 he are going to talk today about a mystery, a mystery, who is killing or what, who and what Western civilization. And as always interested in your point of view, what do you think is responsible for the decline in Western civilization? How bad is this decline? Is this, is it reversible? Is there hope? And, but where's it emanating from? What is really the cause of this? Because, you know, there's a lot of hysteria, panic. Is there a decline imminent? Are we heading towards the end of the world? As if you listen to some people, you would be led to believe. Call in 347-324-3075, both of you are on Facebook Live or you're listening to this on Blog Talk Radio 347-324-3075. Would appreciate somebody in the chat just letting me know the quality of the sound and letting me know if it's good. So let's start by just, you know, this, I guess a basic fact, right? Western civilization is in decline, has been in decline. We would all argue, I in Rand argued, Leonard Peacoff has argued for quite a while, right? For at least a hundred years, arguably, Western civilization as Western civilization has been in decline, you know, since the early part of the 19th century, but certainly since the beginning of the 20th century. I like the date, 1913, where you get real manifestation of the beginnings of the real decline, 1913, in the United States is the year we got an income tax, it's also the year that we get a federal reserve. 1914, World War I breaks out, you know, millions and millions and millions of Europeans are slaughtered. For what? For what? You know, hard to tell. You know, collectivism is on the rise. Of course, we then get World War II, increased statism in America, increased regulation, slow economic growth, slow innovation. And here we are today. We're arguably, we're just closer and closer and closer. We keep inching closer. Some would say sprinting closer to some kind of abyss, some kind of end to what Western civilization is, what Western civilization means. So part of the question is how close are we and how bad things really are? And we can talk about that. But then, why are we, where is this heading? So what's the outcome going to be? Another question is why is it happening? And that's where I really want to focus today, is why is it happening? What is the cause of this? And certainly right now, I see a lot of people, you know, just on the verge of hysteria because of, I don't know, immigrants because of Islam and terrorism and those, is that what the end is going to look like? Is that the cause of our real panic, of our real stress? Is it Donald Trump? Maybe it's Obama, right? Eight years of Obama. That would end any civilization, right? So what is really driving? The end of Western civilization. And what is Western civilization? I mean, we can talk about the end of Western civilization. But what is it? And what are we trying to defend? What is its nature? And for example, a lot of people say, you know, immigrants are coming in and they're destroying our culture, which is against Western civilization because our culture is Western, maybe by restricting immigration, we would at least save Western civilization. Would that work? Is the real threat to Western civilization coming from the outside? Is that its source? So a lot of stuff to talk about. I don't know how much of this will actually cover. I don't want to get into a long discussion of immigration. By the way, if you're interested in the topic of immigration, choir immigration, I did an interview with Amy Peacoff yesterday. You can get that interview and blog talk radio. Just put Amy Peacoff. You can get her excellent podcast. You can download that podcast. But the specific one we did yesterday on immigration, I mean, you should subscribe to all of her podcasts. But the one on immigration yesterday, I did, we spent about an hour and a half. She had a whole list of questions, kind of the typical objections to open immigration. So a great opportunity to, Amy did a great job asking the questions and challenging me. I'm sure many of you would say she wasn't tough enough on me. But I think we covered pretty much all of the points. I'm sure that if we'd have some anti-immigration on there, he would have pushed harder and he would have distorted some of the points I made and come at it from a little differently. But I think for the most part, Amy agrees with me. And it was an opportunity to lay it really out, to really lay out my position on immigration. Some of you know it was originally slated to be a debate, but the person I was supposed to debate bailed out because he admitted that he basically couldn't stay civil during the debate. And you know, so it was great. So we actually laid out what immigration should look like in a lesbian, capitalist free, objectivist world. What would it look like? What should it look like today? And even we discussed how you would start transitioning from a good policy today to a laissez-faire kind of open border like immigration. So you have a real opportunity to listen to that, go to Amy Peacuff and Bogtalk Radio and download that. I think those of you interested in the immigration issue, I think this would be valuable. I don't know that I said anything significantly new that I haven't said any other things, but I did organize it. It's better organized and we covered things that I don't think I've covered before in that way in kind of a systematic way and a comprehensive way. So we are talking today about who is killing, Western civilization. Of course, immigration is one of the villains that people project as the source of the decline of Western civilization. Certainly in Europe, it's Islamic immigration, that is killing Europe, that's killing Western civilization in Europe. Okay, we've already got a caller. So let's take the call. Let's see if this can help frame the debate. Hi, you're on the Iran Book Show. Who's this? Hey, Jennifer, how are you? Fine, how are you? I'm good, I'm good. So I was reading articles, yes, go ahead. I was reading articles like from the 1800s. People were talking about immigrants back then, like from Ireland and Italy and China. And they were saying exactly the same stuff they say now about like Mexicans. They were drunks and subhuman animals, and they were going to ruin American culture, and they were criminals and all the same kind of stuff, total hysteria, exact same stuff they say now. And it didn't happen. They ended up assimilating, and now people love St. Patrick's Day in Chinatown and all that stuff. I don't see why they couldn't assimilate now the same way. How is it any different? Well, I'd say there's only one difference, and this I think gets to the core, but I agree with you completely. And if you go back to the 19th century and you read some of those newspaper articles, I think people, the Irish and the Italians and the Jews and the Poles and pretty much everybody was treated back then and the similarities between how today we treat Mexicans and others who come into this country. The only difference is, and I think it's an important difference, and it kind of goes to the root of what my argument is going to be about killing of Western civilization. The only difference is that America then had a certain confidence in its own values, in its own culture. So when people came here, there was no multiculturalism. There was no idea that, oh, you should preserve your culture. Oh, if you come from this other place, you should you should speak your own language, and you could celebrate your own holidays and and do all the things like you did back then. And there's no better culture, and there are no worse cultures, all cultures are the same. There was definitely this view of you're coming here to assimilate and to assimilate into a superior culture, superior civilization, and it's incumbent on you to make that effort. It will help you where we can, but you have to you have to embrace America and everything America stands for. And today when Mexicans come, particularly if they go to universities or they or the kids go to schools, at the schools they're told, oh, your Mexican culture is just as good as our culture. Indeed, really, California belongs to Mexico, don't tell anybody. But really, this land is your land. And there's nothing special about America, and please don't assimilate, because by assimilating, you will actually, you will actually be worse off, right? So, so I think the difference is us, and I will get to, you know, that's kind of going to be my theme in terms of who's killing Western civilization, we are. Now, what is killing it, we'll get to in a second, but at the end of the day, it's our Mexicans, it's our Muslims, it's not anybody else, it's us. But let me keep working, you know, towards that as we go along. So thanks for the call, Jennifer, and a great point about immigration. I don't think I made that point yesterday in Amy's show, but you can only cover so much. Immigration is kind of a topic that keeps on giving because there's so much to say about it. And the misconceptions out there are so deep and so real that it's pretty amazing. So thanks for the call. There is a, you know, Tim on the chat is saying, yeah, but the Irish and Chinese immigrants 100 years ago did not declare war against America and promised murder. True. But that only relates to a certain number of immigrants, right? And it doesn't, it doesn't relate to immigration. It relates to a particular ideology that some immigrants are coming here with. And that can be dealt with pretty easily. And again, if you