 We'll welcome everybody to tonight's debate on individualism versus conservatism. My name is Tom Gilligan, and I'll be the moderator for tonight's debate. Tonight's debate is brought to us by the Salem Center, which is housed here at the Macomb School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. The center is committed to supporting research practical tools and dialogue that spans the world of academia, public policy, and business. Tonight's debate is intended to be given in the spirit. I want to spend a minute talking about tonight's debate format. Tonight's debate or conversation is about two powerful and potentially competing worldviews, individualism and conservatism. The debate about their relative values will be structured as follows. Each of our speakers who I'll introduce shortly will be given 10 minutes for their opening remarks. After their opening remarks, each will be given two rounds of five minutes for rebuttals and replies. The third segment of our debate tonight will be up to 40 minutes of audience questions with two minute replies. There are speakers, I believe, queued up at the end of the row as we get to that part of this debate tonight. I'll point that out and you can walk up and ask your question. And then both speakers will also be given an opportunity to give five minute closing statements. Before we start again, I want to thank you all for coming tonight, and I hope you enjoy the debate. Our first speaker tonight is Dr. Yaron Brooke, speaking on behalf of individualism. Dr. Brooke is chairman of the board of the Ayn Rand Institute. Dr. Brock is a scholar and accomplished writer. He hosts the Yaron Brock show, which airs live on YouTube and speaker. He was a regular columnist at Forbes.com and his articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investors Business Daily and many other publications. His most recent book entitled In Pursuit of Wealth, The Moral Case for Finance makes the case that few industries are more vital to our prosperity and more aligned than the financial industry. Brooke and co-author Don Watkins explain why finance has faced so much criticism and why despite the conventional image of financiers as greedy and reckless, finance is a moral image, is a moral industry. Brooke and Watkins also authored a national bestseller entitled Free Market Revolution, How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government and a second book entitled Equal is Unfair, America's Misguided Fight Against Income and Equality. Dr. Brooke received his PhD in finance from the McComb School of Business in 1994. Speaking on behalf of conservatism is Dr. Yaron Hazani. Dr. Hazani is president of the Hersey Institute in Jerusalem and currently serves as chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute based in Washington that has hosted the National Conservatism Conference since 2019. He hosts a NatCon Talk, an interview program on politics, religion and philosophy. He too is an accomplished writer whose works have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Box News, CNN, NPR, Time Magazine, The New Republic, National Review, Commentary, First Things and American Affairs, among others. His highly acclaimed book entitled The Virtue of Nationalism was published by Basic Books in September of 2018. His most recent books are being published this year and are entitled The Revolution at Sinai, What Does Tore from Heaven Mean? and Conservatism, A Rediscovery. Dr. Hazani received his PhD in political theory from Rutgers University in 1993. Please, Jeremy, and a round of applause for both of our speakers tonight. Dr. Brooke, you are on the clock. Thank you. One, two, three. One, two, three. There we go, all right. Let me first thank the Salem Center and in particular, Greg Someri for hosting this event, for making it possible. Thank you all, guys, for being here and Yoram, thank you for agreeing to do this debate. You know, we live in a really unique place. United States America is not just any other country. It is a unique country because this country as opposed to pretty much every other place on planet Earth was founded on an idea. It was founded on a moral idea, an ethical idea. This country was founded on the idea of individualism, on the idea of the sanctity of the individual, the idea that man exists for his own sake, that he's not a slave, he is not a servant of others, his life is not here to be sacrificed for some common good, for a tribe, for a nation, for religion, for anything. The man exists for the purpose of living his life by his own standards, pursuing his own values, using his own minds in pursuit of his own happiness. Now, this indeed was a revolutionary idea. It was a revolutionary idea based on a deep and engaged study of history, a deep and engaged study of history and so what worked and what didn't, what was right and what was wrong, what was moral and what was not. And the conclusion I found this came to was that freedom of the individual to pursue his life, to pursue his values, to use his mind, to use his reason, was right, was just, was moral and indeed that the purpose of government, that the purpose of the state was to make that possible for the individual, to leave the individual free, free from coercion, free of force, free of authority imposed on him so that he could use his mind to pursue his values. We call the concept that captures that idea, we call it individual rights and the United States of America was founded on this concept, is at the heart of what this country is about and of course, the consequences of that have been magnificent. This country has become in many regards and in almost every respect, the greatest country that has ever existed both from the ability of people to pursue indeed their happiness and their success, to pursue material wealth, the United States became the richest, wealthiest country in the world not because of natural resources or any other mythology but because its people were free to use their mind to pursue their values, to create, to build, to innovate, to make. It became the land of the pursuit of happiness, it became a land that millions of people wanted to go to not because literally the streets were paved with gold but because they, by exercising their own judgment, could create the gold for themselves, could create that wealth and could pursue that happiness for themselves. It is the land of the pursuit of happiness, it is the land of the individual pursuing his dream, making choices about the kind of life he will want free of coercion, force, free of authority. Now, that, this country was a political manifestation of that, those ideas fulfilled unfortunately imperfectly from the beginning there were compromises and those compromises are compromises we are paid dearly for for 200 plus years. Yes, the obvious compromise of slavery which is completely inconsistent with the ideas of the founding, the principles of the founding and for which this country paid dearly in a civil war but that didn't end it, we had Jim Crow and to a large extent we're still living with kind of the consequences of the attitude towards slavery at the founding of the country. There were inconsistencies in terms of its application that went beyond slavery. Government did not unfortunately restrict itself to only protecting individual rights, to only protecting our freedom. Whether it was from the beginning, government education, which I think is the heart of many of our problems today, the state involvement in educating our children which was accepted by the founders from the beginning unfortunately and has only grown in its influence and its power to this day. And whether it's the regulation of business and in particular you heard about my latest book about finance, the regulation of finance really was part unfortunately of the American founding from day one and we are paying dearly for that, for the state involvement in finance business to this day. So this amazing experiment which is America built on principles and foundations that were individualistic, were idealistic and I think were true, were implemented inconsistently. And the consequence of those inconsistencies indeed is I think what we are observing today in an America in decline. America is declining today, not because of an abundance of individualism. America is declining today not because people are too individualistic but indeed exactly the opposite because of a lack of individualism, a lack of people taking responsibility for their own life, a lack of people using their minds to guide their lives in a thoughtful, long-term, rational way. A lot of that is a consequence of the fact that government has controlled our education for 200 years. A lot of that has to do with a philosophy that has abandoned and turned its back on the foundational concept of this country and of the enlightenment from which it arose which is the idea of reason. An abandonment of the idea of personal responsibility, individualism. Today, we have a political system in which we are torn not between individualism and some form of collectivism but between variety of different forms of collectivism. There is no political movement of individualism today. It's not that the left is individualistic and the right is collectivist or the other way around. We have two forms of collectivism, one of the right and one of the left. And the only anecdote, the only solution to the challenges that we face today is an embrace, a return, an embrace to individualism, a return, an embrace of freedom, a return and embrace of a separation, not a return, but a separation of state, from education, of state, from business, from the economy. An adoption of a truly individualistic system. 10 minutes is like neither here nor there. Let me say a word about conservatism as a proposed solution to this. I think in one regard, and we haven't heard your arm yet but I did a little bit of reading, on the one hand, your arm offers an honesty that I don't find with many conservatives. He doesn't pretend to be an advocate of individualism. He says, here's what my conservative means and it means some form of collectivism at its heart and its core. And at the heart of the core is an idea of nationalism and religion as part of that nationalism. After all, he is the founder now, or one of the founders of the national conservative movement in the United States. It is a conservatism that Hawkins back to tradition, that Hawkins back to the past. But this is exactly the past that our founders I think justly rebelled against. This is a past where there was no progress, where the economy did not grow, where quality of life did not improve, where people's life expectancy was not, did not expand. This is a past and you can take it back 2,000 years or 10,000 years, where income and wealth and longevity were flat, didn't move. It's only when the world, particularly the United States, to some extent Europe, embraced elements of individualism. It's only when tradition was disregarded. It's only when people were given the freedom to challenge tradition, in every respect, did we see the explosion of growth and prosperity and advancement that we saw, starting with the founding of this country and have seen for the last 250 years. Thank you. Dr. Asani. Let me check the mic too. Is that all right? Okay, thank you, you're wrong, that was as usual moving. He's a very eloquent speaker. And even though my job this evening is to defend conservatism, and that means I'm going to have to find all sorts of ways to create a big chasm between me and your own so that the audience can be entertained, there's nevertheless, he's eloquent and he's right on many things. I enjoy listening to him. So just to get it out of the way, I just wanna be clear that Yaron