Speaker 1: You know the quarter Berry.
Speaker 2: Sois hi?
Speaker 1: Everyone, Welcome to Zuga now in English. I know this
Speaker 1: is not very common. We typically speak in Portuguese, but
Speaker 1: we we couldn't waste a chance to speak with Iron Brook,
Speaker 1: which is the guests of today. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for being.
Speaker 3: Here, Thanks for having me and speaking English.
Speaker 1: Appreciate It's an amazing pleasure to have you here. I
Speaker 1: know that you've been doing some events here in Portugal
Speaker 1: in the last day. You left some today here I think,
Speaker 1: how is it called Atlas? At Atlas Campus is helping
Speaker 1: to make to put that together as well for some
Speaker 1: For the the people that are listening at home, guys,
Speaker 1: this is a new space, so pardon us if we
Speaker 1: will have some like sound issues or image issues. It
Speaker 1: will get better through time. It's the first time we
Speaker 1: are doing the postcar podcast in this space. However, for
Speaker 1: the people at home that don't know you. So, Aaron
Speaker 1: Brook is the shareman of n RN's institute, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about what that means.
Speaker 3: Who is rant?
Speaker 1: Where is objectivism? Is the author of books like Free
Speaker 1: Market Revolution, Equal is Unfair, which is also a concept
Speaker 1: that will discuss today, and the leading advocate for capitalism
Speaker 1: and objectivism. So thank you again for being here. It's
Speaker 1: an honor.
Speaker 3: How it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1: How it's been the visit so far in Portugal, It's good.
Speaker 3: Everything's been good. It's a quick visit. I'm on a
Speaker 3: European tour, so this is I don't know, the ninth
Speaker 3: event I'm doing in ten days or something ridiculous like
Speaker 3: that in nine different countries. But it's all good.
Speaker 1: It takes stamina. Well done for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know it takes temina, because I'm not sure
Speaker 3: I have it anymore. I used to do a lot better.
Speaker 1: People here in Portugal might be wondering. Okay, tell me more.
Speaker 1: I've never heard about this objectivism stuff. Who is n Rant?
Speaker 1: So can you? Can you tell us? And let's start
Speaker 1: with that, what is objectivism? Who is n Rant?
Speaker 3: Sure? I mean? Ironland was an author and American author
Speaker 3: who wrote in the middle of the twentieth century and
Speaker 3: probably had a probably among the most important thinkers of
Speaker 3: the twentieth century. I think she'll have a profound impact
Speaker 3: on the future of mankind, certainly of the US and
Speaker 3: in Europe. She's a best selling author. I think she
Speaker 3: already had huge impact. I'd say on kind of the
Speaker 3: generation that elected Margatacher and Ronald Reagan, and kind of
Speaker 3: the move to the to the right that happened in
Speaker 3: the nineteen eighties, or to the free market right that
Speaker 3: happened in the nineteen eighties. She still sells an amazing
Speaker 3: number of books, so she's still somebody who inspires people
Speaker 3: all over the world. Her books have been translated into
Speaker 3: pretty much every language, including Portuguese. And we were just
Speaker 3: talking Portuguese in Brazil and Portuguese Portugal, because I guess
Speaker 3: you guys don't read each other's translations, but like the.
Speaker 1: English American stuff, you know, we like to keep it.
Speaker 1: But it's a bit different. It's a bit different. The
Speaker 1: differences in language are more extreme in terms of I'll
Speaker 1: do construct phrases. Although we obviously understanding each other, we
Speaker 1: don't like it both ways, so we just keep translating
Speaker 1: again and again for Portuguese Portugal and Portuguese Brazil.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so her books are translated pretty much into every
Speaker 3: major language out there and a lot of minor languages.
Speaker 3: I mean, she was born, She's got a fascinating life history.
Speaker 3: She was born in nineteen oh five in Saint Petersburg, Russia,
Speaker 3: and she kind of witnessed the Russian Revolution from her balcony.
Speaker 3: I mean, it happened right there in Saint Petersburg. So
Speaker 3: she lived under communism. She experienced what communism was like.
Speaker 3: Her father, who was a pharmacist, owned a pharmacy that
Speaker 3: was taken from them. The apartment was taking from them,
Speaker 3: had to live with other families, and she, from a
Speaker 3: very young age, had a kind of an individualistic spirit.
Speaker 3: She was an independent thinker and she hated Communism from
Speaker 3: day one. And it was obvious that if she stayed
Speaker 3: in Russia she would not survive. They would kill her.
Speaker 3: So she got out as soon as she could. There
Speaker 3: was a small opening in the nineteen twenties where she
Speaker 3: could leave and go do some research in the US
Speaker 3: and come back, but she knew she would never come back.
Speaker 3: Her family knew she would never come back. Made it
Speaker 3: to the United States, got there, you know, a young
Speaker 3: Russian woman with nothing, went to Hollywood because she wanted
Speaker 3: to write for the movies. Ultimately got all kinds of jobs,
Speaker 3: odds and ends jobs, and ultimately became a script writer
Speaker 3: in Hollywood. She will plays her first novel is We
Speaker 3: the Living, which is a very kind of autobiographical novel.
Speaker 3: It's about a young woman growing up in Russia and
Speaker 3: witnessing the revolution and dealing with that. Very powerful novel.
Speaker 3: If you want to understand communism, read with the Living.
Speaker 3: She wrote a small book called Anthem that was first
Speaker 3: published in the UK, kind of a dystopian novel atte
Speaker 3: very very small, quick read. And then she she wrote
Speaker 3: a book called The fountain Head, which took her quite
Speaker 3: a few years to write. She was It was published
Speaker 3: in nineteen forty five, and she sent it out to
Speaker 3: publish this and nobody wanted it, so twelve publishers rejected it,
Speaker 3: and then the thirteenth thirteenth publisher took it and didn't
Speaker 3: print a lot of copies because they didn't think it
Speaker 3: would amount to much. But it became a best seller.
Speaker 3: It became a kind of a word of mouth bestseller,
Speaker 3: you know, to this day, tens of thousands of copies
Speaker 3: just in the United States, and then globally because it's
Speaker 3: been translated. And then she started working on a magnus Opus,
Speaker 3: which is Atla Shrugg, and she published that in nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty seven. This time all the publishers wanted to publish
Speaker 3: it because they'd seen what happened with The Fountainhead, and
Speaker 3: it came out as an instant bestseller. It again still
Speaker 3: sells hundreds of thousands, I think of copies all over
Speaker 3: the world, and she became a real celebrity in the
Speaker 3: United States. At that point, she started writing philosophy and
Speaker 3: commentary on the culture. So she didn't write another novel,
Speaker 3: but she wrote lots and lots of articles that were
Speaker 3: then put into books Capitalism, non Known Ideal, the Virtue
Speaker 3: of Selfishness, pretty controversial philosophy, Who needs it? These are
Speaker 3: the kind of books she wrote about the very early
Speaker 3: beginnings of the environmentalist movement and about the new Left
Speaker 3: which was rising in the nineteen sixties, so she really
Speaker 3: covered that. She talked about politics and everything that was
Speaker 3: going on in the world. Really during that period. She
Speaker 3: analyzed and covered given her unique philosophical perspective, and she
Speaker 3: wrote some pretty philosophical books like Introduction to Objectivists of Pistemology,
Speaker 3: and she landed up calling her philosophy kind of all
Speaker 3: these ideas that she developed in the novels and then
Speaker 3: that she developed in her nonfiction writing. She called that
Speaker 3: the philosophy of objectivism. So that came together, and it
Speaker 3: turned out given all her writings that she you know,
Speaker 3: she had a position on metaphysics and epistemology, on ethics,
Speaker 3: on politics, and on aesthetics. She's got a book called
Speaker 3: the Romantic Manifesto, which is a theory of art that
Speaker 3: she developed. So you know, I think she'll go down
Speaker 3: as one of the great philosophers and certainly maybe the
Speaker 3: most important thinker of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: All Right, and that's said, with all those amazing novels
Speaker 1: and so on, I've read fountain Head and not Los Shrugged,
Speaker 1: I've not. I've not read With the Living yet.
Speaker 3: So you should. I think you'll enjoy it. I think
Speaker 3: you will.
Speaker 1: Oh will? I will?
Speaker 3: Thanks.
Speaker 1: So that said in a Nutshelle, how can you describe
Speaker 1: to people that never heard about objectivism?
Speaker 3: What is that? I mean?
Speaker 1: People have heard the virtue of selfishness.
Speaker 3: They are in.
Speaker 1: Portugal, so they will scream far right if you say that.
Speaker 3: So well, I don't know if I wish for the
Speaker 3: far right thought the virtue selfishness. I don't think they do.
Speaker 3: But in Portugal, and we can talk about that. Everything
Speaker 3: they don't like.
Speaker 1: Is the far exactly. In Portugal, everything that is not
Speaker 1: like social democracy. Socialism type is a far right extremist. Well,
Speaker 1: let's explain to people.
Speaker 3: Is objectivism so subjectivism, I mean it's hard to do
Speaker 3: because objectivism is philosophy. So it's many many, many books,
Speaker 3: many many volumes could be written. But on kind of
Speaker 3: on one foot the brief topic. You know, I believe
Speaker 3: that reality is what it is. It's not what you
Speaker 3: wish it to be. It's not what what somebody else
Speaker 3: wishes to be. It it existence exists as a the
Speaker 3: law of causality kind of Uh. And then we as
Speaker 3: human beings have the tool to no reality. We know
Speaker 3: reality through reason, through our senses and through our and
Speaker 3: with the use of our mind integrating the information we
Speaker 3: get from our senses. We don't know it from our emotions.
Speaker 3: Our emotions are not tools of cognition. They don't teach
Speaker 3: us about reality. They teach us about ourselves maybe, but
Speaker 3: not about reality. And we don't. We don't learn truth
Speaker 3: from revelation. Truth comes from reason, from from from observing
Speaker 3: and integrating. Uh. And then you know, reason is a
Speaker 3: faculty that only individuals have. There's no collective consciousness, there's
Speaker 3: no collective thinking. Uh. And so individual is the unit
Speaker 3: that is of importance, and uh the individual should, according
Speaker 3: to objectivism, pursue his own interests, his own life, survive, thrive, flourish,
Speaker 3: and ultimately happiness. So the goal of morality should be
Speaker 3: to teach us how to live, how to live well,
Speaker 3: how to flourish, how to thrive, how to be the
Speaker 3: best human beings we can be. It's not to teach
Speaker 3: us how to sacrifice and live for others, and it's
Speaker 3: not to demand other sacrifice for us. It's to live
Speaker 3: your life as an independent human being, using your reason,
Speaker 3: your means of your tool to know the world as
Speaker 3: your guide and then you know. So if such individuals
Speaker 3: pursuing their own happiness, pursuing your own life, they want
Speaker 3: to be basically left free, recognizing that the enemy of
Speaker 3: reason and the enemy of thinking is force cousion. So
Speaker 3: you want a political system that rejects that takes out
Speaker 3: of society force and cosion. So you want a government
Speaker 3: that has a monopoly over the use of force, but
Speaker 3: only can only use it in retaliation, can only use
Speaker 3: them to protect people from force inclusion. So she's against socialism,
Speaker 3: she's against fascism for left, for right, she is she
Speaker 3: is for capitalism, which he defined as the system where
Speaker 3: the government's sole job is the protection and defense of
Speaker 3: individual rights, where all property is owned privately, and where
Speaker 3: there is a complete separation between state and economics. So
Speaker 3: so pretty radical as a as a free marketer, as
Speaker 3: the you know, but it's more than just a market.
Speaker 3: It's the idea that rights much must be protected. That
Speaker 3: is the role of government.
Speaker 1: So you spoke about some concepts that some people might
Speaker 1: think they're very subjective, like happiness, right, Happiness for me
Speaker 1: can be can mean very different things than what it
Speaker 1: means for you. Happiness for you might be doing a
Speaker 1: very nice tour through Europe talking about and random objectivism.
Speaker 1: To me, happiness is like staying with my family and
Speaker 1: enjoy a nice a nice dinner them. So how can
Speaker 1: that be the self interest joining force of the pursuits
Speaker 1: of happiness. How such a subjective thing can can be
Speaker 1: meddled and consistent with objectivism?
Speaker 3: Then, So, first, I don't think it's subjectives, you know.
Speaker 3: Subjective is a term, a philosophical term that really means
Speaker 3: you know, whatever, whatever you feel like. Well, and I
Speaker 3: think the pro the principles, the rules to achieving happiness
Speaker 3: Happiness is not just something that you win, that you whim,
Speaker 3: that just comes out of your own particular whims. It's
Speaker 3: certainly personal. Each one of us is going to experience
Speaker 3: happiness differently, in which can experience happiness from different things.
Speaker 3: But even then there's a principle guiding it all. Happiness
Speaker 3: comes from achieving your values, assuming those values are rational
Speaker 3: and pro life. Right, If your values involved injecting heroin
Speaker 3: and UH and being a sadamasochist, then you're not going
Speaker 3: to achieve happiness by your values. Your values, well, you
Speaker 3: destroy you, make you unhappy, and actually kill you. So
Speaker 3: you have to have life affirming rational values. If you
Speaker 3: have life affirming rational valuers, and they can be a lot,
Speaker 3: it can be. I think everybody needs a career. I think,
Speaker 3: you know, we can talk about that. But career is
Speaker 3: where you get your self esteem, and I think self
Speaker 3: esteem is necessary. But some people might emphasize more family,
Speaker 3: some people might emphasize more travel, some people don't like
Speaker 3: to travel. There are a lot of specifics that differ
Speaker 3: from people, but I don't call them subjective. Hopefully, you know,
Speaker 3: you can define what your values are and why their
Speaker 3: values to you, you know, and in a rational way,
Speaker 3: in a way that you can communicate, and I can
Speaker 3: do the same for mine. So the formula for happiness
Speaker 3: is to achieve your rational life affirming values, and to
Speaker 3: constantly strive to improve, to constantly strive for something better,
Speaker 3: whether it's within your career or whether it's within your family,
Speaker 3: you know whatever.
Speaker 1: Real what if myself interested just to maximize pleasure.
Speaker 3: Well then you won't be happy. You'll land up being miserable.
Speaker 3: The hedonists don't actually achieve. They achieve momentary pleasure, but
Speaker 3: they don't actually achieve happiness. We are not a being
Speaker 3: that is pure material. That is, we're not a being
Speaker 3: that can only survive on a material a pleasure. Pleasure
Speaker 3: is important. I'm all full pleasure. I love pleasure. I
Speaker 3: think pleasure is great, and pleasure is a requirement for happiness,
Speaker 3: but it's not enough. And people who dedicate themselves just
Speaker 3: to having to partying and drinking and drugs or whatever, sex, whatever,
Speaker 3: you know, they can have fun for a while, but
Speaker 3: that doesn't add up to happiness. And that's another thing.
Speaker 3: Happiness is not a momentary emotion. It's not like I'm
Speaker 3: happy one minute and I'm not happy the other minute.
