 The debate really turned on a discussion of my opening statement about individualism. And we didn't really dig in to my criticism of conservatism, or my criticism of nationalism, or my criticism of religion as integrated into the state, which is part of Yom Khazoni and part of the national conservative agenda. We never really dug into that. We never really spent a lot of time on that. And I think that's also true of the Lex Friedman interview, and to some extent, that's a shame. But to another extent, I'd much rather focus on defending individualism, dealing with the challenges to individualism, knocking back the questions about individualism. Then I would slamming conservatism, a particular view of conservatism. So it was, I thought in that sense, the debate took on an interesting and quite positive turn in that it focused really on individualism. And I think the confusion that so many people have about individualism and the specific confusions that I think conservatives have about individualism. Some of this was new to me. It knew to me when I was reading up on Yom Khazoni, when I was reading other conservatives. I just read a piece by David Brooks, which I think summarizes conservative thought, the history of conservatism quite well. And it's absolutely true that a variety of different branches of conservatism, interpretation of conservatism, if you read David Brooks now, he will tell you that there are no real conservatives in the Republican Party, and he is very opposed to the national conservatives as well, and very opposed to Trump as a conservative. He thinks Trump's ridiculous that Trump is a conservative. But I learned quite a bit about conservatives, attitudes, particularly towards reason. I mean, this is an interesting observation. I hope you guys find it interesting, but it was interesting to me. You know, I make a big deal about reason in my talks, and I make a big deal about reason when we do our chats here on the Iran Book Show. I mean, reason is a foundational concept in objectivism. You can't get any of the objectivism without really a link, without a link to reason. Reason is at the core, right? And yet, reason like a concept like freedom is not something that is well understood by other people. It's not something that, for example, Jom Khazani, or for that matter, I think Burke, or many of the conservatives actually understand. Reason to them does not mean the identification, the faculty that identifies and integrates the data provided to us by our senses. Reason to them is not something connected directly to reality. It's not something that uses empirical evidence as the basis for abstraction. To them, reason is a faculty, to some extent at least, if not to a large extent, divorced from reality, divorced from empirical knowledge, divorced from facts. And there's a faculty that starts from axioms, from first principles, and then deduces everything. It doesn't have, it doesn't have any kind of basis in reality for them, right? So conservatives are empiricists. They are skeptical of reason. They believe reason is primarily a means of central planning, that reason is divorced from experience, that reason is divorced from reality, that reason, therefore, is floating. They call this rationalism, and we in objectivism call it rationalism as well. Rationalism is ideas divorced from facts. It's using deduction and pseudo-logic, divorced from reality and facts. It's having floating abstractions, not linked, not connected to reality. An idea of reason connected to reality in the way Iran means it, and in the way I take for granted, when I talk about reason, is not something that they even consider, that they know how to think about, unfortunately. To them, they're two things. There's empirical reality from which we kind of get a sense of the world, and they don't use reason in terms of how we get a sense of the world. We learn from it somehow, and that learning gets institutionalized into our institutions, and that becomes tradition, and that becomes, and then if it doesn't work, we adjust, we fix, we get on the right path, or what we think is the right path, and we keep moving forward and we'll make mistakes, and we keep adjusting as we go along, based on past precedents, and based on reality as it is right now, but there's no reasoning, there's no abstracting away principles, there's no abstracting away the truth, and then aligning our behavior and aligning what we do on the truth, and yes, that truth could be fallible, truth is fallible, but a mechanism, a means of learning from reality, they don't consider that reason, I'm not sure what they call it exactly, and that's important because it just emphasizes the idea that as objectivists, as promoters of a radical set of ideas, as promoters of something truly new, different, it's really, really crucial for us to define our terms. Frank says it sounds Kantian, yes, they basically completely accept the Kantian understanding of the concept of reason, now you could argue that that exists in Locke as well, that to some extent at least, not fully, Locke was a rationalist, at least in terms of his justifications for his epistemology, not necessarily in the way it was explained, but in terms of his justification for it, he was a rationalist, but suddenly their conception of reason is a Kantian conception of reason, so for example, Jom Khazoni hates Kant, but while hating Kant and thinking Kant is the destroyer of Western civilization, and we agree on that, he nevertheless embraces Kant's view of reason, and so do I think all conservatives, and therefore reason is out because reason is just rationalistic