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  • Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome John Anderson.

  • Well, Jordan and Dave, thank you so much for giving us your time.

  • John Anderson dot net is basically dedicated to something that is very, very dear to me as someone who is very wide about our country and where we're going.

  • And it's that you cannot cannot get good public policy without a good public to bite.

  • And it seems now we don't have debates anymore.

  • We just have abusive emotional mudslinging.

  • So that's the sort of the background thing.

  • But then we come to this incredible opportunity today to engage with these two gentlemen and I wanted to get the ball rolling by talking about a number of issues, firstly, personal responsibility.

  • Then I'd like to move on to freedom.

  • What is it?

  • Because it's not license.

  • It's not what so many people think it is today.

  • And how do we make it work?

  • I didn't want to talk about courage because we're gonna need a lot of it going forward and you're going to hear a lot ord see, demonstrated some real courage, I think here and what we're going to talk about and what you're going to hear, what you're going to witness then a bit about social media and how we make it all work and then it's over to you.

  • We live in a nice when it seems that there's a crisis of trust in our culture.

  • It seems that we are very uncertain of our institutions and the people who make them up on what their motivations might be.

  • And indeed the research backs that up.

  • The Australian National University has been tracking Australia's confidence in their politicians and the political process.

  • Now for many decades.

  • We are in uncharted waters.

  • Record numbers of Australians no longer have confidence in the system.

  • Record numbers of Australians now distrust the political process and the players in it.

  • Just more recently, we've had the latest of a series of royal commissions of inquiry into various institutions.

  • This time's banking on the financial service is, and we learned that we couldn't trust bankers.

  • Now there are many trustworthy bankers in case there are any here.

  • But plainly people were deeply concerned by what emerged and you stop and think about this when people are in relationships of trust, harmony and progress could be might when it breaks down harmony and progress are impaired and people flee for safety.

  • If you don't feel safe with someone else, you'll look for the rule book and you look for policing and you'll look for protection.

  • So it's a good thing we've had the Royal Commission of Inquiry, so we know what's been going on.

  • It's a good thing we've got the red 78 recommendations, new laws everywhere, new surveillance, new policing.

  • But it's a tragedy that it was necessary in the first place that people have not been doing what should have been doing without coercion.

  • So now we've got a great big battle ist how to resolve these things, you say the law based approach.

  • But Jordan, you've said something quite different in the midst of all of us.

  • What you have said is that the redemption of the world is not political.

  • It happens at the level of the individual.

  • That's not what we hear in the mayor.

  • Every night there's a new scandal.

  • It's we need more rules.

  • We need more policing.

  • We need more surveillance.

  • We need a different party in power.

  • You're not saying that you're saying it comes back to the individual.

  • The first question is.

  • Do you want that?

  • Do you want a more A state with more regulatory power?

  • Do you want a state with more surveillance?

  • I mean, first of all, why would you think that That would be trustworthy.

  • When all the evidence suggests in the past that as the state expands its surveillance power, it actually becomes less trustworthy rather than Maur.

  • And why would you want you might think?

  • Well, I certainly want someone looking into your affairs, but I don't want anybody looking into mine.

  • Well, good luck with that because, you know, to the degree that I have someone elect someone to look into your affairs there bloody well, going to be looking into mine as well.

  • And that just doesn't strike me as a particularly positive development practically because I don't believe it'll work.

  • I don't think surveillance states do make people more honest.

  • I think all the evidence is the opposite.

  • And then I would say from the individual perspective, it's like I believe that the fundamental what we got fundamentally right in the West, because there is a number of things we got fundamentally right, even though we don't like to admit that anymore is that the ultimate moral responsibility for the state relies on you.

  • It relies on your moral integrity and you know you can.

  • It's not that hard to think that through.

  • It's like, Well, first of all, you have the right and the responsibility to vote, and we could say, Well, that's not exactly given to you by the state.

  • It's something that exists in some, in some sense outside and before the state.

  • It's part and parcel of your intrinsic value.

  • Okay, so that's a decision that we've made in the West, that each person, regardless of their flaws, is characterized by a value and intrinsic value that's so deep and so profound that the very regulation of the state itself rests on their shoulders.

  • And that's really something.

  • That's that's why you have the right to vote.

  • And that's worth thinking about.

  • The first question is, Well, do you think that's a good idea or not?

  • I do believe that we are, in fact sovereign individuals, and then, well, let's assume that you believe that we are because the alternative is some sort of autocracy, right?

  • It's some sort of tyranny.

  • It's it's the it's the parsing off of that sovereignty to a bureaucracy or to some arbitrary form of leadership.

  • And maybe you can believe in that.

  • And you'd like a strong leader and fine.

  • But you want to think that through because if it's not that, then it's you.

  • Well, then it's if it's you and you have to make sure that the ship of state is sailing properly, then the first thing you might want to ask yourself is, What makes you think you're any more trustworthy than the people that you're that your despising or criticizing?