Speaker 3: Happiness is an underlying state of being. It's some that
Speaker 3: you carry with you for you actual real life. You
Speaker 3: can get bad news, you can something really horrible can happen.
Speaker 3: It makes you very, very, very sad, and yet fundamentally
Speaker 3: you're still a happy person. So happiness is not something
Speaker 3: that you switch on and off all the time. It's
Speaker 3: something that once you attain it and you sustain it
Speaker 3: is sustained as an underlying sense of a being.
Speaker 1: So when you say self pursue your self interest and
Speaker 1: your own happiness and so on. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: there's judgment in terms not judgment in a bad sense,
Speaker 1: but judgment in the sense of, obviously there are ways
Speaker 1: to pursue your self interest that are better than others.
Speaker 1: How do you explain that to people? A little bit
Speaker 1: more little because some people say, oh, awesome, I can
Speaker 1: pursue my self interest. I will just do what I
Speaker 1: want and anybody can be good. Is there such a
Speaker 1: thing as objective morality on the objectivist framework?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I mean reality is objective. So the standards of
Speaker 3: your behavior, the prince supposed by which you behave, which
Speaker 3: is what morality kind of articulates, are objective and they're
Speaker 3: not dependent on you. They are uniform to the entire
Speaker 3: human race. That is, these are principle that apply to everybody,
Speaker 3: no matter where they are, no matter what their circumstances are.
Speaker 3: That is, it's true for all human beings that the
Speaker 3: way in which we survive, the way in which we thrive,
Speaker 3: is by the use of our reason.
Speaker 1: And can you give examples, like one of those universal
Speaker 1: objective moral rules.
Speaker 3: Live by reason, live by your mind, be rational. Be
Speaker 3: rational is a moral principle. I know that's very outside
Speaker 3: the norm of what people consider morality, but that's because
Speaker 3: I think morality today is completely messed up, and it's
Speaker 3: anti human and it's it's destructive. It's why we have
Speaker 3: so many problems in the world, why we have so
Speaker 3: many political problems, but also just personal problems. There's a
Speaker 3: lot of people unhappy in the world. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of poverty and death and destruction in the world, and
Speaker 3: it comes from the fact that we have a screwed
Speaker 3: up morality. So I think for two thousand plus years,
Speaker 3: or really since the beginning of mankind, we've messed around
Speaker 3: with morality, and we've dedicated morality to thinking about how
Speaker 3: to sacrifice the other people, and how to place the
Speaker 3: well being of other people in front of everything else.
Speaker 3: And we haven't really thought about how to make our
Speaker 3: own lives good. And this is the revolution I think
Speaker 3: that iron Ran brings. So then number one, if you
Speaker 3: had to boil down all of Ironrand's thinking into one
Speaker 3: principle guidance to life, think, use your mind. I mean,
Speaker 3: the reality is that almost any time you get into
Speaker 3: trouble and you go, oh God, that that was a mistake,
Speaker 3: it's almost always the case that you followed your emotions
Speaker 3: and you didn't think it through beforehand. I mean it's
Speaker 3: almost never that you go, I thought about it too much, right,
Speaker 3: It's I didn't think it through. I didn't really look
Speaker 3: at all the evidence. You know, you you get involved
Speaker 3: with a with a woman who's you know, ultimately not
Speaker 3: so good for you. Yeah, you let your let your
Speaker 3: libido dictate what you do, rather than think about about
Speaker 3: what the consequences of what your what your actual actions
Speaker 3: on what her character might or might not be. So
Speaker 3: thinking is the essence is that the core of human
Speaker 3: morality what guides us to flourishing, it will makes every
Speaker 3: value possible. I mean, none of us are born if
Speaker 3: you look at just basic human values. None of us
Speaker 3: are born with the gene to hunt. I mean, I
Speaker 3: know some men think they do, but they don't have it. Right.
Speaker 3: You know, if you go up against a bison, you
Speaker 3: have to run down a big animal. Right. We're not fast,
Speaker 3: we're not strong, no clause, no fangs. Right, So you're
Speaker 3: not going to be successful. So you need tools. You
Speaker 3: need weapons, you need you need strategy, you need teamwork.
Speaker 3: All of that requirets thinking. All of that requition. We
Speaker 3: don't have a gene to create bows and rows, bows
Speaker 3: and ls. Some genius invented it. We probably burnt him
Speaker 3: at the steak and uh and and and then people
Speaker 3: copied it with some genius had they invented. So, you know,
Speaker 3: the mind is the source of all human values.
Speaker 1: So what do you decay? For example, there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of a bunch of people that would say, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: clearly and very precisely. That's why I reached a conclusion
Speaker 1: that socialism is the best You even had the expression
Speaker 1: of scientific socialism, as you know, right, So they really
Speaker 1: wanted to prove the point that socialism was the best
Speaker 1: rational economic system that you could have. How do you
Speaker 1: work with those people in terms of rational with better reasoning,
Speaker 1: what is our.
Speaker 3: Sure So you could you could make an excuse for
Speaker 3: maybe car marks that he didn't know better. Maybe right,
Speaker 3: Mars is full of contradictions and full of full of
Speaker 3: garbage and his writing, but you can make it. Use
Speaker 3: that one hundred and fifty years ago, two hundred years ago, Okay,
Speaker 3: it seemed scientific, although it wasn't today with the complete
Speaker 3: failures of socialism. I mean, what people who are socialists
Speaker 3: today do is they take a knife and they stick
Speaker 3: it in both of their eyes and they blind themselves
Speaker 3: to reality. The one thing socialists don't do is use
Speaker 3: their mind. The one thing socialists don't do is think,
Speaker 3: because if they use their mind, if they use their eyes,
Speaker 3: if they use their mind, they would see the complete
Speaker 3: another failure of socialism. And if they use their mind,
Speaker 3: they would see that socialism cannot work because it's a
Speaker 3: rotten theory. Marx is wrong and pretty much everything he
Speaker 3: said why he's still popular is bizarre. Right, emotional, it's emotional,
Speaker 3: it's driven by emotion, it's driven by morality, right, by
Speaker 3: a rotten morality.
Speaker 1: That's one thing that I was about to say, which
Speaker 1: is if I go to the streets right now in
Speaker 1: Portugal and I ask someone about their most important let's say,
Speaker 1: top three values that you have. I bet you like
Speaker 1: eighty percent of people will say equality in one of
Speaker 1: those values. But you would say, and you wrote it,
Speaker 1: equality is unfair. Yeah, absolutely, So can you do you
Speaker 1: care to explain that concept to people, which is very
Speaker 1: foreign here in Portugal?
Speaker 3: Sure, I mean we're all different, we have different skills,
Speaker 3: different abilities. I mean, it's a fact, and it's what
Speaker 3: makes life interesting and fun. Is the fact the world different.
Speaker 3: Wall the same, it would be horrible.
Speaker 1: So given the wall different, we all have different values.
Speaker 3: We all work at different jobs, a different level of engagement.
Speaker 3: We work harder, we work less. Some people like to
Speaker 3: be at the beach a lot of the time. Some
Speaker 3: people are lazy, some people are hard working. We have
Speaker 3: different moral characters, all different in every dimension. So the
Speaker 3: outcome of that is going to be we're going to
Speaker 3: produce at different levels. So it's produced a lot. So
Speaker 3: it's produce a lot a bit, And the economic inequality
Speaker 3: is just a reflection of how much you produce. And
Speaker 3: that's that's just reality. You can ignore reality, you can
Speaker 3: evade the reality you can pretend it doesn't exist, but
Speaker 3: the fact is we all produce different amounts, and therefore
Speaker 3: income is different and our wealth is different. When you
Speaker 3: try to equate us in terms of outcome, then you
Speaker 3: have to use cursion. You have to use force. You
Speaker 3: have to take from the person who was really hard working,
Speaker 3: had a great idea, started a business, created something that
Speaker 3: didn't exist before. You have to forcibly take from that
Speaker 3: person and give it to In some cases people who
Speaker 3: just maybe are not that smart, or maybe people who
Speaker 3: are you know, got a bad break in life, or
Speaker 3: people who are lazy, or people with bad moral character
Speaker 3: who people don't want to work hard, who you don't
Speaker 3: want to sit in front of the television and play
Speaker 3: video games all day. So they get by using force.
Speaker 3: They steal, in a sense, the wealth from the person
Speaker 3: who actually created it. So the only way to achieve
Speaker 3: equality is through violence. It's through taking. And so equality
Speaker 3: is a phenomena of violence, and it is it ignores
Speaker 3: the metaphysical reality they were not equal, the mesicallygical reality
Speaker 3: that we don't produce the same amounts. Now, people believe
Speaker 3: that businessmen exploit the money they own is not earned right,
Speaker 3: rich people do. But the reality is that you can't
Speaker 3: become rich unless you make products that people want and
Speaker 3: you sell it to them at the price they're willing
Speaker 3: to pay, and thus doing your making your customers lives better.
Speaker 3: Because nobody buys stuff to make themselves worse. Nobody buys
Speaker 3: stuff because they don't care. People buy stuff because they
Speaker 3: believe that by buying it, their life will be improved.
Speaker 3: And you're doing that by creating the stuff. By opening
Speaker 3: a store, by opening a restaurant, you enhancing the lives
Speaker 3: of the people you engage with. And instead of viewing
Speaker 3: them as virtuous, as good people because they've gone out there,
Speaker 3: they've worked, they've they've created something for themselves and made
Speaker 3: everybody else's lives better, we viewed them as scoundrels, as
Speaker 3: bad guys, exploiters, and we want to take their stuff.
Speaker 3: That's unbelievably unjust. There's another moral principle, right justice. Justice
Speaker 3: means getting what you deserve. If you sit all day
Speaker 3: and play video games, you don't deserve anything, right, you
Speaker 3: deserve the video game. That's it. And if you starve,
Speaker 3: it's your problem. If you go and build a new
Speaker 3: company and create a new product that people enjoy and
Speaker 3: value and are willing to pay for You deserve to
Speaker 3: make a lot of money. So the system that allows
Speaker 3: some people to make a lot of money and other
Speaker 3: people to have less is a system of justice, the
Speaker 3: exact opposite of kind of social justice, which is what
Speaker 3: the socialists push for.
Speaker 1: Ye, So it's complete reversal. They don't even believe in
Speaker 1: objective morality, right, They the New Left, and this every
Speaker 1: type of thing that I've seen, they all deny objective morality,
Speaker 1: but they seem to be the most moralists as possible. Yes,
Speaker 1: a funny combination.
Speaker 3: They live by a certain objective morality. That is, their
Speaker 3: morality is based on on altruism. The morality is based
Speaker 3: on the idea that the poorer you are, that the
Speaker 3: less you have for whatever reason, it doesn't matter to
Speaker 3: them why you're more virtuous, you're good. And the more
Speaker 3: successful you are, the ritue you are, the more prosperous
Speaker 3: you are, the more you've done with your life, the
Speaker 3: more evil you are. And the idea is that the
Speaker 3: only way to get success, to be successful in life,
Speaker 3: is to exploit the unsuccessful. So everything is about oppression
Speaker 3: oppressed and oppressed oppressor. So the successful oppressors. The failures
Speaker 3: are oppressed, and therefore the failures of the good guy
Speaker 3: and the successors are the bad guys. And you can
Speaker 3: see that all over the world. So if a country
Speaker 3: is rich and successful and prosperous, they must be evil.
Speaker 3: If a if a country is poor and miserable and
Speaker 3: treating people horribly, and everybody is everybody is really in
Speaker 3: bad shape, well they must be oppressed. So the other
Speaker 3: good guys and and and that's global politics today.
Speaker 1: So there's a phrase from Solzenski that really puts it
Speaker 1: well in terms of equality. It was also born in
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, born and lived there, and all these books.
Speaker 3: Were persecuted then were sent to the Gulags, and I
Speaker 3: lived a horrible in.
Speaker 1: The Gurlag archipelago. He says. He has a really good
Speaker 1: quote when he says that human human beings are born different.
Speaker 1: That's it, just like you said. So if we are different,
Speaker 1: we will never be the same. Only and if we
Speaker 1: are free, we will never be the same.
Speaker 3: Right, exactly.
Speaker 1: The only way that we are equal is if we
Speaker 1: are not free, yes, absolutely, and even and even then,
Speaker 1: you know, even when we not free, we're not equal.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was everybody equal in Soviet Union. No,
Speaker 3: I mean, is everybody equal in the Gulug? I mean,
Speaker 3: I think one of the points he makes is no,
Speaker 3: not even in the Gulag. Some people are more industrious
Speaker 3: and find ways to do better in the Goolug. Some
Speaker 3: people just give up and die very quickly in the Goolug.
Speaker 3: So even when you have zero freedom, when everything is controlled,
Speaker 3: we're not all going to be equal, you know, because
Speaker 3: we're all different.
Speaker 1: And that's what would you say that the quality is
Speaker 1: are anti human value?
Speaker 3: Yes, now there is one form of equality that's proke,
Speaker 3: human and good. I mean, the founding fathers of America,
Speaker 3: they start off the Declaration of Dependence. They start off
Speaker 3: the Declaration Independence with the statement all men are created equal.
Speaker 3: But they they didn't mean it in a sense that
Speaker 3: the socialists or the left mant it. They mean it,
Speaker 3: and they meant it in the sensus. Politically, that is
Speaker 3: that all men have equal rights. They will all have
Speaker 3: the right of life, liberty, you know, property, in the
Speaker 3: pursuit of happens, we all must be protected by the
Speaker 3: law equally. That sense, a political equality, I think, is
Speaker 3: the only sense in which equality means anything for human beings.
Speaker 3: Any other sense of equality, equality of outcome, equality of opportunity,
Speaker 3: all forms of you know, trying to evade the metaphysical
Speaker 3: reality and using force and coasion in order to do it.
Speaker 1: So permit me a pivot now in the discussion. So
Speaker 1: we are known as a libertarian podcast. We discuss about politics, economics, philosophy.
Speaker 1: That's why you're here, right. Why did n Rand didn't
Speaker 1: refer to ourselves as a libertarian much? Why objectivism and
Speaker 1: objectivists in general don't refer to themselves as libertarian because
Speaker 1: it seems as a political system. I mean, libertarianism seems
Speaker 1: like an expected political system if you think objectively.
Speaker 3: Or maybe not. This is what we're going to talk about, right,
Speaker 3: So it's not that Ironman didn't refer to herself as
Speaker 3: a libertarian. Ironland was very negative on libertarians. She was
Speaker 3: very negative on them. And so I think there are
Speaker 3: a few reasons. One, objectives is a philosophy. It's not
Speaker 3: a it's not politics, it's not a political it's not
Speaker 3: just a political philosophy, it's a philosophy. And Ironmand rejected
Speaker 3: the idea that you could have a political philosophy libertarianism
Speaker 3: without a system. Morality, epistemology, metaphys without a philosophical foundations.
