00:11:30.900And Douglass finally decided to stand up for himself, and he fought back.
00:11:35.460And he and Covey fought for, Douglass says, about an hour until Covey finally stumbled away, unable to beat Douglass.
00:11:43.860And Douglass said that the lesson he learned from this is, he used to quote a line from the poet Lord Byron,
00:11:50.340he who would be free must himself strike the blow.
00:11:53.700And from that point for the rest of his life, he was determined to value himself and to defend his freedom and the freedom of his enslaved brethren.
00:12:02.060So he escaped on the Underground Railroad, first to New York City, and then moved from there to New Bedford, Massachusetts,
00:12:10.260where he got a job working, well, he got odd jobs.
00:13:26.660And that was the position he held for the rest of his life.
00:13:29.320Douglass, of course, goes on to become a very important spokesman for the black community during and after the Civil War.
00:13:35.920Ends up becoming basically the ambassador to Haiti and retires a prominent, highly respected scholar and author and orator, always believing that the U.S. Constitution was a good and anti-slavery document.
00:13:50.880His phrase was the Constitution interpreted as it ought to be interpreted is a glorious liberty document.
00:13:56.460So basically, Douglass would get an F in any test taught today in any university in the United States.
00:14:07.580He would be he would be shunned because today's intellectuals have adopted the Garrisonian view that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document and therefore evil.
00:14:15.860And Douglass said, you know, for what he said, take a look at the Constitution and find the word slave or slavery in it.
00:14:21.740And it doesn't appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution.
00:14:24.500He said, therefore, those who argue that the Constitution is pro-slavery are kind of in the position of a person who claims to own property and then produces a deed that contains no description of the property.
00:14:35.280He said the burden of proof should be on those who claim the Constitution is pro-slavery and find me the proof.
00:14:41.180He said there's only four clauses in the Constitution that even obliquely mention slavery, and those have innocent explanations.
00:14:47.360Now, let me pause to explain how how lawyers interpret the Constitution.
00:14:51.160You start out with rules of interpretation in order to interpret any written document, especially the Constitution.
00:14:57.460And the first rule is only that which is written down on the page is the Constitution, not the subjective personal intentions of the people who wrote it, just the words on the page.
00:15:09.340And then the second rule is that you interpret the Constitution as pro-slavery or pro-freedom, rather, as pro-individual rights whenever you possibly can.
00:15:18.620In other words, you interpret it as innocently as you possibly can.
00:15:22.260You give it a good faith interpretation.
00:15:23.980So with those two rules in mind, you look at the four provisions of the Constitution that seem to be pro-slavery.
00:15:29.860That's the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, the import-export clause, and the clause that prohibits the repeal of the import-export clause.
00:15:39.480And what I mean by the import-export clause is there's a provision that prohibits Congress from interfering with the slave trade until the year 1800.
00:15:46.720So Douglass says, well, you look at these clauses, the three-fifths clause that counts a slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning Congress.
00:17:14.600The privileges and immunities clause in Article 4 says that no state can deprive an American of the privileges and immunities of their citizenship.
00:17:28.860So Douglass makes this argument that if you interpret the Constitution correctly,
00:17:32.320it's actually fundamentally anti-slavery and gives the federal government the power to abolish slavery if it wants to.
00:17:40.520And then he said in 1861, when the Civil War started, he said, see, I was right.
00:17:45.080Because it was the southern states that had to try and get out of the Constitution in order to protect slavery.
00:17:50.600So that proves that he was correct, according to Douglass.
00:17:53.480So everything that you just said, what percentage of American universities would have a course where the gist of everything that you said would be found in the syllabus of some course versus the exact opposite of what you just said?
00:18:20.860This is not some obscure movement, by the way.
00:18:23.000I mean, these pro-Constitution, anti-slavery people like Frederick Douglass or like Senator Charles Sumner, these were the people who wrote the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
00:18:33.540So if you want to understand the U.S. Constitution, if you don't understand the pro-Constitution, anti-slavery view, you don't understand it at all.
00:18:41.640And yet I wasn't taught it in law school or in college or in high school or anything.