  • I mean, if if you are, well, more power to you.

  • But it is self evident that you are, and my suspicions are that it's not even self evident to you that you are because it's a very rare person that you come across.

  • If you talk to them with any degree of seriousness, you know they're able to lay out a whole litany of ways they fall short of their own value, their own values, not values that other people are putting on them.

  • Certainly, that is well, and they can name innumerable ways that not only are they not doing what they shouldn't be doing, so they're falling short of the mark in that way.

  • But they're doing all sorts of things that they definitely shouldn't be doing, and they know it.

  • It's like, Well, we're gonna put that right or not.

  • And my sense is, you know, I wrote a rule in my book.

  • Put your house in perfect order Before you complain about the world before you criticize the world, What's the idea?

  • It's like, Well, you're the sovereign man.

  • If the states, if the ship of state is listing and sinking, that's you, that's your problem.

  • It's your fault.

  • You're not doing it right.

  • You're not educated enough.

  • You're not awake enough.

  • You're not articulated in the target.

  • Articulate enough.

  • You don't know enough about history.

  • You're not taking on enough responsibility.

  • You're looking for other people to blame because it's convenient and and and that's kind of understandable because it's the dispersal of responsibility who wants all that responsibility?

  • But there's a huge price to be paid for it.

  • The the first price that you pay for it is well, there goes the adventure of your life.

  • It's like you could get yourself together and be the bedrock of the state right That'd be hard hat.

  • Call on everything that you have.

  • That would be your adventure.

  • Gonna pass that off to someone else.

  • And then then what do you do?

  • You've got nothing left in your life, a triviality and you can't live.

  • I don't believe that people can live ethically trivially.

  • That's why I think the pursuit of the idea that life is for happiness is wrong because life is too difficult for that to be the case.

  • Our lives are too profound to characterized by suffering and malevolence.

  • The world is to characterized by trouble at every level, for happiness, to be the proper solution.

  • The solution is something like, ah, heavy burden of ethical responsibility, the kind that sets the state's straight.

  • And then in that you find the purpose of your life.

  • And so not only if you want the external monitoring and the surveillance state not only do sacrifice your privacy and invite all that invasive attention and lose, you're impulsive freedom.

  • You lose everything that's profound about your life and someone takes it from you.

  • They take your destiny from you, and that's no way to live.

  • That's just that's the tyranny that we've struggled against in the West successfully for I would say, in one way or another for, for for a number of thousands of years and with a substantial amount of success to draw Dave into this.

  • We met in L.

  • A.

  • A couple of years ago over breakfast.

  • Dave, you're a great defender of culture to now.

  • When we met, it was very interesting.

  • You set out the reasons in a way for me to think he's a card carrying progressive.

  • You tell me where you came from and what do you believe in, what you didn't.

  • And then you said on I'm guy married man, and then you went on to say, and I thank God every day.

  • I live in Christian America and I thought, That's a surprise turning the conversation.

  • And we had a fantastic breakfast talking about it, your defender of culture now, or of our cultural roots at a time when the West seems to be its own worst enemy and doesn't believe in its cultural rates.

  • Could you elaborate?

  • Yeah, of course.

  • Well, you know, first off, as you guys, I'm sure know Jordan.

  • I just left the Sydney Opera house a few minutes ago and we've done about 100 and 20 some odd shows.

  • I've opened for Jordan and it just struck me in the last two minutes that having to follow you is much less fun.

  • I having to go before you.

  • That's easy.

  • I'm usually just setting them up.

  • You're not going to the park, but okay, I'll try.

  • Um well, just quickly on what Jordan said about the individual, because it links exactly to that.

  • You know, people ask me all the time in the Q and A's and are meet and greets.

  • What What is going on?

  • Why is it that people are following this psychologist talking about lobsters all over the country?

  • And and actually that question is what I believe is the answer there is.

  • There has been a complete obliteration for young people to understand what being an individual is, what, being a person that owns your own mind, that decides to get out there and live the life they're supposed to live that doesn't want to take from somebody and give to somebody else or just take for themselves.

  • And that has really been lost.

  • And what's been amazing to me is we've done now 20 some odd countries is that the same things that you guys are thinking about in Sydney are the exact same things that people are thinking about in Toronto and Los Angeles and stock home and all over the country, And that's absolutely fascinating.

  • So, to your question, because I am an individual, that is what led me here that that's, I think, what led you to wanna have breakfast with me in Los Angeles that the difference is the immutable characteristics that we either have in common or separate us, whether it's sexuality or gender or skin color are completely irrelevant.

  • If we really want to be a society that is truly free that truly respects each other, it makes no difference.

  • I mean, I do when I go to colleges, I usually just single out somebody in the crowd, and it's like, How sad would it be if I just looked at you?

  • And I was like, Oh, well, you're a white guy.

