 I wanted to step back, though, from most of these topics. You know, we've talked about COVID, we've talked about the stimulus and the Fed and the economics. We talked about Big Tech and BLM and intersectionality and cancer culture and riots and entitlements and all this stuff, right? And I want to step back and take a big picture, look at it kind of more philosophically and more fundamentally. What is driving all this insanity in the world? And Ayn Rand once said a long time ago, and I can't remember what essay it was, she says the world is dying of an orgy of altruism. I should have made that the title of the show. Orgy, I think, would have attracted a lot of people to the show if I'd used orgy in the title. But the world is dying from an orgy of altruism. And I think right now it's so evident. It's so evident that this is what's going on. An orgy of altruism, an orgy of self-sacrifice, but a perspective on human beings that ignores the individual, ignores individual values, ignores individual happiness. And this is why I titled it the war on individual values. It could have been the war on individual happiness. It could have been an orgy of altruism is killing the world. Altruism is everywhere. Self-sacrifice, the demand for self-sacrifice is everywhere. And importantly, the attack on the individual, his mind and his values is everywhere. And it's a good time to kind of, Linda reminds me that Gail Weynand in the fontanet actually said it. Wow, yeah, I think they're right. I don't remember that because I think I mentioned it later as well, but it's in the fontanet under Gail. That's interesting, but I think it's absolutely true. So I thought we would take some of the issues of the day, issues we've been talking about, issues that we're now not gonna get into the details of should we wear a mask and is big tech all good. But just look at the approach that people take to COVID, to big tech, to trade, to stimulus, to all these things. Look at a firmness perspective from the perspective of altruism, from the perspective of self-sacrifice, from the perspective of a demand that you give up your values, or a different perspective on that is that these issues approach from the perspectives of we in power, we who are smart, who are smart, we who, the philosopher Kingsel would like to be, we don't care about your values. We don't care about your life as an individual. We don't care about your happiness. So I wanna, I wanna, before we get into that, I wanna, so I wanna go through a list of topics and just show how that applies, right? And I'm happy for you to ask questions and see if it applies to other issues and other places and how they all get connected would be amazing if we could do a show around that. But I wanna remind you first of what we mean by altruism and how devastating altruism is and how subtle its effects usually are. Altruism is the moral doctrine that says that your life, the purpose of your life to be other people's wellbeing. That morality entails you sacrificing your values for the sake of others. And importantly, it entails not being selfish. Now what they mean by not being selfish is not thinking of self, not taking your own interests into account, not thinking about your own values, not pursuing your own values, not living for you. Altruism demands that you not think about your values, your happiness, your life, your success. It demands that you focus on others. And when you do think about yourself, when you do act or think selfishly, it demands and expects that you feel guilty and that that results in some kind of competition, some kind of action that will redeem you. So altruism more than a positive ideology, and this is a really important point I think. Altruism more than a positive ideology is a negative one in the sense that what it's really interested in is not you helping others. What it's really interested in is not the wellbeing of other people. What it's really interested in is you not thinking of yourself. I mean, Comte, the guy who founded the name gave it the name altruism, although the ideas have been around forever, says that if you think of yourself, you think you're helping somebody else and you're enjoying it, and you think, oh, I'll help this person and I'll have a good time, I'll enjoy it, I'll get some satisfaction out of it. It's not a moral action anymore, because you dare to think of yourself. Contemplize, you know, contemplize the same thing. Christianity is suspicious if you're too happy, too successful. Spend too much time thinking about your own values or get too much pleasure and do things for the pleasure of helping others and not just helping others for the sake of helping others. So altruism is primarily dedicated to suppressing your own values, suppressing your own life, suppressing your own thinking because at the heart of being selfish is thinking, at the heart of pursuing and choosing values is thinking. And therefore what they're trying to do is to cause you to think, to cause you not to think. And indeed, thinking about the wellbeing of other people is always a dead end. And of course they have to think about the wellbeing of others. It's just a rational dead end. So the best is not to think, the best is to do your duty, the best is to act based on what people tell you what's conventional, what's perceived as good and right, what's good supposedly for the group. How do we know what's good for the group? The group doesn't tell us, but it's leaders do. It's those people who would like to be a philosopher king who tell us what we should sacrifice to, how we should sacrifice and how we should go about. Somebody says, age of altruism, age of nihilism. Well, ultimately the one leads to the other. Altruism is not practical. Particularly when you get rid of Christianity, when you get rid of God, when you get rid of God, then altruism is just not practical. God and religion give altruism a sudden practicality in that they say, yeah, you're gonna suffer in this life but you'll get an afterlife. But once you take religion out, and this is in a sense Nietzsche and some of the other moderns who claimed we were heading towards nihilism were right, once you take religion out, the altruism becomes untenable. Why