 It's always a pleasure to be in in Georgia. This is my I don't know 4th 5th 6th time. I can't I can't keep track anymore West the civilization so you know we live in in pretty amazing times We are unbelievably rich as compared to our ancestors We have available to us amazing technologies You know everybody I always use my iPhone in my lectures because it's such an amazing tool But this is very symbolic of the kind of life that we have and the kind of stuff we take for granted In the West because what is this? What is this? What does it do? It's a communication device right we call it a phone But it's much more than a phone, right? You can video conference with people Multiple people all at the same time by video from anywhere in the world. I Mean I travel all over the world and I Video conference with my kids say good night to them. I mean it's truly stunning now your generation grew up with this I Remember when we had to when there was no cell phones never mind no iPhones and this is young This is just about 10 11 years old, but it's not just a communication device. What else is it? Well, sure. It's an idea, but what does it do? What else does it do? It gives us information a little bit of information Yeah, we can express ourselves on this phone, right? We can take pictures. We can take videos such a camera It's not just a camera. It's a video camera, and it's a video streaming device, right? We can stream our stuff anywhere Instagram Facebook anywhere. It's Information how much information pretty much all the information available in all of human civilization Ever all of it is that our fingertips? Forget the printing press It's all here Whenever you want it at a cost of what? What's a cost zero marginal cost of zero we have This is an entertainment device Every piece of music ever written and recorded in all of history is available here at a marginal cost of Zero this is a more powerful computer in terms of computing power Then the computer that send man to the moon more powerful The mainframe computers that used to fill up a whole room like this. I still remember those I was I think I was the last class in my university that programmed with punch cards Used to punch the zeros and the ones into a card and feed it into a machine go home Come back the next day and get the results after the machine and basically you were doing two plus two equals four And it would take it all night And it would give you hopefully the right answer. I mean that's not that long ago I mean maybe just for you, but not for me. It seems like yesterday 30 years So we have it at disposal the most powerful tool known to mankind It's a communication device. It's a computer. It's a computation device It's an entertainment center and it gives us access to every piece of information Known to me. I mean in many respects the iPhone is a symbol of Western civilization Because what does it reflect? What does it reflect what makes the iPhone possible? What makes the iPhone possible? Freedom the freedom to do what? Freedom's a nice word Everybody loves freedom including the Marxists including the fascists. Everybody claims to like freedom Well free market, but again free market means what what it would people actually do in a female. What's that? It's a product of wealth. We need it to accumulate capital in order to build it We need to have free markets, which is free. What? So it's individual freedom to do what? Not gonna let you get away with just one word answers that are floating abstractions. What does it actually mean? Of what? Expressions to the freedom to express yourself and how does that manifest in an iPhone? Well both on the content side, but even in the creation of the of the iPhone, right? There's an idea here. What's that the freedom to trade the freedoms exchange and what's behind all these freedoms expression trade Manifest ourselves as individuals Feed them to choose make our own choices and what's behind that? What's that? They're all the right Sorry, what did you say? Yeah, all of this behind it is is the right to do all these things What's that? Values yeah, I mean all of these are values, but we have the right To choose own values to pursue own values. That's part of what freedom is, right? It's the ability to choose and pursue our own values But behind it all Is this idea that we have the capacity and the freedom to Think for ourselves Now that's new This idea that each one of us has a tool that allows us to discover truth To know the world and we each have a right to think whatever we want to think and then express those thoughts in action free trade free movement Free markets and in thought free expression free creativity But at the root of all of that is an idea that comes out of the early 18th century a long time ago But the beginning in my view of the real Western civilization as we know What was life like before the 18th century? All over the West all over the world What's that monarchy? What was life as an individual like? So poor short oppressed barbaric We were serfs there were aristocrats we were serfs no freedom No freedom of expression or freedom of movement. No freedom to act And what was what was the consequences of the wealth? How wealthy were we? Well, this is before industrialization, how wealthy were we We had nothing even the aristocrats as compared to anybody in this room had nothing We were nothing we were considered nothing So for a hundred thousand years or for whatever however you want to go backwards in terms of human history We were basically nothing We had nothing if you look at the statistics right basically all of us owned about two dollars a day We couldn't accumulate any wealth because what do you do with the with whatever money we had? We needed it to eat We grew We grew our food and we ate it. We got up When the Sun rose we went to sleep when the Sun set We couldn't read a book because we can read We can read a book because there was no light At night and during the day we worked or we died Those were the alternatives you worked or you died. I mean people have this romantic view of Man, I don't know man in a cave or man a long time ago in the village or it was horrible What was life expectancy? 30 in in the west and you know it reached in the early in the late 18th century to be 39 39 you guys are all middle-aged. I'm dead a long time ago Yes, they were hoping for heaven Right good luck with that So life From all of human history until about 300 years ago life Was awful short brutish Boring boring is good. Yeah, very boring Very boring no iPhones no music No Netflix Boring right and no job that you like you you you were born into your job Right most of us were farmers, but if you lived in a city What was your job? Who chose your job for you? Your parents whatever your father did you did if you are a man and if you're a woman Forget about it. There's no job your job is that kids and most of the kids die Most of the kids died over 50% of children died before the age of 10 and A significant percentage of women died at childbirth. So most of you didn't even survive to see your children And he certainly had no careers But it was no yet. No property yet. No rights and then something amazing happen if you look at at the graph of Income or wealth, it's kind of flat for a hundred thousand years It goes up a little bit people a little bit better off in Greece the little bit better often Rome and then you get the dark ages and they go back down and it stays down and then it Starts going up a little bit during the Renaissance, but it's really all Small movements and there's suddenly Suddenly it goes like that and you have to jump to reach because you can't even measure how high it goes Because how do you measure the value of running water and flushing toilets? How do you measure the value of electricity? I? mean as economists We can measure The amount of money we pay for it or the amount of money we invest in the assets But we can't measure the utility it provides human beings We can't measure the quality of life that is improved as a consequence of having electricity having running water having high rises having universities having schools a Quality of life today is millions of times better than it was 300 years ago In terms of money It's hundreds of times better, but in terms of actual quality of life The fact that we can live into our 80s today your generation might live probably going to live into their 90s And you know if with a little bit of medical innovation maybe well into your hundreds So what happened? That made it possible for us to have this massive spike in a very short you remember a hundred thousand years nothing agriculture another ten thousand years nothing and then suddenly out of nowhere And Now French Revolution killed a bunch of people guilty of people how much progress do we get from slaughtering people? Yeah, I mean that's your evolution and technology, but what caused the industrial illusion Why did the industrial revolution happen when it happened and why didn't it happen where it happened? Why didn't it happen in China? Because of freedom because of freedom a winner freedom come from how do we get freedom? accident We're just wanting it so we took it Centuries waiting for freedom the people waiting for freedom Do we really want freedom? Is it something we're born with and we just can't wait to become free. I mean I wish Because there's still a lot of people in the world they're not free and they see that we're just sitting around Waiting for it to happen It all happens simultaneously, but what is the core of the