Speaker 3: She thought it was a waste of time to just
Speaker 3: focus on politics as mostly in an economics, which is
Speaker 3: what most libertarians focus on. She said, you need a philosophy,
Speaker 3: and everybody has a philosophy and what And she worried
Speaker 3: that because the libertarians accepted anybody's philosophy, that it basically
Speaker 3: made the politics untenable. It made the politics unintelligible, and
Speaker 3: ultimately it was a weak foundation. It was a quicksand right.
Speaker 3: You couldn't build a good foundation. You needed a proper
Speaker 3: philosophy to have the foundation of liberty. And of course
Speaker 3: she was right. And the consequence of that is that
Speaker 3: you you know, what does libertarianism actually mean? Right? You know,
Speaker 3: some libertarians believe in limited governments and individual rights, but
Speaker 3: there were a lot of libertarians out there who believe
Speaker 3: in anarchy, that there should be no government and anything goes.
Speaker 3: Libertarians have defended pedophilia. I mean, if the child wants it,
Speaker 3: they have at liberty to do it. Right. It's pretty crazy,
Speaker 3: but they're all under the tent of libertarianism because they
Speaker 3: have a rotten definition of a philosophical definition. You know,
Speaker 3: the So the libertarians who take a lot of different
Speaker 3: and and and in many cases pretty crazy positions right now,
Speaker 3: for example, you've got libertarians who hate America, who hate Israel,
Speaker 3: who hates civilization, and who are pop puting, and yet
Speaker 3: they call themselves libertarian. You know, the libertarians. There's no
Speaker 3: liberty in any of the you know, there's no liberty there.
Speaker 3: And you've got at the same time people who are
Speaker 3: exactly the opposite. So is what is libertarianism? What's the
Speaker 3: policy that libertarian actually retornis am actually advocate for. And
Speaker 3: I think the problem is it's too big of a pretent.
Speaker 3: There's too many different elements underneath this label, and it
Speaker 3: doesn't have the proper philosophical foundation. So there's no way
Speaker 3: to fix the tent without a foundation.
Speaker 1: I would say. And we can speak a little bit
Speaker 1: about it, because I completely agree with you when you
Speaker 1: say that libertarian libertarianism is incomplete. And most of people
Speaker 1: that say they are libertarian and they don't think too
Speaker 1: much about it because it sounds good. It doesn't sound
Speaker 1: good in Portugal at all. It's a very hard thing
Speaker 1: to sell, let me tell you. But it does sound
Speaker 1: good in people that try to prioritize freedom because that
Speaker 1: sounds good, right, I mean, why should people steal from me?
Speaker 1: Why should people tell me how to live? I should
Speaker 1: decide that for myself. It's very consistent with objectivism. But
Speaker 1: they try to explain everything and try to re orientate
Speaker 1: the world in a sense with only objective, with only
Speaker 1: libertar Liberty is very simple, actually, and it doesn't try
Speaker 1: to solve much. It's it's very in my mind, that's
Speaker 1: my perspective. I see it just as the principle of
Speaker 1: non aggression, no non aggression, the non aggression principle.
Speaker 3: That's it.
Speaker 1: So it doesn't tell you all to live at all.
Speaker 1: It just tells you you shouldn't aggress and initiate violence
Speaker 1: against someone else, and that's it. In all forms. Anything else,
Speaker 1: then you have other systems that inform your reasoning. But
Speaker 1: of course, example we are Libertardian and conservative, so I
Speaker 1: super agree with you that without a moral system that
Speaker 1: underpins your liberty, then you just descend into guests.
Speaker 3: Absolutely so. So so yes, I mean, this is this
Speaker 3: is the challenge, right So.
Speaker 1: But I wouldn't say it's a fault of Libertatianism. I
Speaker 1: would say people are just trying to do with libertarianism
Speaker 1: more than it promises.
Speaker 3: But look, libertarianism is really a term that was founded,
Speaker 3: created really in the nineteen sixties to a lodge extent
Speaker 3: by Mario rothbod Correct, who was an anarchist who believed
Speaker 3: in a lot more than a non aggression principle. And
Speaker 3: of course the non aggression principle is not a principle
Speaker 3: because it has to have a mal reason. Why don't digress?
Speaker 3: I mean, every system of thought in human history was
Speaker 3: pro aggression. You know, Judaism is progression, Christianity's progression Islamist progression.
Speaker 3: Every secular philosopher and ever existed is progression if it's
Speaker 3: for the good cause, if it's for the right cause, right,
Speaker 3: and they've all practiced aggression. So you need to justify
Speaker 3: the non aggression principle. It's not a starting point, it's
Speaker 3: an end in a sense. And I think in order
Speaker 3: to justify the non aggression principle you have to have
Speaker 3: the right moral code. Almost everybody has a wrong model code.
Speaker 3: And therefore when you come to the non aggression principle,
Speaker 3: they go, well, that doesn't sound right, that doesn't make
Speaker 3: any sense, because it doesn't it's inconsistent with what forward before.
Speaker 3: So you know, so libertarianism from the beginning, we're set
Speaker 3: up as a system that's much more than non aggression.
Speaker 3: It has positions and pretty much everything, and it has
Speaker 3: positions about and even when it comes to kind of
Speaker 3: if we agree that there should be an individual right, well,
Speaker 3: where the rights come from, which rights exist, who has rights?
Speaker 3: How do we apply it in government? Those all tricky questions.
Speaker 3: They're not obvious and how to do it. Non aggression
Speaker 3: doesn't tell you how to solve those problems. Those are
Speaker 3: problems that need we solved. And yet your philosophical foundations
Speaker 3: are going to dictate to a large extent, how you
Speaker 3: solve those problems, and therefore we disagree. So I think
Speaker 3: it's a problem to have a big tent. And since
Speaker 3: I do have a philosophy, I do have the model foundations. Uh,
Speaker 3: there's no reason for me to belong to attend because
Speaker 3: I find itself. For example, I think libertary. I think
Speaker 3: anarchists people who call themselves an alco capitalist. I don't
Speaker 3: know if you guys call yourself an aco capitalist, but
Speaker 3: I think that is a very very dangerous ideology. I
Speaker 3: think it's an anti freedom ideology that ultimately leads to bloodshed.
Speaker 3: I don't think it leads to the non aggression principle.
Speaker 3: I think it actually leads to aggression. And it's a
Speaker 3: it's a it's an issue in arco capitalism that actually
Speaker 3: engages the idea of individual rights. Right. It's because there's
Speaker 3: no entity that actually protects individual rights, because individual rights
Speaker 3: are tradable in the marketplace.
Speaker 1: What do you say if people give you some like
Speaker 1: historical examples like the medieval Island because people also have different.
Speaker 3: I love Medieval Iceland because it's yeah, everybody, everybody, everybody
Speaker 3: gives me the me, just finish.
Speaker 1: Because some people also see an archo capitalism in different ways,
Speaker 1: and I really don't like it when people think, oh,
Speaker 1: an archo capitalism is just there's not going to be
Speaker 1: leadership at all, no hierarchies, no everything. And I think
Speaker 1: that's pretty dumb, to be honest, I think that's pretty
Speaker 1: dumb to think that humans will organize themselves in that
Speaker 1: way because leadership and aerarchy is a pretty natural human
Speaker 1: expectant consequence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I've never be free. I've never heard of
Speaker 3: a design of an alcoho capitalism that makes any sense
Speaker 3: to me. They all fall apart, they all turn into violence.
Speaker 3: And so Iceland was one of the first examples that
Speaker 3: people always use. In one of the primary example, David
Speaker 3: Friedman used it, of course. So I visited Iceland, and
Speaker 3: I asked, as a libertarian economist there, I said, you know,
Speaker 3: how do how do I learn about that period in
Speaker 3: Icelandic history? Because I'd like to learn more about what
Speaker 3: actually happened. He said, the best thing is is go
Speaker 3: read the Sagas, the story of kind of the stories
Speaker 3: of what was going on. So I bought they were
Speaker 3: selling the Sagas, and I bought them and I read
Speaker 3: them on a plane and all, my god, right, so
Speaker 3: this is what happened in Iceland. Right, I would steal
Speaker 3: your horse, so you would come and kill my wife,
Speaker 3: so I would kill your children. And then we go
Speaker 3: in front of this big gathering right that they had
Speaker 3: once I don't know a month, once a year in
Speaker 3: Iceland in and we and they say, oh, well, you
Speaker 3: guys need to stop, and you give him and you
Speaker 3: compensate him and say okay, and we do all that,
Speaker 3: and then we go back home and we go No,
Speaker 3: I'm still pissed off. At you, So I go kill
Speaker 3: some more of your children, and you come and steal
Speaker 3: more of my host. And the whole saga is is
Speaker 3: everybody's killing everybody else, constant violence, which is exactly the
Speaker 3: way I perceive anarchy to be. Anarchy is a system
Speaker 3: of violence. It's a system.
Speaker 1: But that's not what happened, right, That's.
Speaker 3: Exactly what happened in Iceland.
Speaker 1: Because most of most of the most of the data
Speaker 1: informs that there was much less murder than the medium
Speaker 1: average of what you had in Europe.
Speaker 3: No, they were the First of all, You've got to
Speaker 3: be suspicious of data from that period of time, particularly
Speaker 3: if you're doing median vis a vis might not that story.
Speaker 3: These are the only accounts we have. These are really
Speaker 3: the only accounts we have of what happened in Iceland.
Speaker 3: We don't have detailed records, we don't have a history,
Speaker 3: a formal history. Really, all we have to learn from
Speaker 3: Iceland to Loge extent is what the stories that were told.
Speaker 3: This is. This was not a civil This the other thing, right,
Speaker 3: it's pretty primitive, right, This is not a civilization where
Speaker 3: they were doing science or or writing, or engaged in writing,
Speaker 3: or engaged in history. Or engaged in everything. It was
Speaker 3: primitive and it stayed primitive for a very very long time.
Speaker 3: So if you look at societies where you actually saw progress,
Speaker 3: which I care about, I just don't. I don't want
Speaker 3: to live in Iceland, you know, just being a farmer.
Speaker 3: I want to I want I want to progress. If
Speaker 3: you look at progress, progress doesn't start in Iceland. Progress
Speaker 3: starts in Florence. A progress starts in in in in
Speaker 3: Europe under very very different conditions h than it did
Speaker 3: in Iceland. So there's no example that I know of
Speaker 3: in human history where a it was truly peaceful and
Speaker 3: b you actually had anything good happening. Right. So it's
Speaker 3: one thing to live in peace, it's another thing to
Speaker 3: advance the progress for good stuff to happen.
Speaker 1: Becausepaia progress pretty much. I mean, they build amazing palaces.
Speaker 1: They made themselves rich by planting tobacco that it was
Speaker 1: forbidden in Italy at the time. Caspaia.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the story because.
Speaker 1: It was like five hundred of years long, their story.
Speaker 1: But I think you make some great points. I think
Speaker 1: you make some great points.
Speaker 3: And you know I've debated this. You can find my
Speaker 3: you know, I've done a couple of debates on this,
Speaker 3: when in Poland and one with Blan Kaplan. Uh, and
Speaker 3: they've got to link the essay on why I objected
Speaker 3: OCCO capitalism.
Speaker 1: I think you make some good points, and it is
Speaker 1: difficult to defend in a sense because it's a freedom system,
Speaker 1: so you don't really know, but you are defending.
Speaker 3: Because it's not a freedom system. This is the fundamental
Speaker 3: philosophical issue. It's not a freedom system because for freedom
Speaker 3: you have to define what freedom means. And to do
Speaker 3: that you have to have a principle of individual rights.
Speaker 3: You have to have a system of right and rights
Speaker 3: need to be defended, and you can't. You know, Brian Kaplan,
Speaker 3: when I debated him, acknowledge the fact that in a
Speaker 3: system with multiple police forces, where we're competing and different judiciaries, yes,
Speaker 3: the individual rights will be violated because you know, what
Speaker 3: come to compromises. I'm not buying an idealistic system in
Speaker 3: which we compromise on individual rights.
Speaker 1: That happens nowadays, right, well, nowadays, it's not a good system.
Speaker 3: I'm not defending. I'm not defending the system that exists today.
Speaker 3: I'm not defending government.
Speaker 1: Even more if you already have law enforcement states.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm saying you have to have. I mean, we
Speaker 3: don't live in a world that understands what individual rights are.
Speaker 3: We don't live in a world that has composed its
Speaker 3: laws and its principles based on individual rights. So we
Speaker 3: don't you know, we can't learn much about what a
Speaker 3: proper system would look like based on you know, what
Speaker 3: we have today.
Speaker 1: Exactly, So that it's a fair argument both ways, but
Speaker 1: you do you make a good case for it. I
Speaker 1: would like to extend some of these conversations also for
Speaker 1: some of the rights, because you spoke about and one
Speaker 1: of their phrases, it was really a good one that
Speaker 1: I'd like just said, if the pursuit of happiness is
Speaker 1: rational and pro life, objectivists are not known for being
Speaker 1: pro life, right, so I would like to discuss that
Speaker 1: point on an abortion so when the right to life begins?
Speaker 3: So, yeah, we're very pro life. I mean, objectivism is
Speaker 3: all about pro life. It's the life of the mother,
Speaker 3: the life the life. Yeah, it's all about semantics, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, you guys chose the anti abortion side, chose
Speaker 3: pro life for some antic reasons. Sounds good. We're pro
Speaker 3: poor life, the real human life that actually exists, versus
Speaker 3: the potential human life that doesn't exist yet. So we
Speaker 3: view a fetus is not human, right, it's a potential human.
Speaker 3: It will become a human being, but it's not yet human,
Speaker 3: and it's not yet an individual, so rights about individual.
Speaker 3: So it hasn't been individuated, it hasn't been separated. So
Speaker 3: all the rights at this point politically, all the rights
Speaker 3: with the mother, you know, the it's it's the state
Speaker 3: has the total responsibility of protecting the mother, not the fetus.
Speaker 3: The state has no relationship with the fetus. It's not
Speaker 3: an individual, it's not being separated, and it's not human yet.
Speaker 3: It's only a potential human. It's certainly in the first
Speaker 3: few months it's just you know, it's am CLMP of cells.
Speaker 1: But you don't think it starts after a few months, right,
Speaker 1: Well when when? No, because it's worth worth defending that.
Speaker 3: Well, once it becomes human and separate, So when it's born.
Speaker 1: So when it's born, So for example, if if I
Speaker 1: have like eight months, if so there's a newborn which
Speaker 1: was born a little bit prior to the nine months,
Speaker 1: let's say seven months and a half, is already born
Speaker 1: is in terms of development is exactly the same as
Speaker 1: the other.
Speaker 3: Well, it's not. It usually has to be in a
Speaker 3: in a you know.
Speaker 1: Special case, let's say eight months now, it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's not a matter of time. It's a
Speaker 3: matter of being born. But that's matter what I.
Speaker 1: Want to that's what I want to test with you,
Speaker 1: which is if I'm more like a week prior and
Speaker 1: there is the same baby which is still in the womb,
Speaker 1: I mean, those are essentially the same beings in terms
Speaker 1: of development, in terms of capabilities and everything. So why
Speaker 1: one can be killed and the other as the full
Speaker 1: right to life?