00:18:45.460I basically had to learn it on my own.
00:18:47.200So if we were to put him within the pantheon of historical American figures, be it in terms of the, you know, social justice and so on, and the proper use of that term, not the sort of the woke sense, or in the more just general great Americans, does he have his rightful place or is he a forgotten individual?
00:19:10.120Actually, yeah, it's actually worse than either of those options.
00:19:13.040The real problem is that he has been co-opted by the left.
00:19:17.140The left tries to use Douglass in order to prove that the evil, the fundamental evil of America and the way that this has been accomplished by historians and scholars, and I use historians in a very loose sense.
00:19:30.000I mean, we're talking about people like Howard Zinn, you know, the way that they use Douglass is to focus on his early life.
00:19:36.640And I mentioned that early in life, he agreed with Garrison that the Constitution was evil and then changed his mind.
00:19:42.080And what you will find in your typical textbooks is they'll talk about Douglass's early life and then totally ignore what came after that.
00:19:49.480Or even worse, some scholars have tried to dismiss him or even said terrible things about him.
00:19:55.340There are some scholars I mentioned in the book, some scholars who say that Douglass was actually, he secretly wanted to be white.
00:20:00.140And that's why he endorsed the Constitution out of this nefarious, self-hating, sort of, he was somehow a racist because he believed that, you know, it's truly insane.
00:20:11.260And yet you find this nonsense still being propagated.
00:20:14.160I mean, or you get Douglass often ignored.
00:20:16.920Like the 1619 Project, for instance, mentions Douglass's name, I think, one time and does not address any of the substance of his views.
00:20:24.800And it was only after my book came out, by the way, that Nicole, Hannah, Hannah Nicole Jones finally actually read Douglass.
00:20:34.360And she put this on. In fact, this we're approaching the university.
00:20:36.760It was around Christmas time of I think it was five years ago now that she put on Twitter that that she was reading Douglass.
00:20:41.580And and, you know, I tweeted back. I was like, well, you know, that's a good thing.
00:20:46.500You know, he was he was pro-Constitution. She she honestly she had obviously never heard of it.
00:20:50.760Of course, she's in the habit of deleting all of her tweets in order to not be held accountable for what she says.
00:20:55.800So you can't find this online anymore.
00:20:57.520But it was only a few years after my book came out that she even bothered reading Douglass and discovering that there's this whole range of black political opinion dating back to the before the Civil War.
00:21:08.180That says, you know, maybe America is not a fundamentally racist, evil country.
00:21:13.140Since you mentioned black Americans. What do you think of this guy?
00:21:18.680Oh, yes. Yes. I think it's impossible not to admire Dr.
00:21:22.920Sowell and Walter Williams and and the school that he has inspired.
00:21:28.020You know, he's as you probably know, he's still alive.
00:21:31.340And one of the published a book he just published. How do you do that?
00:21:34.840God, I hope I have half as much intellectual energy when I'm that age.
00:21:37.840I think I think five percent would be pretty good.
00:21:39.880Yeah, I have. Here's another guy that specifically because you're talking about sort of black individuals, although, of course, they transcend race.
00:21:48.000Although this guy was rather racially motivated.
00:21:52.960No, I heard you mention him during your preview, but I have not heard of him.
00:21:56.980OK, so you might. So Steve Biko, let me tell you a quick story, because I'd love to see if we can draw parallels between all of these heroic figures.
00:22:05.300So Steve Biko, I first heard of him, as I as I mentioned in that prelude, I first came across his work in a 1987 movie called Cry Freedom.
00:22:15.240He was a anti apartheid activist who was killed by the apartheid regime, you know, tortured and so on.
00:22:25.620Now, he resonated with me because, well, he was I often implore people to activate their inner honey badger because being a honey badger is to be fierce.
00:22:36.800I mean, in this case, ideologically defend your principles, don't cower and so on.
00:22:40.960And he wrote a book called I Write What I Like. Right.
00:22:44.860Which is very much sort of the the call to arms for my entire career.
00:22:49.920No one is going to stop me from saying a word.
