 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. Patrick Byrne is best known as the Overstock.com pioneer, but he's also a philosopher, a blockchain entrepreneur, and a great voice for libertarianism. He was kind enough to join us this past weekend at our event in San Diego where he delivered a great speech on the origins of liberty and consent versus totalitarianism and submission. So stay tuned for a great excerpt from his talk. I think we're like a company that has lost its brand, lost its business model, has forgotten its business model. And for the younger folks here, I think it's probably, I think that people should be reminded what our operating system is about. And what I mean by operating system is a great book that's kind of a cult science fiction book. Who hears Red Snow Crash? They have to be kind of a real hardcore anarcho capitalist at Red Snow Crash. But it's a great book from over 20 years ago where a sci-fi novel that envisioned the collapse of civilization, the Snow Crash, a lot of interesting memes come out of it. The concept of cyberpunk metaverse. He envisions in this book in 1993 things that we would now call Facebook or the World Wide Web. Memes itself, the concept of memes got traction in this book. And this is sort of the Bible of the anarcho capitalist. But what this book does is invites us to think of civilizations as operating systems. Nobody kills each other. I think Linux is great. I think Macintosh is great. I think PC, they're just operating systems that have different virtues and different flaws, different design advantages and different design flaws. And the two main classes of operating systems and history is just as this book would invite you to see is just a sort of a Petri dish where we're looking at different operating systems and seeing what emerges as the most successful, which has the least flaws and is the most useful. The two main classes of operating systems are authoritarianism and liberalism. Thoritarianism, I love this. Kennedy said this in his inaugural address. Not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And Milton Friedman said, well, this bike, a few years later he wrote this. He said that clearly, as Kennedy's subsequent act shows, he meant by country government. And Milton Friedman said, neither half of the statement expresses a relationship between the citizen and his government that's worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. And that's because ultimately authoritarianism, the core DNA is submission. It's submission. And I think of George Orwell described the future this way. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stepping on a human face forever. Well, I think that that's too, I hope that that's pessimistic about the future, but it certainly is a good description of history. By and large, I was once in 04, I was in Afghanistan searching for artisanal products for Overstock, and I was talking to a young lady through an interpreter, another woman who was, an Afghani woman who was interpreting, pardon me, it's a little hot. And she was, I was talking to this artisan and in translation the woman was saying, I can't go and pick up the raw materials to make more products for you, because I don't have a husband anymore. If I walk on the road, I might be stolen, and this and that. And I corrected the translator and said, the word isn't stolen, it's kidnapped. And this woman, the translator said, well, not really in our language. We have a word for kidnapped, and if it happens if a man is taken or something you're kidnapped, but if a woman is taken, we use the same word that you would use for a cow or a sheep. Just like if you saw in America a cow walking down the road, you wouldn't think of it as being, you'd ask, who owns it? Who owns the cow? The cow doesn't own the cow, somebody owns the cow. And that's how it is for women in Afghanistan. And so we use the word that you would use if somebody steals a cow or a sheep or a woman, because there's no concept of a free woman. A woman's always owned by her dad or her husband or older brother, something like that. And I think that it's, I think we all should remember that until the liberal revolution came along, that's largely how people had to conceive of themselves. We were ends. We were means for other people's ends. And it's easy to get confused on that when you read philosophy, because people use words. Like here I pulled a line out of Machiavelli. Just as an example of how this can be distorted, Machiavelli speaks of whenever those states which have been acquired or live under their own laws and in freedom, there are three cores for those who wish to hold them, blah, blah, blah. What he means by a free state isn't what we mean. Machiavelli means a state that is not a vassal. It's not subject to another state. But it's just taking for granted, of course, that the prince is the prince. All who live within the state are the means for the prince to achieve his ends. It's not free in that sense. So people have used this word freedom for a long time not to really mean anything like we conceive of it. Where does our conception come from? Well, the liberal conception, the core value for us, is consent. It's all about consent. If you think of what we are really trying to promote at the DNA level is consent. Consensual relations among humans, among citizens, and consent of the governed as a political doctrine. There are three precursors I like to mention. I used to teach philosophy and love. I could teach a whole semester on this. The three precursors. The first time I can even think of this having been conceptualized is in the book of Daniel. If you remember, there is a line. Daniel interprets for the king Nebuchadnezzar and one of his interpretations is you've been judged in the balance and found wanting. Well, that ability to conceive until then political and divine authority were