 Two, one. Well, happy Fourth of July, everybody. It's July 2nd, I know. But I'm not going to be here on the Fourth of July. So I thought today we'd do a show just talking about the meaning of the Fourth of July, really the meaning of the founding of America and deeper than that, the meaning of America itself. What are we celebrating on the Fourth of July? We're celebrating independence. But is that worthy of celebration? Is that an important thing? You know, should you always be patriotic, no matter what your country is? My argument is no. I mean, I left my country at birth. I left my country at birth to come to a better country. I wanted to come to the best place on the planet. And at least when I immigrated to the United States, when I first came to the United States in 1987, I, too, believed that America was the best place on the planet. And in that sense, I'm patriotic. I'm patriotic for all the virtues that are America. I believe in this country. But I really, when I really think about what is it I love about this country, what I really love about this country are the founding principles, are the things that made this country great, is the vision of the founding fathers. It's what happened on the Fourth of July, 1776. What's in the document, the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution that came a few years later. That is what I love about this country. Indeed, that, I think, is what has led to all the good that this country has done. All the good that exists in America is a product of what the founding fathers created, what the founding fathers basically fought for, announced the independence of on that Fourth of July in 1776. So let's think about what it is. What makes America special? What is American exceptionalism? Why is that document in 1776 a document to be revered even today? What is it about that document that makes the United States of America a special country? What's the first document in human history, the first political document in human history, the first time a country is founded on the idea of individual rights? All men are created equal, the founding fathers tell us. And they all have an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, that core idea right there, that principle, is what made America great. It's why I celebrate the Fourth of July. It's why I'm so saddened by the fact that America today has no concept, not the Supreme Court, not a legislator, not a president, and not the voters. No concept of what those unalienable rights are. So on the one hand, I celebrate the Fourth of July. On the other hand, I mourn, I mourn that the principles of the founding fathers are so badly little understood today in America in 2017. What does it mean to have an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? It means, for the first time in history, it means that your life belongs to you. You get to decide how to live it. You get to use your mind, your reason to choose the values and then pursue the values. You believe unnecessary to live unnecessary for your happiness before America, before the Declaration of Independence articulated this case, before America was fought for and won ultimately in the Revolutionary War. Who did your life belong to? Who did all of our lives belong to? Well, it depends on what period of history. But what's common to all of them is that your life did not belong to you. Belong to the tribe, belong to the king, to the queen, to the council, to the pope, to the emperor, to the tribal leader, to the witch doctor, to the whoever fill in the blank, fill in the blank. Somebody throughout human history always had a claim on your life. It's very rare in human history. This idea that your life belongs to you, that your life is yours to live as you see fit. That is a very, very rare in history. Take several hundred thousand years of human history. And there's maybe a few hundred years under Greece and a few hundred years around a few years before the Declaration of Independence and maybe through today where people actually believe that. But in all of human history, you are nothing but a pawn. A pawn to be ruled over, a pawn to be used for some other purpose, for some greater purpose, for a purpose greater than yourself. You meant nothing as an individual. It was the group, it was the collective, it was the leader. It was God. There was everything. And that changed, that all changed with the founding of America. America is the first country in human history to recognize the legitimacy of individualism, the legitimacy of the individual, the fact that the individual's life is his to live as he sees fit. We'll talk about the contradiction in the foundry and slavery in one of the future segments. So let's put that aside. I will recognize that as a major flaw in the founding of America. But we'll talk about it in a minute. So every other country in the world was established in the founding of America on the principle of some ethnic group. And you as an individual belonging to this group and being ruled by somebody. And where your moral responsibility, your political responsibility, your day-to-day responsibility was not to your own life but to the group and to the ruler. It was pure collectivism. All of human history. From the time where you were in a tribe, there was no individualism in a tribe. You did what the tribal leader told you. And if you didn't, the tribe took care of you. They excommunicated you or they killed you. But the individual's life did not gain value politically until the founding of America, now with the exception maybe of ancient Greece where there was a period there of relative freedom and relative individualism. Now how did this come about? How did this come? How did we go from an era where the perception was that human life, individual human life was not that valuable. Individual human life was just there to serve the greater good, the greater purpose, the greater collective, the greater something. But it was not an end in itself. Did not have value in and of itself. How did we get to that point? It's certainly not, it's certainly not in our religious tradition. I mean, we're always treated as a collective in our religious traditions. Your life is not ultimately yours to live as you see fit. You follow your duties. You follow commandments. You follow what you are told. All for some greater good. Greater good that you don't get it opt out of. Greater good that might be consistent with what's good for you might not be consistent with what's good for you. And there's a consequence of that. Human beings have lived in unfreedom forever. What are the few periods in which people are free? Free to say what they want. Free to do what they want. Free to go out and engage in life the way they wanted to engage with it. You know, there's always been some limitations but generally what are the errors in which human beings were free? Well, a short period during maybe in Athens and then America. And since America and the Western world and other countries who have adopted American values, American ideals, the idea of individualism. But that's a rarity. So most of human history, we have been, we have been not quite slaves but we have been unfree. We've been told what to do. We've been told what profession to have. Think of feudalism. We've been told where we can and cannot live. We've been told what was to fight in and forced to fight in those wars whether we liked them or not. Whether we agreed with them or not. We were told who our rulers were. We didn't get to vote on that. We were