The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 397. The Heritage Foundation： Responsibility and Meaning

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening.

00:01:12.060 Today I have the pleasure of speaking with the sitting president of a think tank, conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, Dr. Kevin Roberts.

00:01:20.920 We discuss the operations and practical utility of think tanks, the state of progressivism in the academic environment,

00:01:31.020 how multiple generations of students have now been rendered incapable of facing adversity while claiming to fight it,

00:01:39.280 and why intellectual combat is not something to shut down, but to champion against all odds.

00:01:45.980 So, you know, I was much older than I should have been as an educated person to understand what a think tank was and how they operated.

00:01:56.440 And, you know, I'm probably not as clear about all the details still as I might be.

00:02:01.100 I don't know anything about their history or I don't know who set up the first one.

00:02:06.120 I don't really know exactly who draws upon them and why and what effect they have on public policy at the local and state and national level.

00:02:16.540 And so maybe we could start by just having you give everyone watching and listening a good description of what a think tank is

00:02:24.740 and to put them in context before we start talking about your think tank and specifically.

00:02:30.120 Great question. At its base, any think tank, whether it's on the political left or the political right or in the center, starts with research.

00:02:39.480 It may focus on a certain set of public policy issues.

00:02:43.680 The purpose of that research is a little bit different, maybe even a lot different in some cases,

00:02:48.540 than the research that you might do as a professor or that I was doing as a history professor.

00:02:52.840 And that is the purpose of the research at a think tank is to affect the outcome of public policy.

00:02:58.960 Some think tanks will only focus on the research.

00:03:02.440 Other think tanks, as we'll no doubt discuss, will use that research and then hire people to go advocate,

00:03:09.680 that is to say that they're lobbyists, to directly influence the outcome of public policy,

00:03:15.380 whether that's at the federal level in the United States, obviously, with Congress and the executive branch at the state level or even at the local level.

00:03:23.260 So they are, to sum up, quasi-academic institutions.

00:03:27.600 In fact, many people will leave academia, strictly defined, you know, the university, to do work at a think tank,

00:03:34.680 although there are many people who are professors full-time at universities who do project or contract-based work for think tanks.

00:03:42.880 I understand, as a concluding point to this definition of think tanks broadly,

00:03:48.320 that the United States has the most robust, vibrant system of think tanks across the political spectrum of any place in the world.

00:03:55.700 So about how many high-end think tanks are operating in the U.S.,

00:04:01.940 and are they predominantly a conservative enterprise or a liberal or a progressive enterprise?

00:04:07.960 Is it distributed across the political spectrum?

00:04:10.020 It's fairly distributed across the political spectrum,

00:04:14.960 although in the last generation or so, say the last 25 or 30 years,

00:04:20.560 the proportion of high-end think tanks, of which there are maybe a dozen, maybe 15 in the country,

00:04:28.040 the proportion of them who are on the political right has increased.

00:04:31.980 And I think that's a result of the conservative movement maturing, if you will.

00:04:36.660 Well, many, if not most, of these think tanks are based in Washington, D.C.,

00:04:40.900 although a couple of them are based elsewhere in New York.

00:04:44.300 There are some think tanks on the right, including one that I used to lead that's based in Texas.

00:04:50.700 There's a growing number of state-based groups that are affecting not just their own state policy,

00:04:55.540 but also federal policy.

00:04:56.720 So, well, it also may be that there's been a need for conservative think tanks to emerge

00:05:04.440 because, as is well known on statistical grounds,

00:05:08.480 rather than merely being a consequence of a conspiracy theory,

00:05:11.880 there are virtually no conservatives in universities at the faculty level

00:05:16.300 and certainly vanishingly few in the social sciences and the humanities,

00:05:21.220 which is where most of the research that pertains to policy would otherwise be conducted.

00:05:26.160 And so, you could imagine that the establishment of private enterprises

00:05:32.120 that are devoted towards research on the conservative side

00:05:35.360 might do something to redress that imbalance,

00:05:37.760 and I understand that Heritage Foundation, of course, certainly plays that role.

00:05:42.520 Do you think that's also a contributing factor to the emergence

00:05:45.200 of the conservative think tanks in the U.S.?

00:05:47.220 It's huge.

00:05:49.560 In fact, not that my story of how I became president of the Heritage Foundation

00:05:54.300 is the most important or the most instructive,

00:05:57.140 but that example that you just mentioned of professors

00:06:01.540 who are politically conservative in the social sciences and the humanities

00:06:05.320 being in small number is something I lived out.

00:06:08.060 You know, in fact, when I was in graduate school at the University of Texas,

00:06:11.620 not known for its political conservatism,

00:06:14.060 out of a few hundred graduate students in history,

00:06:17.540 I was the only conservative I was aware of.

00:06:20.140 Of those of us who were teaching assistants, 60, 70 of us,

00:06:23.680 I absolutely was the only one.

00:06:25.660 And so, it was no surprise to me when I had my tenure-track job

00:06:29.940 at a Southwestern public university that I was the only conservative.

00:06:34.400 In fact, as would no doubt surprise you,

00:06:37.440 in the entire College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,

00:06:40.160 there was only one other right-of-center professor I was aware of

00:06:44.480 out of a couple hundred faculty.

00:06:46.580 And so, the relationship between that fact, that reality,

00:06:50.960 and the emergence of a growing number of conservative think tanks

00:06:55.040 is very direct because many of us have said,

00:06:58.140 forget the mistreatment, which is not an overstatement,

00:07:01.720 of conservatives in the social sciences and humanities and public policy.

00:07:05.100 We're just going to go directly or work directly for these public policy organizations,

00:07:10.100 especially those that want to work on higher education policy

00:07:14.200 or education policy writ large.

00:07:17.420 So, I'm going to ask you a bit of a meandering question.

00:07:22.720 It's partly a description of how I became aware of political corruption

00:07:27.720 in the social sciences enterprise.

00:07:29.480 So, I trained as a clinical psychologist and a clinical researcher,

00:07:34.960 and that's actually a very different discipline than social psychology.

00:07:39.500 And so, social psychology is at the intersection, let's say, of sociology and psychology.

00:07:46.800 It has to do, it focuses on the effect of group affiliation, let's say, on psychological processes.

00:07:54.960 And it's a radically leftist sub-discipline, and I would say it's quite corrupt.

00:08:01.460 And one of the ways I discovered that corruption was by beginning to investigate

00:08:07.200 the technical structure of the belief system that makes up progressivism or left-wing thinking,

00:08:15.060 especially left-wing authoritarianism.

00:08:16.760 And as I delved into that, I learned, much to my shock, I would say,

00:08:23.640 that there was an insistence among social psychologists and then everyone that was influenced by them

00:08:29.980 that there was no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism,

00:08:33.680 that authoritarianism in and of itself was only a conservative phenomena

00:08:38.160 and a right-wing phenomenon.

00:08:39.820 And that, and I really couldn't understand that at all, you know,

00:08:46.280 because the evidence that there's left-wing authoritarianism,

00:08:49.520 to call it compelling, is to say almost nothing.

00:08:51.920 I mean, you could make a very strong case, although it's a vicious battle,

00:08:56.680 that left-wing authoritarianism has been responsible for more misery and death

00:09:00.740 in the 20th century than right-wing authoritarianism.

00:09:04.680 It's a, you know, it's a rough contest, but when you have someone like Mao on your side on the left,

00:09:11.740 it's difficult to defeat him on the brutality scale.

00:09:15.380 And, you know, social psychologists didn't begin to admit that there might be such a thing

00:09:20.540 as left-wing authoritarianism literally till 2016.

00:09:24.300 We did some of the first research in that area.

00:09:26.380 So, one of the things I'm wondering about is what,

00:09:31.960 if you can pull yourself out of your conservative proclivity, let's say,

00:09:37.580 and your role, at least in part, as a lobbyist,

00:09:41.240 what did you see when you were operating within the university system

00:09:45.320 that indicated the danger of an academic system

00:09:50.320 dominated not only by liberal individualists, let's say,

00:09:54.820 but even more particularly by so-called progressivists?

00:09:58.920 What did you see that doing to disciplines, say,

00:10:01.880 you could speak more particularly to history, for example?

00:10:06.180 Sure.

00:10:06.800 Well, I'll start with an anecdote from the time when I was a young tenure-track,

00:10:12.520 but still untenured professor, which, and you understand the vulnerability I had,

00:10:17.940 especially given how outspoken I was in this episode.

00:10:20.280 But then I will also speak to something that has happened in my field,

00:10:24.800 which is early American history, but in particular, African-American history.

00:10:29.220 And for people who are listening to us, I am decidedly a middle-aged, bald, white guy,

00:10:33.340 which means that I could no longer, according to the powers that be in academia,

00:10:38.760 be a specialist or an expert in African-American history.

00:10:41.660 But let me start with the aforementioned anecdote.

00:10:43.740 This was about roughly 20 years ago.

00:10:47.080 I forget the exact year, but President Reagan had recently passed away.

00:10:51.920 And my colleagues in the history department decided,

00:10:54.700 and remember, as I've mentioned a few minutes ago, they're all big libs.

00:10:58.640 They decided they were going to host a symposium about Reagan's legacy.

00:11:02.600 And they were going to spend some money to market this around our campus.

00:11:06.160 And, you know, prudence probably suggested that I just keep my mouth shut.

00:11:12.280 But I just thought, while I don't think anyone's perfect,

00:11:16.440 Reagan was a great but not a perfect president,

00:11:19.420 there simply was not going to be a fair, objective assessment

00:11:23.560 of his legacy as president of the United States.

00:11:27.480 And so I talked to my other conservative friend,

00:11:30.940 the other conservative in the College of Liberal Arts, who was an economist.

00:11:33.480 And I said, well, let's go join this panel of four historians

00:11:37.440 and let's offer a balanced opinion.

00:11:42.240 Those four other faculty members had no reason

00:11:46.480 to do anything other than proceed with their conversation.

00:11:50.500 But because of the scheduled appearance of the two of us as conservatives,

00:11:55.480 they canceled it.

00:11:57.020 And they canceled it because, as you know well from your own experience,

00:12:01.340 they can't stand the disagreement.

00:12:04.500 And frankly, although they wouldn't admit it,

00:12:06.680 I think they were fearful of the facts that we would bring to the table.

00:12:10.720 And so that, if that anecdote's helpful, it's helpful in this way.

00:12:15.320 That is just emblematic of everything that's wrong with university.

00:12:19.940 But in my field, what has happened is that someone, say today,

00:12:24.880 in their early 20s who wants to go to graduate school in history

00:12:28.580 and wants to study American Indian history, African American history,

00:12:33.440 the history of a particular culture,

00:12:35.460 if they themselves are not members of that particular culture,

00:12:39.480 they're not even going to be allowed to study it.