synonymous. They were united. The first evidence I can think of where somebody conceived of it differently that there is some external balance by which you can judge political authority is this line in the book of Daniel. A couple hundred years later, really, in Athens, democracy emerges, the first voting. And also, it's interesting, I used to study Athenian democracy and they had several different constitutions. And the constitution that turned out to work the best and created the most stable political system in Athens is when they went to choosing their representatives through sortition, which means randomly, just as we choose jurors. And believe it or not, that's, I was one we don't think of anymore, although we do choose jurors that way. But it was when the Athenian political system chose their electors at random that they actually fared the best. And then third, there was a Greek, he was a Greek man that lived in the Roman Republic. And the Romans spent 500 years pretending they were Greek. They were sort of like East Coast Americans who looked up to the French. Romans looked up to the Greeks so much. And every good Roman aristocratic household would have a Greek slave to teach the children and raise them. And there was a Greek living there in about 120 BC, Polybius, who wrote, and he was a tutor to one of the aristocratic households, and he wrote the histories. And he had this theory. He was the first to articulate this theory of history, which says it's the natural order of things that out of primitive society, kingdom emerges and then kingdoms degenerate to tyrannies. And then the tyranny gets sort of, the tyrant gets usurped by the nobility, the aristocracy around him and they take over. And then that degenerates into oligarchy. And then the people take over. That's democracy. And then that degenerates into mob rule. And history had, so there were benign and malign forms of each government. Kings, deterrents, aristocracies, to oligarchies, democracy, to forget the Greek word for mob rule, but mob rule. And does someone know it? No, it's not mob, it's like octocracy or something. Great. And that the way to stop that was polycentricity, which just means decisions get decentralized. You want to have decent, if the more you centralize decision making in one body, the more it tends to accelerate this process, but the more that you can distribute political authority across different bodies, then you can, we can perhaps stop this tradition of this historical cycle. And his great, he argues in one book of histories that that's the virtue of the Roman Republic, that they had managed to balance these different interests and that this process had come to a stop. Continuing this, it really, but I say that's the precursor, but liberalism really starts just over 500 years ago in Spain. And we normally don't think of it this way, but it starts in Spain in two places. One place in Spain called the Lowlands or the Netherlands, which we got to remember Spain, Europe was all Spain, with this island of France in it, but Europe was Spain. And in the swamps on the northwest of Europe, some Germanic folk who didn't want to be under anyone's authority moved out into these swamps and realized if they could cooperate, they could drain the swamps and build and create land and live together. So it really was a, but then they had to come up with the rules by which they were going to live together. And it actually is, if you, was a social contract. We study, if you're studying college philosophy, political theory, you always hear about contract theory, Hobbes, Locke, John Rawls is the big one that gets studied these days, that the idea of justice is let's all agree if we were in some original position, let's agree on what the rules would be and then whatever rules they would be, that's what we should live under now. Well, they actually did this in the Netherlands. This is what they were doing in the 1300s. And they came up with a form of government that first recognizes that we hire somebody, if we're all working, say, to build a dam on the Amstel River, which is where it all started, hence Amstel Dam, that we're going to have to cooperate and we're going to have to have somebody who runs the show, a mayor or something, but as they think of them, just the first among equals, not some overarching presence in the sky, government's just like a plumber or something that we've hired to get something done. And it's just the first among equals. And then enough of those political bodies federated, and that was the lowlands. So, but from the ground up, it's all consent and it's not based on sort of this overarching respect for government as a ruler of us. It's just somebody we hired because you do need somebody to coordinate, you know, things. A merchant and bourgeoisie town emerged and the values of the merchant class are consent, consensual exchange. Erasmus, a great Catholic theologian, came and wrote the first philosophical defenses of tolerance, religious tolerance and peace, but a philosophical defense of religious tolerance. Spinoza, the great one. You know, for 200 years, if you just referred to the philosopher, you meant Spinoza. And he came up with what we would now call the modern view of the self, maybe even the basis of psychology, our way of conceiving of ourselves as agents who have psychologies and things. That was Spinoza. And he conceived of man for the first time as an entity whose consent matters. It's not just about the princes and their dealings with each other, that the consent of the government, that we are beings worthy of consent. And hence, this whole sort of consensual society developed in this swampy area in the northwest of Europe. And it prospered, it prospered immensely. Something funny happened. We give all this credit to the English as being the cradle of civilization. They even teach this in American high school civics