 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Joining us today is Michael Shermer. Dr. Shermer is founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, executive director of the Skeptic Society, and a columnist for Scientific American. He's the author of many books. His newest is the moral arc, How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice and Freedom. Your book tells a story of moral progress and how that progress was driven not by philosophy or religion but by science. So before we delve into the details of that story, can you maybe just give us the big picture? The big picture is that after the scientific revolution, most thinkers in Europe were inspired by Galileo, Newton, Harvey, and so on and wanted to be the equivalent of that in their own fields. So Thomas Hobbes, for example, self-consciously said, I want to be the Galileo of the William Harvey of civil society. And his book, Leviathan, is one of the most important influential political treaties ever written. And it is a materialistic work beginning with atoms in motion all the way up to how we perceive things through our senses with atoms, impinging on our senses and how we form simple ideas and simple ideas, form compound ideas. And on and on he goes until you get to civil society. Now, the Leviathan was supposed to be a three-part work. The whole first part was just like the physics and biology and then the second part was psychology and then the third part was society. But he ran out of time, so he just put it all in the one. But the point of that is that, you know, he's saying that we have a problem here. There's, you know, too many issues in society. There has to be a way to solve these rationally scientifically. So I'm going to do it this way. And he builds the best science of his day. And how did what specifically had Harvey and Galileo and everyone done that was different? I mean, we like to say science, but... Yeah, well, so it's a naturalistic worldview that the universe is materialistic, deterministic, and there is no supernatural. There's just the natural. There's just natural forces and we can understand them. And that's what Newton did by, you know, tying in celestial mechanics with terrestrial mechanics, basically arguing it's all knowable, you know, and you can actually write equations to describe it. So therefore the human mind is capable of understanding how the universe works and it's a mechanical process. So Hobbes' whole thing, his old treaties, is that it is mechanical. The atoms in motion ending up with a society, you know, with a social contract and all that in the Leviathan. That is a purely materialistic, naturalistic worldview. So this new contribution then that came about during the Enlightenment, not just in what we traditionally think of as science but in moral philosophy, was this new way of thinking that was taking principles of reason, using principles of reason, but also not dependent upon any sort of supernatural stuff. Am I understanding that correctly? That's correct. Yep. So therefore you're really taking God out of the equation. Sure. Even though most people at the time weren't atheists, they were just saying, that's a separate thing. Let's just talk about what we know, what we can know. This seems a different, though, to say the way that Newton talked about God is we can understand all this and still understand the behind the world and the mechanistic operations. There can still be a God. Yes. Newton was a believer or a deist or whatever he actually was by today's labels. But it didn't matter because he wasn't invoking God unless he needed to. His attempt was to close the God of the gaps arguments. He was eliminating gaps by saying, this is just gravity. This is gravity doing all this and here I have equations to describe it. And so he eliminated a lot of the need for a deity. I'm curious this, you say that this came about during the Enlightenment, that this new way of thinking about morality, you call it secular humanism. But what you're describing sounds an awful lot like many thinkers before then. So I'm thinking of the Greeks, the Hellenistic philosophers. Aristotle gave us a godless view of morality and humanity, the Epicureans, the Stoics, Buddhism arguably was not supernatural. So are those different somehow from what happened during the Enlightenment and after? Well, they're different in their specifics. Had those taken root, we might be much further along now than we are. But there was that thing, the Dark Ages. You know that book, The Swerve, in which the rediscovery of some of these old naturalistic texts from the ancient Greeks and republishing them and then those got some traction and all that was part of the Scientific Revolution, which underneath it was this materialistic, naturalistic worldview. So we lost a few centuries. We'd probably be colonizing the galaxy by now. It is pretty astounding how much they destroyed in the process of Christianizing the world. And The Swerve is definitely a great book to talk about that. But we've been talking about science, but we also have this rights thing, which is maybe related to it or a separate thing. Well, I think they are. I think so. I mean, most people think of rights as just a pure philosophical or metaphysical concept. Bentham famously described rights as nonsense and natural rights as nonsense. But he didn't have Darwin. He didn't have evolutionary theory. He didn't have any sound theory of human nature like we have now. We understand much more than