00:12:41.700 And so I was beginning to see the evidence of that

00:12:45.420 when I was still in academia.

00:12:48.180 And I saw that in terms of research grants.

00:12:50.500 I saw it in terms of class assignments that was given by my history department.

00:12:55.140 And Jordan, this was mild.

00:12:57.540 I mean, it was the kind of thing that was just a mere annoyance.

00:13:00.320 But it's now become systematic such that if my own children came to me and said,

00:13:06.640 Dad, you know, we want to go study such and such field in history

00:13:10.080 or political science or anthropology,

00:13:13.180 barring just a handful of schools in North America,

00:13:16.280 I would have to discourage them from doing that.

00:13:18.700 Right, right, right.

00:13:20.660 Okay, so I want to delve into that a little bit too, you know.

00:13:23.320 So I've spent a lot of time thinking about thinking,

00:13:28.240 about its nature and about its relationship to free speech

00:13:32.820 and its relationship to conflict and disagreement.

00:13:37.280 So let me lay out some propositions and you tell me what you think about them.

00:13:42.160 Okay, so the first proposition has to do with why you should think at all.

00:13:46.560 Now, people will avoid thinking because it is difficult, right?

00:13:51.460 It's technically complex and demanding.

00:13:54.040 And so there's reason right there not to engage in it.

00:13:57.440 It's emotionally challenging, right?

00:13:59.720 Because if you already abide by a certain principle

00:14:03.280 and then you go at it even in your own imagination, hammer and tongs,

00:14:08.160 and you start to shake the foundation,

00:14:12.180 then, well, that exposes you to cognitive entropy and that produces anxiety.

00:14:17.500 And that's very well documented in the neuroscience literature.

00:14:20.080 So there's every reason not to question your own presuppositions on the emotional side.

00:14:25.360 So it's difficult and it's emotionally demanding.

00:14:28.900 And then on the social side, if you're thinking with someone,

00:14:32.160 which basically means that you're exchanging verbal ideas,

00:14:36.640 then there's the possibility of eliciting disagreement

00:14:39.820 and the emotional unpleasantness and possible conflict that goes along with that, right?

00:14:46.340 As well as the fact that if you expose yourself to someone who thinks differently than you,

00:14:51.200 they can challenge your presuppositions and make you anxious and leave you bereft of hope.

00:14:56.300 So those are all the reasons you shouldn't think.

00:15:00.180 And then you might say, well, given all those reasons to not think,

00:15:04.820 why should you think?

00:15:06.860 And the answer to that, the best answer to that I've ever seen

00:15:10.080 is implicit in the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead.

00:15:13.780 Whitehead said, and I think this is true from a biological and evolutionary perspective,

00:15:19.460 that we learn to think so that we could allow our inappropriate thoughts

00:15:26.680 or impractical thoughts to die instead of us.

00:15:31.300 So you could think of a thought, not so much as a description of the world,

00:15:35.580 but as a virtual, a fragmented virtual avatar.

00:15:39.360 You send it out in an exploratory foray to see if it can withstand any trials.

00:15:46.400 And if it can't, then you dispense with it.

00:15:48.820 Now, there's some cost to that, the emotional cost and so forth,

00:15:51.960 but the advantage is you don't act out the stupid ideas and die.

00:15:56.940 And so I'm laying this out for the listeners and watchers so that they can understand why.

00:16:03.080 Because they might be thinking, well, do you really have to engage in contentious disagreement

00:16:07.360 at the academic level if you're a thinker?

00:16:10.100 Why can't everyone just get along?

00:16:12.040 And the answer is, well, some ideas are stupid and impractical,

00:16:15.280 and it's better to kill those suckers before they make themselves manifest in the world.

00:16:19.760 And in order to do that, you have to be disagreeable and offensive.

00:16:24.460 Now, no more than necessary.

00:16:26.180 Now, I've really seen a difference there, for example, between the North Americans and the Brits.

00:16:31.240 Because the Brits, at their best, their education system teaches them to engage in, like, blood sport, cognitive combat,

00:16:40.340 and to do that in a very civilized manner, right?

00:16:42.860 So that they keep the argument within the domain of rationality and abstraction.

00:16:48.880 It doesn't spill over into interpersonal conflict.

00:16:51.080 And part of what universities were supposed to do was train people to do that, right?

00:16:56.160 To think critically, to think in a manner that risks disrupting themselves and their interpersonal relationships,

00:17:02.220 without that spilling over into actual conflict, right?

00:17:06.760 And to replace conflict with thought.

00:17:09.900 Now, we seem to be dispensing with that.

00:17:12.300 And interestingly enough, so there's a bunch of things I want you to comment on.

00:17:15.900 And my experience in academia and in the broader political world has been,

00:17:21.740 I have never talked to someone who is conservative once and tried to set them up with a potential combatant

00:17:29.880 and had them refuse to participate or refuse to associate with that person.

00:17:36.020 And that has happened to me while trying to set up conversations dozens of times with people on the left.

00:17:43.040 I saw that starting at about 2010 at the University of Toronto.

00:17:48.940 It just sort of crept into the discourse.

00:17:51.800 So, well, so maybe I could get you to comment on the necessity of combat in thought.

00:17:57.800 But then also, I'd be interested in your ideas about why this proclivity to cancel

00:18:02.180 seems to be so manifest on the left.

00:18:05.800 You'd expect there to be right-wing, you know, tightly bound right-wing thinkers

00:18:10.140 who were also inclined to cancel and shun.

00:18:14.420 But that hasn't been how it's been manifesting itself, at least for the last 15 years.

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00:19:55.960 Well, the intellectual combat is essential at the university level.

00:20:04.340 In fact, the very etymology of the word university talks about or is based on the unification of thought.

00:20:13.100 It doesn't mean the unanimity of thought.

00:20:15.040 It means that there has been a process in place, by the way, I agree with you, exemplified by British institutions and British scholars on the left and right toward whatever capital T truth is.

00:20:27.240 And in American institutions, especially since the 1940s and accelerating in the 70s, there's basically the absence of that.

00:20:36.500 In fact, the opposite of that, so that if you go in and you say that I want to do intellectual combat, you know, somehow you're committing some grave sin inside the American academy.

00:20:46.360 But it's essential because that's where we refine our own positions.

00:20:50.880 And I'll just use an example of what think tanks do, just to go back to that question.

00:20:56.560 The think tank, at its height, I would argue, is one where, of course, it's going to have a particular set of positions that it's taking publicly.

00:21:05.340 But the process of arriving at those positions internally is one where there is, as I like to call it here at the Heritage Foundation, creative conflict.

00:21:15.180 And in my nearly two years here, in almost every meeting that I have with our policy people, I ask them, well, what would the competing, the alternative position be?

00:21:24.920 And what case would we make for that?

00:21:27.460 What evidence would we marshal for that?

00:21:29.660 Because, first of all, we need to question our assumptions.

00:21:33.320 But secondly, given that the reason we do research at Heritage is, in fact, to effect change in public policy, we ought to be better prepared for the attacks that will come.

00:21:43.480 But to your second question, very related, which is why it is that on the political left, there is this absence of that kind of conflict.

00:21:55.200 I think it's because, ultimately, the most radical part of leftism is one that undermines truth very actively.

00:22:02.200 They've sort of lost, as Yates would say in his famous poem, they've lost the center.

00:22:08.720 There's nothing cohering their mode of thought.

00:22:12.480 And if you look at what's going on in the political right, something that you've been talking about and researching more in recent years,

00:22:19.080 there's a very healthy, sometimes kind of fractious debate that's going on about particular policies, about the relationship between the individual and the state.

00:22:28.620 Those can be a little frustrating sometimes in terms of political outcomes, but on the intellectual level, they are important and they speak to the vitality, the intellectual vitality of the political right right now.

00:22:44.120 So, we did some research in 2016 looking at predictors of politically correct authoritarianism.

00:22:51.560 First of all, we did a factor analytic study that showed that there was clearly a set of ideas that were associated with one another that you could identify as political correct authoritarianism.

00:23:03.020 So, it wasn't just some right-wing delusion that that coherent system of ideas existed.

00:23:07.540 And then we looked at, we did that by asking a very large number of participants a very large number of political questions and then subjecting them to statistical analysis so that we could see which opinions clumped together and how.

00:23:23.180 And so, there was a liberal contingent of ideas and a conservative contingent and authoritarian left-wing contingent.

00:23:30.820 And so, then we looked at what predicted that.

00:23:32.880 And the best predictor was low verbal intelligence.

00:23:37.300 And I think the reason for that was that the radical leftists basically offer a unidimensional solution to a very complex problem, which is that all human motivation can be reduced to power, which is technically incorrect and preposterous and also an extremely harmful, what would you call it, a harmful insistence.

00:24:00.560 But it's very easy to understand, but it's very easy to understand and it does provide for universal explanatory power.

00:24:06.160 And then, but we also found that the personality trait, agreeableness, was also a predictor.

00:24:13.080 And agreeableness is associated with compassion.

00:24:15.500 And the thing is, you know, if you engage in the blood sport of critical thinking, you do risk hurting other people's feelings, right?

00:24:25.560 At least in the moment.

00:24:26.520 Now, there might be long-term advantage to that for both players, as there often is when you settle a fractious issue, say, between wife and husband or between family members.

00:24:36.660 There's some combat that's required to set things straight, but then you get an interlude of peace afterward.

00:24:44.680 It might also be that the radical leftists are also temperamentally predisposed to avoid conflict because, as they do say themselves, they prioritize compassion above all.

00:24:58.020 In fact, they make it a universal virtue, let's say, and they don't understand the necessity of having to at least, however irregularly, tolerate periods of emotional discomfort to set things straight.

00:25:13.680 So, you know, I've been trying to puzzle out.

00:25:17.500 I mean, liberals say they don't like borders because they're high in openness, they're creative, and they're low in orderliness.

00:25:23.900 So they don't necessarily find satisfaction in keeping things in their proper place.

00:25:29.700 So that's part of the reason they have a hard time drawing borders and distinctions, you know.

00:25:34.060 So it's why the moderate leftists, I think, have a hard time contending with the radicals.

00:25:38.660 But then there's also this proclivity to prioritize emotional comfort over everything else, even in the moment.

00:25:46.000 And that isn't commensurate with healthy debate of the discriminatory kind that has to occur if you're going to refine your ideas.

00:25:56.080 You know, and then that does expose people in the way that you already said, you know, if you formulate policy and you don't hash, hack the hell out of it in intramural debate within your own institution,

00:26:09.880 and you launch those ideas out there in the world, they're going to get torn into shreds.

00:26:14.780 You bloody well better be your own worst enemy when you're thinking so that you're well protected against what the actual world, social and natural, is going to throw at you.

00:26:24.400 Another reason to think.

00:26:26.080 Well, it is.