  • You look like you're in your early twenties, as if that would give me any inclination that I would have any insight into what you think or how you should think, actually is the better point because you should think whatever you think and hopefully be willing to have that exchange of ideas.

  • So I'm very appreciative that I live in a Christian country, because the simple fact is, while the media will imply that you know, every day there's another story on how evil Christian white people are something like that.

  • And by the way I see that spreading all over the world as well.

  • I mean, there's there's a weird thing going on with the media where I thought it was really American, crumbling of the media.

  • But now I see it all over the place.

  • Um, I live in the freest country in the history of the world, period.

  • The United States in 2019 is the freest place in the history of the world.

  • You can, you know, with the most tiny exceptions on speech around, you know, yelling fire in a crowded theater or a direct threat of violence.

  • You can say whatever you want and even being here in Australia, where you guys have it pretty good on speech.

  • I can tell people are jealous of what America has, and certainly when we were in the U.

  • K.

  • Where they have all sorts of things Where you know this This YouTube creator count dank.

  • Ula had his dog, you know, do the do the Nazi salute and and gotten all sorts of trouble.

  • I mean, we won't have this forever and that that's very clear to me.

  • And I would just add this that Douglas Murray who I'm sure you're familiar with in the UK Um, he's also gay, and I and he's a brilliant thinker, and I didn't even want to ask him anything about that because it's it's completely irrelevant in a certain way.

  • But the last question when I had him on last time, I said him, Do you think your sexuality has a little something to do with your sensitivity about freedom?

  • Because, you know, it might be you first.

  • And he said that he thought his skin was a little thinner because of that.

  • And so I do think that people that are on the outside for whatever, whatever that is, it doesn't have to be Sexuality could be obviously a myriad of different issues.

  • Um, I do think you become a little more sensitive, sensitive to it, and for that reason I'm incredibly I'll go a step further.

  • I am blessed that I live in the United States of America and I can do I can.

  • I'm a free man in the freest country ever.

  • And I'm very appreciative that you can see why we get on.

  • Yeah.

  • Hi.

  • Seriously.

  • Can anyone push back against that?

  • And yet, half a time when you listen to the elite to have their hands on the levers of influence today you would think we lived in cruel and oppressive cultures.

  • Think of the four great revolutions, the American war of Independence.

  • And what came out of that I think of the French Revolution.

  • Think of the Russian Revolution.

  • Think of the mass revolution which one has produced a really understanding of the individual and secure their freedoms.

  • Integrate away on where in Australia, of course, are unbelievably blessed to use your word again because we've inherited what's called a wash Minster the best of the British House of Congress.

  • Sorry.

  • House of Representatives based on the House of Commons, Senators closely modelled on yours and it works unbelievably well.

  • But you wouldn't think it listen to the public commentary today.

  • Now that's come to freedom when you and I talked in Sydney.

  • Uh, back just before Easter last year, we had a great conversation into my enormous delight.

  • I found that we had a friend in common.

  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

  • There you go.

  • There's a photograph of him now.

  • It doesn't look very happy when there's a good reason for that.

  • He would have been probably busted up physically in all sorts of other ways as well.

  • When that photograph was taken, Hey Waas.

  • A hero in Russia in the Second World War.

  • But after the war, he dared to disagree with the regime in Moscow, which was on unbelievably evil, right, Jane for the price.

  • The price for disagreeing was that he ended up and the gulag in a prison.

  • This is a remarkable book.

  • He wrote about his experiences there, said that this wasn't the only one.

  • It was smuggled out to the West.

  • There's no doubt that he's writing shortened the life of that evil regime, but the bit that stayed with me, in which you referred to and have many times you write a great essay on whatever Christmas I recommended to you.

  • It was published in the Times and then in the Australian or you can Google.

  • It was that this black recorder that one day I was lying in his cell.

  • I would imagine freezing called probably ill.

  • Incredibly, I'm happy any circumstances.

  • He hears the thumping over guard down the rows, belting another prisoner up the screams of the prisoner.

  • And then he writes off that it dawned on me as I listened to it that the dividing line between good and evil actually doesn't lie between capture and captive.

  • Can you imagine a prisoner in those circumstances saying the blood doing the beating is captive to He's not free.

  • Rather, he said, the dividing line between good and evil lies somewhere across.

  • Every human heart is not between man and woman, so let the some of the people in today's movements.

  • It's not between Catholic and Baptist or man and woman.

  • The dividing line between good and evil lies somewhere across every human hot.

  • That was very profound for 1,000,000 public life when I was telling these friends on the way out that, for example, you know a point that came to me to be quite realize, a young federal member of parliament was in the outback town of Walden on a very, very angry young aboriginal man came up to me.

  • He swore his head off at me.

  • He said you signed size.

  • You stole this from us.

  • You ruined this.

  • You do.

  • You know you on absolute litany of my crimes, and now you're gonna pass back.

  • And I remember thinking, Stop, stop.

  • Remember that this guy has the stamp of nobility on him, too.

