 the radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Saturday afternoon. Hope everybody's having a fantastic weekend. And you're looking forward to another Iran Brookshow. I can't offer you quite a sexier topic as last night, where the topic was sex. Hopefully, you've all listened to that show. If you haven't, you should. But we will be talking about a topic that is trending right now. And this is why I switched topics at the last minute. I apologize. I know some of you were looking forward to embracing challenges in life, changes in life, changing life, anyway, whatever. But an episode of Iran's Wolves for Life. We'll do that another time. But I did want to write the wave right now of chatter on Twitter, at least, about the sources of rights, where the rights come from. This seems to be a big issue on Twitter right now, a big debate between the left and the right. And as always, they're both wrong. So we will get into that, and we will discuss that. Of course, I will be taking questions from you. So I'll be talking about whatever you want me to talk about once we have a discussion and dig into a little bit this issue of individual rights. But yes, where do individual rights come from? And there are three distinct positions. There are a bunch of variations on the theme. I'll give you what those are. But we'll talk about the three positions. And I'll give you some illustrations of those. All right. Yeah, let's jump in, and we'll do the announcements and all that stuff later, right, towards the end. Let's jump in. OK, so this all kind of became a big deal, and suddenly hit Twitter with a storm, really, it seems. Yesterday, I think, when this woman, I forget who she is. I don't know who she is. I should probably have gotten her name. Anyway, this woman went to MSNBC and said the following. I'm going to show you the section. It's 20 seconds long, so it's pretty short. But this created a massive conversation. And then I'll give you a Christian response to it, and then we'll talk about other alternative responses to it, and then we'll talk about the objectivist response. So let's start with this lady whose name I don't know. It's right here. Hopefully, you can see it. And she is talking about here, Christian nationalism. So this is 20 seconds out of a longer discussion where she's talking about the rise of Christian nationalism. And Donald Trump is going to surround himself with Christian nationalists. And this is going to be their agenda. The second Trump administration is going to be a Christian nationalist agenda. I don't necessarily disagree with much of that. But this 20 seconds has created a firestorm. It's a standard view, but suddenly everybody picked on it because this is how social media works. Somebody says something, like a million people say stuff, and it's ignored. And one person says something, and suddenly it just hits in the right time, in the right place. Somebody clips it out, puts it up, and boom, a firestorm happens. Anyway, let's watch. Let's see what actually happened. So this is her. Let me know if the volume is off or are there any other problems. And that unites all of them, because there's many different groups orbiting Trump. But the thing that unites them as Christian nationalists, not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalists is very different, is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don't come from any earthly authority. They don't come from Congress. They don't come from the Supreme Court. They come from God. Anything that unites? All right, so she's basically saying, because she's been critical here. I mean, she's not saying this as kind of a neutral position. She's been critical. She's saying, these Christian conservatives, they think this crazy thing. They think that rights don't come from Congress. They don't come from the Supreme Court. They come from God. Now, we'll get to the argument about them coming from God in a minute. But let's first deal with this question of, do they come from Congress? Do they come from the Supreme Court? And the answer, of course, is, God, if you read The Funny Fathers, if you know anything about The Funny Fathers, if you read The Declaration of Independence, if you know anything about the conception of rights on which this country is founded, then clearly the answer is, it doesn't come from Congress. And it doesn't come from the Supreme Court. Indeed, the whole concept of rights to a large extent is there to protect us from Congress, the Supreme Court, a president, or any other group that has a majority that can inflict their will on us, even if they don't have a majority, any group that can oppress us in any kind of way. As Ein Rand writes, the principle of man's individual rights represents the extension of morality into the social system, as a limitation on the power of the state, as man's protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. Individual rights, in a sense, stand above government. They are what limit government. They are what constrain government. They can't be something that government determines because then they're not rights at all. Then they're kind of privileges granted to us by the authorities. However, the authorities come to be whether through a democratic process or whether through any kind of process. Rights must be primary to government. And government has to be subordinated to rights. Its functions must be subordinate to rights. So there's no way that government can give us rights. They're not rights then again. It's an negation of the whole idea of what rights are. And it's an negation, importantly, of the purpose of rights, the function of rights. The function is, whoops, I almost screwed that up, the function is to subordinate might to right. And here might, you can conceive of might as majority rule, a dictatorship. The force that government can bring to bear on dictating how you live your life or not live your life. So rights are there to limit the power of the state. That's their purpose. And we'll talk about limit on the basis of what? As man's protection against the brute force of the collective. So whether rights come from God or from somewhere else that we haven't yet discovered or that they haven't yet discovered, rights cannot be something the society votes on. Rights are exactly there to protect us exactly from that. They're there to protect us from Congress, Empton Supreme Court, and from the president, and from all the other. They're there to protect us from politics. They're there to protect us from our neighbors. They're there to protect us from the majority. They're there to subordinate those functions of society to a specific kind of moral law. And that is really the concept that the founders have, is that rights are, in that sense, above government, that government is there to protect the rights. But the rights are not defined by the agency that is protecting them. One of the problems with Anarchy is there's no mechanism by which rights can be above the law. Rights are exactly defined differently by different protection agencies. Go figure that one out and how that lands up and how that all gets settled. All right. So what she's saying is a complete negation, complete negation of the American system of government, complete negation of individual rights. The left wants to keep the concept of rights without adhering to the way it arose historically, without adhering to where it came from, without any kind of understanding of what the purpose of the concept is. Because if Congress just decides, then why is it a right? It's just a law. It's just something Congress decides. The whole idea is that rights are the measure by which we evaluate every law. Is it violating our rights? Or is it protecting our rights? So it's the standard. All right, so that's kind of the left's notion, which is basically they don't want to conceive. They cannot conceive, or they don't want to conceive of anything that limits society's ability to use force, to use coercion, to use might against the individual and therefore rights are a social creation. They're just something that we come up with. And we can change, constantly change, based on the democratic process. Congress. All right, that is conception number one. Conception number two is, of course, a response to this. So this is who is this guy? He is Bishop Robert Barron. And Bishop Warren Barron, this is a little longer. And he wants to, he is there to basically share some reflections with you concerning a recent clip you saw, I saw, from MSNBC, which was one of the most disturbing and frankly dangerous things I've ever seen in a political conversation, which is a little funny because whatever she said in that clip is basically standard practice on basically left of center and maybe even among many right of center. It's basically standard practice among most people who are not super religious, who don't hold the idea that rights come from God. So here is Bishop Robert Barron. He's got that big cross, just in case you didn't notice the white collar, just in case you didn't see the uniform, he's here to let you know that he is from the School of Christ. He is a bearer of a cross. This is pretty powerful stuff. All right, let's watch the bishop explain the alternative. The alternative to the leftist conception of rights. Everybody, it's Bishop Barron. I want to share with you some reflections on a clip I saw. I think it came out last night. Heidi Prishbulla from Politico was on MSNBC. It was one of the most disturbing and frankly dangerous things I've ever seen in a political conversation. She's going after what she calls Christian nationalism. But what she said was, there are these Christian nationalists out there who are claiming that our rights don't come from any human authority. They come from God. And she specified that they're claiming these weirdos, that they're coming not from the Supreme Court or from Congress. Well, first of all, it was Thomas Jefferson who made that claim. We hold these truths to be self-evident that we're endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. And may I say, everybody, it is exceptionally dangerous when we forget the principle that our rights come from God and not from a government. Because the basic problem is, if they come from the government or Congress or the Supreme Court, they can be taken away by those same people. This is opening the door to totalitarianism. This is not some kind of religious nationalism or sectarianism. It's one of the sanest principles of our democratic governance that our rights come from God. Yes, government exists to secure these rights, the Declaration says, not to produce them. It is exceptionally dangerous to go down this road because as I say, we lose our groundedness in something transcendent and become, therefore, by that very move victims of a potentially totalitarian state that can take away the same rights that they gave us in the first place. So can I just say that in their enthusiasm, I suppose, to go against so-called Christian nationalism, they're actually going against the foundations of our democracy. And it's a further evidence of this extreme hostility of the left now toward religion. No, no, precisely as an American, I want to hold that my rights come not from something as vacillating and unreliable as Congress or the Supreme Court, they come from God. All right, so we don't want to rely on something completely unreliable like Congress or the Supreme Court. We don't want to rely on something that can move around and change. We want something solid. We want something that is not gonna change, that is gonna be permanent. And