anymore. You learn this stuff about the English and what really happened was some English separatists, they were Brownians, they moved to, they fled England and they moved to Rotterdam and they lived there for 20 years and they eventually got fed up with the effect of the licentious and wicked ways of Amsterdam on their youth and they decided to move and they sailed to the New World. Landed at Plymouth Rock, we know them as the Pilgrims in our history book. We give all this credit to the Pilgrims that came over, Pilgrims are not Puritans, they're more like we would think of as the Quaker tradition today and they didn't come from England with it. It's left what's not taught in the history books and they learned it in this 20-year period in the Netherlands. And then also, we learn in our civics classes that our founding fathers all read this great English philosopher, John Locke. The second treat is on government where he works out a social contract and this was a very influential book on our founding fathers. In truth, John Locke didn't learn it in England. He sat at the Glorious Revolution sitting over in Amsterdam for three years and then he went back to England and wrote this book. This is really built, again, on his perceptions out of Holland. So in my view, we don't give nearly the credit to the Netherlands that we should intellectually. It's really where liberalism was conceived. It maybe was cradled in England and Britain and then came to the U.S. But... And then there's another part of Spain and there's a wonderful economist who I don't know if he has spoken at Mises, but Jesus Huarto de Soto, is he known in the... And he has developed... Well, it was really Murray Rothbard, I understand, who first made this argument and that Hayek approved it. And it was an argument that what we... Just over 400 years ago, the University of Salamanca in Spain, something very special happened. A bunch of Jesuits and Dominicans created this scholastic school. It really sort of took the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and natural rights philosophy and developed it. And they noticed both from their own philosophizing and also from the... Spain was at the time, it was the Golden Age of Spain and they had big influx of gold and silver from the New World. And so they were thinking economically and they came up with the first subjectivist theory of value, the idea that the value of something is not some function of how much labor has been put in it. People used to have these philosophical discussions like how do we determine what the value of something is. And it was them who said the value is the appraisal of the person who will buy. There's no sort of way to find some intrinsic value in something. There's no sort of socialist calculation. The idea that prices can't be set by any authority because it's just you'd have to know all the preferences of too many people and how they really value things and even God himself and his infinite wisdom could not perform the calculations to describe what the price of everything must be. They saw the big inflation as this gold came back from the New World, there was a big bout of commodity theory of money that even discovered what we now would call the equivalence of demand deposits and certificates of deposits. That if a banking system can create inflation by over issuing either. So it isn't just basically through fractional reserve banking you can create inflation as well. So the value and the sort of fundamental importance of entrepreneurship, property, contract, how this is what really moved society forward. There was just as there was in Spain there was an actual peace movement, probably the world's first peace movement. You had scholastics writing against the crown about the virtues, what we would now call a peace movement, about how wrong it was to be going and doing that in the New World. These thoughts moved to the eastern edge of the Spanish Empire, which was then well, the eastern edge was the Osteraik, the eastern reign, the Osteraik which is Austria. And there they hibernated for 250 years. They hibernated in universities there until they came out and come down to us starting about 150 years ago as the Austrian School of Economics. That's actually what we know as the Austrian School of Economics. Jesus Huerto de Soto and to him I understand Mary Rothbard have confirmed that actually started back 400 years ago in Salamanca. And I view if you mix all these means up of consent, federation among consensual states, consensual exchange, tolerance, religious tolerance, pluralism and on the right these economic concepts I think you get pretty much the U.S. Constitution. In fact this isn't Jefferson read, there was a book by one of these classes called The History of Spain, Marianas and Jefferson got copies and sent it to all the founding fathers. They all read this book because he thought in the history of Spain which is the material from which the Salamanca school worked that one could find proof of the benefit of these concepts and that in an obvious way our U.S. Constitution embodies this tradition. It's under attack so that's the quick short course on I think where liberalism where our operating system comes from. What's important to know is under attack in four ways. Philosophically constitutionally from a point of view of institutional design and a civilizational attack. Philosophically I'm only going to hit one of these really at any length, Rousseau. Rousseau is the great enemy of mankind. Rousseau see when the when the authoritarian couldn't fight it anymore they subverted it in different ways. And for Rousseau he writes this book, The Social Contract where he says yes the consent of people, the will of other people is important but it's not this silly will you don't find out what the will of a people is just by voting. We're French we're superficial. It's that the will