told what to believe in. If you didn't believe in the belief of your neighbors you were often kicked out or again killed. You were told what to think. You couldn't challenge conventional wisdom if it was the Catholic church in the 13th century or the Protestant church in Northern Europe in the 17th century. How dare you, you know, blasphemy laws were everywhere, everywhere. So you couldn't think what you wanted to think. You couldn't say what you wanted to say. You couldn't live what you wanted to live. There was no concept of private property. The Lord, the King, the overseer owned you. There was no sense of freedom. There was no idea of freedom until really the 18th century, until it was, until the Enlightenment, this period in the 18th century from which American founding arose. And indeed, the American founding is the culminating achievement of the Enlightenment. It is the culminating achievement of the whole school of thought for 150 years before the founding of America. It's not accidental. It's not arbitrary. It's not just a few geniuses. The founding fathers, indeed, were geniuses, but it wasn't just the accidental accumulation of few geniuses who came up with all of this because the founders, these are not original ideas to them. They're geniuses in that they understood them and they were original in the implementation, but the ideas around the founding, the ideas around individualism, the idea of individual sovereignty, are not unique to the founders. They got them from previous thinkers. So this era is unique. How is it unique? Why is it unique? How did it come about? Because again, the founding is not accidental. The founding is a combination. It's the bearing of the fruits of something of intellectual philosophical seeds that were planted for 150 years before. What are those seeds? Well, let's do a little bit of history lesson. Let's do a little bit, and a bit of philosophy lesson. Bit of philosophy lesson and a bit of history lesson to lead up to what makes America great and why the Fourth of July is to me. I think to me it's the most important holiday of the year, the most meaningful holiday of the year. I venerate the founders and I venerate the founding of America and I love this country to the extent that it still represents that founding, to the extent that it still represents what was created back then. So how did this all happen? So think about ancient history. Think about, well, not ancient history, but think about the history of Europe in the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries. Europeans were poor. They were dying, the population during one period because of a plague shrunk by a third. There was very little knowledge. There was very little progress. There was very little communication. People's lives were very short. Life expectancy was often around 29. In the better periods, it went into the 30s. Most of us would be dead. Population was small. There was no free thinking. There was no science. There was no invention. There was no production. There was no creativity. There was nothing. And then something amazing started to happen during the Renaissance. Suddenly, people started thinking for themselves, creating beautiful art, starting to think about science. How did this happen? How did we go from the dark, dark ages of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and then enlightenment? It's a discovery of the work of one philosopher. That philosopher is Aristotle. Aristotle is the father, the philosophical father of this country. Aristotle is a great Greek philosopher who believed that human reason was efficacious. That reason, reason, we could use reason to learn about the world around us. We could use reason to discover truth about the world. Science was the application of reason to the physical world that they enter. Discovering, there were laws to be discovered. There were facts to be discovered. He believed that knowledge was not accumulated through a revelation. It didn't come from some mystical entity. But that knowledge, fundamentally, was a product of human reason and that every individual was capable of reasoning. That every individual was capable of discovering knowledge for himself. And suddenly these ideas were discovered by Europeans. Actually, by Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas took these ideas seriously. The great Catholic philosopher. He took these ideas seriously and started challenging church doctrine based on these ideas. And these ideas entered into the Western world. Through the church, all over, people started saying reason, we can think, we can use our minds. And human beings, they're not the miserable, pathetic beings that the art, the art, the aesthetics of the dark ages portrayed them. Gog oils, monsters, creepy creatures, suffering constantly. But there was potential for heroism in human beings. And the art of the Renaissance, the art that is based on this Aristotelian idea of the individual's ability to think, to discover, reflects the heroism of the individual. Now we see that in the Renaissance. And then we start seeing a scientific revolution come about as a consequence. And at the beginning, that scientific revolution is stifled. Think Galileo. Galileo says, hey, the sun doesn't go around the earth. It's the earth that goes around the sun. And the Catholic church says, you can't say that. You can't think that. And that cannot be true because it goes against revelation. It goes against what's written in the Bible. And therefore, we must put you into house arrest. And he was lucky because other scientists were born at the stake. But slowly that idea, that only the holy books, only the Catholic church has a monopoly over truth, has a monopoly over what is right and what is wrong. What science actually teaches us. Slowly that breaks apart. We'll talk more about this when we come back right after this. All right, so we're doing a lot of history today. I hope you're finding this interesting. But I'm trying to lead you up to the founding of America. And I know there's a lot of people out there who sell a very simplistic story about the founding of America. And I think they're wrong. I think the founding of America is a very deep event, a very important event, and a very philosophical event. And you have to understand the sequence of events. And how we came to the idea, how do we come to the idea that individual life was so valuable that we built a political system called the American political system to protect the individual's life, to protect his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to leave him alone, to live his life as he saw fit. That's such a revolution in human thinking. That's such a political revolution in terms of how we organize the states. That I think it's so crucial for us to understand where it comes from so that we can resurrect it, so we can bring it back. I think we're losing America. I think we're losing the idea that was America. We're losing the principles that were America. We're slipping and becoming more European. We're slipping and becoming more collectivist. We're losing that sense of individualism, that sense of individual rights, that sense of we leave people alone so they can live their lives as they see fit. All of that is slipping through our fingers. And our politicians have no clue. I don't think the Supreme Court understands the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. And you can't understand the Constitution unless you understand the Declaration. Because I don't think that any of those