 Kalid kuulete vaate, et tada on meil eriline, küllaline Amerikast. Jaron Brokkes on Aindrendi instituidi juht, autor ja ütteminimade, et kapitalismi eest kõnalee. Hello, Jaron. Hi. Really nice to have you here in Estonia. Nice to be here. What is the kind of main thing that pops in your mind when you think about Estonia? I think the things that I've heard that's most interesting about Estonia, and this is a while back, is that you're all electronic. All digital. All digital. Insurance and driver's license and all that stuff is digital. So that's kind of a cool aspect of what I think of as Estonia. Other than that, a small country bordering Russia that Russia would love to get hands on. And not far from where my family originally is from, which is probably Northern Lithuania. That's awesome. Is there any kind of bad idea that comes to mind when you think about Estonia? Not really. I don't have that much experience with Estonia, so I haven't developed any bad ideas yet about it. Probably from the ex-Soviet Union countries, Estonia is the most pro free market and capitalist. Do you think that's true? It's hard to tell. I think the Czech Republic has lower taxes. I think Georgia, at least for a while, had a free economy. And I don't know how Estonia ranks. It would be interesting to look at all the post-Soviet countries and rank them based on economic freedom. But Estonia certainly has the reputation of being high on the list. We love startups, companies, entrepreneurs. That's really awesome because this is driving our innovation and making people happy. One of the things about Ayn Rand that usually average people get pissed off is about the happiness, the selfishness, the kind of individual responsibility. Yeah, getting pissed off at happiness makes a lot of sense. Yeah, why do you think there's so much people that are actually not willing to put time into their happiness and pursue their dreams? They'd rather be in a kind of negative echo chamber with all the destructive ideas? Well, I think it's a number of things. One is, unfortunately, a lot of people are lazy. Happiness requires effort. And taking care of yourself requires real energy. It requires actually thinking about it. It requires engagement. So there's real effort and energy required. I think the second is that it goes against all of our teachings, everything we're taught from our priests to our family to our philosophers. We are taught that to be happy is to be selfish. Selfishness we're taught is bad. Our moral responsibility, our primary ethical responsibility for the people and the most noble thing you can do is to be selfless. You become a saint, so you become a good person by sacrificing, by giving up your time. And that is kind of baked in primarily through Christianity. But even secular people, while they have maybe abandoned the mysticism of Christianity, they hold on to this moral code because that is all they know. And they have been taught that the alternative, the only alternative to it, is a kind of nastiness. That is, if you're not going to sacrifice, if you're not going to be selfless, you're going to be quote selfish, which means to them, you're going to lie and steal and cheat and exploit other people and just be a horrible human being. And between those choices, they don't want to be a horrible human being, so they give up on life in a sense and they'd rather do that. And it's hard for them to think that there's a third alternative and that is to be self-interested in a kind of a rational sense to be somebody who cares about one's own well-being and that doesn't mean exploiting other people quite the contrary. It means trading. It means creating win-win relationships with other people. But that requires effort and it's hard and it's a new philosophy. It's a new set of ideas. Look, for 2,000 years, since Aristotle, 2,500, 3,000 years, nobody has thought of morality as egoistic as a pro-self-interest other than a invent. So it turns out it's quite an achievement to think in those terms, particularly with the background of Christianity. So it's going to take a while for those ideas to filter through. So it's actually more moral to be egoistic in that sense. Well, I would say the only moral thing to do is to be egoistic because the morality is for what? What's the purpose of morality? Morality is for the purpose of living a good life. Who will live a good life? You, right? It's centered in you. This is Aristotle's whole view of morality is it's a set of principles to help you achieve a flourishing life, to help you achieve success in life. And that's Rand's view. It's how do human beings survive, how do human beings thrive, how do we achieve great things? Well, how do I survive? How do I thrive? So the beneficiary of your action should be you. That means personal responsibility. That means responsibility over your life and over your actions and over your thoughts. And that is morality. So the idea of self-sacrifice, the idea of being self-less is in that sense, it's anti-morality. It doesn't make any sense. It's a morality of death. It's an anti-life morality which is kind of a contradiction in terms because the whole point of morality is to teach human beings how to live. Interesting. I think it's somehow correlating with the thing from that the people are too much tied to their bodies and when you are producing always the stress and the stress hormones, just like sinking and you cannot get out. So basically, the more you are influenced by your body hormones, the less it's a chance that you can get out. So basically, the more ideas you are able to process, the less you are attached to your body processes because your body automatically wants you to basically feel the stress all the time and be destructive and when you have some cheap meal, you want to go for 10 cheap meals and so on. So you're programmed for destruction inside your body. I don't think you're programmed for destruction inside your body. I think, again, bad ideas lead to bad body processes. So I think there's a mind-body integration. But self-control is hard. Yeah, but if you're taught, not to have self-control, but also if you're taught to follow your emotions