they did back then as brilliant as those people were. They didn't know a fraction of what we know today. So I try to make the case in any case in the moral arc for natural rights that you can start. So you've got to start somewhere. So I start with the survival and flourishing of sentient beings. Like Bentham, I use sentience meaning, can you feel and suffer and experience pain? Because when we're talking about morality, we're talking about are people being harmed or helped? Interactions, if you're by yourself on an island, there's no morality. So it's the survival and flourishing of sentient beings. Why individuals? Because natural selection operates on the individual. And then why sentience? Because that connects us to other species and that's how brains operate. And then I just use survival and flourishing because that's what natural selection does. It gives us a drive to survive and thrive and flourish as just part of our nature. And so you have to start somewhere. That's where I start. I know that most of my fellow atheists, skeptics, scientists don't agree with that. They don't think it's possible to ground it in anything objective, that it really is culturally relative. Even though they're personally not cultural relativists or moral relativists and they don't quite go that far. But they always invoke Hume. You know, you can't – the naturalistic fallacy, you can't go from the way things something is to the way it ought to be. But I say nonsense. We already do that a lot. It seems weird to say though that it's my opinion that Hitler was bad. Right. And most people don't. I mean, but if you push him on something like that, they go, well, of course he was bad. Well, how do you know he's bad? Well, it's sort of a Western thing. Or if you push like female genital mutilation, yes, of course I think that's terrible. But I can't completely condemn the Somalis for doing that to their women. Why not? This concept of flourishing is really important to your story because much of the book is talking about how we have increased flourishing, how we've gotten better at enabling people to flourish in the world. So can you tell us a bit more about what you actually mean by flourishing? What does it mean for someone to flourish? What is necessary for someone to flourish? Physical and mental health, happiness, satisfaction, having fulfilling lives, relationships. There's some subjectivity to how you might flourish and how you versus me or something. I like to go ride my bike. You like to do something else. You do something still else. That is a matter. It's just the idea of whatever makes you feel fulfilled, obviously not. Murdering other people makes me feel flourishing. First of all, that's super rare. In any case, something else would trump that that we can get into later. But again, you have to start with something. And the animal rights activists, they start with Bentham and it isn't important. Can they think or have intelligence or use tools? It's can they suffer and feel? Because that's really what we're talking about when the care of other people, people that need help helping the moral aspect of humanity. And that's helped create an expanding circle as you described because you just mentioned animals and different people that it seems that we've brought them into the circle of care, I guess, would be the right way of putting it. I like the sphere as a metaphor because it's multi-dimensional versus a circle, which is on a flat plane. But Peter Sanger's idea that he laid out in the early 80s, I think that's held up pretty well. That is what we've been doing. Just think about incorporating gay rights and same-sex marriage into the sphere. That's all we're doing. That's all they're asking. Just let us do what everybody else, just bring us into the circle, the sphere. And that's what we're doing. The use of government because this is how we kind of get to rights and how government relates to people. And that's particularly what we're interested, of course, here at Cato and how this assertion against government and so we described Hobbes and how we get forward in the mechanistic view. How do you think this changed people's relationship, idea of the relationship between people in the government with these new ideas of science and rights? Yeah. Well, first of all, you wouldn't want to live in Hobbes' society. No, no, no. I'm not really strong enough. And I have to sleep sometime. It's pretty draconian. But these are the hard issues. We can do the low-hanging fruit that I do in my talks. But to what extent should the state step in to intervene in somebody's private religious beliefs that diseases are not caused by germs but they're caused by negative thoughts and we should just pray? You know, you're familiar with these cases. And, you know, it's hard, individual liberty versus the government protecting, you know, those who can't protect themselves. Your notion of flourishing ends up, I mean, you talk about natural rights. It makes me think of the natural thought series of also cite a Catholic, Thomas Aquinas, who kind of approached a similar sort of, you know, we need to think about what are the goods, what's good for a good life. And he looked at the things that were desired by everyone and he came up with what procreation and life and knowledge and sociability, which actually looks quite a lot like your list of things. And so the idea then is are we correcting, is the morality that you argue similar to his in the sense that then the things that