therefore what we want is rights given to us by God by a made up delusion, by a pretend creature that people believe in, not through logic, reason, facts, evidence, but through faith, in other words, through emotion. So, you know, Congress and Supreme Court could change their mind, rights could change, rights could alter. God on the other hand, that's permanent. That is fixed. And we know that if rights can change because of Congress and Supreme Court, we could get totalitarianism. But we know also that God would never, never promote totalitarianism. He would never go for that. And that he has given us these rights that are fixed, that are there to preserve and make it permanent, our liberty and our freedom. How do we know this? I don't know. How do we know this? Because God told it to somebody because people derived it from out of Christianity. How do we know God believes in rights? I mean, let me just be very clear. The God of the Old Testament does not believe in individual rights. No such concept. Not for anybody. This is the God of the Christians believe in individual rights. Well, not really. I mean, Christians have slaves, indeed, you know, slavery in the South that defended for the most part on the basis of religion. Constantine, who brought Christianity, made it the religion of the Roman Empire, was a, as close as you could come to a totalitarian in an era without technology. Certainly authoritarian. He didn't have the concept of rights. I mean, is the concept of rights anywhere to be found in Christianity's first, certainly 1400 years? No. No. And has God ever changed his mind about anything? Well, let's just take the Catholic Church as an example. Has the Catholic Church ever changed his mind about everything, anything? Well, just as an illustration, just recently the Pope said it was okay for priests to confirm gay marriage. That's a big change, not a little, big change. The Catholic Church has changed his mind about usury laws. Used to be a mortal sin, it is now okay. The Catholic Church has changed its mind about pretty much, not everything, but a lot, a lot. And who's to say the Catholic Church is right about even the dogma of Christianity and what Jesus actually said, given how often the Catholic Church has splintered, disagreed, demolished its rivals, slaughtered them, killed them, has God changed his mind about killing? Is there a consensus about killing? Is killing moral or immoral? Is individual rights applied to killing, not killing? I mean, and what happens? Bishop Baron, if it turns out God doesn't exist, which I think is pretty much a certainty. What happens then to the issue of individual rights? Does it just go away? Does it disappear? This is the achievement of John Locke and the achievement of Thomas Jefferson. Just be meaningless because it turns out they were wrong about God. I'm not sure Jefferson was wrong about God, but it appears they were wrong about God, at least in the formulation. And therefore the concept is void, null, void, gone. We have to revert to the democracy. We have to revert to. So individual rights are too important a concept. Too foundational a concept. Too important an achievement in individual rights as an idea or an achievement to be left to the notion of a fairy tale. A made up being who, how do we know what he actually thinks? Even if he exists, we have no idea. We have no idea, right? We don't know if God exists, he doesn't. But if he existed, what he thought? He certainly wasn't clear about it. And there's no reason to believe that Thomas Jefferson had any direct link to him or John Locke had any direct link to him and got it from him in Revelation with certainty. So grounding one of the greatest political achievements in all of human history in terms of conceptual achievements, in terms of God is in Barron, Bishop Barron's term, super dangerous. It makes that achievement contestable. It makes it debatable. And it makes it open to revelation, new revelation, new information about what God thinks or doesn't think. I can imagine a Christian conservative one day saying, yeah, yeah, individual rights, but I'm communing directly or I've got the passages right in front of me and God meant something a little different than what Thomas Jefferson, that atheist, that deist, that horrible person actually meant. Jefferson got a right for the time. But now we have an updated version, just like Jesus had an update on the Old Testament. Now we have an updated version of what rights mean. So rights are not fixed. I mean, ultimately God is not fixed. And we have the same problem. God ultimately, if you believe in God, ultimately is a totalitarian. Is there anything more totalitarian than God? He is everywhere. He knows everything. He judges you constantly. He rewards you and punishes you. At his whim, not even related to anything you particularly did, just read the book of Job. If you don't believe that, it's really completely arbitrary. Completely arbitrary. So God is the foundation of rights is actually as scary and in the wrong hands scarier than Congress and the Supreme Court. And I think Thomas Jefferson knew what he was doing. When he said creator, not a Christian God, he left it kind of open. Is this the creator nature? Is it part of our nature that we have rights? Which I think is the way Thomas Jefferson was closer to thinking in those terms, rather than in terms of, God instilled those rights, gave us those rights and without God, they go away. Without a belief in God, they go away. I think Jefferson probably believed in God, but a very different God than Bishop Barron. Very, very different God than Bishop Barron. Bishop Barron would be horrified by Thomas Jefferson's God. And Jefferson was, by all accounts, a deist. And deists believed more in a prime mover, somebody who initially believed in God who initiated the process and basically lives us alone. Than a God who intervenes in a God who places and endows us with rights. Endows us with rights. I think in Thomas Jefferson's concept, only to the extent that he has designed the process in which he started brought about nature. And nature brought about human beings because of their nature endowed with these rights, which we'll talk about. All right, so those are the two common perspectives on rights. And the two alternatives, the two false alternatives that I think most of the culture presents us with with regard to individual rights and where they come from. And both are wrong and both are incredibly dangerous. I think in most of American history, we have kind of skirted this issue and not really, you know, there's this idea that rights are there, but Congress can also overturn them and rights definition of rights changes over time. So we've given way too much power to Congress and the courts. And yet there's still this vague idea that yes, we're endowed with them by a creator and there's still some respect for that. So it's kind of the tension between those two positions which has shaped the understanding of individual rights in America over the last 200 years. And I think as a consequence, we have the disaster that is the perspective of individual rights over the last 250 years in America and why our understanding of rights is so weak and why our government is so weak in terms of protecting our rights and is so strong in terms of violating them. And has been for well over a hundred years because of this very weak understanding of where rights come from and what purpose rights actually serve. And to some extent the peak understanding of the concept of rights was with the founding fathers and it's only deteriorated since then with the exception of Ayn Rand, of course, which we'll get to. All right, so here's an alternative explanation. This one is from, he calls himself a libertarian Darwinist. He says, where do human rights come from? One, the belief that human rights come from government means they can be negated by government. Absolutely true. Two, the belief that human rights come from divine creator means that it's hard to get people of different religious or atheist degree on what those rights are. Yeah, but it's much worse than that as we've just talked about, much worse than that. In a sense it makes them arbitrary. And it's not even about, it makes them arbitrary so of course you can't agree on them. Three, the belief that human rights are cultural formulations and institutional crystallizations of evolved scientific interests, preferences and agendas seems most empirical accurate to me as a Darwinian libertarian. But it's too abstract and intellectual to motivate most people to defend those rights and to understand those rights might, to understand and understanding of those rights might change as our understanding of human nature changes. So you, it's an attempt to say, well, it's our culture, it's our society, it's our best understanding of the nature of man and all the data that we have where those rights, and I have no idea what he would define as rights and how we would interpret them. But it's this attempt to come up with a secular definition of rights that is not beholden to God and is not beholden to government in places that are outside. So he's attempting to do it, but cultural formulations and institutional crystallizations of evolved scientific interests, preferences and agendas is about as ambiguous, meaningless mumbo jumbo as it gets. Far from clear-cut crystal clear in terms of what actually rights are, what are rights? Tell me, what are rights? And what rights do I have? He's on the right track in a sense. He's trying to come up with a formulation that is derived from reality. This is, you know, he talks about empirical accurate interest preferences and agendas. I'm not sure what all that has to do with it, but he's talking about at least data, but it's a mishmash. And then finally, there is the very popular perspective on individual rights, which comes from a Juval Noah Harari, but he is just one expression of this view that is far more expansive out there. And that is the perception of rights as they don't exist. They're just a fiction of our imagination. They're a convenient fiction that we created to try to understand certain things, but they're just a fiction. There is no such thing as rights. And if you've seen any of my videos on Juval Noah Harari, I did one actually just critiquing this notion of, he literally says, when you open up a cadaver, when you open up a corpse, even when you open up a living human being, you can't find any rights inside. You can find a kidney, you can find a liver, you can't find any rights inside. You can't find love, you can't find reason, you can't find any conceptual knowledge inside. That's not how knowledge works. Knowledge doesn't come into some concrete formulation, concrete reality in front of us. Maybe in some ridiculous interpretation of platonic Plato's ideas, you get that, but that's it, those are the alternatives. Comes to God, comes to society, doesn't exist. Comes to God, comes to government, doesn't exist. Those are the alternatives basically. God, the world needs iron rant. The world really, really, really does need iron rant. So what are rights? Rights are a moral concept. They're just as real as any concept in morality. They're real in terms of they describe certain principles by which human beings should live. Can live would be ridiculous to have a should where the can is impossible. Principles, abstract ideas. But I know this comes as a shock to you, but abstract ideas are just as real, assuming the good ideas as any concrete knowledge. They're just more abstract, more difficult to comprehend, more difficult