 So, if you're able, please consider supporting this channel by becoming a patron at www.eatrion.com. It's a horrible channel. The less you eat, drink, and buy books, the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house, the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save. The greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour, your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e. the greater is your alienated life. The greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth. So the idea here is to create, typical, created the economy between saving and living, between earning and enjoying life. The idea is that if you work, if you invest in your work, if you save money, that means you don't go to restaurants, you don't date, you don't love, you don't do all the fun stuff like climbing mountains, that you should, in some garden of Eden, be able to do. And that creates what moths called and what modern leftists use all the time, alienation. You work to save so you can live well, but because you're constantly chasing the savings, you never will live well. Now I'll get to why this is so. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The work, all passions and all activity, right? So all of you out there who are working for living, you must sacrifice, or you must have sacrificed all your passions for the sake of money, money, money, money, money. That's the only thing that's important to you. Worker may only have enough for him to want to live and may only want to live in order to have that. These words, penned by Karl Marx in 1844, are no less true today than they were 170 years ago. And nowhere on earth do they ring more true than in the United States. As the wealthiest nation on earth, the US enjoys the privilege of looking down on the rest of the world as, quote, less successful. Our people basking in the light of glorious American exceptionalism. What we fail to realize is that our concept of success is not only narrow and short-sighted, but also fundamentally opposed to human flourishing. Our population as a whole may enjoy more wealth than some of our pure nations, but at what cost? Our waking hours are consumed by work, our life expectancy is on the decline, we rate poorly in metrics like happiness and job satisfaction, and those of us in the workforce today will never achieve the financial stability of our parents' generation. Maybe that's because we are taught that work is a burden, work is alienating, work is, you know, by the left teaches us that work is almost slavery, that work is a horrible thing, that if only we could have all the goodies we wanted, if only we could do everything we felt like doing without work. Now note the difference here, they're making an argument that work is opposed to living, the work is opposed to value, work is opposed to virtue, work is opposed to happiness. Now you could maybe, maybe, I think it's insane, but maybe make a case during Marx's era when most work was drudgery, most work was in the factory, most work sucked, but even then it was a lot better than subsistence farming, because before, quote, work, what did we all do? We were very good at dying, many of us died before the age of ten, if we survived we worked from sunrise to sunset just to feed ourselves, no surplus, no hiking, no going up mountains, no vacation, nothing, just work with no fun, just work to survive, nothing beyond that. So working for these people is, working maybe for Marx could be perceived as a challenge, could be perceived as something negative, could be perceived as hard and drudgery. But today, today, when we're as rich as we are, when you have real choices, when you grow up, when so many young people go study, I don't know, critical race theory, agendas, you know, feminist studies, whatever, all kinds of ridiculous topics for fun because they have no application in the world and they have no application for work, somebody's asking who the narrator is, let me just scroll down here and I'll tell you, it's the second thought, it's a channel that has 922,000 subscribers, I don't know who they are, some leftist organizations, 922,000 subscribers, I have 22,000, that's the world in which we live, 22 for me, 922 for the leftist nuts. Think about the world today in which we can choose our profession, choose what we study. We make so much money that we live in big beautiful homes, we drive magnificent cars, we go on lengthy vacations, we save money, which we use later on, the whole perspective here is of work as drudgery, work as force, work as coercion, work as exploitation. I think about the attitude objectivism has, the objectivist approach is that being productive is a primary virtue, it's the source of much of our self-esteem and ultimately a source of much of a happiness for an objectivist. Work is not drudgery, work is not caused, work is the source of his life, it's not just an end to something, I'll have money so I can eat, I'll have money so I can go vacation. It is an end in itself because it is enjoyable in itself and if it's not, switch careers, if it's not, move companies, if it's not, make it so. People are not happy today, they're not happy at work today, suicide rates in America, drug use rates in America are really high. Not because of the quality of the work that they have, but the quality of their values, the quality of their virtues. They don't take personal responsibility over their own life, over their own survival, over the quality of their own life, over the quality of their own job, of