00:26:27.780 And two things come to mind, at least initially.

00:26:31.000 The first is, I think, as I listened to the last part of what you said in reference to public policy,

00:26:38.240 I think one of the frustrations that Americans, presumably Canadians and Brits and many people around the world have with politics is the absence of what they perceive to be a real debate, right?

00:26:52.000 And this is true on the political right.

00:26:54.420 There's a frustration among grassroots activists who are conservatives in the United States about the absence of a real debate,

00:27:02.120 whether it be about specific policy issues or even about the sort of social, economic, cultural diagnosis of the malaise that has beset the Western world.

00:27:13.080 People, especially younger voters, who have a certain bias increasingly towards center-right politics,

00:27:19.980 are looking for those men or women who are candidates for elective office who are at least asking the right questions,

00:27:27.660 even if they may themselves decide that they disagree with that person's answer.

00:27:32.700 They just want the questions asked.

00:27:34.800 And as we then focus on public policy,

00:27:39.020 I don't know how public policy organizations can be prepared for the media that their scholars do,

00:27:44.800 the testimonies, say, for example, that our scholars at Heritage do,

00:27:48.720 without having just a vibrant internal process of disagreement.

00:27:54.000 And I think the key thing to hone in on is that disagreement doesn't have to be disagreeable.

00:28:00.180 It may, and if it does, it may get into the zone of hurting people's feelings.

00:28:05.700 But as I've mentioned to more than one student in my teaching career,

00:28:09.960 I don't mean this to be offensive, but I care a lot less about your feelings than I do about your pursuit of truth,

00:28:17.220 your intellectual rigor that goes into not just the particular field that we might be teaching,

00:28:25.000 in your case, the behavioral sciences, in my case, history,

00:28:27.860 but even more importantly, your relationship as a human person,

00:28:32.700 as a citizen of the polity in which you live, to everyone else, to the state itself.

00:28:38.260 And ultimately, to sum up here, I think one of the problems with radical leftism

00:28:43.860 is that this radical emphasis on the individual creates a radical emphasis on the individual's feelings.

00:28:51.340 Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit, too,

00:28:54.240 because the thing is that radical emphasis on the individual

00:28:59.560 is predicated on a very strange acceptance of what constitutes the individual.

00:29:06.000 Because what you see with the hedonistic radicals

00:29:10.120 is their insistence that their immediate emotional or motivational whim defines their individuality, right?

00:29:19.260 I want what I want right now, and no one has any right to stand in my way.

00:29:25.260 Now, the problem with that is that it's a pretty low-order conception of what it means to be an individual.

00:29:31.460 It's also extremely immature, and I can speak about that technically.

00:29:35.540 So the more immature you are, the more you are ruled by motivations that want to attain gratification right now,

00:29:44.100 regardless of medium to long-term cost.

00:29:46.920 And so actually what happens is that as you mature and you learn to, quote,

00:29:51.540 delay gratification, which is an oversimplification,

00:29:54.840 you learn to subordinate the demands of immediate motivational and emotional states

00:29:59.660 to long-term social harmony and your own long-term well-being.

00:30:05.100 And that requires a sacrifice of that immediate gratification.

00:30:09.380 So one of the weird things about the left is that the individual who they make sacrosanct

00:30:14.600 is an individual defined by his or her subjugation to their own hedonic motivations.

00:30:20.580 And that's a pretty low-order conceptualization of the self, right?

00:30:24.100 And so I don't see it as a true individuality as well.

00:30:28.580 And then on the feeling front, see, one of the things you're trying to do with students

00:30:34.640 at a university is to make their conception of themselves as an individual

00:30:43.040 less dependent on their unconscious axioms.

00:30:47.340 So, you know, I saw this very frequently.

00:30:51.500 I'll take an example that might not be obvious given the tenor of our conversation.

00:30:57.500 I took a very biological approach to psychology in my lectures.

00:31:02.700 And it wasn't that uncommon for me to have a very fundamentalist Christian student

00:31:09.040 who had been raised in a household that insisted that the theory of evolution was incorrect

00:31:15.580 and that the world was, you know, relatively new, 6,000 years or 4,000 years old.

00:31:20.660 And my insistence on an evolutionary approach, especially combined with the fact that I also

00:31:27.520 gave credence to, let's say, the Judeo-Christian tradition, was very hard on them.

00:31:35.000 And it was partly because their faith and their vision of themselves and their vision of the future

00:31:41.620 was predicated on the assumption that you couldn't have that faith or that vision

00:31:46.660 without accepting a non-evolutionary account of creation.

00:31:51.880 And that was where their feelings came into it, right?

00:31:55.480 Because by upsetting that presupposition, they risked exposing those students,

00:32:02.540 they risked exposing themselves to anxiety and hopelessness.

00:32:06.200 So it's not feelings per se that are at stake, it's the automatic and unquestioned assumption

00:32:13.120 that the integrity of your psychological, that your psychological integrity

00:32:19.700 rests necessarily on the acceptance of certain axioms.

00:32:24.980 Now, when you go to university, those axioms are supposed to be questioned.

00:32:29.960 Now, and what that implies is that you help the student replace their self-conceptualization.

00:32:35.360 They stop seeing themselves as the static adherent of a set of dogmatic beliefs,

00:32:40.700 and they start to see themselves as someone whose stability is partly predicated on their ability

00:32:46.980 to dynamically transform and to learn and to engage.

00:32:50.180 So they become more of a dancer than a rock, let's say.

00:32:54.220 And a good university can guide them through that process,

00:32:58.460 so they don't identify with those dogmatic ideas to the same degree.

00:33:02.360 They can detach themselves from the ideas, and that also can help them allow the necessary death

00:33:08.580 of their stupid ideas to occur without undue psychological suffering, right?

00:33:13.720 And that's the debates you have in seminars, and so far, they're practiced for that, right?

00:33:18.020 Under relatively civilized conditions where the stakes are comparatively low.

00:33:22.820 And now we've insisted that everybody become a, you know, a delicate snowflake

00:33:27.220 and that you're never to step on anyone's toes.

00:33:29.320 And all we're doing, as Greg Lukianoff has demonstrated quite clearly on the clinical front,

00:33:33.600 all we're doing is removing the possibility from our students of exposing themselves

00:33:39.720 to the sort of challenges that would actually make them strong.

00:33:43.080 We're actually making them weaker, more hopeless, and more anxious by protecting them in that manner.

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00:34:58.580 And we've been doing that long enough that those hypothetical students,

00:35:03.500 although you've had real students who fit that profile as I have,

00:35:07.940 have become members of Congress.

00:35:09.400 They've become members of the United States Senate.

00:35:12.280 And so, they lead with their feelings.

00:35:14.820 They lead—journalists, sure.

00:35:17.180 They lead with the belief that you can't even ask them a fair but difficult question.

00:35:23.780 And that, of course, is exacerbating the problems that we see in the political sphere.

00:35:28.820 But I just want to respond to your excellent example of you leading with biology in your lectures

00:35:36.600 and encountering a student who believed that the theory of evolution was incorrect.

00:35:42.180 As you may remember, I've led—founded and then led another college of faith,

00:35:47.760 founded a K-12 school.

00:35:49.120 And there, because it was a classical great book school and we had our particular faith dogmas

00:35:57.080 as a Roman Catholic school, we made sure that our students were in classes that were questioning

00:36:02.460 those assumptions, even about our faith, before they went into apologetics.

00:36:06.640 So, even for someone who is a very devout member of a particular denominational faith,

00:36:12.720 it doesn't mean that we should be hostile to the hard questions about what we believe.

00:36:17.640 In fact, speaking as someone of faith who believes in the mysteries of my faith,

00:36:21.480 we ought to really encourage that.

00:36:24.700 And so, that's a way of saying that even for those of us who are politically conservative,

00:36:29.720 you know, perhaps religiously conservative as well, that we ought not develop the same hostility

00:36:35.200 to this creative conflict, these questions about the assumptions of our belief that the

00:36:40.700 left, of course, personifies every day.

00:36:43.360 Well, I think you could make a very strong case that your genuine faith is actually directly

00:36:50.020 proportionate to the degree that you're willing to allow that faith to undergo the most stringent

00:36:54.920 of challenges.

00:36:55.520 I mean, if you have to hide away and never be, you know, called to account for what you

00:37:02.520 presume, there's no faith there.

00:37:04.800 There's just a blind abandonment of reason and the necessity of hiding from reality in

00:37:11.480 order to keep those axioms intact, right?

00:37:13.640 I think this is partly why, for example, there's a powerful biblical injunction in the New Testament

00:37:19.040 to do what you can to even love your enemies, which is a hell of a thing to ask, you know?

00:37:24.160 But if you understand that one of the advantages to adversarial enmity is the refining of your

00:37:32.920 own beliefs, then you can also understand how it might be possible, if you could manage

00:37:38.800 it, to welcome the most dreadful of challenges in the hope that—see, I thought about this

00:37:44.900 in terms of, you know, you remember in the Genesis story when Adam and Eve are barred from

00:37:50.480 paradise. God places cherubim at the entry to paradise, and they wield swords that are

00:37:59.520 on fire that turn every which way. And I've been thinking about that image. It's a very

00:38:04.120 dramatic and powerful image and a strange one. And it also begs the question of why God would

00:38:09.120 do such a thing. And I think the answer is this, is that if the goal is reentry into something

00:38:16.240 approximating a paradisal state, then obviously everything that isn't fit to be there has to be

00:38:22.640 cut away. But that also indicates another issue, which is that if you confront an adversarial enemy,

00:38:30.960 and in their adversarial argumentation, they can demonstrate to you where you're weak and unworthy,

00:38:38.600 even though that'll be painful because you have to let that go, and that might be a lot of you,

00:38:44.000 the net consequence could be that what grows as a replacement in consequence is much better for you

00:38:51.840 and for everyone else. And it does seem to me that that's inevitable. It follows the same logic in some

00:38:57.540 sense as the necessity for critical thinking itself. You know, you have to think critically so you can put

00:39:03.240 your ideas to the test. And this is also why free speech is so necessary. In the same manner,

00:39:09.480 you're not good enough thinker to think up all the objections to your idiocy by yourself. You have to

00:39:15.880 allow other people to call you out. But the net benefit of that, in principle, and this is what we

00:39:22.200 hoped in universities, obviously, is that if you exposed yourself enough to the eradication of your

00:39:27.940 stupidity, then what would be left would be something much more solid and flexible and dynamic

00:39:33.940 and adapted and sophisticated and beneficial and productive, all of that. And I think all of that's

00:39:40.540 solid in terms of psychological doctrine. So that's partly why it's so appalling to see the universities

00:39:46.500 take this false, compassionate turn and hyper-protect their students instead of, you know,

00:39:52.620 trying them by fire, so to speak. It's solid as psychological doctrine. It's also solid in terms

00:40:00.000 of doctrine in civil society, right? Because what happens is that, especially with the advent and

00:40:07.960 popularity of social media, going back to your principle about thinking at its base, eliminating

00:40:15.360 those really kind of dumb thoughts that we have, inappropriate things that should never be put into

00:40:20.020 practice. People aren't thinking, but they're exercising their free speech in a rather messy way

00:40:25.880 on social media. And then, ironically, to kind of come full circle in our conversation, their feelings

00:40:32.400 are hurt because in the absence of their thinking, which would eradicate some of their dumbest thoughts,

00:40:37.940 they are posting ideas. Some of them are elected officials at very high offices, maybe even the

00:40:44.540 president of the United States or the vice president of the United States. And their feelings get hurt

00:40:49.340 because of all of the pushback that's created as a result of how dumb their comments are. All of

00:40:56.780 this goes back to what's lacking in our secondary schools, our elementary schools, our universities,

00:41:02.780 which is creating not just the habit of thought, but creating the physical space. I mean, literally

00:41:08.540 the classroom where this is practiced and where our feelings become harder to hurt because we've had a lot

00:41:16.020 more experience mentioning some kind of dumb thoughts and people explaining why they are.