am I sacrificing? For who am I sacrificing? What's the point if life is just about suffering and there's no afterlife and there's no God, then what's the point of the suffering? And that's the path to nihilism. There's no point in the suffering. But happiness is impossible and happiness would be selfish and that's impossible. That's wrong, we know that's wrong. So what's good, what's moral, what's just causes pain, what's evil might lead to happiness but who wants the happiness if you have to pursue evil to do it? So what the hell, let's just blow stuff up and burn stuff down. And that's how you get the nihilism. The nihilism is, for the most part, a rejection of altruism with no, but without rejecting altruism, without really rejecting it, rejecting the outcome of altruism and therefore rejecting life, qua life, rejecting it all. I will get to questions that are unrelated at the end. So I will answer all these, I promise. Remember, if you wanna get a question answered with high priority, 20 bucks or more, 20 bucks or more. So altruism is primarily the negation of your mind, your values, your happiness. So let's see how this plays out in the different things, in the different issues, political issues that we have today. Altruism also, you know, so let's take COVID. Let's take the response to COVID. The response to COVID has been first to treat everybody the same, not to discriminate. And indeed, to make sure we sacrifice the able, the healthy, to the vulnerable. Instead of, for example, locking down the vulnerable and allowing the rest of humanity to live their lives, you know, under the assumption that they are adults and can figure out their own risk, we don't treat them as individuals. We don't let them choose their own values. We don't differentiate between them and vulnerable people. For example, since February, we have known that most of people who die from this disease are old, that the majority of people who die from COVID are over 65. The data from China was clear about that, and it's been consistent in Italy and England and the US, everywhere. It's been consistent. Old people are the ones most vulnerable to this disease. They die in very large numbers, very high percentage of those who get it die. But among people under 65, it's not that big of a deal. Yes, there are other comorbidities, overweight, diabetes, heart disease, which are usually related to obesity. So it's not clear if it's a heart disease, if it's a diabetes, or if it's obesity. We've known who is vulnerable. Has any political leader come out and said, all right, you know, here's who's vulnerable, here's who's likely to die. We need to protect these people. Here are specific measures that you can take to protect them in order to not overload the hospitals. In particular, we're asking these people not to leave their home. Here's a way we can facilitate the delivery of food for them or whatever. If you have a multi-generational in the house, isolate them, make sure they don't interact, lock them in the room. No, nobody has done that. None of our political leaders, none of our intellectual leaders have done that. They don't differentiate. We all have to suffer. We all have to have now values thrown out the windows. Nobody has treated us as individuals with minds. Nobody's come out and said, here are the risk factors. Here's the danger. Here are the people most vulnerable. Here's how you would act if you were responsible and if you cared about your fellow man and you didn't want to inflict this damage on them. And then we would get to choose, based on our value hierarchy. What activities we want to engage in and what activities we didn't want to engage in and how we were going to protect the people that we cared about who were vulnerable, how we as individuals were going to protect ourselves and our families and how we were gonna live our lives given this new environment, this disease that's out there, how we were gonna live our lives on a day-to-day basis in pursuit of our values, in pursuit of our happiness. We, as individuals, could have made those decisions. But no, we were treated as mindless mobs as a collective that cannot think for itself. We weren't treated as individuals. We were treated as mindless nobodies. That's altruism. Don't pursue your own values. Don't think for yourself. Don't make the risk calculation for yourself. And by the way, the reason for that is that you're all, if you do that, if we let people think for themselves, if we let people act for themselves, if we let people be selfish, then they will score everybody else. They will behave in irresponsible ways and people will be dying in the streets and there'll be millions of people in the hospitals will be overloaded. So we can't treat them as adults. We can't rely on their values. We can't rely on their thinking. We can't rely on their selfishness. Therefore, we need to dictate to them what they can and cannot do. The whole response to COVID from beginning to end has been an orgy of altruism. An expectation of an orgy of self-sacrifice. You can't leave your home unless you walk your dog or whatever. You know, lockdowns. Lockdowns that have no connection to science. Lockdowns that are not related to the cases in a particular area. Lockdowns that, again, don't treat us as adults but treat us as sheep, as a blob, as a mindless collective. And at every stage, at every point, it hasn't been about hear the facts, hear the information. You, as an individual, for the purpose of your own life, for the purpose of the pursuit of your own values, you make the appropriate decisions relative to your life. I mean, it's interesting that of all the governments in the world, the one that actually behaved in this way is Sweden, a country not known for its respect for individualism or focus on selfishness of the individual mind. But they treated individuals like that. They gave everybody the facts, and they told them, you should socially distance. If you can walk in a home, you should walk from home. But we're not gonna ban that. And you shouldn't interact with your older Swedes because they're very vulnerable, they could die. Now, they screwed up, they didn't protect their elderly well enough. And they didn't do the