go to Amy Peacoff's podcast yesterday, I deal with that question, what do you do about the threat of Islam? I've also dealt with it in many other places. And actually, I'll talk about it now. Right? So one idea is, one prevalent idea that Tim's expressing is one of the things that is killing Western civilization is, is the fact that we've got this massive immigration by people who want to kill America. Right? True. But why do we allow them to come here without vetting them? Why, why are these people who've been a war with the United States have declared war in the United States for what now almost 40 years, right? Since 1979, at least. Why is there still a war going on 40 years after it was declared or 38 years after it was declared? And we haven't won it yet. Why is there still a war after 9 11 happened and 3000 Americans died? Why is there still a war going on? So that's not because of them. I would argue that's because of us. I mean, I've said many times it's a war that we could end in a few weeks. Okay, so I may be an exaggerate. You know, some of you would say, oh, Iran's exaggerating, you know, he doesn't really want to nuke every single country in the Middle East, which I don't necessarily think that's okay. So a few months, but certainly not 40 years or 38 years take to win this war. So if we'd won the war in 2003, I'm going to be generous two years after 9 11. Then of course, this wouldn't be a problem. I truly believe that you could win the war again, not going to get into a tear. So the question is, why don't we win the war? What is preventing us from winning the war? Well, if we understood what was preventing us from winning the war, that is what is also killing us. That is what is killing Western civilization, the same thing that's holding us back. But it's deeper because the war is easy to win. That's a cone existential threat. But first of all, it's not that big of an existential threat with all due respect to all the people out there who obsess about the threat of Islam. I mean, it's a threat. I don't want to minimize it. But the fact is your chances of dying in a terrorist attack, even today with the pathetic way in which we're dealing with all of this is pretty minor and insignificant. Doesn't say we shouldn't win the war. Doesn't say we shouldn't make it zero. And maybe you can't make it zero. Maybe it always been tiny, but it's tiny. Even in Europe, where there are millions of Muslim immigrants, the probability of dying from an Islamist attack, terrorist attack, is very small. Now people say, but it's going to be higher in the future. Maybe, maybe. But again, that is only a reflection of our weakness, not of their strength. Remember, this is an enemy that builds nothing, that makes nothing. The comparison to fascism or communism is pathetic because the fascists and the communists, the police, built stuff. They had weapons. The only reason these guys have weapons is because we sell them to them. So yeah, these terrorist attacks instill fear partially because we take them out of all proportion and we exaggerate their effect on our lives. But more importantly, they perpetuate fear and they change the way we behave because we don't deal with them. Because we don't actually go out there and kill them. We don't actually go out there and crush them and destroy them. So yeah, I'm fearful because my government is so pathetic and defending me that yeah, I think this could get worse and worse and worse. And the long-term consequences of not doing anything about this could be devastating to my own life. And yes, at the end of the day, the way civilizations disappear is they're overrun by barbarians. And it very well could be, particularly in Europe, that the disappearance of Western civilization in Europe will happen because the barbarians from the Middle East overrun them. But that is not, the barbarians are not the cause. They weren't the cause of the decline of Rome. And they're certainly not the cause of the decline of Western civilization. So it's not, it's not some external force anymore than bad trade deals are the reason for low economic growth in the United States. If you want to look at why we have low economic growth, which is again, another symptom of the decline of America, it's because it's what? Because we have statism, because we regulate economy, because we tax people to death, because we control, because we have a lousy educational system run by the government that doesn't teach people to think. And therefore, they're not that productive. So if I'm thinking, okay, what are the causes? It's not bad trade deals. It's us. It's not the Chinese, not the Japanese, not anybody else. It's us. We are the villains of the story. Now, why are we the villains? What is causing us to be such villains? That's a different question, right? Now, somebody, some people on the chat are comparing terrorism to a tornado, something like that. You know, that's completely wrong. And I'm not trying to trivialize terrorism. A tornado is an act of nature. Kind of, it's not really an act in a sense that it's willed. It's an accident. And it has to be viewed as an accident, just like car accidents. You don't compare terrorism to car accidents. Accidents happen. They just do. You can protect yourself to the extent that you can. Technology prevents deaths of tornadoes, because we get warnings. Technology prevents deaths in auto crashes, because we have airbags and all this other stuff. So you prepare and you defend yourself. But these are accidents. When it comes to terrorism, it is premeditated. And it's an issue of justice. And therefore, it has to be addressed. And that is the role of government. The one role of government is to protect us from these kind of, you know, monstrous attacks. And of course, it is our government that is failing to do that. So these monstrous attacks are a real threat on Western civilization. But is Western civilization going to end because of Islam? No, it's not. Again, it will end because of our weakness to the threat of Islam. And where does that weakness come from? That's the real question. Why are we so weak when facing this threat? And I would argue even deeper than that. It's not even the Western civilization is going to end from the threat of Islam, right? I'm much more concerned, much more concerned about the riots in Berkeley than I am about Islamic terrorism right now. Because we're going to kill ourselves. I mean, you could project 20, 30 years down the road and a civil war between half the population that's alt left and half the population that's all right, alt right, we'll kill ourselves. Yeah, the barbarians will ultimately come in, but they'll come in in order to pick on the corpses of dead Americans because we'll go after each other. So I don't know if you're familiar with what happened in Berkeley, but Milo went to speak there. There were protests. I don't have a problem with protests. Protests turned into riots when these black clad people came, they pepper straight, other students, they beat people up. There was real violence, but what is really horrifying about it, the really horrifying part of the Berkeley riots is the fact that the Daily Californian, the student newspaper at Berkeley ran a whole series of editorials, a whole series of editorials on Tuesday for February 7th. You can go find this online defending the violence, saying the violence was okay. Now I would even go another step. That is, Milo, while has every right in the world to speak his mind, and I would defend that right, is creepy and represents the same kind of ideology, the same kind of ideas, the same kind of underlying premises that the alt-left does, that these rioters do. And if these are the alternatives that we face today, if it's Milo versus Milo and his alt-right friends, although he claims he's not alt-right, he just defends them constantly, versus these crazy violent rioters from the alt-left, if that is, if that is the difference, then it is, that's what scares me, that's what's going to destroy us. Now, by the way, Tim is comparing Milo to Lenny Bruce. No, Lenny Bruce was nowhere near creepy. Lenny Bruce was shattering speech codes, he was challenging us. Milo is not challenging us. Milo is a nihilist, and we'll get to nihilism in a minute. Milo is a nihilist. He's not the, and Lenny was to say, Lenny Bruce was to some extent, but Milo is not there to make us laugh. Milo is not a professional comedian. Milo is serious. Milo is a serious cultural commentator. He writes serious essays. Now, the essays I believe to a large extent are disgusting, and I think his views to a large extent are disgusting and silly and stupid, but they're not done for the purpose of humor. They're done for the purpose of knocking people down, of knocking things down. When he goes in front of audience and outs people, like a transgender person at the University of Wisconsin, he doesn't do that in jest. He doesn't do that in jest. He does it in order to knock that person down and knock transgender people down, or whatever you think of transgender people. That's just ugly. That's just offensive. No, Milo is a nihilist. Milo worships the zero. Milo is a worshipper of destruction, of offending, of tearing things down. That is the essence of nihilism, tearing things down. And that's what Milo is. Milo is not for positive values. And it's true. Milo himself might not be a racist. Milo himself might not be part of a white supremacist group. I don't think he is, but Milo is setting those white supremacists up. Milo is