to understand. They require drum roll piece. They actually require thinking. Thinking, integrating, observing the world out there and integrating concepts in order to come to a particular truth. In this case, rights are a truth that relates to how we should live as individuals in a society, in a social context. To quote iron rant. And by the way, here I highly recommend, anybody interested in the whole idea of rights, I highly recommend iron rant's essays. Essay man's rights. Man's rights. You can find it in a number of different places. Capitalism not known ideal. It's in the back of the book in the virtue of selfishness. I think it's in the back of the book. You can find man's rights online. It's one of the must read essays of anybody interested in politics, political theory, history and objectivism. It is a crucial essay to understand the world around us. It really is. So I encourage everybody to get man's rights. It is, again, available online for free. So you have no real excuses. But of course, if you have capitalism not known ideal, which everybody should have, if you have the virtue of selfishness, which everybody should have, then these essays are at the back of the book. And this essay is at the back of the book and you should read it. Rand says, writes our moral concept. The concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others. The concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context. The link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society. Between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. To making sure, this is me, not anyone, to making sure, I think you'll be able to tell, just because of that, how condensed the formulations are, and how beautiful they are, might not quite. To making sure that whatever we do in society, whatever our government and our courts do, it is consistent with morality. It's consistent with the morality of man. And what morality here are we talking about? We're talking about a morality of an individual pursuing his life. Of an individual pursuing his values, his goals, based on his own thinking. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. It's a process of acting, of the pursuit of values, pursuit of goals. So the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining, self-generating action. The right to life means that you have a right to do what is necessary to live your life. So here again, as I read, a right is a moral principle, defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. There's only one fundamental right. All the others, its consequences are corollaries. A man's right to his own life. Life is the process of self-sustaining and self-generating action. The right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generating action, which means the freedom, the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of one's own life. So here we go again, what does the right to life mean? The freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of one's own life. That doesn't come down from us from God. He didn't instill in it the moment of conception that makes the whole idea of human beings having rights as zygots or fetuses, right? Freedom to act, freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of the rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. It doesn't apply to fetuses. It doesn't apply to zygots. Fetuses have no rights. Because the idea of the freedom to take action doesn't apply to them. They cannot take action. They're completely 100% dependent on the mother. They get the nutrients, they get their blood, they get everything from the mother. There is no action to be protected. The fetus is not acting in any way. Just relate to the topic of yesterday. She goes on to say, quote, and here, again, this is relevant, right? The concept of a right pertains only to action, specifically to freedom of action. It means freedom for physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men. So a right is the recognition that you must be free, free from physical compulsion, or interference by other men so that you can live your life based on your own rational judgment in pursuit of your own rational goals for the furtherance of your own life and happiness. To put it another way, again, Ayn Rand says, a right is the moral sanction of a positive. This is encountered to the idea that rights are negatives. They're not negative. A right is the moral sanction of a positive, of the freedom to act on his own judgment for his own goals, for his own voluntary and cursed choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligation on them except a negative kind, a negative obligation, not a negative right, to abstain from violating his rights. So rights are an objective concept, an objective concept based on facts of reality, the observation and understanding of the nature of man as a rational being, the fact that man in order to thrive, in order to succeed, in order to live, in order to be moral, in order to survive, which is what morality is concerned with, to survive and thrive, he must be left free, free from coercion, free from force. He must be left free to pursue the values he deems necessary for his survival and for his life. Free chooses judgment to figure out what is necessary for him to be successful at living and ultimately achieve his happiness. Right, an objective concept based on the facts of reality and an understanding of human nature, understanding of man as a rational being and understanding of what is required of man as a rational being in order for him to survive. And understanding the reason cannot function under force, that in order for man to be able to use his reason in pursuit of his life, he must be free from force. Writes are not given to us by God. We're not endowed with them by a creator. They're a philosophical understanding. Writes are a huge philosophical achievement. An achievement that European thinkers, in a sense dabbling with in the 17th century, that John Locke kind of puts together in a pretty good formulation and that ultimately lead us to the understanding of the founding fathers, particularly Jefferson and their codification and the rectification of independence and ultimately in the Constitution. And note that the Constitution doesn't talk a lot about individual rights, but it creates a government whose implicit premise, I mean explicit really if you understand all of the declaration, but its premises, a structure, a separation of powers all geared towards the protection and preservation of rights. And then of course there is a bill of rights which is an explicit articulation of some of what the right to life means. The right to life means you have a right to free speech. The right to life means you have, the government cannot arbitrarily confiscate your stuff. It cannot engage in torture and seizure and whatever. It cannot impose a religion on you. We have got a debate about abortion again. Let's be clear, a zygote has is alive just like the cells in my skin are alive. It even has unique DNA, it has DNA as the cells in my skin have DNA. And it can potentially be a full-fledged human being, but it is not. And even if you consider it human in some bizarre interpretation, it still doesn't have rights. Rights are not endowed. They're not given to you at the moment of conception or at any moment through. You only get rights once you can take actions required by your nature to support your life. Until then you don't have rights. A fetus even a day before it is born is not taking action. And if it doesn't have rights, and I know this is hard because almost everybody, almost everybody, even people who claim to read and read and understand all right, have an intrinsic view of rights. That is rights somehow are in us. They're granted to us, they just plop into you as soon as you're conceived, as soon as you have DNA, you have rights, but you don't. Rights are not part of you. They're not, you're not endowed with them in that sense. By anything, they are a requirement of human action. They're a requirement of human survival. They're a requirement of morality. But morality doesn't apply to a fetus. Action doesn't apply to a fetus. And therefore rights do not apply to a fetus. All right, I don't need to, I don't want to get into a whole abortion discussion. Not the purpose today. No, the once you understand what the right to life is, you can derive and you can figure out all the other rights, right? Here's Ayn Rand's passage on this. The right to life is the source of all rights, according to her, and the right to property is the only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave. Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, not to stuff. Like all others, it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use, and to dispose of material values. All the rights, right to property and ultimately the right to liberty and the right to free speech, which is a part of liberty and the right to, all the rights are just manifestations of the basic idea of the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of the rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment, and the enjoyment of his own life, the freedom. Government are instituted in order to protect that freedom. That's it, to protect that freedom. And therefore government doesn't create rights. Government creates laws and enforces those laws in an attempt to protect our rights, to take the right to life and to apply it to the world. Laws against murder, laws against theft, all kinds of theft. That is the responsibility of government, not to define what the rights are. The right is defined, it's a right to life. Now let's break that down into what do we need to do in order to protect the individual's capacity to live their life as they see fit based on their rational judgment in pursuit of their rational goals, their rational values, ultimately, their achievement of happiness. The pursuit of that achievement, not the getting it. Freedom of action, how do we protect freedom of action? That's it, that's what rights are. Not mystical, not democratic. I do find it a little funny that the bishop talked about foundations of democracy as if, again, it depends on how you define democracy and how he defines democracy, but democracy is a tricky word because democracy, if you take the word seriously, if you take its meaning seriously, democracy is the negation of rights. Democracy is the idea that the government can, the majority can do what it wants. Rights are above them. Rights are what limit, and that's why the appropriate form of government is a constitutional republic, a constitution that codifies the protection of rights and therefore limits how the democratic process actually functions and what it can be applied to and what it cannot. So dangerous to use democracy in this context, you're playing into the hands of the other side, but anyway, alright. Alright, so rights are the recognition of a fact of reality, the recognition of the nature of man and the requirements for human individual survival in a social context and the codification of that. Alright, good, now we know what rights are. Please, if you see people spouting this nonsense, link to my video, link to this video and Christian will probably create a 45, 15 minute video just on this without all the Q and A stuff, just on this so that you can link to it. So please, link to it. If you see this bishop or you see the leftists or you see there is no such thing as rights, link to this video, or even better, here's an even better idea, link to Ayn Rand's essay, Man's Rights, which is right down the