and I agree on a lot of things. We agree, for example, on the crucial role that the creativity of the human being plays in economics and in other things. We agree on the importance of work as a value, of labor as a value. We agree that the free market is by far the best engine for economic growth that mankind has known and supported for that reason. I would go further. I even agree with Yaron about his, about the idea that what he calls selfishness, the motive, the driving force within the heart of the individual man or woman to better themselves, to improve themselves, to seek a better life for themselves and their family and their friends. I agree with Yaron that that is a good thing. And when people say that it's sinful, I think they're mistaken. It's a good thing. We agree about that. And we also agree to an extent, to a significant extent about the state. Yaron and I both think, or I agree with him, that the state as an instrument of force, as an instrument that collects power is easily corrupted and easily turned in the wrong direction. And in general, as someone who lives in a socialist country, in general, I think that the state is far too big, right? In other words, the direction that Yaron wants of greater individual freedom in economic areas, in general, I'm on his side. All right, so that sounds like we agree with about a whole lot of things. Nevertheless, as I said, we're gonna have to create some clash, so let's do that. Yaron's individualism, I'm going to argue, has three things that are wrong with it. One, it's incomplete. That is, I'm gonna argue that, although he's correctly describing a small part of what human beings do, human nature, he's basically missing a lot of human nature and he's basically missing a lot of what human society and politics is like. And because his view is incomplete, it's unsustainable. That is, he's created a view of the way that political society is supposed to work, but it can't actually be sustained, not for more than two or three generations. We're already seeing that now. And finally, because it's unsustainable, it's wrong. And when I say wrong, I don't just mean imprudent in that it's gonna destroy us. I also mean morally. One of the things I love about Yaron is that he always turns the argument towards the moral issue. And I'm with him on this. I think the moral issue needs to be addressed. And I think that morally, you cannot defend an individualism of the kind that Yaron is defending. And I'll try to explain to you why. Now, let me say a word about, just a word about conservatism. I think individualism is more intuitive and less confused in people's mind. I'm gonna be using the term conservatism, roughly the way that Yaron was using it. Conservatism as a political standpoint that regards the recovery, elaboration and restoration of tradition as the key to maintaining a nation and to strengthening it through time. All right, let me say that again, tradition, a conservative says, is the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time. Now, I just said that my trouble with Yaron's individualism is that it's incomplete and it's unsustainable and therefore wrong. Let's focus for a moment on this issue of sustainability. Conservatives are always thinking about sustainability. In fact, sustainability is just, it's like a more modern new fangled word for conserving. What conservatives are trying to conserve is they're trying to figure out what do you need to do, not for your country to be exactly the right thing it's supposed to be right now. They're trying to figure out what do you need to do in order for it to still be around and be in better shape 30 years from now, 50 years from now, 150 years from now. That's the load star. Every conservative thinker is an actual conservative and not some of these people have been using the name for the last 30 years. I have no idea why they think they're conservatives, but people who are real conservatives, you know they are easily because the first thing that they ask is, what do we need to do to sustain our nation or some other community? All right, so what I wanna do now is I wanna say just a few words about what Yaron is missing and what Yaron's individualism is missing in his description of society. This is gonna be a little bit philosophical and then after that I'm gonna turn to concrete examples to make it clear what I'm talking about. So what kinds of things is Yaron missing when he talks about the individual and the freedom of the individual? Well, for starters, I just need to say one thing about the American founding, we can talk about this a little bit more later, but Yaron, when Yaron is talking about the founders, he's usually talking about specific founders. He's talking about Jefferson, he's talking about Payne, and they did think things that are very similar to what Yaron is attributing to the founders. But part of what's being left out in Yaron's description is that the American Constitution wasn't written by Jefferson and Payne. It was written by a different political party, the Federalist Party. The Federalist Party is the American Nationalists, Washington, Adams, Jay, Hamilton, and a guy named Gouverneur Morris who's the primary author of the American Constitution. This group, who I think were the real founders of the United States, but we don't have to resolve that one, this group of Federalists are conservative in the sense that I'm talking about. They're the ones who write into the Constitution in its opening lines, things like, in order to form a more perfect union. That is, they're worried about social cohesion, they're worried about how the nation is gonna be brought together. That's not a question of individual liberty. That's a question of what does the national leadership need to do in order to bring the nation together? They add things like posterity for ourselves and posterity. That is, they can't think of the purpose of government without thinking hundreds of years into the future and saying, we need to do what needs to be done in order to conserve traditions. Now, what traditions are they talking about? Primarily the traditions that they're looking at are English traditions. The American Constitution is mostly an elaboration, a variation on the British Constitution, on the English Constitution. What I wanna say about, what I wanna say in addition to this historical point, which is that there were conservatives at the American founding and they were very, very important people. In fact, you can argue that they're the ones who actually founded the United States and not the individualists. But in order, in addition to that, I wanna talk about what kinds of ideas are they thinking about? What do they see besides individual liberty? So, very quickly, one thing that they see, I mentioned cohesion. Cohesion is a way of describing a nation or some other group of people when the ties of mutual loyalty that bind them to one another are strong. Okay, it's the same as in a family. It's the same as in a marriage. When a husband or wife and their children, when they have cohesion, it means that under stress, they come together. They're always competing with one another. The children are always bickering. Even the husband or wife, they're always bickering. They're always competing to see who doesn't, who doesn't take out the garbage. There's always competition going on. But when there's stress from the outside, when there's an attack or a danger from the outside, they come together if they're cohesive. And that cohesion, that quality of cohesion, it comes from the mutual loyalty of the individuals. Now, conservative thinks it like in the following way. Conservative says, look, if we want our family or tribe or nation to be conserved, we want it to last, to be sustainable, then we have to think about what kinds of things create loyalty? What kinds of things create cohesion? And it turns out that the question of how do you create cohesion? What institutions do you need? National, religious, schools, what kinds of institutions do you need in order to maintain a particular entity, the nation for centuries, those kinds of questions get answered and they only get answered when you think as a conservative. Now, I'm not saying that individual liberty is not important. What I am saying is that individuals compete up until the moment where they're challenged and then they better be cohesive. They better be loyal to one another. And the same thing is true for tribes, different groups within the nation. They compete against one another until there's a threat and then they come together cohesively. What's wrong with the United States right now? A scary, scary time is lack of cohesion. You put pressure on it and all the tribes fall apart and hate each other instead of coming together, right? That's a very, very real characteristic of a certain kind of country. All right, I'm going to have to stop now. So I'll give you more examples and you're going to get so many examples. You're going to say, stop, stop, give me examples, but it'll be later in the next round. Yeah, so I'll focus on two points that I think are important. One is, Joam says he agrees with me on free markets and labor, hard work is a value and a lot of these things. And it's true. I think he does. And it's an important difference and it's the crucial difference is what is the standard of value? Why do I think free markets are good? Why do I think it's important to work hard? Not because I think it makes a country, a nation, a group better off. It does, but that's not my moral focus. The reason I believe free markets are good is because they are the only way in which individuals can express their liberty, their freedom, their choices, their individuality. Free market is the only place in which people can do things without asking for permission. My standard is that individual liberty. My standard are the individuals and the value they represent and the values they pursue and the happiness that they have a right to pursue. So I'm for free markets not because it makes the state better, which I think is implied in Yoram's agreement with me, but because it is the only system that allows individuals to live their lives as they see fit based on their values. So I think while there's similarity, there's also difference because I think as we approach these things from our moral perspective, our moral codes are very different. My moral code is about the individual. Morality is that, the good in morality is that which is good for the individual, qua individual, qua human being, not what is good for the group, the state, others. And that is the core of what I mentioned, talked about when she talks about selfishness or self-interest. It's not about the fact that most people behave in a kind of way that supports their own values, but a morality of self-interest is about taking your life seriously, living by certain principles that lead to a great life. So the best life possible for you as a human being, given the context in which you are born. So I think the standard of value here is very different. Well, let me say something about unity because, shockingly enough, I am very pro-unity. I like the idea of unity. And indeed, I like the idea of posterity. I care about the next 100 or so years, maybe not beyond that, I can't really project more than that. But I absolutely think that those are good things. And I think that one of the real problems in the world today is this breaking apart of American society into little tribes, into little communities of entitled, I don't wanna insult them, but you know what I mean. Where everybody is fighting, everybody is at each other's throats, everybody wants what the other one has, everybody is demanding something at the expense of others. But