 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to the second day of our magnificent, wonderful program. We have a great lineup for you today. But now it's my pleasure to introduce a Lew Church Memorial Lecture, and it's sponsored by the Lew Church Foundation. Our speaker, Daniel Ajamian, is a private consultant. During the last 15 years, he has been chairman of the board of directors of several successful private equity sponsored companies. Prior to this, he also held executive positions in similar companies. These companies have been headquartered in the United States, Canada, Germany, and France. Most of these companies have been turnaround situations. Some acquired out of bankruptcy. Mr. Ajamian currently serves as the chairman of the board for two such companies, ABC Technologies, a supplier of plastic components to the automotive industry, and located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and Syanko Holdings, a leading supplier of sodium cyanide utilized to extract gold headquartered in Perlin, Texas. He is also a member of the Senior Operating Advisory Board of Alliance Global Investors, US Private Credit Solutions. His most enjoyable professional endeavor, however, I'm happy to say, is as a board member of the Mises Institute. Daniel received his master's in business administration from Claremont Graduate School and his Bachelor of Science degree in business with a concentration in finance from California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. In 2000, Mr. Ajamian was named Outstanding Senior Executive Alumni by Cal Poly's College of Business Administration. Today, Daniel will address us on The Cost of the Enlightenment. Please welcome Mr. Ajamian. Good morning. I'd like to thank Joe first for the introduction and invitation. I thank Lou for his leadership of and vision for the Institute, the supporters and friends of the Mises Institute for helping to make it the premier source on economics and liberty. In the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, I especially would like to thank the Lou Church Foundation for annually sponsoring this lecture. It is broadly accepted that out of Enlightenment thinking came many of the goods of our society. Goods economic, political and social. Goods ranging from the material wealth and the technology we enjoy to the classical liberalism and libertarianism. It is on the ladder that I will focus. An exhaustive discussion of the connection of Enlightenment thought to classical liberalism and libertarianism is not necessary for this audience, so I will summarize. Reason, the individual, equality, property rights, the separation of church and state, and science and politics freed from religious dogma. These pillars underlie the classical liberalism that many point to and exclaim, here, we finally found our freedom. Instead, what if these have cost us our freedom? What is Enlightenment? Immanuel Kant gave us his answer. Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Have courage to use your own reason. That is the motto of Enlightenment. There's Diderot's Encyclopedia, considered one of the greatest cultural and intellectual achievements of the Enlightenment. A 20 million word man-made blueprint for the creation of a rational, improving and cultivated society. I checked and God only needed 800,000 words more or less to give us a much better blueprint, in my opinion. Theology is kneeling, subordinate to reason. Diderot explained, in countries enlightened by the light of reason and philosophy, the priest never forgets he is man, subject and citizen. Or as Stephen Pinker proclaims, Enlightenment now, the case for reason, science, humanism and progress. In other words, the case against tradition and religion. And by religion, you can read Christianity. Yet who can deny the progress? It is easy to identify the many goods we attribute to Enlightenment thinking. The acceleration of trade and the drastic improvements in the economic standard of living. Political concepts such as classical liberalism are developed and therefore we believe our freedoms. Well, maybe. As Hans Hoppe offers, according to the proponents of this theory, of which he mentions Francis Fukuyama and Stephen Pinker, what makes the present age so great and qualifies it as the best of all times is the combination of two factors. Hoppe offers first the highest levels of technology and natural science in human history. To which he raises no objection. And second, the highest level of human freedom, which Hoppe considers a historical myth. And T. Wright offers, any movement that gave us the guillotine as one of its first fruits and the gulag as one of its finest cannot simply be affirmed as it stands. The bads of the Enlightenment are not so readily admitted by its proponents. Communism, eugenics, racial purity, selective breeding, national socialism, Fabianism, progressivism, fascism, egalitarianism, modern democracy, freedom from all intermediating governance institutions, the ineffective separation of church and state, the American Revolution, the French Revolution. Regarding the two revolutions, the America that came out of the revolution is described by Ralph Raco as the model liberal nation. And after England, the exemplar of liberalism to the world. This exemplar of liberalism didn't survive four score in seven years, ending in 1861. And if you prefer to make the case for 1846 or 1812, you'll get no argument from me. Whatever one believes regarding liberalism, staying power certainly cannot be considered a meaningful characteristic. But this example is much more successful than what came shortly thereafter. From his magnum opus, from Don to decadence, Jacques Barzun offers. The French Revolution of 1789 must be called the liberal