Speaker 3: It seems a bit I mean defense, I mean, because
Speaker 3: they are completely different entities. One is breathing, the other
Speaker 3: is achieving all of it's all of its life requirements
Speaker 3: come through the ambility corde. It's not breathing, it's not eating,
Speaker 3: it's not digesting. It's it's it has no individual life.
Speaker 3: It's not an individual yet, you know. It's it's it's
Speaker 3: not right to begin at the time. To be to
Speaker 3: have rights, you have to be an individual. So it's
Speaker 3: just a legal it's a legal concept, right.
Speaker 1: So uh, but let's not discuss it that the legal concept, right,
Speaker 1: because legality doesn't dequate to morality. Let's keep it on
Speaker 1: the morality.
Speaker 3: But on all principle, it's often immol to have an abortion.
Speaker 3: So morality is about reason and rationality. So it's a
Speaker 3: question of why is a woman having an abortion? Uh,
Speaker 3: if you if you lived in Brazil and had Zica
Speaker 3: and and your your fetus's brain had shriveled and was
Speaker 3: like tiny, and if it was going to be born,
Speaker 3: it would survive for a few months in complete out
Speaker 3: of misery and pain the entire time.
Speaker 1: It's immoral not to abort that child, you think so?
Speaker 3: Absolutely? But absolutely are.
Speaker 1: We certain that that's going to be his life?
Speaker 3: I mean, that's called science. It's it's called science.
Speaker 1: It because not certain one under oh yes it is.
Speaker 3: Example, if you if you have a shrunken brain and
Speaker 3: and you know, we we know what zeka is, we
Speaker 3: know how it performs.
Speaker 1: Absolutely we know exactly what the life is going to do.
Speaker 3: An example, and even if it's not, let's say I'm
Speaker 3: going to have a child, yeah, and it's ninety percent.
Speaker 4: Probable that I'll have it a life like that exactly,
Speaker 4: I would I would absolutely kill it before. Absolutely, But
Speaker 4: why because because the misery of ninety percent probability misery
Speaker 4: is so horrible that I would never.
Speaker 3: Want to inflict on another human being that kind of misery.
Speaker 3: It's why I believe in That's why I believe suicide
Speaker 3: is not immoral. It's often moral. It's why you know,
Speaker 3: so I think sometimes sometimes life is not worth living.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you just said, like some a few moments ago,
Speaker 1: that you can be suffering a lot and still be happy, right,
Speaker 1: So it doesn't really equate to a utilitarian.
Speaker 3: A baby, a baby that has no conception and is
Speaker 3: born and is just suffering. It's it's intense pain. Oh god,
Speaker 3: I would give I would do anything to avoid that.
Speaker 1: But if even if I said to you, okay, let's
Speaker 1: then forbid every single others of the ninety nine point
Speaker 1: six percent of abortions, you would still didn't care because
Speaker 1: you would still be in favor of that.
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah, but again you you you shifted on me
Speaker 3: because you've gone to politics inte of morality. Right, So
Speaker 3: politically politically absolutely, it's not an individual, it doesn't have rights, no,
Speaker 3: but morally speaking, morally politics, but you know, may.
Speaker 1: The point is, is it rational. That is the point.
Speaker 3: Look, almost no abortions happened in eighth in the eighth months,
Speaker 3: the number of abortion in the eighth month is almost zero.
Speaker 3: And when it does happen, you would be fine with it.
Speaker 3: But when it does happen, yeah, But the point is
Speaker 3: that that we're looking we're talking about actual phenomena, like
Speaker 3: because of morality, not because of legal Because of morality,
Speaker 3: doctors won't perform the abortion in the eighth month, and
Speaker 3: and and mother and and and and potential mothers don't
Speaker 3: want to do it. So that's that's a moral point. Legally, yes, legally,
Speaker 3: state has no business it, right, the state has no business.
Speaker 3: So Mali doctors won't do it for good reason. And
Speaker 3: I don't think you know, I think it's good that
Speaker 3: they don't do it if you're a woman, because it's
Speaker 3: because somemall issue. Let me get to the mall issue.
Speaker 3: If you're a woman and you've they you know, you're
Speaker 3: you're pregnant, you know you're going to have a baby,
Speaker 3: and you know coming eight months you feel like you
Speaker 3: don't want to have it, that's you know, again, my
Speaker 3: morality is about reason. Right, you have to take responsibility.
Speaker 3: So at that point, just you're you know, the whim
Speaker 3: of not doing it. That's why you know it's it's
Speaker 3: it's harmful to you as a woman to have an
Speaker 3: abortion at the eighth month. It's dangerous for you. There's
Speaker 3: so many reasons why you wouldn't want to do it.
Speaker 3: So the only time we have abortions in the eighth
Speaker 3: month is either because the fetus is really in bad
Speaker 3: shape and it's not it is going to have a
Speaker 3: horrible life, is not going to survive, or the mother
Speaker 3: is going to die as a consequence. So those are
Speaker 3: the only abortions in those stations. Earlier than that, most
Speaker 3: of almost all abortions happened before the twentieth weeks, something
Speaker 3: like ninety two percent of abortion having before twenty first week.
Speaker 3: And at that point, Yeah, it's not a human being,
Speaker 3: it's not individuated, and it has no there's no moral issue.
Speaker 3: I view it the other way around. Look, if you're
Speaker 3: a woman and you're pregnant and you don't want.
Speaker 1: To have a child, don't have sex.
Speaker 3: Oh god, yeah, but that's that's what it boils down to.
Speaker 3: You should have sex. Sex is wonderful, Have lots of sex. People,
Speaker 3: Please sex.
Speaker 1: And why the sex exists. Let's be rational, why the
Speaker 1: sex exist in nature?
Speaker 3: Yeah, but see we're not animals. No, but my question, Yeah,
Speaker 3: for sex existence. We're not animals, but we're not that
Speaker 3: kind of animals. We'll step above animals. So we can
Speaker 3: take something that in the animal kingdom only exists for procreation,
Speaker 3: and we can make it a spiritual, meaningful, pleasurable, you know, engaging, stimulating,
Speaker 3: fun thing to do.
Speaker 1: But the next sequence of sex will remain. You can
Speaker 1: do all of that.
Speaker 3: No, but that's why you have contraception. Right, you can
Speaker 3: have abortion. This is the beauty of abortion. So I'm
Speaker 3: not just anti anti abortion, I'm poor abortion. I think
Speaker 3: that if you're if you're a woman and you're pregnant
Speaker 3: and you do not want to have a child, you
Speaker 3: your moral obligation is to have an abortion because the
Speaker 3: worst thing in the world is to bring a child
Speaker 3: into the world who is not wanted. So have that
Speaker 3: abortion and and live your life. And plus you're gonna
Speaker 3: have to live nine months. I mean, I had a predator.
Speaker 3: I've got two kids, so I know what pregnancy is like.
Speaker 3: Nine months which are hard. You know, it's not easy
Speaker 3: for a woman to go through pregnancy, particularly when you
Speaker 3: don't want it. So I think the right thing to do,
Speaker 3: the rational thing to do, the moral thing to do,
Speaker 3: is to get an abortion, and to get it very
Speaker 3: very early. This is why abortion pills are great, and
Speaker 3: getting an abortion in the first three months is ideal
Speaker 3: because it very little medical impact on you. It's still
Speaker 3: just a clump of cells and you get to live
Speaker 3: your life the way you want to live your life.
Speaker 1: We are a comp of cells, just much more more
Speaker 1: cells than yeah, but we're.
Speaker 3: Not comp of cells, not human. My my skin cells,
Speaker 3: my skin cells are human. They have all my DNA.
Speaker 3: But I do this and they die just like the fetus,
Speaker 3: and they die.
Speaker 1: They are human as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that's why we don't. We don't get upset
Speaker 3: when my skin cells die. We don't get accept when
Speaker 3: when you.
Speaker 1: Brush your screen. It will never become a full rational
Speaker 1: human being.
Speaker 3: With The point is you cannot conflate a potential with
Speaker 3: the actual, exactly the the the fetus's potential. It's not
Speaker 3: actual until it's actual, and one day will become actual.
Speaker 3: And the separating point is pretty clicker.
Speaker 1: Because I would say it's much it's I would say
Speaker 1: probably if you ask an adult human being, what do
Speaker 1: you think would be worse? You're not being desired in
Speaker 1: the world by your mother, are you dying? They will
Speaker 1: pretty much say, I mean that would.
Speaker 3: But you're not get conscious of your own death, so
Speaker 3: it's meaningless, right, So you never existing is the point.
Speaker 1: And a lot of a lot of humans about the
Speaker 1: four months old.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you can't because he's already experienced reality and
Speaker 3: he's already functioning by himself. And and it's it's.
Speaker 1: Completely itself, is not autonomous.
Speaker 3: Nobody's walking, he's calling, is sticking, he's moving, is moving.
Speaker 1: He's moving inside of the belly as well.
Speaker 3: No, it's just moving with a fluid. He's moving. He's
Speaker 3: not self initiating action. It is a huge is a
Speaker 3: huge difference.
Speaker 1: So if a baby moves in the womb, it's not
Speaker 1: the mother that moves it.
Speaker 3: It moves by himself. No, it's floating in the liquid
Speaker 3: and it moves around.
Speaker 1: Come on, it kicks, you know that, you know, come on, But.
Speaker 3: It's not kicking because it wants to kick. It just kicks.
Speaker 3: It's not it's not it's not self directed. But the
Speaker 3: action is not self.
Speaker 1: It's the same. I know two months old at all. Yes,
Speaker 1: it doesn't decide anything, it just acts.
Speaker 3: But some things it decides absolutely some things at once,
Speaker 3: and it desires and it goes. It sucks, right, it
Speaker 3: knows how to suck.
Speaker 1: Because the I have an issue with because I think
Speaker 1: ultimately is another version of the consciousness argument. It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have this particular ability that I think is
Speaker 1: necessary for you to give him rights. The conscious people
Speaker 1: they say, oh, they need consciousness, they need to feel
Speaker 1: pain and feel consciousness. And that's around an arbitrary number
Speaker 1: that sometimes put that twenty weeks or whatever. Some people
Speaker 1: say eight weeks, some people. It varies widely.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's I think it's somewhat arbitrary. I mean,
Speaker 3: I I someone understand people who say, you know, if
Speaker 3: it could survive outside the womb, then you shouldn't abort it.
Speaker 3: That That is what I think is there is the
Speaker 3: most reasonable argument you can make. But but I don't
Speaker 3: accept even that argument because again it's not you know, legally,
Speaker 3: it does not it does not have the rights. And look,
Speaker 3: I don't think women should have bought.
Speaker 1: But after a certain point, what do you mention legal
Speaker 1: legally doesn't have the right thing. It doesn't really matter
Speaker 1: because we're talking about morality.
Speaker 3: So legally, so again, morality legally I.
Speaker 1: Could be could considered a threat to the States and
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 3: To me, the moral is the rational, uh it is.
Speaker 3: It is mauld to do with your body as you
Speaker 3: see fit, and it is mauld to do with your
Speaker 3: body what you think is going to make your body better.
Speaker 3: The fetus is part of the mother's body. To deny
Speaker 3: her the ability to determine what happens to her body
Speaker 3: is to deny her freedom. It's to deny her agency.
Speaker 3: And it's imo. It's immoral to tell a woman you
Speaker 3: you know, you can't make a change in your body
Speaker 3: that has massive implications for the rest of your life.
Speaker 3: Having children, as you know, because you have them, is
Speaker 3: a massive, you know, responsibility, it's huge. So and to
Speaker 3: deny sex because of that, which which I think ultimately
Speaker 3: is a lot of the motivation behind some people at
Speaker 3: least anti abortion stands, is horrific. Sex is a re
Speaker 3: information of life. It's a beautiful thing. It's an amazing thing.
Speaker 3: People should be encouraged to have sex, not not discourage,
Speaker 3: and then use contraception, use the methods not to get pregnant,
Speaker 3: and if an accident happens, there's an out. You're not
Speaker 3: doomed then to having a child for eighteen years. You're
Speaker 3: responsible to me. If you have a child, you're not
Speaker 3: responsible for it for eighteen years. In every aspect, it's
Speaker 3: not a small responsibility. This is a major responsibility. So
Speaker 3: be very, very very sure that you want it. And
Speaker 3: I want to give you as many opportunities to get
Speaker 3: out of that decision as possible, so that when you
Speaker 3: take on responsibility, you know exactly what's happening.
Speaker 1: Isn't that because I understand obviously the concept. It is
Speaker 1: a it is a challenge of different moral systems in
Speaker 1: terms of bodily autonomy, and oh, you are telling the
Speaker 1: woman what to do with her body. I mean, I
Speaker 1: would say it's not everybody is within everybody, But it's fine.
Speaker 1: It's a fine argument. It's valid, it's and the right
Speaker 1: to life and all of that. I understand that complication.
Speaker 1: But wouldn't you say that's fleeing away from consequence. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously I want to have sex for pleasure only sometimes,
Speaker 1: and that's fine, that's completely fine, it's reasonable. I think
Speaker 1: that's a great evolution.
Speaker 3: All the sex I have today, all the sex I
Speaker 3: have to for pleasure.
Speaker 1: Exactly, you're not not having. But if it happens because
Speaker 1: it is a natural consequence of sex, it is an
Speaker 1: expected consequence of sex. Why should you have? Why should
Speaker 1: you not deal with the consequences?
Speaker 3: You want dealing with?
Speaker 1: Is a life?
Speaker 3: You know? Yeah, if one of the ways in which
Speaker 3: we deal with the consequence is to go through a
Speaker 3: small medical procedure and get rid of it, It's very
Speaker 3: easy and very simple. Is you know, you can take
Speaker 3: a pill and it just it just flushes out. So
Speaker 3: so you know, science, science is made. But but but
Speaker 3: everything is about dealing with the consequences. That is, again,
Speaker 3: if you don't view the fetus as as as fully
Speaker 3: manifest human life, then the best way to deal with
Speaker 3: the consequence is to get rid of it.
Speaker 1: So, for example, imagine on the pursuit. Yeah, we do
Speaker 1: have questions, Okay, good, when does human life begin?
Speaker 3: Objectively speaking, well, and it's separated from the mother, when
Speaker 3: it's an actual independent being, I e.
Speaker 1: It both, But that's when you recognize rights. Right, human
Speaker 1: life begins at conception, right, it's human and it's a life.
Speaker 3: Absolutely not my again, my my skin cell has all
Speaker 3: the DNA that that that cell has in the beginning,
Speaker 3: and it's I don't consider it human life. So it's
Speaker 3: it's it's a couple of cells, you know, splitting and
Speaker 3: it's multiplying. But it's not it's not yet human. It's
Speaker 3: not yet developed into into into a human being, and
Speaker 3: it's not individuated. So no human life begins when it's born.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you something. It's life, it's just not human.
Speaker 1: Imagine I'm doing an abortion potent human life. Imagine I'm
Speaker 1: doing an abortion at seven months whatever. It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: because for you morally it would be no problem because
Speaker 1: it's not a human yet.