you see, I think that this disunity comes from a focus on collectivism. I think that this unity comes from the idea that the state can decide what is good for us in the long run, that the state can allocate resources. Well, when the state allocates resources, then anything they give you is taken from me and now I don't like you because it was taken from me. When the state intervenes in education, then Yoram doesn't get to educate his kids the way he wants to. He gets to educate, to have his kids educated the way the state wants them to be educated. And I don't get my kids to be educated the way I want to, but the state decides how they get educated. But if education, for example, was all private, then Yoram would send his kids to the schools that he thought were appropriate, where they got educated based on his values and his principles and his ideas. And we would never be in conflict. We would never be yelling, like in America, evolution or creationism. You wanna send your kids to the creation of school, fine. I'll send my kids to the evolutionary school. So it's the fact that we have centralization, that we have planning, that the state believes, as conservatives do, that we can plan for posterity, that we can set up. No, the beauty of the American system is that they set up a system of unity around an idea, the idea of individual rights, the idea of individual liberty, the idea of individual freedom. And that that's what unites us, that idea and willingness to fight and for that freedom. I'll say something about posterity. In the next five minutes, yes. Dr. Azadeh. Okay, Yoram, I'm pulling out your book, Free Market Revolution, which is, look, it's really fun to read, Yoram. You should really, really read the book. No, no, I'm completely serious about it. You learn a lot. I wanna quote a couple of things. And this is with respect to posterity. You say that the reason that we're not able to be unified, that we're not able to be a cohesive society is because of the fact that people are fighting over, factions are fighting over the government allocations. Well, some of that might be true, but I think that a much deeper and more direct point would be to say that you and a long illustrious line of people before you have insisted on individualism at the expense of thinking about the greater whole at the level of the family, at the level of the tribe, at the level of the nation. And you're right, I'm not a purist. I'm saying that realistically, we need to have a balancing act. We need to have some kind of balance. When you say things like that you're seeking a world quote as free as you would be alone on a desert island, right? You're teaching people, you're a great teacher, you write books and you give hundreds of speeches and you teach people that they should try to be as free as you would be alone on a desert island. You're on no one is able to be as free as you would be alone on a desert island. And not only that, nobody wants it. People who try to do that, that's like my son who was living in the basement and he's unhappy. It makes him unhappy to do that. That all of Jordan Peterson is trying to tell you no one wants to be as free as you'd be on a desert island or how about this, you're proposing a philosophy for people who would seek nothing more than the right to live in an independent existence. Again, no one actually can live this way. I mean, maybe you can, but almost nobody can. Normal people can't live this way. They don't want only an independent existence. And here where you say, you focus on career and you write beautifully about career. You say career brings purpose to a person's life. It is the central activity that enables him to make his days not a succession of pointless repetitions but a meaningful sum. It's a person's main form of creativity, growth and personal achievement. Production is the essence of a moral existence. Look, that's beautiful, but it's not true. It's part of the essence. Production is part of the essence. Family is not less a creative act than business. Putting effort into the family is not less important than putting time and effort into your business. And the same thing is true for the nation. What you're proposing is a nation full of people who can't see the sum. They can't see the whole. They're constantly looking at every given moment about what it is that they personally get out of it. And they're not thinking about what they would get if they raised a family. What they would get if they served in the military for their country, which I know you did. And look, the bottom line of all of this is I think that the dichotomy between individualism and collectivism is false. There is such a thing as collectivists. There are socialists, people who believe that the government should plan the entire economy. I'm not one of them. I'm not one of those people. But what I am saying is something like this. Okay, and here I'll give a couple of examples. I'm saying that when you reach the point where the free market has created conditions in which private individuals pursuing their own good, private corporations are offshoring, they're offshoring the jobs of millions of Americans. For example, this happens in other countries too. They're offshoring the jobs of millions of Americans and they're sending those jobs to China. If you only look at it, if you only look at it from the perspective of the individual and his freedom and his rights, then you can't find anything wrong with it. You have to go to a higher level and look at what's happening to the nation, what's happening to the cohesion of the nation. And here if you're realistic, and this is what I'm asking you to do your own, is to be realistic. If you're realistic, then you realize that there is a limit to how much you can ship other people's jobs off to a different country while you make money and they don't, and they're unemployed. There's a limit to how much you can do that before the cohesion, the social cohesion begins to blow apart. I'm not arguing for socialism. I'm arguing for realism. A conservative is somebody who's realistic and says, look, there has to be a balance. There is a point beyond which you simply cannot continue to think only about the individual. Dr. Bra. Thanks. So, I'm gonna take on the off-showing because this is my topic. God. Look, the challenge here is of course that the central planner always sees things in the free market that setting somebody in the equilibrium. Somebody I'm sure has thought, people here in the city of Austin actually thought that Uber was indeed upsetting the tradition of taxi cab drivers, upsetting their profession, driving them out of business and chose to shut down. Uber was shut down here for two or three years in Austin or something like that during a period. It was tough to get around Austin without Uber. There's always somebody being upset by innovation, somebody being upset by progress, somebody who feels like they have lost from progress. But of all the things that conservatives complain about off-showing, first it's questionable whether off-showing even occurred. Producing jobs in the United States have declined by about 50% while production itself has increased. We produce more stuff today in the United States than at any point in our history with half the people. But we produce about 100 times more food with about 1% of the people who used to do it 100 years ago. Not because we are short food production, but because we use technology to make that production far more efficient. And who is the beneficiary of the fact that we import some productive things from overseas? Who benefited from that? Well, it's the lower middle class and poor people in this country will benefit from that. They're the people who shop at Walmart. They're benefited enormously from the importation of quote, cheap goods. And indeed all of us are richer. The quality of life and the standard of living in the United States has gone up dramatically. And how much off-showing of jobs is legitimate? What kind of trade deficit is okay? Who is going to decide? Should we off-shore steal but not she should? Or should we off-shore? Should we develop this industry but not energy? Should we do chip? Should we do that? Who gets to decide? Of course this is socialism and of course this is central planning. There was no difference. It's just a ratio of scope and the scope is bound to increase. Because as you start restricting, for example placing tariffs on steel because you decide that that is a national necessity to have steel, you raise the cost of automobiles and therefore people get laid off in the automobile industry and then you have to find a program that compensates for that. Like Trump had to compensate the farmers for the fact that the Chinese went by soybeans. And on and on it goes, there's no end to government intervention. Once you violate the principle of allowing government to start centrally planning and decide what is acceptable and was unacceptable, there is no end to that slippery slope. And there was never justification to begin with. Now if you're worried about steel workers lost their job in Ohio, then it would be great political leadership to tell the steel worker to get in their car and drive to northeastern Arkansas where they were jobbed. Which is again what this country was, the kind of principles this country was founded on. Where people took it upon themselves to go to where they could raise their families to the best of their ability. To pursue the opportunities that exist out there. Unemployment rates, while everybody's been complaining about offshoring, unemployment rates in the United States have been a historical load. And in spite of what leftist economists keep telling us, standard of living and quality of life in the United States or the middle class has not declined. But if we keep telling people, your jobs will come back. Don't worry, the government will take care of you. We will send you a check. Just stay in Cincinnati, Ohio. Don't go to where the jobs are. And it's our duty to help you because we're a nation and we're all in this together. And don't take personal responsibility for your life. Then yes, you will start getting real sociological problems. You will start getting people feeling alienated. You will start people being upset. You will get what we have gotten in this country over the last 10 years instead of in terms of an uprising among the, it's not because the standard of living has gone down. It's because they've been told that they will be bailed out by the government and they haven't gotten a bailout. And they keep waiting instead of being told that their life is their responsibility and to go out and live it and to make the most of it. So no, I don't think conservatives, I don't think you can just tinker with any economy. You're either gonna control it or not. And we've seen the history of the United States. In every case, they started small and we know where we are today. In terms of the amount of regulation, the amount of control, the amount of the influence they have. Thank you. Before Dr. Hazzani gives this final five minute rebuttal, I wanna remind everybody that the next section is Q and A from the audience. So formulate your brilliant questions and towards the end of this five minutes, please walk to the front of the aisle and we'll start the question and answer period. Dr. Hazzani. Yoran, I don't think you're answering my question. The question in my mind is, what has been left out when you tell people year after year that they should be as free as they would be alone on a desert island? What I suggest is that when you tell a husband and wife when they're getting married, you tell young people getting married that they should be as free as they would be on