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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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The original amendments have nothing to do whatsoever with the states.
That you're not being influenced by your own biases.
The unbelievable and ignorant ingratitude that has spread across the country.
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Chapter 2: Why do Americans seem to hate each other?
We were told a lot of lies about, for example, the efficacy of masks or the ability of vaccines to prevent transmission of the COVID virus. And the backlash to that, that was all in pursuit of a narrative. And the backlash to that was, what if we don't do vaccines ever again? People just won't take vaccines. Vaccines must be bad.
And instead, we're going to rely on whatever we heard on some third-rate podcast from a person who doesn't know a kidney from a spleen. And then obviously when it comes to academia, this is clearly true. The destruction of truth in favor of social engineering has been ongoing for decades in the United States. This is nothing new.
We watched the apotheosis during the sort of woke revolution that happened over the course of the last 10, 15 years. But it's been going on for a very long time. The first book that I ever wrote, I'm now middle-aged. So when I started this, I was your age. When I started working in this field, I was 17. So I've been doing this now for 25 years, because I'm now 42.
The first book that I wrote was a book called Brainwashed, How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth. That book was written in 2004. And that book was all about liberal indoctrination on college campuses. I was at UCLA at the time. I was a junior when I wrote it. And not much has changed, except that it's gotten, in many ways, worse.
And that happened because professors decided, back in the 1960s, essentially, professors and administrators decided to cave to activist students because they did not have the courage of their own principles. And in doing so, they turned over the purpose of a university which is emblazoned on pretty much all of the insignia of every major university, which they then all ignore.
Where I went for law school, Harvard, the insignia says Veritas on it. The last time that Harvard met Veritas, it's been a century. It's been a long, long time. The move from truth to we are going to engineer a population of discontented people who believe that the system must be turned on its ear, that is what college became.
It was still good in some STEM areas, obviously, when it came to science and tech. But when it came to the liberal arts or to the idea that you were actually trying to generate good, productive citizens, citizens in the fullest sense of the word, people who are engaged in their community and who believed in the fundamental principles of their civilization,
These universities decided to discard all of that. And so, naturally, people don't trust the universities anymore. And this was mirrored in a radical distrust of our government. See, the thing about the way the American government is built is that it was built to really pursue one fundamental principle above all. And it wasn't even freedom as much as epistemic humility.
Because freedom is rooted in a certain level of epistemic humility. What I mean by that is the idea you might not be right. If you think you're always right, then you might want to be a tyrant because you're always right. I'm a tyrant with my children. I'm always right, they're always wrong. With my wife, I have to have a little bit of epistemic humility because mostly she's right and I'm wrong.
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Chapter 3: What role do conspiracies play in American society?
It is why we have three branches of government. There are lots of other countries that don't have these systems. This is why we have a Federalist system in which the powers of the federal government are enumerated and the powers of the state government are significantly broader. The whole idea is, Lots of people live lots of different kinds of lives.
And you may not like that, but you might also be wrong. And so in order for us to determine what right looks like, there better be a broad agreement on us, between all of us, to do that thing. And when that wears away, When that wears away, what we end up with when we hate each other is a battle to the death in the blood sport of politics.
We get angry at the checks and balances because it's not possible that people who oppose me are right. Those people are malign. Those people want bad things to happen to me and to my family. And so I'm going to grab the government. I'm going to kill the filibuster. I'm going to stack the Supreme Court.
Chapter 4: How do institutions impact trust among Americans?
I'm going to add states willy-nilly to the United States Senate. And then I'm just going to run right over everybody. And by the way, the sentiment is not a pure left-wing sentiment, although it's very, very often expressed at the top levels of the Democratic Party. It's also expressed at the top levels by some on the Republican side. Sometimes you'll hear it phrased in preemptive tones.
The left will do it. Therefore, we must do it first, which is always a get out of jail free card. But the reality is that in the absence of rebuilding trust in the institutions, what you will end up with is a war of all against all on the governmental level. And things will not go well.
And you can see this with regard to how the government is now approaching a wide variety of issues, how Americans want things from the government they never used to want. Checks and balances, when you get rid of the fundamental epistemic humility of the government, checks and balances give way to a centralized tyranny. Free markets, which are rooted in the idea of epistemic humility, the entire
Marginal theory of value, the idea that was promoted by the Austrian school thinkers in economics, the basic idea that actually value is subjective at the margins. I value a glass of water differently than you value a glass of water, and I value a glass of water differently if I'm in the Sahara Desert than if I'm here in Austin, Texas.
That basic idea suggests that there is no possibility of centralizing economics. The entire basis of free market economics, as Hayek would argue, is diffuse knowledge. That everyone in this room has a different idea of what things are worth. And what the price is is the aggregate of what we all think that thing is worth. That's what a price looks like.
Well, what happens when we don't trust each other and when we think some of us are screwing other of us? Then we say, well, what if there was a person right at the top who is deciding what's fair? And again, I wish this were only a left-wing phenomenon. It is increasingly a right-wing phenomenon. This idea that somehow free market capitalism is eroding the soul of the American people.