setting the stage for the kind of violent response from the right that we are going to see in our future to a large extent as a counterforce to the violent response from the left. So the right, because it is void of any ideology, because it doesn't stand yet for anything, all it can do is respond to the left. All it is is a knee-joke reaction to the left. So Milo is a knee-joke reaction to the nihilism of the left and saying, hey, I can do that too. You want to knock stuff down and destroy stuff down and make fun of everything? I can do that too. So he is a nihilism from the right. And he is responding. And when the left gets violent, my expectation is ultimately the right is going to get violent, and indeed in some places it already has become violent. And then the question is, what happens then? And that's a good question, and I'll get to my answer to that. But they're all basically emotionalists, emotionalists on the left, emotionalists on the right, but they are motivated by nihilism. Nealism is the worship of zero. Nealism is the anti-values. Nealism is about knocking things down, destroying stuff, and not caring about building a value, but knocking down values. That is the essence of nihilism. And as Ayn Rand called it, it's driven towards them by envy, by the emotion of envy. It's hatred of the good for being the good. And you see that on both sides of the debate. You see that constantly, this nihilism. Now, it's often more explicit on the left, but the Milo's and the alt-right, it's obvious in the alt-right, and kind of the memes that they put together and the tweets that they send, that the point is not to raise anything up. It's to knock stuff down. It's to knock stuff down. And this is what Lena Pigov called D2s, disintegration, completely disintegrated epistemology. If you read the op-eds, that are defending the black-clad, violent rioters at Berkeley, what you see is a disintegrated mentality, people who cannot think, who cannot think. And this is a symbol of kind of that D2, what Lena Pigov calls that D2 mentality. Somebody was calling in a few minutes ago to ask a question, but they've gone away. So we're good. If you want to chime in on the discussion, have a point to make, or oh, there we go, you can call in 347-324-3075. Don't forget to press one so that I know you're asking a question and just not calling in, not calling in to ask a question, not calling in just to listen to the show. Now, somebody's asking, does nihilism acquire intent? Yes and no. The intent could be subconscious. That is very few people. I don't know that anybody actually holds it in their mind. I hate everything. I hate life. And what I want to do is destroy, knock things down, obliterate. I worship zero. No. I mean, people don't hold it like that. They hold it as an emotion, but what that emotion is reflective of is nihilism. When Milo insults people for the sake of insulting, right, but individuals, not just abstractly, that is nihilism. Ellsworth Tuey. Now, Ellsworth Tuey is a sophisticated nihilist and a self-aware nihilist, but that's because it's literature. I don't know, on the other hand, James Taggart, who's a nihilist, when he becomes self-aware of his own nihilism, goes crazy. That's out of the shrug. So, you know, you should all be reading out of the shrug than the fondant. So, but most people hold nihilism at an emotional level, not as a clear cut ideology that is going to, you know, is driven in that sense, right? Yeah. And that's right. So, Rand said that Tuey couldn't exist in reality, because it would give evil too much power. Nealism can't really hold itself and still be efficacious, still be able to do what it seeks out to do. You know, the ultimate nihilists are people who become violent and ultimately die very quickly. An intellectual nihilist like Paul Krugman has to evade their own nihilism, as I think somebody like Milo does as well. All right. We've got a bunch of callers now, which is cool. All right. Let's take the first one. How are you on the Iran Book Show? Area code 610. Who's this? Hi, Rand. This is Park from Fodos here. Hey, how's it going? Not bad. How are you? Good. Good. So, I wanted to bring up two points. The first, which you made yesterday, and one that I saw in the chat yesterday. And the first being, I think it's amazing how people, how, you know, the left, like the biggest joke is the left is like pro and open society. I mean, the unions, the hard left loves close borders. And it's funny to me how the conservatives are so quick to settle for a less than ideal society. I agree with you, but that's the nature of the left and right. The left does not hide its ambitions. So, I always use the healthcare debate as an example of this. The left said 50 years ago or more during FDR's period, really, we want universal healthcare. And then slowly, systematically, unapologetically, out in the open, they have passed laws and regulations that slowly move us towards universal socialized government-provided healthcare, right? The right never says what we want is 100% private healthcare and then tries to move systematically step by step towards that. The right is always playing defense. Oh no, you can't have Medicaid. You can't have Medicaid. Oh, you got it. Okay, fine. You can't have Obamacare. Oh, you got it. Oh, fine. You can't have, what do you call, what do you call it? Pre-existing conditions. That's wrong. Oh no, okay, you got it, fine. So, the right has never defined a goal because it's afraid to. It doesn't have the more courage to do it and we'll talk about why in a little bit. And the same with immigration. So, the left doesn't want immigrants. They've never wanted immigrants. When George Bush proposed in 2006, I think it was, comprehensive immigration reform, very similar to what Obama proposed later, where you would legalize or find a way to legalize 11 million who are illegals and then make it easier for people to come into the United States to work. It was the Democrats that blocked him because the unions don't want competition. And I mean, it's, it's, it's just funny how quick, how quick some people are to believe what, you know, what Trump might say about immigration and yet look at what, what this might actually do, which is not much and, which I mean, I mean, I think actions are much more revealing than, so my second point is, a point I saw in the chat was, well, who cares about civilization, worry about your own life? And I just think that's just absurd because, I mean, if you, if you know the nature of Western civilization, you know that a, a decline, a collapse in Western and civilization would be completely disastrous for your own life. I mean, something that an argument that Sam Harris makes about Islam, as he says, you know, fighting Islam is like a tax on his mind because he could be doing so many more productive things, but he has to, he has to fight Islam. And I think the one thing he misses is the bigger fight is the decline of the increasing irrationality in our culture. I mean, that's tax on productiveness, but it's a tax that needs to be removed. Absolutely. It's a tax on everything that we do, but it's, it's even deeper than that because the decline of Western civilization, which I believe has been going on for 100 years, mean, means we don't get it. We don't get art that is as good. We don't get a lot of that art, a lot of the art that I consume was produced, was produced a hundred and something years ago. It means our standard of living is lower. It means we're less free. It means we'll expose the fewer good ideas. So our minds in a sense are limited by the kind of interactions we have, you know, in every dimension it means that life for you as an individual is not as good. And this is hard for people to project because life's pretty good today. But how much better our life could be if we lived in a culture that embraced the enlightenment ideas and was as rich as we are today? I mean, it's hard even to imagine what that would look like. Yeah, I mean, it's like imagining what life would be under a gold standard. And to say, I mean, you still have to operate based on what the dollar is today, but to say that the 98% collapse in the value of the dollar hasn't been destructive is completely ludicrous. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And that's, again, the gold standard is just one, and I'm going to say little because in the big picture, I think it's still little little element in the decline of Western civilization. Imagine a million things that could be a gold standard. That is in economics, it's a gold standard in economics, there's no regulation. But then in art, you have romantic, beautiful painting and sculpture and literature and movies and plays and a benevolent sense of life among people like there was in the 19th century, where people embrace one another and you have flying cars, you know, it's just unimaginable how good life could be. Just take the gold standard and put it on steroids and you can start imagining kind of what values we would have. Thanks a call, really appreciate it. Let's take another caller. Hi, you on the Iran book show. Who's this? It's how you run this today from Portland, Oregon. Hey, Dave, how's it going? Great, great. Yeah, appreciate the topic and I wonder what you think about the idea that I think on a very fundamental level, self-esteem is an issue. Oh, it's definitely an issue, but it's not a primary issue. Self-esteem is a consequence of the kind of life you live, the kind of ideas you hold, the values and virtues, the values you pursue, the virtues that you act on. Self-esteem is a consequence. Now, it's something you need to consciously strive towards. It's a value. It's something you need to gain, to act to gain or keep, but it's the things that are preventing us from even dealing with self-esteem and indeed undercutting our self-esteem, which are the real cause of the decline in Western civilization. Outwardly, yeah, if we had self-esteem as a nation, there would be no Islamist threat. If we had self-esteem as a nation, we would not let stupid bureaucrats and pathetic politicians regulate giants of industry. If we had self-esteem, we would not be walking through TSA security lines without complaining and just accepting it, that the NSA is listening to our phone calls. If we had self-esteem life as we know it would be very, very, very different, the question is, another way to find the question is what is killing our self-esteem? What is killed? Because I think Americans had self-esteem certainly in the 19th century, early 20th century and even to some extent up into World War II, but since then our self-esteem is gone. What's killed our self-esteem? That's the question. I'm going to take another call and then we're going to we're going to start getting to the answer. Hi, you're new on Bookshow. Who's this? Aloha, Stuart. Hey, Stuart, how's it going? Being very heavily, I'm sorry about that, if you can hear it. No, no, I can't hear it, so we're good. Okay, I want to ask you about Israel. So, you know, Milo's friend, Stefan Mullen, you keep saying now that he and Richard Spencer just want a white homeland that keeps out non-whites. And then they say, well, that's just like Israel. They say, well, Israel is just an ethno state and they make it very difficult for Gentiles to immigrate to there. And therefore, if they establish their white homeland that keeps out non-whites, they're being no worse than Israel. Yeah, I mean, Stuart, I'm going to punt on the question, not because I don't want to answer what I do, but because it requires a lengthy explanation of why Israel indeed is a unique country and why it's different than any other country on the planet that I know, and why it is ethnocentric in a significant way, and why we could somehow justify that, at least in the world we live in today. But that would require a whole thing. So, I'm still going to do a show on Israel and cover that point, but I just don't want to do it right now. All right. Okay, we'll make one quick point about something else. Sam Harris is a sparring partner. Majid Nawaz, the liberal Muslim who is becoming more and more effective critic for Islam, he turned to you as his control left. He said, on the computer keyboard, you have an alt key. You have alt for right. You have a control key, so he calls them the control left. Yeah, I like that. But what I really like is the regressive left. I mean, that's what Dave Rubin calls them, and I think that makes the most sense, because in a sense they are essentially regressive, and actually we can use that for the right as well, because the right is regressive. So, to a large extent, there's a big portion of the right that's essentially regressive. So, I actually like the regressive left and regressive right, and actually control you could apply to the right as well, because they want to control us. They just want to control us in different ways than maybe the left does. But generally, I believe that over time, we will come to see more and more similarities between the left and the right as expressed in these alt control regressive movements. Yeah, thanks to it. Appreciate the call. All right, so let's start digging in. Okay, so what is, let's start by the question, the fundamental question of what is it that we're trying to save? What is Western civilization? What represents the essential core of Western civilization? What do we, what am I, hopefully you guys will join me, what am I trying to save? What is the essential characteristic? And here I'd like to recommend to all of you, the, well, I'd like to recommend the whole book, but certainly the prologue, the epilogue, sorry, the epilogue to Opa. Opa, for those of you who don't know, is the, is Objectivism the Philosophy of Ayn Rand? Maybe other than Ayn Rand's books, the most important book written in philosophy in the 20th century, the most important book written in Objectivism other than Ayn Rand's books in ever. So it's by Lena Peacoff, Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand. I recommend everybody not just read this book, but study this book. It is Objectivism. If you want to understand what Objectivism is, this is the book to help you understand it. In other words, if you want to understand Ayn Rand's thought thoroughly and systematically, I mean, suddenly you should read everything Ayn Rand wrote, but to really integrate it, to really get a comprehensive sense of it, to really get a comprehensive total of it, read Opa. And for those of you may be read it 20 years ago, read it again, or read a select chapter once in a while, because, because, you know, you can read, the chapters do stand on their own, particularly if you've read it once. You know, should you read it first? No, you should read Ayn Rand, but, but yeah, I mean, at some point, after Atlas Shrugged, at some point, if you've read some of the non-fiction, you can jump in and read it. So it doesn't require you, you know, it doesn't require you to, there isn't an order. There isn't an order. If you're ready for it, jump in and go read it. But this is, this is read, it's hard to read. It's philosophy. It's not a radio show. It's not politics. It's not current events. It's philosophy. And I would, I would say, soon after reading Ayn Rand, and I, you don't have to read everything Ayn Rand wrote before you read Opa, get into Opa. You can take a break once in a while. And the best way to read Opa, the best way to read Opa is in a study group. So get a few friends together, do a chapter week, do a section a week, every chapter is broken into sections. It took me, first time, second time I did this, I think I did it as a study group. This is 1992 or three, 92, 93, about a year after it came out. You know, he's an excellent writer. But 92, 93, what we did is we went after, I think it took us a year to get through the book. We studied every section. And it's brilliant. And it's a great, great book. But I would, I would, for the purposes of what we're discussing today, I would strongly recommend the entire book, but I would strongly recommend the epilogue. Because the epilogue deals directly with what is shaped Western civilization, what does Western civilization mean? Now he doesn't really talk about it in those terms, but he talks about the fact. The epilogue is called, by the way, the duel between Plato and Aristotle. And the essential theme is that for the last 2000 plus years, civilization or the world or the West, the Western world, certainly, but to a large extent, I think this is becoming global, has witnessed a struggle, a fight, a war between two radically different philosophies, Aristotle's and Plato's. When Plato wins the debate, if you will, when Plato wins in terms of influence, what you get is the dark ages. What you get is world wars. What you get is the decline of Western civilization. And this, this is going to get to the core of what is killing Western civilization. When the West or when, when the world does well, when civilization does well, when civilization is successful, it's because Aristotle's ideas are winning. It's because Aristotle's ideals are the ones shaping the culture, influencing people in the culture. It doesn't mean people in the culture are reading Aristotle. It doesn't mean people in the culture even know necessarily who Aristotle is. But the ideas of Aristotle are shaping their ideas the intellectuals hold. And the intellectuals are then writing books and writing articles and producing art and producing products and ultimately shaping politics in a way that reflects Aristotle's philosophy. And the common people, the rest of us, are benefiting from all of that and are imbued with Aristotelianism because that's just their culture out there. And probably the most recent era in history where Aristotle won or was winning until he suffered a major defeat was the Enlightenment. And if you look at the Founding Fathers, they're essentially Aristotelian. If you look at the art that comes out of the Enlightenment, it's essentially romantic. If you look at the Industrial Revolution, the Industrial Revolution is a cultural consequence, an economic political consequence of the philosophy of Aristotle. And what is it? So what's the fundamental difference between Aristotle and Plato? Now, this is a Lehman's version, right? I know there are scholars out there. They might even be scholars listening to the show right now. So here's your own Brooks Lehman version of these differences. Don't get me. All right. In metaphysics, Plato is essentially a primacy of consciousness, right? In a sense, we create the reality in which we live. Reality is not independent of our consciousness. It is a product of our consciousness. It is what we see is, it comes from our mind, it doesn't come from reality. Reality is not an independent force out there. Aristotle, reality is what it is. Reality is independent. It's the primacy of existence, the primacy of reality. All right, epistemology, epistemology. Knowledge is gained through some form of revelation, according to Plato. So