00:22:52.880Now, the only now what was beautiful about.
00:22:54.960So then I just discovered we were at a book antiquarian place owned by a friend of mine and my wife, as she's browsing, she goes, oh, I think you like this guy.
00:23:04.520Right. And so I ended up buying this biography from the from the 70s and and then read it recently.
00:23:12.080Now, Biko and Douglas share this sort of very noble, as I mentioned earlier, not not so much in their their morphology, but in the way they conduct themselves.
00:23:23.400Right. Biko talked about sort of raising the black man's consciousness.
00:23:27.440Right. I don't have to justify who I am and so on.
00:23:30.060So but some have accused them of being a socialist, of being anti-white, although I didn't really read into that.
00:23:39.220Would Frederick Douglass be considered someone who in trying to elevate black people was trying to put down white people or was he sort of a universalist?
00:23:49.300We're all equal, commonly linked in our universal brother.
00:23:52.660Well, very emphatically, he believed in racial equality and did not believe in what is often called a black pride.
00:24:00.400In fact, he was really concerned about this because there were movements to that effect during his own life that tried to inculcate a sense of basically pro black racism in within the black community.
00:24:10.920And Douglass was was very much opposed to this and very worried about what it would do if it caught on in his day.
00:24:17.080And he similarly, he you know, there was efforts both before and after the Civil War to force black Americans to colonize, to leave the United States and colonize Africa or or Central America or or after the war to persuade them to do so.
00:24:32.200And Douglass was also emphatically against that.
00:24:35.000He said black Americans are American citizens and should cherish their American citizenship.
00:24:39.720They've earned it, God knows, by their true blood, sweat and tears, and they should never be persuaded to let it go.
00:24:46.980And he said the problem with the colonization nonsense or the black pride nonsense, he said, is that it teaches black Americans that there is no country for them, that they aren't entitled to the American dream.
00:24:59.640And it and it doesn't inculcate any hope.
00:25:02.720It simply teaches them cynicism and despair.
00:25:04.900And he said, and white supremacists will take advantage of that.
00:25:08.680If the black world teaches black people that black people have no role in America and that America is a white supremacist nation, Douglass said, well, then we are surrendering.
00:25:19.060I mean, then what what ability do we have to withstand the white racists?
00:25:23.340Instead, our position should be that we're all Americans, all entitled to the Constitution and all equally entitled to our freedom.
00:25:32.980I think that Douglass's most important contribution as an intellectual was his connection of the virtue of personal pride with the value of political freedom.
00:25:44.200I don't know in the history of libertarian thought, I know of no thinker before Douglass who emphasized that connection to anywhere near that degree.
00:25:53.380I mean, you can find in John Locke or Thomas Jefferson, you know, they do say, you know, you have to value yourself if you want to defend freedom.
00:25:59.760But Douglass is the only one who says this is absolutely crucial, that you have to believe yourself worthy of freedom if you're going to defend that freedom.
00:26:09.120And my greatest, my most interesting example of this is he wrote an article encouraging black Americans to enlist in the army during the Civil War.
00:26:19.400And he gives a whole list of reasons of why you should join the army.
00:26:22.960And what's interesting to me is what's not on the list.
00:26:26.040Nowhere does he say you should join the army to serve your country because Douglass would have said we don't owe it to the country.
00:26:32.480The country has abused us so miserably through slavery.
00:26:34.620Instead, all of his examples, all of his reasons are essentially you owe it to yourself.
00:26:40.460You need to build a sense of personal pride and you have to learn how to use guns to defend yourself and all these sorts of things.
00:26:46.740Those are the arguments that he musters because he emphasizes so much the value of psychological independence relating to political freedom.
00:26:54.940As you were saying, that link that you talked about, I literally got goosebumps because in maybe using other words, well, not maybe, in using other words, I think that's exactly what Biko was espousing.
00:27:10.720And so I would love to see whether it be you or someone else who's an expert on either or both to draw that explicit.
00:27:18.140Yeah, it sounds like I have to read this book.
00:27:20.860And I'm just going to put it up for you one more time.