a desert island, then you put pressure on them to instead of riding out the hardships and the pain together and to come together in face of hardships, to take the opportunity when hardship comes along, to blow the relationship apart. When you tell children that they should be as free as if they were alone on a desert island, then what you do is you take away the tradition of the biblical tradition of honoring your father and your mother and you give them a different standard for how to live and you blow the family apart. And it's not surprising that the number of children in the country is below replacement. The reason it's below replacement is because people keep telling everyone that what you need is to be free. What you need to be is a free individual, to be independent. And you're like a sucker if you stay married for 50 years, believe me, that's not an easy thing to do. You're like a sucker if you give honor to your parents. And the same thing is true at the level of the nation. You're a sucker if you serve in the military. You're a sucker if you don't take advantage of immigrants flooding across the border. And instead you want to hire locals. Every single one of these things is the same thing. Every single one of these things comes down to one philosophical issue, which is, is individualism complete as a description of politics? It is not complete, it is incomplete. What you've left out is that in addition to working for a job, people also build tribes. They build little tribes, they build families. And those families have to stick for 50 years or 100 years. They build tribes which are like organizations like the Ein Rand Institute, for example, which is supposed to stick for 100 years. They build military units, innovative military units that never existed before. And those are supposed to be sustainable. And they build nations that are supposed to be sustainable. And at every point, rather than telling people, look, your personal motive of improving your life is important, it's very important. But your personal motive of improving your life should be devoted, should be devoted, not just to career, but to constructing little tribes, families that last, nations that last, institutions that last, instead of explaining to them how to do that, you keep telling them act free. And when you say act free, you mean only one thing. Act free from tradition, act free from the guidelines that help you figure out how to keep a marriage together. Help free yourself from the tradition that a businessman of a certain country also takes into account the people who work for him who are his fellow citizens. They're part of his own tribe, part of his own nation. That's the issue. The issue is if human beings can possibly create something sustainable when they're not thinking about anything other than their own individual freedom. And the answer is obviously no. We need to have people who think about their individual freedom. It's good, I said it at the beginning. It's good for people to try to improve their condition. But while individuals are improving the condition, they also need to think about how they can improve the condition of their family, which Yaron I think accepts. And of the larger tribe or region and of the nation, maybe even an alliance of nations. If you don't have anybody thinking like that, then what happens when it goes in the wrong direction? Now, here's an important point, really important point. Yaron asks, and many, many people do. This is a common question. Who's to decide? Who's to decide? Yaron and I agree that there should be a massive reduction in the scale of government, but I still think that the government has to be able to do the things that the American Constitution said that it's supposed to do. The American Constitution was written by people who believe that the purposes of a government are a more perfect union, justice, domestic peace, common defense, general welfare, that's the well-being of the people as a whole, the general welfare, liberty and posterity. Number six is about individual liberties. The others are collective attributes of the nation. And it's the job of the president, the job of the elected officials, the job of people who we elect and sent to government. It's their job to decide when. It's their job to decide how much. There's no such thing as, no, they don't get to decide. You elect them and they decide how much. You need to teach them the way that they should make the decisions. I'll agree with you on a lot of those decisions, but it's up to them to decide. And that's not a question that has no answer. That's a question that has an answer. That's why we have a government. For questions, if any of you have any questions, you can walk to either Mike. Please identify yourself, tell us who you are, and ask your question. If you can make it as concise as possible, we would appreciate it. Hello, my name is Jason Rines. I'm a professor of philosophy. I'm trying to understand exactly what it is that you sort of value in the conservative system. You mentioned, say, divorce rates. So say 50% of people who get married today are likely to get divorced. And if we were to tell those people, look, there's something bigger than you. There's a marriage and there's something bigger than your marriage. There's the population rates of this country and we need that for national glory or prosperity. Somebody could make a law, someone could just push it on them, they could stay, and we could have twice the number of miserable marriages. Sorry, that's assuming the people who stay together are miserable too. Forget my math. The point is you could have lots of miserable marriages and suppose you'd have more birth rates or something. Who would that serve? What would the benefit of that be? We could make every child be baptized or have a communion. We could force people who don't wanna carry through a pregnancy to have to carry that through all on some traditional notion that you pick out from your religious tradition. And even supposing that we let you do that, right, what would, who would it serve? You kept saying something bigger than yourself. Is that the only thing that it's just can't be just the individual? Is it that this is something that will outlive me? Right, so like it's literally temporal. If so, if we make this thing that lasts 100 years, 200 years, if in the process of making it last for 500 years, we make it 500 years of misery, what was the point? Wouldn't it have been better for it to have just collapsed after one generation? So what is it that's a value here? Okay, look. Your own sets up, your own sets up the idea that we should be searching for those values which give us a good life. You know, what's astonishing about this formulation is that it's the same thing that you read in the book of Deuteronomy. Not that many people read the Bible that often anymore, but if you read in the book of Deuteronomy, it says, I'm setting before you the value system, let's say, I'm setting before you the value system that will give you life and you have the alternative which is to do whatever you want and that's death and I ask you to choose life. Your own is like a kind of a modern Moses. He's making the same exact argument that Moses was making. Okay, the difference. So we're both assuming that there is such a thing that we're both assuming that there is such a thing as a set of values which if you were to be able to hand them down, if you were able to inculcate them, then they would give you as an individual and the society you live in life. We both agree on that. What we're disagreeing about is the following thing. That I think that the arbitrary claim that only pursuing your own self-interest where self is defined as narrowly as you can possibly define it, that that is destructive and that doesn't lead in the direction we're trying to go. Human happiness does not come from this. Human happiness comes from something else. It comes from taking yourself, the desire to improve yourself and expanding that to a family and instead becomes your desire to improve yourself becomes a desire to expand your family and then you expand it further and it becomes the desire to expand your tribe or your community, your congregation and you expand it further that becomes the desire to advance your nation. In other words, what I'm proposing and I think conservatives just generally propose this is that the individual is unhappy when he or she lives as though they have the freedom of a person on a desert island alone. They're unhappy that way. If you wanna know what's gonna make people miserable, that's what's gonna make people miserable. What's gonna make people happy? It's expanding their self to larger groups that they identify with themselves and caring about them too. Thank you. Yeah, so I have to reread my book because I don't remember ever saying that you should be free, you should go to a desert island and indeed I've often argued against it because of course there are immense values to you as an individual, as an egoistic individual, in marriage, in family, in community, in associating and relating with other people. I have to admit here on stage that I've been married almost 40 years, four-zero and I'm no sucker. I'm a selfish fill-in-the-blank. I do it because my wife makes me feel great and I think I make her feel great. We compliment each other, we make each other better. We're both self-interested. I have children. I had children because I thought, sometimes I changed my mind about this, but I thought I would really enjoy it. I didn't do it so the book name could continue into the future. I didn't do it to preserve, I don't know what. I did it because I wanted the joy, the pleasure, the satisfaction, the love that comes from raising children. All selfish, all self-interested. And indeed, I would never go live in a desert island or have gone to live in an island. It's, some would even argue it's a bit of a desert. I love civilization. I love other people. I love interacting with them. I love communicating with them. I do this all day and all night. I love seeing their achievements and their production. But it's done from the context. What is the standard of value? What am I trying to achieve, my happiness? I'm not doing it for an idea called the family. I'm not doing it for the state. I'm not doing it for a posterity. The result, I think, is posterity, but I don't think I'm doing it. I mean, we could get into why I think childbirth rates, are declining, but it's not because people are too self-interested. It's because of all the other pathologies that we have in the world in which we live. Thank you. Let's go to the other side of the room. I'm Alex Cranberg. I'm an engineer and I'm a philosopher. But you each have bemoaned the loss of cohesion in America. Here on you blame the additional government programs and in the sense of entitlement. I was just looking at a survey of the numbers of people in America that consider religion to be very important in their lives. And it just happens that that's gone from 61 to 48% in the last 15 years. 