other things that government's supposed to do, which is test, trace, and isolate. And they managed. New Zealand did well if you consider locking people down well. I don't consider lockdowns well. Lockdowns are an abuse of individual liberty, individual freedom. And a virus doesn't justify locking people down. Now, Sweden was not ideal. Again, Sweden was not ideal because of the lack of testing, tracing and isolating. And because of the lack of support for the elderly. But Sweden treated their citizens like adults as individuals. And indeed, there's something in the Scandinavian spirit that's much more individualistic than I think most of us expect or most of us assume because we've been so drilled into us that Sweden is socialist. And there is a strong element of collectivism, Sweden. But there's also strong elements of individualism there. It's a very entrepreneurial culture. And particularly when they leave Sweden and come to the United States. So altruism is all over the COVID response in every aspect of it. You know, even masking now, it's the same thing. Now, I'm generally full masks. I think Cura gave a good argument yesterday. It reduces the probability you get it, reduces the probability you give it to other people. But if you're outdoors and there's nobody around you, it's silly to mask. If you're outdoors and there are other people around you, but there's a distance between you, it's silly to mask. If you're outdoors and there's a nice breeze and there's plenty of distance, it's silly to mask. If you're indoors in a crowded place where everybody's shoulder to shoulder, it's pretty important to mask. But no, everybody has to treat this the same and tell with facts, tell with evidence, tell with science, tell with research. Tell with just common sense. We have to either impose a mask on everybody all the time. So Biden wants to have a mask mandate whenever you're outside your home. I guess they would want us to wear them in the house and sleep with them. And then of course, these right wing groups, I guess, I don't know what they are, who believe we shouldn't mask ever. Both attitudes, unscientific. Both attitudes do not take into account individual human values. Both attitudes don't take into account thinking, facts, reality. That's what's common. We got a couple of related questions, so I'll take them quickly. Isn't morally acceptable for government to force people entering their countries and border staff to get COVID tests so that the country can keep the virus away? Yes, I think absolutely. So I think that part of what the border is for is to screen people. You screen people that might possess risk. And during a pandemic, there is complete reasonable cause to screen everybody, to actually force everybody to take a test. You want to come in, you've got to take a test. Because if you are carrying the virus, you pose a threat to the individual rights of the people there. And since the test is easy, quick, if you, why would you refuse? Why would you willingly want to go into a country and pose a risk to its population? So, yes, I think it's completely appropriate for them to do so. As it would be for them, for example, for the government to say if you want to enter government property. I mean, this is the beauty of the kind of test Kiro was talking about yesterday, where you could, you know, these paper tests where you get almost immediate results is before you enter anything, a stadium, government property, anything, you could test people. Ashley writes, one of the grossest, most altruistic, ignorant and ungrateful things said was people have gone to war. I think you can sit on your couch, shut down your business for an infinite period of time. Yes, I mean, that is such a denigration of individual values, of individual choices. By the way, I don't think there should have been a draft. So people shouldn't have gone to war because they were forced to go to war. People should have gone to war only, only if they volunteered. And that means only if it was inconsistent with their values. So just like a draft was wrong, even in World War II, certainly for Vietnam and Korea, so is a mandated staying at home wrong. If I would have chosen to go to war, then it means it's part of my values. And I could have chosen to stay home. But it has to be a choice. It has to be consistent with my values. It's also an unbelievable denigration and putting down the whole attitude of the economy versus health, as if you can have health without an economy. Is such a denigration of work, the importance of work to a selfish individual, to a value pursuing individual, to a healthy individual, to a thinking individual. Work is essential. Productive activity is essential for human flourishing, essential for human values, and therefore essential for human happiness. And now there is a context in which I want to say I'm not gonna go to work, I'm gonna go to war, or I'm gonna stay at home because the danger is such that this is consistent with my values, the most important thing I can do. Only, only I can make that choice for myself, not you, not an epidemiologist, not the government. What the epidemiologists can do, and what our government could facilitate, is to provide us with knowledge, to provide us with information, to give us a sense of what the real risks are, and what my real options are, and who's really a danger. And that of course is not being done at any level by anybody or we get a conflicting politically motivated statements of so-called facts. But note the complete and the disregard of individual values, of individual choices, of the individual mind making his own decisions. That is driven, not explicitly, but implicitly by altruism. Altruism is what drives us to disregard the individual, to disregard his mind, to disregard his values. Why should we care? His job is to sacrifice for the collective. His job is to be a cog in the collective machine and if we need him to stay home today or if we need him to go to war today, he must obey. That mentality, that idea is untenable, particularly in America, without the dominance of an altruistic morelly. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. Broads. 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