each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will. There's a general will that we have we don't discover it by voting amongst ourselves but there's a general will that is our purpose the sovereign power need no guarantee to give no guarantee to its subjects thus the dominant will of the prince is or should be nothing but the general will or the law and whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be held to do so by the whole body this means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. This is the great well we laugh but I'm going to show you momentarily where this shows up in our modern discourse you know it this is the great philosophical jujitsu move against liberalism that yes okay you folks are right it is the will that's important but the real will isn't what you silly people think your will is it's what some robespierre is going to come and make clear to you what your will is and if you don't what your collective will is and if you don't go along with it he can just force you to be free and that's what real freedom is so the real jujitsu move to always be alert for is somebody telling you that freedom isn't this or liberty isn't this silly thing of you pursuing what you want is just a board nation submission to some other process to some other mechanism that describes basically the next 200 years of oh by the way Voltaire read this and wrote to Rousseau dear Monsieur Rousseau I've received sir your new book against the human race and thank you for it one longs in reading your book to walk on all fours and that was Voltaire I love somebody once asked Bertrand Rousseau if he had a Bible he said yeah yeah I keep it over there under my Voltaire this mistake has propagated through philosophy for 200 years I'm not going to walk through in great detail but basically the common denominator of this mistake is somebody saying freedom isn't what you think with this American conception of freedom is or what our conception of freedom is it's a submission to something else and Kant was really although we think of him as the father of liberalism some people do he really didn't get it didn't get the joke and he still at the end of the day thought freedom was submission to a historical process Hegel basically in my view just warmed over Kant Marx same thing submission if you've ever had the I don't know misfortune to argue with a hardcore lefty I used to live in China in the early 80's I would have these long debates with my I was a foreign student I would have these debates with my chai kham friends my roommates and they would say well what you are what you understand as freedom is just this bourgeois western understanding and we have you know through the science of Marxism and such and Lenin and Maoist thought we understand that real freedom is submission to this process and by furthering this process that's how a person really achieves true freedom Nietzsche did the same different process named but he actually referred to what did he say if John Stuart Mill only an Englishman cares about happiness in other words this idea of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that's just like this trivial superficial conception of freedom I'm going to bring down from the mountains a much richer conception is through subordination to that submission to that that real freedom exists Lenin kind of twisted well it's not submission to this historical process it's submission to you know the vanguard the vanguard of the process the party itself and literally if you go back a hundred or less than a hundred years and look at how this stuff is debated there are there's actually people made this argument that is through submission in this case to the party now if you've ever that is through submission to the party that real freedom is found so it's the same twist over and over freedom isn't this sort of silly superficial thing of life liberty and pursuit of happiness is submitting yourself to something else is where you really achieve freedom Hitler Arbite Max Frey the gates of the concentration camps work makes you free submission to the to the state and such it's again when I've been in these even Cambodia I've been in a long time ago people all know the Rousseau people the Chinese students maybe couldn't study any western philosopher other than Rousseau and Marx and Marx Marx Lenin it's the authoritarian instinct needs needs to make this flip it's the same Judah move over and over that the that freedom is submission to something else Voltaire said people who believe in absurdities will eventually commit atrocities and that mistake is a that is in it is an absurdity recently had a politician say the more I looked at what our founders were talking about they understood happiness to mean true happiness not pleasure and enjoyment as we see happiness today but doing what you ought to do doing what you're oriented to do doing what God oriented you to do in other words doing the right thing what our founders were talking about was the liberty to be able to pursue what you ought to do and he's very ready to tell you what you ought to do this was Rick Sandorum so this isn't just idle this philosophical error error has crept into the not crept in it is barged into the discourse and polluted it for 200 years and it still lives that's philosophically constitutionally it's always been under attack it held its own and I think that it would have held its own it was a well-designed system that our constitution would have held its own until somebody had to cheat and the great scholar who has deconstructed this so beautifully is Richard Epstein he wrote a book about how progressives rewrote the constitution and he traces how in jurisprudence American jurisprudence the principles of our constitution got subverted and sort of to me I was just hearing people talk about the regulatory state the administrative state none of that