or if you're taught that reason and rationality are beyond you, you're not capable of them, if you're taught that your body is sinful, then all of that creates conflict and creates problems. But if you're taught the harmony of body and mind, if you're taught that pleasure is good, if you're taught that reason is what guides you towards proper pleasure, towards long-term satisfaction and towards long-term happiness, then it's far easier to skip the silly temptations of the moment and to structure everything in terms of how of your long-term happiness. And you're not doing it in the name of anti-pleasure, in the name of something above and beyond the body, some mystical spirit. You're doing it because this is the best thing for your body and your mind. So it's all about the ideas we have. It's all about the habits we pick up as children, which are guided by our parents' ideas. So it's very much, our bodies are guided by the set of ideas we have and when we have conflict in our mind, that manifests itself in stress because we have conflicts, then it manifests in conflicts in our body. Is this set of worldview, is this for like minority of people and it will never be mainstream, we have to always struggle to get the idea of reason out there? I don't think so. I think it can be a mainstream idea, at least in a certain sense. That is not everybody's going to be a philosopher, not everybody's going to dig deep into this. But if it becomes the norm in society, if the intellectuals hold these ideas and convey them to the public and people start doing them because that's kind of the norm, then I think they're self-enforcing and then I think it becomes a second nature. So I think that the fight really is, the battle really is to capture the intellectuals or really to replace the intellectuals. It's to create a next generation of intellectuals so that what people hear are these positive messages about their self-worth, their positive messages about the effort required and the reward that the effort achieves. So if we can capture the intellectual high ground, if we can replace the current intellectuals, then I think it's easy then to get the rest of the people on board with these ideas. It's like managing well your finances, being the good health, basically the same thing is with ideas, right? Yes, and it's funny because people do listen to podcasts about how to manage their health and how to manage their finances, but that is all in the background in which says, don't take care of yourself too much, don't be too self-interested. Remember you should feel guilty about your success because you're not being Mother Teresa, you're not going out into Africa and saving poor people. So there's this constant conflict inside of people's minds which generates guilt, which I think is part of what creates these disharmony within the body, the stress that relates to, on the one hand, yeah, I have this feeling, I have to take care of my finances, I have to do self-help, I have to learn how to meditate, whatever. But on the other hand, I feel guilty because I'm taking care of myself and I'm supposed to do these other things and that creates all kind of cognitive dissonance. Right, that's interesting. But it's kind of always the struggle with these destructive forces, but it's true that they're getting started in your ideas and then they're extrapolated to the body. Yeah, the destructive forces are self-imposed, there's nothing natural about them. We're not born for destruction, quite the contrary. We're born for growth, we're born for harm. And that's interesting because we have so much influence from probably Christianity that was so much indoctrinating these ideas that you are destructive in your core and so on and so on. Yeah, original sin. Original sin is what? To some extent original sin is sex, right? It's the very pleasure that is sex, it's a celebration that is sex. So much of our natural inclinations. We view as negative, we view as sinful, we view as kind of dirty and that creates real internal conflict. Instead of viewing human beings as, we're fundamentally pro-life, pro-growth, pro-progress. Sex is a beautiful, amazing thing. And if we're raised that way, if we grow up that way, if we abandon original sin and the idea that somehow a baby is sinful, there's something bad about just human life, then I think we can grow up with much more of an integrated approach to life with ideas integrated with our body and our soul. And as a consequence be psychologically and spiritually much healthier. Right. Speaking of the ideas, I mean in our society here, even in Estonia, I think I consume 90% of the content that is coming from the US. So basically all the podcasts, navy seals and everything. But I try to choose the constructive content but there is so much things coming from the West that is so crappy in terms of the gender and all these ideologies. What's going on on this battle of ideas? Why these ideas appearing? What's going to happen to them? Because we can see that these are directly transported even to the smaller countries like Estonia and you have all the ideologies pretty active here as well. Yes. I mean once they get a route in the United States they tend to spread all over the world. And the reason is that our modern ideologies are dead. There are no modern ideologies. We have been cruising, if you will, on the ideas of the enlightenment for a long, long time. We have science because of the enlightenment, we have because of the rediscovery of reason and because of the secularization of society and yet in the United States and in the West those ideas of the enlightenment have slowly been abandoned. The idea of reason has been undermined. We have postmodernism. We have subjectivism. We have emotionalism. We have ideas that basically say that there is no objective reality, that there is no objective truth and these ideas that came out, they've been developing for a long time, the anti-enlightment started immediately. It started with Rousseau and with Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, a whole line and then you get the postmodernist and all of that leads to a fragmentation of ideas, no cohesive integration