people and all of Americans who vote, I don't think they understand how unique this country is, how exceptional we really are. I mean, people talk about American exceptionalism. They don't have a clue. We're really exceptional. But not in the way we are today. In our founding. And it's not about race. It's not about ethnicity. It's not about being American. It's about ideas. So what we need to do in order to save America is understand the ideas at the core, at the heart of America. And to do that, we have to do some history. So philosophy. Our founding fathers were real intellectuals. They were well-read men. They were men who understood history and understood philosophy. They understood the roots of the system they were trying to create. And they didn't take any of this for granted. They studied. They read. And they discovered the ideas that allowed them to create this fantastic, this amazing, this almost miraculous country that we have today. So what I'm trying to do today is walk you through some of the things that the founders discovered. Some of the ideas that the foundation of what they put into the Declaration and into the Constitution. The foundation of their vision for what America should be and needed to become. The discovery of the idea of individualism. The discovery of the idea of the individual as the primary in political theory and politics and, you know, that the state was there to protect the individual. The state is there to serve the individual. The state is there as our servant. Not the other way around. Our lives belong to ourselves. Our lives do not belong to the state. We are not. We are not the slaves or the serfs of anybody. We are independent, free people. All right, after this break we'll do a little bit more history. We'll catch you up on the basic foundations of this country. And you're listening to your own book show and we are going to be back after this break. Five. Hi everybody and we're talking about the historical context for the founding of this country and I was talking about the fact that the scientific revolution plays a huge role in the founding of America. How's that connected? Oh, we're going to get to that. We are going to get to that. So during the Renaissance and leading out of the Renaissance people are starting to think for themselves. People are starting to question the monopoly the church and religion has over knowledge. Whether it's Galileo, Coponicus, Kepler and others are starting to explain the physical world by means of science, not revelation. And then, then, Isaac Newton comes around early part of the 18th century and actually explains many, you know, of the physical phenomena around us in simple mathematical physical laws. He actually explains how objects move, he explains how planets move around the sun. And all of this can be proved and it can be shown to be, to work and it takes him a long time to convince people that these, that this new field of physics, this new field of science is legit. Because people are not used to human beings discovering truth about the world. All truth is supposed to be revealed. But no Newton tells us, teaches us really. Human reason is what leads to truth. Human reason is how we discover what's around us. How the physical world works and what it doesn't work. And people take this to heart. People say, wait a minute, if we can explain the physical world through reason. Why can't we explain other things through reason? And hey, why can't I make my own decisions about my own life through reason? Philosophers start asking these questions. John Locke and others in the enlightenment, French enlightenment, American enlightenment. They challenge the conventional wisdom that we need experts to tell us how to live. That we need revelations, people who have special knowledge of the truth to tell us how to live. They say, wait a minute, Aristotle teaches us, we agree that every individual has reason. Aristotle defined human beings as the rational animal. And if every one of us has reason, has the capacity to think, discover the truth about oneself and about one's own values, about one's own needs, about one's own passions, then why do we need other people to tell us what to do? Why do we need other people to tell us what professions to have? How much to pay for the goods that we buy? Where we can and cannot live? What we can and cannot think? Who we can and cannot listen to and read? Why can't we make those decisions? We have the capacity to know the world. We're not dependent on revelation. We're not dependent on some other dimension. For truth, we can discover the truth. And this is when this is the age of enlightenment. This is the 18th century. This is the age that produces the founding fathers. These are the people the founding fathers are reading. They're reading Locke and Montesquieu and Voltaire and Adam Smith and others, the enlightenment. They're reading the thinkers in Scotland and in France and in other places in Europe. The thinkers that are articulating the case. Basically, for a secular world, for a world in which individuals can discover the truth about their lives, about their needs, about how to achieve success in life without the state or the church telling them what they can and cannot do, what they can and cannot think, what is truth and what is falsehood. Once we discover this idea, once we accept this idea and discover this idea, we have the capacity to reason, to look around the world and look around and figure out what's good for us and figure out what's right and figure out who should rule us and what ideas are good and what ideas are bad and say, well, shouldn't we have a vote and who gets to rule us? Shouldn't we? Why can't we just do whatever profession we want? Why are we forced into particular guilds? No, I want to be a poet. I want to be a farmer. I want to be a computer engineer. Why is it the states or the aristocrats or anybody's role? And wait a minute, what makes an aristocrat an aristocrat? Just because he was born that way? I mean, what makes him different? When the founders say that all men are created equal, they mean it in that sense. Why is an aristocrat different than a common person? Aren't we all just human beings? Don't we all have the capacity to reason? And if we all have the capacity to reason, can we all make the most of our own life? Can we all, as individuals, pursue our own happiness? Do we really need to be told how to do that? Do we really need to be forced? Do we really need to be cursed? Do we really need authorities in our lives who tell us how to live and how to think and everything else? And the answer the founders come to following the tradition of the thinkers that they were reading is no. Every individual has the capacity to live a good life. Every individual has the capacity to be moral, to be good. Some people are going to be bad. You need a state to protect us from them. They need to go to jail if they commit violence or they commit a crime. But everybody has the capacity to choose his own way. Everybody has the right to think his own thoughts to believe in whatever he believes. The whole idea of religious freedom which the founders talk a lot about, particularly Thomas Jefferson. You have a right to believe whatever you want to believe. You even have a right not to believe, to be an atheist, to be an agnostic, to be a Buddhist, it's none of my business. It's none of the state's business. There is no authority to tell you what you can and cannot believe. But before this, this wasn't acceptable. Atheists were