

00:49:09.760 Again, we can play on the fringes, right?

00:49:12.160 I mean, as long as we're 99% in agreement, we can talk about the 1% where we differ and we can nibble away at the edges.

00:49:21.360 But if we were radically different in our orientation and our individual reason, we couldn't even talk.

00:49:29.180 Right.

00:49:30.900 By the way, this point is already made explicitly by Selden.

00:49:36.040 John Selden, the great common lawyer and constitutional scholar, in the early 1600s, that every single word that we use is something that was crafted by previous generations, and that's the basis for our capacity to be able to live together.

00:49:56.160 Now, to go back to your question that you started with, if you have a society that has a common inheritance, okay, and I'm not saying that everybody has to agree on everything, but there is exactly, as you said, there's an inheritance in which 90% or 95% or 98% of what we think has been inherited and we agree on it.

00:50:23.340 And then we argue, as you say, on the fringes, that is a very good description of a successful, cohesive polity in which there are competing parties, in which there are, you know, you can have democratic votes, you can have transitions from the rule of one party to another.

00:50:44.860 But all of this depends on a mutual recognition among the different parties that they're part of one inheritance and that they're willing to honor one another because even though they disagree, they may hate each other, but they understand that they're part of one structure, as you said, one inherited logic.

00:51:07.620 And what we've done today is to say, no, we don't need any of that.

00:51:13.760 We don't need any of that.

00:51:14.840 It doesn't matter how much of it you uproot and throw out because we trust the new human reason that the revolutionaries are going to come up with to be something better than what we inherited.

00:51:27.280 Well, I think you really see this.

00:51:29.600 I really believe that you see the most egregious example of this in our willingness to redefine the meaning of man and woman, because my psychological studies have led me to the presumption that there might not be any more fundamental perceptual category than man and woman, than male and female.

00:52:00.580 And there's the direct perception of that on the biological front, which is a precondition for successful reproduction, we should point out, in case it has to be pointed out.

00:52:11.360 And then there are symbolic echoes of masculine and feminine that pervade almost everything we conceptualize.

00:52:19.300 So you see that echoed, for example, in the Taoist conception of reality as yin and yang, which is a masculine and feminine dichotomy.

00:52:26.580 There's this bipolarity of cognition that has as its fundamental basis the distinction between the sexes.

00:52:35.060 And, you know, when Canada moved in 2016 to force the reconstruction of pronouns onto unsuspecting population in the name of compassionate narcissism,

00:52:52.660 I thought, well, because this is such a fundamental cognitive category, if we introduce entropy into it, if we introduce disorder, then we're going to destabilize those who are already quite disordered.

00:53:06.900 And the most likely to be destabilized in that manner would be adolescent girls, because there's historical precedent for that.

00:53:14.640 And so this idiot insistence that all conceptions are up for grabs belies the fact that there's a hierarchy of perception in relationship to the different degrees of depths of different perceptions.

00:53:31.000 And it replaces hierarchical order, not with the freedom that's promised by the Marxists and the liberals, but with absolute bloody intolerable chaos.

00:53:42.440 And when we, I do believe that we're in a Tower of Babel situation in a real sense, is that we've become intellectually pretentious beyond belief.

00:53:51.160 We're building scaffolds that are in principle designed to replace God, and now we've reached an impasse where we no longer speak the same language.

00:54:01.700 We can't even decide what constitutes a man and what constitutes a woman.

00:54:05.480 And if you can't agree on that, then I don't think there's anything that you can agree on.

00:54:10.420 And so if you ask, you know, what does the individual, man or woman, today facing this permanent cultural revolution, which is uprooting the most fundamental things that have been inherited, the most fundamental concepts that we use to understand reality are being smashed.

00:54:35.720 So where do they turn?

00:54:37.580 And here, you know, I understand that this could be controversial for all sorts of people, but I think the bottom line is that if you see the revolution coming, you understand it's going to destroy everything.

00:54:52.480 You understand there's going to literally be nothing that is not uprooted.

00:54:57.720 If you see this, what's the force that could stop it?

00:55:02.040 Well, the force that could stop it is fundamentally young men and young women, young families, older men and older women, going to that institution, which continues to hand down traditions intact, which is, in our society, is almost only, at this point, the church.

00:55:24.820 The orthodox churches, orthodox, I mean, theologically.

00:55:29.040 Yeah, traditionally.

00:55:29.880 Whether they're Catholic or Protestant or orthodox doctrinally, or the synagogue or some other traditional community in which a life of conservation and transmission is actually taking place.

00:55:46.060 It, you know, it begins with young people saying, look, I need to be part of a community.

00:55:56.080 But the next step is to say it can't just be, you know, any arbitrary community.

00:56:01.120 It can't be, you know, like a bunch of 18-year-olds in a dorm room, we're going to set up a community.

00:56:07.580 Because they're not actually engaged in conserving and transmitting anything, right?

00:56:20.040 And so the only way that you can plug yourself into the chain of conservation and transmission, which has been lost, is to find older people.

00:56:31.020 To find older people who've seen it done.

00:56:33.420 I mean, you're not going to be able to keep a marriage together if you don't have actual living models of older people who have succeeded in keeping a marriage together so you can see what it's like, so that you can pick it up from them.

00:56:47.220 And the same thing is true for everything else.

00:56:50.840 If you want to save yourself, right?

00:56:53.520 I mean, I think this is true nationally also.

00:56:55.820 But at the moment, if you as an individual, you want to save yourself.

00:57:00.380 Now, I'm not talking about the Christian question about, like, your eternal salvation.

00:57:05.980 I'm Jewish.

00:57:06.840 I'm talking about you want to save yourself in this life, in this world, all right?

00:57:12.820 And then what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to, I know this is difficult, but you're going to have to go to older people who have a functioning congregation and say,

00:57:25.000 look, I'm coming here to learn.

00:57:26.380 I'm not coming here to judge you.

