 What's interesting about the current political scene, both in your country and here, is the way in which cultural politics has now moved to the front of the stage, so to speak, and in particular, and this is something I associate much more with the new left, than the right, particular obsession with language and the desire to regulate, control language, prevent people like you from even speaking. What do you think philosophically lies behind this? Yes, well, you know, so, what lies behind it is a rejection of the idea that reason is the mechanism by which we discover truth, that reasoned debate, reasoned argument is the way in which you convince other people, and using our mind, our senses, and our reasoning capability is the way we discover truth about the world. To one extent or another, they believe either in complete subjectivism or some kind of way in which truth is revealed to them by some mechanism. They know it, maybe it's through their racial identity or maybe it's through their intersectional identity, depending on who you talk to on the radical left, but once they have that truth, since they didn't achieve that truth through a reasoned mechanism, there's no way for them to explain it to us, and therefore the only way they can get us to come along is by using force. And this is all totalitarianism. You know, the communists can't actually explain to us why we should all be sacrificed, why we should all be killed in the name of the proletarian. There's no reason why the proletarians should rule and the dictatorship of the proletarians should rise. Or what even is the proletarian? Who are the proletarians? How do they make decisions? Because again, they get that through some kind of revelation and they get it through, the only way you get revelation really is through a leader like Stalin or Lenin who sees the truth, right? And they have to use violence. The fascists, how do they know what the Aryan race wants? Well, they get it. You know, somebody has to lead the Aryan race and have the revelation. And he can't explain it to us because he didn't get it through reasons, so he has to use force against us. The New Left is the same way. How do they know that this intersexual pyramid is the right intersexual pyramid? Not through reason, not through fact, not through logic. And once you abandon fact, reason and logic, you're left with force. So you're left with silencing people who are trying to use logic and reason to object to your stance. You're left with trying to enforce your beliefs on other people through force. And that's, you know, that's why philosophically, the thing we must fight for is reason and truth. The idea that truth exists, the truth, there is a truth, there is objective reality, and that the only way to know it is through reason. And if it is through reason and if there is objective truth, then I should be able to show you, I should be able to explain it to you, I should be able to argue about it, and I might be wrong, and we can have that debate, but using the tools of logic, not a fist. And it's when you abandon logic, when you abandon reason, a fist comes into the picture. So they're taking us, all these different types of authoritarian, are taking us back to a really pre-enlightenment period when at one point, you know, it was the Catholic Church or some other religious organization saying, we know the truth, and if you don't go along with it, we're going to burn you alive and torture you. And you have to sort of, you have to subjugate your own consciousness to the priesthood, or to whoever it is. And in a way, what we're seeing now is a reversal of this incredible liberating period that was brought into being by the renaissance, by the enlightenment, whereby individuals were then became free to utilize their own absolute cognitive capacity. And now we seem to be going back with these people. Well, I would say that what has happened over the last 200 years, really, since the enlightenment made these ideas explicit, and actually created a political system to manifest that, which is a free political system, whether it's American or whether it's Western European political systems that are free and respect free speech, because they recognize that reason is the only means to achieve, and therefore argumentation is the only means to achieve truth. But what we've seen is really from the beginning of the enlightenment, certainly from the beginning of the 19th century, that is the end of the intellectual enlightenment, what we've seen as a rebellion against it, whether it was conservatives in the 19th century, particularly German conservatives who resented the idea of individuals having opinions and individuals coming up with their own ideas, and individuals leaving the wonders of the farm to go to the city and be engaged in capitalism, or whether it's ultimately communism and Marx rejecting the enlightenment, or even Kant and Hegel is massively rejecting the enlightenment in his philosophy, but we see, coming out of Germany in particular, but also out of France, a real opposition to the enlightenment thinking. And I'd say the rise of communism and the rise of fascism in Europe are these pre-enlightenment ideas rebelling against the enlightenment. So they're new forms of sort of counter-enlightenment. Constantly we're seeing counter-enlightenment in the West, and we're constantly having to fight back against the counter-enlightenment, and unfortunately the enlightenment left a lot of holes philosophically that are being exploited by these counter-enlightenment forces. And one of I think Rand's contributions here is that I think she is the enlightenment philosopher of the 20th century. So she helps fill in the holes that the enlightenment created, that the enlightenment philosophers didn't fully articulate. For example, the enlightenment philosophers, many of them were quite religious, and she kind of brings a secular perspective and a secular foundation for a lot of these ideas. But we're constantly, and I think she provides us with tools to now continue the fight against the pre-enlightenment ideas. But this is the fate of the West, though, the fate of the world now, because Western ideas dominate the world. It's this constant battle between the enlightenment and the pre-enlightment. And in that sense, most of these ideas have a religious tinge to them. Communism had a religious tinge to it, fascism suddenly had a religious tinge to it, and you're seeing this new left ideology, and I'd say populism on the right, both have religious aspects to them, a priest to it. What do you mean by religious? Because I mean, many of the sort of modernist authoritarians of the 20th century, whether they were fascists or Marxists, certainly have said that they didn't hide against it. Sure. It was certainly God. They replaced God. Why religion? So they replaced God with another mystical entity. The communists replaced God with a mystical entity called the proletarian. Its consciousness, and how do we know what the, again, we need a leader to tell us. We need a pope to tell us what the proletarian wants. Fascism replaced God with the Aryan race or whatever, or the nation, right? Nationalism places the nation above the individual. And again, the nation is kind of a mystical entity. You see it in Putin right now. You know, the nation has kind of, the Russian spirit has kind of a mystical entity and you need that powerful leader to be able to tell you what is good for the nation and what you should do for the nation. And I think the new left has, in a sense, this mystical entity, this knowledge that somehow they have accessed, but it's fundamentally anti-reason. And when you don't have reason what's left, you have left emotion. And I would say that at the end of the day, religion is based on emotion. It's the end of the day. It's based on the truth as revelation, truth as coming, since there's nothing to reveal. It's ultimately the emotion. And so I think that all these supposed secular movements, by rejecting reason, are left with emotionalism. And in that sense, religion. And the state becomes a kind of an omnipresent or powerful agency that kind of replaces God. Yeah. So it could be the state. It forces everything. Or it could be the intellectuals, right? Yeah. It could be the intellectuals that tell you which group today you have to sacrifice. Right? Which group today is at the top of the hierarchy of need and therefore that require your sacrifice. But note that they've taken, in a sense, they've taken Christian morality. They've taken the morality of sacrifice. They've taken the morality of the neediest in society need your help or a group that they define as the neediest. Again, whether it's the parliamentarian, we must all sacrifice for the parliamentarian or whether it's the Aryan race, we must all sacrifice the Aryan race or whether it's transgender, you know, minority ethnic, this, that or the other, that we must all sacrifice too. There's always a group where morality demands that we give up our rights, give up our freedoms for their sake. And that again, I think, is religious, is religious based. All these people are put up on a cross as some kind of ideal that we must live, that we must sacrifice too. 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. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe to lifestyle locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see The Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.