Speaker 3: I didn't say there would be no problem. I said
Speaker 3: it would be.
Speaker 1: Why would be a problem.
Speaker 3: Then again, it depends on why the woman is doing it.
Speaker 3: Because it's seven months. It's it's a complicated medical procedure
Speaker 3: seven months.
Speaker 1: It can happen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it can be moral. I'm not saying it's always.
Speaker 1: So you would have a problem if I would do
Speaker 1: a procedure on a seven month pregnant woman that would
Speaker 1: abort the child. But I would I would do it
Speaker 1: slightly different. I would cause the most painous possible to
Speaker 1: the fetus. Would you have a problem with that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, because you're being a sadist and you're not a
Speaker 3: good human being.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't matter. It's like it's like causing the
Speaker 1: most pains possible to this phone. Yeah, but you wouldn't
Speaker 1: have a problem with me smashing my phone.
Speaker 3: So do you have a problem Do you think I
Speaker 3: would have a problem with you causing the most pain
Speaker 3: possible to your dog? Yeah?
Speaker 1: That was my next question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's I think it's to cause a
Speaker 3: lot of pain to your dog, so purposefully right to
Speaker 3: go through a process of making pain for your dog
Speaker 3: for no reason I value, so you value. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: I have no problem with you killing your dog. I
Speaker 3: don't think you should go to jail for killing your job.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's always in mal to kill your dog.
Speaker 3: If your dog has cancer and you kill it, that
Speaker 3: that's okay.
Speaker 1: But no one is talking about going to jail. It's
Speaker 1: talking you feel it easymoral. If I would beat the
Speaker 1: shit out of my tops, I think that's a pretty
Speaker 1: nasty thing to even though you don't recognize.
Speaker 3: So, so the feed is you need to kill it
Speaker 3: quickly so it doesn't feel pain.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 3: So this is what happens in abortion. In an abortion,
Speaker 3: In an abortion, they do everything to zero. It's not
Speaker 3: it's obviously not a comp ofselves for seven months, right,
Speaker 3: it's it's it's it's a live being.
Speaker 1: It's just not human exactly. But I mean, if it
Speaker 1: doesn't add the right to life, it certainly doesn't have
Speaker 1: the right to comfort. Why should we protect it from suffering.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying anybody should protect it. There's no legal
Speaker 3: issue here. You have an issue with it, yes, morally,
Speaker 3: I have an issue with inflicting pain on purpose. Right,
Speaker 3: we're talking about on purpose here. Now we're not talking
Speaker 3: about it's the only way to do with the abortion.
Speaker 3: We're talking about on purpose and inflicting pain. I have
Speaker 3: a problem with anybody inflicts pain on purpose to another
Speaker 3: living being, whether the human or not. And this is
Speaker 3: not human.
Speaker 1: But but now, but you just every.
Speaker 3: Cell in my body is living. That doesn't make it human.
Speaker 1: So I agree that it's not human. What is it?
Speaker 3: It's a fetus. It's it's a potential humans on the
Speaker 3: way to becoming human.
Speaker 1: Just like a child, it's on the way to becoming
Speaker 1: an adult.
Speaker 3: No, a child is already human, and it's already separate
Speaker 3: and already has its own mind, and it's already conscious,
Speaker 3: and it's already doing a lot of things. It makes
Speaker 3: it a human being.
Speaker 1: I super appreciate you entertaining this go back and forward.
Speaker 1: I would put too much on data. I think it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it becomes a bit clear. I disagree. It's fine.
Speaker 1: You obviously disagree with me. I don't think it's super consistent.
Speaker 1: I think it lacks consistency on the fact that, then
Speaker 1: why should I care about inflicting pain on something that
Speaker 1: I don't even that tobute value at all. However, I
Speaker 1: super appreciate you.
Speaker 3: But I don't think. I don't think. I don't think
Speaker 3: it's right to not that you reat value to it
Speaker 3: at all. It's a potential human being. There's value that
Speaker 3: every potential has a value. The question is how high
Speaker 3: is that value and how important? If you weigh the
Speaker 3: value of a of a fetus and again most of
Speaker 3: them before twenty one weeks of a three month old
Speaker 3: fetus versus the value of a woman who's going to
Speaker 3: give up eighteen years of your life to take care
Speaker 3: of it. To me, it's click cut who who you
Speaker 3: side with.
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you for that, for clarifying that it's
Speaker 1: really good. Can I test the pursuit of happiness value?
Speaker 1: So imagine I'm a father, I am actually and I
Speaker 1: do have two children. So imagine I decided to have
Speaker 1: an amazing family, amazing wife, two kids. But then I say,
Speaker 1: you know what, my pursuit of happiness requires me to
Speaker 1: abandon my family. Now, my ultimate objective is to go
Speaker 1: to somewhere else create I don't know, let's do something
Speaker 1: virtues like a company, solve a lot of issues to people.
Speaker 1: I could even create an organization that creates easiest way
Speaker 1: for you imagine the most virtual stuff. But I would abandon, completely,
Speaker 1: abandon my family. Would you say that's completely fine with objectivism.
Speaker 3: No. And the reason is that when you have child,
Speaker 3: and this is related to our previous conversation, when you
Speaker 3: have a child, you're in a sense signing a contract.
Speaker 3: So you could you could take take business. Right, Let's
Speaker 3: say you sign a contract where you're going to, uh,
Speaker 3: you're gonna you know, somebody's gonna invest in your business
Speaker 3: and uh, you know you you just for ten years.
Speaker 3: These are the terms, and this is all and let's say,
Speaker 3: a year into it, you go, yeah, I don't feel
Speaker 3: like doing this. I'm gonna go go go go in
Speaker 3: an island interest. No, that's that's a that's.
Speaker 1: A you know, you're you're beingoist.
Speaker 3: You are you are violating something much more important, which
Speaker 3: is your integrity. You're violating your your you know you've
Speaker 3: made you've made commitments. So being an egoist means having integrity.
Speaker 3: Being an egoist means being honest. That's what rationality means.
Speaker 3: You cannot be rational and not be honest. You cannot
Speaker 3: be a rational being and have no integrity. You cannot
Speaker 3: be a rational being and not be productive. You can
Speaker 3: be a rational being and live off other people, assuming
Speaker 3: you're an adult. Right, So, once you have a child,
Speaker 3: you basically signed an eighteen year contract to take care
Speaker 3: of that child. Now, after eighteen years, you have no
Speaker 3: obligation to in my view of sixteen or seventeen. Some
Speaker 3: way along the line, you stop having obligations to your children,
Speaker 3: and indeed your children have no obligations to you. Those
Speaker 3: obligations anything beyond eighteen obligations that hopefully are created by
Speaker 3: the fact that you've got a relationship and you like
Speaker 3: hopefully love each other. But you know, not all parents
Speaker 3: love their kids, and not all kids love their parents.
Speaker 3: And yet they made a commitment, so eighteen years they're
Speaker 3: stuck with it. This is why I'm so poor ebotion,
Speaker 3: because don't get in, don't get into that commitment unless
Speaker 3: you're one hundred percent sure you want to do it,
Speaker 3: because otherwise you score up your life and you score
Speaker 3: up your kids life, which is what happens to a
Speaker 3: lot of people.
Speaker 1: So what what would you say? Because you said in
Speaker 1: the beginning, and there's something that objectivists say and the
Speaker 1: I'm super thankful for you to entertaining this this type
Speaker 1: of scenari don't you say because you said, we are
Speaker 1: anti sacrificed. You should not be sacrificing to anybody other
Speaker 1: than yourself.
Speaker 3: But sometimes you are. Yeah, but yeah, but sometimes you
Speaker 3: make mistakes in life, right, So sometimes you make a
Speaker 3: mistake and uh, you know you you you have children
Speaker 3: when you don't really want children, and you've.
Speaker 1: Got to suffer the consequence of your mistake. Just like
Speaker 1: just like my abortion point for me now, just.
Speaker 3: Again, having an abortion, ask any woman who's had an
Speaker 3: abortion is not costless, No, it isn't so well, no,
Speaker 3: because because the woman has to go through a medical
Speaker 3: procedure that's pretty unpleasant. And uh and and so so
Speaker 3: she is suffering some consequences and the latest she waits,
Speaker 3: the consequences are bigger. I was just but but the
Speaker 3: point is that point is that it's not so. Sometimes
Speaker 3: in life, you get you you invest in a stock
Speaker 3: and it's in a goes down. You didn't intend it
Speaker 3: to go down, but it goes down. You lose. Those
Speaker 3: are the consequences of making bad decisions, or in this case,
Speaker 3: it might not have been a bad decision. Things outside
Speaker 3: of your control. You know. Sometimes you marry the wrong
Speaker 3: person and you have to figure out how to separate. No,
Speaker 3: you know, because if you marry the wrong person, that
Speaker 3: is a contract that's reversible. Having kids is not a
Speaker 3: reversible contract. It is, So that's the difference. Some contracts
Speaker 3: are reversible, some or not. When you make an obligation
Speaker 3: to the bank to you take out a loan and
Speaker 3: you have to pay ten payments of whatever, that's not reversible.
Speaker 3: You have to make the payments. So even though you
Speaker 3: now regret taking out the loan, the business didn't work out,
Speaker 3: you have to continue and that's an issue of integrity,
Speaker 3: and you're not going to be happy unless you stick
Speaker 3: to your commitment.
Speaker 1: That is, your happiness depends on your integrity. I can
Speaker 1: tell you why I'm much much happier if I abundoned
Speaker 1: my family. I can tell you that, No.
Speaker 3: That's just not true.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't believe you. I do not believe
Speaker 1: I agree with you. I think you wouldn't be the case,
Speaker 1: but I would. But people would make that.
Speaker 3: Yes, But you see, almost all of those cases are
Speaker 3: based in emotion, and objectivism against rejects arguments from emotion. Look,
Speaker 3: objectivism holds that I said, be rational is the primary value,
Speaker 3: but it has it has virtues, virtues that every human
Speaker 3: being has to bide by if they want to be happy.
Speaker 3: You're not going to be happy, you know. One of
Speaker 3: the visues that might be controversial is unless unless you
Speaker 3: have pride. Pride is one of the virtues that are
Speaker 3: required in order to be happy, and pride means that
Speaker 3: you take your life seriously. Pride is a commitment to
Speaker 3: model excellence. Pride is a commitment to live the best
Speaker 3: life based on them all principles that you can lead
Speaker 3: and if you don't have that you, I don't think
Speaker 3: you can achieve happiness.
Speaker 1: I completely agree with what you said. What I was
Speaker 1: trying to get at is that sense on when you
Speaker 1: say we should not sacrifice for others. I think this
Speaker 1: is clearly an example of you should be selfless in
Speaker 1: the way that you take care of your children. You sacrifice.
Speaker 3: Never be selfless. God, you're not selfless with your kids,
Speaker 3: because I mean, you're not selfless with your kids, So.
Speaker 1: So you certifice.
Speaker 3: For them, you do not sacrifice. I never sacrifice my kids.
Speaker 3: So if I stay, to give me an example of
Speaker 3: a sacrifice you make for your.
Speaker 1: Kids, have time, I don't think that I other. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you could go to the movies and in my
Speaker 1: business or even in my work, yeah, I know that
Speaker 1: I would achieve more. I would have it mylf. You
Speaker 1: do you sacrifice for that?
Speaker 3: You do less at work? Because so what's more valuable
Speaker 3: to you your children or your work?
Speaker 1: Definitely my children.
Speaker 3: Well, then how is it a sacrifice? You're training a
Speaker 3: lower value your work for high value your children. So
Speaker 3: a sacrifice is when you give up a high value
Speaker 3: and get nothing in return, or give or give up
Speaker 3: a high value and get something of low value. In
Speaker 3: the turn, or give up a high value and get
Speaker 3: something in return in another life. You know, you know which,
Speaker 3: which I don't think exists. Right. So if right here
Speaker 3: on earth you are giving up something of low value
Speaker 3: and getting something of high value, that's a trade. I
Speaker 3: do that every single day. So I don't sacrifice my kids.
Speaker 3: When I don't go to the movies and stay with them,
Speaker 3: it's because they're most important, more important than than the movie.
Speaker 3: If they're sick and I don't go to work because
Speaker 3: I and I stay with them, it's because they're more
Speaker 3: important than me going to work that day. So I
Speaker 3: always have a higher key of values, and I strive
Speaker 3: to always. You know, we can't do everything in life.
Speaker 3: You can't do every single thing that you want, so
Speaker 3: you always have trade offs. You want the trade off
Speaker 3: to be higher, agree instead of low. So that's not
Speaker 3: a sacrifice.
Speaker 1: I agree with you in everything.
Speaker 3: That's so, So you're not sacrificing.
Speaker 1: However, in the example that I gave you, I would
Speaker 1: be sacrificing because I don't put my kids up in
Speaker 1: that hierarchy of values and I want to live, and
Speaker 1: you're telling me that's immoral. You should stay, you should sacrifice.
Speaker 3: I'm saying that your integrity, your moral virtues are right
Speaker 3: at the top of your moral hierarchy of your high
Speaker 3: k values. Otherwise you cannot achieve happiness. So the standard
Speaker 3: of morality is your moral code. So once you've made
Speaker 3: that commitment having your children, are going to take care
Speaker 3: of them eighteen years and just abandonment. Now, I'm not
Speaker 3: saying you shouldn't get a divorce and take care of
Speaker 3: them in another way or but you have to. You've
Speaker 3: made a commitment to your kids, and to some extent,
Speaker 3: you made a committed to the wife. This is why
Speaker 3: there's alimony and all these other things. So you financially
Speaker 3: might support her, but you have to live up to
Speaker 3: your commitments. That's called integrity, and that's a that's a
Speaker 3: significant portion of that is at the top of the hierarchy.
Speaker 3: Moral values is always at the top of the higher chary.
Speaker 1: You're a good sport. Thanks a lot. Because I'm trying
Speaker 1: to also connect with the public in portogh because they
Speaker 1: think that oh, no, sacrifice is a good thing.
Speaker 3: But see sacrifices losing that says.
Speaker 1: I think there is a crack in the world. I
Speaker 1: would say because if I don't value my family even
Speaker 1: if I've done the previous commitment, that can change my mind. Right,
Speaker 1: you're not opposed to changing my mind in terms of my.
Speaker 3: Again, this is why studying a family is such a
Speaker 3: big deal. And this is and it's a big deal.
Speaker 3: It's not and I think you know, I'm not worried
Speaker 3: about people not having a lot of kids, you know,
Speaker 3: because I think a lot of people do a lousy
Speaker 3: job with their kids and shouldn't have kids. So it's
Speaker 3: a big deal having a family. It's a huge responsibility.
Speaker 3: Make sure you're ready for it. Make sure you're with
Speaker 3: the right partner for it. You know, I don't believe
Speaker 3: you should have children a year after you get married.