burnt at the stake. Before the Enlightenment there was no such thing as free thinking. You thought only what you were allowed to think. Books were banned. Books were burnt. All over Europe. Well into the 18th century. But it's thinkers like Locke and the whole Enlightenment because they identify the efficacy of human reason. And they identify the individual as an end in itself. They say, wait a minute, you cannot tell an individual what to read and what not to read. What to do, what not to do. As long as he's not using violence against others, then he is free. And more importantly, what Locke and the founders understood is that for a thinking productive, rational human being he needs a certain type of environment in order to thrive. They understood that human beings don't thrive under every environment. They studied history. They saw us dying of starvation. They saw the kind of political systems and kind of environments in which people stagnated. Or worse, died. And they said, look, if an individual is going to be productive, if an individual is going to be rational, which they view as virtues to be rational to be productive, then we need to create a specific type of political environment to make it possible for them to do that. And that's the political environment of freedom. We want a political environment that rewards the best of environment as that. It's an environment that leaves people alone. Because what is the enemy a reason? What is the enemy a production? What is the enemy of human success? What is it that stops you from thinking? And look, every one of our values requires thinking from food. We have to figure out how to do agriculture. We have to figure out how to hunt. You don't have a gene for hunting. You have to figure out how to build a weapon. You have to figure out how to build a gun. Figure out how to use it. That all requires reason, that all requires thought. There is no, there is no shortcut. There is no instinct. There is no human beings to survive, to be successful, to thrive, to be productive, have to use their minds. What's the enemy of the mind? This is the great discovery of enlightenment. What's the enemy of the mind? The positive discovery is the efficacy of the mind. The second part of the discovery is the enemy. What's the enemy? The enemy is force. The enemy is coercion. The enemy is authority. If you put a gun to somebody's head he can't think. He can't be productive because he's now going to do what you tell him. Because otherwise he's dead. You tell somebody from now on five, otherwise I'm going to shoot you. Can't build a bridge. Can't program a computer. Can't do anything in life. Your mind is shut down. Force, coercion, authority shuts you down. So what John Locke and the thinkers of the enlightenment and ultimately the founding fathers discovered was reason is efficacious. Reason is what we want to encourage to do that to make it possible for people to live by reason. What we need to do is extract from human life force. What we need to do is extract from human life coercion. Extract from human life authority with a gun. How do we do that? The concept of individual rights and a political system that protects the individual right. The individual rights to live without being coerced. The individual's right to live without force. The individual's right to live without authority to judge based on his own mind to act based on his own judgment. That's the political system that is America. America is the first political system to recognize the evil of force, to recognize the evil of coercion, to recognize that in order for people to thrive and be successful in their lives they needed to be free from force, needed to be free from coercion, needed to be left alone to live their lives as they see fit so that they could exercise their rational mind, their reason to live the best life that they could live. Alright, history lesson today Fourth of July have a great, great Fourth of July we'll keep discussing this you're listening to your Ron Brookshow on Blaze Radio Network and we'll be back to summarize this and go on to another lesson from the revolution. So happy for the July everybody, we're talking today about the intellectual context in which this country was founded and why it is such a great great achievement. I mean really for the first time in human history people came together and said people have a right individuals have a right to live their lives free from force because they have a right to exercise their mind and use their reason to make their lives the best lives that they can be. They have a right not to be caused this was a revelation, this was new this was exciting we're going to build a country we're going to create a country called in America where we're going to create the optimal conditions to maximize opportunities for people to achieve happiness and we're going to do that by eliminating coercion from society by eliminating force from society initiation of force from society and we're going to create a government a government whose only job is to protect us from somebody initiating force against us it's to protect us from crooks and criminals and fraudsters and invaders and terrorists and all the people who would use force against us to force us to do things to do give us the space give us the freedom to do what's good for us to think about what are the values and virtues necessary to live a good life and then to go and get them whether our neighbors likes it or not whether the state likes it or not to live so the state is there, the government is there to protect us protect us from force from disputes so that we don't have to resort to force against one another when we disagree you need some kind of system of objective law and an objective legal system that can arbitrate those disputes but other than that government should leave us alone government should leave us alone that is the genius of the founding that by doing so it created a space a political space in which people could produce, create, build and as a consequence you got this flowering in America which you got in America as a consequence of the Declaration of Independence and a consequence of this idea of individual freedom is inventors and scientists and businessmen you know, really those professions, particularly the businessmen profession was created in America and in those countries outside of America that adopted these ideas that industrial revolution you got this exciting period in human history where we went from everybody being poor to suddenly everybody being rich in comparison to what they were before not equally rich, some people richer than others but relatively speaking relatively speaking we're all doing great and that's a consequence of the industrial revolution and a consequence of the freedom we've had since then to innovate and produce and create to live our lives to consume what we want to consume to live in a relative free market I wish it was a pure free market but a relative free market so the United States unleashed the productive spirits the energy, the productive energy of millions of people around the world who emigrated to the United States and built and created this fantastic country based on the principles of the Enlightenment based on the principles of the unalienable right to life, liberty of happiness based on the principle that your life is yours to live as you see fit free of coercion free of force using your mind, your reason to live the best life that you can you're listening to your Run Book Show we'll be