00:27:22.500It's Donald Woods was a white Afrikaner, but who was very, very liberal, anti-apartheid, who was the editor of one of the major newspapers.
00:27:33.140They forged this incredible brotherhood between the two of them, friendship.
00:27:38.680So I think there's really some interesting links.
00:27:40.820Now, let's link Frederick Douglass to some of the contemporary wokeness that we see.
00:27:47.460And before I do that, let me talk about another, of course, historic Black American, Martin Luther King, right?
00:27:53.260In the I Have a Dream speech, I mean, literally every single tenet of wokeness is exactly the opposite of what Dr. King said there.
00:28:01.300I'm going to assume, without having read the primary sources of what Frederick Douglass talked about, he would be primarily anti-woke, yes?
00:28:12.520But that's not to say that he would have agreed with King in everything by any means.
00:28:17.020So what I think is really interesting about Douglass as an intellectual compared to Martin Luther King on one hand and Malcolm X on the other is that he would have totally agreed with King's argument that the Declaration of Independence, as King puts it in the I Have a Dream speech, that the Declaration is a promissory note that America must make good on, that all men are created equal, that blacks are Americans just as much as whites are and are entitled to their liberty.
00:28:44.540But he would have disagreed very firmly with King's anti-violence peace ideal.
00:28:54.380Douglass very firmly believed in the right of self-defense and of taking up arms to defend yourself, and he would have agreed very much with Malcolm X in that regard.
00:29:02.420On the other hand, he would have strongly disagreed with Malcolm's black nationalism.
00:29:06.180He would have firmly disagreed with the idea that, you know, Plymouth Rock landed on us and this sort of thing.
00:29:12.300Douglass would have said that this country is our country, too, and we have the right to defend it, including with physical violence when that proves necessary.
00:29:22.380One last link between all of these great gentlemen, and then we can move on to maybe some contemporary political realities.
00:29:28.520Thomas Sowell talks about, I hope I don't botch the story, but how when he moved to New York City, one of his uncles or some older mentor had taken him to the New York Public Library where he sort of was amazed, boy, there's this building with all of these books that I can just take out and read.
00:29:48.320And, of course, that led to his at least cognitive emancipation, right?
00:30:24.280We come from a history of, you know, putting a lot of effort on learning and so on.
00:30:29.660When after my MBA, my mother had heard that one of my older brothers was trying to convince me to work with him in his company rather than immediately pursuing my PhD.
00:30:40.260She takes me to the side, you know, with great worry and says, you know, do you want people to remember you as somebody who dropped out of school?
00:30:47.700Because for her, having had a, you know, a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science and an MBA and stopping at that point would bring great shame to the fact.
00:30:57.880Right. And so, whereas, of course, what regrettably much of today's black culture has internalized is a sense of the exact opposite of that.
00:31:11.040How do we get them to appreciate what both Douglas and Sowell understood?
00:31:16.480Learn, enrich your mind and you will be free.
00:31:19.040Well, I think that's a hard question for me to answer.
00:31:22.760Obviously, I don't live in the black culture myself.
00:31:25.340And so I feel awkward trying to prescribe for people.
00:31:28.540But I would say that I don't think that this is a lesson the black community is unaware of.
00:31:33.440I just think that the black world, and this is true also, by the way, of many sections of the white world, is kind of torn between these two visions of what life should be like.
00:31:44.760And you might you might label them loosely the optimistic and the pessimistic vision and the optimistic vision that says, you know, there is opportunity out there.
00:32:08.180And I think there's that tension within the black community.
00:32:10.920And I do think it's unfortunate that it's since at least 1966, let's say, maybe 68, so much of I would put it this way.
00:32:20.100So much of white attention has been devoted to the nihilistic sector of the black public community, of the black public opinion world.
00:32:29.920So that when you look at a movie or a TV show that's supposedly about black life in America, it's very often it'll be made by white producers in Hollywood.
00:33:00.400It was a marvelous commentary on exactly this phenomenon that it's not necessarily that the black community has embraced the culture of thuggery, although there is too much of that, of course.
00:33:10.100But that's also true in white communities.