their own work or what they should be pursuing which is their own career and their own career is taking their job, their work, their study, their schooling seriously and therefore challenging themselves and therefore enjoying it and therefore gaining the self-esteem that comes from achieving one's goals. So the whole Marxist premise here is that productiveness is not a virtue, that productiveness sucks, that it is a burden, that if only human beings could be, not have to be productive. The whole premise of Marxism and the whole premise of this modern left is that wealth in all its forms just drops like manna from heaven. It's just there, it just gets created without anybody having any effort, without anybody exerting anything. And then it's just a question of how do we redistribute it? How do we distribute it, not redistribute it? How do we figure out who should get what? But it's just there. And God, how dare you, given that it's just there, how dare I have to go to work if I didn't go to work, it still would be there. The work doesn't create anything. It is so, I mean the whole Marxist thread is so anti-reality, anti-fact. Everything we have has to be created. Everything created starts with an idea, then with an entrepreneur, then with a capitalist, then and only then does labor enter the picture. And it does what the entrepreneur tells it to do. And it produces and creates stuff and hopefully labor is in a job they enjoy that is a challenge that pushes them, that allows them to grow. Thank you Troy, I really appreciate it, on top of all the rest of your supports, amazing. But no, for them, labor is in this paradise where they're having a good time, they're partying, they're climbing mountains, they're doing great stuff. And then this evil capitalist and these evil entrepreneurs force them into the factory, force them to program, force them to do this work and then all the wealth, all the benefits of this work go to the entrepreneur and to the capitalist. So they're basically slave labor, held down and denied this utopia that they came from. But that's completely upside down. All of it is upside down. There is no wealth without the capitalist entrepreneur. There are no jobs without the capitalist and entrepreneur. And without jobs, the workers would literally starve or go back to subsistence farming. But the fact that subsistence farming cannot sustain 8 billion people on planet Earth. So the alienation doesn't come from the work. The alienation comes from the preaching, from them taking seriously all the preaching about how they shouldn't have to work, about how vacations are more important than work, how work is misery, about how exploited they're being. That's where the alienation comes from. It's from the propaganda, which unfortunately sadly people today are buying into, are buying into. But the fact is to be ambitious, including by the way to save, but not to save everything. We talked about this on the show. You don't want to save everything. You want to enjoy life. It's not like I work really hard today and one day I'll enjoy it. No. Why are you working hard? You also want to enjoy it? You shouldn't save to excess. There is such a thing as saving to excess. All right, let's do a few of these super chat questions. We'll see then if we continue the video. I'm happy with my job and I think most citizens in the USA are successful in proper hospitals. However, I can't stand the US federal government. Do you think this is a strange contradiction, loving my life but hating the government? Not at all. I think you love your life. You love your life, which is great in spite of the fact that the government is trying to prevent you from loving your life. They take half your income. They regulate your business. They make it difficult for you to have options in terms of jobs because of the labor laws. Government is a burden when it shouldn't be. Government should be there to protect your rights. In other words, government, the only role of government is to protect your freedoms. So, freedom for, what do you need freedom for? Why does anybody need freedom? What the hell? You need freedom so that you can pursue the values necessary for you to have a wonderful life. The point of living is to have a great life. The point of living is to be happy and the government's job is to take away coercion, to take away force so that you can have the best shot at happiness. Instead, the government wants to promote its version of happiness, its version of values. It wants to tell you what you can and cannot do, how much of your money you should keep. It wants to redistribute your wealth and regulate your business and control you. So yes, you should hate your government, not just the federal government, your local government, your state government. They're all in it together and they're all obstructing your freedoms and you're limiting your ability to love your life, your ability to pursue values, your ability to be successful in your life. Eric asks, isn't his a logical consequence of the doctrine of a hungry man isn't free? We need money for food, so when the man makes us work to get money, the man enslaves us from our need for food, yes. But the fact is we need freedom so that we can make our food, not a hungry man isn't free. A hungry man doesn't stay hungry if he's free, because a hungry man produces so that he can eat. But the whole attitude is an attitude of entitlement. I am entitled for food. I'm entitled to other people to provide for me. This is the core of altruism. Other people, if