ideas and I don't think it happens so things It actually happens progressively it happens over time you could start seeing if you look back in history You can start seeing the signs of what is leading up To a massive breakthrough But what is it that makes it all possible? Well, it's ideas So the first really really important point is that ideas shape history ideas make freedom possible Ideas make it possible for us to live the kind of life we have today and what are the idea? What's the most important idea that I think was discovered? articulated taught preached in the 18th century that made this possible Maybe you got tuition is the culmination It's like the end. It's like the beginning of the industrial revolution But that's like where we get to but this idea makes the Constitution possible. Well, this idea is It's an idea that comes out of the Renaissance Into kind of the early 18th century 1700s and it's an idea that the Greeks understood But didn't take it all the way It's the idea that what makes it possible for human beings to survive What is the tool that makes it possible for us to survive to exist to thrive to do well? What makes it possible for us to do well as a species as human beings What makes it what in what way are we different than every other animal out there? Even before communication you need this in order to communicate Compensings of societies reason You have to be able to think what is reason ability to observe reality Integrate the information of reality to abstract it to use logic to discover truth That only we can do no other animal can do that No other animal can abstract from the concrete of reality. No other animal can then Explain its reality and then actually change its environment to fit it. We've been doing this since the beginning of time How do we survive as human beings? What's that evolution Evolution created us we're a product of evolution, but how do we survive? I mean the difference between us Because Evolution made us rational beings, but evolution because it made us rational beings Did not give us the code on how to survive Our genes don't tell us how to hunt our genes don't tell us how to do our agriculture You don't know how to hunt genetically instinctually And certainly we don't know how to do agriculture It took us nine ninety thousand years or maybe a hundred thousand years to discover agriculture So Evolution created something very unique in human beings It gave us the capacity to reason It gave us the capacity to choose Which means it gave us the capacity to think So in order for us to get food we have to figure out how to get food We have to We have to imagine but more than that we have to look at the animals out there and figure out how to catch them I mean look at us We're pathetic animals We're weak, we're slow, we have no claws, we have no fangs, big teeth I mean try running down a bison and biting into it So in order to communicate you have to have concepts In order to have vision Vision is like a fuzzy word What we really need is to think So we have to have a plan We have to build weapons We have to have strategy We have to be able to communicate We have to build traps And then we can go hunting Because just as an individual naked Without weapons, without tools We're pathetic So we've always done this But what was discovered in the beginning of the 18th century Is how efficacious, how competent a reason really is What do we call the period of the 18th century? Historically, what is it called? The Enlightenment What's another age or another name for the Enlightenment? The Age of? Renaissance No, Renaissance was before The Age of Reason So the Enlightenment is an era of the discovery Or rediscover Of the efficacy of human reason A capacity to think And how do we discover this? Well it's also called the Age of Science Newton, everybody know Newton? He is the first, if you will, Enlightenment thinker And what Newton does Is he teaches us About the physical reality Laws of motion Gravity He explains to us the world in simple terms Mathematically but simple We can actually understand how the world works Now remember People up until this point Truth came from where? How did they know what was true? What did they assume truth came from? What explained the world to them Before Newton? Religion, God A book, an ancient book Written a long, long time ago That said, for example, that the sun goes around the earth And the scientist came and said Book is wrong, some of them got burnt at the stake Let's bar him What's that? Let's bar him And let's bar him Somebody will call it It's not bar him Yup You can't disagree with a book for a long time And where does truth come from? It comes from God But how do we know what God thinks? Right? We need some intermediary Like a pope Who talks to God And he tells us what the truth is So we as individuals Up until the 18th century believed That we did not have access to the truth And then these scientists come around And they tell us, no, no, no, no Each one of you has the capacity to reason Each one of you has eyes Each one of you has a brain Each one of you can understand The physical world around you Look here, let me show you Let me give you the equations Let me teach you And Newton's laws are not that hard And to understand Newtonian physics Is not that complicated If you don't know it It's because you had a bad teacher Or have a bad teacher But they're not that hard And Newton and his friends Used to go all over Europe And used to travel And give seminars on the physics And used to do demonstrations And show people, look, it's all understandable You don't need a book You don't need somebody to commune With the world of spirits The world is right here And it is understandable to you Each one of you And suddenly people woke up And say, wait a minute If I have reason If I can understand the physical world Then why can't I decide What profession I want to go into I don't want to be I don't want to be a bookkeeper Or a laborer Or a farmer Or whatever I want to do what I want to do I want to choose I have my reason I have the ability to think for myself And they said, wait a minute If I can reason If I can think for myself Why can't I choose who to marry? Because nobody got to choose In those days who to marry And if I can think for myself Then why can't I choose my political leaders? And if I can think for myself Why is in my life the standard? Why is in my life an end in itself? Why must I be sacrificed to the king To the council To the tribe, to God So western civilization Is really two ideas That come out of this period of time The main idea of western civilization Is the efficacy of reason Reason is our means of survival And reason is accessible To each one of us as individuals That what makes us unique As a species is our capacity to think Capacity to reason And because it is reason Because reason is an individual characteristic There is no floating consciousness Above here There's no collective reason There's no collective mind Just like you cannot eat for me I can only eat for myself You can't think for me You can't discover truth for me I have to discover it I have to think I have a mind It's not your mind It's mine So the second concept Is the idea of the individual And the importance of the individual And the sanctity of the individual Reason, individuals reason Individuals are important And then you get to the Declaration of Independence The American Declaration of Independence The tax For the first time in human history My view is the Declaration of Independence Is the most important political document In all of human history Because it articulates universal truths And it is what western civilization becomes Comes from that document It impacts it All of Europe and today I think the entire world Because it says It identifies the idea that your life belongs to whom Who does your life belong to? You Not to God Not to other people Not to a king Not to a tribe Not to a group But to you Your life is yours And as a consequence You have an inalable right What does an inalable right mean What does a right mean Right to a word we use But what does it actually mean You have freedom to act Right means freedoms of action Right means freedom of action So you are free to act for what? You have a right to your life Which is really the only right Because everything else is derivative of your life But you have a right to your life Which means you have a right to pursue the values That you need That you think you need In order to thrive as a human being As an independent individual human being And it's inaliable means Nobody can take it away Not a majority Not a dictator Nobody You as a human being have this right Because you are a human being Because it's part of your nature You have a right to life You have a right to pursue the values That are necessary for your life And you have a right to think Right to liberty Life, liberty You have a right to think And write and speak And express yourself In any way that you choose Nobody Not a majority Not a king Not a prime minister Not a president Has a right to take that To limit that And to constrain what you can say What you can think What you can express And this is a true revolution You have a right to pursue Your own happiness Which means you're not just a cog in a machine To make the world a better place For some other group You're not essentially Georgian You're just there to make Georgia a better place Or American Or any You're not part of a group Your moral purpose in life is you Your life Your happiness Your success as