00:33:11.580But the real problem, I think, is that elite opinion in Hollywood and elsewhere thinks that the authentic black experience is over here on the on the on the misery end of the spectrum, on the hopelessness end of the spectrum.
00:33:25.260And so I've always thought it ironic that they use the term woke for this attitude because it's not woke.
00:33:33.900If you read Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is the ultimate anti-Frederick Douglas, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has made his entire living off of total nihilism, nihilism to such a degree that he basically cheers on September 11th in his first book.
00:34:24.760And there's a there's a poem by Vatchel Lindsay that touches on this where he says the world's worst crime is is not that the young die, but that they die so dreamlessly.
00:34:34.960And that's what that's the world Coates wants.
00:34:38.000Coates is and the anti Frederick Douglass woke 1619 crowd.
00:34:41.680That's what they're aiming at is the dreamless life.
00:34:44.100Whereas Douglass would have said America is consecrated to a dream.
00:36:07.920Because I'm afraid that the coming administration is not going to be as respectful of the Constitution as it ought to be, and that at best, what we can hope for is a system where everything gets bogged down in petty disputes.
00:36:23.040I think the kinds of change that we need in the United States are important, drastic in some cases.
00:36:32.000And in order to accomplish that, what you need is a leadership that is devoted to ideas, that understands these ideas very thoroughly and is willing to stick to principle no matter what.
00:36:44.480And I don't think that the that this or any other candidate offered that.
00:36:50.040And so we'll see, you know, there were there was good that was accomplished last time around.
00:36:54.740I think the appointment of Justice Gorsuch is a fine example of the good that can be accomplished.
00:37:00.740And he's done a lot of good on the bench.
00:37:02.920But I also think that when we talk about things like, you know, tariffs, which are taxes, just more taxation of the American working class to support the politically well entrenched, when you talk about that sort of thing, that's that's not what we need in this country.
00:37:23.140What we need is a dedicated leadership that understands free market ideas and individual rights and is willing to push for them.
00:37:28.540Do you think that Doge might very quickly be able to cut a lot of the inefficient, useless fat that currently exists?
00:37:37.120No, I think that they'll be able to identify a lot of inefficient and useless fat.
00:37:41.900But really, the problem isn't so much.
00:37:44.540Well, I guess it depends on how you define inefficient, useless fat.
00:37:47.220I mean, we're talking about entire departments of the federal government that ought to be shut down.
00:37:51.400You know, the Cato Institute just recently, I think last week, just published a list of suggestions for Doge to consider.
00:37:57.200And that would be great to see those implemented.
00:37:59.200I just I have maybe I'm too cynical, but I have little hope to see that we'll actually see those things implemented.
00:38:04.620I think what we'll see is a report a report will get written and then things will get bogged down by special interests who pretend to be Republicans when they're actually Democrats and so forth and so on.
00:38:25.080What I'm very serious when I say that the changes that need to be made are changes that need to be made by people who understand the policy, the law, the Constitution, and aren't satisfied with just, you know, drinking liberal tears and all this sort of superficial nonsense that we've heard so much in the past decade or so.
00:38:43.860We don't we are not going to accomplish people by any we're not going to accomplish good by alienating people and treating them badly.
00:39:20.100So there's that's what I mean when I mean, we have to be realistic about this and we have to approach reform, understanding the policy and the challenges that that are presented to us.
00:39:31.680But I don't I don't see a lot of that in the leadership that's so far been promised.
00:39:35.080I've seen things like, you know, the the attorney general nominee and those sorts of things.
00:40:57.940Yeah, I think something like that or maybe attorney general.
00:41:00.960You know, I think that would be a fantastic role for for a modern day Frederick Douglass to be attorney general.
00:41:08.200You know, in fact, the closest modern figure, the closest figure in today's American politics to Frederick Douglass is probably Clarence Thomas, who has a large portrait of Douglass on the wall of his office.
00:41:20.400It's at the U.S. Supreme Court building and has quoted Douglass more than any other justice in American history.
00:41:25.280So I you know, that would be great to see a Frederick, another Frederick Douglass on the U.S. Supreme Court.
