 So we're each going to speak a little bit at the beginning about tribalism and family relationships and then leave a lot of time for questions, I think, honest this time. So I just want to get a sense a little bit of some of your experience. So blood is thicker than water. How many of you actually heard people in your own family say that or things to that effect? I'm just a fair number of you. OK. I'm sorry? OK. How about did you get the attitude again from some family members, you know, you're a Heath or you're a Calabrese, you'll be OK, or our way of doing things, at least implicitly, get the idea. Our way of doing things is the right way because whatever the last name is. How many of you get that from your families? I got that a lot from my families. And guilt, which I think Ankar brought up in a different context this morning. Anybody know guilt from family guilt? Hey, that's God. That's that was the most popular, by the way. OK. Also came up this morning, you know, a lot of us still have tribalist inclinations on some issues. And I hate to say this, but you know, family brings out the tribalist in me. And anyway, I'm working on it, but it's taken some work. I want to talk about a couple of things. Why I think it's natural for family to exert a tremendous grip on a lot of us. Why it's objectively difficult for an objective adult to figure out exactly how to deal with family and then just say a word on how to deal with family. So I think it understandably exerts a tremendous, it can exert a tremendous grip on many of our minds. First impressions count, right? And as a child, these are the very first impressions you're getting in life. Just as you're even getting your bearings, your sense of the world, your sense of reality, your sense of yourself. This is the first social dynamic you're dealing with, but not only social dynamic, right? They're the people who help you. You depend on them. I think this makes it all the more difficult to gain distance and an objective perspective. Even these people, your mother and father, now I understand, obviously people grow up in different circumstances, all sorts of different configurations of families, but unlike everybody else, your mother and father, they get titles. They're mommy and daddy. Even your siblings, right? You quickly learn. Well, you have a sister Maria, oh yeah, and you have an aunt Maria too, or somebody else is named Roger in class like your cousin Roger. But nobody else is mommy or daddy. No wonder what they say and what they do carries some authority in our minds. And the implicit I do think is as important as the explicit, what's actually articulated, right? From these people, particularly the immediate family, in the early years. So it can be natural, I think, to absorb the idea that their ways of doing things just are the right ways of doing things. And when they say you should do this or you have an obligation to do that, that's just taken like a metaphysical fact. This can also be exacerbated by the fact that others in the family aren't questioning some of those things, okay? So then to say a little bit about why I think even as an adult, it can be sometimes complicated to figure out how you should assess your family members and deal with them. Family expectations are often unspoken. There's a lot in a lot of families that's left unspoken. Resentments from 10 years ago, grievances, a lot of families don't like to talk things out and through and some of that can shadow our later relationships. Again, unhealthy dynamics and assessments of other people in the family can be exacerbated by the fact that everybody else in the family is going along with this. You're especially weird if you just question certain things. Often the ways of our families are coming from people who themselves are not on rational premises, right? I mean, a lot of their philosophical beliefs are not sound. Some of them have self-esteem issues and security issues, so these are all in the mix. Then you've got a society that reinforces the idea that family is all. I mean, even last week in the aftermath of the horrible massacre in Pittsburgh, some of the pundits, but we're all one family. Now, even though some of what they were getting at, I think is fine and legitimate, it's that family. Family is the be-all, right? Holiday season coming up, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Everybody spends the holidays, the major holidays with their families, right? At great expense, great trouble, great travel, great distance, right? Oh, you're not spending holiday, you know, Christmas? There's something wrong with you, that's the unspote, right? So family has this really special status, it seems. Then a final complicating factor, at least. Sometimes you do owe your family certain things, right? The message here isn't, oh, you know, grow up, be an objectivist and hell with the family. There are often lots of good things in families and family members, and it's possible that even on egoistic premises, not sacrificial premises, you might owe certain things to people in the family. Even inconveniences at times, right? And inconvenience doesn't mean a sacrifice. Those are not equivalent concepts. You might value certain people in your life, in your families. You might have really gained and benefited in certain ways. Yeah, it's often complicated by the fact that, well, I didn't ask for those benefits when I was two years old or when I was seven years old. Nonetheless, you might have benefited in substantial ways. You might have other things, qualities that you enjoy about family members. There's something in familiarity of having been through some of the same experiences, vacations together, or whatever it might be. That can be grounds for good, positive relationships with a sibling 30 years later or whatever. So anyway, let me just say a little bit more about how then might it make sense to deal with family members, very broadly speaking. Assess them as responsible adults, as adults and as individuals. So be willing to say, yeah, that brother was great and she wasn't so hot at all. That's it, right? Uncle Joe, I always found him really kind of phony. And yeah, Uncle Bill had a great sense of life, wonderful to be around. I would do things for him. I would visit him in the hospital and so on. So judge them as individuals. Realize that family, that word when it's invoked, that isn't a get out of responsibility free card for anybody. Blood isn't thicker than reason, right? So judge people individually, but judge them justly, right? The virtue of justice, judge them objectively. Judge them in context. There's a personal thing I'm debating saying, but I mean, you have to judge people in context. So be rational. You've heard that before. In particular here, I think in this context, question some of your own motivation. Why am I doing that? Why am I inclined, is it just to appease mommy's demands? Is it out of guilt? Is it out of, no, there's a genuine value here or what? So there's a lot of, I think, self-questioning that also has to go into figuring out