an individual So you have the tool to think for yourself And you have a moral responsibility To yourself to think for yourself To think what the values should be That you should pursue And politically What we must do is leave you free To pursue those values And what does freedom mean? Because like I said before If I went in front of a group of communists And I asked them Are you for freedom? Every hand would go up And I went in front of a group of fascists And I asked them Are you for freedom? Every hand would go up Because nobody defines the word What do they actually mean by freedom? They mean something very different than we do What do we mean by freedom? Why mean by freedom? I don't know what you mean What is freedom? What's that? The pursuit of your own happiness But what is that? Free of what? What is freedom mean? What does that capture? To choose something by yourself To choose something by yourself without what? Without somebody else Inflicting violence Occursion Authority on you So freedom is the absence of coercion It is that environment Where we as individuals can pursue our own values Our own life Our own thinking Free of coercion Now this These ideas Reason and individualism And a political system That leaves us free to pursue those That is what the West is That's what is meant by Western civilization Every idea that counters that In my view is anti-Western Communism is anti-Western Nazism, fascism are anti-Western In a sense Religion that tells you Your life is not yours That you shouldn't think for yourself That you don't have the capacity The truth is not from reason It's anti-Western And these Western ideas Are not Western because of a geography They're Western because they happen to develop In a particular place But anybody, anywhere in the world Can adopt them And when they do When they do they are successful It doesn't matter what culture What ethnic group or geography What color, skin or any of those things Human beings are human beings And if they adopt these ideas They succeed So when I talk about Western civilization I talk about these two fundamental ideas Reason and individualism And the political system that makes them possible Which is basically capitalism Freedom And these ideas are under assault today They're under assault from almost every direction We're told in America in particular But I think this is going out there I see it all over Europe now This modern manifestation started in America We're told we're not really individuals, for example You're just a member of a group And your group is defined by what? What defines your group? It's called identity politics in America Your group is defined by your gender Women are different than men They have different logic They have different worth thinking And they've been oppressed for so long That it's changed the way they are We're told And then you're defined by your gender And of course we don't just have two genders anymore Now we suppose they have 99 genders Or 98 or whatever the number is lately And each one of those is a group That has its own identity That functions as a group It's not a group of individuals But a group that is monolithic in some sense And it's not just gender, of course It's color of the skin It's ethnic background It's whatever they come up with lately It's hard to keep track Religion So what defines you as an individual According to these new theories Is your group membership And groups should be treated differently Based on what? Based on how needy they are And how oppressed they've been in the past And the more oppressed they've been in the past The higher they are in the hierarchy And the more oppressive they've been in the past The lower they are in the hierarchy So the assumption is individuals don't matter We as individuals don't matter We should not care about individuals What we should only care is about groups Tribes We're going backwards To tribal mentality And underlying this is the idea We don't know truth That in some sense there is no truth What's true for you is not true for me That the world, reality, everything Truth is in flux There is nothing absolute That reality is not observable Is not knowable for a reason Philosophically this great achievement Of the enlightenment of figuring out What we as individuals have the capacity To know the world was immediately undercut By philosophers in the 19th century No, you don't know the world The world is in another dimension Which what ancient philosophers said Truth is in another dimension We can't know the truth We need philosopher kings to tell us what the truth is Who said that? Yeah, Plato, Socrates and Plato Plato taught us that the truth is in another world What we see here is just shadows It's not real We can't tell anything Therefore we need philosopher kings Dictators Authoritarians Popes To commune with the world of spirits And to tell us what the truth is The enlightenment says no But now we go backwards We can't tell what the truth is as individuals We don't know what reality is as individuals We can't rely on our senses We can't rely on our minds And indeed what's more important than thinking In America they teach this from when we're very little What's more important than thinking? What makes us human we're told today? We tell emotions It's our feelings Can't be upset We can't offend anybody We can't challenge anybody We call Americans your age We call them snowflakes Why snowflakes? Because they're so delicate They're so sensitive If you know each snowflake is unique No two snowflakes are like She's all so unique Which is true But just so delicate That if we just express an idea That might offend you Completely Then we're the same Well human beings we have so much DNA That can guarantee that none of us exactly is the same And even if we had the same DNA Given that we have free will We'd express it differently So therefore we would still be two So if you take identical twins They're not the same Even if they live together they're not the same Because what determines us? You got your DNA That one theory in psychology says Evolutionary psychology says We're just determined by our DNA Right? And what's another theory? That says we're just determined by what? Society By environment, by parents By the way we grow up and everything And then there's some radical Radical psychologist that says No no no it's both It's a little bit of both And I say they're all wrong DNA, environment What's missing? Yeah you You're missing, I'm missing So here you go The choices you make They're choices you make from when you're very young What's that? Your mind And your choice to use it or not Which is the fundamental choice that we all make As human beings To use our mind or not That's true But It's affected by society And our demerits So they might, our free will Our willingness to engage Our free will or not might be affected By certain things But it's still there In my view It's the most important factor that determines who you are Not society Not your genes What you do with your mind Or will ultimately determine who you become Of course It's a cop out otherwise Of course we cannot Decide Forget about society Think about what you choose To do with your life Society is An abstraction and much later Much more important is that you decide How you want to live, what kind of life You as an individual want to have But today Everybody know Sam Harris? Sam Harris And many intellectuals Are claiming we have no free will Our reason is under attack Post-modernism tells us There is no reality out there And we have no idea how to Engage with that reality, how to know that reality And the modern Kind of identitarians On the right And on the left Are telling us we're just a product of our race Racists on the left And racists on the right That you as an individual don't matter Your membership in a group is all that matters In other words Today western civilization Is Under attack in all areas And of course all of these lead To what conclusion in politics If you do not have free will If You cannot access the truth And if you're just a member Of a group and mean nothing as an individual What is that I was more interested In politics Yeah I said cause There's apathy on the part of the individual It causes impudence Cause if I can't think what's the point in anything And It brings us back To an era of human society Before the Enlightenment Where we lived As tribes Where we cared only about people who looked like us Where our lives did not belong to us It's a return To a pre-enlightenment period It's a return to poverty And politically it's a return to what Authoritarianism If you can't discover the truth Then you have to find A political leader Or a group that can somehow Reflect that truth If your reason is impotent If you cannot think Then how What are you going to do? What emotion What emotion do you think we get If we discover that our minds don't work Fear Fear Yeah we become afraid And if we're afraid And don't believe in our own mind What do we look for? What do we search Security In a group In a group With other people who look like us Again the racism If they look like us then I feel safe And then But how does this group make decisions Because you still have to live You still have to make decisions And the groups can't make decisions Right? Collectivists but who makes the decision Somebody has to make a decision for us The government And the government isn't a free government Because we're too incompetent to make To choose We need a leader And a leader has to make decisions for us So the group Which we