Embark on a philosophical voyage with Dr. Ben Bayer, Director of Content at the Einrand Institute, as he joins us to dissect the intrinsic American value of individualism and its current cultural standing. Throughout our conversation, we tackle the complexities of consuming news in an era where 'fake news' floods our feeds, seeking strategies to maintain our sanity while staying truly informed. Dr. Bayer imparts wisdom on the intricate psychology that fuels conspiracy theorists and unpacks the depths of the American abortion debate, asserting the inviolable nature of the right to abortion.
Dr. Bayer's insights shine a spotlight on the societal impacts of conspiracism, challenging the notion that shadowy plots drive history. Instead, he guides us through understanding the role of philosophical ideals in shaping our world. We traverse the global shifts in abortion laws, contrasting the advancements in countries like Argentina and Ireland with the troubling rollback of reproductive rights in the U.S. Our discussion sails through the legal and cultural currents that define personal liberties, emphasizing the pivotal role of education in steering societal change and evolution.
The dialogue culminates in an examination of personal growth and the creation of like-minded communities as essential tools for effecting change. Dr. Bayer previews his upcoming book, which critiques the moral standard of altruism and encourages a reevaluation of our ethical compass. The episode promises an enriching exploration of how personal development, ethical philosophy, and the nurturing of our communities can lead to profound societal transformation. Join us for this exploration of ideas, where philosophy meets practice in the pursuit of a more thoughtful, informed life.
Embark on a philosophical voyage with Dr. Ben Bayer, Director of Content at the Einrand Institute, as he joins us to dissect the intrinsic American value of individualism and its current cultural standing. Throughout our conversation, we tackle the complexities of consuming news in an era where 'fake news' floods our feeds, seeking strategies to maintain our sanity while staying truly informed. Dr. Bayer imparts wisdom on the intricate psychology that fuels conspiracy theorists and unpacks the depths of the American abortion debate, asserting the inviolable nature of the right to abortion.
Dr. Bayer's insights shine a spotlight on the societal impacts of conspiracism, challenging the notion that shadowy plots drive history. Instead, he guides us through understanding the role of philosophical ideals in shaping our world. We traverse the global shifts in abortion laws, contrasting the advancements in countries like Argentina and Ireland with the troubling rollback of reproductive rights in the U.S. Our discussion sails through the legal and cultural currents that define personal liberties, emphasizing the pivotal role of education in steering societal change and evolution.
The dialogue culminates in an examination of personal growth and the creation of like-minded communities as essential tools for effecting change. Dr. Bayer previews his upcoming book, which critiques the moral standard of altruism and encourages a reevaluation of our ethical compass. The episode promises an enriching exploration of how personal development, ethical philosophy, and the nurturing of our communities can lead to profound societal transformation. Join us for this exploration of ideas, where philosophy meets practice in the pursuit of a more thoughtful, informed life.
Dr Ben Bayer is the Director of Content at the Einrand Institute, where we both work. He teaches at the Einrand University and he has taught philosophy at Loyola University, new Orleans, metropolitan State University at Denver, colorado College, loyola University of College and University of Illinois Urbana, champaign. As a professor. His research focus was epistemology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics. He has published scholarly articles in American philosophical quarterly philosophia, acta analytica, and many, many more. He was one of two co-founders of a long-standing student publication, the Undercurrent, for which he was editor and contributor from 2005 to 2016.
Speaker 1:Our conversation today ranged from how to select news to read, how to read the news and remain both sane and objective, the psychology of what he calls conspiracists, the abortion debate in America and what makes that debate in America unique. He is the author of a series of essays put in book form why the Right to Abortion is Sacrosanct, available at a very affordable price on Amazon. On this show, we will investigate and explore the question what is America? From every angle. I'll scour America and the world to learn more about the culture and ideas that have shaped America. Welcome to the America Show. All right, ben.
Speaker 2:Hey Kirk.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 2:Very welcome.
Speaker 1:You are my first guest. Not only you are my first guest, you gave me the idea for the show, so this whole show is your fault. Whatever happens with it, I'm going to say hey, ben, told me to go, do it.
Speaker 2:Don't blame me.
Speaker 1:He didn't actually tell me to do it, but you did give me the idea for the America Show. I don't know if you remember this I do. Do you know what I'm talking about? In Cleveland 2019? At Ocon and, by the way, people should go to Ocon. The objective is conference, because this is where podcasts are born. This is the place where it happens. Do you remember what you told me? What we sat down over drinks at the end of the night Lectures.
Speaker 2:The thing I had was I thought it would be cool if somebody went on the road and did a podcast, sort of inspired by Lexis de Tocqueville's travels across America, and instead of democracy in America, democracy being a concept I'm somewhat critical of, it should be individualism in America, and you could go from sea to shining sea interviewing people who were uniquely individualistic in their own fields and walks of life. I think that was my idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you're welcome to it, because I have a house now so I can't.
Speaker 1:You can't sit. Well, I did, because this is around the time I actually bought an RV. I think it was like before this, maybe I don't remember exactly the time frame. Yeah, so I think it was before this. I was planning a road show. We were talking about different shows. I've been doing podcasts for I don't know since 2012, when I worked a little bit as an assistant on Alex Epstein's podcast Power Hour back in the day. So now what I learned from you is so I did not read all of Alexis de Tocqueville.
Speaker 2:Neither did I.
Speaker 1:He is a big read. I have read through it. I bought the book, I read some of the essays, I read some sections and I didn't think, you know, like the individualistic era or way that you approached. It was not something I figured I had to produce and pull off on a limited budget, but I do think it's a very valuable thing. You wanted to talk to individual or you want to meet and talk to individuals and, you know, learn their story. But this came out and this is a long story about me saying thank you for the idea of this, for the show you know, and for being the first guest in this new little studio in my apartment and it all. The America show really does stem. That's where it kind of I got. I started having the idea from there.
Speaker 2:Well, like Trump in the midterms, if anything goes wrong with it, don't blame me, but if you win, it's all. It's all in my credit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's that's kind of where I was going with this, so I have someone to blame if this doesn't go well. No, I'm just kidding, but the now you know you are the director of content at the Iran Institute and we work together. So, for full disclosure, we work at the Iran Institute. By the way, another thing you help me get my job at AI in 2012 and you help me with that. So you're like I'm here, I think you know fully for stuff like in 20 years, there's like an era of like look what Kirk did to AI horribly or well. We could also say that's helpful for you from you.
Speaker 1:So, thank you again for all of that. So you're the director of content at the Iran Institute. First off, we're going to talk about, like, some of the projects you're working on, some of the ideas, your book that you just put out and a few other things about you know in the world that you're working on. But first off, tell me what director of content, what that means, at the Iran Institute, just well.
Speaker 2:so first of all, I think it's even though I'm the only one. I think it's more accurate to say I'm a director of content, Just because the suggests I'm the chief honcho in charge of everything that we produce content wise, and that's not true. I have senior editors, but so it's a middle manager position is what it is. I'm charged with overseeing the scheduling of the publications and the podcasts that we do and semi formal responsibility of coming up with ideas for future contents that I suggest to other people. I do a fair amount of editing and, of course, I write articles and do podcasts myself.