revolution. What does Barzun mean by liberal? He offers as an example a law passed two years after the outbreak. There are to be no interests other than the interests of the individual and the general interest of all. No intermediate interests are permitted. An attack not only on tyrannical authority, but also on guilds, associations, universities, and especially Christianity. Every intermediating institution that provided decentralization in governance and stood against the monopoly authority of a centralizing state. Every intermediating institution that Robert Nisbet suggests offered the individual room and cover for his freedom. Simon Schama offers that such an attack on intermediating institutions was welcomed by the elite. The people, powerless without these intermediating institutions or the king to turn to, saw it another way. Not all enlightenment thinkers wished for the guillotine or the gulag, as we certainly know. Many sincerely held man's liberty in their sights. John Gray offers that the asserted universal truth of the link between the enlightenment and liberal values is tenuous. It was strongest in enlightenment monotheists and weakest in those thinkers hostile to monotheism. Yet a generic monotheism offers no sustainable foundation. Our liberties were born well before the enlightenment in a specific cultural and religious tradition. Those who lived in and developed this tradition would not refer to themselves blandly as monotheists. Let's look at this history. Barzoon offers, the truth is that during the thousand years before 1500, a new civilization grew from beginnings that were uncommonly difficult, showing the world two renaissance before the one that has monopolized the name. The Germanic invaders brought a type of custom law that some later thinkers have credited with the idea of individual freedom. No rule was held valid if not approved by those it affected. Anglo-Saxon law defined crime literally as breaking the peace. This era was born after the fall of Rome. Germanic tribes mixed with Christianity to create a culture that valued Christian ethics and German honor, resulting in what Fritz Kern describes as the old and good law, law of custom and good tradition. A man's oath made his law. Any noble could veto the king if he could demonstrate his right in this old and good law. A law regime about as libertarian as has ever existed for an extended period in the West and even in the world. Neither the church nor the king held sovereignty. If anything held sovereignty, it was the law. Each of the church and king competed with the other in different yet overlapping circles, with one or the other taking a stronger or lesser role over the years. In this space between church and king, freedom blossomed. In the space between church and king, numerous meaningful, intermediating governance institutions took root, giving the individual both the room and the means to exercise his freedom. It was a time when the church could reprimand the king, despite having no army and no physically coercive means other than what the king provided. Libertarians speak approvingly about the use of shunning when dealing with non-aggressive trespasses. Well, try the eternal shunning of excommunication. Pardon. In Ecclesiastes, we read of the meaninglessness of life when weighed against the eternity that God has placed in the hearts of men. In the Europe of the Middle Ages, the noble was concerned with his eternal life and God's eternal kingdom. And this concern shaped his behavior, no longer the case since the Enlightenment. The common motto for today's enlightened nobility is he who dies with the most toys wins. This is reflected in our time. Corruption, lust, and greed define the new nobility. During much of the Middle Ages, there was a meaningful and functional separation of church and king, each superior in its realm, neither with sovereign power or authority, each offering an avenue for appeal if one felt his liberties were unfairly compromised by the other. Today we have the subordination of church to state. One recalls the exchange between the Jewish priests and Pilate regarding Jesus' fate. Pilate asked, shall I crucify your king? And in reply, the priest shouted, we have no king but Caesar. Sounds like a typical Sunday morning in America. And I think you can check with Lawrence Vance, and he'll give you some details on that if you need. With the Enlightenment, the idea of leaning on tradition and custom was thrown out. The most important tradition to remove was Christianity, not necessarily its ethics, just the supernatural history, the theology, and the church, as if the ethics could exist for long without God and an institution behind these. Barzoon offers, the Bible must be shown to be a set of fables invented by ignorant or designing people. What was a generally accepted belief in Christianity throughout the population began to dissolve in the 18th century. NT Wright points to the earthquake in Lisbon on All Saints Day in 1755 as a key event in this regard. A massive earthquake and calamity that completely shook Christianity. Man's reason could not accept that a good and wise God would allow such terrible tragedies. Drop the ritual and the prayers. Ignore the priests and the monks. Wipe out the disgrace, Voltaire said of the Roman Catholic Church. Voltaire, the Enlightenment illuminated, according to Shama, did his part to make this so through a series of four and five page pamphlets consolidated into a portable philosophic dictionary. Who needs 1,700 years of scholarship and tradition to shape your philosophy when you can carry with you a portable dictionary. No more of the Scott of the Bible. Deism became the religion of reasonable men. God did create the universe, but the story of Genesis is a fable. God did set the rules, the laws of science. He has no reason to interfere thereafter. Jesus? Sure, he was a good and wise man, but out with the virgin birth and the resurrection. The road from Deism went through a revived Epicureanism and ended in Nietzsche's infamous God is Dead, to be found in the parable of the madman, published toward the end of the 19th century. After all, how big a leap is it from Deism's watchmaker to Epicureanism's gods that don't care to God is dead? Where has God gone? Nietzsche's madman cried. I shall tell you, we have killed him, you and I. We are his murderers. Whether are we moving now? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? The madman found that no one would listen. He lamented that he came too early. The great war, the suicide of the West, was still a few years away. What did Nietzsche see as replacing God in his moral law? Man-made ethics would be at the top of the pyramid. The enlightened elite were happy to comply. They would be the superman, establishing a new ethos, new standards of right and wrong, replacing Christian virtues. Each of us using our own reason, making our own compass, creating our own definition of true north, one cannot even claim the non-aggression principle in such an environment. On what basis? Well, we do have Hapa and his argumentation ethics, but not so fast, and forgive me, Hans. From his radio broadcasts during World War II, C.S. Lewis offers that two people properly argue on the basis of some standard. Frank Van Dunne offered a similar comment at last year's Property and Freedom Society Conference to summarize, argumentation ethics is constantly appealing to the other person's conscience. The things we already share, literally, common knowledge. But the ideas of the Enlightenment, liberty, equality, the individual, patriotism, and progress are all abstract ideas, large buckets that can be filled with a wide variety of contents. We complain that these terms don't have the meaning that we intend or the meaning that was originally intended, just as socialists complain the same thing. Who is to say how and with what these buckets should be filled? Based on what foundation? Based on whose reason? Without a common conscience, who or what will arbitrate? Voltaire has said, common sense is not so common. Well, without sense, that is common on what basis do we live peacefully? In a state of conviviality, as Van Dunne puts it, we can't and we have proved it. Barzoon describes the Great War as the blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction. Yet this blow was struck in the West at the time we consider to be the most enlightened, peaceful and free. The decades before the outbreak of the war are known as La Belle Epoche, the beautiful era. It was an optimistic time, born after the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Regional peace, political stability, passport-free travel, material prosperity, technological and scientific innovations, literature and music, the height of what we might consider classical liberalism and freedom. Certainly there was regional peace in Europe, but there was much violence between and among these same actors and against the native populations in the battle for colonies around the world. The art of violence was practiced and perfected. Arms were developed in order to ensure victory. This art would soon be turned inward. The Great War, perhaps alone among all substantial human conflicts, remains almost unexplainable. Why and how could such a thing have happened when and where it did? In this beautiful era, among the beautiful and enlightened people, Alexander Solzhenitsyn offered an answer. He said, men have forgotten God. Nietzsche's madman would agree. In the Great War's wake, Western culture and society were transformed in speed and magnitude, perhaps unknown in history. Family life broken, careers ended, government allowance in the place of productive work, and a tide of egalitarianism. In other words, the perfect cultural soil for the expansion of monopoly state power. War became total war, in large part driven by another gift of the Enlightenment, modern democracy. While Lincoln established the precedent 50 years earlier, it was finally in the Great War when war of all against all became generally accepted throughout and within Europe. An event for the nation and not merely the combatants. An advance to barbarism, as offered by FJP Ville. Poison gas, air raids over civilian populations, submarines destroying ships regardless of flag or purpose, the blockade of civilian food and supplies. Even the peace not leading to relief. And church towers used as observation posts, leading to their destruction. Painting a picture of the cost of the Enlightenment far better than my few thousand words. The war shattered the utopian visions of these students of Enlightenment, leading to the change from what we now call classical liberalism to its modern incarnation. Barzun describes this transition as the great switch. A switch from the idea that the best government is one that governs least to the idea that the best government is one that will give us liberty, good and hard. The deplorables are not capable of liberty. It must be forced upon them. At the time, the transition was barely noted except by authors such as Chesterton and Belach. The new liberal now had nothing standing between him and this individual. All intermediate, pardon me, all intermediating institutions, especially Christianity and the church, had been stripped of any meaningful role. Each individual was standing naked to be molded like clay by these progressive, enlightened, reasonable intellectuals. Legislation would solve every problem in life. Every need and want would