  • It's just I can't see it at the moment, you know, And I've got no right to do him over.

  • He's like, maybe he's a mixture of good and bad, But let's to use this out.

  • This incredible writer who eventually was freed, found his way to America.

  • The Americans and the West refused to listen to his warnings.

  • He was there like a kind of prophet, saying, Look out, you're losing your freedoms.

  • What did he mean?

  • How do you find freedom when it's not physical, you can't move.

  • You're in fear of your life.

  • But in some other way, he found freedom.

  • What's it mean, Conway on background?

  • Because I think it's important.

  • Well, one of the things that's ocean, it's ended.

  • And this is something I think we're thinking about.

  • I mean, I've thought about it for decades because it's such a remarkable story.

  • I think he tells it in the second volume of the Gulag Archipelago because it's a three volume book, full book, and it's all worth reading, especially the second volume and especially the second half.

  • And in that he details his transformation, I would say his psychological or spiritual transformation.

  • No, um, he was on the Russian front, which was not a pleasant place to be because Stalin had signed a pact with Hitler and Hitler broke it, and the Russians were completely unprepared.

  • And so to be on the Russian front at the beginning of World War two was a very bad place to be.

  • And he wrote letters to a compatriot is complaining about the lack of preparation, and that's what got him thrown in the camps.

  • Now it's interesting to note that Stalin, through all of the Soviet prisoners of war, into camps.

  • So if you were a Soviet soldier and you had gone to the West and fought and you were captured and put in a say, a German prisoner of war camp and treated terribly because Stalin didn't sign the um, agreement.

  • It was from Switzerland, Geneva accords on the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Russians were treated so badly that the allies used to feed them.

  • You know, it's not like they were not hungry, and so you would end up in a POW camp there.

  • And then when you were done with that, when you went home to Russia for your hero's welcome, you were thrown into the gulag because Stalin believed that the mere fact that you've been exposed to the West now made you a class enemy.

  • So that was the sort of place the Soviet Union was now.

  • So shin it to spend a lot of time in the gulag.

  • And he observed that there were people there who he admired.

  • Now the camps were mostly run by the prisoners.

  • So because most prisoners, many prisoners, became trustees and then would move up the administrative ladder.

  • And that's pretty interesting in a really dark way, right, because it's like a hell that's run by the devils, and they could escape at any moment if they just realized that they were the ones running it.

  • But they didn't and so and so that made the situation even more brutal than it might have been because he noticed, too, that prisoners who became guards were often more brutal than the civilian guards, maybe to justify to themselves what they had done.

  • Who knows, Anyways, Solzhenitsyn at one point noticed that there were people in the camps whose comportment he truly admired, who seemed incorruptible, who wouldn't deceive or lie or take the easy way out, regardless of what it was that they were being threatened with.

  • And they wouldn't sign the confessions that everybody had designed guilty or not guilty.

  • They refused to play along, and some of them certainly died for that.

  • But many people died in the gulags, so that was hardly a normally.

  • But he said that many of them, many of the people who ran the camps, were terrified by these people and that also that many of them were religious believers, which was quite interesting.

  • And so what he learned was that even under terrible circumstances, there were ways of being more or less noble, and I suppose it would be under terrible circumstances where that sort of thing would be put to the test and it really made him think about his own role in his own demise.

  • You know, like he had Hitler to blame, right?

  • Because, well, there was the second World War, and he had Stalin to blame.

  • And, I mean, if you need people to blame for your misery, those air credible people to blame, you know, especially both of them at the same time.

  • And yet he started to consider, you know, what did I do in my own life that increased the probability that I ended up here.

  • You know, as a citizen, for example, who was responsible for the way that the country operated.

  • Because, you know, like in East Germany, 1/3 of the people in East Germany were informers.

  • And everybody in the Soviet system lied about everything to everyone all the time.

  • Which is, of course, what you wouldn't do if one in three people were informers.

  • Because that would be like two people in your family.

  • And so the whole system was set up and maintain because everyone lie.

  • You think?

  • Well, if I stopped lying, I'm done for.

  • It's like, Yeah, fair enough, man.

  • But if you keep lying and so does everyone else, you're also done for and so is everyone else.

  • So that doesn't seem to be much of an option.

  • And soldier, it's noted that there were people even under these extreme circumstances that would tell the truth.

  • And he decided that he would go over his life with a fine tooth comb, get nothing but time to think about every time he had acted in some manner in his life that transgressed against his own conscience right there where he did something he knew to be wrong and then to see if he could figure out how to set it right then Now obviously couldn't necessarily apologize to the people against who he had transgressed, right?

  • Sometimes you have to pay for something you did in a currency other than that which you took and his determination was too chronicle his experiences in his truthful a manner as possible, which was basically impossible.

  • It wasn't like he had paper and pencil and and time to write and privacy.

  • Had his notebooks ever being discovered, well, he would have been in serious trouble and they would have been destroyed.

