 What is the philosophical theory that allows you kind of to dabble and to have a little bit of everything and to avoid really at all costs, you know, consistency and principle? Well, ultimately, it is pragmatism. What really drives most Americans ideologically is some form of pragmatism. Pragmatism is this notion, you do what works, you don't really hold any principle consistently. You might have ideals and ideas, which you practice sometimes when it's convenient, when it doesn't hurt too much, and you don't think too much about the long-term, long-term consequences. Who knows what they're going to be, how do you even tell, what do you do with them? So you focus primarily on the short-term and you avoid principle and you avoid pain to the extent that you can and you dabble with your altruism, you do a little bit of it here and there but you don't want to do too much and you don't want to engage in too much and you convince yourself that it's somehow good and you maybe even convince yourself that you enjoy it. What really works on Americans is, and James Galberth from an economic political perspective, and James Galberth plays on this really, really well, I think, and so do almost everybody except for the far-out socialists or leftists. Is this notion that life's pretty good? Iran, what are you complaining about? Why do we need to engage in this radical experiment of capitalism, of freedom, of getting rid of the welfare state and social security and Medicare and getting rid of regulation? I mean that sounds really risky and who knows what will happen. We can't actually tell, we can't actually figure out what will happen. I mean a lot of it, as James Galberth said during the debate, a lot of it sounds very appealing. It sounds very appealing. It's freedom and liberty and technology and progress, well, we're all for that and economic growth, all for that, but don't we kind of get that anyway? I mean, don't we get that in a mixed economy? Yeah, we can make the mixed economy a lot better and we can get rid of bad regulations and keep the good ones and we can make redistribution more effective and more efficient, but do we really want to attest whether people can survive in a lesser fit capitalism without any redistribution? Do we really want to test, do we really want to test whether businesses are not going to kill us if we deregulate? We can't tell, of course, what exactly will happen because remember there are no principles. And yeah, sure, government uses force to redistribute wealth, sure, government uses force to regulate, but okay, so there's a little bit of force. Why is that such a bad thing? If the outcome is pretty good, you know, no, it's not ideal and life is, you know, entrepreneurs, you get an iPhone, progress is happening, life is getting better, most of you in the audience are pretty good, life is pretty good, pretty happy and with this crowd on Thursday, you know, this was a pretty well-off crowd, if you will. So what they present is an anti-idealistic, pragmatic, a little cynical view of the world and it resonates. It resonates because people are generally, most people are comfortable and most people have given up on idealism and most people don't believe in principles to begin with and particularly if you're speaking to an older audience, principles sound, they sound kind of cool, but they sound dangerous, you know, they respond very positively to my passionate principled argument, but would they actually embrace it? No, too risky, too dangerous, too uncertain and again, life is pretty good. I mean, I keep telling you guys, and I know most of you don't believe me, that life is pretty good, even in this world, right? Life expectancy is increasing, we're getting cures for various cancers, we keep getting these amazing technologies, money, people keep making money and some people make a lot of money and live really, really well and yeah, there are problems, there's a lot of poverty, but even the poverty with redistribution of wealth, not that much poverty in America. So we've kind of cured that and yeah, people are kind of unhappy, but who can be happy? Yes, happiness is very difficult to attain and you know, Amir says people are not ready to suffer for ideas, but the point is that not people are not ready to suffer for ideas because the ideas I present are not ideas for which people will suffer. People are not willing to take risk for their ideas and because you could argue life is pretty comfortable today to move towards the life of capitalism is risky from their perspective. It's a change and yeah, you know, they're pissed off at woke and you know, if you're conservative and you know, the left is pissed off in inequality and even the right views inequality is a little problematic because it creates social unrest and maybe inequality led to the election of Trump and maybe inequality, you know, has led to woke and maybe inequality is, this is what they're being told, so they don't know because again, they don't have any principle to latch on to, they don't have any ideas that they can hook on to and try to understand the world so they don't really understand it. So it's just moments or year to year and again, they want a better Republican candidate or the anti-the left, most of the people in the audience I think on Thursday were conservatives, they want to, but let's say the Capitol, oh, that's a little scary, that's a little problematic. So I think the problem in America and this is a problem that is, you know, this is a problem that is really inculcated into the minds of people when they're very young is the problem of pragmatism, is the problem of not really believing in principles and the reason not to believe in principles, and they have a good reason I think not to believe in principles, is that most principles, is that most principles are bad principles. If you're raised with the idea, the principle of let's say altruism that says you should sacrifice, you should give up the things that you value, you should live for other people, your life doesn't matter, your happiness doesn't matter, they're not essential. And you have even a shred of self-esteem, you don't want to live that life, you don't want to be like that, so you say to hell with principles, I'm going to be a pragmatist and almost all businessmen in America today are to some extent pragmatists, almost none of them idealistic of either left or right, I mean even when they cater to the left or woke or whatever, they cater to the left because they think it's what they need to do in order to keep their business flowed, in order to get more customers in terms of, in order to appeal to the cultural elites if you will. But it's not out of principle, it's not because they truly believe and this is the way the world should be, there's almost none of that. It really is just kind of pragmatism, okay now we'll woke, we'll do woke for a few years and something else will come about later and we'll do that, it's this very little conviction, I think particularly among businessmen, but I think in Americans generally. And this is why I think this is part of what appeals in somebody like Trump or is the lack of principle, it's the pragmatism, you know. I'm not here to tell you we're going to be more capitalist, I'm not here to be more free markets, I'm