internet, easily available. And yeah, use social media to promote our values, our ideas. I mean, the rest of the bad guys use social media constantly to promote their ideas. We need to get better at it. We just, and we need to get more aggressive at it. We need to get more, what is it, energized around it. It seems like you have to kind of coax objectivists to promote objectivism. No, get some fire in the belly. And social media allows you to do this on a scale, even allows you to be anonymous if you wanna be anonymous in doing it so that you're not discovered as an objectivist. Create an account, start promoting. All of you should create accounts and start promoting stuff. Yeah, you should create, you know what you could do? Create a TikTok account and download all my short one-minute videos and upload them there. Doesn't, it's easy to do. All right, thank you guys. Let's see, we've got some super chat questions. Mainly two to five, but we've got a few, so we're gonna turn to those and talk about what you guys wanna talk about. I'll remind everybody that this show is made possible through the support of you, of individuals like you, of listeners like you. It can't happen without that. You are basically supporting my time, effort, research, energy, whatever, in doing this, everything we do in this, so thank you for that support. You can do so if you're listening live by using a sticker, using super chat to support the show, it's very easy. You just press on the dollar sign below the chat. I think that's available both on the mobile app and on the website. And those of you who are listening after the fact, if you're on YouTube, you can do an applause, which is also a way of supporting the show, which is right beneath there. But you can also just go and make it a multi-contribution, which is the best way to support the show because it's predictable. And you can do that at uranbrookshow.com slash membership or on Patreon. Patreon is a great way to do it. It's easy. It's pretty straightforward. And a lot of you use Patreon, so please, Patreon is probably the easy way to actually get this done. All right, and the questions don't have to be on this topic. So we are now going into the Q&A, and the Q&A, as you know, can be on anything. And you can ask on anything. And so that will be interesting and fun. All right, let's see what we have here. Edward says, your cells have no rights, but the whole entity does have rights. True. True. But the reason is that the whole entity acts. It is the thing that is engaged in action, in choices. Your cells, individual cells, don't have that. That's why a fetus doesn't have that. All right, let's just to thank the stickers quickly. Paul, thank you. Enric, thank you. Or thank you. And Travis, thank you. Yeah, that's as far back as I can go. I'm sure there were some others before that. So again, thank you to all the superchatters. All right, let's jump into these. And yeah, please feel free to ask more questions. The more, the better, particularly if you're willing to do $20 or $50 or $100. We need a couple of $100 to get us off the ground into the right place. Close that goal. Can non-objectivists live only mediocre lives at best? No, I don't think that's true. They can live pretty good lives, really good lives. They can't live as good a lives as they could otherwise. There is an increment that they can only do, I think, having objectivism. But that would say that everybody in human history has lived just a mediocre life. And that's just not true. I mean, did Leonardo da Vinci live a mediocre life? No, I think he lived a pretty robust, pretty amazing life. Did Steve Jobs live just a mediocre life? I don't think you can say that about the achievements of Steve Jobs or any of the great achievers in history. So no, I think to the extent that they are anti-reason or they go against reason or they go against the principles of the objective morality, which I think are grounded in reality, to that extent they won't be as happy, as completely fulfilled as they could otherwise be. But you can still be great. You can still be amazing, particularly given the low standard we have in the world today, even without adhering to every single one of those consistently. And it just takes more. And if you look at their lives, you look at great people's lives, they implicitly adhere to many of the principles of objectivism, otherwise they couldn't. Because they adhere to reality. And they adhere to reason, otherwise they couldn't have lived great lives. But I certainly wouldn't call them mediocre. It's just they're leaving something on the table. There's not as much as they could have been. James, most people have no idea what a healthy confidence looks like. They're stuck in a false dichotomy between being a narcissist and being a pushover. Yes, I think that's absolutely right. And there are very few models for, if you will, a healthy self-esteem, very few models for healthy masculinity. And that's sad. It really is sad. And I think there are real opportunities for people to talk about these things in terms of masculinity, in terms of self-esteem, and model these ideas. But it's not happening. And they leave the door open to the Donald Trumps and what do you call it, that horrible God. He has a brother. They live in Romania. And they abuse women, whether they abuse them physically or mentally. They clearly abuse women. And they take pride in it. I forget his name. Anyway, they leave the open to that, to those people. Andrew Tate. Thank you, Neocon. To the Andrew Tates of the world, to model the pseudo self-esteem and the pseudo masculinity. And that is really unfortunate, because we don't really have many models for proper masculinity and proper self-esteem. Again, I think I'm just using Steve Jobs, because he's in my mind right now. But Steve Jobs would be a good model for both of those. Here's a guy who was supremely confident, had a vision, executed in that vision, pursued values, uncompromising, tough, tough, but also, I think in many respects, approachable, and an incredibly rational guy. So where do we find more public figures who both exude because reflect their true confidence in themselves and in reality and in their mind? A great ability to produce, which I think is essential for masculinity. I do not think you could be masculine if you're not a producer. Where do we find these rational producers who have great self-esteem to really model, to really show what self-esteem and what masculinity can really be? All right, let's see, James. Most people have no idea what a healthy confidence looks like. Yeah, that's what we just did. We just talked about that. All right, yeah. Liam, conservatives claiming we have open borders are reminiscent of the left who claimed we have capitalism. Each blames their chosen fiction on the problems created solely by statism. Yes, I mean, that's absolutely right. We don't have open borders. We have very closed borders. We have super-closed borders when it comes to legal migration, super-closed. And therefore, we force people, we incentivize people, we funnel people into the illegal immigration avenue because they want to come to the United States and the legal migration path is blocked. And they fly across the border in what looks like open immigration, but it wouldn't be if there was open immigration today. It wouldn't be this flood. It would be completely organized and it would be completely up front because it would be legal. It would be hidden. It wouldn't be sneaky. It wouldn't be appeals for asylum and all these things. No, it would just be, all right, you're here. You're not a criminal. You're not a terrorist. You don't have an infectious disease. Welcome to the United States. Here's your work permit. That's open borders. We don't have that. We have who the hell are you? Why are you here? Oh, you're applying for asylum. OK, now that you applied for asylum, here's 32 forms you have to fill out. And let us tell you, we might decide to kick you back over. We might keep you for a few months here and then decide to kick you back over. We might allow you to stay for a while. Maybe we'll give you a work visa. Maybe we won't, or work permit. Maybe we won't. And maybe a few years from now, we'll decide, oh, well, maybe you should stay. That is a statist, authoritarian, completely arbitrary and subjectivist view of the border. And you're right. It's exactly the same as the approach they have towards, yeah, well, we have today's capitalism. You mean the capitalism? We have to ask for approval permission to do almost everything today in business, with how much I pay my employees and the kind of benefits I give them. And when I trade my stock and when I announce earnings and when I do all these things, all needs permission of the government, you mean that capitalism? The capitalism of permission? I have a shocking revelation for you guys. It's not capitalism. If you have to ask for permission, if you get approval from the regulators for everything that you do, not capitalism, it turns out. That's not what capitalism is. Capitalism is a permissionless economy, a permissionless society, where you don't have to ask permission from the authorities. But yes, people don't define their terms. People hold terms as mushy. Look at the discussion of rights. People hold stuff as mushy, inconsistent nonsense in their minds. And the consequence is that they can't keep track of what capitalism is, what open immigration is at all. And those are simple concepts. Never mind, never mind. Think about rights and what they are, which is a far more complicated concept than capitalism or open immigration. Those two are relatively easy, particularly once you understand individual rights. Because immigration is just an application of rights. And capitalism is just an application of rights. All right. I'm encouraging mildly, softly, more questions, more questions. All right, we got to do better than where we are right now. Chad, the existential character of any given individual is irrelevant. The ban on initiating force is universal. So the existential character of any given individual is irrelevant. The ban on initiating force is universal. Yes, if one understands what initiating force is, preemption can be, preemption looks maybe like initiation force in some context, but it's actually an act of self-defense. So force can only be, only, be used in self-defense. The existential character of somebody makes no difference. As long as he doesn't use force against you or somebody else, you have no right to use force against him. Now, if he threatens force, if he's running around shooting a gun in the air and exhibiting behavior like he could pointed at you and shoot, I mean, there are a lot of borderline cases in which, yeah, you're going to, in self-defense, act against them. But that is beyond character. That's not his existential character. Those are actions that he's taken that are a threat to your life. And that's why you can act against them. Michael, did you get a chance to see Norm Fickerson in the debate? Rabbi Schmoley, God, I get this question every day. No, I haven't. I have a life. You can't ask me this every single day. It's only been half a day since I was asked this already. You could have done a better job going at hominem, I'm not sure, was the way to go. Yeah, but you pretty much any debate out there, you could say I could have done a better job. But no, I haven't seen it yet. I do have it written down. I will watch it at some point, although I find watching Norma Finkestein so disgusting and depressing that I try to avoid it, but yeah. All right, I also do have a couple