Speaker 1:And one of the articles I don't remember. If you did this for the Iran Institute, for New Ideal, was this really interesting series on news, reading news articles properly? And I think the first one was like the sniff test. And the reason I'm thinking about this is just because while I was planning for talking to you tonight, I was kind of you know, I think of you as an epistemologist. You have a PhD and what's your? Can you tell us what your PhD was in it?
Speaker 2:Well, it's in philosophy and and yeah, the dissertation, the subject of the dissertation, was a particular narrow niche in the contemporary debates about epistemology. Okay, so I certainly have a background in theory of knowledge, which is what epistemology is. Though these days I think I'm thinking and writing a lot more about ethics.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, yeah, so one of the things I learned from you, one of the many things I learned from you, was the differentiating of like or how to read the news, especially in a contemporary world. You have a series of articles Remind me the name. I know the first one's like sniff test, yeah.
Speaker 2:The sniff test was a series of articles I wrote on medium. It was before I was working at AI.
Speaker 1:Before okay.
Speaker 2:It was my last few years as a philosophy professor and I had. This was 2016 or so, and it was right around the time Trump was elected and there was a lot of talk about fake news.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost getting started, that concept right.
Speaker 2:Or popularized. It was popularized, yeah, and it's because there was so much misinformation, so much fake, so many fake stories, or simply misinterpretations of stories, or shoddy journalism, going around on social media. To what extent it influenced the election, I think, is unclear, but it was at that point that the journalists started talking about it, and so I had been debunking people's bad takes on the news for many years prior on social media. Whenever there were urban legends they were spreading, I would do the digging and figure out there was really no basis for it, and so that series of articles is really just a summary of the collected practical wisdom I had gathered over the years.
Speaker 1:And so I'm preparing for this. I was kind of doing an inventory, trying to do an honest inventory of where I get my new sources. Then I'm recording this with you at the end of 2022. And so some of the places and this is a little embarrassing actually. So I'm going to reveal my soul a little bit and you can critique me, but because I find this interesting, like, how do we get our news? How do we learn about the world? Where are the sources coming from? So number one was the Iran Brook show. For me, actually, it's actually pretty high in terms of just he disseminates information. He now has a news, a morning news show that he just launched. So he does it a couple of times a week. Number two, I think, is probably social media, if I'm being honest. Number three are like news digests, but pretty rarely, not as much. And then number four would be, I think, word of mouth. And number five is I probably don't know anything about what's happening.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of stuff I just don't know. That's not a source.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's not a source, but it's like you know, like I'll word of mouth, in the sense of all I'll get something and thinking about what you do and what that series of articles and you know, lectures and talks I've seen you give on things like how to sniff out the truth, how to figure out what the truth is, for instance, what's going on with COVID, which was a really big issue, obviously, of how to differentiate and make decisions in your life. But in this modern world that we live in, where I don't think I'm that crazy with, where I'm getting my new sources, what advice or what thoughts do you have on this fractured world where news is coming at us from all different directions, different sources? Do you have any advice on that type of approach?
Speaker 2:A little bit. Yeah so, and I talk about this to some extent in the article series, but also in a talk I gave at Ocon in 2017 called being Objective About the News, which you can find that on AIRI's YouTube channel, which is kind of a summary of the summary from the articles.
Speaker 2:So yeah, we live in a world where there's all kinds of sources and all kinds of viewpoints. You described it as fractured, and in certain ways that's true. I think that the profession of journalism is becoming increasingly challenged, in part by the economic realities of the fact that journalism can't pay. It's harder and harder for news agencies to get the money they need to cover the news that they need to cover. I have thoughts about why that's true we could talk about later if you're interested but in part because the methodology has degraded and it's driven by clicks. But from another perspective, there's more news and more sources of information than there ever were before, and most of us have access to it in one form or another for free. So there's a real opportunity for somebody who really wants to know what's going on to be able to do it if they want. But it's a question of managing their sources efficiently, and so the first thing that I would say, if you're really trying to figure out what's going on, is don't get your news through social media.
Speaker 1:At all.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you're on there and someone shares an article and you want to read it, you should read it. But if that's the only place that you're getting it, then you're relying on the choices of the friends that you follow on social media to curate the news for you, and most of your friends are probably not journalists who know whether a story is well-sourced, whether it's representative, whether it's giving the big picture. So I strongly recommend going closer to the primary sources, which means, in one way or another, going to the actual newspapers, the actual news agencies that are reporting, and not just looking at the stories that your friends are giving you, but surveying the news, like here's all the headlines from today's New York Times and what are all the things that they're reporting? Here are all the headlines from the Wall Street Journal, what are they reporting? So it's not just this one story that goes viral and that's the only one.
Speaker 2:That you know about the way that I and there's different ways to do this, but the way that I find most effective in doing this is using RSS. I use Feedly to subscribe to a bunch of different, a large number of newspapers and other news sites from the left and the right and varying degrees of quality, but I personally subscribe by actually paying money to a large number of newspapers and magazines too. But you do this for a living, yeah, so I have more of a reason to do it. But I think even somebody who's not professionally monitoring the news can implement a more modest version of the same thing by just I mean it could be as easy as just bookmarking the webpage in the New York Times, wall Street Journal, one or two other sources and going there first.
Speaker 2:As opposed to social media, here's another simple solution. Google News is a site I like, newsgooglecom, which is a. It's generated by algorithms of what are the stories that the major sites are featuring, and it's divided by topic, like here's all the stories from all the different papers on this one recent story and you can click on that and see what all the different papers are saying about it. And they usually have a nice kind of home landing page where you see different headlines on different stories and then you can follow each of them and see what all the different papers are saying about the same story. That's a great place to start.
Speaker 1:So how do you choose what you you can't even you with doing this professionally can't possibly learn all the news of any given day, no Right. So you're still selecting. Oh yeah, so, and you do this for a living right. So how so for you, for instance, just as a professional, how do you decide what you will and will not pursue? And then what could be extrapolate for someone who's has a family they're working, you know, 80 hours a week. Like what do they? You know? So, like, one of the things I think about is you know, I I think about with news also, and how we conceive of it is.
Speaker 1:When I was growing up, the way I perceived it is this kind of romanticized movie version where it's like Papa reads the newspaper at the, you know, at the dinner table. Or I remember as a kid I would, you know when I look like you know five, six, seven years old, jumping my parents bed Sunday morning read it. It looks like and that's to me like that's okay. So when I grew up, I was like, well, that's all I need, right, it's just a little bit of this newspaper reading and that's it.
Speaker 1:But the the issue with that, I think, is what you were just talking about where we do now have these different sources. So in the past you could just get a couple of newspapers and get pretty much all the important stuff you need around the, the breakfast table before you went to work or something, or maybe you listen to the radio or something like that, and that was, and you kind of trusted that you were getting enough of what you needed. Now it seems like we have independent control to kind of figure out what we want to learn about and not just like here's the headlines that this one or two newspapers I'm subscribed to get. Does that make sense? What I'm trying to say?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. The trouble, of course, was that when there was only one or two newspapers you read there was that meant that the editors of that paper really controlled the narrative.