  • In fact, when he got out, he had two copies of the full manuscript H out to a different type ist secretly.

  • The KGB got ahold of one, destroyed it, and the type ist committed suicide, you know.

  • So he basically memorized the book and its 2400 pages long of eight point type like it's It's It's one remarkable, um, work.

  • It's one long scream of truthful outrage, you know, and that came out of his decision to set himself right.

  • And then it was, as John said, it was smuggled into the West, where it had a walloping impact.

  • It's completely demolished, at least for a long while.

  • The moral credibility of communist completely from from like 1972 on.

  • If you knew about the existence of the Gulag Archipelago, you didn't get to say anything good about communism, and that lasted for a long time and even convinced French intellectuals that there was something wrong with communism.

  • And there's no doubt that it was one of the historical events that caused the Soviet Union to collapse.

  • And that was a good thing.

  • And, you know, when it collapsed relatively peacefully, all things considered, no thermal nuclear war Yugoslavia was no picnic and, you know, but for the demise of one of the most evil empires that ever existed.

  • It was pretty damn smooth.

  • And certainly the world's being in way better shape, especially Africa, since the Soviet Union has disappeared because the African economies air booming like mad now, and it's partly because they aren't doing things that insanely foolish under the guide guidance of, you know, Carmen, This direction and So soldier Nixon decided, under these conditions of absolute powerlessness, privation, right, to put himself together and to say what he had to say.

  • And that was enough to knock over the Soviet Union, wasn't it?

  • Wasn't all that knocked it over, but it wasn't nothing.

  • It's sold 35 million copies.

  • You know, it's arguably the most influential nonfiction book of the 20th century, and it's unbelievably powerful.

  • You think?

  • Well, what power do you have?

  • If you're willing to tell the truth, It's not easy to tell the truth.

  • It's it's complicated.

  • You have to take yourself into account right over the long run you have take your family into account.

  • You have take your society into account.

  • You have to think it through.

  • You have to think strategically, and then you have to find your words And that's hard to find your words because you tend to use other people's words or ideological words or words that mask or hide.

  • It's not easy to find your own words, but if you find your own words and they're truthful words, there isn't anything that can stop them.

  • You think we'll do?

  • You believe that?

  • Well, let's go back to the sovereign idea.

  • Are you sovereign citizens or not?

  • Well, if you are well, why is that when it's because you have a certain faculty, a certain power?

  • What do you have?

  • You have the power of your convictions in your truth and your ability to communicate, and that's what's supposed to set the state straight.

  • Okay, so you have that.

  • It's like, Well, then maybe it's true that you're pursuing in seeking if you have any sense and what's true?

  • Well, truth is the best reflection.

  • You can manage of reality in perfect because you're in perfect, but it's the best you've got.

  • It's like what?

  • What's gonna be better for you than to have reality on your side and what's going to stand in your way?

  • If you have reality on your side live, I don't think so.

  • That isn't how it works.

  • And I don't think anyone believes that.

  • Because the other thing I've noted and discussed with people frequently is If you have someone that you love a child, let's say and you're trying to raise a child in a decent manner, you don't tell them.

  • Look, kid, this is how the world runs.

  • Everything's corrupt beyond belief, including you and your parents and and society and a nature for that matter.

  • It's just just complete bloody hell everywhere.

  • And the only possible way that you can make it through life effectively is to learn to lie as brilliantly and undisguised glee as possible.

  • No one does that well, Why not?

  • If you believed in falsehood, if you believe that that was the way forward, then that would be the right thing to teach what you don't You teach your Children to tell the truth, even if it's painful.

  • And the reason for that is that you actually believe in the power of the truth.

  • I'll finish that with one thing.

  • There's very interesting scene in Revelations is a very strange document appended to the end of the primary book in the Western canon right, and it's a hallucinogenic nightmare revelation.

  • And in it Christ comes back to Earth.

  • And he's not the merciful savior of the Gospels.

  • He's the judge, and there's a reason for that.

  • A psychological reason.

  • And the reason is that if you have an ideal and whatever, Christ is metaphysically, you're psychologically he's an ideal if you have an ideal.

  • An ideal is a judge, because the ideal judges you right?

  • Okay, so he comes back as a judge, has a sword in his mouth, and he judges that saved in the dam.

  • And it's not pretty.

  • But here's something interesting.

  • It's so fascinating.

  • He saves his worst contempt and uses contemptuous language, says, I will spit you out of my mouth and Renee's.

  • I will vomit you out of my mouth.

  • Not if you were a bad person.

  • Not if you were a good person.

  • Not if you were a bad person.

  • But if you sat on the bloody fence right, if you were neither warm nor cold, you wanted to play it both ways.

  • Well, I'll lie when it's in my favor, and I'll tell the truth when it's expedient for me, it's like you're you're in the category of the dam, and I think that's absolutely right, because that's riel cowardice.

  • If you believed in falsehood, it's like Good.

  • Get on with it, man.