I have a need for food, for work, for money, for vacation, for climbing a mountain, it's other people's moral responsibility to take care of me, to provide those things for me, to make sure I have those things. And that's at the core of socialism, welfare state, all the redistributive policies that exist out there. That's at the core of them. That's at the heart of it. So absolutely this idea of a hungry man isn't free, is of course a complete negation of what freedom means. Freedom means not that you get stuff for free. Freedom means that you're the absence of coercion. Freedom means the environment in which you are free to pursue your values, and one of those values, by the way, is food. Free of coercion, free of force. Yeah, Jennifer reminds us of a, in the old, I think this is the old twilight zone, which were very philosophical and very clever. I think this is from the 1670s. I ran really like this show. There was an episode where the man got whatever he wanted with no effort, and he went insane. But that's the utopia that Marx imagines. That by the way is the Garden of Eden. And that is why I often say that Marx's inspiration is religion. He takes Christian morality, and in a sense, Jewish mythology, the Garden of Eden, Christian morality's altruism, which he builds his whole theory. And the end game, the utopia, is the Garden of Eden. Food is just there. Any value you want is just there. You don't have to do any work, and indeed, when God kicks Adam of Eve out of the Garden of Eden, what is it that he burdens them with? He burdens them with the need to work in order to feed themselves. And that's the beginning of work as a burden. That's the beginning of work as exploitation. If you set yourself up as the standard, the Garden of Eden, then everything else is hard. Everything else is a burden. Everything else is less. And that religion does and Marx capitalizes on that. And of course, the left that claims to be secular adopts this really religious premise that the Garden of Eden, i.e. utopia, is a place where you have to do no work. But we as objectivists are focused on reality, on human nature, on the world as it is, not as fantasy would have it. And the world as it is requires humans to work in order to have food, to work in order to have anything, any to work in order to have even the slightest sense of self-esteem because you need to know that you can materially take care of yourself. I'm going to do a show soon on productiveness as a virtue, and we'll talk more about this and I'll repeat some of what I'm saying here. Yeah, I mean, Jordan Peterson, somebody mentioned Jordan, Jordan Peterson has this complete opposite view of the Bible. The opposite view of Garden of Eden. But he's wrong. Once you set up the Garden of Eden as your ideal, then Marx, that's what Marx does. That's what Marx does. So yeah, I mean, I would love to talk to Jordan Peterson about his biblical stories lectures because I mean, I disagree with him about Adam and Eve. I disagree with him about Abraham and Jacob, Abraham's sacrifice of Jacob, all of that. He is absolutely distorting and perverting the actual story in order to fit his story he wants to tell you, all right? I mean, the Garden of Eden is one of the most destructive stories you could imagine. In terms of human psychology, human motivation. So and again, it's what it's what Marx leverages. All right, we'll do a little bit more of this video and then we'll call it a day. In this episode, we're going to attempt to divorce the notion of success from the dogged pursuit of the accumulation of capital. Let's start with the core belief that animates many American workers. The idea of the American dream, a sort of national ethos. The philosophy of the American dream can be something like this. Everyone has the opportunity for prosperity and success, regardless of their background and based solely upon their ability or achievement. It's very much a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality. Yeah, that's a beautiful thing. One of the greatness of America is the idea of personal responsibility, of the ability to bootstrap yourself, the ability to succeed, the ability to better yourself, better yourself materially. Absolutely. But as a consequence of bettering yourself materially, we have opportunities open up to better yourself in any other aspect, educationally, spiritually, artistically, human relationship wise. The point about John Peterson's stories is not that they're not capitalistic. It's the fact that Abraham's story is not about sacrifice for greater love, greater life. It's about blind obedience. It's about blind obedience to a greater power. The problem is that John Peterson wants to believe that Abrahamic story is pro-capitalist and he distorts it and perverts it. But that's not the message of Abraham's decision of that story. It's the exact opposite. Abraham's story is about authoritarianism. It's about the virtue of authoritarianism and the importance of authoritarianism. All right. So notice how they view a cynicism. Which is also very common in American life. The idea that one should be able to succeed without any external help solely through one's own force of will and hard work. This notion is, of course, absurd and is made even more ridiculous by the fact that the phrase has been adopted by so many in a manner completely opposite to its original meaning. To pull yourself up by your own bootstraps is obviously impossible and that was the original meaning of the phrase. Yeah, but of course nobody thinks