some mechanism by which we discover some other world in which pure knowledge exists. And we might use human reason to try to get to that world, but not really, because not to the extent that you understand human reason as based on observation. So we get to that world, that world of forms, that other dimension, that mystical world. So fundamentally, Plato is a mystic. There's another dimension, another world in which truth exists. Aristotle, we know the truth based on reason, based on the use of our mind. There is an independent reality out there. There is a human mind. We can know the truth about the world through observation and through the use of our rational faculty. In ethics, again, at the end of the day, Plato wouldn't put it exactly this way, right? Your duty is to something bigger than yourself. The group, the state, the poly, you know, the polys, the other dimension, the whatever else there is, right? In Christianity would be to God. So self-sacrifice to that other dimension. Now, in Plato, and to a little extent in Christianity, ultimately, there is a reward for that. So you get rewarded in it in another dimension. So there is an ultimate reward, but in this world, in this life, it's about sacrificing your own self-interest. Aristotle is about happiness in this world, achieving happiness, achieving flourishing, achieving success as a human being, as a human being. So the idea of primacy of consciousness, mysticism and sacrifice as fundamental philosophical ideas are what lead ultimately to Christianity with its depravity, hatred of the individual, suffering, adoration of suffering, of sacrifice, of whipping oneself, of blood, of real pain, right? And the Dark Ages is a consequence. Aristotle is about the rediscovery, you know, starting in with Thomas Aquinas, a reason of the secular nature of reality, of it's okay to live for individual human happiness. We can know the world, and ultimately through that, there's a renaissance, there's a renaissance in art. Think about the manifestation in art in the Dark Ages. You get gargoyles. You get human beings that are distorted and disfigured and suffering and ugly and, you know, horrible. And then you get a renaissance. You get Michelangelo. Again, heroic, heroic man. Man is capable. Man is competent. Man is able. Man is beautiful. That represents a different stream. Plato and Aristotle in their manifestations are not taken to their logical extremes. Now, so Aristotle is the renaissance and the enlightenment and the greatest achievement in politics, certainly, is the United States of America, the recognition of the individualist sovereign above the state, above everything else, that he has the capacity to live his own life using his reason in with the goal of achieving his own happiness by commanding nature, which means nature is a separate entity. Reality does exist and we, through our reason, can command it by, you know, nature to be commanded must be obeyed, right? So by learning it, by studying it, by figuring out, using reason, using science, we then can command it. We then can change it. We then can create. We can build. We can be creative. We can be innovative. That is the fundamental. The fundamental is that struggle between Plato and Aristotle. Now, in the book and in many other writings, Leonard talks about the fact that Aristotle was inconsistent. To some extent, Plato was inconsistent. Plato becoming consistent is Immanuel Kant, who comes right after the, who basically ends the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, early 19th century and Aristotle's inconsistencies that drive, that a part of the Enlightenment then get crushed by Kant and Inran is then the consistent Aristotle. So she takes out all the inconsistencies. She takes out all the intrinsicism and the Platonism. She saves Aristotle from all the Platonic influences on his ideas. So the struggle today is still Aristotle versus Plato, but in fundamental sense, the struggle today is Inran versus Kant. And what's killing Western civilization? What has been killing Western civilization for the last 100 years is basically the victory of Plato, the victory of Plato in one way or another, the victory of Kant or ultimately Kant coming to his logical conclusion, which is nothing, which is emptiness, which is nihilism, right? It's nihilism of the German concentration camp. That was defeated. That form of nihilism was defeated. And now it's nihilism in the form of kind of the apathy, the resignation of most people in the West, the complete lack of self-esteem and the animation, the animation of this, of the regressive left and regressive right. You know, they are the ones animated. There's always minorities that are animated by a vicious kind of nihilism that is undercutting and destroying the West. And what really, what really ultimately leads to this is the lack of defense of Aristotle. So in a sense, evil gains when good is silent or when good can't defend itself. So the fact that so few people ever braced in Rand is the consistent Aristotelian. The fact that people have not embraced in Rand to fight the nihilism of the regressive right and the regressive left. The fact that they've not embraced in Rand as the weapon to save Western civilization. And the fact that we're still so small, the fact that we still have no influence. It's the vacuum created by the fact that we are so small and there's nothing out there. There's just this mush. Most people are just apathetic. Most people just don't know what to do with it. They're just there. But there's enough people motivated both on left and right to express their nihilism. You've got nihilism, nothingness and objectivism. There's almost nothing else. The only other thing is religion and we'll get to that. We'll get to that in a minute because I think ultimately the nihilism will collapse into a religiosity. And people who think the religion is dead in America are very, very, very wrong. And anyway, I still think Leonard Peacock is right in his hypothesis where he predicts that the ultimate death of American civilization will come at the hands of a religious dictator. I don't think it'll be a leftist dictator. Certainly don't think it'll be Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a nothing. He's a non-ideolog. He's a non-principled. At the end of the day, it's ideas that we now what we need, if you don't need, what we don't need actually, is a more consistent Platonist. And now I think the way in which Platonism would manifest itself in modern America is much more likely to be religion. Somebody like Steve Bannon is much more closer to this because he is very religious and he has this hatred of individualism and reason and capitalism. I think it is much more likely that somebody like Stephen Bannon represents where we're heading in terms of the decline of the West than it is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is in a sense just a tool for the Stephen Bannon's of the world, but he could get even uglier than Stephen Bannon. All right, we've got one more caller. Hi, you're in the Yoram Book Show. Who's this? Hi, my name is Chandra. Hi, Chandra. Hi, Yoram. I've actually, I've not been listening to this show completely. I've just joined right now. So I really find this topic very interesting. What is killing Western civilization? One observation is that Western world, one thing is very consistent from the beginning, that is celebration of success. So even in the past or even now, Western world celebrate success much more than any part of the world. But then now the definition of success has changed completely. So at one point of time, as you've been saying, individualism, individual contributions, achievements, they have been celebrated. But now, right now, the celebrations are like Super Bowls, Miss America's or probably some religious processions. So these are the celebrations, like when a youth tunes into media, any kind of media, he or she cannot really look into one single individual achievement. We don't celebrate Nobel Prize winners or inventions as much as we celebrate Super Bowls and Miss America's. So I think definition of success has predominantly changed because of this group conscious activities going on around. Yeah, no, I agree with you. And that's a manifestation of the fact that the idea of individualism, the idea of self interest, the idea of individual success, the idea of individual achievement has been undercut. And of course, ideologically, if your achievement manifests itself in making money, that is viewed as greedy and selfish in a bad sense and somehow dirty. So sports and beauty contest or singing contest or things like that, as legitimate as they are, they seem to be less about the money, they seem to be less about self interest and therefore, you know, people are much more willing to tolerate it, although there is a movement even to kill competition, to kill achievement and to kill embracing achievement, even in sports and in things like that. So even there, I think you're seeing people under attack. So I agree with you, but I think it's more fundamental. Go ahead. Right. Right. Even politics, like we are, at least after Donald Trump, we have started celebrating politics also, unfortunately. But then I think all these are not successes, these are sensations. We are just trying to celebrate sensations in the garb of they being successes. And that's really a very wrong example for any generation to follow. Yeah, no, I really, I think you're right. But let me, let me go to, let me, let me