rational ways of dealing with our families, okay? That's great. So let me just elaborate on a few things that Terry just said, because I agree with all of that. It's because of that guilt, right? That it makes it so much harder to evaluate and to judge. And you have to be aware of that, that it's hard to evaluate your parents partially because you're young and life experience is limited and it's hard to be objective about something as close as the relationship. They were part of your life, or they're a part of your life for 18 years, for most of us. 18 years that they're all the time. And then most parents, particularly if you're Jewish or Catholic, have embedded some good guilt within us. Which is an emotion that's hard to deal with. Yeah, good guilt, good guilt. Family guilt, which is always good guilt. There's no such thing as good guilt. There's own guilt and unearned guilt. This is unearned, because what are you? You're a kid, right? So, and it's very hard to undo all that. You're also rebelling. Most of us rebelled when we were teenagers, you know, in rational and irrational ways. I certainly rebelled in irrational ways when I was a teenager. I didn't have the context that I had five, six, seven years later. So the tendency is they don't know anything. You know, so you can go, you can bounce around. They're useless, and as you go older, well, maybe there was some virtues there. Maybe there's some good things there. So you can go in either direction. You can become too subservient, or you can rebel for the sake of rebelling. And again, the challenge, and it's not easy, particularly with family, for all the reasons Tara mentioned. And because if they were a good family, they've given you so much, right? You have gotten life, that's the big one. But they've supported you for 18 years. Now it was their choice, but they still supported you for 18 years. So you, in that sense, they've given you a lot to untangle all of that. And the objective about evaluating your parents is very hard, and I think it's part of why, even years and years later, we look back, and we still, we have to unpack it, and it's hard to deal with, and so on. But you have to hold one thing clearly. It's your life. It's not theirs, right? And I know this is pretty basic, and if you've read The Fountainhead, it's all over The Fountainhead, but it's about you. It's not about them. You have to develop that independence of thinking and independence of living. You don't automatically own your parents anything. You owe them justice. You owe them, if they were good, you owe them how you would treat any good person. You owe them that sense of justice. But you don't automatically owe them obedience. You don't automatically owe them love. You don't automatically owe them anything. It has to be earned based on your assessment today of how they treated you growing up and what value they contribute to your life now, at your age as you're living right now. I was doing an interview, I just posted up on YouTube a couple of days ago with an evolutionary psychology by the name of Godside. Many of you might know him. And he, during the interview, he said something like, everybody jumps in the river to save their own kid. It's blood is thicker than water, right? And we're evolutionarily programmed to love our kids and to jump in. And we're evolutionarily programmed to love our parents. We have to do it. There's no choice. I said, really? But what about those parents who not only don't jump to save their kids, but abuse their own kids, treat them really, really badly, right? And what about a kid you don't love? What about a parent you don't love? There's nothing about this that's automatic. It has, but it's, again, it seems automatic because for 18 years, we've been in this particular environment, we've had to deal with them. And the expectation is they, parents tell their kids all the time how much they love them and the expectation is you love them back. And it's very, very hard and challenging to be independent and to think independently about this particular relationship and you're like, probably the hardest one for anybody in terms of the relationship because of the time. And the culture, as Terry just said, the culture is constantly reinforcing this, whether it's evolutionary biologists now telling us how it's in our genes, right? To the religious conservatives who tell us that the unit in society, American conservatives constantly say the unit in society is not the individual, right? It's the family, whether it's Centurum or Jeff Sessions. I mean, they talk about this all the time about the essential unit socially as the family and this is constantly reinforced. Why? Why is it the family? Why isn't it you and go back to, I didn't hear Greg's talk, but I take it that Greg talked about what is the unit, right? So it's a tough one. I think family is one of the toughest ones in terms of human relationship, maybe the toughest in terms of figuring out exactly where you stand and establishing your own independence without rebelling for the sake of rebellion, which is kind of the other part of it. So, you gotta be your own person. You gotta think for yourself and be as objective as you can be in assessing your relationship with your parents, with your siblings. And at the end of the day, I mean, so many people I know who there's still a sense of duty. We have to go and spend holidays with the family. It's really hard, particularly if you live close to them. It's almost, you know, because otherwise it's a massive breakup, right? So the two pieces of advice, I think for yourself, move. Move away, move away, yeah. And moving away makes it easier. I can say, you know, from personal experience, makes it much easier to deal with it and to have some objectivity about it because you're not engaged in the daily thing. So, but yeah, it's a challenge because it's the first tribe and most parents want it to keep it a tribe and you're trying to break away from the tribe and be your own person, and it's hard. I'll just quickly add, well, echo really two things said. I think this is, so Ayn Rand's advice is always to judge. And I think this is an area in which it's super important to judge, but judgment, it has a kind of stigma attached to it now, that judgment means negative judgment. And it doesn't mean negative, it means objective judgment. And I think if you've had halfway decent parents, the judgment has to be super positive that they've contributed so much to your life. And even if it's, you disagree with things they did and if you're now looking at it from as an existing or a future parent, I'd do some things differently. That doesn't mean that they weren't trying to do their best. And so, and I mean, it's one of the worst things I think that can befall an individual, to have really bad, to have really bad, abusive parents because they're not yet equipped of how to cope. It's difficult to judge your parents because of the relationship and so on. But if any parent who's trying, it's a hard job. I mean, it's a really hard job. And that's, you don't have