of ideas and it leads to a distrust of reality, a distrust of our own capacity to reason, a distrust of truth, so we now live in a so-called post-truth era. It's a complete disintegration of human knowledge and that leads to crappy ideas, all kinds of crappy ideas. There's no theme to the crappy ideas except that they're crappy and that they're integrated, they're non-universal so what you get is this intersectionality type thing where people now compete, they take this morality that says that the needy, out of Christianity really, that the needy are virtuous, that need is a claim against everybody else, that people should be self-less and they should devote their lives to helping the needy and then they take that and they create hierarchies of need and so if you're a minority, you need more than if you're a white male and if you're a trans and a minority and all the combinations of neediness, that gives you the ultimate but it's all based on a combination of Christianity with post-modernism, a complete negation of human reason and we're critical race theory survive in some form, most of it everybody can see as crap will it be abandoned but what will replace it? More crap, a different variation of crap because the fundamental is unless we're willing to go in a sense to rediscover the idea of one reality of objective reality, reason as a means of knowing that reality, logic as a means of discovering truth, real truth and existence of truth and then the fact that we're not identified by our needs and our weaknesses and our failings but that each one of us is individual but there are certain universal principles that guide us all, certain moral universal principles certain epistemological universal principles that's what has to be rediscovered kind of the ideas of the enlightenment but better and I think Ayn Rand takes the enlightenment and makes it better, she fills in all the gaps all the philosophical gaps in the holes and that's what needs to be kind of discovered, rediscovered and only when we abandon the kind of German romantic philosophies we abandon kind of the post-modernism the subjectivism, the moral and epistemological subjectivism can we get back on a path towards reinvigorating our ideas and reinvigorating philosophy and reinvigorating science and getting back to a pro life path Yeah, it's sometimes it gets absurd in that sense that even like here you have people who are talking about the critical race theory even though our society, our history is really off from all these topics but people engage to them and they kind of think of these problems as their own even though they don't have any connection with that but it fits because you know Estonia is part of a Christian tradition that says that you have original sin original sin transmutes constantly what that constitutes original sin is being white it's being European it's you know you're inherently an oppressor you're inherently quote privilege you're inherently bad because you happen to have a certain color skin we used to call this racism identifying somebody based on the color of their skin and associating and it is it's basically a new form of racism it truly is horrific but this is kind of the fragmentation and the anti-reason I mean how can you be against racism and then accuse all white people of acts or anything else it's completely illogical irrational negation of reason and look it comes from a background that there really was racism that there really is racism today so it's not out of nowhere but it is another mutation of the Christian idea of original sin the Christian idea of your moral commitment to selflessness so you're not part of a group what identifies you is not your moral characteristics as an individual human being what identifies you is a membership in a particular group you're blonde and you're white therefore you must be an oppressor you must be part of a majority and nobody cares about who you are as an individual you're identified as those parameters but again that's all the same philosophy we've been dealing with since the end of the enlightenment hashed over mutated into its various ugly forms yeah that's interesting but it feels like we're just in a specific phase of the history where we will get over these ideas and come with the new ones well the question is will the new ones be better or will they be worse it seems like the trend is towards worse ideas not better ideas there was a sense in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell apart that bad ideas were dead and that socialism was dead but generally with socialism died a lot of the bad ideas associated with socialism and it turns out no that unless we're willing to advocate for new good ideas unless we're willing to educate people about good ideas and their importance and their importance to the individual unless we're willing to go beyond politics and really delve into philosophy and epistemology and morality and the nature of human beings we have to teach the world what the alternative is it's not just gonna happen automatically because what tends to happen is the Soviet Union falls yes everybody's against socialism for a while but then there's no alternative there's no other ideas to come in there's no new ideas that introduce you have to work on this because you have to work on this and people have to adopt those new ideas and they have to be intellectuals to teach these new ideas and so people start looking for alternatives to socialism and they don't reject the foundation they don't reject the collectivism the anti-individualism they don't reject the anti-reason ideas of communism so they adopt some other form of collectivism and that's what we've seen over the last 30 years communism morfing into now critical race theory or tribalism or fascism or religionism or whatever but other forms of the same thing just rehashed and constructed differently is government involved much in spreading all these ideas and being the cause of basically having involvement in all parts of life telling basically people what to do how to think because usually when you see the spread of the bad ideas you see that they're not coming from private capital or