Speaker 1:They controlled it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I'm saying exactly, and so that's why there's at least if you do it the right way there's an opportunity to be able to see beyond the narrative and to be able to see what different people from different slants are saying and then synthesize a perspective of your own. It takes work to do that and, yeah, so if somebody is not a professional monitoring the news, it's going to be less obvious why you need to do that and less obvious how. But I still think that there's ways, and even if you aren't a news hound, I do think the main thing I would recommend is read headlines, like you don't have to read all the stories. I don't read all the stories. I read a lot of headlines.
Speaker 1:But aren't headlines a clickbait?
Speaker 2:A lot of them are.
Speaker 1:It's annoying sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yes, but if the headlines that you're looking at are in semi-respectable, established news, sites.
Speaker 2:That's the big question. Then if you scan a lot of them, you'll get at least a sense of the things that are happening and then if you need to know more about them, you can click further. But the trouble with getting your news from social media is you're only seeing the same headlines everybody else is seeing In the old-fashioned language that they use with paper newspapers. You're seeing the above-the-fold stories. You're not seeing anything that's below the fold. You're not seeing anything that's on page A3, a5, between the front page and the op-ed section. That's the stuff nobody thinks about because they only read above-the-fold. In effect, I suggest at least scanning the headlines below the fold, which means if you've got an actual newspaper, open it up and at least look through it.
Speaker 2:I should say I still like the experience of reading an actual newspaper. I finally subscribed to a real one for the first time last year. I got the Wall Street Journal. They're probably the best actual paper newspaper that you can get. I think in this country they're probably still too expensive. I don't know if I'll keep paying for it, but it's just the act of looking through what the headlines are and then reading what you as your interest carries you and as your purpose carries you. Different people have different purposes and will focus on different things, but at least if they're looking at the headlines, they're able to put the stories they do read in some kind of context.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like the advice of looking at multiple sources, because one of the questions people have today is I can't trust the news. There's so much about that. It even seems like you can't trust large chunks of the mainstream media because they do seem very uniform. There's these meme videos that go around of all these different news anchors and news pundits literally saying the same phrases. Have you seen these things?
Speaker 2:But I don't like the concept of mainstream media. What does that mean? Does that mean mainstream? Does that mean the prominent corporate left-leaning networks? What about the prominent corporate right-leaning networks? Is Fox News mainstream? That's watched by probably half of America, but there's a lot of Fox viewers who say I'm against mainstream media. Well, what the heck do you think you're watching? That's about as quote-unquote mainstream. I don't think the concept's very informative. It's true that there are plenty of talking heads who will mouth party lines and toe the line that they're supposed to on both sides of the aisle. It's probably always been that way. Maybe people notice it more today just because it's easier technologically to find the similarities in the patterns. People have been conformist and uncritical in their thinking for millennia.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good way. Buddy, I asked you a question a long time ago and then I interrupted before you got to answer it about how you select, given that you're a professional. There's infinite amounts of news stories you could pursue. How do you choose the things you're going to pursue? Take it as a professional first.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I have research interests. I have books. I have a book I'm starting to work on and I have articles that I'm writing in support of that book and podcasts. I'm doing that supplement or complement it. I tend to look for articles on subjects that relate to my writing projects, but that's something that I've only really started to focus on in the last year or two.
Speaker 2:Prior to that, I was more of an equal opportunity reader. I would read more on more subjects. In part that's because I was trying to figure out what was I going to focus on. I started reading newspapers and magazines pretty systematically when I was in high school, especially for debate, where we had to, just in order to be able to compete on the topic. We had to be ready on all kinds of topics, and in the news especially. I started reading the New York Times, started reading the Economist, various other sources At that time and this is why this is relevant to someone who's listening to the audience.
Speaker 2:At that time I didn't know much about anything. I didn't know much about the world. I was just starting to figure it out. So then I would read everything. I remember reading the whole.
Speaker 2:Every once in a while I would read the whole New York Times front to back to see what's going on in the world. I don't know what any of these stories are about, I don't know which ones matter, so I would just be egalitarian in that way. Used to do that with the Economist too. The Economist, by the way, is a great magazine to do this with. I don't know if anyone in the audience has ever picked it up.
Speaker 2:This is British Magazine and it covers the news of the world and they have a section each week on the Americas, on Europe, on the Middle East, on Africa, on Asia, and they have like four or five stories in each region and they have these cub reporters who are scattered around the world that write these things up and so you can get a summary of the entire world's news just by reading like a 30, 40 page magazine. I used to do that every once in a while. I don't do it anymore. It wouldn't be a good use of my time because I now have a research focus. But if you're interested in just figuring out what's going on, those are great ways to do it.
Speaker 1:How much do you need to know about what's going?
Speaker 2:on. It depends, again, on your purpose. But if you're the kind of person who's asking the very questions that you're asking, like how do I know what to read, well, that presupposes that you already want to know a lot.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a pressure, there's a societal pressure, I think, to know things. I don't know if that's important or necessary, but there is like you don't know what's going on in Ukraine, like could you imagine walking around and not knowing what's going on in Ukraine at all? And I felt this pressure sometimes even when I was in more of like a traditional sales role with, like sports. If I wanted to have a conversation about sports, I needed to like I'm not a big sports watcher really, so I had to kind of figure it out and learn it, because the people I was trying to sell to loved it, and so I had, and so there's a and. So I feel like I wonder if there's a lot of this social pressure to know all the important news and to have an opinion on everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there might be, but I don't, I mean, I don't think that's a good reason.
Speaker 1:I don't. I agree. I don't think it's a good reason either.
Speaker 2:I was doing it because I was curious and trying to understand where I was living and what was going on in my life and in the world.
Speaker 2:And different people have different purposes and may not need to know as much to achieve their purposes. And here's a confession Like I almost never read sports and it's not because I just like sports. I like sports but I like watching it. I don't like reading about it and I don't think I need to read it and know all the stats and everything to enjoy it when I watch it. And that's and in part, because it doesn't affect me that much, like it's just recreation. But all the other stuff the politics and economics and the wars and things these affect me in one way or another, in a way that sports don't, and they affect everybody in a way, in one way or another. So there is a case that's not just society wants you to know, but that you, to some extent or another, need to know what's going on in the world if you want to live in it, because these things are going to affect you somehow or another.
Speaker 1:So, like this is a case to not be a news hermit and to not, I think there's a good case to at least not be a news hermit.
Speaker 2:That doesn't mean you need to be a news hound, but burying your head in the sand is not a not a great way to go.
Speaker 1:You're a part of your citizen of this country, presumably you do have a job, you do have family. You should care who, on some level, like the direction the politics of your country is headed. I agree, I think that's important Also, like if you have kids, like you should kind of care if we might be in wars someday again in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what are they going to be learning at the schools you're sending them to?
Speaker 1:and education, and what kind?