20% drop in just 15 years, which is pretty remarkable. Do you see that as being a symptom or a cause of this loss of cohesion, the symptom or a cause by increased sense of government entitlement? What's the interplay that you two see between our national pathology and this loss of importance of religion? It's a good question. I mean, I'm trying to think of what I think of the, I think, first I don't think it's a bad thing. So you're built into the question is an assumption it is necessarily a bad thing and I do not. Let me say something about what I think the real cause is because while I think the political cause is what I mentioned, I think there's no fundamental cause and this goes to the issue of religion. I think the fundamental cause is a breakdown in the philosophy that is always or that has inspired Americans for a long time and implicit philosophy. Most Americans are not philosophers, they're engineers, but they have an implicit philosophy. And I think in America there was always an implicit philosophy of individualism. There was always this idea people came here and people lived here under the idea of taking responsibility for their own life, for their own families, for their own futures and not living in the moment. I've never argued to live in the moment in the sense of not thinking long term but how to use your mind to plan long term so that you have a successful life over the span. And I think that was always implied as an implicit philosophy in Americans. And I think one of the great virtues of Americans with religion was always relegated to something you did on a Sunday and something you did maybe with your kids and stuff but it was never taken overly seriously by Americans. Religion, this was never a religious country, it's become more religious I think today than it was 100, 200 years ago in spite of those surveys. And what I think is broken down is that implicit philosophy, then a philosophy of individualism and independence, independence not in the sense of living on a desert island, independence in a sense of guiding your own life by your own mind through your own effort. And I think that philosophy has been disappeared, has been destroyed, appartially, philosophically by school of thought that have come in and said, no, we're all our brothers' keepers, we all have to take care of each other, social responsibility, and again from the left and the right and by the welfare state which has sent this message. No, you don't have to think for yourself, you don't have to care for yourself, you know, we're all our brothers' keepers. And that has slowly destroyed the ideological foundation of what it meant to be America. Dr. Zan. Okay, so page 128, I really don't mean this as a gotcha, I just think that this is the spirit that you get in this book which I urge you to read. Page 128, a society of rights is one in which you are as free as you would, I'm sorry, as free as you would be alone on an island. And now that I've read that, let me just read down the page. It should be obvious that there can be no such thing as group rights or collective rights. A group is merely a number of individuals. Now look, Iran, I don't think that the founders could possibly have agreed with you. And now even talking about Jefferson, the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence is the assertion of a collective right. It talks about when in the course of human events, when one people determines that it's going to separate the bonds that tie it to another people and to take the station that, I'm sorry, I don't have the exact line memories, but take the station that is its right among the nations of the world as an independent nation. Okay, look, those founders were much more interested in collective rights than you say they are. They were also much more interested in religion than you say they are. It's very difficult to find one of the founders who didn't think that public religion was crucial for the United States, Washington, Adams, these are Hamilton, all of these people said explicitly and in public forms, they said that if you give up on the religious traditions, which carry the moral traditions, then you will lose the constitution of this country. That was their outlook. And what you're saying is, let's just take the individual liberty part but let's drop the part about public Christianity and their nationalism. And that can't work, it's not sustainable. This side please. Hello, a student here from the Southern Center. So a question for each both relating to values. So, Yoram, you talk about conservatism. I'm wondering, and values of course, I'm wondering how far do we go back for those values? I mean, is the Bronze Age man said the good way to go? How do we know? I'm curious. And for Yoram, so Nietzsche called for the transvaluation of all values. Is brandism up to the task? Say transvaluation of all values. What does transvaluation mean? I'm sorry. A reevaluation and examination. A reevaluation of the proper philosophical ground for those values. Is what up to the task? Brandism. Thank you both. Whoever would go? I can't remember the question. How far back do you go? Oh, that's a good, that's a very good question. I like that question. Look, I'll tell you something funny about this national conservative movement that I've been involved in together with some of the people in the audience here. There's all sorts of people in the movement. And one of the favorite things that Catholics have to say is, you know what the real problem is? The real problem is the reformation. You know, like, if only we could just not have had the reformation, then we've got the right conservatism. And then, you know, I would never say this normally, but as soon as you start talking like that, I start thinking, you know, among my Jewish friends, of course, you know, maybe the problem was the New Testament. I mean, wouldn't we have a better conservatism if we just didn't, you know, didn't do that? And of course, if you really want to, you can go, you say, no, the problem is the Old Testament. And really, really, it's the old paganism. Look, so it's a great question. The answer is something like this. Okay, now I'm just channeling Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke represents the common law tradition in England. He speaks for, he thinks the way he understands it. He speaks for 800 years at least of English legal and political tradition. And what he says is the traditions don't stay the same. The traditions swish back and forth. We make mistakes. We make changes. Problems come up and then there's trial and error. And sometimes we have a good solution to a problem that comes up and it becomes part of the tradition. Sometimes we have a bad solution and then we have to go back. His principle, rule of thumb is we always need to be going back to the moment where things went off the rails. So if you ask me, probably you should ask me in the next question, you always go back to the moment that you believe things went off the rails. So this is an easy one. One word answer. Yes, she's up to the task. Objectivism is up to that. I can't see. Absolutely, I think. And if you look, if you disagree, but you're willing to accept the challenge of debating the values that are necessary for individual human flourishing, then that's a debate that we should all be happy to have. If we can get away from framing morality as self-sacrifice, framing morality as somehow the subjugation of the individual for the purpose of the group, for the purpose of a collective for something else, i.e framing morality as equal to altruism. If we can now ask the question, okay, morality is about individual human flourishing. I'm not sure about Rand's specific values and virtues. Let's discuss which ones are most appropriate for individual human flourishing. Great, that's a conversation that is worthy of having and that's a conversation where we can push the boundaries. But yes, I think I haven't heard an argument why they're not and I haven't heard an argument of anything better. I think they're grounded on a solid foundation rooted in reason and rooted in human nature, rooted in the fundamental alternative that all human beings face and that is to survive to live or not to live and what is required for living, living both just surviving and living for our human being, i.e flourishing. And I think she gives the ultimate answer. So absolutely, I think she's up to the task. This side of the room, please. Dr. Zoni, I'm curious, in your opening statement, you referenced the founding fathers in kind of Washington and Hamilton versus Jefferson and Madison. So maybe somewhat similar to the last question, but like if you put yourself back at that point in time where it seems like that was an important time for you, historically, would you have sided with Washington at that time or would you have like wanted to conserve the British empire? And I'm curious how you would reconcile that? These are great questions. I love it. First of all, I wasn't there, so I don't know. Okay, just to be clear. Not that old? Not yet that old, but I'm petting there fast. Let's look at it like this. The revolutionaries thought that they were defending. If you're talking about, I'm not talking about Tom Payne who's a real radical, but Washington in his circle, they actually thought what they thought that they were doing was defending the existing constitution of the empire. Their argument for why they should revolt, their argument was that there's a traditional, traditional English constitution in which the parliament is in dialogue with the king and the parliament determines whether there's going to be taxation in dialogue with the king. And the claim was that the English were violating the English constitution by the way that they treated the Americans. That was the argument. The argument was fundamentally a traditionalist argument and their claim was we're trying to preserve something that works and what you the English are doing is you're destroying something that works. So I have a pretty good feeling that I would have been on the side of Washington. You could and should ask me, well, does that mean that you'd support the constitution with slavery? The party that I'm talking about mostly opposed slavery, but the question's important nonetheless. Slavery was an evil. It was an evil that was invented in America, meaning that there wasn't slavery in England. It was something that was concocted by the Americans. It was an innovation. And the Americans should have gone back to, should have been going back to their, the English anti-slavery traditions. Let me give you a better, oh no, I can't, sorry. So, yes, I would have sided with Washington. This side of the room. You didn't mind, I guess. Question for you on. Did you wanna? I'm sorry. You're not gonna say who you would have sided with. Yeah, so I'll do this, I'll say something. I mean, we could have a whole debate about the founding of America and I'm no expert, but I would suggest that the Declaration of Independence, more so than the Constitution, is a truly revolutionary document. And yes, it was authored by Thomas Jefferson, a radical, one with exception of slavery, happy to be on the side of. But it was signed by a lot of people, including Washington. And it was indeed authored, not just by Jefferson, but it was edited by Adams Franklin, who supported the Declaration. And Adams is typically not considered a radical, although my friend Brad Thompson wrote a book about Adams would certainly consider him on the side of the radicals in this perspective. And of course, it's hard to mention the Constitution without mentioning Madison, who is in many regards considered the author of the Constitution, I think is on the side of the more radical aspect of. Propaganda. Propaganda. So, but I'll let you guys judge in terms of the founders. I wish they had been more radical. And I said, am I opening? I think the downfall of America that we're experiencing today is a consequence of their lack of radical. I would have, first, of course, on the issue of slavery. You would have saved a lot of blood, and a lot of horror to the slaves if slavery had not been sanctioned. And I will say, I don't think slavery was an American invention. Spanish-led slaves, the British bought slavery to America as part of their colonization. Slavery was all over the world. It's always existed in how a particular character in the US, but