back after this break happy Mother of July everybody we're back this is the Run Book Show we take a deeper look at the events of the day and we take a more philosophical look at the events of the day we look at issues and history and ethics and epistemology we talked about reason in the previous hour talked about the role of reason in the creation of America yeah, there would be no America today if the idea of reason as the source of human knowledge had not come back to the West an idea that's ancient from Ancient Rome the efficacy of reason rediscovered by Thomas Aquinas brought into the Catholic Church during the 14th and 15th centuries resulted in a renaissance renaissance and spread throughout Europe ultimately we got a reformation but even the reformation was still dedicated to a particular dogma religious dogma that started breaking apart and shattering completely in the 17th and 18th centuries as thinkers became more independent discovered more truth and as science gave them the ability to say see this is how the world works and we can discover it through human reason we can discover it all but the founders understood all this if you look at Thomas Jefferson renaissance men in the sense of they studied science politics, they studied philosophy these were great thinkers who understood the full context the full context of what they were creating they understood I think they were on achievement they were creating the first free country in human history the first country they recognized the sanctity of the individual the first country they recognized individual rights that the individual was free to act in pursuit of his own rational values that the state was there to protect his ability to do that that's all a protection agency that's what government is protect us now he does so by passing laws passing laws that define property rights that define boundaries but it cannot, should not must not violate rights in other words it must not should not cannot initiate force on us it's citizens and that's where we've gone wrong now the government has grown now the government is no longer there's no longer there to protect us to defend us our government is there to help us to take our wealth and redistribute it to help us be good people it's there to tell us what we can and cannot do what professions we can and cannot get into how much we have to pay in order to get a license to shampoo hair in California who's a licensed this and who's a licensed that who's permitted to do this and who's permitted to do that we have a government today that's not protecting our rights but it's violating them on a massive scale indeed you could argue easily that the government today is violating our rights much more than King George ever did we have not started a revolution how sad is that how sad is that and to the extent I think that today we are still somewhat free because we're not very free to the extent to today that the economy is still doing well and we're still getting richer all the time and there's still innovation and still creativity I think it's to the extent that we're still living off of the values created by the founding fathers the values that got this country going the values of the enlightenment but those are disappearing fast more and more people across the entire political spectrum denounce reason denounce thinking should be intuitive Donald Trump tells us there are no principles he's not an ideologue he doesn't believe in ideals whatever works in a short run of course don't think about it too hard just go by the gut go by instinct that's a rejection of reason and thinking and rationality suddenly a rejection of individualism because he's not about what works in order to free up the individual he talks about what works in order to make America great again whatever that means there's only one way to make America great again it's to resurrect the founding documents to resurrect the declaration of constitution of the United States to understand them thoroughly and to implement them and that means that means freedom that means shrinking government by like 80% that means phasing our medican phasing out Social Security and phasing out all the regulations and freeing up the American people means not telling us how to use our money no we've come a long way from Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton and all those great thinkers and all those I mean there's nobody there's no voice today in America there's nobody today in the political arena there's nobody today even in the ideologic arena other than Ayn Rand and some of us who advocate for ideas we're tiny we're tiny there's no significant figure out there who actually understands what this country stands for what this country means what freedom means what individual rights mean I mean Donald Trump never mentions individual rights he doesn't know what the concept is in my view I don't think any of the presidential candidates understand what it means it doesn't come from God individual rights are a necessity if you believe there are moral principle if you are moral principle they come from reality they come from the fact that human beings in order to thrive in order to be successful must be free of coercion that forces the enemy of reason forces the enemy of the mind forces the enemy of production of productivity or productiveness and therefore we need a concept that captures the need for human beings to be free of coercion the need for human beings to use reason in order to thrive and survive and that concept is individual rights I have a right to live my life based on reason without asking for your permission and that's that's a moral concept it's not a concept that is revealed from any source it's not a concept in some holy book individual rights there is no such thing as natural law in the sense that it's somewhere out there in nature yeah it is natural in the sense that as a human being reality teaches us that we need to be free in order to thrive that we need to be able to use our minds in order to survive that's the sense in which it's natural it's a natural right but rights come from our nature come from the fact reason based being come from the fact Aristotle argued that we are rational rational animals so yeah America is a great country because it recognizes that yes the founders were great men because they understood this principle and we have no men like that today there's nobody seems to understand this you know so even a Ted Cruz you know real conservatives sometimes talk about individual rights they don't have the real concepts they don't have a real understanding they don't understand where it comes from they don't understand the nature the true nature of man again as a rational being so it's very disheartening it's very disheartening you know here's this masterpiece that was created by the founders that was created by the enlightenment being destroyed and nobody cares now I wanted to talk about you know one of the great contradictions of the founding one of the real tragedy real sad story and that is slavery and the fact that in spite of declaring that all men created equal no cure for a second I'll return to slavery in a second they didn't mean that all men have equal in outcome all men have equal opportunities or any of the sloppy leftist conservative understandings of the world equality is today there is no such thing as equality of opportunity I mean I worked damn hard so that my kids have more opportunities than other kids I wanted to give them the most opportunities they