of questions offline that I want to get to. I'll do those after I finish the $20 questions. But you should continue asking $20 questions because we need quite a few more $20 questions to get to our goal. Hopper Campbell, most intellectuals in the 1920s, oh, there we go, Frank asked a $50 question. That really helps. Most intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s were communists. Why were the intellectuals in Germany most sympathetic to fascism and egalitarianism? Well, they weren't. Most intellectuals were leftists in the 1920s. Many of them left Germany once the Nazis came to power. Some of them got convinced and convinced themselves that the same goals they were trying to achieve through their advocacy of communism, they could now achieve through their advocacy of fascism. So many of them came to understand that the differences between communism and fascism were trivial in the big picture. And that the goals that they wanted to achieve, including a certain level of egalitarianism in a particular context, could be achieved through fascism. Remember that Nazism was national socialist. What's his name? Mussolini, when he founded the fascist movement, when he created the concept of fascism, he was a socialist who had never given up his ideas of socialism, the value of socialism, the ideal of socialism. He just believed that he had come across a more effective, more efficient way of achieving the same outcome. In that sense, there is no big difference between socialism and fascism and communism. They're all application of statism in a variety of different forms with different excuses and different justifications. And the intellectuals who were left leaning some, who were left leaning in Germany in the 1920s, some of them converted to Nazism, some of them were killed by the Nazis, and some of them escaped. Frank, $50. Thank you, Frank. That is very generous. Really, we need another $450 questions. It would be great if we could raise $500 today. That would keep us on track for the monthly goal. And given that I didn't do shows while I was traveling, we need to make it up a little bit in terms of... But if we reach our goal, then we're in great shape. All right, Andrew just gave $10, so we literally, $350 short of the goal, but $200 would be great in terms of getting us to keeping on track with the month. Frank says, courtesy of your show, I see rights as a value from the asymmetry of causality and freedom, free will, and law as an asymmetry of causality and restraint, customary origins, awesome job with the lecture. Frank always has these ways of formulating things that are not easy to really get my head around. OK, so let's read this slowly, right? Rights as a value, the asymmetry of causality and freedom, which is free will, right? The asymmetry of causality and freedom, and therefore you need rights because of the asymmetry. And OK, so that's one aspect, one asymmetry. The other asymmetry is causality and restraint, customary origins. So causality and restraint, which is what the government does. The government does the causality and restraint. The government is what is restraining. So yes, I think that's all consistent. It's just a very interesting way of putting it, not the way I would put it. Certainly not the way I would put it, but probably consistent if I need to really think about it. But thank you, Frank. Really appreciate the support. And I'm happy that I'm stimulating thoughts, stimulating ideas. Andrew, utmost respect for the founding documents of the United States is the intellectual pillars that created unparalleled peace and prosperity. However, ultimately, these pillars need a firm philosophical base to continue to stand. Yes, they always did. And the erosion, which started almost immediately, even by the founding fathers themselves, wouldn't have happened if they'd had a more solid, substantial philosophical base, primarily in ethics, and which would have led, I think, to you can't fully understand rights without fully understand ethics. Man as a rational being and his moral goal is the surviving, thriving happiness, right? And reason is the means of doing that. Those are the things you need to understand. The role of reason and egoistic morality. And from that, you get rights. And so I think they had, to some extent, reason. What they didn't have, they had the outlines, the beginnings of, the beginnings of thoughts of an egoistic morality. But they didn't have it properly articulated. And the most important thing is, and this is Rand's genius, one of many, is what they didn't have is a connection, a connection between the understanding of reason and understanding of morality. That is, I think the two stood separate. So I don't know of any enlightenment figure that actually identifies reason properly understood. Reason as man's means of survival, therefore, as man's ultimate value. Not ultimate, but the value that he strives towards. The value that makes of all other values possible. And rationality as the virtue. That is not, they didn't have that. That's Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand, it would have been great if she came right then in parallel to Kant, right then at the end of the Enlightenment. But then the question is, could she have developed this philosophy then before the Industrial Revolution? She says she couldn't have. Said, how to wait? But by waiting, it gave a lot of time for the enemies of the Enlightenment to rally their troops and to build up the forces and to so that they dominate. They dominate everywhere you look. Anti-Enlightenment, whether religious or whether left, dominate. Graham, hey, Iran. I watched the show yesterday, and I just got to say how much I admire your passion and dedication. Keep it up. Great show today as well. Thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, the show yesterday is tough because to me, these things are so clear. And there's nothing more valuable to me than the ability of human beings to pursue their happiness. And what is more beautiful and amazing and a means to that happiness than sex and love and intimacy? And to bound that up, it can only happen in marriage. And even then, only football, Christian. I mean, it's just so primitive and bizarre and limiting. And the reason I wanted to do today's show on Iran rules for life, kind of embracing the idea of change and relishing change, excuse me, relishing the idea of change, is I want to do everything I can with you guys to just get rid of whatever traditionalism, conservatism, veneration of the past, veneration of the way things are being done for 2,000 years, and get you to think. To think, if you will, in an original way about your own life, but your own happiness, your own values, and what it takes and not be bound up by, but this is the way it's always been done, or bound up in, oh, but I've noticed people doing that other thing and they're not happy, maybe they're doing it wrong. Shouldn't you investigate and figure out, you are responsible for your life. You're responsible for your happiness. You have a mind by which to make these judgments and evaluate them, and people are so freaking conservative. And one of the things that struck me when I read Iran and when I understood Iran and understood how revolutionary she was, I think it's important, how revolutionary she was, that she stood out against every other philosopher out there and the whole tradition of mankind, in a sense, is that basically what Rand required, who is my understanding, my understanding, that we rethink everything, everything. Now, maybe we come to the conclusion that the way people do things is right, but you have to prove it anew. You have to prove it from the perspective of reason, reality, your knowledge of objectivism. You can't just say, well, everybody's done it for 2,000 years, must be OK. So you have to question. I'm not saying reverse. You have to question and prove to yourself concepts like marriage, monogamy, sex, heterosexual, whatever. You need a question. I'm not saying again, challenge. The state, economic or anything we know about economics, anything we know about, even history, you have to really put them to the test of reason, of reason. And you don't evaluate them. Good, bad, pro-life, anti-life, stand up to reason. That's it. Somebody mentioned that Lenna Pieckoff made the same point. To a large extent, everything good I say, everything true I say, I've learned from Lenna Pieckoff while I'm Rand. So a lot of what I say, Lenna has already said. And I learned from him. So Lenna is the greatest exponent of the objective's philosophy, second only time Rand, of course, and the greatest philosopher's second only time Rand in terms of these ideas. And he is, in many respects, or was in many respects, an original thinker, an original thinker at elaborating Rand's philosophy, understanding Rand's philosophy, and applying Rand's philosophy. And I consider myself his student. So I do my best based on his and her ideas. But you really need to think everything through and not just accept it. And it's hard because it puts you up against the entire culture. And many things you're going to have to say, I don't really know. I don't really know. I did, I just finished a book. I'm going to, I guess, one of the next shows I'm going to do a book review on the closing of the Western Mind. And then we'll do a show on the reopening of the Western Mind, both books by the same author. Really, really interesting and highly recommended. But I will do a book review of it sometime soon. Jennifer says, if rights are inside you instead of being a moral concept, then how could anyone justify putting a murderer in jail? This right to freedom would still be inside him even though he murdered. Yes, and people make that argument, Jennifer. I mean, people do on the left in particular. But this is an issue that I think a lot of Christians have had to deal with. A lot of the arguments against capital punishment are exactly this argument. God gave you life. God placed rights inside of you. How can a life be taken? Who are we to take a life? So yes, I think that argument is actually used by people, amazingly enough, in terms of incarcerating prisoners or in terms of the death penalty or other applications. They take this stuff seriously. All right, Frank, another $50. Thank you, Frank. Let's see. Asymmetry means neither dualistic nor a dichotomy. All right, so they're not asymmetry. They're not two different things, dualistic nor a dichotomy. But an integration of two components, a perception, freedom, law, and abstraction, causality restraint. That makes value possible. Yes, I think that's right. So it's integration of freedom and the idea of law, rights. And then, of course, the idea of causality, free will. Without free will, there are no rights. That's another problem that some Christians should have. And some leftists should have if you don't have free will. How can they be rights? Yeah, and restraint is who should be restrained, right? In what context is restraint appropriate? And again, individual rights gives us the answer to that. So it's an integration of all of those. Cool. I think I get it. Dave, do you think freedom, Dave, $50. Thank you, Dave. People are following you, Frank. Really appreciate it. Do you think freedom of action as pertains to individual rights refers to the innate biological freedom to act and or the psychological freedom to act within the context of a moral political context? Well, I think both. Although I'm not sure they're distinct, right? What does it mean, the biological freedom to act? What does that mean? And free of a psychological