that perspective, I think, as it growing up. You tend to think, yeah, your parents know everything and can do everything and they can't and they don't know everything. So it's, and that, to get an objective perspective, you should get, oh yeah, okay, this is really difficult. If they did halfway decent, you should have a positive evaluation of it. But I think the other aspect of it is to become an adult, you're becoming, as Iran was stressing, an individual. And it takes, in a relationship, it takes two people to be striving to now have an adult relationship. So, and I think it's difficult for parents to now view the child no longer as a child, but as a fellow adult. But the child has to do that as well. So I've been in a lot of relationships where people are complaining about their parents are still treating them like kids. And I tell them, yeah, but you act like a kid around them. So what do you expect to happen? You have to, and that you're asserting now that you have your own life and your own values is not, I'm condemning everything you're doing. It's just, this is my life, these are my values, these are my interests. And they might not now sync up with yours, what you think and what you value and so on. And you can still have a real relationship, just like this, you can have friends you disagree with. But if you're trying to move to adulthood, you have to try to deal with your parents as though now they're individuals. But that also means with a life of their own and interests of their own. And it's not every time I need them, I go and then I expect them to drop everything and they're gonna pay attention to me. But when they start treating me like a kid and want that kind of relationship, I said, what are you doing? I mean, I'm an adult. You can't, so it takes a lot, I think, to establish a good relationship. And it takes both. And if both sides aren't trying to do it, it's often a very difficult thing to navigate them. But both sides have to be doing it. We take questions? Yeah, and if we don't get questions, we can always talk. Yeah, we can talk more. No, no, we want questions. And it opened it up. I mean, I think we're willing to take questions on anything discussed today or any of the issues that were raised today. So feel free, yeah. So I wanna go back to Dr. Brooks point about the family and how there may not be an evolutionary desire to jump in and save your kid from the pool who's drowning. But I think in terms of people in general, part of me wonders if there's an element of tribalism that is inevitable, because even before the capacity to reason or philosophy, there were still, people still formed groups or humans still formed groups in order to survive. So I wanna ask all the panelists, is there an element of this that is inevitable, an element of tribalism that is inevitable, or does that ultimately reduce back to the individual? Anyway, I just was wondering about that. I mean, I would say there, I don't think of it as it's inevitable. And certainly in a modern context where you're choosing, the parents are choosing to have kids. It's a chosen, and it should be at least a chosen relationship from the child's perspective. Yeah, you didn't choose to be born or conceived. But it's, so I don't think of it as at all as there's no necessarily tribal relationship in human affairs when you're talking about individuals that have the power of choice and some recognition that they have the power of choice and some ability to exercise that power. They often can descend into a tribal kind of, it's our family right or wrong, but there's no reason that has to start like that. I think for many families, it doesn't, it's not like that and never was like that. I think tribalism is a default. It's what people default to when they don't reason and when they don't recognize themselves as individuals. That makes sense. Because if you're relying on emotions rather than reason, because that's the only choice you have, right, to see their emotions or reason, then if you can't think, then life is scary and I think people get scared when they're not reasoning and the tribe is a way for them to get comfort, not to eliminate the fear, because the fear still exists, but to get comfort from other people who are afraid like them. So I don't think it's genetic. I think it's a default of not thinking and therefore looking for a group to shield you from reality, which is now the enemy, because you're not using your mind to actually engage with reality. Yeah, the only thing I would say, and it's kind of murky even in my own mind, but I would say something like this, to the extent that there's any physical or physiological, just natural inclination in human beings to be tribal, that's kind of pre-tribal or pre-the concept of tribal and as we talk about tribal today, we're talking about making a choice because we have free will. We choose who we associate with and on what grounds and even how we think of ourselves and what do I identify with? So in that sense, I completely agree, there's nothing inevitable about our being tribalists and I think it's dangerous to, I mean, it's good to raise this question and this issue and to try to sort out what I've only said merkily, but I think there's something to be, anyway, I won't repeat myself. Thank you. Greg? Yeah, so there's a lot of discussion about dealing with the parent-child relationship, but almost all from the child perspective and so you're on, since you're a parent of grown kids, I wonder if you could share a few thoughts on your perspective on that as a parent that might be helpful for all the rest of us who aren't thinking of it from the perspective of relating to our parents. I was trying to avoid doing that. Thank you, Greg. Yeah, I mean, I'd echo some of what Ankar said. Being a parent is really, really hard and it's really hard to know if the way you're treating your kids is right or not. You're constantly second guessing yourself. It's really stressful and hard, so it brings out a lot of emotions which are challenging. You're learning on the job. There's no course you take in advance. It's the hardest thing in many respects. It's the hardest thing, certainly emotionally. It's the hardest thing you will ever do. And then, as Harry always reminds us, these things have free will. And so there's no guarantee that even if you do the best job in the world, they will actually turn out to be good human beings. There's zero guarantee of any of that. So it can be quite frustrating, particularly as they're older. I always tell, I mean, I think of it as this way, you can have kids with the idea of, yeah, one day they'll grow up and then I'll enjoy them because we'll have this great relationship because you don't know that. You better enjoy the kids when they're kids. You better like babies. Yeah, Harry's turning away. I've got a good Harry baby story. You better like kids. You better enjoy the process of being a parent and engaging with the kids. Now, my kids are gonna watch this thing and say, oh, my dad hates us now, but no, you better enjoy that because