00:41:22.360 Well, we're also in a community there. We're also in a community there. This is one of the things

00:41:26.880 that's quite different from the online world, you know, like, and I'll ask you how your think tank is

00:41:32.380 constructed because of this. So if you're in a seminar, let's say, there's the possibility of developing

00:41:39.300 interpersonal relationships. So that would be a means of communication and potential friendship

00:41:45.580 that would iterate across time. And that broader container that's community-based can help buttress

00:41:52.220 you against the fractiousness of momentary disagreement, right? You can think, and this used

00:41:58.240 to happen politically too, when people actually lived in Washington instead of just sojourning there,

00:42:02.940 say, as congressmen. You know, 40% of congressmen sleep in their offices now. So it used to be that

00:42:08.160 you could have a scrap with the guy across the aisle and then go for a beer with him afterwards or

00:42:12.620 meet him on the golf course or, you know, go play baseball, go to a baseball game with him and his

00:42:17.780 kids. And a lot of that's disappeared from Washington. The problem, partly the problem with

00:42:23.020 the online discourse is there's no community of reciprocal interaction that binds people together

00:42:30.880 at the same time the expression of their random opinions divides them. And so I wanted to ask you

00:42:36.940 about that on the think tank front. How is the Heritage Foundation actually set up? How is it

00:42:42.440 constituted? How often do you people meet? How do you establish the preconditions for fractious

00:42:49.020 thought while maintaining the underlying social community and keeping people united in vision,

00:42:56.240 let's say, as they move forward? Well, our first rule, to your point about being in person and

00:43:02.900 living in community is that any conversation that may have a difference of opinion, which at least in

00:43:09.940 our think tank would be many, has to be in person. That we're not going to have that conversation via

00:43:14.760 email. We're not going to have that conversation by phone. We're also not going to have that

00:43:18.860 conversation via video conference. And because we, the purpose of our research isn't just to write

00:43:25.900 a white paper, but for that white paper's ideas, the ideas of the author, to actually take shape and

00:43:32.820 ultimately become law, we have to do that work in person. It's very difficult to advocate for these

00:43:38.680 ideas without being in the office of a member of the House or a member of the Senate. So that's how we

00:43:44.420 live out that first rule. But the second rule is that as long as the debate doesn't become personal,

00:43:50.560 everything is fair game. The assumptions, the principles, the applications of, you know, what we

00:43:57.440 would call the permanent things, timeless conservative principles to our particular

00:44:02.200 circumstances. And I will say in the last two years at the Heritage Foundation, in part, if not in large

00:44:08.840 part, because of getting past some of the COVID nonsense, we're really living that out in a vibrant

00:44:14.080 way. In fact, we often have friends, you know, whether they're financial supporters or just supporters of

00:44:19.460 another kind who will visit, and they find it remarkable at the intensity of the debates that

00:44:25.780 we have here, while also recognizing the third thing, which is that for us, culture is everything.

00:44:32.320 By that, we mean internal culture. That is to say that when you walk in the doors here, we want this

00:44:37.760 to be the most cheerful place in Washington, D.C. I understand that's a low bar, but for us, our

00:44:43.680 cheerfulness, our hospitality goes hand in hand, very fittingly, as you know, with our

00:44:49.440 willingness to be engaged in a very intense debate with our friends and colleagues.

00:44:54.800 So, you know, I just did a seminar on Exodus in Miami. We, it was 16 two-hour sessions. They've

00:45:02.640 been released on YouTube, and we did one eight-day session, and then we broke for six months and did

00:45:09.620 another eight-day session. And one of the things we did, we brought together nine people, and we kind

00:45:15.240 of knew each other, but not that well. And there was a wide range of opinions on the panel, from

00:45:21.340 moderate left to pretty socially conservative. No real progressive types, but certainly people on

00:45:28.500 the moderate left. And we found, we were really attempted to be hospitable to all of our guests. So

00:45:36.760 in addition to having the seminar lay itself out for two hours each evening, I hosted people

00:45:44.820 continually at an Airbnb that I rented there, and we barbecued together, and I rented people some jet

00:45:50.280 skis, and we had some fun, and like each night was a party. And at the same time that that was

00:45:56.040 happening, it was also, well, we were walking through Exodus and through other elements of the Old

00:46:01.300 Testament. And I was struck by the immense emphasis in those texts on the absolute sacred nature of

00:46:10.120 hospitality, right, as a duty. And I came to understand thinking that through, but also watching

00:46:17.080 what was happening with this seminar, was that if you're hospitable to people, and this is partly

00:46:22.580 speaks to the necessity of an actual localized community, then they begin to trust each other

00:46:28.280 at a fundamental level. There's a core of consensus and trust there, mutual regard for mutual well-being

00:46:38.840 that then enables experimentation to take place at the cognitive fringes in an atmosphere of trust,

00:46:46.380 right, and humor. And so I've really been struck in Washington, you know, I've been talking to people

00:46:52.340 there, people involved with the presidential prayer breakfast, and one of the things they've said

00:46:56.640 repeatedly is that the civil society in Washington has broken down in the last four decades, partly

00:47:03.480 because of virtualized communication, so people don't have to be present, partly because under

00:47:10.360 Newt Gingrich, there was incentives for congressmen to spend more time in their district and less time

00:47:16.380 in Washington, which might have had some benefits, but also helped undermine the Washington society,

00:47:22.100 because of the difficulty in having congressmen bring their entire families to Washington for

00:47:28.280 what can be a relatively brief career, right? They have to disrupt the career of their spouse,

00:47:32.940 for example. And so one of the things, and so many of them, as I said, don't even have apartments in

00:47:37.900 Washington now. They don't make friendships or establish social relationships, even with the

00:47:43.340 people in their own party, much less talking across the aisle to Republicans, for example, if they're

00:47:49.160 Democrats. So that, so okay, so now you said at the Heritage Foundation that you have fostered an

00:47:55.280 atmosphere, you know, you said it with a bit, with a bit of irony, because it's a low bar in Washington,

00:48:02.820 but that it's a very cheerful enterprise. And so what do you think you've done right to foster

00:48:07.620 that atmosphere, the atmosphere that enables robust debate to occur without it degenerating into ill

00:48:14.500 will? Well, the most important thing is that we, our mission, which is focused on revitalizing

00:48:21.960 self-governance in this country and across the world, is very unifying and motivating. And so the

00:48:26.980 people who want to work at Heritage are people who are animated by that. And in our selection process

00:48:34.680 of how we hire someone, whether at the junior level or the senior level, is not just about

00:48:39.760 philosophical or political alignment, but it's as much about cultural alignment. That is to say,

00:48:45.500 a lot of the interview process is focused on how this potential colleague is going to fit into our

00:48:51.360 process of creative conflict. And that creative conflict, as we've discussed, being something that

00:48:57.540 never swerves into the personal and is so focused on the ideas and our love for the ideas.

00:49:03.680 But I also want to mention that that's very much related to your excellent and accurate point

00:49:09.060 about the sort of demise of Washington society. I mean, I've heard from so many long-term members

00:49:16.500 of the Senate, so many long-term members of the House, and these are stalwart conservatives who don't

00:49:22.460 wake up each day looking to compromise with the left. They say that they and their spouses have seen a

00:49:29.180 huge deterioration in even members of the Republican Party spending time together. Now, as you said,

00:49:36.640 there are certain benefits to that, you know, being home in your district or your state, but there are also

00:49:41.160 benefits to the people who do the good work in Washington, D.C., and there are some to having

00:49:48.300 community. And I'll just give you an example that is, that's self-critical. When I first got here about two years

00:49:54.400 ago, I was always talking about D.C. being a terrible place to live, and no doubt there are

00:49:59.620 parts of D.C. that are. But at the same time, sometimes in the same paragraph, I was encouraging

00:50:05.760 relatively young conservatives to join our presidential transition project, which we call

00:50:11.200 Project 2025. And one of them mustered the courage after one of these talks to come up and say,

00:50:17.040 Kevin, you know, those two things don't go hand in hand. If you want people to leave their communities,

00:50:23.660 their hometown, you know, their lives as they have established them wherever home is, and come to D.C.

00:50:30.660 and, in your words, tithe two or four or eight years to the next conservative administration,

00:50:36.260 maybe Heritage needs to spend some time helping to revitalize that society, helping to revitalize

00:50:41.780 that community. And that was a really good constructive criticism that we've taken to heart

00:50:46.400 because of the culture that we have here at Heritage. Yeah, well, it points to a broader

00:50:51.780 problem, too, I would say, on the conservative side, practically and philosophically. I mean,

00:50:57.200 there are plenty of reasons for conservatives, for example, to engage in the kind of dialogue that

00:51:02.820 we've been engaging in in this conversation, for example, to level substantive criticisms at the

00:51:10.440 universities as institutions. And of course, we've taken the odd side shot at the Washington

00:51:15.700 establishment, let's say, in the political process per se. And that's very problematic on the conservative

00:51:21.500 side, because the progressive mantra is that all institutions are so corrupt, they should be

00:51:27.860 demolished and replaced. And to the degree that conservatives engage in incautious social critique,

00:51:35.100 it seems to me that we play, they play, we play, to the degree that I'm conservative,

00:51:40.860 into the hands of those very progressives, right? And to Biggs, another question, too, is that,

00:51:45.760 you know, you're, it's a matter of drawing lines, always a matter of drawing lines, where and how

00:51:52.480 to include and exclude. Now, you want to produce a culture that's hospitable and unified, but that's

00:51:59.680 also capable of fractious debate. And you said that precludes, for example, hiring people who are

00:52:06.120 of the progressive left. How in the world do you think you manage to determine when it is that

00:52:13.340 someone has ideas that are sufficiently different and novel so that they can add to the utility of

00:52:19.580 the fractious debate, but not so disruptive and novel that they violate the tenets of the community?