freedom to act. That means psychological just means willed. It means you are motivating. You are the one motivating this, right? So it's because it's your choice. That's what a psychological freedom to act. So you have a right to choose and to act. But at the end of the day, it's biological freedom. And biological freedom is not that you are free to, I don't know, do what your body necessitates. I don't know, go to the bathroom, eat. It's much broader than that. It includes all the values that you choose to have. So it includes psychological. The biological and the psychological ultimately are one because we are cognitive biological being. We're cognitive being. Like Frank says, rights are an asymmetry of freedom and causality. Why not just say that rights are integration of freedom and causality? Why asymmetry? Why do you use the term asymmetry? I'm not sure what that adds. And he says, law is an asymmetry of causality with restraint. I get that, but why not integration? Because that's really what we're getting at. All right, Michael, why is biology not reducible to physics? Isn't everything physics? Maybe it is reducible to physics. But if it is, we don't know how. We don't understand the physics of much of biology. We don't understand the physics of life. We don't understand the physics of biology. I don't think we understand the physics of a lot of biological processes. I don't know with regard to our understanding of the physics of chemical processes. I think we have an understanding there. But I'm not sure we have an understanding of the physics of biological processes. Now, it could be that it all boils down to, physics will explain every other aspect, but maybe not. Because remember, biology studies something different than physics. So there is this reductionist approach, which I'm not sure is right. That is, at the end of the day, the three laws of physics that explain the entire universe. I don't think that's right. And there's also a real challenge to our mechanical understanding of determinism, which quantum theory poses, or quantum mechanics poses. I don't know that I have a solution to it. It can't contradict the law of causality. But I think it's incompatible with the law of causality as often understood of a billion balls. So I think it contradicts our, at least, superficial understanding of a deterministic universe. It's not clear that quantum physics is compatible with that. So again, I don't want to get above my head. But it doesn't strike me that everything has to be physics. And even if it is, we certainly have very little. We know very little. And again, suddenly, about the so-called physics of life. And I'm not sure there is a physics of life. That's what biology is. I guess I don't understand the need to reduce everything to physics. Why is physics the fundamental? I mean, it's obviously fundamental in a particular realm. But I'm not sure it's the fundamental when it comes to life. All right, but good questions for philosophers when they're on. Does government have one proper function to protect individual rights, or two, to transition to government that protects individual rights and then do so? Well, an ideal government has one proper function. The current government has two. I agree with that. Well, no. The current government has one proper function. So both have one proper function. The current government's proper function is the transition to government that protects individual rights and can only do so by protecting as many rights as it can in the process. And an ideal government has the proper function of protecting individual rights. That's it. So they each have one. Raphael, Locke doesn't answer why we have rights. He only answers that we can't be enslaved by men because we are God slaves. You know, I'm not an expert, but I think Locke's argument is more sophisticated than that. I think it's more sophisticated than that. But I do agree with you. His argument is not good enough. It's far from good enough to justify why we have rights. Harper Campbell, how would international patents be enforced in an objectiveist world without some kind of world government or global property rights courts through treaties, through treaties? And there would obviously be violations of those rights outside of the treaties. And in different ways, the government would tell people, look, we don't have a treaty with China about intellectual property rights. Beware when you deal with China. They could easily take your intellectual property rights. So be careful. I don't see any other way to do it. So you can't have a global property rights court because how would you enforce it? And it's rulings. And what basis does the court run? What are the principles? So no, you enforce it internationally through treaty and you try to establish as many widespread treaties. And look, if somebody violates a treaty, there might be penalties associated with it. But how do you enforce those? And ultimately, one of the ways in which all of these things are enforced is by having a dominant power in the United States in the world today that can enforce certain things, treaties, and can protect the sea lanes from pirates. And so I think the United States serves a really, really important function, selfish function, self-interested function in being an enforcer, at least at some level, of certain international standards like free shipping. Clark says, rights come from before government. Rights are there to inform government of what they may or may not do. Absolutely, absolutely. Harper says, would you consider Nazism a Catholic movement of a kind of neo-mystical pagan movement? I think so. I think Nazism at the end is a kind of a neo-mystical pagan movement. But I don't know enough about it. So I would have to really read about the Nazis to figure it out. Clearly, there are strong mystical elements in it. Sometimes it seems like they reject Christianity, but there are other times in which it seems that they're embracing Christianity. I'm not even sure there was a consistent view among the Nazis about Christianity. But with regard to mysticism, I think it's pretty clear that the Nazis were mystics of maybe a neo-pagan form or a neo-Christian form. I don't know, but certainly mystics. But yeah, you would have to study up on the Nazis, which I've not done. Gail says, listen to Yasmeen Muhammad's powerful story. Oh, you left a link, but the link is long gone. I'll look for it. I'll look for Yasmeen Muhammad's story. Because the link is gone. Unless you can post a link now, and that'll help me a little bit. Oh, I forgot. Let me do these questions now before I forget them again. All right, so Michalis, send me a Venmo contribution and a question. So those of you not listening live, those of you not listening live, can send a Venmo to Iran Brook, just at Iran Brook, I think, in Venmo. Send a contribution with a question, and I will answer it during the show. You can also do that with PayPal. But Michalis does it with Venmo. You can do it with PayPal. You can send in a contribution, a one-time contribution, with a question attached to it, and I will get to that question. So that was one question. And here's another one, which is more detailed. So let me read this. Let me read this. This also came to me, I think, with PayPal. A contribution came associated with this. I think it came by email, and then PayPal contribution was made. So please consider that a way of asking questions when you're not live. When it comes to the history of intellectuals and their post-socialism, anti-capitalism origins, I tend to agree with Hayek and not Ayn Rand. So when I have to summarize their ideas in one sentence, I would explain the views of Hayek and Ayn Rand as follows. Ayn Rand, the cause of socialism, anti-capitalism, is rooted in anti-reason ideas and anti-reason philosophy, starting with Immanuel Kant. All right? Hayek, the origin really starts with Descartes and his Cartesian rationalism. It is the idea that intellectuals have to prove everything around them scientifically to believe in something, that they cannot believe in something they cannot prove factually scientifically. Therefore, intellectuals view socialism as pro-science and pro-reason and capitalism as anti-science, anti-reason. God, there's so much confusion there. I mean, this almost makes sense to do a whole show just on this because I think the whole view, Hayek's whole view is wrong and perverse. Now, it's true that that's how intellectuals viewed it. Socialism, pro-science. But the only possible way they could view it that way is because of Kant, because of a divorcing of reason from reality, from practical, day-to-day individual uses in understanding reality, comprehending reality, choosing one's values, living by one's values, all of that requires reasoning. It requires being rational. So he says, when I look around me, I then think, Hayek is right. Yes, I see the idea of Inran in the post-modernist movement, but not when I look at most intellectuals. For example, here in the Netherlands, so famous historical intellectuals like Keynes, Burnett, Russell, Einstein, et cetera, or the climate change scientists of today, for example, in all of them, I see why more the idea that they can explain the world around them factually, that they are pro-reason, pro-science. Yeah, but they can explain the world around them factually. I mean, I don't understand what the problem is here. So put aside whether they can, because I don't think Keynes, Russell, or Einstein, or particularly Keynes and Russell, put aside, I don't think they could explain the world around them. But if they could explain the world around them rationally, why is that a problem? That doesn't make them socialists. So socialism is not pro-reason and capitalism anti-reason. Capitalism is pro-reason. Reason does not imply that you know what I want, that you can explain my behavior, or my desires, or my values. You can't. Only I can. Reason cannot imply that you can think my thoughts. Again, choose my values. You can't. So the problem is to divorce reason from the individual actor, from the individual reasoning person. Reason is something individuals do. And it's the mechanism by which they choose their values, choose how to live, choose what to pursue. And as such, nobody else can do it for them. And that understanding of reason is somehow divorced from your specific values and connects you as an individual with reality. And that these values are derived from reality, that divorce of reason comes from Kant. Now, I agree that the Kant and Cartesians are part of that as well. But Kant is not different than the Cartesian rationalists in the sense that reason is floating and divorced from empirical evidence from reality. And by the way, the Cartesians rejected empiricism. So the whole thing is messed up. The cause of socialism and anti-capitalism is the inability to connect facts with reality. And it's an inability, therefore, to understand what reason actually does. An inability to understand the reason as a faculty of the individual. An inability, then, to understand that as a rational being, your moral responsibility, your morality is about survival and pursuing values that further your life as a conceptual being. And that the only political system compatible with individuals reasoning for themselves in pursuit for their own values is capitalism. Now, that's not Hayek. There's nothing there that's Hayek. And Hayek's mistake is that he thinks that the problem with the intellectuals is the two pro-reason. No, no, no. They're post something, not reason. They're pro-Akanthian view of reason, which is wrong. And at