that's not that similar to the character that had a Brazil in many other countries. There's nothing unique in that sense. And it is only the ideas in the Declaration that ultimately led to its abolition. But of course, as I said, I would have separated state from education and I would have separated state from economics. And that is kind of radicalism. I think that if we had it in the Declaration of America we would be in much better state. We would have, what were the words? We would have achieved better prosperity and greater unity. Beside of it. Mostly for your, you say that you kind of second your own when he talks about individual freedom, et cetera. But it seems to me that there's a key difference that you're meeting and correct me. What am I missing? I want to find out. Seems to me that his brand of individualism, I'm, my interaction with others is fully voluntary by mutual agreement. You decide that there's some bigger body there, you call it the whole, that can coerce on me to interact with other people, to do other things, because big brother knows that it's better for the whole. Where do you draw the line by number of votes? I mean, let's take it to extreme. Hitler follows a majority that decided for the whole it's better to get rid of the Jews. Some of us will not be around if that would have gone to the extreme. Thank you. I think you're absolutely right. Your own rights in a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. All human relationships are voluntary. And my claim is that this is a false description of human beings. There is no way to make all human relationships voluntary. When you're born, you do not choose the family that you're born into. You don't choose your parents. I'll give you, I'll tell you something surprising. Even your parents don't choose you. You are someone that your parents didn't choose. Maybe they choose to have a child, a generic child. But you, that 17 year old who's throwing fits in the living room, your parents never chose you, all right? Relationships are not voluntary. We don't choose the country that we live in. Now it's true, some of us do. A small number do. Yaron and I actually both chose which country that we live in. So there's a small number of people, but the overwhelming majority of people do not choose the town in which they grew up. They don't choose the religion in which they grew up. They don't choose the nation in which they grew up. So the claim that there's such a thing as human nature can allow all human relationships to be voluntary on the model of trade, of win-win. That's a complete absurdity. It's a fantasy. We need to be realistic. Human beings are what they are. We can make them freer than at certain times in the past, but we can't make them free of the following kind of thing. I have a relative. I don't usually talk about this. I have a relative who is mentally ill, who's been mentally ill for decades. And I'm responsible for caring for that. My wife. Do I get anything out of it? No. It just hurts like hell. It's just pain, okay? But it's something I have to do and they wanna try to figure out where does it come from? It comes from the fact that I want to uphold the values of my tradition, which includes taking care of parents. That's where it comes from. But is it an individual? Is it me as an individual? No, me as an individual is only suffering from it. You can't make decisions just this way. You have to balance your rights and your freedoms against duties which you inherit and you may be able to ameliorate them, but you can't just get rid of them. Like a book. Yeah, I mean, freedom is this tricky word. When I say free as you would be in a desert island, it's freedom as opposed to what? Freedom in what context? It's the political freedom that you have in a desert island, i.e., nobody tells you what to do and nobody coerces you. Of course you don't have the freedom to choose your parents. Of course you don't have the freedom to choose who your child will be, have the freedom to choose whether they have a child or not, but not who that child will be. You don't have the freedom to choose to ignore gravity. You don't have the freedom to choose to deny the metaphysical facts that exist. But once those metaphysical facts exist, you get to choose what you do about it. How to behave? You chose to take care of your relative. For whatever reason, you chose it. It was a voluntary decision. Nobody coerced you. And the whole idea of the desert island is to say coercion should be out. Nobody is there to coerce me on a desert island. There should be nobody equivalent in society that is able to coerce me. One of the reasons, one of the reasons I'm so pro-immigration is because I want people to be able to choose where they live. I want people not to be stuck in the country, in the village, in the town where they happened accidentally to be born. They're stuck there metaphysically because that's where they were born. There's no way around that. Once they are at their age where they can make a choice, I would love them to be able to choose where they get to live. And that's why I'm so strongly for immigration and strongly for free markets so people have the maximum opportunity to make as many choices and decisions that they can in their lives as they live them in the realm where choice is relevant. Choice is not relevant with regard to the metaphysic. That's how the room plays. This is a question for both of you probably. So Dr. Hisani and Dr. Brooke, I keep hearing you guys talk that the general subject of this discussion was conservatism versus individualism. So when I hear you talk about conservatism, I hear you talk a lot about sustainability and about tradition. And I'm just wondering what your, I hear from Dr. Brooke that when he talks about individualism, I hear him talking about flourishing, not just sustainability, but flourishing. So in my mind, sustainability is like kind of a baseline of where we're meeting a bare minimum. And flourishing is going beyond that bare minimum and reaching some higher goal. So I wondered if you could elaborate on what you think flourishing would look like while looking at conservatism. And Dr. Brooke, if you could elaborate on what you think sustainability looks like in an individualistic society. Good question. Look, do you want to go first? I just started, she said Dr. Hisani, so I thought it was me. Look, collectives, human groups, loyalty groups, groups that are bound by mutual loyalty, they have certain characteristics that seem to be common to all such groups. So every loyalty group has material concerns. You know, that there's enough food, that there's shelter, that whatever there is, that's true whether it's a nation or whether it's a family or whether it's a congregation. There's material needs, economic needs. All loyalty groups also have needs which are, I described using the word cohesion. They have the need to be worked on in order to build the internal loyalties because they come apart, they can be put back together again, but it takes work. It's something that you have to work hard in order to do. And all loyalty groups also have a cultural inheritance which is the traditional ideas that are handed down from one generation to the next within the loyalty group, within the congregation or the nation or the family. And that traditional inheritance, it also, it needs to be worked on, it needs to be built up, it needs to be improved. Sometimes it winds down and it needs to be improved or you can see it's going wrong, you need to fix it. So you're absolutely right that sustainability is a big, but I think that it's correct to say that every loyalty group, every group that is based on mutual loyalties is at a given moment is either declining or it's flourishing. And the job of the conservative, the person who's thinking about these things is to say, well, if it's declining, what do we need for it to go back to flourishing? And if it's flourishing, what can we do in order to strengthen the direction of the flourishing so that we have some time before it starts collapsing again? So I think flourishing is an integral part of what I mean by sustainability. Thank you for pointing that out to me. So what do I think about sustainability? I think that freedom is what is sustainable. The beauty of freedom is that you're free to choose the groups that you create, that you build, that you make. It's not that long ago in our history, in our traditions, you want free to choose your own family. The families were decided by others of who should marry whom, and you want free in terms of how many children you'd have because there was no control over it. It was that was a metaphysical fact. Today, we have means by which we can decide the size of our family and so on. The Einstein Institute that you mentioned, corporations, businesses, are groups that we create for particular purposes that are mutually agreed upon voluntarily, that serve the individual purposes, the individual goals of the different members of it, where you can leave if you don't like it. The problem is that when you get into political groups, i.e. nations, something else enters the picture that does not enter the picture when we're just interacting with one another in a free society, and that is the potential for use of coercion and force. Then there's the potential of one group imposing its will on another group, or one special pressure group imposing its will on somebody else. That is the essence of unsustainability. That is what destroys cohesion and unity and this idea of sustainability. I think when people are free, free to join whatever groups they want, lead whatever groups they want, commit to whoever relationships they want, not commit to other relationships, that is the most sustainable kind of human society possible. It is the only society that does not pit human being against human being. It is the only society that recognizes that life does not and should not be a zero-sum game. It is a win-win kind of relationship. That's sustainable. I'm sorry. My name is Jacob Brunton. I'm a Christian egoist. Kind of make both of you mad. My question is mainly for Dr. Hazzoni, but Dr. Brooke can answer too. Are there objective moral principles which transcend tradition? And if so, shouldn't we pursue those objective moral principles individually with our families, with our churches, with our communities, whatever, regardless of what tradition says? In other words, what really is the value of tradition if there are objective moral principles that we can identify objectively? Great question. Look, from the perspective of an individualist, traditions are, I think, largely dispensable. I mean, Yaron can correct me, but I think that the individualist is usually saying, we have a tradition that you take care, of your mentally ill family member. That's our tradition. But actually, a better way of looking at it would be to say everybody's free. They make their own decisions. You can decide or not. And so lots of people won't take care of their mentally ill relative. I think that a conservative view answers the question the following way. Yes, there are transcendent principles. They are not things that you can easily discover. What we do in history, in history, is that different groups seek those principles. Tradition is the instrument that we use in order to seek those principles. Even Yaron and people like Ayn Rand, who in fact, many Enlightenment figures, who say that they're exercising reason and they don't need tradition, if you actually look at what they're doing, you'll see that what they're doing is they're inheriting a certain tradition and they're elaborating it. The tradition is the instrument that a group uses in order to seek the truth. Conservatives think