00:52:26.860 And that would allow, if you answer that, that would also allow you to expound on the central

00:52:31.600 ideals of the Heritage Foundation. You said revitalizing self-governance is part of the

00:52:37.060 heritage mission. And I assume that the people you hire have to accept the validity of the central

00:52:43.120 message, at least, right? There's got to be some core axiom that unites everyone. But how do you

00:52:49.320 differentiate, well, how do you solve that conundrum? And what do you think, what is the central

00:52:55.520 axis around which the entire Heritage Foundation rotates, let's say? What are you guys aiming at and

00:53:03.340 why? Yeah, great question, especially as it relates to hiring people, which we've been doing a lot of

00:53:09.060 over the last couple of years because of growth. The focus of Heritage in terms of policy is that we

00:53:16.880 need a much more limited federal government. And not just because limited government is an end unto

00:53:24.280 itself, but because it is a symptom of flourishing by individuals who are living in community, who are

00:53:32.160 also, of course, enjoying greater self-governance. But in terms of specific policy that we're looking

00:53:37.360 for, there's the typical list that people would expect that if you're going to have a more limited

00:53:41.900 government, you're going to have a fairer taxation system that's probably lower. States are probably

00:53:47.940 going to have more authority to make decisions that are closer to the people they're governing.

00:53:54.120 There's a certain belief on the foreign policy side that America should be strong, although in the

00:53:58.920 Heritage view, that strength needs to be more restrained and less expensive and less adventuresome

00:54:04.120 than the neocons of the last generation we're arguing for. And we also believe, to speak about,

00:54:11.140 not surprisingly to you, the policy I care most deeply about in education, that every dollar that

00:54:17.840 Americans spend on government-funded schools should follow every child to the school of his or her

00:54:23.720 parents' choice. That's just a brief smattering of the specific policy issues, but they all, if you think

00:54:29.840 about it, speak to the preeminence of the individual in his or her community working at the local level

00:54:37.120 and eventually the state level, having great authority over the federal government. And so, ultimately, to be

00:54:42.660 succinct about this, the Heritage Foundation exists to devolve power from Washington back to the states and

00:54:50.240 ultimately back to the people themselves. Now, if you pause and think about that, there's room for a lot of

00:54:56.820 differences of opinion, at least, at the very least, differences in priority, right? And so, to your question

00:55:02.840 about people coming in, job applicants coming in, there's going to be some difference of opinion,

00:55:09.400 but what we're looking for is the absence of a disagreement on some of the core principles. And

00:55:15.980 now I'll speak to them. Probably the best summary of these, in addition to Heritage Products,

00:55:24.520 would be the historian Russell Kirk's great essay on the Ten Principles of Conservatism,

00:55:30.040 which emphasize things like continuity, prudence and change, community. If someone's wanting to work

00:55:38.080 at the Heritage Foundation and they don't understand or appreciate those, or they don't have a concern

00:55:43.480 about what I think is the greatest problem in America today, which is fatherlessness, the

00:55:49.500 deterioration of the family. And that if we fail to address those on the social and cultural and maybe

00:55:56.820 even policy fronts, that everything else we're working on is almost moot, then there's going to

00:56:03.140 be a philosophical misalignment. But there's also still, even within that set of positions, that we

00:56:11.600 have opportunity for great differences. We have some economists here who are going to say that as it

00:56:18.400 relates to the so-called family policy, public policy arena, that the only thing that we need to do

00:56:24.320 is to make sure that we're ending the disincentives to marriage and family formation and American tax

00:56:30.500 law. There are others of us who might more commonly be called social conservatives who say

00:56:36.620 there may be a role for the state, whether it's the federal government or a state government, as the

00:56:42.840 nation of Hungary, the nation of Israel have done to actually proactively aid marriage and family

00:56:49.120 formation for the sake of saving society. All of that to say, because we're a think tank, in the interviews

00:56:55.200 with policy people or prospective policy people, we have these conversations. And it has become in the last

00:57:01.460 several years in conservative public policy, pretty easy to ferret out when someone's not completely on the

00:57:09.180 reservation, if you will. And perhaps the most common conundrum that we have, just to give a precise

00:57:15.420 example, would be on the nature of the free market. For so many years, I mean, my entire upbringing,

00:57:21.980 to be conservative was to believe that the free market was some sort of altar. That, in fact,

00:57:29.040 free market belief was tantamount to being conservative. And while the free market is a good,

00:57:35.660 free market is a symptom of a healthy society, healthy families, good public policy. It isn't the end

00:57:42.020 unto itself. And so I mentioned that example because it's the most common conversation that we

00:57:47.160 have internally when we're interviewing potential policy colleagues, but also when we're having

00:57:53.880 conversations internally about how to help the American political right navigate this reality

00:58:00.060 that so many leaders of the so-called free market aren't even in the free market themselves. And most

00:58:05.680 leaders of Fortune 500 companies actually hate conservatives and hate conservatism.

00:58:10.900 The Heritage Foundation is, I would like to think, leading in the way and beginning to resolve that

00:58:15.920 conflict. Okay. Well, I have a bunch of questions about that. So the first comment in question,

00:58:22.640 I suppose, is one on the strategic front. So I think the conservative movement has weakened its argument

00:58:30.740 for the decentralization of power by aligning that argument too closely with libertarian,

00:58:38.060 neocon and free market principles, because it often devolves into a proclamation that a government

00:58:46.920 that's too large is too dangerous, which I do believe, but that's not the crucial issue as far

00:58:52.340 as I'm concerned, that if the government was smaller, the tax burden would be less. If the tax burden

00:58:57.700 would be less, that would be better because people should be economically free and they should be

00:59:01.800 economically free because, well, the free, because the society functions better when the free market

00:59:07.120 is as untrammeled as possible. And so it's kind of a, in some ways, it's an Ayn Rand philosophy of,

00:59:15.520 you know, rugged individualism conjoined with libertarian admiration for the free market. Now,

00:59:21.660 there are some problems with that. One you pointed to, and we'll get back to that later,

00:59:27.440 I think when we discuss neoconservatism, one is that the free market itself is probably not

00:59:33.260 the only basis for an equitable and just and moral polity. It's not the thing that's at the bottom.

00:59:42.100 And I think that's where the libertarian types have it wrong. And I think there are good reasons for

00:59:46.820 that. But more importantly, there is a better reason to discuss the necessity of devolving power

00:59:55.400 down the hierarchy to lower levels. The first thing I would say is it's not power

01:00:00.800 when we shouldn't use that language because that's the language the leftists use.

01:00:06.280 It's meaning and responsibility. And those things are aligned. And so what happens,

01:00:12.260 and I've really found this idea striking a chord with audiences as I've talked around the world,

01:00:17.720 is that if you deprive people of local responsibility,

01:00:22.220 responsibility, you deprive them of all the meaning in their life. Because the meaning in

01:00:28.180 their life is actually a consequence of taking responsibility for themselves, taking responsibility

01:00:34.740 for their marriage, for their family, for their local community, for their business enterprises,

01:00:40.020 for their town, for their state, for their country, in that order, right? And then maybe to God.

01:00:45.460 And responsibility obtains at every one of those levels. That's the subsidiarity idea,

01:00:50.660 of course. But the purpose for that is that if you devolve that responsibility down the hierarchy,

01:00:56.940 you reinstill the meaning in people's lives, the meaning that sustains them through catastrophe.

01:01:02.840 And so, because you've got to ask, you know, well, why should the typical young person listen to a

01:01:08.040 conservative who says, well, you should take more local responsibility? Because it sounds like a lot of

01:01:13.700 work, a lot of duty, and something that's not particularly hedonically gratifying. But if the answer is,

01:01:19.500 well, if you forego that responsibility, you have nothing to sustain you when you suffer,

01:01:26.140 and you forego the possibility of formulating the extremely tight and reciprocal social interactions

01:01:32.960 that buttress you through life, and you deprive your life of intrinsic meaning, then that seems like a very

01:01:39.240 bad idea for you. And I found, it's very striking, everywhere I've gone to talk, if I make that connection

01:01:45.820 between responsibility and meaning, the audiences fall completely silent. It always happens, because

01:01:52.140 no one, see, we haven't had a good discussion about the relationship between meaning and responsibility

01:01:57.600 in the West for like 60 years, right, since the mid-60s.

01:02:01.680 It's been a long time.

01:02:02.840 It's been a very long time. People assume that there's no meaning outside of a kind of a narrow

01:02:08.520 hedonism, or that there's no meaning at all. And that's a very dismal, that's a very dismal set

01:02:14.880 of propositions. And it is a weak place in the progressive enterprise, because sustaining meaning

01:02:21.160 is found in responsibility, and really in self-sacrifice, or at least the sacrifice of the narrow self.

01:02:26.680 Now, this insistence that you, your enterprise has on this subsidiary vision, is that grounded, at least

01:02:35.600 in part, in Catholic social doctrine?

01:02:37.960 It is.

01:02:38.640 Because that principle of subsidy, it is, okay.

01:02:40.680 Can you elaborate on that a bit?

01:02:42.900 Sure, and the Heritage Foundation's non-sectarian, but we're animated by the Judeo-Christian

01:02:50.320 intellectual tradition. And as we discussed earlier in reference to education,

01:02:55.260 I'm Roman Catholic, but the effect of subsidiarity on Heritage's mission, of course, long predates me.

01:03:02.360 We've been around 50 years, and it's just because it's a vital part of our Western intellectual

01:03:07.620 tradition, as you explained so well. And I think it's an excellent way, given the conversations

01:03:14.020 on the political right right now, to talk about the issues we're discussing here about meaning

01:03:19.940 and responsibility. It's related very much to something that has become more common parlance

01:03:25.880 in conservative circles, which is to say that the reason we want a more limited government

01:03:32.320 isn't because of some doctrinaire belief that the free market is always better than government.