the end of the day, all they're left with is anti-reason. So it's not that the socialists are post-science. The socialists are not post-science. They're trying to apply science in a way that's anti-science. They're trying to apply science to something that the form of science they're trying to do is inapplicable, that divorced from reality, which is exactly what Kant promotes, the divorce from reality. But that is a whole, that requires really unpacking and doing a whole show around. But thank you for the question. All right, let's see. OE asks, why is the concept of self-love not emphasized in objectivism? Do you view it as synonymous with self-esteem? No, not exactly, because it's, I don't know. I think it's a strange concept. To love is to value. And to love is to esteem. And I think that's already there. So love is an emotional response to value. Do you really have an emotional response to you? It's not really that applicable. It's not even self-like. It's self-esteem. Self-esteem means I know that I belong in this world. I know that I'm competent, that I can achieve my goals. I know that's what it means. It's not, oh, I forget about myself today. And it's not, love is an emotion. Esteem is an evaluation. Love is an emotional response. And I don't think you respond to yourself really in innocence. You respond to what's out there based on who you are. So esteem captures what you're really talking about much better. I'm evaluating myself as good, competent, able. Reality is knowable to me. That's what you're esteeming. That's the concept you're trying to capture. Not I feel good about myself. I mean, maybe you do, but you don't. I mean, if you love somebody that heartbeat racing, that emotional, that sweating a little bit, that excitement, you don't get that from thinking about yourself. And you shouldn't. It's weird. Too self-referential in a sense. So I think that's why. Liam, I've heard you seem to imply in past talks that it's the Jews, other minorities fault that they were marched into concentration camps. Is this victim blaming, or did these populations operate on zero self-esteem and pride? No, I mean, I don't blame them. Of course not. The moral blame is, of course, on the Nazis. I do think, though, that the Jews, many of the Jews, not all of them, because some of them stood up, the Jews lacked a fighting spirit. Now, again, not all of them. You can hear about Jewish heroes in the World War II, people who got it very early on and joined the Polish or Russian partisans, or fought in the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazis for a very long time, really massive damage on the Nazis, given how few weapons they had and what they had. There were Jews who stood up. There were Jews who tried to escape. There were Jews who fought. But a significant number of Jews did not. And I do think there's a certain lack of fights in them, lack of self-esteem. Partially, you could argue they didn't know, but at some point they certainly didn't know. So I find it hard to understand. Now, again, I hope that I would have acted differently. It's hard to tell, but I hope that I would have acted differently. In other words, I would have rather died taking out a Nazi, or rather died fighting a Nazi, than died passively in a gas shower. I think that's how I would have chosen to go. I can't imagine just giving in in the way many of them did. Not all of them. Many of them did. Is the Torah the same as the Old Testament? I don't think so. I think the Torah is the first five books of the Old Testament. The Old Testament is more than just the five first books of it, I think. And I can't remember the names of the books. Certainly, I don't remember them in English. But there's after the first five books, there's kings, and then there's all kinds of others in Solomon's song, and all of that, the Book of Job. All of that together is the Old Testament versus the beginning, which I think is the Torah. Daniel says, what is the relationship between the CCD and the standard of value? Writes aren't self-evident. The history of philosophy shows that objectivity of concepts and values aren't self-evident either. Absolutely. Absolutely. You're asking me a question that I don't think I can answer right now. What is the relationship between the CCD and the standard of value? I'm going to copy-paste that and do it when I'm a little bit fresher than I am right now. But I will get to it, I promise. But absolutely, it's very difficult to establish the objectivity of ideas, objectivity of values. And every concept needs, sorry, a CCD is the conceptual common denominator. And it's the process by which ultimately we form concepts, particularly abstract concepts. But what is the relationship between the CCD and the standard of value? Yeah, I need to think about that one. Andrew says, man's life, but sure. But yeah, I need to think about it. And you're absolutely right. It's very difficult to show that a concept like rights is objective. Well, it's difficult, but then Inran does it so elegantly and simply that you think, yeah. If rights are concept-protecting human action, would a baby born without a brain have rights? Without a brain, such a human being would not be able to take any action. Yeah, and it would die. So no, I mean, really, it wouldn't have rights. No. I mean, there's a lot of tricky questions about rights in babies. I mean, clearly, a healthy baby has rights. But even then, some of those rights are being held for it by its parents. It's delegated, the baby's rights are delegated to the parents. And if the parents abuse that, then to the state. So it's tricky. It's tricky. And if a baby's born who cannot live, who cannot actually do the actions necessary for life, then it's questionable whether that baby has rights. And I don't think it does. Another reason to abort a completely deformed fetus because it doesn't have rights, even when it's born. Never mind when it's in the woman. Why inflict on it the pain of living in that state? Daniel, what could be the ways to help our politicians approach the real nature of rights? God, I don't know. I mean, other than short of they need to study political philosophy. They need to study the objectivist political philosophy. They need to get a basic grasp of morality and the world of reason and human life. And then from there, understand what human life requires. I mean, that's the basic they need to understand. And then the role of government is just to preserve the ability of human beings to live their life to their life. So I think that's what they need. Andrew, some creative writing, the mixed economy's freedoms and the controls is like the waltz between a beautiful woman and the grim reaper under thundering skies. All right, mixed economy's freedoms. OK, yeah. All right, I see it. Yeah, I mean, you should weave that into a novel one day. Daniel says, thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate the support, Daniel. Andrew, what do you think of the criticism of free will? That no identification has been made of free will's exact physiological function. The critics don't seem to accept the argument that it is self-evident. Yeah, I mean, we don't understand its physiological, exact physiological function where it comes from physiologically. What is the mechanism? But that's reduction of biology to physics. We have free will. We activate it. I mean, in that extent, again, we can't reduce life to physics either. So it doesn't bother me one way or the other. I mean, do we know the function of gravity? Do we understand where it comes from? No, we observe it in reality. We keep gaining more knowledge about it. We have some hypothesis on, quote, where it comes from. But it's there. Free will is there. Can explain it from a physics perspective or from a physiological perspective. But we'll keep learning more. We'll keep gaining more knowledge around it. And maybe one day, we can explain more of the function. Mark, there's so much evil down the rabbit hole regarding threat that mysticism posed into reason. People will kill for it still. Thoughts on how to approach? Yeah, no, they do kill for it. Just look at jihadism and look at the Muslims. They're killing for it all the time. And I think the Christians have killed for it in the past and will kill for it in the future. So how do you approach it? You approach it by rejecting it and then arguing against it and presenting a rational alternative. See what the right wants you to believe is there are only two alternatives that this fits into Lenin-Pikov's dim hypothesis. The only two alternatives, the order structure of a religious life and a religious-based political system, or the disorder, anarchy, fragmentation, disintegration of the left. And that's the only two alternatives. And the main thing we can do, the main thing in our approach needs to be to offer a rational, orderly, systematic alternative that is neither mystical nor subjective. Of course, mystical is subjective, but I think you understand what I mean. Justin says that Israel is not allowing some Eritrean Jews the right of return. Is that true? Yes, it's pathetic. But they don't believe them that they're Jews. So they don't believe them that they're Jews and therefore they're not allowing the men based on the fact that they don't think they're Jews. There's a conflict about whether they are actually Jews or not Jews or pretending to be Jews so they can come to Israel. To me, it's the air on the side of letting them in. A lot of the Russians who got citizenship in Israel, who came in the 1990s, claimed to be Jews. There was almost zero proof of it. Whatever Jew even means by whose definition, the rabbis in Jerusalem, I guess. But many of the Russians who came to Israel in the 1990s were not technically, by the rabbis definition, even Jews. And they let them in. Frank, can rights come from following the rules, like in sports games? In many games, you don't have the right to do anything you want. It'd be cheating. That's not right. Right is not about following the rules. Rights are not about following the rules. That's a conservative interpretation of rights. You know, in sports, you're cheating. You're just not following the rules. They're rules. This is how we play. It's not an issue of rights. It's an issue of agreement, contract. We agreed something and you're violating that agreement. Not everything is rights. There's a sense in which you can say, by violating the agreement, you're violating the other person's rights. Sure, but that's, it's an application, but that's way down rabbit hole. Rights are not duties. Rights are not follow this, do this. Rights are your free goal of your life. That's what rights are. Joshua, thank you. Having trouble with the word greed, it seems like it could be positive by consistently being productive, no matter how much money you have. And negative, some people just steal and steal and steal. Could you help clarify? Yeah, I mean, it very much could be the greed is neutral. The greed is a neutral concept, which could be applied in a way that's positive, focused on production, focused on his productivity, and keeps on producing, even though he's got enough money that, you know, so on. And therefore it could be applied in a negative way. He's, he'll do anything for it. But I tend to think that Ayn Rand thought of it as a positive. That she would say greed to steal money, well, but steal is, steal is anti-life. It's anti the fundamental thing that you're striving towards in production, which is life, which is happiness, which is integrity, and being productive, the virtue of productiveness. You're undermining your