be met. All be stowed via government largesse. Barzun describes these naked individuals as impotent, the receivers of benefits, victims, lacking room to breathe, oppressed by his fellows and the state alike. This naked individual now had but one objective. Barzun called it the unconditioned life. Emancipation from the realities of this world, nothing to stand in the way of every wish, expecting no rebuffs, life with no conditions, anything goes and you can't stop me. My pleasure is my highest priority. The highest goal in life is to be happy. Enlightened man, like his forefathers after the flood, who attempted to build a tower to heaven in order to be like God, found, as Paul Vander Clay says, that when you try to bring heaven down to earth, you bring hell up with it. We need not even look to the isms of interwar Russia, Italy or Germany. For examples of this, it is sufficient to look to the social justice liberalism and grievance studies curriculum of America today. Barzun concludes his magnum opus with a listing of the decadence found in the West over the last century. Man's liberation from all norms, traditions and customs, nothing left to provide governance except the state. And a state very happy to oblige. What happened to the promise of enlightenment? We consider the individual and reason as born in the enlightenment to be key foundations of liberty. As the meaning of these concepts has been divorced from God, these have actually brought on liberty's downfall. Without God, the enlightenment's liberty is a house built on sand. First, the individual without God. The individual was discovered not in the enlightenment or even in the Renaissance. Anselm of Canterbury offered us the individual in the 11th century with roots to be found even centuries before. Anselm's individual had a sense of self-awareness and a personal identity. An individual with a moral responsibility. An individual requiring spirituality. This was an individual who found his freedom within the cultural and religious context of the time. Free to live according to and within this tradition. This individual found and was able to maintain his freedom via the many intermediating institutions of the time. Most importantly, the church, which could stand against the king. The enlightenment's guillotine killed all intermediating institutions, thus killing the freedom of this individual. We now have an individual freed from such troublesome burdens as truth, justice, and mercy. An individual freed from any moral responsibility. An individual standing naked and impotent in front of the state. An individual living free in a gulag. Meanwhile, the state pushes further division, ever more individualized individuals. The state encourages and subsidizes culture-destroying behavior. As absent governance provided by custom and tradition, governance will be provided by the state. What a reason without God. As the enlightenment freed our reason from revelation and tradition, the result should be no surprise. Just because your reason has been freed doesn't mean that the strong man's reason will leave you alone, or that your reason will convince him. As his reason is no longer bound by anything other than his reason, it will not be your reason that governs but his. To what higher authority can you appeal? There is no higher authority than man's reason, and the strong man's reason has bigger guns than your reason does. Recognizing this strong man's reason, John Gray offers, what if the enlightenment's future is not in the liberal West, now almost ungovernable as a result of the culture wars in which it has mired, but in Xi Jinping's China, where an altogether tougher breed of rationalist is in charge. It is a prospect that Voltaire, Jeremy Bentham, and other exponents of enlightenment despotism would have heartily welcomed. Maybe God knew what he was doing when he warned Adam off of the tree of knowledge and good and evil, with death the consequence of man's reason without God. The Hoover Institution's Peter Berkowitz offered a five-part challenge to Patrick DeNene's recent book, Why Liberalism Failed. While suggesting that DeNene has gone too far and attributed too much fault to the concepts of the enlightenment, probably what some of you will say about this lecture, in part four he does recognize the detrimental features of contemporary society. The scorn for inherited wisdom, the demotion of duty in favor of personal preference, and the obsession with material goods and superficial amusements, at the expense of citizenship, friendship, and love, promoted by the individualism and statism that arise from taking the principles of freedom and equality to an extreme. Jordan Peterson asked regarding the post-modernists, what from the enlightenment do you toss out the window before things get ugly? Jonathan Goodwin suggests that this is the wrong question if one's objective is liberty. The question should be, what is required to be reintroduced that the enlightenment destroyed? In part five of his critique of DeNene's book, Berkowitz aims at answering this question. To this end, he cites Edmund Burke, from Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, written in 1790. History consists for the greater part of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites. These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, rights of men are the pretexts. It is worth noting, none of the vices identified by Burke violate the non-aggression principle, except maybe revenge, depending on how cold the dish is when served. Yet perhaps recognizing these vices as dangerous to liberty and incorporating this recognition into their work is an appropriate task for libertarian thinkers of tomorrow. Continuing with Berkowitz. Burke rebuked