Sam Harris

I don't want a hospital that treats my daughter better than anyone else in the lobby because she's my daughter and I've bribed the guy at the door or whatever, or the guy's a fan of my podcast or whatever the thing is.

You don't want starkly corrupt, unfair situations.

And when you sort of get pressed down the hierarchy of Maslow's needs, individually and societally,

A bunch of those variables change, and they change for the worse, understandably.

But yeah, when everyone's corrupt and you're in a state of collective emergency, you've got a lifeboat problem, you're scrambling to get into the lifeboat.

yeah, then fairness and norms and the other vestiges of civilization begin to get stripped off.

We can't reason from those emergencies to normal life.

I mean, in normal life,

we want justice, we want fairness, we're all better off for it, even when the spotlight of our concern is focused on the people we know, the people who are our friends, the people who are family, people we have good reason to care about, we still by default want a system that protects the interests of strangers too.

And we know that generally speaking, and just in game theoretic terms, we're all gonna tend to be better off in a fair system than a corrupt one.

I think it's important, but it only takes you so far, right?

It doesn't get you to truth, right?

Truth is not a

It's not decided by democratic principles.

And certain people believe things for understandable reasons, but those reasons are nonetheless bad reasons, right?

They don't scale.

They don't generalize.

They're not reasons anyone should adopt for themselves or respect epistemologically.

And yet their circumstance is understandable and it's something you can care about.

Right.