could and I know a lot of parents and you know what my kids have more opportunities than a kid growing up in south central Los Angeles because they went to better schools and you're never going to take that away they're always going to be richer kids and poorer kids and kids who go to better schools and worse schools and hopefully none of it no kid ever goes to schools as bad as they are in south central LA hopefully we can improve on that but there always be differences the idea of equality of outcome or opportunity is a nutty science fiction bogus concept and the only way to try to achieve it is by taking from some to give to others it's by knocking people of ability down we'll talk about inequality I mean as many of you know I have a book called equal is unfair equal is unfair you can buy it on Amazon go do it now any format known to man audio you know kindle, hardcover softcover anything you can get you can get the book in so go buy it equal is unfair so we'll talk a lot about inequality but I want to talk about the sense in which the founders mean all men are created equal and what they mean by it is that we all have the same political freedoms that we all should be treated by the law in the same way and deeper than that that we all have the same rights we all have the same liberties all of us all human beings have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness no matter where they live no matter where they were born no matter what class they were born in no matter how much money they have no matter what the color of their skin is no matter what sexual orientation they have as human beings as reasoning thinking beings we have a right to be free from coercion we have a right to pursue the values that we de-necessary to live a productive happy life and nobody has a right to stop us not the state not the government, not our neighbors not the democracy, nobody that's why their rights are unalienable unalienable so equality for the founders meant political equality it meant equality of rights equality of liberties it meant that the state could not discriminate because we're all free and all the state's job is is to protect us and should protect all of us equally the same and yet there's a whole group of people who had no rights who were slaves slavery is the exact opposite of rights your life in a sense belonged to somebody else you're owned as a human being and we can discuss you know why they had this conception but at the end of the day they compromised at the end of the day they gave in to slave owners to maybe the economic interest that some people had that blacks weren't human beings but it was wrong it was a violation of the principle that they articulated and for that for that contradiction for that violation for that evil of allowing slavery to continue we had a civil war 600,000 Americans died in that war was even more than it would be today imagine 600,000 dying today in a war and this is when we were a fraction of the size we are today and that's because of this compromise because they did not take this idea of equality, of rights of liberty consistently did not cover everybody but I'll say this in their defense it is by articulating the case for rights for individual rights not group rights, not collective rights there are no such things individual rights it is because they articulated that case it's because they created a country based on that and proved the efficacy of that the viability of that idea that ultimately slavery was eradicated without the founding fathers without the thoughts of July without the creation of this country I don't think slavery would have ever been eradicated from the face of it's not completely eradicated there's still cultures particularly in the Middle East that still have slavery but from the western world it was eradicated because of the ideas articulated by the founding fathers now ideas granted that they got from other enlightenment thinkers but they put it into reality they put these ideas in a country and within a few years after the founding of America maybe 20 years in Britain they banned slavery and then they banned the trade in slavery and the British fleet went out there to stop slave ships from running and this tide has shifted and slowly slavery was eradicated so by the late 19th century at least in the western world slavery was gone it was a phenomenon that existed from the beginning of time the bible tells the Jews how to treat their slaves there's no banning of slavery in the bible it's a modern idea it's an idea of the enlightenment it's an idea that comes out of the ideas of the founders the idea of unalienable rights that human beings have and human beings doesn't distinguish between color it doesn't distinguish between race sex ultimately it's a declaration of independence it's the founding of this country that led to the emancipation of women because the fact is that the declaration applies to all human beings women are human beings so it has to apply to them so that contradiction ultimately was done away with these ideas these ideas at the heart of the declaration at the heart of the 4th of July at the heart of the founding of America are unbelievable and powerful ideas the most powerful political ideas in human history based on a lengthy philosophical tradition of the enlightenment these are the ideas that must be celebrated the ideas that liberate all of humanity and can liberate all of humanity that's what we should be celebrating on the 4th of July that's what we celebrate here on the Iran book show you're listening to Iran book show on the blaze radio network after this break happy 4th of July everybody we're talking here about the importance, the intellectual, philosophical historical significance of the 4th of July the founding of this great in all of human history country because it was founded on the principles of liberty and the principle of individual rights individual rights, not the kind of rights that the left particularly but everybody seems to talk about today group rights public rights, minority rights Ain Rand said just a fact that it's absolutely true what is the smallest minority in the world the individual and it's the individual that has a right groups can't have rights groups don't exist society doesn't exist the public doesn't exist what is the public it's a bunch of people, it's a bunch of individuals what's a group, a bunch of individuals the unit that exists the unit that's of significance the unit that's of importance is the individual only individuals think just like only individuals can eat we don't have a collective stomach we don't have a collective brain only individuals have rights there's no such thing as minority rights, group rights collective rights all that whole idea is a bogus idea that is destroying America that's turning us into Europe and away from the vision of the founders you have a right as an individual to live free to pursue the values, we talk about it all day pursue the values necessary for your survival for your thriving that you have rationally concluded that you need so that you can go out and produce and create to live the best life that you can live and today in the name of groups we want to stop that you know everybody does this so you know I'm basically going up there everybody talks about the public interest the common good, what's good for America there is no America, there is no public there is no common what's good for America is what's good for the individual and what's good for the individual is to be free we want