00:57:28.300 I'm not coming here to, you know, to preach the things I believe.

00:57:31.820 I'm coming here to learn how a life of conservation and transmission used to work.

00:57:37.660 I want to learn that to see whether I can be part of it.

00:57:41.780 That is a very big change.

00:57:44.160 The best way to fight the oncoming revolution is, as you say, the oncoming chaos is with order.

00:57:53.180 But you can't create that order yourself.

00:57:55.580 You have to be a part of some existing order.

00:57:59.260 And luckily, it still exists.

00:58:00.980 So in relationship to your comments earlier about the conservatives thinkers, who I think we should also go through, by the way, making the case that things did fall apart of their own accord.

00:58:14.560 There's a thinker, Mircea Eliad, a great historian of religions, who tracked the commonalities among flood myths across very many different cultures and came up with a formula for why God or the gods would become angry enough to destroy everything in a chaotic catastrophe.

00:58:40.880 And he said, well, the first issue is that things deteriorate of their own accord.

00:58:49.100 And that's just an observation about the effect of entropy, I would say, is that things fall apart.

00:58:55.080 If you just leave them sit, they'll fall apart by themselves because things decay.

00:59:00.360 And then Eliad also said that a very common theme was that that process of entropic decay was sped along by the sins of men.

00:59:11.080 And what he meant by that was the proclivity for people to be willfully blind.

00:59:18.600 And so imagine that there are small things going wrong in your marriage.

00:59:23.220 Your wife becomes less attentive or you do.

00:59:25.900 Your attention starts to be attracted by other people and you just let it slide.

00:59:30.480 You know that something's up, but you don't do the attentive work necessary to do the repairs when the time is appropriate.

00:59:39.300 Well, then you speed the process of decay.

00:59:44.800 And so one of the implications of this was that the central organizing principle of the psyche,

00:59:53.820 and this might be the principle to which religious systems, to some degree, put forward as the highest possible good,

01:00:05.120 is something like constant attention to that process of decay and communication about it to stem off the ravages of time.

01:00:16.200 You could think about that as an organizing principle of the psyche, a necessary organizing principle of the psyche.

01:00:22.540 So the god Horus, for example, in the ancient Egyptian pantheon, was the all-seeing eye that paid attention

01:00:32.760 and who could see corruption when it emerged.

01:00:35.940 And the Mesopotamian god Marduk had eyes all the way around his head and spoke magic words.

01:00:41.700 And so that seemed to be something like a core organizing principle.

01:00:46.840 And you talked about these cardinal, canonical, conservative thinkers

01:00:54.060 and their willingness to make the presumption that things did go wrong and needed to be fixed.

01:01:01.900 Maybe we could go through them a little bit, if you don't mind.

01:01:06.260 Fortescue, Hooker, Selden, and Burke.

01:01:08.400 Well, you know, before we launch into them, let me just say something about the biblical flood myth

01:01:20.580 and its flood story, I should say, and its relationship to the conversation that we're having.

01:01:32.800 Eliade's mapping is helpful,

01:01:35.560 but there is a big difference between the Mesopotamian flood myth

01:01:42.020 where you have basically the gods get angry because human beings are annoying.

01:01:47.860 Human beings are bothering them.

01:01:49.360 They're troublesome.

01:01:50.740 Right.

01:01:50.860 When that story in the hands of Moses and the Israelite prophets,

01:02:00.700 that story becomes one of God's intention of creating an Edenic world,

01:02:11.500 a perfect world where human beings and animals are all eating grasses and vegetables

01:02:18.840 and no creature hurts another creature.

01:02:22.400 And what you see in the biblical account is that the world has this intrinsic,

01:02:30.640 the chaotic waters that God's wind or God's spirit fashions the world out of,

01:02:38.040 those chaotic waters never, you know, they never fully go away.

01:02:42.380 They're always constantly about to happen.

01:02:45.100 And that affects human nature in that human beings are incapable of living in this perfect world

01:02:53.020 that, you know, that God imagined in Eden.

01:02:57.480 The flood story actually has almost the, you know, the opposite meaning

01:03:03.600 because what God discovers from the flood

01:03:07.980 is that he thought that he was going to give Noah and Noah's children a chance to create the perfect world.

01:03:15.880 The moment that the flood is over, Noah starts getting drunk.

01:03:20.020 There's sexual impropriety.

01:03:21.400 There's also, you know, there's all sorts of awful things that immediately happen to Noah,

01:03:27.200 who is supposed to be the best of, you know, the best of human beings.

01:03:31.960 And that creates a religious framework in which God says,

01:03:38.580 all right, I can't perfect the world.

01:03:41.960 I have no way of perfecting the world.

01:03:44.340 It's not within my power to do that, which is not exactly the way that it's often presented.

01:03:50.000 But that's what it says in the text, is that God doesn't have the power to create a perfect world.

01:03:56.300 And he needs human beings to take up a role as his, you know, his vice regents,

01:04:04.500 as his associates and assistants in trying to fix, in trying to fix the world.

01:04:12.300 And that structure, notice that it's a hierarchical structure.

01:04:17.280 It's not a metaphor of an all-powerful God that we should just obey.

01:04:22.440 It's a different metaphor.

01:04:23.800 It's a metaphor of a God who actually needs our help.

01:04:27.780 He could destroy the whole world, but he can't fix it without our help.

01:04:31.020 That's the fundamental structure that makes Judaism and later Christianity different from the preceding religions,

01:04:39.080 is that there is a role for man within the hierarchy of the cosmos.

01:04:44.040 God needs us.

01:04:45.080 And the covenant is about us stepping forward and shouldering that responsibility.

01:04:51.480 So, the other thing that I've seen, another thing that I've seen on my tours is that the call to responsibility has become somewhat of a clarion call.

01:05:04.800 And, you know, you can see the Marxists and the environmental types as well capitalizing on the attractiveness of responsibility and destiny to some degree

01:05:16.680 by offering these utopian schemes as a sort of messianic alternative to the enemy of liberalism.