  • You could be a criminal and lay your life out and see how that works.

  • And if you believe in truth, well, then perhaps you put yourself on the line for the truth.

  • But you don't play the the two sides against the middle because there's nothing in that that isn't self serving at the cost of your own well being and at the cost of everyone else's.

  • So you have to think about You have to think about your relationship with the truth.

  • You know, there isn't anything more important than you can do than that because you're you're you're.

  • I've seen people in major corporations that were corrupt and failing.

  • Spend three years doing nothing but telling the truth, often at their own peril.

  • Fix the companies and it's such a relief to the people that they were talking to because they'd go talk to them.

  • The companies run by people who are not doing what they should be doing, and they're questioning.

  • It's like, Okay, well, what's really going on here?

  • Well, no one wants to talk because they're afraid.

  • But the person who's doing the questioning actually wants to know.

  • When people start opening up, he gathers.

  • Information is like, Oh, I see.

  • Here is the real problems here.

  • It's like we've got all sorts of problems here.

  • This is why the company's in trouble.

  • But it's okay if we know what the problems, Well, then we can fix them and we'll go ahead and fix them and then the company will work and everybody who's terrified and won't say anything.

  • It isn't really working hard anymore because they're so dispirited and believing that the projects are corrupt and that the leadership isn't doing what it's supposed to.

  • They start having a bit of hope.

  • It's like, really mean.

  • You're actually willing to admit that that is the problem and you're gonna give me a problem.

  • That is a real problem that I could actually work on and actually solve and benefit from that.

  • And the whole company switches around and that works.

  • It's not naive to believe that, and I'll say one more thing about trust that's very much worth knowing.

  • So this is what you learn if you're a clinician, most people who trust are naive and naive is not a virtue.

  • It's a fault.

  • It's partly a fault because if you're naive and you run into someone who's malevolent, including you, they might do you incalculable damage so that you will never recover.

  • So that's not a good thing.

  • You don't want to be naive.

  • If you're not naive.

  • That means you've been burned once or twice, or three or four times.

  • And you know, once you've bean burned in that manner, well, then it's hard to trust because you think, well, why would I trust you or me, for that matter, knowing full well that I could be betrayed?

  • And so then you're cynical, and you think that's an improvement over being naive.

  • You know, it's you're more mature, cynical than you are naive, even if it's premature and it's often premature.

  • And young people, it's like, OK, so how do you get out of that conundrum?

  • Well, this is a crucial thing to know.

  • You trust people because you're courageous.

  • That's why it's the same reason that you're grateful.

  • It's a mark of courage.

  • It's a mark of commitment.

  • It's like you and I we're gonna make an agreement and you're full of snakes, and so am I.

  • And there's lots of ways this could go sideways.

  • But we're going to put together an agreement.

  • We're gonna articulate it out.

  • We're going to try to find something that is of mutual benefit to both of us.

  • We're gonna put our hands out and shake, and we're going to try to stick to that.

  • And we're gonna risk trusting each other, right?

  • It's a risk.

  • And that's the risk upon which the state is based.

  • Really?

  • Like, I believe.

  • And I think the evidence for this is very strong.

  • By the way.

  • I don't think that there is any other natural resource than trust and for trust.

  • You need courage, not naive ity.

  • And you go to overcome your cynicism so that you trust.

  • And then you ask yourself, too.

  • If you don't trust your institutions, it's like, Hey, they're your institutions.

  • Why don't you go out and do something about them?

  • You think well, I can't.

  • It's like that's not true.

  • That is, that is absolutely not true that there's there's nothing vaguely accurate about that.

  • In a society like this, almost all of our democratic institutions are crying out for people to participate.

  • They can't find enough people to do it.

  • And if you participate and you and you do it diligently and you have your say and you're careful and trustworthy and you and you and you and you and you and you speak your mind, you could have way more effect than you think.

  • So if you're cynical about the institutions, it's like, look in the mirror, cause those institutions the corruption of those institutions is a direct reflection of your inability to get your act together.

  • And that's what it means to be a sovereign part of the Western community.

  • So it's not someone else.

  • So this issue of trust now, I would have thought that after what he'd been through, a new outlined it not alone by any means.

  • But some of these people who have warned us off need to be responsible and a hate history.

  • Sultan Nixon is a classic example.

  • What has happened?

  • You made the point that for a very long time we understood how dangerous that sort of drift towards totalitarianism, ese, it seems to have washed out of the system.

  • Now it seems as though we don't teach history.

  • We don't respect it.

  • We don't understand that.

  • It's contagious.

  • Valuable listens.

  • What worries me about that is the old saying.

  • If you don't understand history, you may very well repeat it.

  • Why do we walk away from people we can trust?

  • Warning us of the consequences.

  • What if there was an interesting reason for that?

  • That sort of brings the sultan it's and story into 2019 which is that he was truly oppressed.

  • This was a life of actual oppression.