are morally wrong or right are those things that enhance those necessary things for flourishing and those would be the good things and then things that are morally wrong are the things that undermine those necessary constituent parts of flourishing? It's a place to start. It's a good place to start. But of course you're going to find exceptions to that. You know, the person that flourishes from torturing animals or, you know, the psychopath or the sadist or masochist and, you know, yes, of course there are those, so we have to make exceptions. But for the most part, it's a good place to start. Interestingly, in your book, when you taught the animal rights chapter, about maybe two-thirds of the way through it or so, you just come for us and I do eat meat. Yes, I do. And that kind of surprised me. I had a meat sandwich today. Well, we're all inconsistent. Of course, yeah, yeah. I routinely tell people, like, if I were a better person, I would be a vegetarian. Yeah. But my will is not strong enough. I mean, the animal rights activists have good arguments. They really do. And they follow pretty much on the footsteps of all the great rights revolutionaries. In the past, the arguments they made against the abolition of slavery and women's right to vote and so on. And so I can't say that they're wrong. What makes it hard is that we have to eat. You don't have to have a slave. You can flourish just fine without a slave. But you have to eat. And so now where I live in LA, there's tons of great vegan restaurants with really good food. But, you know, other times it's hard to not eat meat and it's tasty. And, you know, that makes it hard. So for a while I didn't, you know, when I was writing that chapter anyway, because, you know, I watched all those awful, awful hidden camera documentaries. Oh, the horror world, absolutely, yeah. Factory farms and, oh, just, you know, I had to, like, cover my eyes and peek through my fingers to see what was going on the screen. And, oh, you know, there you don't want to do it because it's really bringing it home. But that's what the whole point of it is. You know, you want to, like, carry a Tubman's, you know, Uncle Tom's cabin. The whole point of that was just to make people aware of this is what it's like. And then you read it. So this is the argument about literacy and rights revolutions. You know, just making people aware of what it's like to be in that condition. And, oh, you know, and that's, that's all rights revolutionary since then have tried to put people interchange perspective, put people into that position to see how you would feel. How do you think this is, you mentioned two things that were interesting, like in terms of not eating a slave or needing meat. It's something we talk about a lot here. Cato is the growth of human prosperity. And it's in your book, The Hockey Stick Graph. But there seems to be a relationship between the moral arc, as you're describing it, and prosperity. There's some things that you may not be prosperous enough to care about. You talk about the walrus hunters in the animal chapter. So maybe it's poor people have a hard time being moral in many situations. Well, that's right. I mean, if you live in Africa, I mean, who cares about the animal rights? I don't have any rights. You know, so you got to, you got to get your, so that, yeah, the solution is, is we got to make these people prosperous and successful. And, you know, then they'll get education. I mean, with democracies comes better education. With free markets comes more money from better education. And then with that comes all the other goodies. And so, yeah, you got to start somewhere. Which is why I like the Gates Foundation's, you know, they're not going for these lofty utopian things. They're just saying, let's see if we can just eliminate this one thing right here. And let's see if we can have better toilets. And just really basic stuff that allow people in to care about the next level up. And eventually, you know, we'll get to caring about the environment. But in any case, the more educated you are, the fewer children you have, the more less pressures on the environment. So again, just get people to get China, get China through the Industrial Revolution as quick as possible and get them up to speed on renewables and whatever they got to do to get their population under control. And that's progress. So then as part of the story of progress, is it that increasing wealth is what leads to moral progress? Or is it, which is what you've just been talking about, that they need to be, we need to get them to certain levels of income so that then they can start caring about these things? Or is it that the moral progress is what results in the increasing wealth? Or is it somewhere in between? Well, it's both. But, you know, the hockey stick curve comes a bit after the rights revolutions and the humanitarian revolutions had already been well underway. So it's probably not the cause. It's probably interactive and they're both caused by something else. And then it feeds into it in a positive way. For a while I was toying with the, you know, life is hard theory of why people are mean and nasty, you know, because who cares, you know, life is so grim. But as Pinker points out, you could just easily make the opposite argument that if, you know, life is grim, then I'm really going to feel bad for you because I know what it feels like to be poor and diseased and miserable. So it isn't clear which way it should go and in any case the