01:03:39.180 That's not the case. It's because there is an inherent dignity that comes from work,

01:03:44.640 are put more broadly. There's a dignity that comes from responsibility, and therefore we have

01:03:49.680 greater meaning. It's no surprise to me that you've gotten that wonderful response in all of those

01:03:54.900 talks when you emphasize those points, because people not only know that that's true,

01:04:01.760 just intuitively, right, naturally. The second thing, to come back to my constructive criticism

01:04:08.800 of free marketism, conservatives, myself included, years ago, have done a very poor job of taking

01:04:17.740 advantage of that great vulnerability of the political left that you identified, which is this

01:04:22.240 very issue, because our response to that for 20 or 25 years was, well, the free market will take care

01:04:28.800 of it. Pull yourself up from your bootstraps. Read Ayn Rand. It's all going to be okay. Just work a little

01:04:34.560 bit harder. Well, in reality, that isn't true in the first place, but this is really key. It's

01:04:40.240 especially not been true since the mid-1960s with the ill-named war on poverty, because what that has

01:04:47.360 done is actually eradicate for two generations of Americans the meaning and responsibility that every

01:04:55.920 human person should have. Therefore, in order for, just to kind of swerve into the sidewalk level,

01:05:02.520 as I like to say, if conservatives are going to succeed in safety net reform and so-called welfare

01:05:08.020 reform, we first have to get better at talking about the limitations of the free market and the

01:05:14.920 necessity of conservative principles, conservative political dogma, to be associated with our long

01:05:22.300 tradition of living in community, which actually has a longer history in conservatism than even free

01:05:28.520 market principles. Well, that also points to a place where social conservatism and the more free

01:05:35.320 market end of conservatism, the libertarian end, could be unified, right? So, okay, so let's concentrate

01:05:40.920 on responsibility for a moment. So, I'm going to speak about that psychologically. So, someone young

01:05:46.680 might be thinking, well, why should I bear up under the load of additional responsibility? And I would say,

01:05:52.160 well, if you, responsibility is going to be a challenge. It means you have to determine that

01:06:00.100 you are going to lift something that you haven't yet lifted. And then you might say, well, why should

01:06:05.540 I do that? And the answer is something like, so you get stronger and better. And so, if you decide to

01:06:12.840 take responsibility for yourself, then you put yourself through the paces that will discipline you

01:06:18.860 enough so that all your idiocy and bad habits, all the ones that interfere with your ability to take

01:06:24.080 care of yourself, disappear. Now, often students do that to some degree when they go off to university

01:06:28.680 because they have to learn how to live independently, right? Which is a big part of what university does.

01:06:33.460 And that burns off the remaining childhood idiocy that they've carried with them, right? That dependence

01:06:39.020 on their parents and maybe the dependence, over-dependence on their initial peer group.

01:06:44.040 So, they have to mature. And the whole, the utility of taking on responsibility is that you

01:06:50.540 confront yourself with necessity in a manner that forces beneficial change. You know, and you might

01:06:58.500 say, well, why does it have to be forced? And the answer is, well, you know, we don't know how much

01:07:03.320 situational privation and necessity has to be there to motivate people to develop. Now, you could take on

01:07:11.280 just exactly the right amount of responsibility, you know, so it would feel like the challenge was

01:07:15.860 optimized, right? But that also, that optimized challenge is also what puts you in the zone of

01:07:21.520 proximal development and forces you to expand your horizons. And so, you adopt responsibility,

01:07:28.660 you can care for yourself, then you can care for other people better. But that also does genuinely

01:07:33.980 make you a better person in that your domain of competent action expands in precise proportion to

01:07:42.280 the amount of responsibility that you've been willing to undertake voluntarily, right? And it's not

01:07:47.400 surprising that that's associated with meaning. So, the conservatives can sell, the leftists can sell

01:07:53.420 rights, rights, rights, which is what they've been doing forever. And the hedonic self-gratification

01:07:58.780 goes along with that. But the right can sell the deep and abiding meaning that comes with the

01:08:04.040 hoisting of voluntary responsibility. And that is, that's not a free market argument, right?

01:08:10.500 It is not at all.

01:08:11.180 The free market is a consequence of that, exactly. The free market isn't going to work,

01:08:14.840 and this is where the social conservatives have an edge too. And I think this is becoming increasingly

01:08:19.120 obvious. In the absence of that underlying ethos of responsibility, responsible conduct,

01:08:24.980 you can't have a free market. Because people have to be able to trust each other before the free

01:08:29.960 market can even get going. And you can't trust irresponsible people.

01:08:33.920 That's the precise rub. And I will tell you that any leader in a public policy organization

01:08:42.920 has certain things that he or she does every day. Every single day, either directly or indirectly,

01:08:49.200 I'm dealing with that tension on the political right. Because part of what Heritage tries to do,

01:08:54.980 beyond the research and advocacy that we do, is also play at this plane where you and I are having

01:09:01.980 this conversation on the intellectual level. And when we do that, what we're arguing for is,

01:09:08.840 I like to say, an unhyphenated conservatism. We're all of those things. But when you're all of those

01:09:15.560 things, you're not trying to be something to everybody. We're talking to our audience on the

01:09:20.240 political right. It means that you're also going to be aware of the limitations of some of the

01:09:25.980 things that are goods, like the free market. The free market is good. But there are many higher goods.

01:09:32.140 And as we've talked about, chronologically speaking, which is what I try to do almost every day in

01:09:37.820 reminding more free market-oriented friends on the right, is you have to have that healthy society.

01:09:44.800 You have to have, as I often like to put it, healthy families. You have to have this moral system in

01:09:50.720 place to even give birth to the free market. It was the monks of Salamanca in the 1200s who first

01:09:56.920 came up with this concept. And even Adam Smith himself, I think, would be very, very comfortable

01:10:02.420 in this exchange that you and I are having about the lack of primacy of the free market as it relates

01:10:08.560 to human goods. Yeah, well, that's a matter of putting everything in its proper place, right?

01:10:14.660 And it is an open question. How far down the hierarchy of axiomatic primacy the free market

01:10:23.120 rests? But yeah, and the more libertarian types, they're going to say it's right at the bottom. And

01:10:28.040 Ayn Rand is a good exemplar of that, right? For her, the free market is the god out of which all other

01:10:32.940 goods emerge. But I think the Adam Smith conceptualization, the classic British liberal

01:10:38.280 conceptualization for that matter, is much more accurate, which is that once you have a society

01:10:45.080 that's essentially predicated on the Judeo-Christian axioms, one of those being responsible self-sacrifice

01:10:52.620 and the trust that emerges from that, then you can instantiate a free market. And it can serve

01:10:58.620 a governing function, but it can't exist. See, I think the same thing's actually true of science.

01:11:05.500 This is something I want to talk to Richard Dawkins about, because I don't think the scientific

01:11:09.480 enterprise itself, the scientific enterprise is predicated on the idea that the cosmic order is

01:11:16.380 good, that we can investigate it, that we can understand it, and that if we do that, that will

01:11:22.140 be good. Those are all axioms of faith in my estimation, and they're also specifically Judeo-Christian

01:11:27.720 axioms. There's a bunch of axioms of faith that are embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition

01:11:33.060 that are also presuppositions of the free market, like fairness in weights and measure, and honesty

01:11:40.480 in mutual exchange, right? Because the free marketers have a hard time dealing with a simple

01:11:47.060 question, like, if I can screw you over and make money doing it, why shouldn't I?

01:11:51.980 That's an Ayn Rand principle, right? Self-interest is the most important thing. And the other thing,

01:11:57.060 just to introduce this to this wonderful exchange that is so true about the free market in the 2020s,

01:12:04.340 is that what most Americans think of when they think of the free market right now rests. It almost

01:12:11.580 requires collusion with what Heritage would call big government, right? And so what I try to do,

01:12:18.980 all of us at Heritage try to do when we're talking about the best aspects of the free market,

01:12:23.500 is to place the emphasis not on those companies that are actually seeking regulatory favoritism

01:12:30.080 actively by agencies in D.C. Don't put the emphasis on them. Instead, put the emphasis on

01:12:36.360 small businesses, on entrepreneurs in America who actually are the ones creating the jobs. They're much

01:12:42.680 more in line with this proper understanding of where the free market falls in that list of axioms for the

01:12:51.400 conservative dogma. Yeah, well, one of the places that the left and the right, the more socially

01:13:00.540 conservative classical subsidiarity right could be aligned, and I see this emerging in people like

01:13:08.120 Russell Brand and Joe Rogan, right, is that there's every reason to be skeptical of Towers of Babel,

01:13:16.920 whether they're corporate or government. Yeah, well, the thing is, is that once something gets so large

01:13:24.060 that it can capture the environment in which it's supposed to thrive, then it presents a danger. And

01:13:30.100 it doesn't matter whether it's a corporation or a government. And that means that all of us,

01:13:35.200 left and right alike, like the lefties are always saying, oh my God, big corporations. And, you know,

01:13:41.120 looking at the behavior of the pharmaceutical companies, for example, over the last 20 years,

01:13:45.920 you can have some sympathy for their perspective. And then the libertarians say, oh my God,

01:13:51.960 big government. And neither of them seem to notice that the unifying horror there is big,

01:13:57.980 right? It's out of control big and the danger of regulatory capture. And, you know, one of the

01:14:02.800 things we're trying to puzzle through, I started this organization, I'm involved in the origin of

01:14:08.340 this organization called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. And we're trying to work

01:14:12.740 through these issues of subsidiarity, but also expressing great concern about corporate gigantism

01:14:20.040 and fascist collusion at the highest levels of the hierarchical enterprise, right? And the true

01:14:26.600 fascism, I would say. And so how have you at the Heritage Foundation grappled with this issue of the

01:14:33.880 danger of regulatory capture? Like what policies do you think should be put in place? I mean, like on

01:14:40.600 the YouTube front, for example, I mean, it's one corporation now that controls the primary

01:14:45.420 communication network for 7 billion people. And in the main, they've done a pretty damn good job. But

01:14:50.320 YouTube's got a bit heavy handed on the censorship front, as has Facebook, you know, colluding with the

01:14:56.780 Biden administration, as has come out in recent weeks. How do you guys grapple with the problem of

01:15:02.260 emergent gigantism, say, within a free market framework? How do you conceptualize the solutions

01:15:07.380 to that problem? Well, three things come to mind. The first is, and I don't mean this to be just sort

01:15:13.400 of academic think tank speak, it's really important on the political right for us to be doing this as a

01:15:18.660 first step, because of this 30, 40 year long held position that the free market equates to

01:15:26.760 conservatism. And that is to remind people that regulatory capture is a result of so-called,

01:15:34.080 quote unquote, free market leaders going to government and asking for favorable treatment.

01:15:41.340 The second thing, which is more substantial in terms of what we do on a day-to-day basis,

01:15:46.320 is through our Project 2025. Roughly speaking, it's a presidential transition project where we're

01:15:53.260 coming up with the policies, including deregulatory policies for the next conservative administration.

01:15:58.580 But it's also one, and this is vital, that as important as the policy is, we're recruiting

01:16:05.200 20,000 people to go into the next conservative administration. And if that happens, then you're

01:16:12.980 going to see across the board, from the Department of Energy to the Department of Education, which we've

01:16:18.320 written the plan to completely destroy. We need that eliminated by the end of this decade, to

01:16:23.800 completely starting from scratch with the FBI. What this public policy organization, the Heritage

01:16:30.260 Foundation does, isn't just talk about those things, and we don't just come up with the plans.