Whenever people say that capitalism is what's responsible for the soul sickness in Americans, and you hear this from, I've seen this in places like Compact Magazine, for example. When you see this sort of argument, understand that trying to solve a soul problem with economics is like trying to change a baby diaper with a hammer. It is the wrong tool. That is not what economics are for.
Economics and free market economics are about the generation of new and better products at a better and lower price. That is what free market economics are designed to do this. This is what they do better than anything else because of the preservation of private property and because of the diffusion of knowledge.
But if you don't trust your neighbor and you think your neighbor's screwing you, you might be very likely to say that maybe the government should just do what you want it to do. Grab that brass ring and do exactly what you want with that power.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of populism in American politics?
But one of the things that we've decided as a sort of internet culture is that if we debate the fundamental propositions of things like private property or free speech, or freedom of religion, that somehow things get wildly better. And I mean, I'd just like to point out that all of those things were actually come to, in a sort of Burkean sense, by human experience, not by logic.
We did not argue ourself into freedom of religion. We had a bunch of bloody wars. And then we decided, hey, you know what would be great? Freedom of religion. We did not argue ourself into free speech. We had a bunch of people who were burned at the stake. And then we decided, hey, you know what? This is too much of that. Let's not do that anymore.
Private property was not the outgrowth of people arguing themselves into private property. It was the outgrowth of the experience of centuries of poverty and death and despair. And if you have to argue your way back into private property, this doesn't mean you can't and shouldn't defend it, you should.
But if the idea is that you can only win this debate on the fundamental basis of speaking it out, that's not right. Human experience has something to say about this as well, which is why it is so dangerous what is happening right now, because it takes centuries to build the institutions that we are taking minutes to destroy.
Only a carefully cultivated moral culture that values truth and evidence and logic and moral decency, that actually protects free speech and property rights and equal rights under the law, is capable of restoring our institutions. We shouldn't be debating about the fundamental moral matters. Things like lying is wrong. If I have to debate you about that, there's no debate.
Or that truth is superior to falsehood. There can be no debate about this. Or that individual human beings have moral worth and that their autonomy has moral value. Those are the values that we begin with. And those are the values that need to be embodied in institutions. And that's why, bringing it all the way back to the beginning, that's why University of Austin is really valuable.
Because University of Austin takes, as its fundamental presuppositions, the building blocks on which you can actually erect a civilization
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Chapter 6: What are the failures of our current institutions?
the most important fundamentals of that civilization. Now, they can give you all the justification for all those principles. I can, too. If you read the literature, you can do it. But the point is that that is already there. It doesn't have to be erected de novo. It doesn't have to be remade from nothing.
And so the case for University of Austin is that it is a brand new institution built on very old things. It's a brand new institution that is taking the foundations that have been cast aside by all of these institutions And it is taking those, and it is building a new institution atop the foundations that have been discarded. There is no more important work.
And if you're considering coming here, if you're already here, congratulations, because you're making the right choice. Thanks so much. If you own a business, you probably have no idea how many brokers it actually takes to insure your business. That's a bit of a problem. You have policies scattered everywhere, applications that keep asking for the same information.
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For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. In our American experiment class, we learned about how Lincoln connected the Declaration of Independence to why slavery should be ended or by the end of his arguments. Do you think it was a mistake to connect the ideals of the Declaration of Independence to law in the American imagination?
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Chapter 7: How can we rebuild trust in our institutions?
I mean, it's very interesting to read the arguments and counterarguments leading up to the Civil War about the application of the Constitution to the issue of slavery.
Chapter 8: How can individuals navigate political polarization?
But the idea that what Lincoln was doing was reading the Constitution in light of the Declaration, that I think is correct. I think that the sort of hard divide that was made by the secessionists between the Declaration saying this is not law and the Constitution saying this is law, that's ideologically wrong and un-American. And so I think Lincoln was right to link the two.
And again, I think that the mistake would be to de-link in the other direction the Declaration from the Constitution, say the Constitution is not important, The principles of the Declaration are what's important.
That's how you end up with the idea that on the basis of vague pursuit of happiness standards, the government can do whatever it wants, as opposed to the actual limitations of that frame of silver.
Thank you.
Hi, Ben. I'm a Noahide from Houston, and I've always been fascinated by government. One of our seven laws in our religion is to establish courts of justice, in other words, to make good government. Where would you say that is most needed in our government, whether state or federal? Where is it most needed?
The biggest thing that's needed in government is for the federal government to go back to its constitutional boundaries, which, of course, is never going to happen. But it's a nice idea. The truth is that the state governments were given extraordinary powers under the federal constitution. The original amendments have nothing to do whatsoever with the states.
So, for example, the First Amendment, which declares freedom of speech, says, literally, Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech. It does not say that states shall make no law abridging it. Now, there are mirror provisions in virtually every state constitution in the original colonies, but the idea that There's a strange sort of balance.
I actually have a political philosophy book that I wrote that has not been published yet and may one day. But the basic thing that I talk about in that book is the idea that the place where you can do and it's appropriate to do the most legislation is the place where you need the least and vice versa.
So in your local community, in your HOA, there are a lot of informal things that don't need to be codified because you know all of your neighbors and you know your family members. But that would also be the place where, theoretically, a lot of rules could theoretically apply because there's a lot of agreement.
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