Speaker 2:of theories are they going to be hearing, and are they actually going to be able to graduate with a degree that's going to get them anywhere, and what's the economy going to be like when they do it? All these things matter.
Speaker 1:And so you need to have values in the world or you need to have values that you're pursuing in the world for this to happen. And one of the reasons I bring that up is I think there are a great number or some number I don't know the number of people who are becoming more and more hermit like and they're not interacting with the world. And it seems like those are the individuals. I don't know if you have any thoughts on this. You know the, the guys who kind of give up on all values and all pursuit of external values, and they, they watch.
Speaker 1:You know conspiracy theories I know that's something you've written about and I think I don't know if there's a one to one correlation between these, these guys. These, you know, like one term they give is like I don't like using this term, but like the incel type crowd or something like, like men who just let's take up on, men, who kind of give up on a lot of pursuits. They do seem to be heavily influenced by these conspiracy theories, would you say. Is that? Is that observation close to anything? Do you think, or is that?
Speaker 2:some of them certainly are influenced by conspiracism. I don't like the term conspiracy theory because I think theories are important scientific achievements and that's not what people who are worried about conspiracies are actually doing.
Speaker 1:But well, I'm gonna stick on that because I'm sorry, that is important. I forgot that. So I think there was a movie with Mel Gibson conspiracy theory that I like. There's a fun.
Speaker 2:I like that movie.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a good movie.
Speaker 2:So you're telling me conspiracy theories, not they're not really theories they're not theories, so I like on Cargate's alternate phrase, conspiracy fantasies is much better.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the conspiracy fantasy with Julia Roberts and Mel Gibson. That could work. Actually I think we just. So why do we call it conspiracy theory?
Speaker 2:I think in part because theory, the word theory, has a bad reputation in our culture people think it's just a theory.
Speaker 2:They say that about the Darwin's theory of evolution, which one of the best confirmed and scientifically supported theories in the history of human knowledge, and in part this because they think there's a difference between theory and practice. Practice is real, theory is floating up in the air somewhere, and so it lends itself to being okay with thinking that what quote unquote conspiracy theorists are doing? Well, they're just theorizing. It's just, you know, hot air, and that's then even seen as part of what's bad about them. But I want to save the term theory from that. Newton's theory of universal gravitation is a work of genius and it only becomes a theory after a series of hypotheses have been very well tested and confirmed.
Speaker 1:So there's this. So you're saying that that part of it is this theory, this view of three, theory and practice in America or in the West, not just. America that has degraded, dated, the the value of what a theory really is, and so we no longer have that clearly like we have less respect, particularly among the general population, and I've that's not like I know the theory, practice. I think we all understand that, that view. So so you want to call it conspiracy, fantasy or I?
Speaker 2:sometimes just call it conspiracism, conspiracism that's one I like more of a mentality than it is any kind of intellectual product, which is what conspiracy theory would suggest.
Speaker 1:Do you think it comes out of a psychology, or is there? Is it purely ideas?
Speaker 2:Definitely comes out of a psychology. And if you read Einran's essay, the selfishness without our self, where she describes a particular version of what she calls the anti-conceptual mentality, she talks about how there are certain people who have this mentality, where they and what that means is they've never really gotten above the perceptual level, there they form some concepts, but whenever it gets to higher level concepts related to values, related to abstract, the kind of abstract issues that philosophy deals with they don't think these ideas through themselves, they absorb them from their culture, they absorb them from their tribe. That's what it is to have the anti-conceptual mentality. But there's a particular subclass of the anti-conceptual mentality that she says.
Speaker 2:Certain type of people are so manipulative that they're constantly kicked out of the tribes that they want to be in, and so they go from tribe to tribe trying to find someone to belong to. But they keep getting kicked out, and so they start to develop this view that there's a conspiracy against them. And what is the them that the conspiracy is against? What's the self? There is no real self, because they've never really developed any values of their own, and so it's a kind of malevolent universe view that's made worse by the fact that they're so anti-conceptual they have never really developed values of their own. They feel the world is against them but there's nothing that they really stand for, and so there's a mentality there and there's a even with the more generic anti-conceptual view that the people who do stick with the tribe. That lends itself to conspiracism as well, because you strongly identify with members of your tribe and you hate the other tribe and so you see the world in terms of us, versus them, and they are out to get us.
Speaker 2:And whenever something goes wrong, when you don't understand it, in part because you haven't, you haven't lifted yourself up to the conceptual level, you, you don't know how to understand the world, you, the your first recourse is well, if I don't understand it, it must be some force, some force behind the scenes. In the same way that religion works right, people who believe in religion, when they find it normally, they don't understand it must have been god and tribalist conspiracists are. The are the same way, and there's more to say about that.
Speaker 1:But I don't know how much, how deep you want to go into it well, I mean one of the things, so I haven't read that essay in a long time. One of the things I was thinking about was and I think you and I have talked about this before maybe, or have mentioned this to you before is when I think of the psychology of the conspiracy theory type person, because I've seen this on like social media you, the people who shout at you, you know, you too, on Twitter and on Facebook and they're in all caps and they're, they're yelling and there's. There is a mentality that I think we can maybe recognize, and I remember recognizing it in literature with the character of Holden Caulfield.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And JD Salinger's Ketcher and the Rye and I remember thinking like this was such a conspiracy theorist and now he's a young kid and it's that's how it's sold to us, everybody's a phony.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Everybody's a phony. He doesn't understand why he's always kicked out of all the social groups and he gets in a fight with his roommate at the right at the beginning. He tries to have some kind of conversation with some old bud, old pal of his at a bar. This is like the fifties, I guess you could do that. I think they went to some club or something and he was like 16 years old. I was like man, what a cool time to live.
Speaker 1:And you know, it instantly goes wrong and he didn't want it to go wrong. I remember he was thinking like he wanted to connect with somebody he calls a girl, you know, and it doesn't go well because it immediately goes off the rails. She said something. He doesn't like it. It goes off the rails. And then he's wondering like, why am I alone? And he's like walking around trying to figure this out. He goes to his you know, so on and so forth, and over and over, and over and over and over and over again. Right, and that's the. That's the story. And I feel like you know when, when I was reading your articles, when I was thinking about this, it seemed like that was the epitome of the psychology of the conspiracy theorist in practice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's fair.
Speaker 1:And it's not, and you know. So I made the connection go ahead.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say you can sort of forgive Holden Caulfield Because he's young, Because he's young. He's a kid. It's a childish way of thinking about the world that people don't like me, they're out to get me. But yeah, it's. It's like the people who maintain it when they get older have not grown up intellectually. And it's it's. There's ways in which even then, it's forgivable to some extent, because the, in a way, they've not been given the guidance that they need to understand the world around them.
Speaker 1:Like poor education.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's part of it. I mean, when people what spurs conspiracy thinking is there's something I don't understand. It doesn't make any sense to me and the only kind of primitive tool they have to try to to try to understand is it's part of somebody's plan who's out to get me. But so part of the problem there is that they don't understand it, that and they haven't gotten the education that would help them. But at a deeper level it's. It's a way of looking at the world as a whole and and history.