try go. Thanks, thanks for calling and, and, and bringing up that point, because I think it's an excellent point. Again, it's another symptom of the fact that we are dying. The fact that we don't celebrate the great businessman, we don't celebrate great innovators and great achievers scientists. And yet we go Gaga for Lady Gaga, right? And we just, we take mediocre aesthetics, mediocre art, and we, and we, we go Gaga over it, we go crazy over it. Time and time again, we accept mediocrity all over the place. And the only place in which we really love excellence is in sports because it's the physical. And again, what is the cause of that? So let's, let's take a step back. What defines Western civilization? What defines civilization in this sense is Aristotle. It is the idea of the efficacy of reason, which assumes, which has implicit in it, the primacy of existence. So, you know, reason as the way in which we know the world, reason as the real achievement, reason as learning about everything around us, using it to guide our lives, using it to guide knowledge as the only way of achieving knowledge. That's what a shape Western civilization, the good part of Western civilization. So indeed the bad part, I wouldn't call civilization. So it's reason. Now who reasons? Well, individuals reason, there's no such thing as collective reasoning. Right? I'm gonna, I'm gonna sit down a little bit. We've got a, we'll talk about this. We've got a new setup here where I've been standing all the while. I've got this little bouncy chair. We've got a whole new setup for the studio, which is pretty cool. But reason is an attribute of the individual. Only individuals can reason. Collectives don't reason. Groups don't reason. There is no group consciousness anywhere, any more than there is a group stomach to eat. So individuals reason. So if we, if we properly define reason, if probably understand the role of reason in human life, then we have to be individualists. The individual is the primary. It's a primary epistemologically, obviously, because only the individual can reason, only the individual can think, only the individual could integrate, only the individual sees. But then also, right, morally the individual is primary. The individual's life is the purpose of living. The individual's success, the individual's flourishing, the individual's happiness is the purpose of that individual's life. Not to sacrifice, not to die for others, not to die for a greater cause, but to live, to embrace life, to be happy, to live the best life you can live as a human being. That is what Western civilization is about. Those two ideas, reason and individualism, and as a consequence of those two ideas, the consequence of those two ideas is freedom, because only under freedom can individuals pursue their reason to attain a happy success on flourishing life. Reason is the negation of authority. It's a negation of forces, a negation of coercion. It means, freedom means, leaving people free from coercion in order to do what in order to pursue their lives, in order to make their life the best life that it can be. So essentially, Western civilization is about the ideas of reason, individualism, and freedom. And again, they all come together in the founding of the United States of America, which was based on the idea of freedom, but not freedom as a floating abstraction as some libertarians would like to have it. But freedom is based on an understanding of reason as man's basic means of survival and egoism, self-interest, the pursuit of happiness is the basic purpose of life. That is what led to the Industrial Revolution, that led to the creation of America, that's what led to this high stand of living we have today. That's what led to Western civilization as we know it. What is killing this? What's killing it is the exact opposite. What's killing this is the ideas of Plato and their various guises, again primarily in the guise of Kant and ultimately in the guise of nihilism. What's killing it is altruism, mysticism, and statism. So mysticism, mysticism is growing in America. Not just in its religious form, maybe that's shrinking somewhat. You don't feel it if you go to some parts of the country. But those places that are taking religion seriously, as viewing religion as the basis for everything else. If you read Bannon, Donald Trump's advisor, to him, the only good capitalism is a capitalism based on a judo-christian strong ethic and ideology. And yet he says in one of his speeches, that iron rand version of capitalism, that's bad. That's what we need to get rid of. That's what we are against. You have to ground these things on a mystical base, which is what the judo-christian tradition is. It's mysticism. It's a belief in a God and in books that were written a long time ago, that supposedly have some secret knowledge in them. It's the same as Plato's philosopher kings who commune with the spirits and commune with the world of forms to tell us what the real reality is like, what real knowledge is, what the truth is. Instead you read it in the book, but it's the same principle. It's not reason-based. And yet you see that in the evangelical community, in the emotionalism of so much of the Christian religion and the growth of that over the last 50 years. And yes, it's a little subdued right now, but look, they got excited about Donald Trump. And it's not an accident they got excited about Donald Trump. What they really seek, what religion really seeks to give people is authority, is to tell them what to do. And Trump saying, trust me, that appeals to religious people because, I mean, a certain type of religious person, because it basically says, oh great, we finally have an authority to tell us what to do. We bought into the authorities of the past. Now we've got a new authority, right? We've got an interpreter of the truth, because we don't want, God forbid, we as individuals should be interpreters of the truth, should be non interpreters, discoverers of the truth. So what you get is a rise of mysticism, and the same is true on the left. They're complete emotionalists. I mean, you read this stuff written by people defending the violence in Berkeley. And what you get from that is that emotions are primary, that offending them is equivalent to slapping them and punching them in the face. And that for somebody to come who disagrees with them and with the majority of Berkeley students is like somebody committing violence against them. And that they felt, felt threatened, that they felt. And one of the writers of these op-eds was one of the people in the black suits and masks who actually hit people, right? But he felt threatened. He was defending himself against, I guess, the aura of this other point of view that in even expressing itself, and remember Milo never even spoke, they just beat up people who were there to defend Milo, right? But in their very existence exhibit force against them. So it's this mystical notion that words can be violence. Who cares about facts? Who cares about definitions? Who cares about the difference between reason and emotion? And the thing that characterizes all these letters, these op-eds, is the emotional nature of all of them. So emotionalism, which is mysticism, another form of mysticism, it's again the negation of reality. It's the negation of the primacy of consciousness. Now remember the negation of primacy of existence. It is the affirmation of a primacy of consciousness mentality. And the same is true on the alt-right. The same is true on the racist, the same is true on the, on the people who offend for the sake of offending, the people who send me tweets, you know, glorifying the Nazis. I mean, they might have been kidding. Maybe they're all nice kids who really don't mean it. But what does that even mean? It means a complete, it means that they're placing their consciousness, their feelings, their thoughts about what a joke is before the reality of what really happened and what Nazis really are. So what you get on both sides, on both sides are emotionalists who have a primacy of consciousness. Suddenly Donald Trump exhibits this primacy of consciousness. I want it, therefore, its true mentality all the time. Now he doesn't do it, you know, in an emotionalism all the time, just read his tweets, right? And people love it, people cheer it. Now this is what's killing western civilization. What's killing western civilization is, is this idea of a primacy of consciousness, this idea of elevating emotions above everything else, above reality, above reason. It's, as a consequence, if all you've got is based on emotion, then you need a group to help you, because you are psychologically and in reality you are impotent as an individual because emotions are not tools by which to live. So you need a group and you need to lash out because that's what emotions are. They're form of lashing out when you, when you, when you elevate them to primacy. So you burn stuff, you beat people up, you destroy property and who cares? Who cares? It's it's just another form of expression. They would argue, right? I just beat this person up, but that was just self-defense. And plus, you know, it's me expressing my values, me expressing my views. You know, this is little Nazi youth. This is what they did in the 1930s to Jews and to others. You know, it wasn't about war, it was just, you know, it was just following orders. So what you're seeing today is the destruction of reason, destruction of self-interest, the destruction of the idea of the pursuit of