whole increase in wealth after the industrial revolution was well after, you know, the rights revolutions were already underway. So, you know, we're looking at something else. But all things be equal, it's better to be prosperous and wealthy than not for a whole bunch of other reasons that helps propel it along faster. I was, I confess it as I was reading through it, being a little bit uncertain at times precisely what you meant by moral progress that we were tracking because at some times there's the question of do you mean progress in the sense of our values, those things that we think are morally valuable are changing, getting better in some way. Poor values are being replaced with better values. Or do you mean it in the sense that, like in your, you could expand on what this means, your, what is it, the witch? Which theory of causality? Yes, that in that instance what you describe as progress, like abandoning the witch theory of causality is moral progress. I don't know what you're saying is it's better, our underlying moral values haven't changed. We still, people thought it was not okay to harm or that it was okay to stop people from harming but their data changed, their knowledge of the world changed such that they now don't think what they thought was harm wasn't actually harmful. That's what I mean by moral progress mostly and also very specific measurable things, decline in homicides, abolition of slavery, rights for women and blacks and so forth. Very specific measurable things instead of something a little more metaphysical like, you know, what, we have different moral values but what does it mean? The rights revolution. But even there, the rights, what are we talking about? The right to vote. Okay, so I can go in and actually stamp a ballot. That's an actual specific thing or I'm less likely to die or be enslaved or tortured living today than I lived centuries ago and or thousands of years ago. These are just very specific instances like that. I'm not a philosopher, I'm a science guy so I'm looking at things that are quantitative, measurable, life is better if you have three square meals a day rather than two. If you make 10,000 a year versus 6,000 a year. Just North Korea, South Korea, very specific things. They're three inches shorter. That's not good. I can see the difference. That moral progress, there are some of the most striking examples, the biggest examples of moral progress that you talk about. Right, so as I mentioned the abolition of slavery, the various rights revolutions, humanitarian revolutions that abolish torture and the death penalty which is almost gone. Those kinds of things just the decline of war, the number of people that die in war, percentage of populations that die in conflicts, the number of conflicts that there are between western powers is declined dramatically. All of those add up to I'm less likely to die and I'm more likely to flourish. Again, I don't like talking about groups like this race or that nation or that gender. It's you, it's me, it's an individual person that's less likely to be harmed or killed and more likely to be prosperous and flourish and that's my measure, my criteria. When you look back at people at 16th century, 17th century sometimes you wonder if everyone in the society were sadists with public executions bear baiting, the kind of thing that they thought was a good time and is now absolutely reprehensible. It does seem like something is going on. Okay, that would be an example of something like a value I suppose that we don't think it's fun anymore to torture cats or bear baiting. So there are sentiments have expanded to being concerned about the welfare and suffering of other sentient beings like dogs and bears, cats and bears. So that would be progress in a value, a moral value in a very measurable way. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. The interesting thing that Aaron and I were talking about before was in Aristotle, for example, it's unclear and I think your book does a pretty good job of explaining this. He thinks that there are natural slaves but he thinks that they need to be slaves because it helps them flourish. So perhaps he's just making a scientific error, a factual error and that's why the witch causality people are just getting better understanding that this is the same type of thing as this. Another criteria is to ask the affected party how they would feel like, hey, I'm pretty sure you'll be flourishing better as a slave. What do you think? No, I actually don't really think that or the woman. How about we torture, you know, torture you on the pyre there? No, I actually don't really want to do that. And then we get to the difficult questions because one thing from the libertarian standpoint that struck me in your book and I don't think you consider yourself totally libertarian but friendly or whatever. Yeah. Small L, a libertarian maybe. But there seems to be a danger in there possibly. Someone could read it incorrectly that the misuse of science, or use of science to the point of trumping rights that because science has been used for some really horrible things. Eugenics, for example, things like this. And the idea that there are some people who have any of the science is so right that perhaps we should just make more bureaucracies, more technocracies. Turn the rule over to scientists. Turn the rule over to scientists, central planning, all these things. If you get to or uncovered one thing that the Danish disuses of the world can kind