00:41:39.200And then we can maybe delve into some personal issues.
00:41:42.060What makes Timothy tick in the morning and so on and so forth.
00:41:45.280But maybe we could start with what are some what are some of the give me the top two, three things that are keeping you up at night?
00:41:52.360Well, at the Goldwater Institute, what we do is primarily we focus on state level issues.
00:41:57.820We were particularly focused on state constitutions.
00:42:00.440A lot of people look at the U.S. Constitution, but they forget about state constitutions, which often contain better protections for individual rights than does the federal constitution.
00:42:10.340And so we litigate issues involving things like government subsidies to private businesses, which are actually illegal in most states.
00:42:19.920And so we litigate a lot of cases involving this, what's called the gift clause, which are clauses of state constitutions that forbid the government from giving away things.
00:42:28.540And so we litigate a lot of issues, a lot of cases involving that.
00:42:31.580We're doing cases in Arizona, Texas, New Jersey, across the country on that issue.
00:42:37.060Parental rights is a particular focus of the institute, protecting the rights of parents to be in charge of their children's upbringing and education and not government bureaucrats,
00:42:46.100who for many years have often claimed that they know better than parents and can even keep information secret from parents about what's going on in the public schools.
00:42:55.720We're litigating cases in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals about that in the courts all across the country.
00:43:02.440And then economic liberty is another issue that I particularly consider important.
00:43:07.120I think economic freedom, the right to earn a living, is as crucial a right as your right to free speech, private property rights, freedom of religion.
00:43:16.500And or certainly it's more important to most people than the right to vote.
00:43:20.940If you think about how few people actually vote and yet everybody thinks of the right to earn a living, to get a job or to start your own business as a crucial element of the American dream.
00:43:31.400And so a lot of our energies at the institute are devoted to protecting that.
00:43:34.900And that's a lot of what I work on, too.
00:43:36.900Well, I'm glad you mentioned this, the third one last, because it segues into arguably the most painful existential reality that I ever faced a few years ago.
00:43:47.980Wow, that's a terrible buildup. Now I feel sorry for you. What happened?
00:43:53.660So this book right here, The Parasitic Mind, which is, you know, went on to be a huge success because I am I reside in Canada, but the publisher is in the U.S.
00:44:05.940I got all the royalties tax free because my U.S. publisher wouldn't tax me because I'm not a resident or citizen of the U.S.
00:44:14.720But Canada, under its world income provision, right, I mean, I could move to Mars on one of Elon's ships and if I make money on Mars, that money is largely Canada's, right?
00:44:29.400And so I had this money that was sitting in my bank account for many months and then came tax season, right?
00:44:37.500And now I want you to imagine this, Timothy, there is literally in my personal bank account at the time I've since incorporated, there's the Quebec government and the Canadian government.
00:44:50.340And I just hit a send button and this very large number, which would have secured my retirement.
00:45:01.180And here I'm usually a very smiley guy, but I'm going to keep it together.
00:45:05.260It would take me, in terms of the savings that I make from my salary as a professor, well over 10 more years of working as a professor, given the number that I hit and it went send and all that money disappeared.
00:45:27.860Now, for about, I mean, literally for a week or two, I was unrecognizable.
00:45:35.020My children were worried because I just couldn't make sense of a reality where already on my professorial salary, you're taxing me well over 50%.
00:45:45.840Then I went and tried to do something.
00:45:48.680Now, there is something unique about taxing book royalties.
00:45:53.040Any taxation is problematic, certainly to that kind of punitive level.
00:45:57.160But when it's your words, when it's your thoughts, when it's me writing about my experience in Lebanon and the fruits of that initiative,
00:46:08.480the government gets to keep more of it than I do, by the way, it came out to about 58%.
00:46:16.000The highest rate that you get taxed in the Quebec and federal governments are 25% and 33% respectively.
00:46:25.920So when you add up my income tax, my property tax, now we have two layers of sales tax, which amount to about 15%.
00:46:37.360So after you've taxed me at nearly 60%, what's left with me, if I go out and spend, you take 15% of that.