there are no guarantees in terms of what's gonna happen later on. Now, hopefully you have a great relationship with afterwards, but you might not. You might not or it might be not as good as, you can't have this trade. I'm sacrificing for 18 years so that one day, I'm investing for 18 years so that one day I have a great relationship. That is really, and again, it's hard work. And I think, unfortunately, most parents go into it not realizing it, not expecting it, not thinking about it and not planning for it. It really has to be something you consciously think about planned for and do purposefully. I say this when my first kid was in an accident, but we intended to have kids, so the timing was more the accident than the intention. And we gave it a lot of thought and I read tons of books, all of Montessori's books and all kinds of books, some of them were good, some of them were crap, but you have to take it seriously. It's a massive, massive, you have to invest your money and time and emotional energy and thought and everything that's engaged with it. And then, of course, when they become teenagers and there is this natural tendency to they want to be independent and they don't know exactly how to be independent, so there's definitely a rebellion. And as well as you raise them, at least my experiences, there's this period where they want to rebel, sometimes it lasts very short, sometimes it lasts a lot longer. And it's, again, it's very, very challenging to figure out how to deal with that and then as they become adults, my kids are adults, they're older than you guys, what is your relationship exactly with them? Again, they can behave like kids and you don't want them as a parent, you don't want them, you want them to be independent, but on the other hand, you want to help them. All of these choices are not easy and I'm sure I've made a gazillion mistakes in the process and you have to constantly reevaluate and then are they any good? Just like you as children have to judge your parents, you as parents have to judge your kids at some point. What kind of relationship do you want to have with your kids? And that's not necessarily easy to do in terms of being objective about it, right? You've, in a sense, invested 18 years and there's an emotional investment and it's very difficult. And then if you have more than one kid, it's judging them as individuals and not as my kids, right? They always, who do you love more, right, Daddy? It's, but you have to be objective about who do you love more and what is your relationship with each one and how do you, your relationship is not gonna be the same, they're two different individual people, in my case too. So it's an amazing experience. I mean, it's the greatest thing, it's amazing, it's a great challenge, it's exciting. I enjoyed the whole parent thing, I enjoyed them at every age, I love babies, I love little kids, in a sense I enjoyed them more when they were babies than maybe when they were teenagers. But you have to, it's an incredibly satisfying and wonderful, fantastic experience and you have to really embrace it and love it, but it's a challenge. Like everything in life that's worthwhile, there's a challenge involved, it's not that it's hard, it's just challenging and interesting and exciting and you have to figure stuff out, you make mistakes and you get up and you make it better and you're constantly engaged with the activity. And I think the choice not to have kids is if you don't wanna do all that and that's a legitimate rational choice, but it's, so I don't know, that's some thoughts on it, probably say a lot more, but... If you'll forgive me, I wanna cover, not ask a question, but cover a point that is kinda left open by implication. You're talking about the majority, the vast majority of the children in relation to adults, but there is the Ayn Rand type who doesn't have that attitude that can be so common and natural of placing the parents in a separate category and so forth. She said that, in fact, quite the opposite, that she said, she generalized it to everybody, but obviously speaking for herself, there's your parents and then there's normal people. You would never take your parents to be normal people, so you wouldn't form your concept of man from daddy or your concept of woman from mommy because they're just mommy and daddy. So she had quite the opposite viewpoint. So I think by implication, I take it you don't wanna be saying nobody can find it easy to judge their parents and be independent from the start. I'd like you to comment on that, huh? I say it's hard. What? Nobody but Ayn Rand. I had no difficulty. No, no, it is quite possible. But I think it's, again, understandable why- Yeah, what you said had to be said, yeah, absolutely. I know I agree with what you said. Just by implication, you don't wanna say that's the only possibility. The other thing is that on evolutionary psychology, I don't think there is any such valid field as evolutionary human psychology because man is born topical of Razzon. I wonder if you agreed with that. Yeah, so I think it's interesting. I think there's something there about what is it genetically that we're born with that makes us different in inclinations and I don't even have the vocabulary. But when my two boys were born, for moment one, they were different. So what's interesting is not just physically, but you could tell one like the slave one was more looked. I mean, there were clearly differences. And to me, there's something there to ask the question, what is it that is wired differently when we're born? And it can't be conceptual and it can't be knowledge. But what is it, there's something. And I think the field is not doing that and that's the sad thing. There was a canonical objectivist answer back in the day which was temperament is in a. But what does temperament mean? The emotional, the time course of the emotion that some people have slow, low emotions and other people have spiky and quickly over emotions. It seems like it's more than that. And are you attaching some special significance to the psychology? So if you ask, studying the evolution of human consciousness, I mean to me that's a valid field and there would be a lot to understand about the mechanisms of the emotions. And so there's a lot that I think is partly psychological. But the way they use it now, I think is it's. Yeah, you have a gene to become a criminal, that kind of stuff. Hi. So you guys talked a lot about sort of intellectual maturity and I guess physical maturity and all those things. So I guess my question is how do you think that those sort of coincide and are different? Like, does intellectual maturity come along with physical maturity or maybe later or can come earlier or sort of thoughts on that? I don't think they necessarily coincide at all. I mean, there are very grown up people in terms of age and height and all that stuff, right? Who are very immature intellectually and vice versa. You know, they're precocious, which is sort of a weird word. But... I mean, there's clearly a biological dimension. Something