of occasionally make a very small point about is the place like the Soviet Union tended to be incredibly science driven type of bureaucracies even if it was perverted. So how would you respond to that? Right. Well, of course, when you phrase it that way, we envision the lab coat guy out there with his calibers saying this race is inferior to that race or whatever. So first of all, all eugenics thing was mistaken anyway. It's wrong. It's pseudoscience. But even if it turned out it was right. And let's say blacks really are inferior to whites or whatever your preference is there. But still the idea of rights for all sentient beings would trump that idea. That even though you think this is the problem with utilitarianism, it's too easy to make the trolley calculation. I'll flip the switch for the trolley to save the five workers and kill only one worker. Almost everybody agrees. Yeah, that seems right. But then it's easy to go from, well, I'll kill these one million people to save these five million people or kill these 10 million people to save the 50 million people. And all of a sudden you have a genocide. And so that's the problem with utilitarianism and it's the problem with allowing just deeper, more important principles like rights to be trumped by just some scientific theory even if it turned out it was right. But even there, see I'm making a case for natural rights that these are things we discover about our human nature that we have this desire to flourish and survive. And therefore again, you have to start somewhere so I start there and from there I can say, well, we discovered natural rights. We discovered that this is through study and research that this is what people really like. This is what helps them survive and flourish. And there's a huge body literature now in happiness. Tons of books about it, what people need. They need meaningful work, family, friends, social connections and some kind of spiritual or a deeper fulfilling purpose to your life, that kind of thing. Okay, well we know that now. So there's all sorts of things we shouldn't do because it reduces that. Let me ask a question related to something you said but I fear maybe slightly off topic. But I think it's on a topic that my hope is of interest to our audience. We're sitting here with the editor of the show who is famous for debunking pseudoscience, for distinguishing actual science from pseudoscience. You're very, very good at that, yes. And this, I mean we're inundated every day with all sorts of claims that claim to be scientific statements that, you know, we've got to do this or we've got to do that and there's science behind it. So just for those of us living in the world and exposed this stuff, what is the difference between science and pseudoscience and how do we tell? Right. Well there's not to be a hard problem because it's what Carl Popper called the boundary problem that, you know, you clearly see something that's super extreme that's just crazy and that's not true psychic power or something like that but there's a lot of gray areas in there that it's not quite clear. You know, cold fusion, you know, what was that string theory is, you know, it's not quite science, it's not really pseudoscience, it's in that gray area and so it ends up being something of a social construction of, you know, good science is what most scientists accept in practice. It leads to a working hypothesis and paradigm that you can run experiments in and test and it's useful and it's been verified and corroborated from others and so on and pseudoscience claims tend to be, you know, isolated they don't give you any testable hypotheses or just assertions and speculations and conjectures and and so that's kind of the difference and it varies depending on which particular claim you're talking about. So like an alternative medicine we deal a lot with this there is an alternative medicine. There's just medicine that's been tested and scientific and then there's everything else that just claims. Yes, medicine that's been proved to work. Alternative medicine that's been proved to work is called medicine. That's right, medicine. That's right, exactly right and so, you know, there, I mean, even skeptics disagree on certain, you know, things about what science or pseudoscience and also calling something pseudoscience has been something of a badge of, you know, of really scolding somebody for believing something crazy. It's a pejorative term like calling something a conspiracy theory. Well, there are conspiracies so some of the theories are going to turn out to be right. Yeah, MKUltra really set back a lot. It gave conspiracy theorists a lot of energy kind of like how the CELA can't has let crypto zoologists be able to save about anything. Well, it could be a CELA can or a mountain gorilla. There was one period where they did not believe that and now they just run away with it forever. But your question, your claim about scientists and scientific thought, I have to ask this question, not because I really believe it, but it brings up the global warming question, which I'm not qualified to have huge opinions about global warming, but you hear the question, well, how is science done by consensus? There has to be people who could be right and goes against the consensus. Well, that's right and that does happen occasionally, but not as often as you think. Most people on the margins or the heretics, they're usually wrong about their ideas. You just don't hear about it because, well, they were wrong