Speaker 3: You know, get married, live with a woman for five, six,
Speaker 3: seven years, make sure you're compatible, make sure you work together,
Speaker 3: and then have kids. Right. I know people who have
Speaker 3: a bad marriage and to solve the conflict in the marriage,
Speaker 3: they have kids. That it drives me crazy. It was
Speaker 3: idea ever because the kids will just make that all
Speaker 3: the challenges even was but but so yeah, I take
Speaker 3: it very seriously. Your commitments in life are very serious.
Speaker 3: If you say you're going to do a job, do
Speaker 3: the job. If and here you said, I'm going to
Speaker 3: do the job of taking care of these kids, then
Speaker 3: do it. Uh and so so, Yes, it is sometimes
Speaker 3: you have to make long term investments and you have
Speaker 3: to you have to live up to those commitments.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree, I agree, I agree with that. Can
Speaker 1: we move on to a simple question. So and Wren
Speaker 1: said that she liked Aristotles, right, Yeah, what she liked
Speaker 1: about Aristotles.
Speaker 3: I mean she liked she liked a lot about Aristotle.
Speaker 3: I mean she liked his emphasis on reality a is
Speaker 3: a kind of the whole idea of reality is what
Speaker 3: it is, and the identification of that. She liked.
Speaker 1: Uh, she liked and ethics. I think that's true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean she she basically liked the ethics. The
Speaker 3: standard of the ethics is individual human flourishing. She would
Speaker 3: disagree with the particular virtues. She had different virtues, and
Speaker 3: she comes at them very ferily than Aristotle does. But
Speaker 3: she likes I mean, he's the only other philosopher, a
Speaker 3: thinker who had an egoistic moral system. His system is
Speaker 3: based on your own flourishing, and here are the ways
Speaker 3: to get it. They disagree on the ways, but they
Speaker 3: agree on the human flourishing as the standard you dominea,
Speaker 3: happiness is the stand is what you strive towards. You know.
Speaker 3: She liked the fact that he was the father of logic,
Speaker 3: right and and really the father of science. He was
Speaker 3: a scientist himself. Now, he wasn't a very good one
Speaker 3: in a sense that a lot of his conclusions scientific
Speaker 3: conclusions turned out to be wrong, but his methodology was right.
Speaker 3: So the only way to correct Aristotle is to use
Speaker 3: Aristotle's method to correct it. Look, he was the greatest
Speaker 3: philosophy in all of human history. I think, you know,
Speaker 3: almost all of the modern world that exists today is
Speaker 3: due to Aristotle. Uh and and so yeah, I mean
Speaker 3: she was she was the only he's the only philosopher
Speaker 3: she really admired because of Zados. I mean, ideas were
Speaker 3: I mean, there were flaws in them, but again, he
Speaker 3: lived twenty five hundred years ago, so you'd expect that.
Speaker 1: Would she disagree with him also on because he had
Speaker 1: the mover argument for the existence of a deity right
Speaker 1: existence of a god?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: What did?
Speaker 1: Would and Rand also disagree on Objectivists also disagree with
Speaker 1: aristotles on that if to move something, there needs to
Speaker 1: initiate movement, and there needs to but there's needs to
Speaker 1: be someone that initially moves something in the universe is moving,
Speaker 1: you know how it goes?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean and and you know who initiated the initiator?
Speaker 1: So this was my slik way of introducing religion.
Speaker 3: Yes, so so who do you think who initiated the initiator?
Speaker 3: You know, I don't think it's a particularly good argument,
Speaker 3: but again, it's twenty five hundred years ago, you know.
Speaker 3: I think Iman, you know, argued that religion was a
Speaker 3: permittive form of philosophy. I think Aristotle is pretty advanced philosophy.
Speaker 3: And that's why God plays such a small role in universe.
Speaker 3: It just thoughts and then he walks away. He's not
Speaker 3: a present God. So you know, I don't think I
Speaker 3: don't think it stands up. His argument stands up to
Speaker 3: logic and reality. But I'd rather take his argument for
Speaker 3: the existence of God as something that moved it and
Speaker 3: went away then conventional religions argument for ever present God
Speaker 3: who intervenes in human affairs and who listens to our prayers.
Speaker 1: Do you think it is at least or it has
Speaker 1: been utilitarial and speaking like if you think purely as
Speaker 1: a utilitarian, I think at least that has been Would
Speaker 1: you recognize the utility of it to create those moral
Speaker 1: codes that you say are essential for humans to flourish
Speaker 1: with freedom within each other.
Speaker 3: No, I think it's exactly the opposite. I think it's
Speaker 3: I mean, in almost every realm, I think religion has
Speaker 3: been a net negative for humanity, particularly i'd say over
Speaker 3: the last two thousand years. Yes, I mean, what it
Speaker 3: did is retard the ability to come up with rational,
Speaker 3: objective moral codes. Because it's it.
Speaker 1: Even if you're so, let's focus on European experience, because
Speaker 1: otherwise I'm not just just your talk just about you.
Speaker 1: Most of most of the philosophers of like the Dark
Speaker 1: Ages and the Middle Ages are they are there. They
Speaker 1: were all like priests, like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they were terrible philosophers. They were really really bad,
Speaker 3: with exception of a quietness. We'll get to good. Yeah,
Speaker 3: well not really good. He was good, but we'll get
Speaker 3: to why he was good. He was good in comparison
Speaker 3: to everybody else, he was really good, but in terms
Speaker 3: of objectively he was only good. And in comparison to Aristotle,
Speaker 3: I mean, but so so the point is this imagine
Speaker 3: a world and I know it's hard, but imagine a
Speaker 3: world that where Christianity never rises. And who takes Aristotle seriously,
Speaker 3: just Aristotle right takes Aristotilian philosophy and now says, okay,
Speaker 3: let's work on this problem that he gave us how
Speaker 3: to construct the best moral system, given you doming air,
Speaker 3: given the need for human flowishing, I think we would
Speaker 3: be a thousand years more advanced today than we all right,
Speaker 3: I mean, that is an amazing world. You wouldn't have socialists,
Speaker 3: you would't have communists. You know, you wouldn't have a
Speaker 3: fascist because because you'd have built a moral system from
Speaker 3: the beginning on a foundations of reason, on a foundation
Speaker 3: of science, and a foundation on the best philosopher ever
Speaker 3: was laying, which is a foundation of self interest. Instead,
Speaker 3: and I don't want to I'm gonna say harsh things
Speaker 3: about Christianity. I don't want to offend it. So instead
Speaker 3: you get Jesus. Instead, you get a philosophy that says
Speaker 3: that your idol, your hero, is somebody who died a
Speaker 3: most horrific death, a really painful death. We really talk
Speaker 3: about pain, right, A horrific death, not for his sins
Speaker 3: that I could get under stand right, but for everybody
Speaker 3: else's sins and in an act of ultimate sacrifice that
Speaker 3: is horrific. That's the ma all ideal. So the mall
Speaker 3: ideal now is for me to sacrifice the other people
Speaker 3: the all ideal, and every saint, every saint that we
Speaker 3: have in the list of saints, all give up their
Speaker 3: lives for the sake of you know, other people.
Speaker 1: Higher idea, but not a higher.
Speaker 3: Idea that's connected to this world, the higher idea that's
Speaker 3: connected to another world. Then none of us have any
Speaker 3: evidence exists. All of it is about the other world.
Speaker 3: So if you think about Aristotle, Aristotle believes in he
Speaker 3: doesn't believe in sacrificing for another world. You know, he
Speaker 3: doesn't believe in sacrificing for God. His God just set
Speaker 3: the world of notion and it's gone. He doesn't believe
Speaker 3: in sacrificing for other people. He believes in sort of
Speaker 3: virtues that will get you. I disagree with some of
Speaker 3: those virtues, but that's a see, that's an interesting conversation.
Speaker 3: We can have a conversation once we agree that you
Speaker 3: need virtues in or to achieve individual happiness, and that
Speaker 3: this world is our standard we can now have an
Speaker 3: a discussion about which virtues make sense, which virtues don't. Instead,
Speaker 3: we have had two thousand years of discussing how to sacrifice,
Speaker 3: who to sacrifice, to win, to sacrifice when it's not
Speaker 3: good to sacrifice, and then what Thomas Aquinas does. Because
Speaker 3: for a thousand years, up until Thomas Aquinas, Christianity was
Speaker 3: almost exclusively and all the philosophers and all the monks
Speaker 3: and exclusively focus on on on the other world. This
Speaker 3: world sucked. It was horrible. It was terrible. You just
Speaker 3: need to somehow survive it and you get to the
Speaker 3: other world. And it was it did.
Speaker 1: It really sucked at the time.
Speaker 3: It did, and it did to a large example because Christianity,
Speaker 3: I mean Christianity was the cause of the sucking.
Speaker 1: It was more, it was more advents than other cultures
Speaker 1: in Filago, for example, that the Church founded most of
Speaker 1: the universities.
Speaker 3: That no, I mean, I mean, I'm reading a lot
Speaker 3: of history right now, so I'm writing a book, by
Speaker 3: the way.
Speaker 1: But didn't Church created most of the universities.
Speaker 3: But late late in the Middle Ages, I mean.
Speaker 1: There were no universities property.
Speaker 3: But the universities in the beginning when they started, they
Speaker 3: were universities. By the way, we're talking about Europe Kale right, Oh, no,
Speaker 3: the scale was much larger. Baghdad was much larger than
Speaker 3: anything was done in the West. In Bukar, in Central Asia,
Speaker 3: in India and China, there were universities on a scale
Speaker 3: much bigger than anything that existed in the West. They
Speaker 3: were richer, they were more prosperous, they were they were
Speaker 3: more advanced scientifically in every respect in the West. The
Speaker 3: West from the period of the rise of Christianity until
Speaker 3: Thomas Aquinas and really until the Renaissance till fourteen hundred,
Speaker 3: was a primitive society on a global scale. It was
Speaker 3: way behind the Arabs, the Muslims, it was way behind
Speaker 3: the Indians, and it was way behind the Chinese. I mean,
Speaker 3: what does a magnitude behind, Right, It's only when Thomas
Speaker 3: Aquinas does something miraculous instead of the focus on the
Speaker 3: other world, which I think sustained Europe into poverty and
Speaker 3: misery for a thousand years. By the way, in those
Speaker 3: thousand years in Christendom, not a single astronomic observation was made.
Speaker 3: Right now, for most of the Greeks and the Romans,
Speaker 3: people will make astronomical observations all the time. And this
Speaker 3: is just an indication of almost no science, almost nothing.
Speaker 3: All the scientific achievements are happening in the Arab world,
Speaker 3: in the Indian world, in the Chinese world. So then
Speaker 3: the Quinas says, I've read Aristotle, and Aristotle puts a
Speaker 3: huge emphasis on this world, on reality, unhappiness. Maybe we
Speaker 3: need to integrate them. So he brings Aristotle in from
Speaker 3: and then you start seeing progress. Then you start you
Speaker 3: get universities. Then, I mean the university started a little before,
Speaker 3: but also from the discovery of Aristotle, the University of Paris.
Speaker 3: They're getting the book where they're getting Aristota from from
Speaker 3: the Arab libraries in Coldeba and Toledo. That the Christians
Speaker 3: are concrete and they're taking those books and they're translating.
Speaker 3: They read Aristotle not in Greek because they don't know Greek.
Speaker 3: They read him in they translate the Arab transfer of
Speaker 3: the original Greek into Latin. And that's how they read Aristotle.
Speaker 3: Since the Arabs who save civilization as horrible as that
Speaker 3: as I unimagine was that is given the Arab world today.
Speaker 3: But it is interesting because what happens in the Arab
Speaker 3: world is they have this amazing enlightenment in sense of
Speaker 3: Renaissance enlightenment from eight hundred to twelve hundred, and it dies.
Speaker 3: It dies for a couple of two reasons. One mongol
Speaker 3: invasions kill a lot of them. But the second is
Speaker 3: they start taking Islam seriously. And the more you take
Speaker 3: religion seriously, the less progress science success there is the
Speaker 3: more so. And that happened in the Christian world, that
Speaker 3: happened in the Islamic world, it happens, it happens in
Speaker 3: India with Buddhism and everywhere you go. When religion is primary,
Speaker 3: then science and progress and human happiness and flourishing and
Speaker 3: all of that goes down when religion is subsides and
Speaker 3: you allow for these ideas to come up. And of
Speaker 3: course the wealth that we have today is a product
Speaker 3: of enlightenment. It's a product of a secular society. It's
Speaker 3: not a product of religion. It's a it's an egagment
Speaker 3: of religion. And again, just having moral values doesn't guarantee
Speaker 3: feeder happiness. You need the right moral values, and I
Speaker 3: think Christianity has the wrong moral values because it emphasizes
Speaker 3: another world and it emphasizes wu based, an authority based system,
Speaker 3: which also opens up human consciousness to authority.
Speaker 1: Can I can I object to that? Examples? So for example,
Speaker 1: you mentioned socialism and communism. I mean, everybody knows that
Speaker 1: was an atheist movement. Everybody knows that.
Speaker 3: But it's just not true.
Speaker 1: So even called religion.
Speaker 3: People, yes, even even what's his name, oh God, this
Speaker 3: book called Dominion, which is which is a big, very
Speaker 3: successful book. Even in Dominion, he knows and he realizes
Speaker 3: that all marks does, and all that socialists do is
Speaker 3: secularize Christianity. That is the fun mental thing that they do.
Speaker 3: They take them all code of Christianity and they secularize it.
Speaker 3: And indeed, if you look at the first communes, the
Speaker 3: first socialist settlements in the in human history, they're all
Speaker 3: Christian and and then the the the Church suppresses them
Speaker 3: because it doesn't want its authority questioned and it doesn't
Speaker 3: like this this stuff. But it's all based on someone
Speaker 3: in the mound. It's all based on the ideas in
Speaker 3: the Old Testiament, at least their interpretation of it. You
Speaker 3: might have a different interpretation, and that's fine. It's one
Speaker 3: of the beauties of of of of religious books. You
Speaker 3: can find whatever the hell you want in them. You
Speaker 3: bring your own philosophy to it, and you and you,
Speaker 3: and you, you take from it what you want. But
Speaker 3: you know, no socialism and and and and communism, of
Speaker 3: all the trappings of religion. They have all the trappings
Speaker 3: of a particular religion, Christianity. It's it's a it's a
Speaker 3: very Christian, secularized Christian philosophy, and it's basically based on
Speaker 3: idea of sacrifice. It's based on the idea of morality
Speaker 3: that the individual doesn't matter. There's some higher being that
Speaker 3: you should sacrifice too. And here they replace God with
Speaker 3: the proletarian, and you should sacrifice to the proletarians they
Speaker 3: replaced they replaced the pope with a with a dictator,
Speaker 3: because you need somebody to commune with the spirit, you
Speaker 3: need somebody to get revealed truth. And it's the exactly opposite. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but it's exactly opposite.
Speaker 1: People will inevitable create hierarchies of value, and they will
Speaker 1: substitute all the things.
Speaker 3: Yes, but the whole point is not to substitute God.