joined because we're afraid Because we've lost trust in our own minds Now has to choose a leader And usually we don't choose them It just arises Who now can exploit the group But who can tell us what is true and what is not And every collectivistic World view Every collectivistic vision Has to have a leader I mean think about communism Right? I don't know if you've heard Marx But Marx has this utopia in the future And the utopia in the future There are no leaders We all just are in paradise Our material will be It's all guaranteed, it's done It's figured out so we don't have to worry about food And material stuff We do fun stuff We all wander around doing cool things Right? That's his ideal But how do we get there? We get there, we have to Gather up as a group The proletarian But this proletarian And we have to act in the interest of the proletarian But how do we know what's the interest of the proletarian? How do we know what's good for the proletarian? What's that? Yeah, we need a leader We need a philosopher king Who can be commune With the spirit of the proletarian And let us know what the proletarian needs I mean it might need 40 million Ukrainians Dying of starvation I mean that's what the proletarian needs Right? What did Lenin say? You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette Which means you have to kill a few people To get a perfect society But it doesn't matter In a collectivistic mind Because individuals don't matter There's the group and if the group requires some to die For the sake of the group Who cares? That's okay But it's again the philosopher king We need that leader, the Nazis Right? We're going to do this for the Aryan race Well who knows what the Aryan race needs Who knows what the Aryan race wants? Well Hitler does He communes with the Aryan race He has this vision Of what's good for the Aryan And he dictates Collectiveism Always leads to authoritarianism Denying Individual reason Always leads to collectivism So what's democracy? How many people? I don't agree with What's that? All the people No, no, no So take the first democracy First democracy And you know Pure democracy, we'll talk about pure democracy The first democracy was in Athens In Greece And there was this philosopher We mentioned him earlier of Socrates And Socrates were walking around town And he was challenging young people About their religion And he was offending the religious authorities And they were worried Because he was corrupting the youth Corrupting You So what did they decide to do? Yeah, and how did they make the decision? By majority By majority vote By democracy Athenian democracy Killed Socrates But the majority of people wanted it So it must be good because democracy is always good No Since when the majority Is not what's true Since when the majority is not what's right Since when the majority Discovered Newton's laws The majority Decide what it can The majority decides what's right and what is wrong By the way Glory understand Is that democracy Call us And there should be a skepticism In this case I don't even trust democracy But what is democracy? And I'm saying I'd say more than that I'd say that the founding of America Which I think is symbolic of what the West is Was not democratic Democracy is the idea That we get to choose everything But then I'm giving you the power over my life What if you decide That I should do something I don't want to do Then what about my right to life Liberty and the pursuit of happiness Democracy is in contradiction Is in conflict with the right to life Liberty and the pursuit of happiness Because the way it says I have the freedom to act In pursuit of my values In pursuit of my happiness It doesn't say If the majority allows Rights are absolute So Democracy which In the modern world today has become a god Has become the thing Democracy is incompatible Pure democracy is incompatible With freedom So what you need is A method, a system of government That protects freedom That yes maybe we can vote For who is at the head Of that system of government But they have no power Over your lives The only job A proper government's only job Only job Should be to do what To protect your rights Take Create a world Where you can pursue your values Free of coercion Free of interference Free of authority Including the authority of the government So the purpose of government is only one That is to secure your freedom To secure your rights Not to intervene Not to tell you what's good for you Not to tell you who to live for Not to tell you who to help Not to tell you what businesses to open And not to open Not to tell you how much to pay your employees But to leave you free To make choices for yourself Based on your own mind Based on your own reason Then you get rid of them You have to To get rid of them, you have to first educate You have to first believe in something You have to know what you're fighting for Because it's easy to fight against But what are we fighting for What are we fighting for But if we have a freedom We are going to have equality If we have full freedom We won't have equality That's right Who the hell wants equality So what's more important No, what's more important I think that we are Equally So what does equality mean What do we mean by equality See equality of outcome Equality of wealth Equality of opportunities So we're all going to have exactly the same Opportunities Now think about this Ideals should be realistic They should be doable in reality Otherwise they're just floating Is equality of opportunity possible No, is equality of outcome possible No Let me tell you a story There's a group of intellectuals We studied in Paris Good universities Sorbonne, places like that With the best philosophers And they decided they wanted equality They were going to fight for equality And they went back to their country And they went back to their country And they managed to get political power And they said we're going to Establish a society for the first time Of equality But there was a problem In the countryside Some people lived in this big city What are we going to do The people in the city have huge advantages Over the people in the countryside How do we make them equal How do we make them equal No, you can't kick them out of the city So they literally drove Everybody out of the city Millions of people Out of the city into the countryside But now Where do you find food And some people Are good at producing food And some people are not so good at producing food So what do you do then Some people are foraging, you know what foraging is It's like going out and picking nuts and berries Some people are really good at it Some people are not So they ban foraging So now people are starving But even under these conditions Where everybody's in the countryside Almost everybody's starving They're not equal Some people went to university Some people went to high school Some people have glasses Some people don't What are we going to do How are we going to establish equality How do you make it equal Between people with education And lack of education Look, these people don't have time We need to establish equality quickly We're not going to wait generations until equality happens We need to make it happen today So how do you do Through the government Killing the guys Oh no, you can't Killing them Killing them You kill them But the people who remain I know you can't But play along They literally Anybody who wore glasses Was shot Anybody who had an education Was shot Anybody who exhibited Any unique skills Was shot Why do we have to have a name They killed Two million people Of their own people Out of seven million Anybody know Cambodian You can look this up All educated in Paris All with great ideas about equality And all motivated by utopian society Were all equal They killed over 40% Of their own population That's what equality will get you So what kind of equality Can we achieve What kind of equality should we achieve What kind of equality Means something That doesn't involve killing people Yeah, equality of rights Were all free Were all free To pursue our lives But you know what, some of us are going to make a lot of money And some of us won't Who cares Some of us chose to be teachers We're pretty smart We could have gone and been bankers Done something else But we chose to be poor Because teaching never pays a lot of money Certainly not as much as banking But you make choices in life So what It's not about money Life's about choices Life's about living Life's about experiencing Life's about pursuing your values And if your values are not monetary Then you won't pursue monetary values So what So the only equality that matters Is equality of rights Equality of liberty Equality of freedom Were all equally free We all Each one of us as individuals has a right To life's liberty and the pursuit of happiness And I don't have a right Even if I get a lot of people to vote with me To take your rights away To constrain you To limit you You have a right to do what you want And if that involves making billions of dollars Why would I stop you Why is it any of my business On the contrary, I love billionaires I think billionaires are cool I use their products I'm not talking about in Georgia I'm talking about real billionaires Who actually produce stuff to get their billions I don't know how your billion is I'm not talking about olivox I'm talking about real billionaires in a marketplace That make money by producing stuff That we all consume Like Steve Jobs Bill Gates, who actually we've all benefited from Jeff Bezos I can't