that you can succeed without interacting with other people. It's a strawman they create as if individualism is being on a desert island. Well, of course it's not. Of course you trade with other people in order to improve yourself. But that's the American dream. The American dream is improving yourself not by exploiting other people but by trading with other people. The American dream is about self-improvement. It's about taking responsibility for self. That doesn't mean isolation. That doesn't mean he's right. Booting yourself by your own bootstraps, right, because you can't. It means doing the best that you can. Trading with other people. Benefiting from the world in which you live to the best of your ability. With that requires choice, thought, effort. To attempt something that is completely absurd. Of course in America nothing is impossible so we refitted the expression to better suit our dogmatic obsession with self-reliance. America is an interesting case study because unlike many other countries, when settlers first arrived here there seemed to be an endless expanse of land to explore and claim. This frontier lifestyle gave birth to the restless nature of the American dream. One governor noted in 1774 that the Americans, forever imagined the lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled. He added that, if they attained paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west. This sums up the American relationship to work pretty well. Yeah, and what's wrong with that? Why is that a negative? Let me quickly do a couple of super chat questions here and then we'll see. I'm reading Matt Ridley's book, The Innovation That Went Into Increasing Crop Yields to Feed Billions is astounding, yes. It's called the Green Revolution. I mean the real Green Revolution, not the kind of Green New Deal we're talking about. To leftist food, yeah I mean that feeds billions and that was an amazing innovation that a lot of people against because it used science and technology but it changed the environment. Who asked, have you analyzed nation happiness studies? I've looked into it a little bit. The work I've looked into, I'm not impressed. These happiness surveys are weird and biased and they're based on theories of happiness that I don't think are true, that are distorted and then as of course they ignore kind of cultural issues, for example in Scandinavia, you expect it to be happy so people say they're happy because that's the expectation is that they are happy. Other cultures you're not expected to be happy and to say you're happy is arrogant and offensive. The studies are very, very poorly done from everything I've seen. Now I'm not a psychologist, I'm not an expert in these kind of studies but even to me who knows a little bit about statistics and a little bit about happiness, they don't make any sense, any sense. All right, I wanted to comment one more thing about Jordan Peterson just because this came up. Spoon says, okay but that is your interpretation, if someone's listening to his perception they are going to take that out of it and preach that, why is that bad? It's bad because it's detached from reality. It's bad because nobody else has that interpretation of the story. It's bad because that's not what the story is. So what happens is that they associate sacrifice, authoritarianism with capitalism because they're not going to bind to Jordan Peterson's story, not ultimately because it's not there. He has to massage it, he has to distort it and pervert it in order to do it. And plus his whole use of the term sacrifice is wrong because he uses sacrifice in that context as investment. But there's no investment there. There is truly a sacrifice and willing to sacrifice this value, your only son for what? For what? What is the better life that you're going to get? All there is is you're willing to sacrifice your only son based on the authority of a God. That's not a justification for capitalism. There cannot be a justification for capitalism. It's a perversion and distortion and nobody can hold this sophisticated perversion and distortion of Jordan Peterson. This is why defending capitalism has to be done right. Not every defense of capitalism is good. Most defenses of capitalism actually undercut the cause. Most defenses of capitalism actually make our job much, much more difficult. Because not only now do we have to undo everything the Marxists say about capitalism, now we have to fight everything that the so-called pro-capitalist side has to say about capitalism in terms of its morality, its philosophical, its intellectual basis. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. But at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I go to 100. All it takes is a click of a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this and you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there, help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share and you can support the show at your own book show.com slash support on Patreon or subscribe star or locals and show your support for all, for the work, for the value, hopefully you're receiving from this. And of course, don't forget, if you're not a subscriber, even if you just come here to troll, or even if you're here like Matthew to defend Marx, then you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up. You'll know what shows are on, when they're on. You'll get notified. So yes, like, share, subscribe, support. Like share, subscribe, support. There you go. Easy. One, all of those, please.