was really possible in the constitution as it was written the idea was to have 13 laboratories or 50 laboratories trying lots of different things polycentricity remember lots of different laboratories trying to solve problems and then the better solutions would get recognized and emulated and that's how policy innovation would work that was a beautiful aspect of the constitution not sufficiently appreciated it seems to me judging from the discourse well that got ruined by the administrative state the particular case was Wicked vs. Philburn you know Roosevelt came in and he passed all these laws and the supreme court struck down said these are unconstitutionally basically tried to Mussolini our country and which is an interesting story to go into aside but people forget Mussolini was very widely respected and regarded in the United States until 1935 when he invaded Libya but Mussolini anyway oh Tom is Tom did you write about this the connection between Mussolini and Roosevelt is that okay you have everything else why not this anyway they and it really comes down to absurd a case is this a farmer I think it was in Iowa well eventually Roosevelt got sick of this and in 1936 told the supreme court I told the country I'm going to pack the supreme court nothing says I can't take it from 9 judges to 15 there's nothing in the constitution that specifies the number of judges originally was 5 and I'm going to put 6 of my own guys on and at that point the spring term in 1937 the supreme court buckled called the switch in time that saved 9 and they buckled and they started rubber stamping as constitutional the flagrantly unconstitutional unconstitutional things FDR was doing and in 1942 or 43 a case came to the supreme court where Roosevelt had a program that was setting prices for agricultural goods nationally and a farmer had grown wheat in his own backyard and made something that got in trouble with the feds goes all the way to the supreme court and on the grounds of the commerce clause that the federal government could reach in because the federal government had an interest in maintaining price stability in farm products and this and that and if a farmer grows his own wheat and eats it then that's wheat he didn't buy in the national market so he's having an effect however infinitesimal on the national market hence this is a fit subject for federal intervention well that's so philosophically tenuous that's what I mean by saying the system really ultimately did take a crime to be broken it took the threat to pack the court and it took decisions like that to for for the constitution to stop working and what that decision was the opening of the administrative state once they did that then it becomes a fit subject for federal administrators and regulators to regulate just about anything another great example of that actually marijuana in California when it was first legalized here there was a woman like a leukemia patient who was dying and grew a plant in her backyard and that was the test case they brought was Gonzalez of E. Reich and went to the supreme court where we just got where there's only one person on the supreme court in my mind who actually understands the constitution it's Clarence Thomas and because lots of conservative judges are way too deferential to Congress and way too deferential to government authority if you want to read a real libertarian treasure read Clarence Thomas's dissent in the Gonzalez v. Reich where he said if the federal government can regulate that a woman growing a pot plant in her backyard they can regulate spelling bees and anything else in the country so the third of the four ways it's under attack is institutional design and here is here's the real insertion point in our operating system for the virus that we are up against is the insertion point for the virus of authoritarianism is centralized institutions because centralized institutions I won't read all of this but federalist 10 I just heard federalist 47 refer to federalist 10 says it was it was Madison wrote it basically we studied all the ways that other that all their attempts at democracy had failed how they failed and we designed this constitution to be better than that but the thing that we haven't I'm bridging and the thing that we haven't solved he's basically saying is this problem of faction none deserves when we're actually developed and its tendency to break the balance of faction the trend of popular governments never find themselves so much alarm for their character is money and fates is when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice this is what factions is what are the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished and by factions he meant what we would call special interests special interest the ability for people to organize and get special treatment and he says this very interesting thing the valuable improvements made by the American constitutions meaning this constitution and the popular models both ancient and modern cannot certainly be too much admired but it would be an unwarrantable partiality to contend that they have as effectively the danger on the side is was wished and imagined in other words we have designed this constitution to prevent all these flaws that we've seen take down previous attempts at democracy but there's one thing that we wish we had solved better was this problem of special interests and that's the one that brings down democracies in the long run so this is the weakness in our operating system it comes with wanting a rule in the nation of laws and not men you have to rely on centralized institutions and centralized institutions have this tendency to become corrupted they have this tendency to get captured regulatory capture we call it when it happens to regulators there are actually marxists who argue it happens much deeper than just with the regulators it happens through