 They're almost to the point of literal determinism. They think that what you are, who you are, is shaped entirely from the outside. And whether they attribute credit to that, as our president does, that you didn't build that society, helped you build that, other people were there, etc., etc., that kind of collectivist mentality, when it turns into the self, the individual, the person, it becomes even more damaging. This is the idea, which another aspiring president, it takes a village concept. But you aren't really who you are. You aren't the sum of your choices. You aren't who you are because of yourself. You're who you are because of your genetics, because of your family, because of your culture, because of your race, all of these other characteristics that you had no control over. So people try to attack this idea. They say it's a myth. They try to look at statistics and say, how many people actually rise up from the bottom levels of poverty into the upper echelons of wealth? I say that's not the issue. There are some people, it's not statistically likely, but there is a lot of mobility in American society from one level of income to another, but that's not the issue. The issue is, what does it mean for the individual, and what are the conditions under which the individual can actually exercise this self-making? What is it about? What does it actually mean? So to give you some of the examples, I wanted to start today with what I think is probably the best example in American history of self-making, Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is a great example of the literature of self-making. His autobiography or what he used to call in his life, his memoirs, were a document that was very carefully constructed. In the version of an autobiography, of course, one of the great things that you have as an author is the ability to edit out the things that you don't like about your life and to promote the things that you do like about your life. And Franklin was very conscious of this. And his original conception of his memoirs was actually in a letter to his son to try to explain to his son where it was their family had come from, where Franklin had come from. So for those of you who may not know as much about Benjamin Franklin, the story is pretty inspiring. He was born in 1706 in Boston. He was the 10th of 10 children, imagine his poor mother, right? He was the 10th of 10 children. And his father originally had wanted him to go into the ministry. But the schooling to do so was too expensive. He had been in a Latin school and he had been in a basic grammar school, but he was pulled out by the time he was about nine or 10 because it was too expensive for the family after all with 10 children. This is quite an undertaking. And his father decided that the best path for young Benjamin in his life was to be apprenticed to his older brother. Basically to be sold into an indenture contract, to basically become an quasi-property of his brother who was running a print shop at the time. And then Benjamin Franklin would learn a trade, he would learn how to be a printer, and also subsequently because most of the print houses had a lot of the literature, the pamphlets that were being imported from Britain and things that were being written. He would learn how to be a writer as well. And Franklin took to this task, despite the friction that he had with his older brother who basically considered him something less than one of his hired laborers, because after all, young Benjamin couldn't get out of his labor contract. It was something his father had promised to his brother, that he would serve you for an X number of years and then you would release him into the world. Well, young Franklin and his older brother, who was quite a political radical at the time, started to come into conflict. The idea of how he was going to run his life was different from his older brothers, and eventually at the young age of 16, I believe, 15, 16, he decided, in secret, that he would run away and he went to Philadelphia. And he started his own business. He quickly rose through the ranks. He started publishing Poor Richard's Almanac, from which we get so many of the common phrases, early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise, et cetera. Penny saved as a penny earned. All of these common stock phrases about self-improvement or about diligence and hard work probably come from Franklin, probably come from Poor Richard. He also published a number of newspaper articles. He had traveled to London. He had started to become more prominent. He had met with the governor of Pennsylvania. He was rising in the world. And then at the ripe old age of 42, because of his success as a publisher, he retired. And it was something to aspire to, to be so successful that you can sell your business to a partner and get residuals, basically, to get payments for your investment such that you can now support what becomes Franklin's next pursuit, scientific career. Many people remember Franklin either as the author of the Poor Richard's Almanac and the autobiography, or they remember Franklin as the politician and the diplomat. But sandwiched in between those parts of his career, he was a groundbreaking scientist. He did the fundamental work and experimentation on electricity. The kite, people remember, the sentry box, the study of electricity. He fundamentally characterized the basic field idea. Positive and negative charge was something that Franklin came up with. Clark Maxwell, many, many years later in the late 19th century, said that Franklin had done, if you know Maxwell's equations, this is basic electromagnetism. I don't actually know this, but I pretend to because I know the names. So I don't actually understand the theories. But Maxwell is very, very important to the field of electromagnetism. And he said Franklin had basically laid out more than any other thinker in the field. He was like the Newton of the field of electromagnetism. So Franklin had this enormously significant scientific career. He had come up with a thing that literally would save people's lives, the lightning rod, right? Where at the time other scientists believed that trying to attract charge out of the atmosphere and ground it was going to attract too much lightning to buildings, and then it would set them a fire. Franklin, of course, knew the scientific background of this. And he said, no, this will actually dissipate charge. It will save lives. Actually ended up ultimately having arguments with other English scientists. He was made a member of the Royal Society, which was absolutely unprecedented for a colonial to become a member of the prestigious Royal Society in London. After this, into the 1750s, because of his international acclaim, even the Queen of France had China made with Franklin's face on it, because he was so well known in Europe to which Louis was quite disappointed and had himself a chamber pot made with Franklin's face on the bottom. He did not so much like his wife being enamored of Benjamin Franklin. But because of his prominence, and because of his savvy, he was appointed as a colonial agent, which meant that he was to represent Pennsylvania, and ultimately he also represented Georgia and other colonies in parliament. And so he got involved in politics. And he became involved at the very heart of the American Revolution. Like the other patriots, he had this idea that America should have a kind of self-determination as a nation, that England was becoming oppressive, that the level of taxation, the level of interference was becoming oppressive, and that they had fundamentally different ideas about how to protect individual rights. The English believed that these were relational, that government created rights and that you should just accept them and be happy with them. Franklin and the other founders believed, no, individual rights are what individuals have as a claim against government. It's how we tell the government, no. And so he became involved not only as a colonial agent, later at the Constitutional Convention, and then ultimately as a diplomat, as an attaché basically to France after the revolution. He came back to the colonies in 1785, and shortly thereafter retired for the real retirement, which was only lasted a couple of years before his death in 1790. And in the interim, he crafted this biography, this autobiography. And the really interesting thing to me about this autobiography is Franklin is aware, as an Enlightenment thinker, as someone who had read Locke and Newton and studied the great Enlightenment thinkers, he was aware of the fact that the way that he portrayed his own personal development could become a model for others.