unrelated to empirical knowledge, and what they can't conceive of, or what is difficult for them to conceive of, and where they fault the error lies, is the unwillingness to accept this context, content of the objective, as Ayn Rand understands it, that is as objective reality, and then objectivity, and then this objectivist concept of reason, and it's not just objectivist concept of reason, this is science, this is how science is done. You observe reality, you observe certain phenomena in reality, you observe certain relationships in reality, you abstract from that an understanding of it, you integrate it into the rest of your knowledge, and you come up with an understanding of it that then in science you would test, you would come up with a hypothesis in scientific method, and you would test that hypothesis, but you always start with experience, you always start with the facts, that is the identification part of reason, you identify what's going on, then you integrate it and that's the new knowledge, and then you test your integration against reality, you reduce it back to reality to see if it actually is true, and that kind of abstraction, which is what science does, which is what the scientific method is all about, which is what we see in action with science, they have no, they don't have a sense of it, they don't have a sense of it, and of course part of it is that they're not scientists and they're intellectuals and they live in their own little bubble and they come up with intellectual arguments, but, and I think religion plays a bit in this, right? The wall of revelation, the wall of discovering truth that's divorced from experience, so Jom's an interesting religionist because he's an empiricist, so it was interesting because it just reinforces the idea that we, as radicals, have to really, we really have to define our terms constantly, what do we mean by reason, you can't just take it because we all understand each other, take it that everybody else out there understands us as well, they don't, most people have a content understanding of reason, and they think that if you're mentioning reason, you're talking about some deduction from original, I don't know, some kind of arbitrary axioms, and none of that is indeed true, new knowledge, almost all new knowledge is inductive, and this is not me saying, all new knowledge is inductive, it's not me saying this is, I ran, let it pick up, this is objectivism, so that was, I thought interesting in preparing for the debate, the extent to which that is true, to the extent to which they are anti-reason because they have a wrong conception of reason, and indeed the right conception of reason is beyond them, they can't comprehend it, and indeed most philosophers can't comprehend it, anyways, so I thought the debate was a good debate, it was a debate I think people could learn from, it was a debate that, you know, I think Jom focused on objections to individualism rather than positive presentation of the virtue of conservatism, and that gave me an opportunity to rebut them, I also thought that the questions brought out a lot of that, so there were a lot of good questions, and generally the audience was particularly intellectual, I'd say most of the audience were objectivists but there were a number of students there who asked questions, and the questions were good, and they were not just, they were good questions, and they were not got your questions, which is always a danger with an objectivist audience, they were good thoughtful questions that got us talking about important things. Okay, let's look at some of these super chat. Robert says, excellent debate is always the question for which they socialist nationalists are like, have no answers, why? Why should one act for the sake of something anything which is no personal value significance? Yes, and that's the sense in which he never made a positive case for conservatism. I asked that why, I asked the why in terms of, you know, my objective, objection to his collectivism, and I asked it in my opening statement, and he never really answered, because there never really is an answer, but that is the key, and that's why I think there's so much more content on the side of individualism to talk about, including to attack, so I think much of the conversation, both in debate and at the Friedman interview was very much focused on the individualism, but again, I am interested curious about your responses to the debate and what you thought there was covered and whether you have any questions coming out of it, any comments, any suggestions, any criticisms, so please use the super chat to do all that. We're at about $170 so far. Okay, Michael asks, with $50, thank you Michael. Yohan mentioned he was caring for mentally apparent and gets no selfish benefit from it, however, but he is doing it out of tradition. Why don't you address this during the debate? How would you handle such a situation in your own life? If I remember right, that was during the Q&A, you can address everything, and it's really, I mean that is a complicated issue. You have to attribute motivation to him, so it's complicated, and it's difficult to do when you're asked only respond to questions with two minutes, which is what we were asked to, only have two minutes, so there were other things that I thought were more important, relevant to that, but here's what I would have said. I would have said, two things, if it's truly you're doing it only out of a sense of duty and out of a sense of tradition, then I think it is a sacrifice, and it's not good. You shouldn't be doing it. Why are you doing it? Where's