Speaker 2:And the article that I wrote about this that you're probably thinking of is the one about Ayn Rand's view of conspiracism, and her view is that in most of the kinds of cases where there's a, there's an anomaly in current events that people don't understand and they look around, they see all the different parties converging on the same view or taking this, responding to it in the same way. They think that's points to conspiracy. And her point is no, people are acting on ideas that they openly accept that they get from philosophy, and it was her view that philosophy is the fundamental driver of history and it's not a conspiracy, unless you talk about it as a conspiracy of ideas. But it's not. That's not a conspiracy, because conspiracies are secretive and the ideas that people accept and preach are right there in the open, and I mean for more examples of that I would go to that article of mine that I think is called an alternative to conspiracism's foolish delusions, or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a difficult process to understand, like what is going on with the increase of conspiracy theories. Is it really an increase Like? No that's what I was going to ask.
Speaker 2:It's getting more news because it's easier now to see the thinking of the man on the street who has these theories, because they all get to write in comment sections and they all get to have social media. So it's, and then that also makes it spread faster perhaps.
Speaker 1:And now there's also the ability.
Speaker 2:I think people have always thought this way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so like.
Speaker 2:A chunk of people have always thought this way.
Speaker 1:I mentioned earlier, like the idea of fractioning of media in a sense, and I think what that allows is you can have these people who just start up a YouTube channel that becomes very prominent, or a podcast, and they now have a ready-made audience of people that think this way and they can just kind of direct their thoughts, beam them right more into that person, and I think that's part of the thing we have to figure out how to get out of in America, and this is a perennial problem, as you've mentioned, of education and figuring out how to think for ourselves, sift through knowledge, sift through facts and opinions, pursue knowledge, pursue news, and this is not an easy endeavor.
Speaker 1:It's something that we each individually have to do, right? Yep, okay, so you know, I did want to make sure that I touched on a really big topic that you just wrote a book on, and it's a collection of your essays that you published for the New Ideal, and it's an important issue, and you know, speaking of the news. So I mean, this is one of the things that I think is really I learned like, for instance, at the Iran Brooks show is there's a lot of news that even doing a lot of what you're doing, like, if you're not on Twitter, you won't get this. So I'm going to talk about the book in a second. The news I'm talking about that I learned only from the Iran Brooks show, and only because he's on Twitter. So much is the girls that I ran and the rebellions that I ran, which is not being covered anywhere, and this is a good example of.
Speaker 2:It is Like a problem.
Speaker 1:It is being covered maybe not enough, but but not front page you can definitely learn a lot more about it on Twitter than you can from major media sources.
Speaker 2:So, as it turns out, what's on Twitter is not always reliable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, what's that referring to? I don't know about this.
Speaker 2:Oh, there was a story about how 15,000 Iranians protestors had been arrested, which is true, but then that was spun into and then the Iranians government has voted to execute all of them, which was not true. And I ran a file of my own, oh, you built Journalistic guidelines and retweeted one of these stories until I did some Google and find no, that's not quite true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:They have voted to execute one or two of the protestors. We'll see what they do with the rest. We don't know yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is a horrific story. I think more people should be talking about this story. No, I'm not going to talk about the girls, the heroes, masa.
Speaker 2:Amini Heroines in.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry what.
Speaker 2:Masa Amini, I think is your name.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, so we're not going to talk about that right now, but what I'm kind of referring to is I. There was a big to-do about Roe v Wade and the overturning of Roe v Wade. It's still in the news, but I Again maybe this is because I'm not following enough of the news properly, but I'm not. I don't know where the pro what used to be called the pro choice people are Like what are they doing right now? Where's the fight? I don't. It seems like this is one of the biggest issues of our era to me, and I don't know what the hell is going on Like. Why are people not more furious? It seems.
Speaker 2:Maybe they are. It's a good question. They certainly should be, I think, more furious than they are. You mentioned the book, and the book is called. You should share it with the audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, why the right to abortion is sacrosanct.
Speaker 2:Right to abortion is sacrosanct. So that's a pretty provocative opinion, and that gives you an idea of what I think. And so, because I think it's sacrosanct, it is a massive injustice that federal protection of right to abortion has been removed in half the country, in effect. Now, well, it's been Federal protection has been removed all over the country because only about half the states have it. That means the state protection has now eroded significantly. So why aren't they doing more? What are they doing? Well, they're doing some things.
Speaker 2:I mean, there are still advocacy organizations that are doing their advocacy. They're not able to do the kinds of things they used to do. In part, they don't know what to do at this point because what they used to spend a lot of their resources and time doing was litigating in the courts and explaining why some state policy or other was a violation of Roe v Wade. But now they don't have that anymore and so they can't litigate much. Now there have been some attempts still to do it, even in states where there have been bans, like recently in Georgia. There was a court decision that struck down or tried to strike down the Georgia abortion ban on the basis of the argument that it was passed before Roe v Wade was repealed and that that means it wasn't valid. I don't know if that argument's going to go very far in that part of the country, but they can't use their normal legal strategy. So I think they are trying to orient themselves and figure out what's next. Now, in part, what they were doing was they were trying to get Democrats elected in the midterms because it was the Republicans who overturned it. Now, even that's not much of a strategy, because even if the Democrats were to have held both houses of Congress, it's not clear what you can do with that.
Speaker 2:You could try to pass a federal abortion rights bill and maybe the president would sign it, but then would that stand up in the court? Would that stand up to the Supreme Court? The Supreme Court could say arguably possibly for the same reason that they struck down Roe v Wade that the federal government has no constitutional basis for regulating abortion one way or the other. Perhaps there's what they pass in Congress as a constitutional amendment, and that would be very difficult to do. So if you got two-thirds of the House and the Senate to do it, maybe you could do that. So that's not going to happen anytime soon. You'd think that the place where abortion rights advocates could make mileage is in the actual state houses, as those are the bodies that are actually passing the abortion bans that have now gone into effect. Maybe that's what's next for them, but they didn't have much chance of making much progress in most states where there are bans.
Speaker 2:Now there was, of course, the referendum, where the public could vote directly on the subject of abortion, bypassing the state houses, and this is, of course, what happened in Kansas, which was the most hopeful sign of what could happen in the wake of Roe v Wade, because Kansas is a very red state, it's very Republican, and yet the margin of people voting to basically allow expanse of abortion rights was double digits, and so there was a big chunk of Republicans who voted for abortion rights, and I think that if you were to put similar measures on the ballot in most red states, in most conservative states, you'd probably get similar results. It happened also in Kentucky. During the midterms. There was a similar referendum in Kentucky, also a red state, and they were asked directly to vote whether or not the Constitution should ban abortion, and the citizens of Kentucky said no. I think the same thing would happen in Texas if we had a vote here. But now I think the conservatives have figured out this is the way the votes are going to go, and so they don't want to have these referenda, and they have to be approved, usually by a state house in the first place, even if the house isn't the one that's voting on the law. So this would be a source of active.