Speaker 3: The whole point is to go by reason, to go
Speaker 3: by rationality, and rationality is not a God. Reason is
Speaker 3: not a god. Reason is a methodology, and the beauty
Speaker 3: of the Enlightenment is that it doesn't. What it does
Speaker 3: is it introduces reason. And what Marks does, in spite
Speaker 3: of calling himself scientific, is you reject reason. He rejects
Speaker 3: evidence that the communist reject reason, Fascism reject reason. So
Speaker 3: all of these are the rejection of reasons I view,
Speaker 3: I view anti reason ideologies, religion, communism, socialism, Marxism, they
Speaker 3: have much more in common. What's new is the Enlightenment
Speaker 3: and objectivism. Objectivism I view as a continuation of the
Speaker 3: spirit of the Enlightenment, of the ideas of the Enlightenment
Speaker 3: is pro reason, so anti reason, proism. That's the way
Speaker 3: you should divide ideas up.
Speaker 1: And you're probably very aware of the French Revolution.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but the Frenchier evolution was motivated primarily Again, history matters.
Speaker 3: The Frenier evolution is primarily motivated by the one thinker
Speaker 3: in France who is anti Enlightenment, and that is Russau.
Speaker 3: Russau writes his first major essay is an essay that says, but.
Speaker 1: They use the same arguments, did they even substitute.
Speaker 3: Is pro Yes? You know that right, yes?
Speaker 1: And you know the consequence, yes, course.
Speaker 3: But they're inspired. They're inspired not by the Enlightenment that
Speaker 3: actually advocated for reason. They're inspired by Rousseau, who's a
Speaker 3: bad guy, but he's the one who dominated why because
Speaker 3: he the closest to Christianity. He was the closest of religions.
Speaker 1: So when people were built, rejected Christianity, they even burned known.
Speaker 3: But that's the beauty of it, right, The beauty of
Speaker 3: it is that if you create a secular philosophy, it's
Speaker 3: very similar to Christianity. You can be added Christian and
Speaker 3: pretend that you're free of Christianity, but you're not because
Speaker 3: it's so similar. The difference is the funding fathers, the
Speaker 3: founding fathers, created a new system, not based on Christianity,
Speaker 3: not connected, not based on Christianity. No individual rights.
Speaker 1: It's given by God, right, I mean, it's there on.
Speaker 3: The it's by by they create it exactly. So yeah,
Speaker 3: but but but what kind of what kind of creator
Speaker 3: is it? It's nature? It's Christian They were all English,
Speaker 3: they were they were not Christian. They were deists. Most
Speaker 3: of them were deists. Jefferson was a Deist. They were
Speaker 3: very unconventional Christians. They viewed more. They viewed, Uh, Christianity
Speaker 3: is as you know, they rejected all the miracles, right.
Speaker 3: You know there's a Jeffersonian Bible where he cuts out
Speaker 3: of the New Testament all the miracles.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's something called the Jeffersonian Bible. You can look
Speaker 3: it up. It's really interesting. No, you know, they are
Speaker 3: men of the Enlightenment. If you look at their libraries,
Speaker 3: their libraries are dominated by Enlightenment writings, the Minutes of Science,
Speaker 3: the Renaissance Man. Yeah, religion plays a role. They hadn't
Speaker 3: completely rejected it yet, but it's a small role relative.
Speaker 3: There's no The whole system of government that they create
Speaker 3: is something that's created. It comes out of the writings
Speaker 3: of Lacke, and it comes out of the writings of
Speaker 3: Monusque and out of others. It's not something that they're
Speaker 3: just taking from the Old Testament or the New Testament.
Speaker 3: It's something that they create a new whereas the French
Speaker 3: Revolution is very much in its values aligned with Christianity.
Speaker 3: That's why, you know, and that's why it's so easy
Speaker 3: to accept. That's why the masses just embrace it so quickly.
Speaker 3: But you have to separate the Enlightenment from so is
Speaker 3: the first anti Enlightenment philosopher, and he is the most
Speaker 3: influential philosopher during the French life, during French Revolution, which
Speaker 3: is the tragedy. The French Revolution could have been a
Speaker 3: good thing if it had just gotten rid of the
Speaker 3: king and they hadn't had all the bloodshed. But it
Speaker 3: could have been. It could been. It could have mimicked
Speaker 3: the American Revolution, and they chose not to mimic the
Speaker 3: American Revolution and in that sense, to be an anti
Speaker 3: Enlightenment phenomena instead of a po Enlightenment phenomena.
Speaker 1: Yeah, awesome, and we will move to that. Let me
Speaker 1: just do a final point on that. What about if
Speaker 1: you look at today, So the secular world of today,
Speaker 1: why don't you say that it's more idnistic.
Speaker 3: I hate the secular world of today exactly, but I
Speaker 3: also hate the religious world of today. So it's it's
Speaker 3: a false economy, right to take there.
Speaker 1: But it's the world without religion, and look at what
Speaker 1: it brought to Yeah.
Speaker 3: But you know, it's a world without religion, and yet
Speaker 3: here we sit streaming all over the world that marginal
Speaker 3: cost of zero this podcast. It's an amazing world that
Speaker 3: we have because it's it's a non religious world. So yes,
Speaker 3: I mean a lot of people lack values because they
Speaker 3: haven't been introduced a prof of philosophy. And what we
Speaker 3: need is to replace religion, not with nothing, not with
Speaker 3: a void. I'm not arguing that we should all become
Speaker 3: hedonists nihilists, which I think a lot of people become,
Speaker 3: but replace religion with philosophy. And if we replace religion
Speaker 3: with philosophy, then the world would as good as it is.
Speaker 3: And I think it's pretty wonderful as it is in
Speaker 3: spite of out all our negativity. It's pretty amazing that
Speaker 3: we're sitting here and doing what we're doing. And I
Speaker 3: flew here and everything. It could be so so so
Speaker 3: much better and people would be so so much happier.
Speaker 3: But for that, they don't need the cutch of religion.
Speaker 3: What they need is a new philosophy.
Speaker 1: Awesome, thanks a lot for clarifying that. Let's go to
Speaker 1: some of the questions. Okay, okay, but are your favorite
Speaker 1: thing then? So Mario Golmus says that religion has delayed
Speaker 1: science for decade maybe centurists. Those are facts, he said,
Speaker 1: So it's with you and the monol Bourgado says that
Speaker 1: it can say what it wants, but the West wouldn't
Speaker 1: be what it is today without Christianity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we wouldn't have socialism, we wouldn't have communism, we
Speaker 3: wouldn't have all the bad elements.
Speaker 1: Well, I think that's a bad example, right, because socialism
Speaker 1: it's it's like an atheist movement.
Speaker 3: But it couldn't be.
Speaker 1: But it's not a good example.
Speaker 3: First of all, it's not true because as I said,
Speaker 3: the first the first socialist communities were Christian communities in
Speaker 3: in the in the in the tenth century.
Speaker 1: The first university is like in Europe or Catholic. But
Speaker 1: again they were the biggest philosophers.
Speaker 3: But you don't need you know, the universities came about
Speaker 3: in spite of Catholicism, not because of Catholicism. They they weren't.
Speaker 3: They weren't They weren't made possible by Catholicism. They somehow
Speaker 3: achieved the success in spite of being in a Catholic world.
Speaker 1: But they were. But I understand what he's saying, But
Speaker 1: they were actually directly funded through the She's not like
Speaker 1: they against the searching looks, let's just funded them.
Speaker 3: I get that the church, the Church often acted against,
Speaker 3: you know, certain of its interests, that then changed its mind.
Speaker 3: So so you know, the church funded all the great
Speaker 3: art in the Renaissance, and then Luther got pissed off
Speaker 3: at that and among many other things, and started. So
Speaker 3: there was a counter there was a counter reformation, and
Speaker 3: you know, they went to the they went to the
Speaker 3: Sistine Chapel and in Michelangelo's what do you call it? Uh?
Speaker 3: When you be when the dead all rise? Uh? And
Speaker 3: and and Jesus decide who goes to heaven hell? What
Speaker 3: do you call that?
Speaker 1: I don't know what he called that. When Jesus came
Speaker 1: zus volta it's see the connect anyway, there's the.
Speaker 3: Huge painting in the Sistine Chapel. There is and and
Speaker 3: and the pope pope tells them to cover up all
Speaker 3: the penises. Ye yep. Because the counter reformations they go
Speaker 3: back and forth, right, they go back and forth during time.
Speaker 3: But look, the reason universities were founded, the reason that
Speaker 3: the Church, the Church did that is not because of Christianity.
Speaker 3: It was because they were discovering all these secular writings
Speaker 3: in these libraries. They were discovering in Spain of Aristotle
Speaker 3: of the first doctors from Greece, the astronomers from Greece,
Speaker 3: the scientists from Greece, and they needed to integrate this
Speaker 3: material and they created universal universities for that. So it's
Speaker 3: the discovery of a secular world. And when we look
Speaker 3: at a secular world, you can look at Greece, you
Speaker 3: can look at Rome as examples, rather than looking at
Speaker 3: at socialism or communism. Those were just a secular and
Speaker 3: in the Greece you could argue more and yeah, but
Speaker 3: you know, gods that are running around among us and
Speaker 3: having sex is not exactly.
Speaker 1: It's not exactly religion. But let me just push back
Speaker 1: a little bit because I've been reading Lock and even
Speaker 1: some of the founders in the in the US are
Speaker 1: always pretty adamant in terms of their inspiration on Christianity
Speaker 1: to found our society. And even Lock himself he has
Speaker 1: texts saying what I've written is not for the beast
Speaker 1: Like atheists. He actually said.
Speaker 3: That I know, I know, I know, but but but yes,
Speaker 3: I know that, but but but look, you know, he
Speaker 3: lived in the he lived in the early you know,
Speaker 3: in the seventeenth century, in the late part of the
Speaker 3: seventeenth century, you could not be religious at that point.
Speaker 3: Everybody was. Everybody was crazy. Everybody no, no, he he
Speaker 3: doesn't believe atheists have rights, and he doesn't really Catholics
Speaker 3: have rights, by the way, so he says really nasty
Speaker 3: things about Catholics.
Speaker 1: That's true, and he.
Speaker 3: Has to escape London and go to Amsterdam because the
Speaker 3: Catholic king is coming. So look, I mean, Lucke is
Speaker 3: not God right and and he's flawed.
Speaker 1: And I say that because a lot of people.
Speaker 3: But his logic is not derived from theology. His logic
Speaker 3: is derived from reality.
Speaker 1: He himself said it was I know.
Speaker 3: But but it wasn't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there was I was about to say something. Oh.
Speaker 1: There is a book called Inventing the Individual. That's why
Speaker 1: I say this, And I'm saying this for a point,
Speaker 1: which is the eventual of the individual. That book argues actually,
Speaker 1: and it goes to the history of the Church and
Speaker 1: the history of Christianity, and it argues that actually the liberal, objectivists,
Speaker 1: libertarian all those combination of values that combine with each
Speaker 1: other to create the individual, and that sense, the egoistic
Speaker 1: individual that should pursue its happiness actually derives from Christian believes.
Speaker 3: That is that is a big reach because you know,
Speaker 3: when Christianity dominates the no egoists and they know people
Speaker 3: pursuing their values, what you get as the Dark Ages.
Speaker 3: When Christianity wins, what you get is collectivism. You don't
Speaker 3: get individualism, you know, and and the creation of the individual.
Speaker 3: You know, you already have those ideas in Greece before
Speaker 3: I'm on Greek philosophers, before the invention of Christianity. So
Speaker 3: so no, I don't buy any of those argum. It's
Speaker 3: like exposed people looking back and try to rationalize. If
Speaker 3: you actually look at the history, it's very clear Western
Speaker 3: civilization becomes civilized when it introduces Greek ideas, and the
Speaker 3: more committed it is to religion, the less civilized it is.
Speaker 3: The more committed it is to Greece, the more civilized
Speaker 3: it is. So there's a direct relationship. So I've got
Speaker 3: a book coming out. You might be interested. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's I'm hoping to come out next year because we're
Speaker 3: still writing it. But it's basically Christianity versus the West.
Speaker 3: So my argument is Christianity is hampered West, and the
Speaker 3: West not helped it. That it's it's held it back
Speaker 3: and we'll compare with some of the other civilizations. This
Speaker 3: is why I'm doing a lot of reading on this
Speaker 3: with the other civilizations at the same time. But it's
Speaker 3: it's pretty amazing what was going on, for example, in
Speaker 3: Central Asia in the ninth and tenth century when there
Speaker 3: was nothing going on in the West.
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, Thanks a lot for thinking and.
Speaker 3: And I just want to say this, the reason it
Speaker 3: was going on in Central Asia is because they were
Speaker 3: translating the Greeks. So you know, they had all the
Speaker 3: Aristotle's writings, that Plato, they had the other science, and
Speaker 3: they worked they developed that. So even though they were
Speaker 3: nominally Muslim, they you know, Islam was in the background,
Speaker 3: and they focused on philosophy and science. Just like post
Speaker 3: a Quinas, we kind of put religion Christianity a little
Speaker 3: bit to the side and we focus on Aristotle and
Speaker 3: the sciences and all this stuff. So every civilization that's
Speaker 3: exposed to Greek ideas does well.
Speaker 1: All right, Thanks a lot for explaining it. I think
Speaker 1: it's pretty clear your your view, and that's what matters
Speaker 1: the most.
Speaker 3: Yes, you have more appreciate that.
Speaker 1: I could finish off with.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of religious opposition and I could tell that.
Speaker 1: No, but it's it's it's because I knew that like abortion,
Speaker 1: religion and all of those topics will give an interesting
Speaker 1: conversation for you to actually explain your views. And I do.
Speaker 1: I do disagree, and I think that's obvious. But but
Speaker 1: it's good. Another question, says Manuel, Uh, a Christian society
Speaker 1: can resist better to invasion of Muslims, for example, which
Speaker 1: is happening right now, to a secular society.
Speaker 3: I think that's absolutely not the case. It's it's, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, a secular society. Again, what secular society? Secular
Speaker 3: means nothing, right, So what secular society and objective is?
Speaker 1: Second that Europe is a very secular organized society right now?
Speaker 3: Right, I mean yeah, but but it's but secular without
Speaker 3: values is not a value to me. Right. I'm not
Speaker 3: defending I'm not defending a Europe as a stance today
Speaker 3: versus some Christian ideal I think.
Speaker 1: Christian idea, right, I mean we organized around the Crusades,
Speaker 1: I mean Portugal was born that way.
Speaker 3: No, I know. And the first people, you know, who
Speaker 3: are the first people you killed out you killed during
Speaker 3: the Crusades, Who were the first Muslims? No, first people
Speaker 3: you killed in the crusade. Read up in the first
Speaker 3: crusade with the Jews. So the crusade starts in northern
Speaker 3: Germany and northern France and northern Germany. They sweep down
Speaker 3: in Germany, they killed any Jew they find, They kill
Speaker 3: whole communities. They slaughtered them all way before they reached
Speaker 3: they reached the Middle East. So it was bar Babic Christianity.