the positive answer to why? Tradition is not an answer. Tradition is an answer, but it's an irrational answer. It's not, if you don't have a self-interested reason to do it, if you don't have a rational reason to do it, if you're doing it just because that's what people do, that's what's expected of me, now you're complete second-handed, or this is the tradition that's complete second-handed, I expect you at least to have some explanation, but that's the problem with your collectivism, tradition, altruism, is they don't have an answer to the why. They don't have an answer to why do you do it. What's the reason? And they certainly don't have a reason to answer, partially because they don't believe in reason as important. How would I handle the situation? Well, it depends, and that's the thing that happens when you have a rational morality. It depends is obvious. Everything is contextual. Everything depends on the circumstances, the relationship, what's going on. For example, how close is this relative to me? Or in this case, parent. But let's say it's a relative. I think he said relative, not parent. How close is the relative to me? Close, distant. I see him all the time, never seen him at all. So what is the relationship? How important is this person to me? It's a parent I kind of like, but I never see and don't care that much for. It's a parent I love, respect, admire, who had a crucial part in raising me and helping me become the person I become. My relationship with that person is completely different depending on that answer. So who is the person? What's my relationship to it is, defines how I would deal with that situation. A remote relative or even a close relative that is remote in a sense that I didn't have a relationship, don't have a relationship with. Obviously, I wouldn't care for. I mean, I'd consider providing some funding with other family members to provide support to them if I had some positive relationship with them. But if I had no positive relationship with them, I wouldn't even do that. If it was my wife, my child, a parent that I love deeply, then of course I would do it. Not out of a sense of tradition or out of a sense of duty, but out of a sense of love. This person is dear to me. They are struggling. They're having a hard time. They need help, even though it's hard, even though it's painful. They're part of me. You can't separate the people I love in that sense from me. So of course I would take care of them. Of course I would help them out. Of course it would be difficult, but it is part of what it means to have a deep relationship with somebody. It's part of what it means to love. Part of that is to take care of somebody. You know, particularly as we grow older, this becomes evident. You know, as we grow older, things are gonna be rough. You don't just walk away from somebody you love because things are rough. You don't walk away from somebody you love because they're hurting. They're struggling. In the country. What then does your love mean? It's the same as a question somebody asked me actually in Denver. Am I talking Denver? Well what about soldiers who fight in a war? Aren't they being self-less? No. If your values are sometimes going to acquire you to do difficult things. Your values are sometimes going to acquire you to risk your life. Your values are sometimes going to acquire you to spend a lot of money. So for example, for a soldier, your values are sometimes going to require you to go to war because your value of freedom, the value of living on your own terms, the value of being, of providing for your family and for the people that you love and making sure that they live under freedom. That sometimes will require you to risk your life. It certainly required the founding fathers to risk their lives. Not to risk your life for it. Not to fight for it. Is indeed a betrayal of yourself. A betrayal of your values. And this is what people get wrong about individualism. This is what people get wrong about the whole idea of individualism. Individualism doesn't mean living on a desert island. Individualism doesn't mean not caring about anybody else. Individualism in the pursuit of happiness doesn't mean short termism. It means identifying the values that will make you happy and fighting for those. And sometimes you will fight for them and not win. And it means that if a person, another person, a friend, a lover, is in deep trouble or is deeply hurting or is mental problems or physical problems, then one cares for them because they are a value to you. And it's your loyalty to your own values that you do it. This is why it's selfish to do it because it's your loyalty to your own values. And that's what people don't get about being selfish. Being selfish is not about going by emotion. Being selfish is not about being short term. Being selfish is not about some superficial, I want to have my ice cream now. Being selfish means deciding on choosing, evaluating, constantly reaffirming a higher care values and then fighting for those values. Now, not an arbitrary higher care values. Not a higher care values based on tradition. Not a higher care values based on what other people think. A higher care values that you have discovered that you have chosen as yours because these are the principles that you believe will lead to your happiness consistent with your morality, consistent with your philosophy. And you don't just willy nilly dump a bunch of them just because, whoops, it's going to take a lot of work. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching. Show your appreciation. 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