kind of private sources arguably they are arguably a lot of our tech companies are following these ideas so I don't think it's purely government but certainly government has a huge role to play here and the biggest part of that role is government controls education most of our educational institutions are run by government they're government schools and even private schools are often guided in the curriculum through the department of education and education curriculum and I think that undermines I think even in the best schools in Estonia suppose he has very good schools Finland suppose he has the best schools in the world but my guess is they could be so much better and the education in them could be so much better and my guess is that in these schools they teach math and science pretty well but what they don't teach is these other ideas and particularly the ideas of personal responsibility the ideas of taking responsibility over your life over your mind over everything that's involved they don't teach you how to while they teach you math and science they don't teach you how to properly reason about life and about the world so I think the biggest way in which government influences is through education and the second biggest it encourages us not to be independent it facilitates it facilitates this dependence it says don't worry be happy we'll provide you we'll solve all your problems it encourages laziness and encourages unthinking and then when you get the latest fad ideological fad government seems to embrace it in the United States certainly on the left with the democratic party they try to codify it into law they try to codify it into particular behaviors I think a lot of what's happening today around race is a consequence of the laws that were passed during the civil rights era things like affirmative action and things like that that kind of created a whole culture that was looking for that looks at race and emphasizes race and focuses on race and makes a big deal out of race in the name of doing away with racism and the actual result of it is that it's actually embraced racism and made racism worse so I think government does make these things worse by institutionalizing them and turning them into kind of governing habits Interesting I want to talk a bit about Ukraine in the sense that there's one guy whose name is Alexi Aristovich and he is a advisory to the president office and what he is saying now is basically after the Ukraine will win there will be the new set of ideas spread from Ukraine since they have fight for freedom to the Europe and Europe ideas will be replaced by the new ones that will come from these territories because people have been kind of setting up a new life with the new world view Do you believe that something can come from there? I think if Ukraine wins good will happen but I don't think Ukraine winning is going to challenge the fundamental ideas that dominate you because he says that the European ideas are rotten and it's kind of I agree but what are the ideas coming out of Ukraine Ukraine believes in freedom but what does freedom mean right now it means not being ruled by Russians but does that mean not being ruled by Ukrainians that is are Ukrainians willing once they defeat the Russians are they willing to establish real freedom in Ukraine Ukraine wasn't the freest country before the war it was incredibly corrupt the government did a lot of things it shouldn't have done the government was involved in a lot of life the government was involved in a lot of industry it wouldn't privatize it held a lot of land it held a lot of natural resources when the war is over is the government suddenly going to become capitalist and want to sell everything and really challenge Europe so maybe what Europe will learn from this is that appeasement is evil at least in the short run but you think they would have learned that from World War II so it's not clear to me that they actually learn the lessons and for how long I think I think that they will learn the lesson with regard to Russia they will learn the lesson maybe about appeasement maybe they'll interpret that in a positive way in terms of how to deal with China maybe they'll be some shake up but the fundamental ideas behind this the fundamental political ideas the fundamental ideas behind the welfare state the fundamental ideas behind our mixed economies with heavy regulations and so on I don't see how I don't see intellectuals in Ukraine advocating for something very different and challenging the west ideas about the welfare state and about the mixed economy maybe I'm wrong maybe there are better thinkers in Ukraine and we'll discover that certainly they're courageous they're winning the fight that's an improvement and you're already seeing certain ideas in Europe shaken up a little bit Germany announcing that they will increase the defense budget although we'll see if they actually do it talking about it and doing it are two separate things but I don't see coming out of Ukraine a new set of intellectuals with real fresh ideas about a new role of government and a shrinking of the role of the state and individual freedom again they're fighting for their country's freedom which is different than they're fighting for individual freedom probably maybe his ideas is that there will be certain refreshment because they couldn't do so much when all the government was corrupt so there's a new page where they can probably start I hope so I think there's always been a lot of potential in Ukraine they seem to have they have a memory of the Soviet Union they have a memory of communism they have a memory now of corruption and kind of what that leads to they know how evil Putin is they've just fought a war against Putin does that ultimately lead them to establishing a better government and a rational government or one of the things that could happen is that at the end of the war they will look to the west for money they will look to the west to rebuild and with all the money they get from Germany and the United States and other places there will be a lot of strings attached and those strings maybe there will just corruption in Ukraine but they will