that a lot of that is trial and error, that the balance between the king and the parliament, which leads to unprecedented freedom in the United Kingdom, is not necessarily something that somebody sat down and designed, but once people saw how it worked, they understood that it was something good. So if, like me, you think that there is no way of escaping your tradition, that there are different traditions around you of a certain degree of ability to choose among them, but mostly Yaron is, there he is, channeling Moses, then you care more about the fact that what is the tradition gives you because it's the tradition that allows you to reason in a way that's competent. I thought of myself as Moses, but I might take it up. I'm gonna keep hammering on this. I feel like I'm on a roll with it. So if what you mean by tradition is a history, a certain knowledge of this trial and error that has happened in the past and in consequence, then it is important. It's important we understand what happened in the past, what works and what doesn't work, as long as we have the right standard for what works mean. But then what is required for us to do is to take all those experiences, to evaluate them and abstract from them as good scientists would do. The principles that should guide our lives. So yes, we might have a lot of experience of people out there doing all kinds of things in marriage, like cheating, loving, lots of different things. And we can extract from it what achieves a good successful marriage and that would be the principle of a good marriage. So morality is the same thing. Morality is not derived detached from reality, detached from experience and from knowledge by some rationalistic deduction. It is a consequence of knowing human experiences, of knowing history, of knowing the different trials and errors that sometimes we ourselves might do and learning the consequence of those and learning from all the concrete examples and abstracting away the principles. Lying is actually not good for you. It's really, really bad because you suffer the consequences. Honesty is a virtue. That was very simplistic, but you get there. So objective moral principles, to the extent that tradition is in opposition to what you've achieved as an objective moral principle, it should be rejected. To the extent that it happens to be true, it can be bolstered now by a better understanding of the ideas that stand behind it of the concrete examples and abstract principles that it supports. We're getting near the end of our program. I think we have two more questioners. I'm gonna exercise my exit three, two over here, four. So if we can quicken the pace, quick questions, quick answers and we'll try to get you all in. And please, if you're not standing now, unless you're extremely provoked, stay seated. All right, so let's start from over there. In the conversation around unity and cohesion as a value, what happens to the dissenting group, especially when they threaten that as a value, that whether that's an individual dissenter or a minority group? Well, I think in a system of freedom, nothing, they don't accept it, they live their lives. I always tell my socialist friends in quotes that if they wanna be socialist under capitalism, they can go start their commune and live pathetic, miserable lives to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability. And nobody's gonna stop them from doing that as long as they do it voluntarily. So you can live the kind of life you want in a free society. The problem is once you start chipping away at freedom, they need to start imposing your will on groups that might not agree with the majority cult. Thank you, Dr. Son, if you have any. Oh, I don't actually think that that's what you think, Iran. Here, on page 133, you say capitalism is the system that institutionalizes freedom in order to protect a specific way of life, a life of reason, productiveness, and trade, okay? You are setting up a system to protect those things that you most value. I'm sorry. But I'm only talking about protecting also. I'm sorry. Look, this entire thing about Khazani, you must be trying to get people to force people to have children. The state is gonna force them. Come on, this is ridiculous. Both of us are talking about what it takes in order to make a society flourish and what it takes to make it sustainable. And I'm arguing that the values that Iran is teaching are not sustainable. And I've told you why they're not sustainable. They're not sustainable because he ignores the fact that families and tribes and nations are not constructed through trade. He's taking the values of businessmen in the marketplace and saying you can build a family like that too. This has nothing to do with the government coercion. The question is, is his philosophical system sustainable? The answer is no, it's not sustainable. If you start treating your wife the way you treat people in the marketplace, then she'll hit you upside the head. And if you keep doing it, then she'll throw you out. You have to treat her a different way, right? In our tradition, the way that a husband and wife treat one another is called honoring. You give honor. What does give honor mean? It basically means that you find ways to suck up to them. To, no, I'm serious. I understand this is strange. Liberals just don't believe this because liberals think, oh, we just are happy within each other's company, but that isn't true. If you have a tradition, if you have a tradition for how to hold the marriage together, then you know that the honor that you give your wife, every time you give honor to your wife, you're strengthening the loyalty of the relationship. Nobody teaches you that in philosophy of freedom classes, you can only learn that in traditional societies that hand down how to keep a marriage together. That's what we're arguing about is whether we need those traditions or not. Two questions, one for Yoram and one for Yoram. In principle, how is the centrally planned economy that you advocate for different from socialism or communism? And Yoram, you mentioned a free market in education, so taking the government out of education. What other sector, well, let me ask you this, what sector would you not leave up to the free market? Okay, everything that I've ever read that advocates socialism or communism takes it as a given that a central planner is able to do better than the free market at allocating resources and introducing innovation at cultivating growth. I don't believe anything like that. I basically think that when I go to a government bureaucrat who's sitting in some ministry, I'm dealing with a mediocrity, usually just like Yoram says. I'm usually dealing with someone who doesn't have incentives to help me with whatever my problems are and does have incentives to make my life annoying because it's fun for him, all right? That I have no sympathy for that. I have no sympathy for the socialist idea whatsoever. But I do think that there's a difference between what Yoram proposes, which is a government that doesn't have any leeway to intervene in order to deal with the most pressing and most pressing problems that the nation is facing. And one where the government just intervenes in everything. Okay, so Yoram says it's a slippery slope. I understand the slippery slope. I'm actually sympathetic. I think that argument is empirically has a lot going for it. But in principle, when you're talking about Alexander Hamilton, what he's talking about, when he's talking about a vigorous executive, he's not talking about a federal government that has three or four million bureaucrats on his payroll. He's talking about the ability of the executive to spot things that are real dangerous to command a small number of people sitting with this team and to issue directives in order to try to deal with it. Look, I'm not an economist and Yoram probably can help me better than I can with this. But I think a simple way of looking at this is socialists think that if 70% of GDP is being taken up by government activities on any possible subject, they think that's okay. That makes sense. I think that if you're talking about 10% of GDP being directed to things like investing in dual use technologies that private firms are doing basic research on in order to be able to beat the Chinese because right now they're kicking the daylights out of us or if the government says, look, we have three times as many stamp PhDs being produced in China as in the United States with six times as many engineers. The free market is not causing us to be able to reach a point where we're gonna be able to defend this country a few years from now. So the government has to do something about it. I think there's a big difference between the really pressing things and everything. Yeah, so the challenge is what is the principle? Once there is no principle, and I think what Jordan is suggesting is really there's no principle. The principle is when they think whoever's in charge that something is really, really bad, then they will intervene. But there's no principle guiding what really, really bad is. The principle that guidance would guide me in that sense is the government has no business in the business. The business has no business in economics. Why? And this goes to the question I was asked. Government is cause, government is force. Government isn't gun. This Washington said, I think it's second and all of a grass. Government isn't gun, government is force. Well, where is force appropriate? Not in the classroom, not in our hospitals, not in our boardrooms. But force is necessary in one place. In the place where force is being used against us, force and self-defense is necessary. So government's job and the only thing government should do is be an actor on our behalf, our agents of self-defense. And in that sense government should only have a police or military and a judiciary. And that's it. It doesn't need, we don't need to bring a gun into the thing, we've got a new text, we've got a cycle. We don't need to bring a gun into all of our human activities. We don't need to bring the power of coercion into all of our human activities. The only activity where gun is necessary, where coercion is justified, is in self-defense. And that's the job of government. Period. And that's the principle. And it limits. Thank you. Last question on this side we have one more question. All right, I'm a student here at Salem Center. One question for each Dr. Azoni. I earlier you did say that individualism was a little incomplete for the reasons that you did state. But I'm a little curious, can conservatism be considered complete if the values that you said were to be, the values that are there that show how to live a proper life are kind of scattered all over the place, hard to find. And it's up to us, we who are capable of error to make the right judgments as to how to apply these values when times are always changing. As for Dr. Brooke, it seems like that's what's core to individualism is the pursuit of happiness and whatever makes you happy is enough. But is that all there is to it? Is that all there is to life? And if living a principled life isn't part of what makes you happy, then is it okay to live an unprincipled life in the pursuit of happiness? And what is the meaning of that? I guess I should ask. Dr. Zahn, do you have a question? I know it's a question. I forgot the question. I forgot the question. Could you say the question again? You go first. We'll clear it up. He's running back. I was running back. No, I got so interested in the second question that I couldn't. Sorry, I should have been more concise. Can conservatism be considered complete if the values that are supposed to guide us to the best life are so scattered and capable of