virtues, you're undermining your life, and as such it's not selfish, and maybe greed is just an application of selfishness. And therefore it is always positive. I guess I'm open to both ways of thinking about it, right? Greed is not one where I'm willing to go on the barricades to fight for like selfish, which I think is worth fighting for. Greed might, we might concede that it's a neutral one where it can be good and it can be bad. Remember, I think, isn't one of the sections in Atlas Shog, one of the chapter names, greed, I have greed in the title. So I suspect Ayn Rand thought of it as an aspect of selfishness. Single-minded pursuit of something good, something pro-life would be greed. That would be the positive application of it. Mathias, off topic, Eliezer Yudowski, in his fan fiction HPMOR, characterizes Atlas Shog as obvious, can you comment on that? I mean, the first thing to come to my mind is arrogant prick, and I think he is generally. Yeah, I mean, really? Ayn Rand writes, basically Gold's speech is in the whole book, is a articulation and a concretization in brilliant aesthetic fashion of a world-changing, world-challenging philosophy. There's nothing obvious about it, nothing. Nobody's ever had these thoughts, at least put them into writing, ever, in all of human history. Obvious, and of course, Eliezer Yudowski is a effective altruist, so he doesn't think it's obvious, he thinks it's wrong. Maybe he thinks it's obviously wrong, I don't know. But a comment like that does not impress me and I haven't been impressed by Yudkowski's comments on AI, so just reinforces my not being impressed with him. Michael, Millay is currently live at CPAC and his speech is fire, will you be doing your reaction to it? Well, first I wanna watch it. I'm worried about it. I hope he's not giving the conservatives what they want. I hope he's challenging them. But I will see it and then I'll respond to it. Ron, Gabriele, I can't accept that abortion in third trimester is wrong. It goes against reason that a perfectly healthy and formed baby is a human being, it's not a baby. It's inside the womb of a mother. It is not, it does not have freedom of action. It is not free, it is not relevant. Freedom of action is not relevant to the baby. It's not an individuated human being. It might be immoral in certain circumstances. Certainly it would be immoral to wait until the third trimester to do it, but it should never be illegal because the law only deals with rights. So you could argue about the morality of it. You could ask why she waited so long. You could ask why she's even having the abortion. Is it rational? That would determine whether it's moral. But the baby has no rights, legal rights. There's no legal remedy against her if she doesn't. But you can condemn her morally if you have got enough reason for it. Andrew, in an effort to keep the riffing going can you riff on the arbitrary in any direction? Where do you observe the error from the arbitrary manifested in the culture? God, you guys are really trying to challenge me here today with epistemological questions. The arbitrary is that which has no proof, no evidence. No evidence to suggest of its existence. The arbitrary is just arbitrary. It's out of no way. It is unconnected to reality by anything. And therefore Lenin Pigov says it has no cognitive stance. It's not true or false because you haven't presented anything for me to judge. It's completely random. It's completely arbitrary. And of course that exists throughout our culture. Most people hold religion as the arbitrary. Some people try to hold it rationally and they have so-called proofs that you can disprove. But most people hold their religion as completely arbitrary. God exists. That's it. I don't need any proof. I don't need any evidence. I don't need any suggestion, nothing. You can't argue. That's just random. That's just meaningless gibberish. Meaningless gibberish. I don't know. There are probably certain scientific claims that are just arbitrary. They come from nowhere. They have no evidence. They have nothing to suggest that they exist, that this hypothesis exists. But a lot of people, conspiracy theories, often are the arbitrary. And in that sense, it's not even that they're false. It's just that they're nothing. There's nothing. I can't connect to it. There's no facts. There's no factual relationship. There's an invisible gremlin under my desk now. That's arbitrary. You can't say, no, there isn't. I mean, it's just stupid you're on. What are you talking about? It's meaningless. Doesn't mean anything. All right, best I can do right now. Richard, I think the left and right interpret greed as taking more than one needs, making it a sin to both. Well, in that sense, greed is good then. You should take more than you need. I don't know what need means and who gets to determine what you need. But in that sense, I would say greed is good. And yes, I think you're right, Richard, that that is how they interpret it. But that's good enough reason to defend greed. Because you should never give in to this idea that somebody else gets to decide what you need, what's enough for you. Only person can decide what's enough for you is you and maybe your psychologist, but you. All right, Ryan wants to follow up on the third trimester baby. Third trimester baby has thoughts as a functioning brain is capable of existing on its own outside the womb. How can it not have rights to live? Because it's not an individual. It's not functioning. It doesn't even have its own blood. It doesn't eat its own food. It has a brain that in a sense is not really, it's not active, free will is not being engaged. It's not using even those very basic instincts that a baby is born with, like sucking. It doesn't even have that. It's not acting. It's not an actor in reality. Rights only apply to actions. A fetus doesn't act. It's not acting in the world. It might have a brain. It could act. If you took it out, maybe it could act. Maybe it would start sucking and do the things, but it would have to be taken out. As long as it's in the woman, it has no rights. Once it's taken out, it does because now it acts in reality, moves its hands, it sucks, it's looking for purpose. It's doing purposeful things. It's not just floating around basically as part of the mother. Even though it has a brain, it's not, it doesn't have thoughts. You can't have thoughts until you've actually started to observe reality. And that happens when you're out of the womb and observing reality. There are no thoughts independent of perceptions. And to what extent a third trimester baby, fetus has perception, is questionable. But it's very, very, very limited. Blind people have thoughts, yeah, because they have other senses. Watch the best illustration of the connection between thoughts and sense perception. Is that woman, that movie, God, the movie about the blind, deaf and dumb girl, what's that movie? Come on, guys, somebody give me that movie. It's one of the Helen Keller, but what's the name of the movie? Helen Keller, but what's the name of the movie? It's one of the greatest movies ever made. And it's Miracle Worker. You gotta watch the original, original Miracle Worker. The original Miracle Worker is this brilliant, brilliant movie about concept formation and thoughts and how this child cannot really think until it figures out how to use whatever senses it has, in this sense, touch, to form concepts. Until it does that, it's just, she's basically functioning at the level of an animal. She can form concepts because she has at least one sense and that is the sense of touch. Miracle Worker is one of the great top five movies of all time, in my view. It really is brilliant and it gets concepts and concept formation right, which is an unusual feat. All right, Joshua, I tend to argue that individual rights requires two things, rationality, a mind capable of reason and individuality. This is consistent with objectives and as far as I can tell, it seems to get complicated with conjoined twins. Yeah, I mean, it does. It's very complicated with conjoined twins. The conjoined twins have rights, but as what? As a dual thing. And look, they are always, not always, but they are borderline cases. They are things where you have to think a little deeper. They are things where there's no solution to it. Which one of the twin has the rights? And now hopefully you can separate them but some conjoined twins can't be separated but that's an aberration in reality where you have one body, two brains and that's just difficult. I don't know how you deal with that from a rights perspective. The being, the conjoined twins have rights but which one of them? And what when they disagree? I don't have an answer. Flip a coin, I guess. I really don't have an answer. Dave Dean, regarding individual rights, some relegate the unborn to being a slave, the property of another until the unborn are capable of exercising biological, physiological, freedom of action. Can an unborn be a conceptually viable slave? No, no, because you're not conceptually viable until you're born. You're not conceptually viable until you're free of the mother's womb. And once you're conceptually viable, you have rights. And the concept of slave cannot be applied. I mean, the whole point of slavery and why it's an evil institution and why it's always evil is because you're enslaving another individual who has a mind, who can't function. We don't talk about enslaving your dog because it has to do what you tell it to do. So slave means another conscious human being, another capable cognition that is being forced to do what you tell it to do. That has no longer have the right to its own life. That cannot be applied to something that's not an individuated human being. Ron says, Peter Schiff lost hope in democracy. He claimed a king with constitution earning one billion a year would be doing a better job. What are your thoughts about placing an objective as king in office? I mean, yeah, an objective as king would be great. But what if he's not an objectiveist? How do you guarantee that he's an objectiveist? No king in human history has been even close. Kings have been a disaster for most of human history. And I really do believe that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And if you had a proper constitution, the power politicians would be minimal anyway. So no, I mean, I don't know. This comes from Hoppe. This whole longing for monarchy just strikes me as ridiculous, ahistorical and ridiculous and not understanding what it means to be a king, which means to have the kind of power that a king has and how corrupting that is. Just having the power is corrupting. And what are the checks and balances? The whole point of a king is no checks and balances. What if he wants to do away with the constitution? Who rises up against him? Why? By what standard? No, I mean, it's an awful idea. But it's very attractive to libertarians who've given up on, who don't quite wanna yet advocate for anarchy, but have given up on the current system. And I'd given up on the current system, but I know what's possible, and which is the original American system is pretty damn good. It just needs a better constitution. All right, guys, I'm done, done, done. Two and a quarter hours. Thank you. We reached that goal. I appreciate that. Really, really appreciate it. Thanks to all the superchatters. You guys did great, lots and lots and lots of questions. And I will see you all on Monday. Monday we'll do a news roundup. Have a fantastic weekend. Be greedy in pursuing your values this weekend. And have fun. I will see you all on Monday. Bye, everybody.