and they don't get published or nobody pays any attention to them because they're not useful ideas that don't lead to anything. So the idea, well, they laughed at Galileo and they laughed at the Marx brothers. Well, they laughed at the Wright brothers and they laughed at the Marx brothers. You know, it doesn't really make any difference. You ultimately have to be right at some level, by which I mean corroborated by other people. So the reason climate scientists talk about this 97% of climate scientists agree global warming is real. The reason that's done, I mean that's not normally done. You never hear something like, you know, 97% of scientists agree that Saturn has 13 million years of life. You don't have to do that because it's not controversial. It only comes up because you know, people on the 3% are making a lot of noise. And only because there's some political economic ramifications that people feel it threatens their world view. Nobody cares about the germ theory of disease or the plate tectonics theory of geology. That doesn't stir up political animosity amongst people. So it's only to that extent that we even talk about that. But the consensus process is interesting one. This was, you know, the sociology of science and the history of science. You know, they talk about, well what does lead to a paradigm shift and you know, occasionally the young guys get a toe hold with a new theory and then they oust the old guys and the old theory. But that only happens if they are also right and like Einstein you know replaced Newton. No, no actually Newtonian mechanics is just fine. It just doesn't work out on the extremes and so you need a refinement of that which is Einstein relativity and we need further refinements with quantum mechanics and okay, so there's more to come but it's not like one's replacing the other. They're just sort of layered on top of layers. That's what the the scientist, the scientism governing our lives and then we mentioned China and the rights of people in China and the big question is when do you override these rights? That's what you mentioned. That's a really difficult question and that becomes a difficulty in terms of when do we for global warming to override the rights of poor Chinese people to get cheap energy. Yes, I agree. That's a naughty political problem. Can science answer that question? When we should do that? Not at the moment. We can't. You can make projections and employ the precautionary principle which I don't like because it stifles innovation too much. I'd rather see us go let the Chinese do whatever they want but let's get them better technologies. In fact let's approach. Let's just have all electric cars and let's just solve all these problems with better technology as opposed to going backwards. Harder to go backwards, better to go forward especially if there's a profit incentive or even just a value incentive. Elon Musk gave away the patents for all his electric cars. He has a bigger goal. He has to make a profit because it's a company but his bigger goal is let's make the world a better place. That's a great example of what he calls conscious capitalism. Capitalism is good. It's okay to make a profit. Nothing wrong with making money but we could also have other cool values too and add on to that. You talk about governments providing the rule of law and a structured system of criminal code punishment and that being a really important thing for us to flourish but in the book you also discuss the possibility that governments themselves might become obsolete at some point and that moral progress might result into the triumph of cities over larger governments. Can you talk a bit about that? Yep. Before I wrote this book I was always a small government libertarian. People just want to be left alone. Turns out not everybody just wants to be left alone. I've got a lot of letters about that by the way. I don't want to just be left alone. I want somebody to take care of me. Oh, okay. Go join a religion then or something. I discovered through Pinker's book and other historical works that in fact government was a good thing in terms of removing the whole self-help justice thing which causes a lot of violence and homicide rates to be pretty high. Again, I'm just looking at very specific measurable things. Homicide rates are super high. How can we get them lower? One thing is to have better policing, better enforcement of the rules and laws, better courts, better judicial system and so on. It would be better if you don't just go shoot someone because they stole something from you and that's up to you to do that. Right. But of course governments can be abusive and they have been, but not all of them. Again, it's like you're saying religion's the problem. It's too broad. Religion is a whole bunch of different things. You can't say government's the problem. Well, which governments? Some are way worse than others. So the whole point of the political process is to try to refine it better and better and I think we have been getting better over the long run at doing that. I mean police departments now have all these really intelligent database data-based policing. Really interesting programs in LA where if a crime happens at this intersection here that increases by 50% that another one will happen within a block of there. So you send the cops there before the next one happens and then that stops it. They just know from data analysis big data and some more of that kind of thing. Again, very specific things like