the French revolutionaries for supposing that the rights of men authorized the blanket repudiation of inherited faith, the established regime, and the country's settled laws and the replacement with new modes of moral judgment and political order derived from pure reason. Given the cost to liberty of this repudiation, perhaps libertarian thinkers might incorporate something of the inherited faith and tradition when considering liberty as the objective. Further, Alexander Solzhenitsyn from his Harvard University commencement address in 1978. Having lived under a communist regime his whole life, he understood that a society without an objective legal scale is a terrible one, but a society with only an objective legal scale is as well. In such a society, man has been given freedom for good and evil, and such a society has no defense against the decadent abyss. He suggests that for a thousand years, man had freedom within a framework of his religious responsibility, but no such responsibility attaches today. Solzhenitsyn offers, this means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. The proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. Nietzsche offered the consequences of killing God in Twilight of the Idols. Despite the wishes of many Enlightenment thinkers, the English flatheads, as he describes them, when one gives up the Christian faith, one also loses the right to Christian morality. What is this moral Christian right, if not at minimum, the non-aggression principle? This is what man has given up in the Enlightenment. We have traded Christian morality and therefore our liberty for the enlightened Superman's reasonable right to decide what is moral. Libertarians point to many Enlightenment thinkers and their theories and concepts that freed the individual and empowered reason, concepts that we believe offer the foundations for liberty. But we knew all of this before the so-called age of reason. We did not need the Enlightenment to become enlightened. Hans Hoppe has made it acceptable, at least in these circles, for me to cite as foundational for liberty the decalogue, certainly the portion of it that related to man's relationship to man. Honor your father and mother. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery, steal, or bear false witness. Do not covet your neighbor's wife or his possessions. As Hoppe offers, some libertarians may argue that not all of these commandments have the same rank or status. This is quite true. In some cases, we see nonviolent trespasses. The question for the libertarian as libertarian, does the violation rise to the point of requiring formal physical punishment? Jesus answered this question. We read in John chapter eight of the Pharisees bringing to Jesus a woman caught in adultery, certainly not an offense that libertarians would view as rising to the level deserving of physical punishment. The law commanded stoning for such an offense. The Pharisees asked Jesus what should be done with this woman. His reply, he that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone. Yes, it was a sin, but it was not a violation worthy of physical punishment. One by one, the accusers left. Jesus then admonished the woman, go and sin no more. Advice and counsel, not punishment, is the example Jesus gave us regarding what we would describe as a nonviolent trespass. Libertarians lament our inability to convert the masses. Who can disagree with the logic and the purity of the non-aggression principle? We cry while pouring ashes on our head. Maybe we should consider this lack of a common conscience. Maybe we should consider that for us to move toward liberty, this cultural and religious tradition must be the foundation. Goodwin recently asked, is libertarianism sufficient for liberty? Is it our objective to purify libertarian theory or is it to find liberty? Maybe we should consider what it means to have lost the right to Christian morality when it comes to moving toward liberty. If our objective is liberty, maybe we should consider the necessity of regaining this lost right. The one person that I had read a draft of this at all, so before today was my dad. I asked him to read it because he knows the Bible probably better than almost anyone standing in a pulpit or on a stage on a Sunday morning. I'd say present company accepted. And I had already included these other references, biblical references. I asked him, what else am I missing or what else can you think about? And he offered the following, it's from the book of Romans. Paul offered the consequences of discarding the knowledge of God by the enlightened of his generation in Romans one beginning with verse 18, through to the end of the chapter. We read of God's wrath against those who suppressed the truth by their wickedness from Paul. Just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind so that they do what ought not to be done. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death. They not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. Now, I won't read the rest of the chapter here if you're interested, I'll suggest you read it on your own. The reason I won't read it is I'm quite certain YouTube will then block this video. They may even take down the entire Mises channel. I think it's safe to say that Paul was not woke and I think I can safely say that my dad isn't either. Paul could be writing to our generation. From the seventh of his eight-part Gifford lectures, Wright offers, to be an image bearer is more than just behavior. Otherwise, we put the knowledge of good and evil before the knowledge of God. By not keeping the knowledge of God before individual reason, good stands no chance against evil. As good loses to evil, we most certainly lose our liberty. This ultimately is the cost of the Enlightenment. Thank you. I promise I'll take questions but I can't promise that I can answer them all, so. Thank you very much. When an imperialist nation invades another nation, they wanna win the hearts and minds of the population so they can make them more docile and control them and rule them. With Diderot in creating the Encyclopedia, his goal was to create one book that would be for the masses and throw away all the other books. Most people don't know that. My question is that you talk about the church and the state and that individuality but is not that individuality such that it's allowed to exist in a log rolling fashion only within the parameters that both the state and the church want to exist until the Protestant Reformation with the solace of scripture. My question is, is that do you see also that this individuality is only allowed to exist so it's in the interest of the state and the church? And then also, do you see the enlightenment as a long-term psychological operation in response to the Reformation? The individual that I see at the time when there was a church and not a state, it was a king because there was no state. When the church and the king each had authority in somewhat different realms, very different realms, but they were obviously overlapping. Yes, an individual had to conform to the culture and tradition around him. When I think of libertarianism, I don't think of finding the world or a community where I fit perfectly. I think of decentralization and I think of where do I have the most choices to find something that I am comfortable fitting within. So if you're asking like, does an individual have to conform within a certain cultural tradition? I don't know how an individual survives unless they wanna go live in a mountaintop or something absent that. Is your question about the enlightenment? Yeah, do you see it as a psychological operation to counter the reformation effectability of man? Oh, I don't know. Look, each one of these events had a reason for the event. And I wouldn't even call them an event because people living at the time that we consider the birth of the enlightenment weren't thinking about enlightenment. They were thinking about issues they were dealing with at the time they were dealing with them. So I mean, in terms of some long-term psychological thing, look, that realm is for, you know, angels and demons, right? And I leave that to everybody to decide if that's how the game's being played. Question back here. I'd like your reaction to a couple of authors. First of all, at the beginning of your talk, you mentioned Stephen Pinker. And one impressive thing about his books, Enlightenment Now, and then his earlier book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, is he's got a lot of empirical evidence in the books. You know, he's saying, you know, are things better now since the Enlightenment? Let's look at the data. And with the better angels of our nature, he looks at interpersonal violence. You know, are we better in that regard? And he's got a lot of data there. So I'd be interested in your following up a little bit of comments on Pinker. And secondly, a lot of people came to libertarianism through reading Ein Rand. And Rand is obviously hostile to religion. So I would also be interested in your comments about libertarianism and religion with regard to Ein Rand and her work. First question, I will lean strongly on Hans, as you can tell I pretty much did throughout the lecture. Hans gives a very thorough discussion of Pinker's work in the Last Property and Freedom Society Conference. And I think the video's available online as is the written lecture. As I recall, and there's at least one person in the room that can certainly correct me if I'm recalling incorrectly. Pinker very much ignores the violence perpetrated on us by the state. So yes, theft is much reduced if you don't count the 40 or 50 or 60% of taxes taken from us, right? Violence is very much reduced if you don't count the perpetual wars we've been living in. It's very much reduced if you don't count the violence against the victims incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, right? And my understanding, and I'll take it from Hans, is that once you ignore all of the ways violence is being perpetrated on us and we live in a very peaceful society. Oh, Ein Rand, look, I'll raise my hand to that one too, one of the very first things I read was her very short novel, Anthem. As I've worked through this, I don't know how libertarianism is sustainable without a cultural foundation under it. Our entire Western civilization is built on a cultural tradition that survived for a thousand years and more, where this liberty was born. So there are many libertarians, probably most libertarians, who either would say the culture doesn't matter. Certainly religion is not necessary or religion is even an enemy to liberty. I make the distinction the way Jesus handled the woman caught in adultery, right? Let's separate these ideas of physical punishment versus proper living. But without a cultural foundation, who's rallying around this idea of free minds and free markets? I mean, there is nothing there, right? There's nothing there. People don't live in that space, right? We live in the space of a culture, we live in the space of a tradition. And if that's sustained and sustainable, there's a chance for increasing our liberty. Yes, where? Yes. The question, there is a verse out of judges that says in those days Israel had no king and everyone did what they saw fit. So my question to you is with the lack of Christian morality, do you think we are without a king and without a moral compass? We've each been convinced to make ourselves