01:05:26.280 Let's put it that way.

01:05:27.540 The conservative approach seems to me to be something more like, what would you call it, the pursuit of responsibility in humble micro-domains, at least to begin with, right?

01:05:42.120 So that to set yourself right, you should try to set your family relationships right and maybe to establish a family.

01:05:50.300 And having established a certain degree of harmony and functionality in your family,

01:05:55.440 then maybe you could extend out a few tentacles into the surrounding civic community and you could build from the bottom up.

01:06:02.640 You could build a stable life and a stable social life and then a stable political life, let's say, from the bottom up.

01:06:10.380 And one of the things that I've been heartened by is the fact that if you lay out those arguments to young people,

01:06:18.280 you say, look, you need to be embedded in a social surround and you need to take responsibility for it.

01:06:22.900 The reason you need that is because that's where you're going to find the purpose of your life.

01:06:28.060 That sounds to me like an echo of this biblical insistence that there actually is something for human beings to do,

01:06:34.800 as long as they don't bite off more than they can chew and get all prideful about it.

01:06:39.780 You said maybe start a family.

01:06:42.340 So, you know, this might be controversial with some of your viewers,

01:06:47.600 but in the Jewish version of the biblical tradition, in the Jewish tradition,

01:06:53.500 the starting a family is an obligation that everyone who can do it must do it.

01:06:59.680 Right.

01:07:00.020 And if you think about that in terms of the responsibility issue,

01:07:07.560 young Orthodox Jews are raised to believe that if you don't take on this responsibility,

01:07:18.020 if you as a young man, if you don't make it your business to find a wife and to have children

01:07:25.660 and to do what it takes to create a stable structure,

01:07:32.220 you're going to be for your entire life unable to understand what it actually takes

01:07:38.280 in order to create human order.

01:07:42.600 I mean, you know, various people have noticed that many of the European leaders

01:07:50.400 are unmarried and don't have children and the situation in which

01:07:59.140 young people don't learn how to, they don't learn how to govern.

01:08:05.920 They don't learn how to be a king and a queen in their own homes.

01:08:09.920 They don't know how to govern a family.

01:08:11.440 They don't know how to hold it together despite the incredible pain and difficulties

01:08:17.480 that often takes place.

01:08:20.400 Between men and women and children aren't, you know, children are, you know,

01:08:25.640 they're sometimes fun, but they're sometimes incredibly difficult, incredibly painful to raise.

01:08:31.300 This whole concept that every young man and woman who can do it

01:08:37.460 must take the responsibility to bring life into the world,

01:08:41.960 to create the world anew, to try to build up on the basis of what's been inherited,

01:08:47.060 to try to make it better than what it was in previous generations.

01:08:51.440 That view, I think in many ways, that's like the bedrock Jewish and Christian view,

01:09:00.060 which says, you know, we're not slaves to the gods.

01:09:04.120 We're partners in creating this world, but that means we have an obligation to do the act of creation.

01:09:10.660 And the most fundamental act of creation is creating a family.

01:09:14.920 Once you've done that, then, you know, you were hinting to this,

01:09:19.520 then I think you can also learn to create congregations, to uphold nations.

01:09:25.920 All of that flows from the first step of very young people taking responsibility

01:09:30.640 for creating, you know, basically their own little world in a family.

01:09:35.100 Well, there is no more profound responsibility than that.

01:09:38.780 And so it's an initiation into profound responsibility.

01:09:42.120 I mean, one of the things that happens to a parent that,

01:09:46.760 and I think it's very difficult for this to happen if you don't become a parent,

01:09:52.320 is that once you're a parent, there is definitely someone in your life

01:09:58.320 who's more important than you are, right?

01:10:02.200 So your orientation to the world, well, I would say it matures properly,

01:10:06.600 and it matures under the force of moral obligation, fundamentally.

01:10:11.020 You have this person now who's, for better or worse,

01:10:14.920 almost entirely dependent on your not-so-tender mercies, you and your wife,

01:10:19.780 and who's subject to all of your trials and tribulations and inadequacies.

01:10:25.180 And if you have any sense at all, that wakes you up as much as anything will.

01:10:30.220 And without that, I think it's very difficult to shed the constraints of hedonistic adolescence.

01:10:38.960 It's not good for people, you know, it's not good for people.

01:10:41.960 You just...

01:10:43.000 So go ahead.

01:10:43.700 Yeah, no, I think that's exactly true.

01:10:47.460 I think, as you said, you can't, in a lot of ways, you can't actually mature

01:10:54.920 until you've created and are the government of a household.

01:11:01.040 And the alternative that sort of mainstream liberalism gives us,

01:11:07.540 this view that, you know, when you reach 18 or 20 years old,

01:11:13.740 you're a rational individual, and, you know, now you can do whatever you want.

01:11:18.520 You can...

01:11:19.200 And usually doing whatever you want.

01:11:21.340 We can see in young people that doing whatever you want means

01:11:24.280 that they get too scared to get married.

01:11:27.960 They get too scared to have children.

01:11:29.540 They...

01:11:30.980 Even...

01:11:31.920 I'm talking about something that even affects Orthodox religious communities.

01:11:36.080 You can see it very, very clearly that the...

01:11:40.540 That they look at these responsibilities as a kind of...

01:11:47.940 With terrible fear, as though it's like an enslavement,

01:11:51.520 something they need to spend another five years and another ten years

01:11:55.180 and another five years, get more degrees.

01:11:57.360 You know, they need to keep preparing in order to be ready to do it.

01:12:01.860 And that's the opposite of the traditional view that says,

01:12:07.720 that says, take the responsibility and then live up to it.

01:12:13.280 You'll grow by living up to it.

01:12:14.860 You'll become a complete person.

01:12:17.060 As the rabbis say, you complete yourself by entering and taking the responsibility of marriage and children.