happens when you're a teenager that the hormones kick in and you're rebelling and there's something going on there, right? And almost everybody experiences it. And there's also something about the development of the frontal lobe. When it doesn't exist, it's hard to be an independent thinker when you can't think. So the biology, you know, the mechanisms have to be developed enough to do it. Now, when that happens, and I agree completely with Tara, right? Some people have it all developed and they're still babies and some people at a very young age with very little of the mechanics, they seem to be incredibly mature. I think it goes back to the choices you make and how you deal with the world around you and how you deal with yourself. But not just the choices you make. I mean, so my answer to your question is, I don't know. I haven't studied it. There's people who study this kind of thing. You can give sort of your observations. And I think, I mean, a way to put it is the norm is there's a relationship between the physical development and the mental development. And something, if you think in the law, and age, drawing a line at age of consent, you wouldn't do it pre-purity. So there's a relationship between the two, but what exactly, how to think about that, what all the variation is, what are the factors that can cause variation? I mean, there's a tremendous amount to study there. People study, but not us. Thanks. So, hi. If any of you can elaborate what those being objective means, I'm new to this kind of idea, so I would like to know a little bit more about objectivism, if you can elaborate. Part of it, I mostly want to say Ankar should take this, but it's going by the object that you are evaluating or trying to understand, as opposed to going by, I mean, one of the, I think, helpful contrasts here is as opposed to going by your emotions about it or what you'd like to believe about it. You go by the, you look for the actual evidence of the nature of the object in question or if it's an event, you know, the nature of what actually took place here. You're riveted by the object in question, again, whatever it might be, and all of the evidence and reasoning, logical reasoning that would help you understand that and evaluate that as fully as you can, as opposed to, again, these sorts of things like, well, this is what I'd like to believe, but this is what everybody else seems to believe, this is what the authorities say is so or tradition has said is so for, you know, or the tribe says is so, or I really want it to be, you know, what is the case? That's what you're trying to find out in being objective, so that's some quick. Yeah, and I'd add to that that it's, so objectivity is a concept in objectivism that's designating the proper method of thinking so that, I mean, Greg had up in the first talk that knowledge is work, but it's primarily mental work and it's what are the steps and processes that your mind actually has to engage in in order to do what Teres said, to reach the actual object and the actual facts of reality, not what they make you feel, not what you would want them to be, not what you've heard they are from other peoples. What are the actual facts, but it doesn't, you don't just grasp reality by looking out when we're talking at the conceptual level, you don't grasp Newton's physics, you don't grasp mathematics, you don't grasp philosophy, there's all, there's a process involved and that because it's, you have choice and volition, you can make all kinds of errors and missteps in the search for truth, or you can get it right. And it's objectivity is about the, are you using the right method to reach the facts and the, this is when we talk in objectivism and elsewhere of what is Western civilization and what is distinctive about it, what's distinct, the most distinctive point I think is that it reached the level of sophistication to grasp that you need a method in order to reach knowledge and this comes with the ancient Greeks that they get, it's not just or your answers right or wrong but is your method of even trying to answer questions right or wrong and it's such a more abstract perspective on the pursuit of knowledge and then you can focus on okay, what are the methods and that's when the birth of logic occurs and the rest of Western civilization is a refinement of that, the scientific method is a more complex perspective on the pursuit of truth but that the pursuit of truth is an activity that requires actual steps and processes and to define that is what objectivity, the concept of objectivity is about. So is there any recommendations that you can give me since I'm new to these ideas that I can start you know, so that I can become more objective? I can give you two things to read and you guys might have more. The Einrens, who is the final authority in ethics is where she talks about the notion of objectivity the most and then I would recommend Dr. Leonard Pekoff's opar, the philosophy of objective because the theme really is why that philosophy is called objectivism because of this new concept of objectivity that she has and there's a whole chapter on objectivity so those are the two things I would add. I would add Einrens own introduction to objective epistemology, it's a thin book it's a difficult book but it gives you the essence of what objectivity is all about and I would strongly recommend that at some stage but I think yeah, I mean sort of depending on your own tastes and interests in terms of getting into this these Ankar makes good suggestions as well but not to be forgotten is her own this is how to think about things. Thank you. Hi, I'd like to ask a question concerning parental authority. So during the first few years of a child's life you obviously need some sort of authority to make sure they develop in the right way and as a society we have determined the age of 18 to be the legal age of independence so at what point objectively do you think that the child is able to make his own rational decisions apart from the parent's authority and independent from that? Is it age 18 or is it some other age? Well I think the law has to define an age and then I would say that a child who thinks that at 15 or 16 or 17 they are in a position to make their own decisions and are willing to bear the consequences of that and their parent is objecting let's say but they're willing to provide for themselves and then they would have to appeal to a court and get and show that right and it would be up to a court to make that decision. I don't think it's a uniform age for everybody but the law has to make an age by which it's standardized and then you can have exceptions but you have to prove you're an exception. So is parental authority morally justified until that age or are there exceptions in which the child can make his own independent? Well it depends by what you mean parental authority and over what. Suddenly when a child is very very young parents have to decide pretty much everything that the child does and they have no realm but when we talk about moral you talked