00:46:47.160When you add up all the taxes, I'm lucky if I'm left with about 30 cents to the dollar.
00:46:53.440So that at the end, when I'm looking at the final statement, Timothy, and I say, my God, I'm this well-known professor with this massive international bestseller.
00:47:45.460Well, of course, of course, a better world is possible, not just in this, but in many other ways.
00:47:51.000Ideas got us into this mess, and ideas can get us out of this mess.
00:47:54.480But it takes the will to respect those who earn the wealth that others redistribute.
00:48:02.780And one of the crippling problems we have in our culture today is the lack of respect for the hard work and individual enterprise that go into creating wealth,
00:48:14.880and the right in that wealth that that creates, not just under the doctrines of socialism, obviously,
00:48:21.400but under its other cousins, ideological cousins like wokeness included, that say that what you are basically belongs to the state, right?
00:48:34.700You didn't build that philosophy that says that because the government builds a road and you drive on that road,
00:48:41.260therefore you owe your life's earnings to the government.
00:48:44.100That attitude has become very pervasive in our society, and it ultimately boils down to,
00:48:49.360you mentioned how it feels to have your own words taxed.
00:48:52.160I mean, this is, in a philosophical sense, this is saying that your mind belongs to the state.
00:50:30.280You know, I think now I don't pretend to be a psychologist, but my own theory is that the root psychological cause of this is the sense of personal worthlessness
00:50:41.320that is a part and parcel of the philosophy of altruism, which teaches people that they live for the sake of others, that the moral justification for your existence is what you do for other people, which is a lie and has been perpetuated by those in power seeking to retain power for eons.
00:51:01.120Because by teaching you that you belong to the state, not just not just in a physical sense or that your earnings belong to the state, but that you are morally worthless if you stand up for your right to exist for your own happiness.
00:51:13.580I mean, the reason for why America speaks of the pursuit of happiness, right, the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, whereas in Canada, you have peace, order and good government, right?
00:51:23.820Those are psychologically worlds apart from each other.
00:51:27.760And America was fundamentally based on the principle that I have a right to pursue my own happiness, which, of course, brings us back to Douglas, because this is what Douglas means when he says he who would be free must himself strike the blow.
00:51:39.240What he means is you have the right to live for your own sake. You do not belong to other people, not just in a political sense, but in a moral sense, you that the philosophy of altruism and the sense of self-worthlessness that it inculcates is false and is basically invisible shackles on you.
00:51:57.280And actually, to bring this back to Douglas, by the way, I mentioned at the very beginning that Douglas loved photography.
00:52:04.680One of the most interesting things Douglas ever did was he delivered a series of lectures on the philosophy of picture making, which I think are the most interesting, certainly among the most interesting things he ever wrote.
00:52:17.520And his idea was basically what you and I might call a romanticist notion.
00:52:23.280What he said was human beings are unique because we envision, we create a vision of the self we want to be, and then we try to embody those values.
00:52:33.880There was a philosopher, Iris Murdoch, who said man is a being who creates a picture and then tries to be like the picture.
00:52:40.480And that's exactly what Douglas thought. And so that's why he loved great heroic stories like Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.
00:52:48.920Those were his favorite writers because he said he had this heroic vision of what it means to be a human being, as opposed to the nihilistic vision we were talking about earlier that sees man as helpless and as a figure, basically a puppet of circumstances.
00:53:05.160And that the only way we can seek salvation is to enslave ourselves for the benefit of our fellow slaves and that I owe my life to satisfying other people and so forth and so on.
00:53:17.080Douglas had a very different vision of the world. He said life is full of joy and possibility and opportunity if you will embrace it.
00:53:24.900And the first step toward doing that is saying I exist for my own sake, for the pursuit of my own happiness, and I have a right to do so.
00:53:32.820And nobody has the right to take that away from me, whether it be in the form of deducting money from your bank account or in Douglas's case, actually shackling you with with iron chains.
00:53:43.460Well, two points to follow up. Number one, did you know that Thomas Sowell is a big photographer as well?
00:53:51.320Did you know that? Excellent. No, I didn't. That's one of the things.