01:12:25.620 And the alternative is adolescence that's extended forever.

01:12:31.820 What?

01:12:32.040 You think that when you're 35 years old and now you're going to start looking to get married,

01:12:38.240 it's going to be easier to get married?

01:12:39.600 You'll actually be more capable of it than when you were 23?

01:12:43.880 I don't think that's true at all.

01:12:46.560 I think what you learn during those extra 10 or 15 years of adolescence is to just care for yourself

01:12:54.300 instead of to learn how to create something, to learn how to command something.

01:12:58.500 That idea also highlights, in some sense, both the practical necessity and the inevitability of faith or the lack thereof.

01:13:08.380 I mean, many things in your life you have to throw yourself into without first knowing that you can do it.

01:13:16.160 And I don't mean to do that in an impulsive and foolish manner, like heedless of all risks.

01:13:22.740 I mean that when you get married, you don't know if it's going to work.

01:13:29.220 And in some sense, that's even a foolish question because the issue is that when you decide to get married,

01:13:35.700 it's the first and foremost decision among 50,000 decisions that are going to determine whether or not you can stay married.

01:13:45.020 And you can boil that down to a question like, did I marry the right person?

01:13:50.080 And the answer to that is always no.

01:13:51.820 And they didn't marry the right person either.

01:13:54.280 And because neither of you are the right person in your current unbelievably flawed condition.

01:14:00.760 And so, but you throw yourself into it thinking that having faith that you can manage it

01:14:07.760 and also having faith that the alternative, that no matter how dismal the reality,

01:14:12.560 the alternative is likely to be far worse.

01:14:14.600 And I would say the same thing is true on the child-rearing front, which is, as you pointed out, it's difficult.

01:14:22.560 It isn't obvious that you're prepared or that extra preparation is really going to help you.

01:14:27.840 But what's the alternative to the difficulty?

01:14:31.800 One of the things I love about the story of Abraham, one of the things I think that makes it such a profound story,

01:14:37.300 is that Abraham is really characterized by quite the protracted adolescence, according to the beginning of the story.

01:14:44.320 He's quite old when God finally convinces him to get the hell out of his tent and to get out there in the world.

01:14:50.540 And God in that story is definitely manifested, manifests himself as the call to adventure,

01:14:58.380 even to the pathologically underdeveloped, the call to adventure.

01:15:02.440 And of course, Abraham just steps into any number of catastrophes as soon as he leaves the confines of his tent and his father's home.

01:15:11.480 But the story is a triumph in its totality, because despite the fact that he encounters tyranny

01:15:20.820 and the likely loss of his wife at the hands of people who are essentially tyrants and starvation and war

01:15:30.040 and all of the catastrophes of life, he has a great adventure.

01:15:34.960 And that's the adventure, as far as I can tell, it's something like the adventure of truth and dedication and responsibility.

01:15:40.500 And that's very seldom marketed, you know, by conservatives to young people as an adventure, right?

01:15:47.020 And you said their default position is often to regard these strictures of community as, what would you call it,

01:15:55.760 impediments and impositions on their hedonic freedom.

01:15:58.920 But there's very little of value in that hedonic freedom.

01:16:01.720 And all of the adventure in life, as far as I can tell, is to be found, weirdly enough, in truth and responsibility.

01:16:07.560 Yep, I completely agree.

01:16:11.520 You have God telling Abraham, look, I'm going to give you an opportunity to become a great nation,

01:16:26.260 to become a great tradition, to become a teacher of all the peoples in the world.

01:16:35.600 But, you know, that's the biggest adventure that, you know, that the prophets could imagine,

01:16:41.920 was setting out to become a teacher to the entire world and to create a great nation that would influence the whole world

01:16:48.560 and would be in covenant with God.

01:16:51.680 The prophets can't imagine a larger scale adventure than that.

01:16:56.320 And yet the whole thing pivots around, you take a wife, you have to have a child, you have to raise that child.

01:17:07.460 That involves hardship, that involves difficulty.

01:17:10.820 And, you know, there's all of these descriptions of Abraham's adventures.

01:17:14.480 And, you know, it takes many generations until you can see the consequences of what, of, you know,

01:17:21.940 the full consequences of what he did, but the first step is taking responsibility, as you say.

01:17:28.300 And now we have to ask, we have to, I mean, now we're talking about, you know,

01:17:33.100 tens of millions of young people and not so young people who are beginning to realize that, you know,

01:17:42.020 that a career, meaning, you know, like your place within the corporate economy,

01:17:49.160 you know, which cubicle, getting to that corner office,

01:17:53.460 that that's nowhere near the adventure of creating a family,

01:17:59.020 which is creating a little nation, which then has the opportunity to grow if you do it right.

01:18:05.000 I mean, really, these two things are basically battling with one another.

01:18:11.500 Which of them is more important?

01:18:13.680 And the answer will, you know, you can have both.

01:18:18.020 Sometimes it's true, but it's terribly misleading.

01:18:21.120 It's terribly misleading because that cubicle in which, you know,

01:18:27.220 you sit in front of that computer screen and try to, you know,

01:18:30.600 move yourself up in the corporate game,

01:18:34.900 that's not a life of conservation and transmission.

01:18:38.280 That's not a life of responsibility.

01:18:40.340 That, you know, that for most people, it's almost nothing, actually.

01:18:44.880 And so what we really need to be telling people is, look, enough with the fear.

01:18:55.280 Enough with the fear.

01:18:56.260 Come join a religious community, a congregation in which people did get married when they were young

01:19:03.000 and they did have children, and come see what it's like.

01:19:06.760 By the way, the commandment of being fruitful and having children is only one part of your place in the hierarchy.

01:19:18.880 Another part of your place in the hierarchy is the commandment to honor your parents.

01:19:23.360 And that also is something that young people find incredibly difficult whenever I speak in front of young audiences.