Speaker 2:It comes back to the question of who controls the state legislatures, and that's probably where a lot of the activism on this will happen in the future, among the pro-choice advocates. I suspect some of them will become successful and it could change the political alignment in the South, in certain cases at least. But that's a long battle and the problem is the ultimate answer to your question why aren't they more outraged? Why aren't we hearing more from them Is?
Speaker 2:I think that the Democrats, who are traditionally the defenders of abortion rights in this country, don't really have a belief in the morality of abortion rights in their soul, and it's because the morality that you need to defend abortion rights, the morality of individualism, is the morality that they're otherwise opposed to in all of their other policies, and I suspect that in many cases, many of them at least the politicians support abortion rights in a cynical way. There's a voting bloc women that they want to appeal to for collectivist reasons. They think they can get excitement in that constituency and votes. They don't believe in it in their souls. I think a lot of women do, a lot of even apparently Republicans do, but they don't know how to articulate it, they don't know how to make it consistent and it's also inconsistent with other elements of their worldview that they accept, to the extent that they either accept religion or to the extent that they accept some kind of socialist collectivist views, which is again inconsistent with the individuals and that's implicit in the idea of abortion rights.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because all the fire is on the right, it seems.
Speaker 2:On this issue?
Speaker 1:yeah, On this issue Like they're fired up. When I thought of this issue, I always thought of the fire being on the left and the screamers, in a sense, being the pro choice. It's a woman's body, it's her choice.
Speaker 2:They scream, but there's a difference between real passion and just childish antics.
Speaker 1:I'm using that just as an example of passion, not necessarily that there were no real advocates and I'm just saying like there's, I don't seem to think maybe I'm missing something, but I'm just not seeing that as much as I used to. I did see a rally when I was in Boston. Was it Boston or Philadelphia? No, it must have been Boston. So I did a road trip. I think it was in Boston. I saw a rally. I think I sent you some pictures. I don't know if you saw those but and it was a real like I first off, I don't know that I knew it was an argument that their main reason for this as a political issue is that abortion is a healthcare right.
Speaker 2:Which to me was a kind of like I guess I might have said that before, but Access to abortion is the new language they're using Curiously, which is and revealingly, rather than talking about abortion rights.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so-.
Speaker 2:And it's abortion is healthcare. They think that's that's the one. Yeah, they think that's an argument because, oh, because you have a right to healthcare, and so if you can link abortion up to healthcare, that's supposed to make it more persuasive. But then that's just trying to convey that abortion is like a welfare entitlement as opposed to a liberty right, which is what it really is.
Speaker 1:Well, so like I don't know how to do this in a truncated time I don't know if you know this, but like I am a little curious about why this is happening, or you know what is the background of this in America. Like is there something? Does this happen in other countries? This abortion right issue Is it yes. Okay, so because for some reason I only think of it as an American thing. But I assume there are other places where this is an issue.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I mean obviously Interestingly in the rest of the world it's going in the other direction. Okay.
Speaker 2:So you have heavily Catholic countries like Argentina and Mexico and Ireland, which in the last five plus years have all legalized abortion for the first time, and it's America that's going backwards on this one.
Speaker 1:Why do you think?
Speaker 2:that is, it's hard to say. In part it's the erosion of religion in some of those countries.
Speaker 2:Those are traditionally Catholic countries, but Catholicism has been in the retreat in the last 10 years for lots of reasons, in part because of the rise of evangelical religion, but also because of the scandals in the Catholic church. I suspect that it's not. To some extent it's because of the advancement of various collectivist ideologies in those countries where abortion is taken on board as a feminist women's issue. That's part of it. So that's not the best reason for it to be happening. The decline of religion is a better reason. But then I guess a third element would be that the better reason, which is the rise of more cosmopolitan, globalist, economic individualism in these other countries. All of these countries have been quote unquote globalized, so they've been better integrated in the world economy. The people who live there have become more ambitious. Their expectations are rising for improving their lives, and a woman's ability to improve her life through reproductive rights is then seen as part of that. Why has it been going the opposite direction of the United States?
Speaker 2:Well, in the US we've had the erosion of individualism.
Speaker 2:I mean, we were historically the champions of it, and in the 20th century at least, in the what they call the realm of personal liberty, which I think is an invalid conceptualization that's an attempt to carve it out as against economic liberty.
Speaker 2:You saw, at least in advance, in personal liberties in the court decisions in the Supreme Court, and I think that's the reason why it's in personal liberties in the court decisions in the Supreme Court in the United States, and abortion was one of many of them, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, contraceptive rights, things like this. But that for this I point the audience to the talk Ankar Ghatay gave last year, this past summer at Ocon in Washington DC on why Roe v Wade failed and the undercurrents of legal thinking that it was simply it was incapable. Once you say, well, you don't have any individual freedom in the economic realm, but you still have it in the personal realm, it becomes very difficult to defend even the realm of personal liberty anymore because it becomes unmoored now from the principles of individuals that were explicit in the Constitution in the first place. There was never this dichotomy in the declaration.
Speaker 1:I guess I don't understand. So you're saying that because it wasn't explicit enough. Is that the argument that this is so? There's been the degradation over 200 years to the point where, over the last 10 years, we've gotten sufficient in the reverse to enough individual rights.
Speaker 2:Put it this way all of the arguments that are given for why you don't have, for instance, the right to sanctity of the contract.
Speaker 2:This was the position that was taken at the end of what they call the Lochner era. So in the early 20th century there's a court case Lochner where there's an economic regulation that a baker wants to it's an employment regulation. He's not allowed to hire his employees for more than a certain number of hours a week. And he goes to court and takes it all the way to Supreme Court and he says I've got the right contract and that's why I should be able to hire and fire people under the conditions that I please, that they please me and it please them that they agree to. But there's no right to contract. That's enumerated in the constitution. And what they argued at the time was yeah, there's no right to contract enumerated explicitly, but it's a corollary to an application of the right to liberty. And that case he won that case and for a short period of time early 20th century they call the Lochner era.
Speaker 2:This idea that the right to individual liberty entails an expansive economic freedom Was the rule of the day and it ended during the New Deal. And at that point the Supreme Court said no, you don't get to say that the right to liberty implies economic liberty because it's not enumerated. Instead, you have to apply this what they call rational basis test. You have to say, for any right that isn't explicitly enumerated, like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, for everything else, liberty, general rights to liberty, don't imply unencumbered liberty. That what they imply is. You can have maybe a weak claim to liberty until you show that the government has an interest in something. And if the government has an interest in regulating labor, it has an interest in alleviating inequality, insecurity et cetera then because it's when the government exercises that interest, because it's not offending against an enumerated right, it's justifiable.
Speaker 2:And as long as that's your, then your, understanding of how rights are to be understood and interpreted in our constitution, as long as you think Lochner was a dirty word, then it's hard to explain why personal liberties that aren't enumerated should fare any better. And that's exactly the argument that's made in the repeal of Roe v Wade. It's what Justice Alito, justice Thomas, have been saying for years and years. They'd say why should we think there's a right to abortion or a right to quote, unquote privacy that's associated with it, when none of these things are enumerated in constitution and the defendants want to say, well, but they're implied by the right to liberty. Okay, but that argument doesn't work for economic liberty because we've overturned Lochner, so why should it work for personal liberty? And they don't have a leg to stand on at that point. That's the discussion that Ankar elaborates on in his talk.