00:53:54.080That was Barry Goldwater. Is that right? Wow.
00:53:58.440I claim to have a big love of photography in that, in the abstract sense, I really love the idea.
00:54:04.640We used to play a game in my family when the kids were very young, where we would each have, you know, a few minutes to take one photo of anything in the house.
00:54:16.380And then those four photos, so we have two children, my wife and I, we would send them to an impartial arbiter who was usually my wife's parents.
00:54:26.000And then without them knowing who it was, they'd have to judge which was the aesthetically more beautiful.
00:54:33.080And so I can really appreciate, you know, the idea of sort of finding a moment and freezing it.
00:54:39.120I, although I haven't really practiced much photography, the second point I was going to make is that, and this kind of segues into my next book.
00:54:46.340My next book is titled Suicidal Empathy.
00:54:48.460The idea being that empathy, as long as it is targeted to the right people and in right measure, makes perfect evolutionary sense.
00:54:58.500So here I'm going to bring in my evolutionary psychology perspective.
00:55:01.180So it's not as though, you know, we are not empathetic creatures, but we are not orgiastically and indiscriminately empathetic towards all.
00:55:11.300It makes perfect evolutionary sense for me to be more than willing to jump in front of a moving bus to save my children than I am to save a random stranger.
00:55:20.080That doesn't make me a callous, selfish individual.
00:55:23.100It makes me a Darwinian sentient being.
00:55:25.440And so in a sense, what parasitic taxation and the social welfare state and so on do, they are anti-human nature because you and I and everybody else walking on earth, short of those who benefit from the parasitic taxation, have not evolved to say, you know what, let me go out and write these great books so that it could benefit random strangers.
00:55:46.700I mean, not in terms of the ideas, but in terms of the rewards, the pecuniary rewards that come with me selling those books.
00:55:57.680And what really is probably the the the cap on the the moral offense of those who say otherwise is that they label their doctrine of self-sacrifice love.
00:56:09.440And they say, well, you need to love your fellow man more because you're so greedy and selfish.
00:56:14.300And this is a doctrine of mutual enslavement that's being taught to us under the under the name love.
00:56:19.400Just imagine what it would be like to actually love a person in the way that they're speaking of to say to to your girlfriend, you're going to propose to her.
00:56:29.000You say, well, well, dear, I would I'm going to propose that we get married, not out of any selfish desire on my part, not because it makes me happy as a greedy, selfish person.
00:56:38.880But for your sake, for the sake of for you, as a as an act of charity, because I love you in this selfless sense, it's a sacrifice to me to be married to you.
00:56:49.420But here's what a good person I am that I'm going to do it anyway.
00:57:08.940You were mentioning the pursuit of happiness as being enshrined within the American ethos.
00:57:14.740My latest book, my previous book was called The Sad Truth About Happiness, where I tried.
00:57:21.080I had the goal to actually write a book about happiness when people since Epictetus and Seneca and Aristotle have been writing about happiness.
00:57:29.300Hopefully I had something insightful to say.
00:57:31.320What is it when Timothy Sandefur wakes up in the morning?
00:57:38.640What is it that makes him happy as he looks over the looming horizon of that day, of that week, of that year?
00:57:48.060I'm one of the great good fortunes of my life is that not only do I get to do something that I love for a living and that I care deeply about and that, you know,
00:57:58.060I love the history and the law and the philosophy of freedom, and that's what I get to do for a living.
00:58:02.460But I'm also incredibly fortunate that I have a wife who shares that with me.
00:58:06.900In fact, she works alongside me here at the Institute.
00:58:09.520Actually, technically, she's my boss, believe it or not, both at home and at work.
00:58:16.540And so I have that is a huge benefit, a huge blessing in life to not only have a career that you love and care about, but have a partner who cares and loves that cares about and loves that thing also.
00:58:43.020Your answer is actually one of the chapters in my happiness book, because I talk about the two decisions that you'll make in your life that are most likely to either impart great happiness or great misery,
00:58:54.880depending on whether you make the right or wrong choice, is choice of spouse and choice of profession.