to make America great again we discover individualism we want America great again make America great again get rid of all the controls and the regulations the dictator individuals they live their life you want to make America great again reaffirm the value of real free speech individuals should have the right to say whatever they want to say and if it offends you walk away yell back at them but you don't have a right to silence somebody because you're offended you want to make America great again show respect for the individual human mind free it up all the regulations, the taxes the controls that restrict what we can do as individuals and can't do as individuals stop stealing our money as individuals stop taking our money and giving it to others it's bad for me because you're taking my money but it's also bad for the people you're giving the money to because you're basically telling them they're worthless they can't take care of themselves they can't think for themselves they're worthless human beings so they need to depend on government I say no every human being out there, every American can take care of himself and if there are a few a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent that truly can't take care of themselves the rest of us will take care of them we don't need government to intervene so I'm all for making America great again I just don't think this crop of politicians and our president has a clue on how to do it really because you need a deep understanding of what America is you need to have a deep understanding of what the digitalism requires and as we've said nobody really in the political world has that but we're trying to change that right here on the Iran Book Show we'll be right back after this break hi everybody on this wonderful 4th of July weekend I hope you're having a great time and firing up those barbecues and getting ready for a fantastic celebration my favorite holiday my favorite holiday my favorite day my favorite thing more glorious to celebrate than the founding of this country the principles of freedom of liberty of individual rights they, you know, they animate everything that I do they animate my whole philosophy of life and I am an immigrant I came to this country because I love these ideas I came to this country because I believe still that this country is the best manifestation of those ideas I'm getting away and that makes me sad and one of the reasons I do this radio show one of the reasons I write books one of the reasons I travel all over the world speaking is because I want to save this country I want to save this country as an act of justice to the founders who gave us such a magnificent document and fought fought we're willing to give up their life their honor, their property we're putting all of that at stake and what do we do? we just take it all for granted we just cruise we complain here and there about our politics we go vote once every four years not that it means anything because what is the real fundamental difference between democrats and republicans we pretend that we care we go to rallies once in a while here we're men who put their lives on the line for freedom, for liberty here we're men who put their lives on the line for the right of the individual to own his own life to live his own life as he saw fit in pursuit of his own values to create they put their lives on the line to create a country that left us free to pursue our happiness what a noble cause what do we do? we take it all for granted and we vote it all away and we elect politicians that are destroying everything that the founding fathers created and we're slipping away into mediocrity we're slipping away into becoming another France or Germany or Sweden America's losing what it means to be America it used to be that if you lost your job in Ohio you didn't sit around on your butt waiting for the government to bail you out you didn't elect the president to promise to bring you jobs to Ohio you got in your car and you went looking for a job you went across the country I mean that's what this country is about you took responsibility for yourself you took advantage of the freedom we have in this country and you made something of your life but today so many Americans feel entitled we want healthcare we have pre-existing conditions take care of us instead of standing up in their own feet instead of living their lives for themselves they become dependent entitled on everybody else exact opposite exact opposite of the vision the founders had for this country an exact opposite of the way Americans behaved in the 19th century this country was created not through entitlement but a hard work of individuals taking responsibility for responsibility for their own lives too many Americans have abandoned that too many Americans that's gone and until we resurrect that spirit of personal responsibility of dependence there's really no hope listening to your own book show we'll be right back after this break alright we're talking about the America there was and yeah I mean 100 years ago 150 years ago 200 years ago certainly there were no entitlements, there was no welfare there was no redistribution of wealth people expected to manage well to be successful in life because they were left alone because they were free there was some respect for the competence of individual there wasn't this conception of oh you can't survive I need to help you I need to take care of you I mean that's true hundreds of years ago when we thought all human beings were ignorant and pathetic and impotent but what the enlightenment taught us and what the American Revolution institutionalized was the exact opposite idea the idea that human beings were competent able had the ability to take care of themselves and what the 19th century the 100 years after the establishment of America proved to us was that it worked America went from the one of the poor country a third-rate colony the British didn't even fight us properly because they didn't care that much and 140 years later we'd become the mightiest economy in the world the dawn of the eve of the dawn of World War I mightiest military minus the economy in the world how did that happen how did we get from poor third-rate colony to the strongest economy in the world how do we do that we did that because of freedom we did that because of entrepreneurs and businessmen so-called robber barons who created and built this country because they were free to do it can you imagine Thomas Edison today you know how many environmental regulations he would need he'd probably be shut down because he didn't weigh goggles in his experiments can you even imagine Rockefeller doing what he did back then the environmentalists would shut him down and he created an oil industry he lowered the cost of energy to nothing in this country he made it possible to light the world to have an internal combustion engine we demonized fossil fuels ooh, evil fossil fuels but they made the modern world possible they made you as rich as you are so this experiment we ran at the founding 140 years of freedom relatively freedom not as good as I would have liked still flaws in the system, slavery for example but we ran the experiment and it worked it worked magnificently well with no entitlements with very little regulation with very little controls just leaving people free people didn't starve in the streets I mean you could find here and there somebody who starved in the street but that wasn't the rule immigrants came here millions of them from the poorest