about morality suddenly as a child grows older it is part of the responsibility of the parent to let the child have a broader and broader realm in which they make the decisions whether it's which toy to buy. I didn't ask my one year old what toy they wanted because that would mean nothing, right? There was nobody to communicate with in that sense but by the time they were five they chose their toys, right? Or most of their toys or some of their toys or whatever. So you've got a broad scope in which they make but you are still the final authority until they reach legal age that is your responsibility. I would think that in broadening the authority you've got to be paying attention to this kid, right? Some of your, let's say you have a few different children, right? Some of them might be much more mature and able to make certain decisions on their own at the age of 12 than at the age of well now his brother he needs more oversight. No, we can't trust him to do this or have that night at home alone or whatever. So you've got to, so I don't think there's a single, this is the moral age, you know? As a parent I would think this is one of the very difficult kinds of decisions is how much, you know, you want to be giving them more and more autonomy. Responsibly though, and again, heedful of well no, this kid is different from my old, my first child so I need to pay attention. So yeah. Thank you. So if I have a relative who I really can't stand, I hate everything about them. Should I ask that question? No, I don't. Just disagree with them, don't respect them but I pretend to, I maintain this illusion of acting like I do to avoid conflict and avoid a difficult situation for myself and for my other relatives to avoid creating that kind of scene that's gonna be harmful for the people I do care about and do respect. Is that valid? Is that self-interested? Treating it as a hypothetical question because I appreciate you don't know the details but is it okay to sort of lie and pretend to care about someone for your benefit and for other people's benefit? Is that a valid situation? I missed a word in the last part. Is it what to? Is it valid or is it self-interested? Is it objectively the right thing to do? To avoid the situation. I get just a few thoughts. Depending on the kind of person you're talking about and how much I cannot stand to be, I mean there are people who you could put up with like you could put up with and there are a lot of other pluses in your being in this setting with some of these other people and so on I can handle him in the sense of I can kind of tune out and not get into a big argument or something that's gonna be agitating for everybody but there are some people who's like I'm sorry I can't be with him. So you have to gauge the person and so on and sometimes it means you don't wanna be there. I think that can be valid. I think both approaches can be valid that you'd need to know a lot more about the specific context and so on. I mean if you really have, depending on how serious in the nature of the objection that you have to this person then there can be reasons to just not associate. But I would, I agree with that but I don't think it's, you should misrepresent what you're doing or lie about it or something. So there's many of my extended family I don't like. But if it's some big family gathering you both can know we don't like each other so we'll avoid each other but we're both gonna show up so let's not have a fight at there. But that's out in the open. I mean it doesn't have to be out in the open with the whole family. But the terms are known. So it's the putting on the heirs. I find a lot of family dynamics just phony from this regard and it doesn't help anybody from my point of view. So I wouldn't do it. That's really helpful, thanks. Dr. Gatte, earlier you were talking about the foundation of how we think about morality and you had briefly mentioned in passing that you liked the method more than other people of Dawkins for example. And then Dr. Brook you talked about evolutionary biology in your context right now and so I think it's still relevant. So a lot of atheists, new atheists and just people that are interested in evolution and biology as such, they have their sense of morality come from, they say well we get our sense of morality from evolution we just know from these ways and so it seems to be this intrinsic form of morality as distinguished from the intrinsic morality of people that use religion. And so that's just how I gather it but you might have a different conclusion. Do you think that the method of people like Dawkins or of Heiris are better than religion? Even though they use either a subjective or intrinsic way of looking at ethics. So I'll say something on Dawkins so it may be that I misspoke in the lecture. Yeah, but so what I respect about Dawkins is the emphasis that he places on science, his clear love of science that he doesn't apologize for but rather thinks this is something very significant about him as a person which I think is true and that this isn't characteristic that you should want to emulate this kind of wonder, curiosity, passionate investigation of the natural world is a tremendous virtue and it's part of it to have a real conception of what you should have reverence for. This is the kind of thing that you should have reverence for. So he's good on all that I think and he's somewhat unusual in that and I have a lot of respect for him in that regard and for many of his other work but in regard to morality it's not that I think the method is good. The method is not good, emphatically not good and it's a good illustration of the point that I was making that it's way harder to challenge morality than it is to challenge religion and religion is already hard to challenge because what Dawkins does is in effect takes Jefferson's view that there's a moral sense and gives an evolutionary spin on that. We all just know what's right and wrong and the reason is not because the creators it's evolution has programmed us to know what is right and wrong and what ends up happening in his view and but this is a lot of the new atheists I think Harris is better in this regard actually but is that the whole content of morality is determined by Christianity and then he gives an evolutionary spin on it and if he did this in science or if scientists do that he was, this is monstrously wrong. You can't take what, and this is his kind of life, you can't take what some shepherds in 500 BC would said and so on and take this now this is gonna dictate the content of our science but he does that in morality in effect and this is that to have people who can challenge the content of morality and be moral innovators is such a rare phenomenon and Ein Rand is, I mean this is in regard in which she is such a rare phenomenon. Well one more thing, do you think that method is any better or worse than the religious approach where you, or is it basically the same in methodology? It's better but it's not good. Okay, thank you. It's better but at the same time much more