that. And then so my long-term prediction, I'm just speculating in the last chapter of Protopia, you know, I don't know what's going to happen any more than anybody else, but that that kind of problem solving can happen better at the local level. So, and then, you know, people like the Long Now Foundation Stuart Brand and, you know, these guys are talking about cities. Cities is where the action is. And now more than 50% of the world lives in cities. And, you know, when mayors rule the world is this book I cited. And it's because that's where I call it the fixing the pothole problems. Again, I just want to be left alone except for just, you know, let's fix certain problems that need to be fixed. There's no Democrat or Republican way to fix a pothole. That's right. To rip off of the LaGuardia's old quote. That's right. Yeah. Absolutely. That's right. So in the long run, I think it would be better if governance happened more locally now that we have improved technologies of governance. We know how to do it better. You know, that's a science. What's the best way to govern a group of people? You know, we've tried everything for, you know, thousands of years and we've got it down now. So, you know, the idea of the problem with the nation state is that it's too large and nefarious and nebulous and it could be nefarious and you get these antiquated notions of the glory of war. It's just such an inane idea. Glory for who? Yeah. I mean, there is no, you know, it's just me and you. It's a bunch of people and the glory of the, what does that do for me? And so, again, the individual is the target and I think the mayor is going to care more about me than the president and maybe, you know, the mayor's assistant will care even more about me. I think that could happen. I'm not sure. You know, if you look at the consolidation of states from, you know, thousands and thousands down to a couple hundred over the last 500 years, you know, the one world there's sort of predicting. And there were far more states further in the last. Political units. Political units. Small political units. So, like, 600 AD, there were a ton of small little governments. That's right. Yeah. Now, and in Europe there was, you know, something like 5,000 different political entities in 1500. So, isn't that what I'm talking about? No, because they didn't know what they were doing. First of all, they just had walled cities and they were just constantly at war with each other. Like, just Tuscany in Italy, for example. Yeah, that's right. Just, you know. So, we don't do that anymore. We've gotten past that. Now that we have the technology of how to build a society and infrastructure and governance. So, going forward, maybe we'll bounce off at the bottom instead of having one world government where now I have to depend on somebody that lives 10,000 miles away to care about me and they don't. Just back up to, you know, thousands of small political units. City states. I'm wondering how we make people a governing sorts of people. So, the people who might even be in charge of these small city states care about that sort of thing. The people who run for president. So, this is an issue that we talk a lot about on the podcast is, I mean, we can say like it would be great if people's lives were better and there are these obvious ways that we can do it but one of the problems with government is that the people get in and there are all sorts of other incentives. Yes, right. And so, we can this gets back to those kind of two possible ways of looking at moral progress. Right? The like, we know what the moral thing to do is and we just need the better information on how to do it which is kind of, I mean, what you're describing like if, you know, governments, if they just know how to make how to govern correctly and we just need to implement it but then there's also the changing of the values because there are people out there lots of people running states who know this sort of stuff but they want to protect their friends they want to give them subsidies or I happen to think what's, you know, helping my particular class I convince myself is in the interests of everyone. Like, I've shrunk that moral circle. Right. Well, the solution is a social, technological one. You just have more checks and balances. Two signatures on a check rather than one or maybe three. It should be three signatures on a check before you can cash it and, you know, something like that just so the founding filers, you know, the best things they did was, you know, to break up the power structure and have more checks and balances and probably even more in terms of, you know, corruption. That's a big problem. There's no reason to think that, you know, you and I sitting here fully aware and conscious of how corrupt people can be and how bad that is. If we had the power range that we would not just go ahead and take care of our family and friends just like, you know, the temptations are super strong given human nature so that's why you needed the outside source. And we're recording this when I was interacting with Aaron there, we're recording this the day after the state of the union so this is a particular day when libertarians feel that everyone just had a massive national delusion for about 59 minutes last night and we had to watch it and grit our teeth of the whole thing but at the same time Aaron's point being that we watch this man stand up and talk about us as a family and how we have a common purpose and its overuse of the term