king, right? And it works well for the state, right? So either we lack a king or we're each a king, neither one, I'd say neither one works, but the reason, you know, the reason I look to the medieval period is there was a king offset by a church and a king who respected, look, when a king got excommunicated, he dealt with that, right? He wasn't just counting how much acreage he had by the time he died, right? What mattered to him was something about what happened after he died. So I don't think of king in any state sense. You know, when I use the word, if you will, favorably. But I think our time today, we're all convinced we're each our own king, which inherently means none of us are. And so somebody else gets to make all the rules and treat us how they want. Yes. Yeah, isn't there an answer to the excesses of what you called strong man's reason and the answer is behind you? It's Mises and his demonstration that the excesses of reason or the wrong past break down. It's the economic calculation argument. Look, everything, let's see, everything breaks down, right? I mean, if the medieval period with all of the, if you will, relatively positive features for liberty, even this broke down, people want power, right? Look, I stand here as a big supporter of that sign. That sign doesn't defend itself. What defends it, right? What defends it? So yeah, it will break down. We're seeing the breakdown. It may not be very pleasant, but we're seeing it. In the meantime, look, markets themselves, it's difficult to envision humans finding meaning only in more stuff, right? If more stuff gave us meaning, we're all wasting our time here, right? I mean, we live in the 99.999th percentile of wealth and comfort of anybody, anywhere in the world, in history, right? So why do we keep lamenting about liberty, right? What's missing? We can all buy anything we need, anything we want, we can buy, reasonably speaking, certainly within comfort of life. So if you point to the sign and say, markets will break it down, markets don't give us meaning and they don't give us a sustainable culture or tradition, I think. Who's got the blue box? Okay. So as Westerners, we are heirs of the Greco-Roman world and you focus very strongly on the Roman world, especially the church in Rome with your medieval example. But at the same time, you also had another major Christian civilization and that was the Byzantine Empire, the Greco part of the Greco-Roman world. And there the relationship between the church and the emperor, you may have a better view on this than I do, was more of subordination of the church to the emperor as I believe the patriarch had some direct subordination and to the emperor. And you can see that continued system today in Russia now with the Russian Orthodox Church. Do you believe that this balance is also conducive to liberty or is this a separate system? Look, I'm not claiming to be an expert on any of this. I mean, you guys are the scholars. My dad asked me, who's the audience you're going to talk to? And I said, dad, these are all like scholars and academicians in any subject I may want to talk about. And he's not an expert obviously on what was in the whole paper. And he says, yeah, he says, he says, I could tell they must know something about the subject. And I said, dad, they know more about the subject than I do. As soon as you say the church is subordinate to the king or to the state, then the balance that was there in the Western tradition is no longer there, right? To say anything beyond that. I mean, look, I'm a child of the Western tradition. I can at least speak somewhat sensibly about that. But as soon as you say one subordinate to the other, which to my understanding is so, that means you've got one ruler. That means you've got, there isn't any division in power and authority. Those values of righteousness and truth that you mentioned were developed long centuries by very different people than we are under very different conditions. Do you think it's possible still to develop the same values all over again at a very different place where you are right now under these different conditions or should we find new ways of going about it? My point is not that we need new values. My point is these are different times, different conditions and we're different people and we don't have centuries. Do you think we still can? Oh, we may not have centuries. It may take more time than our lifetime. Look, first my belief in all of this is firmly grounded. Let's see. What I will say is firmly grounded in my belief that God is God. What will it take? Maybe Lawrence Vance, like more churches modeled after some of the things Lawrence writes about, like let's stop celebrating war and violence and destruction and troops and all of that nonsense. Let's stop that, right? Let's work on dealing with people who have problems with drugs in a manner other than using it as a pretext to get more people thrown in prison and to search more people, right? Start with those kinds of messages on Sunday. I imagine many churches and parishes would lose many members. I imagine many other people will be drawn to those messages. It's almost embarrassing that it takes an exemplar of the student of the Enlightenment, Jordan Peterson, to deliver a message of meaning to Western man that has lost all sense of meaning. Shouldn't that be happening every Sunday, right? But time, when I was a lot younger, I thought, oh, sometime in the next few years, yeah, the fed will be gone and this imperialism will end. Think longer term, right? There's an eternal life. There's an eternal kingdom. We'll have children. We'll have grandchildren, right? And if nobody is talking about these things now, then nobody talks about them. Thank you all. Thank you.