happiness, and the destruction as a consequence of individualism and therefore of freedom. So what is rising in the West and what has been rising in the West for a hundred years is a philosophy antagonistic to reason, individualism and freedom. And you see its political manifestations and the fact that we're less free than we were a hundred years ago, for the most part, and that we are, that we have a lot less respect for reason. We have, we don't, we don't have the same adoration for scientists that we used to. Now there's still an element in American society, which is to some extent lacking in European society, but it's still an element in American society where we love technology. We love technology companies. We love startups. We love the idea of a startup. And that's still that American sense of life holding on to. No, no, I respect reason. I do believe in individualism. These core values are really important to me, but the number of those people is shrinking. And indeed, many, I've seen many people, even people who call themselves objectivists, condemning those people because they get their politics wrong because they tend to be more, you know, status in their politics. They tend to be leftist in their politics. But if you look at Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley is the last remnant of the enlightenment in the world in which we live because they love, they love science. They love reason. They're pursuing happiness. They're pursuing their own happiness. They're living the life. Somebody asked me yesterday, I did a Reddit AMA, I guess it's called, and somebody asked me what I thought of startup culture. The whole idea of startups and I think it's wonderful. I think that is the expression of America. It's that entrepreneurship. It's that using reason and working hard and being productive and being an individualist. I want to make money doing this. And I want to express my own, you know, passion around this. And I want to build things that I believe in. All of that is the remnant of the enlightenment in America. It's in the technology industry. It's in Silicon Valley. And yeah, they're leftists. This is why I don't, just because on the political map you happen to vote Democratic, I don't view you as the enemy. The enemy is anybody who upholds, anybody who believes, anybody who projects, anybody who acts on the ideas that are destroying the West and those ideas are the primacy of consciousness. The idea that reality isn't real, that we are shaping it. It's the ideas that reason is not efficacious, that we can just emote our way through the world, that we can just feel our way everywhere. We want to destroy, knock down. It's the idea that the group is the primary, the group is the essential, the gang, the tribe, that is the essential. And that's what you get at Berkeley and other places. Left and right. Left is worse right now in terms of its violence. But I wouldn't, I'm not convinced that that is the truth into the future. It's the idea of America first or American jobs and American trade and American fill in the blank. It's the idea not of protecting individuals, not of empowering individuals, not of leaving individuals free to pursue their own happiness using their own reason. But it's I am going to take care of you that is on the right and on the left. So the enemy, the destroyer of Western civilization is philosophy. And this is the unique perspective of Ayn Rand. This is what objectivism is about. It's not about Islamists, it's not about immigration, it's not about this politician or that politician, about the left and the right. It's about philosophy. Philosophy drives history. Philosophy determines history. To know the future is, one has to know the philosophical direction of a country. This is why the ominous parallels and dim are such powerful books that Lena Peacock has written. This is why Ayn Rand was able to predict in Atlas Shrugged and in a nonfiction writing kind of the state of the world decades in the future because she understood the roles of ideas, the role of ideas in history, how ideas explicitly philosophy, explicitly the philosophy of Plato versus the philosophy of Aristotle as interpreted by modern intellectual shape history and shape our world. So who's destroying the world today? It's Plato through Kant to the logical conclusion of both weakness and apathy and lack of self-esteem and just nothingness which is so prevalent among a big majority of the population being driven by intellectuals that essentially nihilists. And the apathy is a consequence of the fact that the intellectuals are nihilists because you can't get passionate about the nihilism of the left or the right. So what do you do? You don't do anything, just sit around. You don't think. Who can think when you're told that thinking is useless and pathetic? Think about what's being taught at our universities. Not the politics of it. Think about the epistemology of what's being taught at the universities. Think about the morality that's being taught at the universities. Think about the philosophy that's being taught at the universities as applied to all these fields. It's not even what's taught in the philosophy departments. That's not essential anymore because the philosophy that has dominated the last 200 years, the Kantian philosophy that's dominated the last 200 years has embedded itself in English, in history, in economics, in every one of these other fields. Some are a little saner because they have more of an Aristotelian element. They're still more connected to science and knowledge and reason and some are more corrupt because they're less connected to that Aristotelian past. So it's philosophy. So the fight is not a fight about should we let this immigrant in or not that immigrant in? Should we let this thing happen? Should we let the fight is about real philosophical ideas, deep philosophical ideas, in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics. So if you want to fight for freedom, if you believe in America as it was and as it can be, if you believe in individual rights, if you believe in capitalism and you want the weapon that can change the world and you want to fight at the level in which the battle, the war is really being fought, you got to study philosophy. You got to study the ideas of Einrand not just superficially, not just in Atlas Shrugged and not that they're superficial in Atlas Shrugged but not Atlas Shrugged. They read Atlas Shrugged. That's enough. You got to study them. You got to understand what the battle is about. You got to have the tools. You got to be able to defend reason. You got to be able to defend self-interest. You got to be able to defend capitalism based on a particular philosophy not just as a floating abstraction. This is why libertarians have to lose because they can't do that. They don't have a philosophy or the philosophy they have is inconsistent with the economics they believe in. The philosophy that they have undercuts the economics they believe in. Many of them are Kantian. Others are just mystics. Others are just emotionalists. Hey, that's the Ron Paul phenomena. Hey, freedom sounds cool. Let's be for freedom. How long will that last? Is it an accident that so many so-called young libertarians voted for Bernie Sanders? No. When Bernie Sanders was cool, that was cool. Ron Paul was cool. That was cool. It's all about coolness. You have to study the ideas. So this is a pitch for OPA. Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Lena Peacoff. It's a pitch for reading Ayn Rand's non-fiction. It's a pitch for going on ARI campus, which has all these amazing courses by Lena Peacoff about really thinking about Objectivism. What does it mean? What is Objectivism? How to think about it? How to improve your own ability to think, to advocate. But first you have to, first before you advocate, before you defend, before you get into arguments, before you try to change the world, you have to know the ideas first and you have to protect yourself from rationalism and empiricism. The two fallacies that can destroy one's ability to think even within Objectivism. All right. So my pitch today is, philosophy is destroying the West. To defend it, we must arm ourselves with philosophy, a specific philosophy. The philosophy of Aristotle made complete, which is Ayn Rand. We need to study it, we need to know it, and we need to go out there into the world and advocate for it. Stop obsessing about particular concretes. There are other people, the conservatives can fight the Islamists, the libertarians can fight some of these economic issues. What's uniquely us and what's so important about Objectivism and what's so different about Objectivism is that we have a philosophy and that's the level field in which we need to fight. Now people on the chat, you see they can't hold philosophy, right? So they want me, they want to go back to Bannon, right? Read Bannon. I don't read Mother Jones' interview. I read Bannon, just go and read Bannon, read Bannon's speech to the Vatican. There's audio, so they can't take anything out of context. There's a transcript. Read it, right? So you don't have to have second hand information here. You can go and read the source. Listen to some of Bannon's radio shows. Listen to what he says. I don't want any immigrants in the country, no matter their educational ability, no matter, you know, go read actual stuff. Anyway, diversion. Okay, we got one more call and then I do want to pitch one of my new favorite television shows. All right, you're