the whole state through academia and I actually have a website called deep capture which is about this process we're already on our financial markets so the real problem with if liberalism is an operating system of institutions or laws and not men or institutions and not people then when those institutions get captured that's our great weakness and if they have a tendency to be captured they create this creates what John Kenneth Galbraith called the bezel in financial circles yeah Galbraith said that at any given time there's what the people are being told is in the financial system and what's there if you could just freeze time and add up what every single one of you is being told is there your ownership and compare what's there there's a huge discrepancy and that discrepancy is the amount that has been embezzled from society over time that's the bezel and I would argue that our centralized institutions that govern our financial arrangements display this to no end so we want to get rid of where possible centralized institutions because they are this liability they are this weak point in our operating system and where possible we don't want to be overseen by centralized institutions because they do get captured the blockchain has come along and what the blockchain is so great at the economist calls it the trust machine we can now through blockchain engage in all kinds of consensual exchange and all kinds of activities without them being mediated by central institutions we will see shortly central banking is one of them I have been focusing my attention on an area of wall street called central counterparty clearing I'm not going into the details but what effectively what the blockchain does to wall street is as follows it drags it behind the barn and it kills it with an axe and and why that's going to do that to wall street quickly but it also it can do it to all kinds of centralized institutions think of property think of land titling you can't trust you know the common denominator of so many central institutions is we can't trust each other so we agree I'll stop this from slashing the bull we can't well what the heck you know I'm going to trade you a camel for your gold coin I don't know whether to trust you did you debase the coin or not so there's a business model that is someone prints the remit and they the monopoly on violence in an area creates a mint puts his face on everything gets minted anyone who debases that gets killed it's a way to monetize one's monopoly on violence it's a business model we happen to call it government but it's a business model there's lots of business models that both public and private that share this feature it's we can't trust each other so we just agree there's some third party institution we trust land titling could be one another I mean there's all kinds of these things that now we can achieve that trust the first time in 6000 years of human history we can have that trust come about not through some central institution that we all agree on but through blockchain how that happens is a big subject I won't go any farther and lastly and I read in the material that you pride yourselves on not being PC so I'm going to bring up an uncomfortable subject at least in much discourse and that is if our DNA if our genetic material is about consent what do we do if a authoritarian operating system emerges disguised as a religion it's core values submission but it's as a religion we grant it from the very beginning we've been about religious tolerance so now of course I'm talking about Islam now Islam has I've spent a lot of my life in the Middle East I'm not just speaking from Fox News Islam has variance before say 1979 I think it was it did not have the tendency I'm describing but at the core for some Salafist and extremist interpretations of Islam the basic world view is there's the world that has submitted to the will of Allah the world that has submitted the world the Dar El Islam and Islam means submission the Dar El Islam and we in the world of submitted who have submitted versus the world that we're still at war with so there's the world of submission in the world of war Dar El Islam and Dar El Harb and what do you do if an operating system comes along it's fundamental value by some interpretations is submission and that shows up where in a society whose fundamental value is consent I'm not sure that a carbon based life form can ever mate successfully with a silicon based life form I'm not sure there's ever going to be a way to work this out now fortunately we're assured it's a small fraction of Muslims who believe this way and I'm happy to hear that I read a poll last year on among the immigrants to Europe 13% of them 10% of them support ISIS somewhat and 13% support ISIS strongly that's 23% will telepulster they support ISIS I don't know what the real number is my guess is higher than 23% so there's some non-negotiable fraction that don't have anything like the fuzzy bunny soft interpretation of Islam that we are told is the standard interpretation of Islam and like I've said I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East with a lot of people who believe in another interpretation of Islam describing the fundamental value is submission and we may be kidding ourselves that you can ever, that there's ever a way to integrate that into a liberal society maybe not, maybe we have to do a better job of integrating but maybe it's something that has to be fought in a different way my preferred route is I think the US should be all about women in the Muslim world we should focus all of our attention on the situation of women in the Muslim world both because it is consistent with our values and because it would be, it is quite subversive for their societies and that's how we, I believe we should be addressing that bro, sort of way that is liberalism that is the four ways it's under attack