Speaker 1:And so I mean, this is like a legal battle, only Is there not a cultural. Like you know, we're not lawyers. So what's the relationship? It's what I'm trying to figure out, right Like, do we all have to just kind of try to figure out how to support the right kind of legislation for this, or how do we actually affect change in the long term? You know? So what led up to Roe v Wade in the first place, where there are cultural movements that caused it, or was it just? You know, it seems to me like America's becoming more and more litigious and I don't know if it's a good or bad thing where it's like everything's on this minute level of you know, coming to these long traditions, and how do you get, how do you untangle that over 200 years? And do we have to have like another revolution and start over again, or something Like it just seems more and more challenging to affect it and kind of change.
Speaker 2:We're not lawyers and the story that I was just telling about the devolution of a certain legal idea is in part a story about the unfolding of certain legal theories, but it's unfolding of legal theories under the influence of philosophical ideas that are of broader influence throughout the culture. In that case in particular, it's a kind of anti-conceptual mentality. What is an individual right? That's such an abstract concept. How am I supposed to know what liberty means? I can tell you what freedom of speech is, what freedom of the press is, and that we have them because there you see, it's written right there in the text of the Constitution. I don't have to look further beyond the plain language of the text of the Constitution. But if you wanna ask me what's liberty and what are all of its implications, that's so high flutin' and abstract you can't tell me.
Speaker 2:And that goes hand in hand with pragmatism, with the advance of pragmatism in America, which is a very anti-intellectual philosophy that has skepticism about these high level abstractions. In fact, the lead jurist who is a critic of Lochner, who signed the, who wrote the famous dissent in Lochner, was Oliver Wendell Holmes, and he was notoriously a major pragmatist in not just the Cloakwheel sense. But philosophically speaking he was friends with the major pragmatist philosophers, associates of major pragmatist philosophers of the day. So the-.
Speaker 1:This is.
Speaker 2:John Dewey, dewey, james Perce, yes, and so it's the intellectual trend of America that's been driving the degradation of individual liberty. Individual liberty is an abstract moral principle, and so how do you stop this degradation? How do you have a revolution? I don't think that would do much good today, because a revolution's only worth having if you think that the system that's going to replace the current system is gonna be better as opposed to worse. But for that to happen, you gotta have reasonable confidence that the people who are gonna fight in this revolution have a plan and have a set of principles and ideals, and ideals that they're fighting for that will be implemented in the new system. And I don't have any confidence that that's true today. So all there is that we can do is fight for better ideals and try to educate people to someday reach a critical mass where they see the world differently and they are intolerant of the kind of pragmatist thinking that's coming out of not just our judicial system but our educational system and everything else.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think this is a good place to kind of bring it back and kind of finish up the conversation, although I could talk forever with you about this stuff there's so many more things but there's, I see, people on the political right or the cultural right I think is for me more accurate and from my perspective, they're not just political people, they're really trying to be cultural movers. I think People on the left are trying to be. There's a cultural woke left and there's those little libertarian groups over there. It's like a high school cafeteria you got the right people on the right, the left people on the left and never the 20 children Libertarians are hanging out with the Goths.
Speaker 1:And all the outsiders are over in that corner. And then there's that little philosopher, ein Rangai, over there with his Atlas Shrugged.
Speaker 2:He's all by himself. He's all by himself, basically.
Speaker 1:And there's a. It's like okay, so people, why? The right to abortion is sacrosanctis, your book Great. I'll read some articles. Who cares? Right, I mean, everyone's trying. The right is saying let's affect change by being the Daily Wire Plus and getting into mainstream media, quote, unquote. I don't like that. There's the left that's let's get into boardrooms and let's change it in there and let's have real change Right now. Let's just get in your face and make CEOs change and make all these companies change. And again, the right is like we have to use politics and the levers of power to make this change. And we're saying read books. So what do we? Nobody disagrees with education. I don't think there's anybody that you'd be like nah that's not important.
Speaker 2:Let's be stupid.
Speaker 1:The question, I think, is something like look like we talked about the reason for reading news and it matters for our life and we want to. I want to do something, and there are some people who want to do something, and listening to stuff listening to your own book show, listening to other podcasts, listening to the news whatever can sometimes make we're arguing with people on the streets or with someone online might make you feel good. Sure, so does it make any change? So what options do I have? If I really want to change something and that's, to me, the real let's get fired up and do something. That's where I'm trying to. And, by the way, I'm not saying don't read the book. I think the book is. It's actually quite short. I think it's practically free on Amazon. It's like a couple bucks. It's very cheap. Yeah, it's affordable. It's a great little booklet. It does give you a completely different understanding of Let me not even understand these are the right word A reframing of the whole debate how it's always been placed in America.
Speaker 1:But I'm just trying to get at the idea of If the only thing is education, then fine. I guess the only answer is let's all abscond from the daily politics and all the life things and just become teachers. That's it. That's our only solution to have a better world. And is that it's?
Speaker 2:not the only solution, and I'm not going to pretend to be any kind of expert on what it takes to change the world. Very few people, if any, are, and anyone who tells you they know the thing that's going to change the world overnight is probably trying to sell you things.
Speaker 1:You mean, besides the America show. That's what this is going to do.
Speaker 2:So what I have to say is just the best that I can on the spot. But I think there's two things that come to mind here. One is that One is a defense of the kind of knee-jerk reaction against the recommendation of education as a solution, because it sounds kind of pat. It's like that's the best you can do. That's what all the objectivists say, okay. But here's where I go back to the beginning of our conversation and what's wrong with the sort of conspiracist mentality, the holding-call-field mentality, and it's the. You want to have things go your way and not everybody's complying, and then you have a fit because of it and figure out, and you figure that there's a conspiracy against you. Well, that's an understandable mentality for a young person. But part of growing up, I think, is realizing wow, there's a big world out there and, yeah, there are a lot of people who think differently and yeah, because of that you can't have your way overnight, maybe not even If you're talking about your way and the way you want a society to be run. It takes decades, it sometimes takes centuries for that kind of change to happen, unless you start a violent revolution and kill a lot of people. But then the only change you get is blood in the streets. So, yeah, we can't have a holding-call-field mentality about what it's going to take for the world to change.
Speaker 2:The kind of mature, adult mentality is. Change of an entire culture, which is a massive thing, happens very gradually, and when it happens quickly it usually only ends with bloodshed. So I think that's the enlightened mentality that you have to have, and when you have it, I think it gives you a kind of patience, not patience for injustice. You still as you can see from my views about abortion you still have righteous indignation for the things that are going wrong, but you also have an understanding about where change comes from.