new on Book Show. Who's this? Hey, yes. Hello? Go ahead. Oh, hi. Well, I was wondering, you talked about how sort of danger the right, but the left has been with political correctness and sort of their silencing of speech and sort of their aggressive actions, their actions sort of suggested sort of a slow slide into a kind of oblivion. Right. Yeah, no, look. Where it would just be like the sheepishness of Communist Russia where people would just, it was just pure silence and people would just be dragged away in the night. I mean, I agree with you. So the left is definitely pushing that, has been pushing it for a hundred years. My point is that the right is pushing the same slide, sometimes a little slower. In the future, it might be even faster. I don't know. But the right is not the alternative to the left. The right is a meek and often it mimics the left. So the alt-right is mimicking the regressive left. It's mimicking the social justice warriors. That's all it's doing. Trump and his entourage, a different new form of collectivism and of of statism. It's not a real rebuke to the left. It's not a real negation of the left. So my view is the enemy. The enemy, if you understand the fundamentals, if you actually understand the philosophy, the enemy is the left and the right. The enemy is anybody who's a collectivist. The enemy is anybody who negates reason. That means the religious right is the enemy. That means emotionalism on the right is the enemy. And anybody who negates the idea of the primacy of existence, which again, is many people on the right as well as many people on the left. Now, I'm not giving you explicit political advice saying right now it's better to vote for the right because it'll slow things down and won't deteriorate quite as fast. All I'm saying is in the big picture, left and right are both the enemies philosophically. And so with the religiousness of the right, I'm not sure because usually when I think of it is that the reason why people are religious is because they hold some sort of value to be like they get something out of religion that they don't otherwise get out of, that they don't otherwise get out of. Sure, out of a secular philosophy or secular ideas. Yeah, so there's certainly religious people like that and who are better as a consequence, but that is not the direction in my view that the right is heading. Religion is not healthy. So the longer people hold these ideas, even if they're motivated by something good like they're value-oriented, ultimately they will be overwhelmed by the bad stuff in religion and they will open themselves up to an authoritarian who rallies them around some kind of religious flag or something else. But religion is not neutral in that sense. Yeah, maybe they're better than the left under certain circumstances because they're value-oriented, but the religion itself, the very elevation of mysticism, the elevation of altruism and collectivism, ultimately after they end badly, they cannot end in a good way. Do you know of any way that you can actually sort of like kind of kind of read into the mind of a religious person or are they just sort of... Sure, I mean a lot of religious people have become atheists and a lot of religious people have become objectivists. Now it's hard, so that's why you need to get them when they're young, you need to get them when they're kids, the younger you get the better. But at the end of the day, we tend to think about politics as a primary, we tend to think only about politics. And I think that once you realize that the real war, the long-term struggle is a philosophical one, and you start identifying, okay, let's say it's Plato versus Aristotle. Who's on the side of Plato and who's on the side of Aristotle and who's like a neutral in neither here nor there, then you suddenly realize that the left and the right to a large extent are both on Plato's side. A lot of the American public are neither here nor there. They've got elements still of Aristotle, which is what is good about America, and they've got a foot in Plato, but there's nobody standing on the Aristotle side except objectivists and a few others and I think some better people out there in the culture, somebody like Sam Harris is somewhat cautiously on Aristotle side and there are others who are somewhat on Aristotle side, but that the vast majority of people on the left and people on the right are solidly on the side of Plato and solidly on the side of irrationality and solidly on the side of ultimately of statism. And this is the battle that has to be waged and I'm trying to get us away from politics and towards philosophy because I think that's where we either win it or we lose it, right? Well, how many people do you, I mean, but I mean, because most people aren't that consistent. No, and most people don't need to be consistent. The people who need to be consistent on the intellectuals, the people who need to be consistent are the leaders of a culture and we need to lead them, but there are plenty of academics on campus who are consistently nihilists and who are inspiring a generation or multiple generations of nihilists and there are plenty of people on the right, particularly on the so-called alt-right or regressive right who are consistently, in a sense, fascists and those groups, the groups that are being consistent, are growing and they're growing in influence and that's what I think is so scary, so scary about what is going on in America today and why, again, if we're going to win the battle, if we're going to win the war, we have to fight it at the level of philosophical ideas, of the level of very basic philosophical ideas. What sort of significant numbers do you think, what, I mean, is it? It's not numbers. It's not numbers. It's intellectuals. You know, if we had a thousand objectivist intellectuals who could articulate the case, who could be on television, on radio, write books, write articles, write up ads, we would win. So a thousand real intellectuals, real activists, really engaged, really promoting these ideas, really engaged with the cultural, you know, fight war, then we would win. So to me, this is, this is, this war is not determined by numbers. It's determined by, well, numbers, but by numbers of intellectuals, not numbers of sheer people. You need significantly numbers of people who really understand, this is why I encourage everybody, go read Ayn Rand's nonfiction, go study her philosophy, go arm yourself so you can join the people who are already doing this to wage a war on the bad ideas that are out there. But that is what is needed. It's not politics. We spent a lot of time in politics. I spent a lot of time in politics. But at the end of the day, politics doesn't matter. We're going to hell, no matter who wins. We're going to hell, no matter what happens in the political world, if we don't win the philosophical battle. All right, I have to, I unfortunately have to go, but call again. This is good. Thanks for calling in. Thanks for listening. All right, quick recommendation. I know I've recommended this before to you. And part of the recommendation is because it's such a clever show. It respects how this view is reason. It is a show that is smart. It's not action oriented. It's thought oriented. And, you know, so the show is called The Bureau. It's in French. I don't know how many of you can tolerate watching a show in French. It's got subtitles. It's called The Bureau. It's on, I know it's on iTunes. And I just watched, finished watching season two, which was excellent and it ended on a cliffhanger. I can't wait for season three. It's just smart telling, you know, that appeals to the mind and to the emotion because art has to, has to, you know, cause you to, to feel something. But it is, it is just, it's a, it's a great, it's about French equivalent of the CIA fighting Islamic terrorists, the role of the CIA and all of that, the politics, but also real missions and what's happening. They've got an agent in Iran. What happens to that agent in Iran, the kind of politics around that agent in Iran. So all of this is, is fascinating, interesting. And I encourage you all to, to watch it. So that is the show, The Bureau in French on iTunes. I just finished season two, both seasons are excellent. And they, they're sequential. So don't skip to season two without watching season one. Great characters, interesting characters, you get engaged with them. You want to know about them. You want to know who they are. Just good television, as good as it gets. So The Bureau. All right, guys, hopefully you enjoyed the show today. And I'm going to try to orient the shows more. And, and you know, we've talked a lot about politics and we've talked a lot about political issues. But what I'd like to go back to is something I did early on in the show is talk about more philosophical issues. And in particular, talk about some of Iran's nonfiction essays and discuss them and, and, and expose you to them and really dig into them. Because I think that that's the kind of intellectual ammunition we all need in order to win this war. I'll be doing for those of you interested, I'll be doing my AM560 show in, in an hour. And I'll be analyzing more of the bookly, the things that happen at Bookly on that show. So see you all there. See you all next week. Next week, by the way, Sunday, not Saturday, Sunday, not Saturday. I'm traveling Saturday. I'll see you all talk to you all. And you can see me on Facebook live next Sunday at 1130 AM Pacific time. Have a great week.