live without Amazon I don't know how I ever lived without Amazon He's changed my life Hugely better If I ever met Jeff Bezos First thing I'd say to him is Thank you Because The value, the utility he's provided My life far exceeds The money I've I've given to Amazon In exchange for goods So the real battle For western civilization Is a battle about your right As an individual to think And act on your own behalf And that doesn't require democracy That requires freedom And some democratic systems are unfree Because the majority Imposes itself on minorities And what's the smallest minority? The individual The only significant minority Is the individual We shouldn't define minorities By color of skin Or by gender, by sexual orientation We should define a minority That the individual is the smallest minority And what we should defend Is minority rights Which means individual rights Our right as individuals To live our life as we see fit Free Of force, free of coercion, free of an authority That tells us what the truth is That tells us How to live our lives That tells us what our values should be No, we get to choose as individuals What those should be And we get to live our lives as we see fit That's what western civilization is about That's what's under threat And that's What fighting for Fighting for your right To live your life as you see fit Based on your reason Based on your mind So fight, thank you Any questions? Now we're able to ask questions Okay How Immanuel Kant is going to answer Do you know that the Immanuel Kant is a Like Basically Where the current particular idea And how then his ideas Are kind of similar What is part of the history of their ideas So Immanuel Kant Was a late 18th century philosopher from Germany And He was the first Anti-Enlightenment philosopher I mean him and his soul About the same time, but they're both anti-enlightenment And really their goal is Their goal Is to undermine the enlightenment In the critique of pure reason Kant says that he's writing the book In order to save Faith from reason To save faith from reason And what Kant does is he does I mean he does a lot of things, but two big things The first thing is He says You think you're observing the world But you're not What you're observing is what your senses In your mind Have configured Of the world, but the world is in a different dimension You don't know what it is Echoing Plato You live in a cave So Kant says we don't know what reality really is We just Our senses shape Our understanding of reality It distorts our understanding of reality So the real reality out there is unknowable To us So science, logic, reason Is just a game inside our heads And has no real relevance To real reality So it divorces reason from fact From Reality itself Reason becomes a game inside our heads So that's an epistemology The theory of knowledge The other part of it is he says You can't know What is right and what is wrong What is small and not Based on reason The only way to know what's small And not is to follow What he calls categorical imperatives Commandments In secular terms Now where do you find these commandments Now he's trying to do the secular even though He's very religious He's trying to do it without God The commandments In your consciousness somehow We all know What's right and what's wrong And what is good Good is to live for other people Good is to assist other people And you must do so Out of a sense of duty Of obligation If when you're helping the poor for example You think oh I'm going to enjoy this This is going to be fun Like some people in charity you know I'm going to help people it's going to make me feel better That's not all Because you thought about yourself The essence of morality For cons Is selflessness No self No individual No you Now how does that Even says in a passage he says If you meet somebody happy He's suspicious Why Because if they're happy They probably pursue their own self-interest Somewhere along the line Because how do you become happy if you don't try to be happy If you don't pursue self-interest So don't trust them because they're probably immoral Now remember The enlightenment is about what It's about using your reason That discovers truth Not just what it feels real truth In order to pursue Your own life And your own Happiness The enlightenment western civilization Is about self-interest It's about you taking control over your own life Your own mind pursuing your own Values for the sake of your own Happiness And cons says No cons says you must Sacrifice cons says you must live for others Cons says you must always Be self less If you're going to be more And I think in his epistemology And in his ethics He basically undercuts the enlightenment He challenges it and all the thinkers after him Are anti-enlightened Hego tells us Contradictions are part of the world There's contradictions embraced them Relish them, right? The opposite Of the Chilean logic which says no, no, no There can't be contradictions A is A There can be A and non-A at the same time Hego, Schopenhauer, Marx Who then completely throws out individualism Right? And all the way to Nietzsche Who throws out morality All of them Are anti-enlightened figures All of them are anti-freedom Anti-individual So even if in their politics Even a cons says some good things in his politics In his economics It doesn't matter because his philosophy His underlying ideas are fundamentally Anti-freedom Anti-individualism Anti-the individual And anti-accapacity reasons He undercuts himself Even if he says some good things in politics And that's true of all the rest of the thinkers The whole line of German thinkers post-cons Is anti-enlightenment, anti-individualism And anti-freedom And that's what influences the world today They're all Descendants Of Immanuel Kant and Rousseau Rousseau is the other one All about emotion Anti-reason Any questions? It's free from external External inputs External cause So our will Is caused by itself It's a first cause In a sense it's free from society So free will really, according to Rand Free will at its core Is the choice to think or not to think To engage your mind Or not to engage your mind And that Doesn't have a cause external to itself That choice is Its own cause So it's Not determined By other causes external to it That's what it is You get to wake up in the morning And either turn it on Or not And you know some mornings You don't want to get out of bed You don't want to focus You don't want to look around Just once in a while But if you do that every day You screw up your life But that's a choice you make And you can even feel it No, no, I need a focus And that, no, no, I need a focus That's the act of fuel Everything else is a subsidiary Of that first choice that you make The focus or not the focus And many people Many people go out throughout the day In half focus Not to get run over by a car But not engaging their mind In thinking, in observing In choosing In setting values In evaluating In really using their reason And what Rand encourages us to do Is use the tool Use your mind Constantly stay engaged with the world Choose, evaluate Judge Think, think, think For Rand, the most important thing You can do in your life is to think And then act on those thoughts But to think Because that There's nothing else Other questions What do I think about political correctness? Yeah, it's like I think It kind of makes some people again To a total control Yeah, I mean political correctness Is what I was talking about before It's a, it's an attempt To limit our thinking It's an attempt to limit our expression It's an attempt to tell us What is, what we can and cannot say What we can and cannot think What we can and cannot do All in the name of Somebody's being offended Somebody doesn't like it Somebody feels bad Now, there's an element of truth To political correctness, right? There's no reason to offend people For no reason There's no reason to be just vulgar And rude, right? When you interact with other people But they've taken that basic idea Of just civility Of just being a decent human being And now they say You're bad If you say something that might offend other people How do I know what's going to offend other people? Well, you have to be very, very careful And hear some words you can't say And hear some ideas you can't think And on and on and on Right, so it's an attempt to control our thinking In the name of, oh no We're just trying to be, you know Polite and civil So now, you know, in America Comedians have to be careful what they say So there's certain jokes you can't make And a lot of universities Won't invite certain Comedians to the university Because they say offensive things Now, almost anything you say is offensive If you make a joke about women It's offensive, it's a women If you make a joke about men Well, it's never offensive to men if they're white Because they're the oppressors There's a whole hierarchy now of oppression White men at the top And, you know And then you can You know, you can score yourself On how many oppression Points you get Right, if you're Straight, that is not homosexual Or not trans or anything and you're white And you're male, you're at the top Now, I find all of that All of that way of thinking Disgusting, right If I look at my skin, it's white But I don't consider myself white It's meaningless It's super g Meaningless, because we're all kind of mutts So I don't Look at myself as white as you need I mean, male is important Because it has a Function, right But The color of my skin is irrelevant It's stupid But