Speaker 2:It comes from people changing their mind, and you know that doesn't happen overnight, and so there's a way of balancing righteous indignation about injustice with a desire for change if you have an ideal that you're working toward and you're doing what you can in the time that you have to push things toward that ideal. So that's the first thing I would have to say, which is don't be holding-call-field. But the second thing is that it's not. So that's the case for education. That's the case for why we should be patient and be willing to work for education. But then the second point is it's not just education, there are more things that one can do, and here I refer the audience to an older talk of mine that I gave, I think maybe around 2014, in Las Vegas at Ocon, and it was called the spreading objectivism by living it.
Speaker 1:That's on YouTube as well. Yes, all this is on YouTube?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's. In a way it's a form of education, but that's pushing the limits of what education is. It's the idea that if you want to change the world, you do it one person at a time. You do it with the people you know, and you don't do that primarily by educating them in the sense of teaching them a lesson, giving them an argument, making them read a book or something like that. People change their minds. Look to change one's mind about something as grand as a philosophic worldview it's a big deal Like.
Speaker 2:You've wired together all these beliefs over the course of years and years, and to change that hurts, it requires a lot of not just effort but sometimes just outright pain as you disentangle the connections and integrations you've forged over the course of a lifetime.
Speaker 2:And so rational people, if they're really rational won't change it at the drop of a hat.
Speaker 2:They're not going to say, oh, my whole worldview is wrong, because they know the implications if it were wrong and they know how much they'd have to change. So what you can do is you can't change somebody's mind overnight. You have to plant seeds, and rational people aren't going to let those seeds grow unless they know they're coming from a good place, unless they know that the person who's planted the seed is a good, admirable person that they want to be like. And so that's why the talk is spreading Objectivism by living it, because I mean the most success that I've had with changing people's minds has been from people who were close to me, who were friends of mine, who, I presume, thought I was a good guy and they wanted to learn more about what made me tick. And it was the same thing that got me interested in changing my mind because I saw people who I admired and I want to know what books they were reading, and so I read their books and so it's a person-to-person approach to philosophic change.
Speaker 1:But that's going to mean something specific in terms of being a good Objectivist, not in terms of having a really good knowledge.
Speaker 2:It's about being a good person.
Speaker 1:And the issue there, I think, is about becoming, because I've thought about this over the years, about people who've come to me and come to Objectivism or learned about it through me, and I've learned the same thing, and part of it is a method of being like me challenging my own ideas about a whole bunch of issues, including really listening to somebody who, if that is somewhat rational I mean, they're not crazy when they're talking about abortion and someone is anti-abortion.
Speaker 1:They're on the other side and I'm still going to listen to them a little bit and have a conversation at least, and at least try to grasp the principles and the ideas underlying their view on this and to better understand where they're coming from for my own purposes, so I can understand what are the issues involved and why is it important to them, or something like gun rights in America that's very passionate in Texas, and you come up with these issues. But I think the issue in terms of what you're saying, that I've seen myself and others that are good at this is I don't scream at them or show them that they're wrong and do anything like that. You should genuinely listen to individuals and try to, and that means you should be challenging your own ideas.
Speaker 2:And that's part of what you are role modeling.
Speaker 1:That's a good one.
Speaker 2:It's part of what it is to be a good person, is to be somebody who listens, and somebody who has conversations rather than arguments, and somebody who exhibits genuine interest in the truth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's part of listening to the news properly that we talked about.
Speaker 2:There is a connection.
Speaker 1:It's a full circle of. There's this idea of before you order the outer world, you need to order the inner world, which means your world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like the idea of changing the world one person at a time. And when you think about it, the world that you actually live in is not one that's for billion people or whatever the current world population is. I think it's more than that. The world you live in is a world of 50, 60 people. You know and there's that line from Ayn Rand in the romantic manifesto those who fight for the future live in it today.
Speaker 2:I think this is part of what that means. I think you can live in your own future if you create a circle of friends who you have a community of values with and yeah, you can't even with the best such circle, the external world is still going to affect you. That's part of why you need to know about the news. But while there's a big quality of life difference, it can make to you if you just surround yourself directly with the best people and work on making that little world the best that you can make it, and that also, I think, gives you the more fuel for having the kind of patience with the external world that we were talking about before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, knowing what you can and cannot change. Yeah, I think it's an important thing. Okay, so last thing what projects are you working on? And we'll close with that.
Speaker 2:I'm doing a lot. I mentioned earlier that I am doing more work on ethics these days than on epistemology, and I'm right now in the early phases of planning a book that I want to write first, major chapter of which is close to being done, where the theme of the book is why the morality of altruism comes from religion.
Speaker 1:Why the morality of altruism? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Why the?
Speaker 1:Or is that not known? Is that not the view?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a whole movement today. You've probably heard of them recently called effective altruism.
Speaker 1:They've been involved in the scandal with.
Speaker 2:Bitcoin and whatnot, or with FTX, and they all think of themselves as secularists.
Speaker 1:Sam Bankman-Free it comes from, so there's a whole group of people you want to talk to.
Speaker 2:And it's wider than them. The point is that the conventional morality of our age is the idea that what morality means is giving up yourself for the sake of others. And the effective altruists are just one twist on that, where they say well, you need to know exactly the right people to give it to to see what the best impact on the future is going to be.
Speaker 1:They're trying to be scientific about this essentially.
Speaker 2:They're trying to be scientific about the means to their end, but my argument is they're not being scientific about the end itself.
Speaker 2:If the end is other people's need, regardless of how much it is you're giving up for the sake of them. That is an idea that comes from religion and most of them don't appreciate that. Most of them think that because they're being scientific about the means, that makes the viewpoint scientific. But in fact, like just historically speaking, their idea of what the purpose of morality is would have been perceived as alien, I think, by ancient Greek moral philosophers in many ways, and you don't really start to see anything like it appearing in the West until you get to Augustine and Christianity. And there's lots of reasons that there are connections and parallels between religion and between this moral viewpoint.
Speaker 2:And there's lots of ways in which the major theorists of altruism in the 18th and 19th century were in one way or another, influenced by their own religious heritage, even though they were in one. They were also less religious than their forefathers, but they were still under the sway of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Sermon on the Mount. And so I want to make an argument in this book and I want to make it to a general audience of secular minded people who value rationality, who value science, who think of themselves as secular and scientific but who have this big blind spot, and that's when it comes to morality, and they've not yet turned the spotlight of science, even when they think they have, onto their basic premises about morality. That's what the book is hopefully going to be about.
Speaker 1:All right, so we're recording this on the day before Thanksgiving. This is the first episode. I'm not 100% sure when I'm going to start releasing these, but probably soon. But I am glad to hear that I'll probably release it before your book is out, because you're on chapter one Probably. So I think I'm good on that. Okay, so maybe I'll wait and we'll do and we'll release all of them. I'm just kidding, I won't do that because it'll do you have like a deadline of when you're trying to accomplish this whole thing?
Speaker 2:Not yet. No, okay, you don't want to announce to the world one year from today. It's not going to be that soon. I know this is a big project. Hopefully, hopefully, less than three years. We'll see.
Speaker 1:Okay, great. Well, thank you so much, ben, for coming, and this has been a lot of fun. I've enjoyed this and I think there's a lot of really interesting things that I've learned about the news and this, this debate and making change, and so thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, kirk. Good night Dr.