  • Right now we have people that are walking around.

  • Everyone in this room has this in their pocket.

  • And if you have this in your pocket, turned off, I hope, Yeah, hopefully turned up.

  • But if you have this thing in your pocket and you think you're repressed, you're very confused.

  • We we live in a time with such absurd freedoms in the West that are so beyond imagination of what people could only dream of two generations ago, even one generation ago.

  • Especially with this, that people now have a perceived depression instead of a real depression.

  • So one of things that I find when I go to when I go to college campuses is that you know, these kids will protest and they'll scream and that you know, that everyone's all right and everyone's neo Nazi and the rest of this and I I always find All right, Well, how do you How do you break through to somebody like that?

  • How do you actually when they have, you know, you've talked about this when they have that look in their eye truly a possessed looking and they're you know, it's this This post modern monster has become sort of a secular religion on I think that's also one of the reasons why what Jordan's doing is resonating because they've they removed religion from the equation, and now they have no meaning.

  • And they put it all into this really competing set of ideas.

  • Uh, what were we called the Oppression Olympics, where they're constantly competing for oppression because they believe that victimhood is virtue.

  • And victimhood, of course, is not virtuous.

  • Virtuous is getting your life in order and going out and doing something, so I'm always looking for a little trick.

  • Thio get through to these kids and it's really hard because when they have that sort of glossed over zombie.

  • Look, it's it's tough, and I found one trick that actually kind of works if you can get it to them in the most simple, personal way.

  • And this particularly works in the United States, and I've no doubt that it would work here in Australia as well.

  • I'll say to them, Anyone in this room does anyone in this room have it worse than their grand parents?

  • I've done this 100 times.

  • Probably nobody has ever raised their hand.

  • Nobody ever.

  • If you live in the United States, you basically short.

  • I mean, the only outsider case would be if your grandparents were oil barons or something like that.

  • And then they lost all the money.

  • In which case, in which case, the leftist would actually love that, too, because it would show that well, it would show that that accumulated wealth doesn't stay beyond generations.

  • So they're all about that, right?

  • So But if you could do something like that, I mean, if you say I mean everyone in this room could do it, I can everyone picture of their grand parents.

  • Do you have a better or worse?

  • I mean, does anyone in your have it worse than their grand parents.

  • And that shows you that it's a perceived depression, not a real oppression, that that the thing that they're fighting, this patriarchal, post modern capitalistic thing that they're fighting, then they can't define it.

  • So it's hard to define it for them that it actually has bent toward justice, always, always and when when you get it, if you can plant that seed in them, I think it's a little bit of something, but it's very hard to break them out of that.

  • But I think the key here is understand that it's a perceived depression.

  • If you live in a free society in the West in 2019 you're not oppressed you.

  • Maybe you maybe don't happen as well as your neighbor does.

  • And maybe you came from or and they came from less.

  • Or maybe you're sick and they're not or a series of other things.

  • Um, but you've got a chance, and that's all you're supposed to have in life.

  • And I think getting that through to them, as opposed to Oh, the system is horrible and I have to now destroy the system as if they could magically re constitute a system that really would just be in effect, throwing away thousands of years of human history that they're so wise.

  • They're so wise at 24 years old, is there shouting down speakers that they could?

  • They could build up what nobody before them could, and that's the danger there.

  • So I think, getting them tow, think about their own lives.

  • Where they come from, I think, is a pretty effective way of getting through to people.

  • Well, we could also say, like, Look, there's a claim that the West is an oppressive patriarchy and so that's actually true.

  • The problem with the claim is that it's not just an oppressive patriarchy.

  • And there's a big difference between something being completely something and something being partly something because one of the things you might point out is that you can look at human history anywhere, and what you see is a complete bloody nightmare, right?

  • It's death and struggle and privation and war and horror everywhere, with some progress.

  • You know, some ability of us to pull ourselves out of the mire, you know, and the West is the same is there's plenty of catastrophe in our past of all sorts, and I think it's it's necessary to know that.

  • But then it's necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff.

  • You know, one of the things I see with readers who are unsophisticated and intellectually arrogant is they'll read someone great.

  • Maybe they'll read Nietzsche, for example, and they'll find the odd thing that Nietzsche said, that grates against their current moral sensibilities.

  • Whether they do that in context or out.

  • And then they'll throw away the whole book.

  • It's like you don't throw away the whole book.

  • It was Nietzsche.

  • You don't throw away the book.

  • He's like one in a 1,000,000,000.

  • You read it carefully and you think, Well, okay, no to that.

  • But yes to this.

  • And you do the same thing with dossier of ski, and you do the same thing with tool story.

  • You do the same thing with the great writers of the past that have been passed down to us.

  • You read intelligently.

  • You separate the wheat from the chaffing right, and you gain wisdom that way.

  • Well, you do the same.

  • When you look at your own history.

  • It's like, well, of course, it's a bloody nightmare What do you expect?