that's what everybody's focused on These days, both on the Crazy right and on the crazy left And yes Some people are being oppressed Blacks Some extend women Homosexuals, others And that's bad So stop oppressing them Let's stop oppressing them and treat them like individuals Great, problem solved Move on But they obsess about this And that's wrong What do you think Who is John Galt? Is he the most important symbol of freedom? So is John Galt For those of you who've read Al Shragd And those of you who haven't, you should Is he the most important symbol of freedom? I mean, I think he is I think he is I think he is Because who is John Galt? John Galt is the thinker John Galt is The independent individual Thinker who lives for whom? For himself And that's That's what you need for liberty That's what you need for freedom Not a member of a group Not a motor Not A person of faith But to have freedom To have liberty, what you need Is an individual who thinks For himself and Pursues his own happiness For himself and Galt Has an oath in the book There's an oath I swear by my life That I will live for no other man And ask no other man to live for me So you don't sacrifice for other people But you don't expect other people to sacrifice You don't demand that they sacrifice to you You don't want them to sacrifice to you You live for yourself Using your mind Under a political system that is free But think about it this way If I believe I'm determined by my group And what's important is my group identity And what's important is what my friends think And what other people think Then what kind of government do I want? I want a government that tells me what to do Because I don't know what to do I need to figure out what my friends want I need to figure out what my group wants I need somebody to tell me What the group thinks is a good thing for me to do So collectivists, people who are Individually collectivistic That is, they look to other people For their identity They look for other people for the truth They look for other people for sympathy Everything is about other people They want strong, powerful Governors But think about an individual Who says, no, I've got a mind I can think for myself I want to choose my own values I want to choose my own life I want to decide how to live my life I have this capacity to reason And I want to use it Like that, what? What's that? Yeah, he wants to be left alone Don't put mother governments on my shoulder Telling me what I can eat, what I can drink What I can smoke What I can do with my life I get to choose, I might make mistakes I know I'm going to make mistakes But it's my responsibility To make them To learn from them To prove myself, to make myself a better life I don't want other people To a government Forcing me to do things I don't want to do So in order to have a world of liberty In order to have a society That respects liberty First you have to have a world Of individuals Who respect themselves Who respect their own life Who respect their own mind Who respect their own thinking Their own values What does that mean To fight for our happiness? What is a disaster? No matter what they say Even if they say they're for liberty and freedom It's not going to manifest They might say they're for liberty and freedom Because all their friends say they're for liberty and freedom So they're just following the group But then The government, the politics Are still driven by collectivism So you need For individualists Government, you need an individualist society An individualist society You can only make By each one of us living an individualistic life An advocating for an individualistic life Okay My question is not about The topic but I have one argument about Why Someone should be reduced With no more anger And he will say that If you can Reduce How children Need a child Who can do it Who can do it Who can do it Who can do it You can do it For adults too And How will you answer So Look Children Again, because of the way Human beings Evolved We have this capacity to reason And a mind that has to grow It has to achieve a certain Just size In order to be able to actually Deal with the complexities of the world Children cannot deal with those Complexities Metaphysically, biologically Physically, they can walk Initially, right? They can't call initially Never mind think, they can't communicate They don't have concepts They can't really abstract So Biologically they are incapable Of doing those things And as a consequence Somebody has to Protect their ability To grow up To be an individual To think for themselves and so on And that's the job of the parents Parents In a sense Well, parents, by having the kids Take on the responsibility Of guiding them through life So that they can become adults So that they can stop being dependent Right? But that's biological But once you're an adult There's no biological Think preventing you From Choosing your own values Choices necessary for your own life And nobody has a way to use force Against you The only reason we use force against children Is because they truly don't have the capacity And even then, you should limit them Out to force you to use the children You stop them from walking in the street But you don't beat them up just because they're children You do what is necessary To preserve their life So that they can develop the skills And their capabilities to become adults But the only reason to be a child Is to be what? Is to be an adult Everybody thinks being a child is fun No, it's much more fun being an adult Because you actually have your four capabilities with you So no, you can't compare the two The whole point of being an adult Is you or you And you get to make the choices at that point Because you have the four capabilities Now what if somebody is Mentally retarded Never Never has the Mentally retarded capacity More than a five year Then somebody has to take care of them And somebody in a sense does use force against them But if you're a normal Adult Who has the mental capacity To take care of themselves Why would anybody interfere? Children, again, are biologically different They're not fully human In that sense They're certainly not adults Any other questions? I think it's Georgian politics Yeah, we'll go there and then we'll come back You mentioned the snowflake generation, right? The snowflake generation The people that are easily damaged and vulnerable One of the universities in America Bend the Clapton group lecture They thought that it would become Kind of a barrier or an anxiety for the students What do you think about this kind of Practices and how it could exist to be Free society when we went out Express ourselves even by Yeah, I mean I think it's ridiculous I mean I can understand bending, clapping If it's disruptive Or if it interferes with the flow of the lecture Or if it's something like that But to bend clapping because it creates anxiety Like get a life Get a psychologist I don't know Go to therapy I mean anxiety is part of life Anxiety is part of life Anxiety is Is an evolutionary fuel tool To tell us something's wrong And we need to take care of it And we need to deal with it To deal with it And if you get anxious because of clapping Then you've got problems That you should have to deal with So I think what's happened in America And I doubt it's happened in Georgia But in America it's happened Is the American educational system Doesn't focus anymore And we're talking about from when they're very young Doesn't focus anymore On facts And thinking That's old fashioned Thinking Facts What does it focus on? On how the kids feel On socialization On making sure we get along together And this is all again Philosophy shapes everything Ideas shape everything This is the philosophy of John Dewey John Dewey was an American philosopher A pragmatic philosopher And he was the most Influential Philosopher of education And his view was Schools are not for teaching you Facts and logic Schools are for socialization And for teaching you How to express and Feel your emotions Now I'm not against emotions They're great As you can tell I'm pretty passionate Emotions are how we Experience life You want To have strong emotions Because that's how we experience the world But emotions are not tools Of cognition They don't tell us about the truth Other than our own truth In a sense of what's happening inside ourselves They don't tell me about the world out there Only my mind can do that Only logic can evaluate Reason can evaluate what's going on So What we've done is we've elevated emotions Above reason So now if I say something and it causes you a bad emotion Then I have to stop saying it You know they're safe spaces Where they get to cuddle with teddy bears And listen to soft pleasant music To calm them down because they got a little emotional But part of what Education should be about Is to teach children How to Relate to their emotions Okay so I'm feeling stressed right now Why? What's causing the stress? How do I deal with it? How do I put it aside until I finish the lecture And then I'll take care of the stress I'm not feeling stressed I'm just using it the exact way That's what education should feel Is how to control And ultimately how to understand our emotions So that if they're inappropriate We Can take steps to fix them And emotions Where do emotions come from? What do we have the emotions that we have? Just random What's that? Animal instincts We don't have many animal instincts So one of their beauties of evolution Is they gave us reason instead of Instincts Stimulate So No matter