we and how he's driving the bus the entire time and people seem to believe this stuff which is the sort of the question of whether or not the moral arc can bend away from thinking that that's the kind of situation we want to have but we want someone to all address us and be the national father well some people do like that absolutely I mean the libertarians are we are a few in number for many reasons but that's one of them some people like the idea of a sort of a patriarchal led community is going to take care of me but that's also something you get used to or not people grow up accustomed to public education for example so when I use the phrase government schools versus private schools people like what do you mean government schools I don't send my kid to a government school well actually you do they're public right yeah but that's not a oh okay I mean and these are the same people that are you know super critical of say super critical of government and say well I know governments always mess things up then why would you want to send your kid this is the most important thing you will ever do as a parent is educate your kid two people you know are incompetent okay so you know something like that I forgot what the question was I mean what you're describing is brings us back to why the argument why your vision of smaller city states handling everything locally is so appealing because it looks like you can say yes you might want this cradle to grave welfare state you may think that's good you may want these kind of national greatness plans and all that and if you want that there's a community there for you run by Michael Bloomberg right and I want if I want this other community that sticks to you know a night watchman state and just protects rights I can do that and then we can we can look we can see like are you actually working is it working out for you or is it working out but this is Robert Nozick's utopia utopia yeah well there like I like Sam Harris's metaphor the moral landscape title of his book in which instead of looking for one single answer multiple peaks on the moral landscape some slightly better than others or whatever but there's lots of solutions of ways to live so libertarians are fond of these proprietary communities where you know you like the community where no one's allowed to paint their door red and you like it where everybody can paint the door any color they want and so you live in the one and you live in the other and you know that that actually could work in principle I think it does where it does work I mean there's you know hotels or private proprietary communities that have roads not only literal roads but vertical roads elevators and you know they have shops and places to get your hair cut you can almost live in some of these Vegas hotels you could actually never leave which is the whole point that they don't want you to leave and so those are like many cities and there's no reason why you couldn't extend that idea out and of course the rebuttal well what about the terrorists with the nuclear bomb okay well obviously we had this is going to take a while you have to eliminate those problems with better technologies your position seems to be within the scientific skeptical atheist community that is your community you thrive in your people I imagine that as opposed to the sort of one government type of view in my what just my little sense of the community it's more common to look at sort of the one government view not like New World Order but that the progress is synonymous with more government than it is to have this sort of decentralization more libertarian view how does that how can we better convey this to that community these ideas that decentralization might work better in terms of solving these problems and might create a better and brighter future well one way I've tried to do it is to that community all recognizes the power of bottom up through evolution you know evolution operates through these you know there is no central designer there's no intelligent designer you know we've debunked that idea you know natural selection is the designer from the bottom up and in a way the economy is like that or the social systems are like that they're self organized even pirate societies I've been writing about that in the book because of Pete leesons you know it turns out these are organized societies they have to be you know it's too costly if everybody just does whatever they damn well please and kills each other it's a net loss for the whole organization right so we got to have rules and that does happen so I try to show my fellow liberal atheists you know that top down solutions are not always the best ones and the intelligent designer is debunked and so the intelligent designer in government is maybe not always the right thing to do either I don't know to what extent that works because ever since I called started calling myself a libertarian I found out people just quit listening to you they just go oh you're just a libertarian and I have to think about what you're saying so sometimes I wish I hadn't said the word just so that people would listen to the specific arguments you're making because you know the labels they really stick and their linguistic shortcuts to having to think thank you for listening to free thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on Twitter at free thoughts pod that's free thoughts pod free thoughts is a project of libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org