also try to make Ukraine into another just another European country so I'm not sure which direction the influence will flow European ideas are very powerful the European Union is very dominant Ukraine wants to be a member they've already applied for membership if they become a member of the European Union if they become a member of this regulatory somewhat authoritarian kind of economic system it will do them good because they come from such a bad place in terms of corruption but it will reduce their ability to impact the rest of Europe so to some extent it's already impacted Europe because it's woken Europe up to the fact that they're still evil in the world and they're still really bad players in the world but where there wakes it up I usually ask my guests who were born during the Soviet times about the difference between the lifestyle back then and today and all of them say that during the time when they were going be raised as a kid and go to the university and have a job the people were more friendly the life was more meaningful and they are struggling today to find the same values so what do you think or even though they were under this regime but they're still nostalgic about the human relationship and all this stuff that sounds bizarre to me completely insane friendly when your neighbor might be reporting you to the KGB friendly when the state is all powerful and looking over your shoulder and monitoring what you do and what you say and what you think I don't know if you've ever seen the movie The Lives of Others it's an excellent movie about life in Eastern Germany during communism it's anything but friendly everybody is your enemy everybody could call you in I think people are delusional it's best that they feel today and they when we're children everything seems wonderful but they don't they don't project it back as adults they don't think about what life was really like what their parents would really go through and older people that's all they knew so yes I think it's completely delusional I think it's completely wrong I have no doubt in my mind that free people are friendlier now they are struggling to find meaning and this is where we started the conversation by saying it takes effort life takes effort, likes to take focus life takes real energy and under communism it didn't in a sense you were told what to do you were told where to go, where to show up how to live you were told what's possible to you and what's not possible to you everything was dictated to you so mentally it was but there is joy in thinking for yourself the whole idea of finding meaning what's more meaningful than thinking for yourself what's more meaningful than a life of thought than a life of effort than a life of pursuing your own values people are looking for some external meaning out there to come hit them over the head again a remnant of Christianity I think Europe is dominated by Christianity even though it's rejected it the meaning is out there somewhere I have to go find it the meaning is inside of you the choices you make about life meaning is about the kind of path of life you choose for yourself meaning is an independent thoughtful life of reason that is what meaning is but that requires thought, that requires effort and that requires risk taking because it's about you and there's no safety net in terms of thinking and that avocates a certain independence and unfortunately because they grew up under communism they were not trained to be independent thinkers they were not trained to find meaning in their own lives they were trained to look to the state to look to others to look to authority for meaning for ideas so in that sense they're lost hopefully the generation that's been brought born under freedom has more of a chance to be successful than the people born under communism but yeah it's completely it's completely delusional interesting they live in a fantasy world but it's probably right because so much stuff was done for you but that doesn't lead to happiness that leads to dread and that leads to boring and that leads to meaning less lives not meaning full lives meaning less to have a meaningful life you need to exert effort meaning full life you have to actually pursue values when you don't pursue values when things are just given to you your life becomes meaning less it's boring, it's dull and it's ugly but people forget the ugliness people forget that they become nostalgic because the stress of the moment leads them to think that something was ideally in the past it was not the last question or the comment I want to add what will be your message for the people who are now being refugees from the Ukraine I believe that many of them will become entrepreneurs what kind of message would you encourage them with I think the main message is to take their life seriously and to make something of their lives in a sense they have an opportunity they've been welcomed into countries that tend to be free countries relatively speaking because they are being welcomed by these countries they have many opportunities they have many opportunities to take control of their lives to become entrepreneurs to make something in a peaceful environment some of them will go back to Ukraine some of them will never go back to Ukraine they'll stay in these countries but this is an opportunity to rebuild your life it will not only be an opportunity for Ukraine once it wins to rebuild the country but now for every Ukrainian has an opportunity to rebuild their life to reimagine their life and to take responsibility for it and to really make the most of it at the end of the day life is for living I like to say with a capital L every moment of your life is a moment you will not get back there is no second chance of life you've got to embrace it you've got to take it seriously you've got to use your mind to figure out the best way to live you've got to choose your own values and maybe the war is a wake up call that life is short it's precious and you've got to embrace it and you've got to be passionate about it and you've got to make the most of it thank you very much Sharon Brook for being in our show my pleasure thanks for having me