01:19:29.640 The moment that I mention, you know, honoring your father and your mother, honoring your teachers,

01:19:35.040 that immediately somebody says, well, you know, only if they deserve to be honored, right?

01:19:40.280 I mean, you're not talking about honoring them, you know, if they're terrible.

01:19:44.140 And, of course, that loophole basically allows, you know,

01:19:46.980 every single individual young man and woman in the audience to say, well, you know, my parents are, you know,

01:19:52.220 I judge my parents, they're not, you know, they're not worthy of being honored.

01:19:55.980 That it begins by going away to college and you don't need to talk to them anymore.

01:19:59.760 And it ends by putting your parents in an old age home

01:20:02.480 and paying somebody else to take care of them in old age.

01:20:05.860 Again, you know, just simply dumping responsibility on somebody else,

01:20:09.000 paying somebody else to take the responsibility.

01:20:11.420 And both parts of this, the fear of bringing children in the world,

01:20:16.900 but also the refusal to admit the biblical truth

01:20:21.500 that you have a lifelong obligation to honor your parents, your father and your mother.

01:20:26.720 You don't choose whether to have that obligation or not.

01:20:30.560 This is like, you know, this is both barrels against the fundamental assumption of liberalism,

01:20:37.020 which is that you choose your obligations, but you don't choose your obligations.

01:20:41.920 You don't choose which family you're born into.

01:20:43.860 You don't choose who your parents are or who your brothers are or who your sisters are.

01:20:48.600 You don't even choose who your children are.

01:20:50.180 And so all of these, in the end, are unchosen obligations.

01:20:54.720 And the question is, you know, are you going to develop the strength of personality,

01:21:01.200 the power and the wisdom, and the ability to uphold these responsibilities

01:21:07.860 in a way that's impressive and classy and powerful?

01:21:11.980 And it can also be magnificent.

01:21:14.520 You know, you get to a certain age and you've got, you know, all of these decades of, you know,

01:21:23.060 I think of my, you know, my aunt and uncle who, they're in their 80s now,

01:21:30.460 and Orthodox Jews in Israel.

01:21:32.280 And they took a drone photograph of them with the, you know, 90 of their biological and adopted descendants

01:21:46.420 who came to, like, a picnic.

01:21:48.760 And you look at this and you say, you know, they built an empire.

01:21:55.280 They, I mean, they've begun to, you know, to alter the face of the world with what they did.

01:22:02.280 What about you?

01:22:04.400 Are, you know, you're just going to sit it out?

01:22:07.760 No, that honor, too.

01:22:08.900 You know, I've been thinking about many of the injunctions on the religious side as moral efforts.

01:22:18.520 So faith, for example, you can pillory it as blind insistence that something

01:22:25.680 that no one could possibly believe to be true is true.

01:22:30.480 Or you could say, no, faith is the courage that it requires to leap into the unknown

01:22:37.740 and to wrestle with possibility itself.

01:22:40.760 And you could think of honor the same way, is that, you know,

01:22:43.900 I read this book by Frank McCourt called Angela's Ashes.

01:22:47.160 And in that book, he talks about his father back in Ireland.

01:22:51.660 They were a very poor Irish family.

01:22:53.320 And his father was an absolutely unrepentant alcoholic who drank up every cent the family

01:23:02.880 ever made and had many, many children, a number of whom developed very serious illnesses as

01:23:11.380 a consequence of the poverty induced by the father's drinking and some of whom died.

01:23:16.100 And Frank had the wisdom, even as a young man, to sort of divide his father into two parts.

01:23:24.260 There was sober, useful, productive, encouraging morning father.

01:23:29.360 And then there was nighttime and binge father.

01:23:33.140 And he did everything he could to extract out the encouraging patriarchal spirit from the best

01:23:39.440 that his father had to offer.

01:23:41.360 And it seems to me that that's something like honor, you know, and to honor your parents,

01:23:48.900 to honor your wife, to honor your siblings is to, is to have the best in you serve the best in them.

01:23:57.920 It's something like that.

01:23:59.100 It's active, right?

01:24:00.320 It's, it's, it, it requires effort, like courage requires effort.

01:24:05.500 It's, it's not something you do blindly and foolishly.

01:24:09.780 And so when people say, well, my parents have done things that

01:24:12.940 make them less than honorable in my eyes.

01:24:16.900 I mean, there's two rejoinders to that.

01:24:18.820 The first is, well, and what makes you so perfect?

01:24:22.820 And so who exactly is it within you that's doing this judging?

01:24:29.820 And second, you have an obligation to work as hard as you can to

01:24:35.140 foster the best in other people.

01:24:38.220 And that would include your parents and your siblings and the people that you were close to.

01:24:41.800 That's something you really work at.

01:24:43.480 And that's the honoring.

01:24:45.680 You know, when my wife and I got married to speak personally for a bit,

01:24:49.480 one of the things we did decide was that

01:24:51.620 we were going to honor each other as husband and wife.

01:24:57.500 And so we tried, tried very hard, for example, not to put each other down, particularly in public.

01:25:05.680 And not, and that wasn't because we weren't often irritated with one another, because

01:25:10.500 obviously, if you live with someone, irritation emerges.

01:25:14.660 It's because you have a duty to honor your wife or your husband.

01:25:22.020 And if you don't uphold that duty, then you denigrate the relationship and

01:25:26.220 you make yourself look like an utter fool too.

01:25:29.800 You know, if you don't treat your wife with a certain amount of respect,

01:25:33.100 well, first of all, it does her no good, but it also does you no good.

01:25:40.580 You entered into the relationship.

01:25:43.120 You have a moral obligation to keep it as pristine as you can in your public utterances.

01:25:50.600 And that's part of the necessary responsibility that provides a scaffold for the relationship.

01:25:55.340 Same with your parents.

01:25:59.140 Yeah, I would add that it's not just the public utterances.

01:26:05.280 Of course.