Speaker 3: It has been in its history of bar Barbic religion,
Speaker 3: and it it you know, it went to war with
Speaker 3: the Muslims over something that was irrelevant. What was irrelevance
Speaker 3: to a peasant in France who wouled Jusalem? What a
Speaker 3: stupid War's engaging.
Speaker 1: Not only about that, right, because all of the most
Speaker 1: of the Middle Easts, in that part which is now
Speaker 1: I mean Israel, it was a Byzantine empire, was Bristian, right,
Speaker 1: so they were defending the invasion of in Christian territory.
Speaker 1: There became an attacks on non prior Christian lens.
Speaker 3: There was never a well, there was all the time, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, much of the crusades were in Scandinavia, which
Speaker 3: were pagan countries, and there was an attack there to
Speaker 3: convert them into Christianity. Most of Europe was Christianized by
Speaker 3: the sword, and through through you know, Constantine, post Constantine
Speaker 3: to own Empire expans Christianity throughout Europe by the sword.
Speaker 3: So so no, you know, I think that the best
Speaker 3: way to combat the kombat Islam is with a with
Speaker 3: a secular ideology that's based on reason. And believe me
Speaker 3: that my views, if people had listened to me after
Speaker 3: nine to eleven, or even before nine to eleven, then
Speaker 3: we would not have an Islamic problem right now. So again,
Speaker 3: I don't sympathize with everybody who says I'm secular. I mean,
Speaker 3: obviously communists and socialist are my enemies on ninety nine
Speaker 3: percent of the stuff. Just because they say they're secular
Speaker 3: doesn't mean anything to me, doesn't make them my allies.
Speaker 3: I have a particular philosophy, This is the point. And
Speaker 3: Christianity it doesn't know how to deal with Islam and
Speaker 3: UH and the secular world does it does the secular
Speaker 3: it doesn't. It doesn't know how to deal with the
Speaker 3: slamp and and what it will lead to is religious wars,
Speaker 3: which is not what we need. What we need is
Speaker 3: the deal with the Slam and the deal with the
Speaker 3: Slam through reason, and then the stand Islam is a
Speaker 3: religion and why it's an enemy of the West, and
Speaker 3: how to deal with it as an enemy.
Speaker 1: For example, maybe I'm creating a false picture, but I
Speaker 1: don't think I am, Which is, if you are. If
Speaker 1: if Islam looks at the Christian world as infidels and
Speaker 1: they want to create a world in which they are
Speaker 1: not here and they convert to Islam, they are using
Speaker 1: the sword. So it's I mean, it's self defense that
Speaker 1: you would use the sort back, and that's I think.
Speaker 3: I'm all for using swords back. I have no problem
Speaker 3: with you.
Speaker 1: I think that's that's Manuel's point, which is, Look, I've
Speaker 1: looked at history and I seen Christians coming up together
Speaker 1: around the same values and combating Islam. Yes, but what
Speaker 1: would I don't think you like, but what another religion? Yes?
Speaker 3: But what world were they defending? It was a Christian world, yes,
Speaker 3: and thus primitive, barbaric violence and unfree. So you cannot
Speaker 3: have a Christian world uniting to fight Islam and have freedom.
Speaker 3: The Christianity and freedom are not compatible, and particularly not
Speaker 3: compatible when it's going to go to war.
Speaker 1: Now, now, what are the nations that are most free,
Speaker 1: they all left Christian backgrounds.
Speaker 3: In the world secular today. They've all they've all mean
Speaker 3: secular since they became free.
Speaker 1: But you don't think there's an underlying contamination effect on everything.
Speaker 3: Every single one of the free countries. Japan is not
Speaker 3: a Christian country, and it's a it's a it's a
Speaker 3: it's a free country relatively speaking, right, South Korea, Taiwan,
Speaker 3: Hong Kong, Singapore.
Speaker 1: Korea was influenced by the US to be a free country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all of these countries were influenced by the US
Speaker 3: and all and the US was influenced by the Enlightenment
Speaker 3: to be a free country, by the secular Enlightenment to
Speaker 3: be a free country. And again, Jefferson read, you know,
Speaker 3: the founders of America read a lot more of the
Speaker 3: secular Enlightenment than they did of theological debates about how
Speaker 3: many how many Angels that and I have a needle.
Speaker 3: So so the America is a secular country. And the
Speaker 3: freedom that America enjoyed is a product of its secular nature,
Speaker 3: not of its religious nature. And coming together on the
Speaker 3: false ideology which I think Christianity is is not helpful.
Speaker 3: So in order to combat Islam. You need to think
Speaker 3: and you need to figure out how to defeat them.
Speaker 3: It's not that hard because they're pretty weak and pretty
Speaker 3: barbaric and pretty primitive. So it's not it not hard
Speaker 3: to defeat is Slam.
Speaker 1: And but they're winning rounds in Europe. I think that's
Speaker 1: Manuel's point.
Speaker 3: Oh, I agree that they're winning.
Speaker 1: But that and n say about this migration problem in Europe.
Speaker 3: I don't know what I mean would say. I'll tell
Speaker 3: you what I would say, because men did not have
Speaker 3: this problem. You know, Islam, the Islamic world has a
Speaker 3: real problem of fundamentalists, religious fundamentalists, Islamism, Islamic radicals, however
Speaker 3: you want to call it, Islamic totalitians who believe that
Speaker 3: God has given them the world and they will dominate
Speaker 3: the world, and they should rule over the world, and
Speaker 3: they will use force in order to gain that. The
Speaker 3: West has to recognize that. First step one, recognize that fact.
Speaker 3: Step two, identify that it's a real threat, and declare
Speaker 3: war on it. So after nine to eleven, George Bush,
Speaker 3: a good Christian, I called Islam a religion of peace
Speaker 3: and celebraated the Ramadan. On October two.
Speaker 1: Thousand and one in two.
Speaker 3: Thousand and one. Yes, in the White House Ramadan October,
Speaker 3: a month after nine to eleven, the Ramadan was celebated.
Speaker 3: Now that is unbelievably Christian, turn the other cheek, love
Speaker 3: your enemy like you do, and horrifically anti objectivist, an
Speaker 3: anti reason and anti rationality. I said at the time,
Speaker 3: declare war and crush them. Any make a list of
Speaker 3: every organization and every state that adheres to Islamic fundamentalism.
Speaker 3: That would be al Qaeda, obviously al Kaida, you know
Speaker 3: today isis ramas Chris Bala, islami Jihad, the Muslim brotherhood
Speaker 3: which is behind all of this.
Speaker 1: Iran not Iraq was a secular country.
Speaker 3: Who cared? I mean, the guy was a monster, but
Speaker 3: he didn't you know, he wasn't spending terrorism around the world.
Speaker 3: Who did? I won, So you won should have been
Speaker 3: the target. So if you understand who the enemy is Islamic,
Speaker 3: this Islamist ideology, then you can have a proper list
Speaker 3: of enemies. And it's not oh, it's a it's a
Speaker 3: religious world. We have to push back on Muslims because
Speaker 3: some Muslim countries are not your enemy, but some are
Speaker 3: really your enemy. Iran is an enemy and destroy them
Speaker 3: and then we all over and we could have destroyed
Speaker 3: them in a maunt of weeks months.
Speaker 1: So what the advice would you give for us that
Speaker 1: are struggling in Portugal. We are struggling a.
Speaker 3: Long claar war on Islamic on the Islamist not Islam,
Speaker 3: on the Islamist ideology. So make it so that you
Speaker 3: can kick them out and and and and and you know,
Speaker 3: if they're preachers out there, preaching Sharia and preaching the
Speaker 3: destruction of Western civilization, send them packing.
Speaker 1: I agree. Okay, let's move on. If Islam was a
Speaker 1: religion of peace, the Islamic extremists would be extremely peaceful.
Speaker 1: That's for sure a good point.
Speaker 3: Well, there is no such thing as a religion apeace.
Speaker 3: That is a contradiction in terms. There's never been a
Speaker 3: religion of peace. Again, Christianity christianized Europe by the sword,
Speaker 3: and not against Muslims, against Pagans and against Jews. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, this is the combination of Rome and Christianity, right,
Speaker 3: and and Augustine, Augustine who is one of the fathers
Speaker 3: of the Church. Augustine has whole writings about the morality
Speaker 3: of war, and in order to justify when is war
Speaker 3: justified was only justified to convert somebody to Christianity, So
Speaker 3: was ali fied for good? Good defined by Christianity. And
Speaker 3: this is my point about force. Everybody. Everybody agrees force
Speaker 3: is okay if it's for the right cause. Augustine, who
Speaker 3: defined Christian morality with regard to violence, said violence is
Speaker 3: okay if it promotes Christianity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but sorry, guys, if I'm taking a while to translate,
Speaker 1: because you guys write in Portuguese and I have to
Speaker 1: translate in my hand. And by the way, that noise.
Speaker 3: You're hearing is it's pouring wain hopefully, I don't know
Speaker 3: if you're hearing, we're hearing it.
Speaker 1: What's other questions, Odrico, can you scroll a bit so
Speaker 1: I can see a little bit more questions? Do we
Speaker 1: need to leave, Miguel, Yeah, we will finish, finish right away.
Speaker 1: So let's see if there's any last question and we'll
Speaker 1: just finish.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: It's the same people's using the correct term fundamentalist Islam,
Speaker 1: meaning it's how Islam was funded. That's true violence, force,
Speaker 1: et cetera.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I mean it's interesting how the different
Speaker 3: religions were founded. Islamos founded and this is what gives
Speaker 3: them the I don't know, the the gall if you
Speaker 3: will to go out and try to try to dominate
Speaker 3: the world. They were founded by a warrior, by a
Speaker 3: warrior trader. Uh, you know. And and and Christianity was
Speaker 3: founded by you know, somebody was crucified.
Speaker 1: A peaceful guy. Right, they never heard anybody.
Speaker 3: Yeah, peaceful, but I'd say week week and uh suffering
Speaker 3: and uh and failed right as a as an individual,
Speaker 3: he never saw his success. If if you think as
Speaker 3: a man, if you think he was successful, what happened
Speaker 3: you're successful? Well after his death. Muhammad was successful in
Speaker 3: his life. But but that tells you something about the
Speaker 3: attitude of both religions. Right, Muhammad was successful during his life,
Speaker 3: the whole plot he was. I mean he conquered lands,
Speaker 3: but he conquered lands, I mean successful in in those
Speaker 3: kinds of times.
Speaker 1: I think Jesus being being being murdered by the Romans
Speaker 1: and the and.
Speaker 3: That it makes it makes it good.
Speaker 1: That was that was the plan. It was not like
Speaker 1: it was successful on this plan. It was actually the plan.
Speaker 3: It's not his plan, you know. I I don't think
Speaker 3: that was I don't think he was a plan you know,
Speaker 3: I think le Yeah, he had the masses with Jesus
Speaker 3: a certain point. No, he had he Christian. He doesn't
Speaker 3: really gain any it doesn't gain numbers and cloud or
Speaker 3: anything until Constantine. You know, it brings it into the
Speaker 3: Roman Empire. That's when it really starts taking off. And
Speaker 3: and then it's using the soul to conflot people.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure.
Speaker 3: Pleasure.
Speaker 1: Are really a good fun guy to discuss a lot
Speaker 1: of topics.
Speaker 3: With sounds good.
Speaker 1: How okay, what do you need? It's in what's up?
Speaker 1: Or yeah, I will I will, uh, yes, okay, yes,
Speaker 1: of course. Okay, guys there at home, if somebody is
Speaker 1: interested in her hearing more about what we are discussing here.
Speaker 1: There's going to be extra conferences and events. There was
Speaker 1: one yesterday. It's already recorded and available in YouTube because
Speaker 1: I saw it. There's going to be uh in a
Speaker 1: conference in the seventeen and nineteen of April. Is that
Speaker 1: it in the next year, And there is a group.
Speaker 3: Called CON's it's an in conference in Porto. Uh it's
Speaker 3: we do want to year? Is that? No, we do
Speaker 3: any year in Europe? But it is the first time
Speaker 3: it's in Porto. First time it's in Portugal, so that
Speaker 3: we'll be being speaking a number of speakers from the
Speaker 3: US and so yeah, people should should should go check
Speaker 3: it out online and uh hope to see a lot
Speaker 3: of a lot of people from Portugal at the conference
Speaker 3: if we can will be there, Yeah, that'd be great,
Speaker 3: beret to go.
Speaker 1: There is also a group of Objectivists in Portugal. If
Speaker 1: people want to join what is the group called objectives
Speaker 1: in Portugal? Where where can they find them? Okay, get
Speaker 1: in touch with with with us comment down below and
Speaker 1: we will comment where you can find I guess there
Speaker 1: are groups Discord, Instagram, whatever, there are groups that you
Speaker 1: can join.
Speaker 3: And there is an event on Thursday, so the day
Speaker 3: after tomorrow this since this is live, there's an event
Speaker 3: in Lisbon on Thursday with a pretty pretty famous people
Speaker 3: who's will be there in Carlous. It's called in the
Speaker 3: morality of Capitalism.
Speaker 1: That's that's a good topic we would not disagree on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you can you can, well we will disagree
Speaker 3: on what the morality is, but.
Speaker 1: Maybe not, maybe not, we don't know. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Is there a pleasure any extra last message you want
Speaker 1: to give before we.
Speaker 3: I mean, people should check out my podcast You run
Speaker 3: book show. You can find it on YouTube pretty easily.
Speaker 3: You on bookshow dot com is the website and if
Speaker 3: you're interested in iron Rand go read some minevent. I
Speaker 3: think everybody will benefit from it, whether you agree or
Speaker 3: not agree. In the end, read at less the Fountain
Speaker 3: at read the Virtue of Selfishness, provocative title or capitalism
Speaker 3: not known ideal. These are good and you can check
Speaker 3: out I ran dot org a y n r n
Speaker 3: d dot org for information about her, about her life,
Speaker 3: about the books, what languages they're available in. It's all
Speaker 3: available on the website.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Er my pleasure, absolutely, super real fun absolutely and it
Speaker 3: was really fun. It was fun for me absolutely.
Speaker 1: Guys, stick with us. We'll have a NEXTRA podcast today
Speaker 1: at nine pm, probably between.
Speaker 3: Eight and what about your kids?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what about talk kids exactly, That's what I say
Speaker 1: about sacrifice. Guys, stick with us. We will have a
Speaker 1: conversation about home schooling, about even I mean, you'll see,
Speaker 1: you'll see Juan Calsu and the sand will be here.
Speaker 1: You know them already. It's going to be a great conversation. Tonight,
Speaker 1: and we will actually try to follow, for example tomorrow
Speaker 1: and in the other days, the presidential interviews on on
Speaker 1: a typ so be be sure to follow that as well.
Speaker 1: If you still don't follow us on Instagram, you will
Speaker 1: be always aware of the next episodes. Thank you so much,
Speaker 1: Thank you for the questions, Thank you for listening. If
Speaker 1: you like it, share it with everybody that you know.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. And Susan, thanks you guys.
Speaker 3: You know, the quarter of public.
Speaker 2: So spious.
Speaker 1: Some Kingrodas and mothers Sibius and awesome