being judged incorrectly by us now when times are changing from where they were in the past? Got it. Maybe let me go before I forget it again. Please. Look, I don't mean that conservatism is complete. Okay. My own view is political theoretical systems. You know, we develop them by trial and error. We learn as we go along. I think it's striking that the conservatives who have spoken on the subject of what are the principles that need the statesmen, conservatives come up with a much longer list than your own's individualism does, right? To go back to the conservative preamble of the American Constitution, there are seven principles there. And obviously, there are trade-offs between them. And the moment you have seven principles, you say, well, you know, who is to decide? And the answer, the only answer is you try to elect the best people and it's their job to make the decisions. You can argue with them, but that's the answer. Conservatives say, look, nothing else is realistic. If you try to tell me, well, actually, there's only one principle that matters and that's individual freedom. So I've said all evening that if you try to say there's only one principle and that's individual freedom, then what you get is something that is radically incomplete. Okay, maybe the seven principles of the founders were incomplete, but the one principle is much more incomplete or two. So you get something that's incomplete. It's so incomplete that you can't even understand what's going on in your society. You look at it and you see we're losing to China. We're losing the ability for political parties to give transitions of power from one to another. We're losing the ability to have children. We're losing the ability to keep together marriage and the government just sits back and says, well, who would decide on these things? It's not our job. So a conservative says, what are you talking about? You've been elected to be responsible. You know, if you're the father or the mother of a family, things come up that you've never in your life dreamed that you'd ever have anything to do with. You can't say, oh, well, I'm not trained for this. No matter what comes up, you have to be responsible. It's the same thing with the head of state. They have to be responsible. No matter what comes up, seven principles is a pretty good attempt at describing it. It doesn't mean it's complete. It doesn't mean it's final. Yeah, I'll just say, I think all those problems that we face in China and anybody else, a consequence of the fact that government's trying to do wings and muds to do things they shouldn't do, but let me get to the patent. Yes, pursuing happiness is it. Happiness is the goal. It's the focus. How do you pursue that is a challenging question. And it requires principles. It requires thought out principles by which to live. You can't go, how does this make me feel? How does that make me feel? Let me figure it out now. You need some principles to guide you, some ideas about what is right and what is wrong. What will lead to a better life, a happier life, a more fulfilling life? What will destroy that life? Avoid the parts that destroy, go for the parts that do. But don't contrast principle life versus happiness. No, if you have the right principle, they will lead you to a happy life. And indeed, if you don't, you will never get happiness. Happiness is not, as Jordan Peterson, since you quoted him, it's not as Jordan Peterson said, just something that happens to you out of the blue. You suddenly boom, happiness drops in punch. Happiness is a consequence of the choices and actions that you pursue in life. Now, there's luck, of course there's luck that plays a role here, but that is not the essential. And the choices and actions that you must take are ones that are guided by principle to arrive through your use of reason, reason based on experience, reason based on studying the world, studying human beings, studying, in a sense, what has worked and what doesn't work, what is good for you and what is not for you. Last question, please. Is this still on? I guess it is. I have a question actually for both of you, and I'm not sure which should be first to answer, but a decade ago, I was in Bulgaria for a year. And one of the primary things I did was to teach a number of classes of kids from five to 14 or 15 from a wealthy family that put them in a private school. And my job was to teach them American English by virtue of anything I wanted to talk about as long as I was talking American English. So the topics I talked about were several fold, but one of the biggest ones was I could talk a little bit about really basic ideas of philosophy, not try to teach them an entire course, but just basic ideas. And one of the basic ideas that I talked about often was happiness and doing something to build happiness. I'm skipping over a thousand details there, but that's the point. So four months into it, there was a student that was one of the most challenging in the group room, his name was Donny. And he suddenly looked very disturbed, and he stood up and said, Mr. Withrow, you don't mean that this thing that you're saying to take steps to build happiness, you don't mean that's like a higher standard than the family, because of course the family is the highest. And I stopped and he stopped and everybody just sort of stood there, look at each other and I realized I was facing a conflict I hadn't expected to face. I didn't expect anyone to ever have that position. My apologies to various people in the world, but I didn't think of that as being something that could possibly be taken higher than the choice of what to do to build happiness based on your mind and your rationality. So I just stopped, he stopped and I said, let's talk about that after class. And so we did, we spent an hour afterwards talking about it. My question though is, was that silly of me to not realize that that was gonna be coming up as a major conflict? I hadn't heard of it before, but I sure as heck heard of it then. And it turned out that I met several other students, this was in Bulgaria, so this was European. They often had that viewpoint and some of them would name tradition as a background for why that made sense, by the way. So I was surprised and my question for you is, was I silly or naive to not realize that was gonna be a major problem for us? It really hit me. So what I said to him though afterwards was, well, I'm not just saying happiness is important, but that your purpose, your way of getting it is to build your own happiness, which means you take the job. You're responsible for that, just like you're responsible for everything else. Oh, I think we have your question. Thank you so much. We have your question. Yeah, that's my question. Thank you. Thanks. Look, I just think that if you think, and I understand probably, most people in the room probably do think this, but if you think that you can build from the ground up a view of happiness, right, that you invented it yourself, either from whole cloth, doing things that nobody's ever done before, or by researching every option that exists on the face of the earth and making decisions, if you think that you can get to happiness that way, look, we're at an impasse because I think you're mistaken. I think that those kids who have grown up in free-to-be, whatever you wanna be, you make the choices. It's all up to you. When they grow up in that, they, many, many, many of them, maybe not every last one, but most of them, they reach a complete intolerable impasse. They reach an inability to decide, should I get married, should I not get married, should I serve in the military, should I not serve in the military, should I start a business, should I not start a business? Anybody who's dealt with these kids, the ones who have grown up on nothing but that, right, when you deal with them, you find that they are completely paralyzed by the freedom that they've been given. And this isn't like some kind of surprise. This is Durkheim, this is Nietzsche. People have been saying this already for 130 years. If you take away all the guide rails that tell people, plus, minus, here's a good life, you take away all the guide rails and you say, you invent it yourself, then they don't invent it themselves. Usually what they end up doing is just stuck and they go nowhere. Sometimes instead of being stuck and going nowhere, they go join the Nazi party or communists, they do lunatic things because they don't know how to make these choices. And so, yes, I'm in favor of reason, I don't wanna say anything about reason, but I don't think we properly understand reason. The tradition that Burke and his predecessors, the commune lawyers, they understood that reason is something that begins from an inherited tradition. And then different people, they play with it. They move to one side or another in order to exercise their creativity. But nothing, giving nothing, just saying reason, you're killing, you're just killing. Dr. Burke. Yeah, I mean, I don't think anybody argues that every individual should invent everything whole clock. That is just not the case. Individuals need moral guidance. They benefit from moral guidance. Real question is, where does that moral guidance comes from? And what I am arguing is that that moral guidance comes from reason, not that they invented whole clock, but that they consult philosophers who help them find the principles to guide them towards happiness. There is an important role for philosophers in the world as moral teachers, as moral guides. But those philosophers do not impose or do not suggest their moral ideas, or shouldn't, just because I said so. Those moral ideas need to be presented in a way that shows, proves, suggests to our young people why they should follow that moral guidance. What are the reasons for it? In the end, the individual does need to rely on their own reason to choose their values based on this guidance. It's not like everybody needs to be their own philosopher. But the sad situation that we live in today that I think you're describing is not that we tell people they're free. What we tell people is that there are no standards. We tell people that they should follow their emotions, that they should do whatever they feel like doing, that happiness comes from doing what you feel like doing, from embracing the moment, from that there are no principles, that there is no guide, that there are no truths, that reason is not efficacious. Indeed, they shouldn't trust their mind. They should just go by emotion. And we've got an entire generation that is influenced by this emotionalism. And yes, emotions are not tools of cognition. Emotions are not guides towards happiness. Happiness is something that needs the guidance of reason and that needs the guidance of principles. Great, thank you very much. Well, now in with some five minute closing statements by both of our speakers, Dr. Brooke, you can start us off. God, yeah, okay. Take a breath, take your time. So we live in a world today that is clearly, or I think everybody has a sense and we can show there's a decline. We are choices about the future of this country, of the world in which we live, need to be made. The system we have today, to use words we've talked about before, is not sustainable. The path we are on is not sustainable. We are offered today two alternatives, political. We are offered a collectivism of the left, the ones to take our freedoms, whatever are left of them. And so a large extent, destroy them. We are offered the alternative to what we have today is more of the same, more government intervention, more thought control, more control of all what we do and how we do. The individual is lost. And on the right, we are offered. A return to some of the logical paths