01:26:05.920 You know, there's, everybody at this point has, you know, these Hollywood images of, you know,

01:26:12.740 of happy marriages, you know, which just sort of like magically everybody's having a good time.

01:26:18.160 And unhappy marriages where people are, you know, are constantly insulting and abusing one another.

01:26:26.200 And what is missing from, you know, this simplified version of marriage is that, you know,

01:26:35.680 you simply don't have to say everything you think all the time.

01:26:40.420 And part of, an integral part of liberalism is the, you know, I want to express myself.

01:26:47.380 You know, I feel something, so I want to say it.

01:26:50.820 I want to tell people with the assumption being that if you say everything you think,

01:26:56.480 then, you know, then you'll persuade the other, you know, your wife or your parents,

01:27:01.100 you'll persuade the world of, you know, the truth of your view.

01:27:04.920 But, you know, empirically we say, you know, we can see that isn't remotely true.

01:27:10.240 If you say everything you think all the time,

01:27:12.540 then what happens is that you hurt your wife over and over and over again.

01:27:18.000 And you bring her to the point where she, you know,

01:27:19.720 even the things that she could do, you know, that you want her to do,

01:27:23.120 she finds painful and she starts hurting you back.

01:27:26.520 I mean, the whole traditional view that honoring means sometimes you don't say the truth.

01:27:36.720 Okay, I'm not saying that, you know, you should lie to your wife or your husband.

01:27:40.720 God forbid, I'm not talking about that.

01:27:42.340 But I'm saying that for every 10 criticisms that, you know, come to you of, you know, about your wife,

01:27:51.800 it might be that only one of them is worth saying.

01:27:54.760 And that one maybe shouldn't be worth saying.

01:27:56.820 It shouldn't be said now.

01:27:58.320 Maybe it should be said later.

01:27:59.880 Well, there's actually, you know.

01:28:01.500 No, there's empirical data on that.

01:28:04.680 So if you track the utterances of married couples,

01:28:10.520 and then you use the utterance tracking to predict the longevity of the relationship,

01:28:18.700 it was found that if the relationship deteriorates to the point where there's one negative comment

01:28:27.920 for every five positive comments, then the relationship doesn't maintain itself.

01:28:34.020 So 20% negative is too high.

01:28:36.960 But interestingly enough, there's a bound on the other end too,

01:28:41.320 which is that if the positive to the negative exceeds 11 to 1,

01:28:46.800 the relationship also tends to deteriorate.

01:28:50.080 And so it's something like judicious communication, right?

01:28:53.300 You don't have to make a case that every time something irritates you, that turns into a war.

01:29:00.620 But you can't be a pushover or someone who is naively blind

01:29:08.780 and expect the relationship to maintain itself as well.

01:29:12.800 So this is, you know, this is actually one of the central arguments that I make in my conservatism book,

01:29:21.100 which is that honoring, which is purposely trying to,

01:29:28.620 in Hebrew the word is l'chabed, for honoring.

01:29:32.500 The word is to literally make someone heavy, to, you know, like in English we can say

01:29:40.520 that certain statements or certain words were significant.

01:29:46.620 Here we're talking about making an individual significant by making them weighty,

01:29:56.420 giving weight to their words, saying it was important that you did that,

01:30:00.520 it was good that you did that.

01:30:02.480 This is actually the key to creating a loyal relationship.

01:30:07.360 People feel, people don't feel loved if they're not being honored.

01:30:11.760 People don't feel good if they're not being honored.

01:30:14.220 If they're not being honored, they begin to hate, they begin to resent.

01:30:20.120 And so you can say this with respect to husbands and wives,

01:30:25.520 you can say this with respect to children relating to their parents,

01:30:29.560 but you can also, I mean, take a look politically at, you know,

01:30:33.100 what's happening in America, what's happening in other democratic countries

01:30:36.760 where the competing political parties, the competing tribes,

01:30:43.100 no longer honor one another.

01:30:44.800 Right.

01:30:45.520 And, you know, all you need to do is to, you know,

01:30:48.180 go back to the, you know, to the Nixon-Kennedy debates from the 1960s

01:30:53.900 or the Reagan-Mondale debates from the 80s

01:31:00.160 and just look at those videos of the way they treat one another.

01:31:05.320 I mean, it may be that in their hearts they hate one another

01:31:07.800 and they think they're dangerous people, but look at the way they talk.

01:31:12.140 They're constantly giving honor to the other side

01:31:15.220 because they value the fact that if the other side wins,

01:31:23.040 then they're going to be the loyal opposition.

01:31:24.960 They'll do their best to honor them until the next election.

01:31:27.520 Hopefully they'll win.

01:31:28.520 I don't want to turn this into something like, you know,

01:31:31.020 too dreamy or utopian,

01:31:35.220 but the difference between, you know, what that kind of politics

01:31:39.760 and the politics we have today, which consists, you know,

01:31:43.000 of this constant, constant drumbeat of insult, abuse, slander,

01:31:49.440 dishonoring one another.

01:31:51.080 Look, it's just like a marriage.

01:31:52.860 If you want a divorce, if you want a civil war,

01:31:56.180 then just keep dishonoring the other person.

01:31:58.620 Just keep focusing on everything that's wrong with them

01:32:01.220 and you'll get your divorce.

01:32:02.960 You'll get your civil war.

01:32:03.980 So you're construing honor as something like respect and encouragement.

01:32:08.840 I mean, one of the things that B.F. Skinner,

01:32:12.540 who was famously able to train animals to do almost anything,

01:32:17.640 he pointed out that the most effective behavior modification technique,

01:32:23.760 to put it rather coldly, was the use of targeted reward.

01:32:28.500 And so he would watch animals and when they did something

01:32:31.000 that was approximately appropriate to what he was trying to teach them to do,

01:32:37.540 he would reward them.