countries in Europe Italy, Ireland, Jews from Ukraine and Poland people who are ignorant people who are farmers and within a generation or two they were middle class and they didn't come with a hand out because we weren't giving them stuff the whole American principle of self-reliance of self-responsibility that's what the country was built that's the idea of individual rights you have a right which means we're going to leave you alone which means you have to take care of yourself that's the point of freedom what's the point of freedom so that you can take care of yourself so you can pursue the values you need to survive and to thrive that's the point but now we have mother government telling us what research we can do what we can do what labs we can work in how big we can build everything is controlled everything is regulated we don't have private property anymore we need the environmental regulatory agencies to do with our own land imagine if that was in the 19th century we'd still be one of the we'd still be a poor country none of the riches we have today are possible with this level of control of regulation if you start out that way we couldn't have gotten to where we are today if we had started out that way but you know so we proved the experiment 100 years we tried freedom and it worked magnificently better probably with more economic success than even the founders would have imagined and yet we'd be moving away from it and why for 100 years we'd been undercutting it and moving away from it and controlling and redistributing and telling people that they can't think and they can't take care of themselves and they need the state so we have to have public education because the government needs to get involved in how and what we think but how we work how much we get paid with minimum wage laws and labor regulations up the kazoo the government wants to tell me who I can fire when I can fire, who I can hire, when I can hire them there's no end to the amount of intervention we have today it could be a lot worse we could be purely socialist we could elect Bernie Sanders definitely be worse but that's the direction we're heading I wouldn't be surprised that Bernie Sanders a Bernie Sanders light candidate wins in one of our future elections how did we get here we got here by abandoning the idea of individual rights we got here by abandoning the idea of the primacy of the individual we got here by abandoning the principle in which this country was founded the idea of individualism starting in the late 19th century in the early 20th century we started importing the collectivist ideas of European philosophies from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer to Karl Marx and those ideas were first embraced by universities why were they embraced by universities think about it, when Yale and Harvard and Princeton want to become the top universities in the world where did they go to hire their professors well they went to Europe they brought them here with all their rotten ideas with their evil philosophies and they've been teaching our kids since then since then, since the late 19th century the left has dominated universities and the left is becoming crazier and crazier and crazier at these universities right? so it's becoming worse and worse and worse but they have dominated for a hundred years which has colored everything everything we studied from history to economics to everything in the humanities and to some extent even the sciences has been colored by these philosophies and these all these philosophies all these philosophies want to return us to an era before the enlightenment before the discovery of reason and individualism they want to tell us all these philosophies tell us all you have to do is walk into an English class or a sociology class of some extent a philosophy class on campus today that reason is impotent that individuals don't know what's really in reality they can't discover real truth what's truth? there's no truth there's no such thing, there's my truth, your truth there's black truth, there's green truth there's yellow truth there's Hispanic truth, there's female truth there's male truth, there's no one truth that's what they teach us and therefore, since the individual is incompetent since the individual is impotent since his mind is useless to survive, he must rely on the group and the group, how does he decide how does he pick a group? well, he doesn't get to pick, his group is genetically imposed on him his race, his color, his ethnicity his background or he can just choose a group by whim you don't want to be male, you want to be female you don't want to be white, you can become black you can, I guess, whim some people and then it's all about groups they're no individuals there's how do white males treat black females and how black females treat LGBT whatever trans you know, and then it's just and then it becomes all this group is oppressing that group and this group, it's called inter-sectionality we'll talk in a future show about inter-sectionality, but it's all collectivism one form or another it's all turning the American Revolution on its head the rejection of individualism for collectivism the rejection of individual rights for the right of the group over the individual collectivism is the political enemy in America today it's been a political enemy for 100 years and we, the individualists are losing the founders would be horrified by the state of the world today they would be horrified that all the discoveries all the great ideas of the enlightenment all the great ideas that they embraced, that they studied that they understood and that they incorporated into the founding of this country, all of that has been abandoned and today, most people are just ignorant of it, they don't even know it existed, America means nothing to them, it's just another country with borders all our kids know is that we once had slaves, we interned the Japanese and I don't know, what else and we killed the Indians that's what they know about American history they don't understand at the core, the fundamental concepts and the fundamental magnificent earth-shattering, world-changing achievement that was America I mean, not to say that slavery wasn't an ill and we treated the Indians really, really badly and the other stuff, right not everything about America is perfect you don't have to think everything about America is perfect to love the founding and to love the ideas behind the founding the fact that we did not implement those ideas well it's not the founder's fault although it is their fault that they that they compromised on slavery alright, I don't want to end on a negative note so, you know, let's just remember let's use the Fourth of July to recommit ourselves to the fight to the fight for individualism to the fight for freedom to the fight for individual rights to the fight for America we're losing America America's lost we need to rediscover it we need to teach Americans about what America is today Americans don't know what America is it's incumbent on all of us who do know to teach them and as I mentioned earlier the founding fathers on the Fourth of July basically signed away their lives their property, their sacred honor in the cause of liberty, in the cause of freedom what are we willing to do? are we willing to do any less than what they were willing to do? we don't have to take up arms now but what we need to do is speak speak, speak so go out there and speak for America you're listening to your own book show Happy Fourth of July