disappointing in the sense that these people show you that they can think on certain issues and they're challenging the status quo and they're brave, they're courageous and the way they go up against religion on certain issues and then they fall flat when it comes to morality or in Sam Harris's case when it comes to free will, it's so disappointing that they don't take that courage. And could have known but should have known. It's almost they should have known but it emphasizes on cause point of how hard to penetrate morality is how hard to challenge the morality, you can challenge religion, you can challenge the supernatural but to challenge morality that requires an Ein Rand. I mean that is and at least Harris, I don't think I don't know about Dawkins but at least have some exposure to Ein Rand and yet there's still this rejection of it so. Hello, I have a question that we require a bit of speculation. Couple of years ago I was telling my mother about the objectivism and ideas of Ein Rand and she said, yeah, that's brilliant but I bet she didn't have any kids and then I thought about, she didn't have any kids. My mother said that I bet Ein Rand didn't have any and then I started thinking that's true and then I analyzed her female characters, they didn't have any kids. So I was wondering if you could speculate why do you think she didn't have any and do you think it might be because she would have to alter her philosophy if she had to have kids, if she chose to have kids? Do you think it would lead her to some compromise? No, I mean and I think she talked about this, I don't think we have to speculate about why she didn't have to think she said it. I mean she took having kids seriously, right? As I said before, it's like a profession, it's a career. If you're gonna have kids, you have to invest in them. I think you take it seriously and you take it as a more responsibility. It's massively time consuming and her career was as a novelist and as a philosopher and there was no time for two careers. This was the career she was going to engage in and there was never any doubt. It wasn't that she weighed the two options. There was one career that she had chosen, she was gonna do this career and she couldn't conceive I think of doing something else that would take a massive amount of energy like raising kids that would involved in that but let me just say there's nothing in objectivism as a parent, right? And now other parents here that can attest to this. There's nothing in objectivism that contradicts having kids. Plenty of us have kids and it's not like we're conflicted between having the kids and being good objectivists. It's completely integrated, it's completely seamless. There's no conflict between the two activities. It's just you have to make a commitment that this is gonna be my primary orientation or a big chunk of my orientation and I in that was not willing to do it because she had chosen a different primary orientation. Can I just ask, because I'm not sure if I heard the question fully correctly but toward the end it sounded like you're asking, do you think she chose not to have kids because it would have, I forget the word you used and again I might not have heard it right. I think it's altered maybe. It might have threatened her philosophy in some ways. Yeah maybe she would have to resort to compromise. No I have to say, I find absolutely no evidence and anything I know about Ayn Rand to think that, oh I'm not gonna do that because if I do that I might have to question what I already think, like there's a good little dogmatist or something about reality so. But I was, that's true but when I was reading her, while she was writing novels not only her essays on philosophy she said because there's nothing better to exemplify her philosophy than a character and I found no main characters in her book there would be a model for parenthood because they were all independent mature adults with no kids. So I was just wondering why she didn't picture a model of her parent in her book. I mean I think of that as the, that's reading too much the novels as their propaganda for the philosophy and not self-expression. So she's a romanticist in art and it is essentially her view is essentially self-expression. So I think she's not interested in it but that there's no implication that you shouldn't be interested in having kids. She's not interested in writing about it, dramatizing it. It's not true that there's no kids in the, so there is a little bit in the fountain head, the midwife and I think even more relevant for things. We the living is Kira you meet her as a teenager it is about family. So if you're interested also in her kind of view and perspective on family, We the Living is an interesting book to read from that perspective but it's still, they're not propaganda for the philosophy and you can't read them like that. So it's, the books have a little bit of about music. They don't have much about her tiddly wink music because that's what she loved. And so you can't, is it, you can't, there's a lot of art to getting how to look at the novels and what she views and what she thinks or not. They're self-expression but as she said, you can't get my whole view of life and so on from the novels and my whole sense of life as she put it. And I wouldn't say one just thing about career that what I don't think you were saying this but you could take as an implication you got some kind of choice between having a family and having a career. I think, and that's not, I mean you can have both but I ran, I mean I view her as a genius and what a career is for that person is really different than for many people. It's all consuming often. Like does Beethoven have kids? I don't know, I could well conceive that he doesn't or he might have been neglectful towards his kids because it's, his career is all, it's an all consuming passion and I think that's what literature was for Ayn Rand and so it's am I gonna write Atlas Shrugged or have kids? That's different than am I gonna be a writer and have kids? So that's sort of funny enough piggybacks a little bit off that question I think. When it comes to like children or raising children which like I've always been super on board with like objectivism and the idea of like I'm like cool, great, I don't need any of that stuff but thinking about perhaps like having children in the coming years, I do start to find myself thinking about it a little different in terms of like exposing them to religion or like superstitious ideas and just like the development of a child's mind and the ability to like handle such complex concepts. You know, I just wanted to see if any of you guys have had thoughts on you know, if it's okay to expose a child to like superstitious ideas at certain stages and then you know, maybe pair it away or allow them to, how do I guess expose them with that and still allow them to make up their mind, you know? So I don't think that you know, part of what you do as a parent is expose the kids to all the ideas out there so they can make up their mind, which one is