01:32:38.540 And so, for example, if he wanted to have a rat walk up a little ladder

01:32:42.840 and do a dance on the top,

01:32:44.800 he'd just watch the rat until it got close to the ladder

01:32:47.480 and when it got close to the ladder in its cage,

01:32:49.680 he'd give it a food pellet

01:32:50.760 and then it would hang around the ladder more

01:32:52.420 and then eventually it would put a paw up on one of the rungs

01:32:55.840 and he'd give it a food pellet

01:32:57.180 and soon he could get the rat climbing the ladder

01:32:59.900 and doing a little dance on top

01:33:01.580 and all sorts of complicated things.

01:33:04.240 And he knew that you could shape behavior with threat and punishment,

01:33:08.320 but that reward was much more effective,

01:33:12.480 although it required a large degree of attention.

01:33:15.680 One of the things I suggested to my clinical clients in my lectures

01:33:18.880 was that you pay very close attention to the people around you

01:33:25.180 and whenever they do something that you'd like to see them repeat,

01:33:29.980 you let them know in some detail what it was that you observed.

01:33:34.180 And that sounds like the manner in which you're construing honor

01:33:38.120 in addition to the respect element,

01:33:39.900 which is to give credit where credit is due.

01:33:43.020 Yeah, this is not simply give credit where credit is due

01:33:48.460 because, you know, as we said before,

01:33:52.500 if your mindset is, you know, I'm judging, I'm critiquing,

01:33:58.880 then you'll easily destroy,

01:34:01.120 I mean, you'll just destroy your parents' worthiness in your own eyes,

01:34:05.500 your wife's worthiness in your own eyes,

01:34:06.920 your political rival's worthiness in your own eyes.

01:34:09.520 If that's what you're doing, you're saying,

01:34:12.040 well, I'm going to judge where it's due all the time,

01:34:15.060 you're not going to make it.

01:34:17.040 You're not going to succeed in doing the action,

01:34:20.600 the biblical action of giving honor.

01:34:22.820 The biblical action of giving honor is to elevate someone,

01:34:30.580 to make them feel like they are important and worthy,

01:34:35.260 not for you to judge whether they're worthy,

01:34:37.880 for you to make them feel that they are worthy.

01:34:40.960 And, I mean, the comparison with the rats is useful,

01:34:47.020 but in this case, we have,

01:34:50.400 this is going, taking place in both directions

01:34:53.640 between a husband and wife.

01:34:55.380 If each of them,

01:34:56.380 if I tell my wife why she's worthy,

01:35:01.440 she comes away feeling loved and strengthened and important,

01:35:05.840 and if she does it back to me,

01:35:08.180 then I come away feeling loved and strengthened and important.

01:35:11.360 And guess what?

01:35:12.940 The single relationship, that bond,

01:35:17.940 is when it's strengthened from both sides in that way,

01:35:21.700 it becomes something astonishing.

01:35:24.420 I mean, even, you know, the whole thing about,

01:35:28.020 well, you know, I don't feel attracted to my wife.

01:35:30.520 You know, of course you don't feel attracted to your wife

01:35:32.380 because, you know, you were a young person

01:35:38.400 and you were in the throes of hormonal ecstasy,

01:35:42.740 and that lasts for a few years.

01:35:44.720 But the key to an attraction

01:35:47.620 is if you keep making her feel worthy,

01:35:52.300 then she'll continue to feel attracted to you.

01:35:54.520 And if she keeps making you feel worthy,

01:35:56.340 then you'll keep feeling attracted to her.

01:35:58.160 There's a direct connection between honoring somebody

01:36:01.940 and their feeling a desire for you.

01:36:06.900 And I'm including physical desire, all kinds of desire.

01:36:10.880 And, you know, all of these things are kind of secrets

01:36:15.380 of the traditional society,

01:36:17.360 which have been wiped away by, you know,

01:36:22.420 along with the biblical tradition.

01:36:23.940 You know, the assumption that we don't have anything

01:36:26.860 to learn from Scripture or from tradition

01:36:30.160 basically is the key to our inability

01:36:33.820 to maintain long-term any kind of loyalty.

01:36:39.160 So if you were going to extract out a message

01:36:42.800 to young people,

01:36:45.760 and perhaps not just young people

01:36:47.680 who are watching and listening,

01:36:49.900 from your work in relationship

01:36:52.940 to how they should conduct their life,

01:36:55.140 I mean, we've been touching on that

01:36:56.560 the entire conversation,

01:36:58.740 what would you tell them in relationship

01:37:01.780 to conservatism rather than liberalism

01:37:05.040 or, God forbid, let's say, Marxism?

01:37:08.820 Why tilt in the conservative direction

01:37:11.460 if you're young?

01:37:12.440 The most important thing about tilting

01:37:15.320 in a conservative direction

01:37:16.520 is that you yourself have to lead

01:37:22.480 a conservative life, right?

01:37:24.160 I mean, there's importance

01:37:26.220 in voting for conservatives,

01:37:27.680 but this is not the key to the issue.

01:37:31.840 The key to the issue is

01:37:33.120 if you're voting for conservatives,

01:37:35.280 but you're leading a liberal life,

01:37:37.040 you're, you know, you're 33 years old

01:37:39.160 and you're living with a, you know,

01:37:40.700 you're living with a woman year after year,

01:37:43.220 you go to the beach on the Sabbaths,

01:37:45.260 you're not a member of any congregation,

01:37:47.400 you don't read Scripture,

01:37:48.920 you're 1,000 miles away from your parents,

01:37:50.580 so you don't inherit anything

01:37:52.340 from the community that you grew up in

01:37:54.880 because you don't go to a congregation,

01:37:57.040 you don't have a new community

01:37:58.220 that you inherit from.

01:38:00.080 You talk to your parents, you know,

01:38:02.140 on Thanksgiving or, I don't know, once a month.

01:38:04.940 This whole construct is a liberal life.

01:38:09.440 It is a life in which nothing is conserved

01:38:12.620 and nothing is transmitted

01:38:14.060 from one generation to the next.