what the circumstances I give you the same stimuli to feel the same emotions Where do emotions come from? Experience That it's not just the experience That's too passive It's what you conclude about the Experience And just give you a simple silly example Right? You're four or five years old A big dog comes and barks at you And you get really afraid And you come to the conclusion And maybe this happens three or four times Conclusion Dog scary Every time you see a dog You don't know because you can't remember That they bark at you when you were little You can't remember the bad experience Maybe you got bitten by a dog But all your fear is the fear But the fear is a consequence Of an experience you have And a conclusion you came to About the experience It's not socialization It provides you with experiences Not just other people Like this is a dog providing you with other experiences And it's not just the experience Because some children have a barking dog And they go up to it and they pet it And they have a good time with it And they don't care that it's barking And they never feel They never come to the conclusion This is the threat I need to be afraid of dogs So it's what you conclude about The experience that matters It's not a therapy And you can relive the experience with the dog And you can say yes I understand I came to that conclusion it was mistaken Dogs are kind of cute and cuddly and nice And I shouldn't be afraid of them And their emotion goes away over time But we all experience changing emotions Fall in love with somebody They cheat on you You don't love them anymore Why? Because you know more You get more information Usually it takes a little bit of time For the emotion to follow Usually first you decide oh they're bad for me Then their emotion slows Because their attachment is strong I want to stay with them But no they're bad for me Right? When we change our conclusions When we change our ideas Our emotions follow So it's the wall of emotion in life Is really crucial to understanding this They put emotion at the top Because it's determinant of everything else My question is about Hero Hero means to be Selfless Or irrational selfish I think being a hero Means to be rational and selfish Which one is Like it means to be selfless No I don't think I mean today It means being selfless I think hero Is somebody Who Overcomes great challenges In achieving Their goal Their values It's not about other people It's about I look at people Who let's say grew up in Awful poverty And under really bad conditions And they make a great Life for themselves That's heroic to me Right? It's not about jumping on grenades And marching up the hill and winning And flying the flag The collectives want you to think heroism as well What the collectives want you to think Is heroism is about Sacrificing for other people Sacrificing for the group Sacrificing for their nation Being selfish But I think heroism is about achieving your values And sometimes those values You're fighting for good cause You're fighting for freedom But it's about your values And it's about achieving Overcoming fear and achieving And overcoming great obstacles In achieving your values That to me is heroic So it's about being selfish Not about being selfless Yeah in the back I have a question With something that is simple for me But I don't understand The difference between what is good and bad I mean I wouldn't tell you exactly right now For example to rob someone I mean to get the money from someone And is it good Is it bad Or it's a weakness Because for example I cannot do it Is it something for example Society is giving to me I mean For example right now I have I have some thoughts For example this is good and this is bad For someone from a different country It might be different You got what the question is right Yeah so I mean it's a big question And it's a deep question right It's like what is morality That's what you're asking Where does it come from Because what's morality Morality is the science The field of study that tells us what good is And what bad is What's good and what's bad Comes to them from I don't know Their parents from society Different societies you know For the Nazis good was killing Jews Right So For most people It comes in and they just accept it And they go by what's good and what's bad Based on what they've absorbed From society For some people what's good and bad Is defined by religion 10 commandments This is good, these are the vices This is bad But I believe you have to use reason to discover What good and bad is For example I'll give you an example So I'm Rand and I encourage you all To read I'm Rand again Particularly virtue of selfishness In this regard where she develops an ethical theory Because this is about a theory of morality It's your job To discover what is good and bad And each individual must discover it for himself Helps, hopefully By philosophers, by thinkers By people who actually develop the principles But first you have to decide Good or bad for whom You have to have a standard And again Conventional morality says Don't think about yourself Good or bad is about other people And I'm Rand says no The fundamental choices That you have to make Are about you What is good for me What is bad for me For my life For my survival For my happiness And then the question is okay But are there universal things That are good for all individuals For their life And Rand would say yes Absolutely they're universal We all have Certain needs That have to be fulfilled In order for us to be successful In life So for Rand What would be, what do you think The most important of those is What's the most important thing That human beings must do In order to be successful in life Well, live their life as a tautology That's saying the same thing in different words So what must they do In order to live their life Use their reason Think So for I and Rand for example The good is to think Now think about what Think about how to live a good life How to survive So thinking Now we can't just think We also have to act right Because food doesn't just enter Our mouth automatically And wealth doesn't just appear The wealth that we want That we desire that we believe Will make our life better We need what We need money, so we need to produce We need to be productive So for Rand let's just take those two You can go on, but let's take those two You have to use your mind You have to think And you have to produce Now let's take stealing For example, why stealing bad Why stealing bad Because it is bad because society says So it's bad because it hurts other people But it could be good for you According to that theory Because Someone can also damage you Okay, so one reason is bad for you Is because if you engage in stealing You're legitimizing stealing And then other people can steal from you And that's true But that's not the essential What's the essential reason Why stealing bad The essential reason Why stealing is bad for you And always think about For you, put aside everybody else Put aside the whole world Why if you were thief Would it be bad for you It would affect your self-esteem So what does stealing mean? Stealing, I'm saying to myself I can't produce He's produced This guy who has stuff He's produced He's taking care of something I can't do it I have to use muscle Not the money Muscle in order to take his stuff For me You can use your mind to steal something You can use your mind to steal something Yes, you can You can use your mind to steal something I don't mean I'm not I'm going to show you you need the money But this is the point I know you can hack into the bank Again, all of that is force And all of that is an acknowledgement Because that's not productive You haven't created anything What you've done is you've taken something Somebody else has created And taken it And that taking is an act of force Even if it's through a computer program But it's not You didn't make it You see money is not just paper stuff It's not just this It's the work that went into creating this Now today because banks Because central banks just Print this stuff We've lost the connection between this And where it comes from But this is a reflection of work If you take my money You're taking my work And you Are living off of my Production I created something that didn't exist before That's how I got the money I didn't redistribute it I created something That's the difference By stealing You're redistributing from somebody else To you Which is an acknowledgement In your own mind That you cannot create new stuff So it is a destroyer Of your own self-esteem It's an acknowledgement of your own weakness An acknowledgement of your own Lack of ability to survive In reality And by the means Of force You would call it intellectual force It's self-forcing So it undercuts yourself I'll give you one more example Why should you be honest If you're self-interested If you're pursuing your own values If you're using If you believe in reason Why should you be honest What is reason to depend on? Trust again, you're talking about other people What is reason to depend on? Supporters Forget profits, forget the world What is your reason to depend on? Fact Fact Right Fact, you need Thinking is about things It's not just thinking It's about stuff You need to make sure that what you're thinking about is true If you want the answer to be true There's a term in computer science Garbage out If you put garbage into computer You'll get garbage Same with the human mind You put garbage in, you get garbage out The human mind is a very