01:16:35.560 We're actually recruiting the men and women who will put that in place, hopefully as soon as 2025.

01:16:40.200 But the third sort of kill shot, if you will, that one bullet that will be really helpful to ending

01:16:47.720 regulatory capture is Schedule F reform. It's the civil service reform that will give the next president

01:16:53.340 to the United States power to fire the bureaucrats who are part of the problem. But if that's all you do,

01:17:00.100 and you don't take the first step, which is to explain on quote-unquote our side, you know, the sort of

01:17:05.280 business free market side, that we have to call out those businesses that are asking for this kind

01:17:11.080 of treatment, then we're not going to solve the problem. Okay, so I have two questions that arise

01:17:16.560 from that. One is on the presidential candidate front. Vivek Ramaswamy has made comments about

01:17:23.720 the destructuring of the so-called managerial deep state that are akin to the proposals that seem

01:17:30.760 akin to the proposals that you're putting forward. Part of Trump's attractiveness was his promise to

01:17:35.540 do that. So let's leave that aside for a moment. I want to return to Rand and Rand for a minute.

01:17:41.880 I've just been rereading Atlas Shrugged, which I do, oddly enough, about every 15 years. And

01:17:47.880 I figured out one of the core problems with her doctrine. It might be the core problem.

01:17:53.160 So she assumes that self-interest is the appropriate governing principle. But she never really defines

01:18:00.580 what constitutes self-interest. And that's a big problem. So because you can have narrowly hedonic

01:18:06.940 self-interest. And Rand actually wanders into that territory because her protagonists, Rourke and Dagny

01:18:14.260 Taggart and so forth, do have and express quite continually their right to do whatever the hell they want

01:18:20.940 whenever the hell they want to. And that they should be guided by no other principle in some

01:18:26.320 sense than the gratification of their own desires. But that's exactly what the hedonists on the left

01:18:31.280 say. And so this begs the question of what constitutes the individual whose self-interest is at stake.

01:18:37.960 And where Rand makes a mistake is she doesn't understand that there's a set of constraints that

01:18:44.340 operate on what constitutes individual self-interest. So you don't exist just right now. You exist out,

01:18:55.000 say, decades into the future and in an attenuated form in your descendants. And what that implies is

01:19:00.860 that every action you undertake right now has to be bound by the necessity of not betraying that

01:19:08.280 sequence of future selves. And I don't think there's any difference in a game theory, from a game theory

01:19:16.260 perspective, of the collective that is you across time and other people. So I think that enlightened

01:19:24.700 self-interest and social interest are exactly the same thing. And I don't think that Rand understood

01:19:31.620 that, right, is that she seems to believe that there's this internal self, which is the part

01:19:38.900 that's self-interested, that's almost like the internal self the radical leftists insist upon being

01:19:45.400 able to establish such things as gender self-identification, right, that's 100% autonomous and

01:19:51.560 unmoored, that can operate itself as an autonomous governing principle. It's almost like a deity.

01:19:58.820 And it's the conservative version of the same mistake that the radicals on the progressive

01:20:04.520 side are making. I think that's exactly right. In fact, you talked about you yourself rereading

01:20:10.220 Atlas Shrugged. I do that with about the same frequency. And the last time I did, three or four

01:20:15.200 or five years ago, it's because I had a junior colleague at the policy organization I was leading

01:20:20.180 prior to being at Heritage who was a capital O objectivist. And I thought, well, let me reread Rand

01:20:27.420 and see if I'm missing anything and be a good colleague, a good mentor. And I realized this

01:20:32.360 actually sort of come full circle. Rereading Atlas Shrugged four or five years ago, ironically,

01:20:38.740 is what made me realize my own deficiencies in thought about the free market and a couple of

01:20:45.700 other shibboleths of the right, which is to say that so many very thoughtful men and women who are

01:20:51.340 devotees of Rand make the mistake that she's making, and they haven't thought through the consequences

01:20:57.380 of that as it relates, for example, to regulatory capture. And so the exciting thing, this is all

01:21:04.460 very troubling on kind of an intellectual level, but the exciting thing is that we're finally having

01:21:09.460 these conversations on the political right. And the exciting thing for us at Heritage, often referred

01:21:14.820 to as a legacy organization, is that I wouldn't say we're necessarily driving those conversations,

01:21:19.940 but we're very active participants in them. And that is to the extent that we've got credibility

01:21:24.600 with people on the center right in America. It is, we're lending that credibility to that

01:21:30.080 conversation, which must happen in order to achieve the public policy ideas that we've had for a few

01:21:36.920 decades. Well, the way that Rand maneuvers around the complexity of those questions, say with regards to

01:21:46.040 regulatory capture, is that she attributes to her protagonists a kind of a vague nobility of character.

01:21:54.600 Right. So that it's distasteful for Rourke and Taggart, for example, to engage in any plaintiff

01:22:03.240 negotiations with government agencies. Right. It's beneath them to ask for favors from government,

01:22:09.560 but she never establishes why it's beneath them. Right. It's vaguely associated in principle with their

01:22:16.360 self-interest and their implicit heroism. But it's very difficult to derive that heroism from that narrow self-interest,

01:22:24.360 and I think the reason it's difficult to do that is because it doesn't derive from that narrow self-interest.

01:22:31.320 It derives from the necessity of a higher order self-interest that has the community as an intrinsic part of itself.

01:22:40.680 And she's very weak on that front. Right. Because her characters, Taggart's a good example, and so is Rourke. Rourke's in a very unhappy marriage.

01:22:48.920 And Dagny Taggart is single. Those people aren't bound by, like, they're all noble individual heroes who stand alone.

01:22:58.320 They're not well-situated in happy marriages. They're not, as couples, well-situated in functional families.

01:23:06.200 But she's almost Rousselian in that regard. She seems to regard any form of higher order social involvement as an impediment to the noble strivings of the disaggregated individual.

01:23:21.200 And so it's very strange to see that dovetail with the more radical ideas of the progressive left.

01:23:26.020 And it's definitely a flaw in her thinking, right, both from the perspective of characterization, but also from the perspective of ethics.

01:23:33.200 It's that narrow self-interest, that's not the highest self. That's not the true self. It's just the immature and impulsive self.

01:23:44.720 And she tries to make that noble. And it's not noble. It's just immature.

01:23:50.280 So I think that's why her work never hits. It's like, Rand is not Dostoevsky, right?

01:23:58.220 There's a shallowness about her work that's, I like reading it. It's exciting. It's adventurous.

01:24:03.360 It's a romantic adventure, you know? And it's got a strong hero narrative element, but it's definitely not literature.

01:24:11.760 And I think the reason for that is that her characterizations are too, they're too simplified.

01:24:17.320 You won't be expecting this reference, I'm sure, but I grew up reading Louis L'Amour books, you know, written in the 20th century.

01:24:24.900 But they were 20th century versions of the Western dime novels of the late 1800s.

01:24:30.740 You read them as a boy. And every time, I guess I've read Atlas Shug three or four or five times.

01:24:36.660 I don't mean to be too offensive toward Rand followers, but we've established that feelings are okay to hurt.

01:24:42.860 Her characters are just as flat as the great heroes in Louis L'Amour novels who showed up in these Western towns and they were rugged individuals, right?

01:24:53.060 And as a 10 or 11-year-old boy, those were good things to read in the same way that there's a certain value to reading Rand's work.

01:24:59.560 But it's not literature. It's certainly not Dostoevsky.

01:25:02.400 And in the great book schools that I've led, Rand had no part of the curriculum.

01:25:08.580 And I'll just make this final point, if I may, on this thread.

01:25:12.180 The way this plays out in conservative politics, and by that I mean not elected officials, but to some extent the donor class.

01:25:21.240 But these are thoughtful men and women, most of whom have made their own wealth themselves, is that they think that those characters from Atlas Shrugged are the model.

01:25:31.820 But in reality, I mean almost without exception as I think about these men and women, in their own lives, they are living out that higher order thinking or set of values far better than Rand's own characters.

01:25:45.640 In other words, they themselves, these devotees of Rand, personify the limitations of the book.

01:25:52.960 It can be hard to explain that to them because they're so committed to this mode of thought.

01:25:58.060 But the point is, the more of those devotees of Rand who come to grips with those limitations, the quicker the American political right will be able to resolve this conundrum we have about the community and about the free market.

01:26:15.640 Yeah, well, I think that your characterization of Rand's books as sophisticated cowboy stories is exactly dead on.

01:26:23.880 Because first of all, she was attracted to that rugged American individualism, not least because she was an escapee from communist hell.

01:26:32.640 And so she had a reason to hero worship that pattern of rugged individualism.

01:26:37.260 And it is associated in a genuine sense with the great American dream, which is a real phenomenon and something to be reckoned with.

01:26:45.940 But the fact that her characters, and some of her characters, they're almost literal cowboys.

01:26:53.600 I mean, in Atlas Shrugged, I can't remember the gentleman's name, but Wyatt, that's his name.

01:26:59.580 He's even got a cowboy name, Wyatt.

01:27:02.100 He runs a sequence of oil rigs and oil explorations in the frontier state of California, right?

01:27:09.820 And he's definitely a cowboy in every sense of the word, and so are the rest of her male characters.

01:27:15.120 And so you can also understand that that admiration for rugged individualism has a place if the rugged individuals are already nested inside like a stable couple and a stable family and a stable community and so forth.

01:27:33.180 If all those preconditions are met, then you should go out on your individual adventure.

01:27:38.660 But if none of them are met, if you're that sort of cowboy, you're almost indistinguishable from a psychopath.

01:27:45.560 And so, yeah, so that's a big problem.

01:27:48.340 It's the same problem on the free market side, right?

01:27:50.600 The free market doesn't work unless it's embedded in an underlying ethos.

01:27:54.200 And that rugged individualism doesn't work unless, for exactly the same reasons, unless the underlying preconditions of stabilization are already in place.

01:28:04.360 And it's very much related to the excellent point you made about meaning and responsibility, right?

01:28:09.640 Because part of that responsibility, you know, part of freedom, properly understood, not in a Randian way, is the moral duty that's conferred.

01:28:20.640 That, for those of us who emphasize the natural law over what the left likes to talk about rights, that moral duty is to the community.

01:28:28.720 It's to the other as much as it is to ourselves.

01:28:31.860 And those two things, more often than not, can actually not be intentioned.

01:28:37.440 They can be resolved and exist harmoniously.

01:28:40.480 And it's in that gap, just to be kind of simplistic here, where properly ordered government, a properly limited government, exists.

01:28:48.800 As I like to tell people, the Heritage Foundation is a conservative, not a libertarian public policy organization.

01:28:55.200 We see a very proper role for government, and we look forward to getting it back into that box.