01:38:15.500 It doesn't make any difference how you vote

01:38:17.660 if your personal life is one in which

01:38:20.920 you're not part of the chain of transmission

01:38:25.660 in a hierarchical society

01:38:27.500 in which you learn to honor people

01:38:29.560 who you didn't necessarily choose.

01:38:32.320 And you, you know, as you get older

01:38:35.040 and you get wiser

01:38:38.400 and you accomplish real things

01:38:41.760 by creating a family,

01:38:42.940 as you get older,

01:38:45.600 you yourself become honored.

01:38:48.640 You yourself become somebody

01:38:49.840 who's worthy of that kind of honor,

01:38:51.800 which means that you feel good about your life,

01:38:55.660 which there isn't any other way to do it

01:38:58.780 other than in this way, I believe.

01:39:01.660 Right, so it's not a political issue fundamentally

01:39:04.000 what you're putting forward.

01:39:05.520 And it also seems to be commensurate

01:39:08.100 with this idea that psychological well-being,

01:39:12.360 which is a weak word,

01:39:14.020 it's happiness in the more classical sense,

01:39:18.480 I would say,

01:39:19.320 which had ties to virtue,

01:39:21.700 is something that's practiced locally,

01:39:24.960 practiced personally,

01:39:26.600 practiced within the family,

01:39:28.020 practiced within the broader community,

01:39:29.820 and so forth,

01:39:30.480 and all these nested hierarchical structures.

01:39:33.180 And that that's really the essence

01:39:38.340 in some sense of conducting yourself

01:39:41.240 in a sustainable and traditional manner.

01:39:43.840 And the utility of that

01:39:44.940 is that you actually get a full life.

01:39:47.040 And maybe you can live in some degree

01:39:49.540 of productive peace and harmony

01:39:50.980 with other people,

01:39:52.400 which, you know,

01:39:53.160 is probably preferable to horrible conflict and war.

01:39:57.640 All of that's true.

01:39:58.860 And in our current moment,

01:40:00.260 I mean, it's always been true,

01:40:01.880 but in our current moment,

01:40:04.100 you know,

01:40:04.400 where the alternatives are

01:40:07.120 a deracinated liberalism

01:40:10.300 or a Marxism whose purpose is just,

01:40:14.440 you know,

01:40:14.740 really is to destroy

01:40:16.940 all of the inherited structures and knowledge

01:40:19.060 that have come to us

01:40:20.080 from previous generations.

01:40:22.240 You know,

01:40:22.580 I just,

01:40:23.420 I can't see it.

01:40:24.540 I can't understand

01:40:25.460 how young people

01:40:26.720 or even old people,

01:40:28.380 you know,

01:40:28.720 whose kids went away to college

01:40:31.560 and never came back.

01:40:32.620 You know,

01:40:33.480 why not try

01:40:36.300 a conservative congregation

01:40:39.540 and see whether that can

01:40:44.020 give you the kind of flowering

01:40:46.720 that, you know,

01:40:48.060 you're looking for,

01:40:48.880 but you don't have any other way to get it.

01:40:51.000 I don't,

01:40:52.360 I think this is the best thing

01:40:55.080 that anyone can do

01:40:56.460 to fight the cultural revolution

01:40:58.660 and the woke madness

01:40:59.720 is to find a Christian

01:41:03.660 or a Jewish

01:41:05.040 or some other congregation

01:41:08.160 in which you can experience

01:41:10.220 inheriting and honoring,

01:41:11.780 honoring and inheriting yourself

01:41:14.680 and be a part of that.

01:41:16.220 That's,

01:41:17.320 you know,

01:41:17.680 if people don't do that,

01:41:20.640 there isn't much of a future.

01:41:23.680 Well,

01:41:24.760 that's a,

01:41:25.300 that's a salutary place

01:41:27.200 to draw this conversation

01:41:28.920 to a close,

01:41:29.660 I would say.

01:41:31.280 I'm going to talk to,

01:41:33.020 for all those

01:41:33.580 who are listening

01:41:34.200 and watching,

01:41:34.800 I'm going to talk to Dr. Hazoni

01:41:36.960 for another half an hour

01:41:38.160 on the DW Plus platform.

01:41:40.100 I use that time

01:41:41.700 to wander through

01:41:43.660 my guest's biography.

01:41:47.740 I'm very interested

01:41:48.600 in what sets people

01:41:50.640 on a particular path

01:41:51.760 and also interested

01:41:52.800 in sharing

01:41:54.180 what you might describe

01:41:56.100 as the wisdom

01:41:57.880 of success

01:41:58.560 with as many people

01:42:00.080 who are inclined

01:42:00.820 to listen and watch

01:42:01.800 and so that'll happen

01:42:02.680 on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

01:42:05.680 In the meantime,

01:42:06.740 thank you

01:42:07.300 to all of you

01:42:09.000 who are watching

01:42:10.040 and listening.

01:42:10.700 Your attention

01:42:11.200 is much appreciated

01:42:12.100 and thank you,

01:42:14.540 Dr. Yeram Hazoni

01:42:15.740 for speaking with me today

01:42:18.000 and for sharing

01:42:20.060 your thoughts

01:42:20.620 with the listening

01:42:22.860 and watching audience.

01:42:24.480 Much appreciated, sir.

01:42:26.400 My pleasure.

01:42:27.040 Thank you.

01:42:28.480 Hello, everyone.

01:42:29.420 I would encourage you

01:42:30.280 to continue listening

01:42:31.440 to my conversation

01:42:32.480 with my guest

01:42:33.340 on dailywireplus.com.

01:42:36.280 Thank you.

01:42:36.980 Thank you, Don.

01:42:38.000 Thank you.

01:42:40.520 Thank you.

01:42:41.840 Thank you.

01:42:42.580 Thank you.

01:42:43.460 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 14, 2022

305. How Marxism is Disguised as Woke Morality ｜ Dr. Yoram Hazony

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