delicate machine If you poison it With non-facts, with lies It won't function well So you're crippling Your own means of survival You're crippling your own mind You're crippling the way in which to achieve happiness You're mine I'm only lying to other people I'm not lying to myself But really, once you engage in lying Now you've got a piece of your mind That is engaged in falsehoods And our mind The one thing our mind does constantly Our subconscious When you sleep It integrates, it connects Makes connections between things And you can't completely separate the lies from the rest And if you know people who lie all the time I know people who lie all the time Half the time they don't know that they're lying Because they've lost all connection to reality Donald Trump is a good example Half the time he doesn't know he's lying Because he doesn't know what reality is He's lost complete contact With the world out there So if you value your reason If you value your mind If you value your life You don't lie Lying is just a stupid Strategy for success If you're in business and you lie Nobody will deal with you Never mind what you do to yourself So again, it destroys your self-esteem It destroys your capacity to think It's a destructive mechanism By the way, at the end of the day Stealing, I didn't address this But stealing, you get caught You go to GAO Doesn't work for you But even if you didn't get caught It would still be bad for you Yes, but maybe I think that society Is not stealing, for example, the majority Because they are afraid They are afraid to go to jail That's right, so that's true That today in the world Most people don't steal Because they're afraid to go to jail But that's because we've done a lousy job Educating about what they should live for So in my view Morality, ethics Should be the science That teaches us What are your universal values What is true for all of us And how to live well In other words, ethics should be the science An empirical science About what is good and what is evil Good is that which enhances life Evil is that which threatens life Which undercuts life But it's a hard science Like all sciences You need experts So moral philosophers, moral thinkers Should be focused on this Which is not what they do So people don't know what is good And what is bad And this is why there's so much education Necessary, and this is why I encourage all of you To read Ayn Rand Because I think she's the greatest thinker When it comes to these kind of questions Aristotle did the same thing Aristotle's whole, I think Says, what leads me to Eudemania Eudemania being flourishing Success at living And what leads away from success and flourishing And he's trying to figure out Which values, virtues lead to this Which behaviors lead to that And that's what Ayn Rand does Just I think better than Aristotle Because she comes 2,000 years afterwards So she knows a lot more But the fundamental idea is What can I What are those things That I should do in order to Achieve success in living In life So deep question And you're right Most people don't know the answer to it But that's what we need to teach people That's what Philosophers should be doing I think what Yeah, these 2 questions Yeah, show us So, you mentioned about democracy And how Crime opportunities Are a failure for others We can't trust it However, like, just through civilization We depend on it Like the way we So what do you think Should be the Alternatives Democracy So that's the system that we Can rely on So democracy in the west Has not been absolute democracy From the beginning And that's what makes it work To some extent So for example, we can't Execute somebody for trying To corrupt the youth Understanding that free speech Cannot be overruled by democracy I mean, somewhat of an understanding We have hate speech laws in Europe But We try to constrain those In America, there's a First Amendment You cannot ban speech So democracy has been contained By the idea of rights Not in nothing, my view So The ideal system Is the American system Where you have The government's only job Is to protect rights The rights are articulated And the democracy Can never violate those rights And the only problem In America is that The number of problems In the American Constitution Is the rights are not clearly defined enough They weren't clearly understood enough So the only voting you do Is for Who will represent you But the representatives Their governments Should be as impotent And weak as possible Except in one field Which is protection Should have a police and military and a judiciary It should protect us, protect our rights And leave us alone And that's what should be defined In a constitution So you elect people who don't have a big job So all of us think about politics All the time We fight about politics, we argue about politics We think about politics, we read the newspaper For politics In a good world In a free world We wouldn't care Because politics wouldn't be In our lives They defend us They protect us when there was a threat The legislature, you've got a parliament Not far from here, right? How often do they meet? They talk about Laws and how to Influence your life And how to take money from you and give it to them And regulate your behavior and regulate him And regulate They're constantly working A good parliament meets once a year For a short period of time Passes a couple of laws With regard to property rights and goes home Congress in the US Used to meet Two or three months every year In the 19th century had jobs They actually worked for living They were politicians on the side Now To be a politician is a full time job With 75 assistants And 55 departments and drivers and security I mean, it's, whoa It's ridiculous Politicians should be Weak In everything except the One thing that they're supposed to do Which is protect us, nothing else If that, then yes You have democracy for electing officials But you don't have democracy for making decisions Because the decisions are small And Don't happen very frequently And You know They need to be deliberated And they need to think about it And they need to be, you know They need to be expert opinions about How do you define property rights on the internet Stuff like that, right? What you want is to constrain That's what the bill of rights does And you have a constitution that says Government can only do these things You constrain it with the bill of rights Individuals have rights, not the government The government can't infringe on those rights You make the government as limited as possible And within that limit You can have democracy In a sense that you vote for your representatives But they shouldn't be able to vote And taking my mind They shouldn't be able to vote To tell me how to run my business But that's what minimum wage laws are That's what regulations are That's what, you know, welfare state is It's all People voting to decide how you should live That's all Yeah, in the back Question to ask When we talk about freedom We mostly talk about freedom In some kind of order, right? In government The order exists only We say it exists like government Because it's a social thing Because we said that Everybody said that The government doesn't exist What I want is to know Isn't it just Changing the point of view Because What matters is the outcome But Does it really change Infraining an outcome Because Changing the point of view to what? If I want to be individual If you have individual freedom I need Order to give me Like freedom to have This individual freedom So I have to influence other people To Think like me To everybody So it's kind of Collectivist thing The question is Isn't it just Changing the point of view? No, so you need Order to be To be able to pursue your individual Values But what kind of order do you need? Order Makes it sound I don't know You need a certain system The only system you need That recognizes your freedom That recognizes your rights That's the order that you need So it's a system that recognizes What you want to do Which is live your life as an individual That's all it is So there's no Thing to convince other people Other than That their life Is worth living as individuals In pursuit of their own values And only they can choose those values And therefore Once everybody agrees on that Then you're done Now if you mean it's collectivist Because we all agree, then yes We all have to have some basic agreement To live in society If we live by ourselves Then nobody has to agree with you Because it's just you But once we get into society We have to agree on at least the fact That we can't cause one another That we can't use violence against one another That in order to pursue our individual lives We must be free to do so We must be free of authority And violence and coercion And force to do so That's the only order That you need in a sense That's a standard that you need But it's a standard that says That's the only way we can interact And we know that You go to a party You don't bring a gun Right? So it's basic Idea is if you want to have If you want to get along with other people If you want to live in a society You can't use force Now unfortunately We don't believe that Because today we use force all the time Against individuals In the name of a better society We tax them We regulate them We control them We take from them We steal from them In the name of some societal good But that's what needs to be eradicated And we need to focus back on an individual An individual's sovereignty And individual values Alright, thanks everybody