01:29:01.040 Well, I would say mature identity is the balance between the interests of the individual and the interests of the extended individual and the collective.

01:29:12.360 That harmony, that harmony as well, is what people mean when they say sanity.

01:29:19.080 Like, sanity isn't something you carry around within you.

01:29:21.760 Sanity is the harmonious balance between your interests and the interests of you in the long term and other people.

01:29:27.840 It's actually the manifestation of that balance.

01:29:30.380 You know, and I'm going to say something in favor of Rand, too, because there are elements of her thought that are subtle.

01:29:37.900 You know, so if you say that the individual has an obligation to the community,

01:29:43.300 then that obligation can be twisted and bent by people who will use moral guilt as a cudgel.

01:29:49.800 And she does a nice job of outlining that.

01:29:51.780 So she tells the story, for example, of a factory that decided to run on the principle of to each according to his need and from each according to his ability.

01:30:00.520 And she shows how that, and that was foisted upon the workers, right?

01:30:06.900 So she shows how that immediately degenerates into a competition of victimization and slavery to that self-described victimization.

01:30:17.960 But she fails to make a distinction between me being burdened by force with the needs of other people and me taking on the responsibility as a voluntary choice to address the needs of other people.

01:30:34.260 And so that would be the difference between being a slave, let's say, and having a family.

01:30:38.980 I mean, you're both working for—in both situations, you're working for someone else, the good of your children, let's say.

01:30:44.920 But in the case of a well-constituted family, you're doing that voluntarily.

01:30:50.800 And that makes all the difference.

01:30:52.160 It makes all the physiological difference, too, because a burden undertaken voluntarily is much less stressful physiologically than the same burden foisted upon you involuntarily.

01:31:02.260 The data on that are very clear.

01:31:05.040 So she does a nice job of insisting that whatever responsibility is undertaken has to be undertaken voluntarily.

01:31:12.940 But that's also the same as that call to responsibility that we were discussing earlier.

01:31:17.140 She makes a great reminder about that.

01:31:21.800 And I think, again, to kind of swerve into what we do every day or every week at the Heritage Foundation, what we try to do is acknowledge these tensions in our movement, a broad intellectual movement, resolve them in a way that allows people to have the creative conflict.

01:31:39.700 But ultimately, we're not just having those conversations, right?

01:31:42.680 We're trying to do that, to resolve those tensions, so that we can develop popular support for public policy solutions.

01:31:51.400 And I would be remiss if I were not to say that rather than just being headquartered and supported here in the imperial city of D.C., we're distinctive, if not unique, among public policy organizations on the right because of how we're supported, which is hundreds of thousands of people across the country.

01:32:09.540 I say that not at all to make a fundraising pitch, but to explain that we are, as I like to say, the everyday Americans' outpost.

01:32:17.940 And so it's, I mean, it's highly, highly improbable that the Heritage Foundation would be captured by these excesses of the nation's capital.

01:32:29.040 I mentioned that in reference to what you said about Rand, because I think she herself would appreciate that greatly about how we work, even though we obviously have some points of contention with some of her key points.

01:32:42.220 Yeah, well, that was actually another thing I was going to hassle you about.

01:32:45.480 Maybe I'll do that to close.

01:32:46.920 I mean, there are clearly dangers, and I'll talk to you about this more, I think, on the Daily Wire side of this conversation.

01:32:55.080 There are clearly dangers posed to educational institutions and other institutions as a consequence of taking federal money, government money.

01:33:04.640 And I think that that proclivity for universities to accept federal money has now finally corrupted the scientific enterprise itself.

01:33:15.300 And because it's gone downhill in quite a catastrophic manner in the last 10 years.

01:33:20.000 I know that you've had qualms, to say the least, about accepting government money.

01:33:27.140 But then the same accusation can be levied, let's say, against conservative think tanks who derive their funding from gigantic corporations.

01:33:35.840 How do you avoid becoming an instrument of the same regulatory capture that you protest against?

01:33:42.100 Now, you just said quite clearly, but I think it's worth reiterating.

01:33:46.640 Tell me your funding model and how Heritage has protected itself against capture, let's say, by the giants of the corporate world.

01:33:58.080 Well, in two ways.

01:33:59.320 The first is, from the very beginning, Heritage was funded primarily by small donors.

01:34:05.920 We have a membership model, and the average donation given to Heritage each year is, I think, $82, as it was in 2022.

01:34:15.820 We do have some individuals who make larger contributions than that, obviously.

01:34:21.040 But we receive very little.

01:34:23.000 I mean, a minuscule amount of corporate money.

01:34:25.560 That's always been the case, but it's especially true over the last few years, as Heritage has sharpened its criticism of regulatory capture.

01:34:33.620 So, that inoculates us, the membership model that we have, but also the explicit position we have not to receive corporate money from most businesses.

01:34:47.400 We receive a little bit of that, but it's tiny.

01:34:50.360 And, of course, this is coming from me, because when I was at Wyoming Catholic College, we, like Hillsdale and a few other schools, decided that the Department of Education could keep its money.

01:35:00.440 We didn't want to be captured by their ideas.

01:35:02.220 So, in other words, Heritage has always had this philosophy, but I've underscored it because of my hostility to that entire system.

01:35:10.020 Okay, so two closing questions.

01:35:13.140 The first is, how has Heritage managed to fund itself successfully, given its unwillingness to rely either on government or corporate money?

01:35:23.880 I mean, that's a lot of sources of money.

01:35:25.420 Go on.

01:35:25.760 How have you appealed to ordinary people, let's say, and why has that worked?

01:35:29.900 And along with that, maybe you could explain to everyone what they would have to do in order to learn more about how the Heritage Foundation operates and to participate in that if they, or at least to learn more if they chose to do so.

01:35:45.920 Thanks for asking those questions.

01:35:47.920 On the first one, we have been one of the few organizations on the right that has perfected a particular model of, most importantly, the work that we do in D.C.

01:36:00.860 It's not for our sake, it's not for the sake of the researchers, the policy leads, but we really see ourselves as the advocacy organization for the everyday American.

01:36:11.260 And when we're able to report successes in that realm, which we've been able to do a lot, and convey that to individual Americans through direct mail and all the means that organizations use to raise money, it's been extremely successful for us over many, many years.

01:36:26.700 The second way is, or the answer to your second question is, you can go to our website, heritage.org.

01:36:34.520 There you will see, most importantly, the research we do.

01:36:37.840 Also, we're very good, or we've become better, at giving individual Americans talking points, sort of messaging that's linked to that research, because we don't just want them to read the research, we want them to be part of the solution, right?

01:36:50.980 We're not just here ourselves to do the work and then ask them to support financially what we're doing.

01:36:56.600 A vital part of our business model, and it speaks to the success that we've had, is having individual Americans participate in what we do, such that 10 years ago, we founded, we created our own kind of campaign arm, Heritage Action for America, which gives our enterprise the ability to do more direct lobbying, more involvement in particular campaigns.

01:37:17.000 Most importantly, it also is the kind of currency that elected officials understand, which is the ability to, as is the parlance in our work, key vote a particular vote on a particular piece of legislation, yay or nay, and hold those elected officials accountable.

01:37:34.120 They don't like it, but between the research that we have, the hundreds of thousands of supporters we have, and the power of that scorecard that we keep, we've become very influential in D.C.

01:37:44.940 As I like to say, we're sort of the people's advocate behind enemy alliance.

01:37:49.820 Okay, okay, well, I'll close with a question on that front then.

01:37:54.780 There are a number of candidates for president on the Republican side.

01:37:59.640 I have no doubt that your organization is watching that completely surreal race intensely.

01:38:06.940 Are there particular candidates, or how are you working with candidates, so that your plan to restructure the corporate deep state, or the government deep state, dovetails with their campaign offers?

01:38:24.040 Is that happening formally, does it happen informally?

01:38:27.300 Where do you see an alignment of interests, or conflict of interests, for that matter?

01:38:31.300 Great question.

01:38:32.160 It happens both formally and informally.

01:38:34.180 Formally, because of our tax designation from the IRS, we can't endorse in a political race, and so we don't.

01:38:41.060 But that doesn't mean that we don't have any influence over it.

01:38:43.920 And the influence that we try to have over it, I think we are, is in ideas and policy.

01:38:48.840 And so, I mentioned a couple of times earlier this Project 2025, the policies and personnel for the next administration.

01:38:57.280 We have shared those policies with all of the major conservative aspirants.

01:39:02.620 And for that matter, a couple of candidates left of center, including RFK, because we are ultimately nonpartisan in our tax designation.

01:39:10.080 The informal part of that is, we provide policy briefings to any candidate who accepts our invitation for that.

01:39:18.080 We've made that invitation across the political spectrum this year.

01:39:21.420 I personally have done the briefing for a handful of the, I guess, more likely nominees for the Republican nomination.

01:39:28.680 There are a few candidates who are probably misaligned with Heritage, but those who are highest ranking in the polls are those we're closest to.

01:39:36.760 I will say this, the most important thing for the Heritage Foundation and our members, as it relates to 2024, is not just that the most conservative candidate who can win the general election becomes our standard bearer.

01:39:49.480 It's that he or she, even before they take the oath of office on January 20th, 2025, is ready to govern in the most aggressive, ambitious, audacious way to destroy the deep state and devolve power back to the individual Americans.

01:40:07.460 That's a good place to bring this to a close.

01:40:10.920 So for everyone who's watching and listening, thank you, as always, for your time and attention to the Daily Wire Plus folks for facilitating these conversations and working so effectively on the production quality front.

01:40:25.080 That's much appreciated.

01:40:26.180 The film crew here up in Northern Ontario, thank you very much for talking to me today.

01:40:31.520 We're going to switch now to the Daily Wire Plus side.

01:40:34.640 I'm going to talk, our discussion now will turn to more autobiographical matters, as they usually do on that side of the platform.

01:40:41.800 And so those of you who are watching and listening who are interested might give some consideration to casting some attention the Daily Wire Plus way.

01:40:50.200 And other than that, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.

01:40:54.180 And thank you to all of you who've been watching and listening.

01:41:04.640 I'm going to talk.

01:41:05.980 I'm going to tap on the poll on in Georgia.

01:41:22.360 We are two stars.

01:41:23.560 We are two stars.

01:41:24.660 We are three stars.

01:41:25.600 We are two stars.

01:41:26.280 We are three stars.

01:41:27.840 We are three stars.

01:41:28.280 We are three stars.

01:41:29.180 We are four stars.

01:41:29.380 We arezie in 9 seconds.

01:41:30.020 We are one stars.

01:41:31.060 We are two stars.

01:41:32.180 We are two stars on Broadway, right?

01:41:32.980 We have two stars.

01:41:33.180 And we are three stars.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 16, 2023

397. The Heritage Foundation： Responsibility and Meaning ｜ Dr. Kevin Roberts

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