true. You expose them to the best of your understanding of what the truth is. Now I, you know, there's a little bit of disagreement among objectivists about this, but I couldn't do the Santa Claus thing and the Tooth Fairy thing. I mean, it's, yeah, so you know, I couldn't keep a straight face with my kids if I did that, so I never exposed my kids to any superstition in that sense and say I don't know if that's what you're talking about, but and they were never exposed to religion. I mean, they were, I mean, my kids, my oldest son's first exposed to religion was in preschool where somebody said God bless you and he came in and he said as one word, what does God bless you mean? He had no, he had no, your God was not anything. And so we had a small conversation about it and I, you know, we didn't talk much about religion because if you, I think, if you raise them without it, it never becomes an issue. It's like, yeah, it's reality and you know, there's the, you know, people believe in stuff, but okay, I don't see it, right? So it's, you don't have, I don't see where it comes in, where you need to expose them to all these things. You have to explain why other people believe in these things, why other people might have these ideas and you have to teach them not to go around advocating for their atheism at age five, which was a little tricky with my older one, but which was, I mean, it was a lot of funny stuff that, you know, that came about around that, but so I, you know, you gotta teach them about reality, about truth. So I mean, a lot depends on what we mean by expose here because it's not, oh, to raise good, objective as children, you blind fold them from certain, it's like, you gotta expose your kids to reality. You have to expose your kids to reality again on a responsible, gradual basis and so on and it doesn't mean you say, okay, this six month period, we're gonna live like mystics or something, it's like, but no, you have to expose them to, and as your own said, of course, gee, Johnny's family celebrates this Christmas thing or they celebrate Yom Kippur or whatever it might be. So you're not shielding them from reality, you're willing to talk about when they come home from school with different ideas and so on. Yeah, but they're, yeah. I would say the key thing to what both of you had said is you don't BS the kid. So it's, and you treat a kid with the respect that he or she deserves. So the Santa Claus kind of thing. It's kids don't like pretend and make, so you can't tell them, no, we pretend there's a Santa Claus and he comes down and, oh no, that's gonna ruin everything for them. No, the kids love to make believe and pretend, so I mean, that's what my parents did. I never thought there was a Santa Claus, but we still, it was fun, Christmas was fun. And in regard to God and religion, my parents did not raise us religions, but never shielded us either. But if we went, I went to, I mean, there's again this Catholic school. And I mean, my attitude is I was reading Spider-Man comics and I was learning about Noah's Ark. And my Spider-Man comics with radioactive spiders is more sophisticated and believable. No, I mean, really, than Noah's Ark. And I don't believe Spider-Man's real. Why have you got a book? And then if my parents BS'd me and said, no, but this is much more respectable and you have to take this much more, that would be corrupt. But if I come and say, like, this looks more sophisticated, yeah, it is more sophisticated. That's the end of the story. Thanks. But can I just say, notice a nice, the don't BS your kids, similar to don't BS your family if you have that strong conflict that Ankar had raised in another. Yeah, and I just wanna emphasize, because I know some parents who have this, that doesn't mean you can't pretend, you can't have fun, you can't enjoy Santa Claus, you can't play with it, you just, it's a play, right? And so I don't wanna, we don't have to be that rigidity of yeah, because he's not real, we pretend he doesn't, we can't do anything with it. You have fun with Santa Claus. We used to celebrate Christmas, but never as a religious holiday, but as a fun celebration of life. Yeah, my question kinda comes off the back of that. It's, I took a lot of notes here, but with regards to a concept that came up a little bit earlier of evolutionary programming, could you elaborate a bit more on that and maybe tie it to a non-explicit idea-oriented thing? So I guess a fictional example I could bring in is someone like George Costanza. So if anyone knows what his parents' relationship is like and how he's like shown in the show dealing with that, kind of becoming his parents because he's absorbing these implicit ideas because of the emotions and the way they're not dealing with them. I mean, I don't wanna, I'm not gonna say, I'm not qualified to say a lot about the issue of what's, I think there's a lot to study about, as Alcan said, the biology and consciousness and evolution, there's a lot we don't know. But in terms of George Costanza or those kind of things, it goes back to the tribalism point that I made earlier that, I'll be curious what Alcanteres said. When you default on reason, when you're not thinking, when you're not everything in your life is consciously, part of a conscious goal, you're thinking about it, you, Ankhai is a great essay in the book in, The Companion? What's that? In The Companion to Ayn Rand. About shaping your own soul, right? And this is Ayn Rand's view. You are responsible for who you are. And part of what you should be doing in life is shaping who you are and determining who you are through the choices that you make and by judging and thinking about the world out there and the values that you choose to pursue and how you pursue those choices. You are shaping who you are in your own soul. If you don't do that, if you're not conscious of the process of shaping who you are consciously and purposefully, then you will be shaped by other things. And this is where maybe biology plays some role. Suddenly, the environment in which you live plays some role. You join a tribe. You get attached to a family in an unhealthy way. You become your father, right? You become your parents. And I know people who become their father as they age because they're not consciously trying to become them, right? So they become the thing that is closest to them and they spend a lot of years with their father. So they start mimicking the stuff that their father does. Or you become your spouse. Or you become, I don't know, somebody else. So becoming you requires real work. It goes back as to what Greg said. Becoming you requires real work. It requires real effort. It requires a lot of thinking. And it's amazing because then you're you, right? You really are you. It's what it's meaning and purpose in life. It's having all of that. And a lot of people, certainly Joe Costanza on the show is not. He's not a thinker. He's not purposefully creating a soul. He drifts intellectually, emotionally. He's a drifter. And when you drift, other influences shape who you are. Thank you.