  • It's like, What's your point?

  • What?

  • We're gonna burn it down, and then we're gonna have something better as a consequence.

  • Well, not so easily.

  • Not so quickly.

  • Maybe we read our history carefully, we think.

  • Okay, Well, what did we get, right?

  • Well, what do we get, right?

  • Well, the sovereignty of the individual.

  • That's pretty good.

  • The fact that you have right to property, that's pretty good.

  • You could argue about the limits on that.

  • But you know, you don't want someone just taking your purse.

  • You know, it's it's helpful that there are things that you can earn an own.

  • You know, the dignity of the individual.

  • That's another one.

  • The innocents before the law.

  • God, that's that's a miracle that we ever came up with That idea.

  • I can't believe that that idea exists, because in most cultures it's like, well, you might be guilty.

  • Okay, you're dead because, well, that's easier.

  • You might be guilty.

  • You know, why go through all the trouble?

  • There's plenty of people where you came from.

  • It's like the trouble of presuming your innocence.

  • It's even innocent.

  • It's even hard for you to do that for yourself and and and the idea that each person has an intrinsic worth, regardless off there while externalities.

  • Let's say that's another idea.

  • That's a complete miracle.

  • It's like what we're doing, what we're gonna do.

  • We're gonna throw all that away with the statement that we live in an oppressive patriarchy, and then we're gonna be left with nothing.

  • And what what good is that?

  • How about we look at our history and we take responsibility for it?

  • We think.

  • Okay, well, here's some things that need to be fixed.

  • There's plenty of them, right?

  • There's plenty of them for each of us to fix it.

  • We go fix them, and maybe then we can atone for the bloodiness of our history and for our so called unearned privilege, you know, some of which all of us have, and that would be good.

  • That would be part of the adventure of your life, too.

  • And that's that's a far more sensible and wise approach to the diagnosis of what's wrong with the West then, well, it's an oppressive patriarchy, and it should be overthrown or whatever that you know, current, uh, low resolution and resentful ideology happens to be and there's something to be said for a bit of humility as well.

  • It's like, really, you really think that you're capable of making large scale social transformations and getting it right?

  • Do you?

  • You really think that you're 25 you're 30 or 40?

  • I don't care.

  • You know, what makes you think you're smart enough to pull off something like that?

  • It's very, very difficult.

  • Very, very, very difficult to take a system that works not too badly, and to do anything to it that doesn't make it worse, much less to radically reconstituted and make it better.

  • That's really hard.

  • So you know, if you're upset about your culture, well, maybe you could think of some small ways that our local that you could go out and improve it.

  • I think you should start with yourself because, well, then you're only harming yourself, and you know what a bad person to practice on and then you could extend that to your fat Well, at least you suffer for the consequences of your own experiments that way, rather than having someone else do it, and then maybe you can work on bringing a little more harmony into your family.

  • And maybe you can get a job and see if you're any good at that.

  • And then if you manage those three things half ways, respectably, well, then you could dare to put a toe hold out into the broader community and think, maybe I have an idea here that we could tentatively attempt That might make some small things slightly better that we could measure carefully and assess.

  • And that would be your contribution.

  • And and maybe you get real good at that, you know?

  • So by the time you're 50 or 60 and you have a soul of life behind you, you're actually capable of generating large scale improvements carefully.

  • Um, you know, as you were saying that I was thinking I mean, this is exactly what Alexandria Picazio Cortez is.

  • I mean, this is a failed this a bartender with a 4 30 credit score, which is pretty terrible, but all she's ever done in her life has been a bartender.

  • Now that's fine.

  • I've been a bartender at times, but the her only accomplishment is becoming a congresswoman with, I think, around 15,000 votes by saying the exact thing that the that the media wants you to say all the time, right?

  • The idea that she could write this green new deal and that somehow she is the one that can, Of course, she didn't really write it, you know, we're not.

  • We don't know who really wrote it, but the idea that she could present this as if she has the ideas that could rejigger the entire United States economy and how we deal with energy and transportation and everything, and we're not gonna have planes, and we're gonna pay people unwilling to work.

  • Although then she deleted that part and put that, you know, it's like it's the lack of humility there that's actually staggering that she thinks no one before her might have tried to move some of these things on the margins a little bit, But she but the crazy or the or that moving things on the margins isn't enough.

  • Well, they don't believe it's enough, But the really crazy part of this is that pretty much I think the five or six Democratic candidates that we have now have all basically signed on board this thing, this thing, which is a I think you could probably argue that it's unconstitutional on on the grounds of It's just taking more for the government.

  • But it defies everything we know from history about how economics really well, she's admitted.

  • You can't know all of this, she says.

  • Well, tax the billionaires.

  • And then she also tell you tells you that the billionaire's air, the blight on society So it's like, Well, which one

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome John Anderson.

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與約翰-安德森的對話。喬丹-彼得森和戴夫-魯賓 (Conversations with John Anderson: Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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