not here to, I don't know, quote you the founding fathers, I'm here to try to make things work. We've got these problems and we need to solve them and I can solve them and I know how to make things work and that's what our focus needs to be. It's, you know, pragmatism and arguments for pragmatism, I think ultimately in the context of altruism because there is no alternative, I think ultimately other most effective arguments for statism and that pragmatism basically again indicates that look, still getting economic growth and things are good and you know if you go to, if you're smart and you invest and you really try hard and you work hard and you become an entrepreneur and you will need to take risks, you can be successful in this world. You know again, why change, why go for something that could upend everything and that's what somebody like James Gawguth will tell you, God, you want that, you know people are going to die of food poisoning, you want that, elevators are going to drop from the sky, you want that, you remember that building in Miami collapsed because of no regulations or because you know imagine if there were really no regulations all these buildings would collapse. Do you really want that, that sounds risky and I can say no, no, no, here are the ways in which the market would regulate these things but that sounds kind of science fiction and nobody's tried that before and you know that sounds like an argument from principle and principles, principles don't work, principles don't work, so it's very hard to convince an audience that is being trained on pragmatism. Again pragmatism is to say do what works in the short run, avoid principles and avoid thinking too much about the long run because there's no way, in reality, practically there's no way to think about the long run without thinking in principle because the long run involves too many variables, too many problems, you cannot predict the long run without principle thinking and yet our educational system teaches kids not to think principally, our culture teaches kids not to think principally and when they encounter principles, you guys there, one, two, three, let me know in the chat if you guys are still there and if we're still running, alright, okay, hopefully you are, I'm back, okay, I went away and I'm back. So what they always say is look, yeah, they're problems today, you know, there's real issues and if they're conservative then what they say is yeah, they're hawking back to the 1950s and those days we had a much better culture, we had families, we had, you know, none of this LBGTQ stuff and so there's a nostalgia to the past that is associated with a culture, an amazing culture of the past, you know, and they say oh yes, can we resurrect that and of course the conservatives are focused on culture so that is their focus, it's a hawking back to the 50s and the beautiful culture of the 1950s and you know when women and men were men and families were families and there was none of this gay stuff going on and then the liberals hawking back to the past, right, and when they hawking back to the past they hawking back to the 50s, when we had high tax rates and lots of regulations and big unions and powerful unions and unions controlled things and wages went up and wasn't that a beautiful thing and there was bipartisanship, both conservatives and Democrats, bipartisanship and we got things done and the government built a highway system and we went to the moon and isn't it amazing and we could, you know, so what we need is to resurrect that to both a nostalgic to a kind of a past, a statist, culturally I'd say square, limiting, collectivist, past and the nostalgic, nostalgic also to the Cold War, there was an enemy, we knew who the enemy was, we were all united around having an enemy, this is why I think they're trying to recreate a Cold War right now, you know, to have one enemy that they can all rally around, now they're trying to make it and China's helping, they're trying to make it China and China's of course assisting in turning itself into a real Cold War, but the nostalgia thing is amazing and how many times did James Goldberg, oh, once when the unions were strong and once when Congress was functional and Congress isn't functional anymore and we got stuff done and there was bipartisanship and we could get stuff done again and no principles, no, we just need to tinker with the system, we'll make it better if we elect this guy, if we just reshuffle the politics a little bit and we get the Supreme Court to do this or that, then we could get and everything's great and this is the consequence of pragmatism, again they can't think in principle, they can't think and he's not a socialist, he's not a communist, he doesn't want that, he wants the mixed economy and I think the strongest argument for in a pragmatic world, in a world where people are basically pragmatists, the best argument for statism is mixed economy and the fact that it seems to work and there's a way in which until it collapses, maybe we can't convince adults, this is why by the way I think our focus should be on young people because young people are not yet given up on idealism, young people I think are still open to the idea of idealism, still view idealism as a potential and what we need to convince them of is to abandon the idealism of socialism, the idealism of the left, the idealism even of communism and embrace an idealism of liberty, an idealism of freedom, but once people reach a certain age and they've given up, once they give up on idealism, once they give up on principles, once they give up on some vision for the future, once they give up on being willing to take a risk about the future, about change, it's over, it's finished, it's harder to convince them and this is one sense in which there's a sense in which it's harder to convince conservatives than I think you know certainly left of center people and that is because conservatives at that point have bought into conserving, the best we can do is not embrace too radical of a change, the best we can do is to conserve, is to look for the past, is to bring back the 50s and I think you know a lot of the left are conservative in the sense that James Goldberg wants to conserve, wants to go back to the 50s as well, a different variation of the 50s. What we need to capture are the young people who are interested in change, who are interested in making the world a better place, who believe that making the world a better place changing you know and taking risks for that change is a worthwhile goal but who are open to challenging altruism. See it's all driven by altruism right? Why do we become pragmatists? Why do people become pragmatists? They become pragmatists because altruism is not viable, they become pragmatists because altruism is anti-life, they become pragmatists because altruism is is anti-happiness and anti anti- America but so they abandon it and they abandon principles with it but they don't abandon altruism completely, they abandon it as a system of principle, they still hold it as a moral ideal, they just don't think a moral ideal can be achieved and therefore it tugs at their heartstrings. Thanks for listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. 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