A Deliberation on Liberalism

Transcript · May contain transcription errors · en

Oh, the libertarian pipeline always ends in neo-reaction. Once you grasp that the people are never sovereign and that there is always an elite, then there has to become a certain set of choices that you make if you want to maximize liberty. And none of them involve democratic process. Thank you everyone for tuning in to I think this is our fifth Free State Party live event. I'm here with the fantastic Auron MacIntyre. We are going to be doing a deliberation on liberalism. The way that these work is we're gonna run through a set of propositions around 10. It can vary depending on time. We'll talk about them. It's really not a series meant for the internet, despite being on the internet, because we're gonna be nice to one another. And on the internet, everyone likes you to fight. Uh, we will, of course, disagree, uh, but this is a good faith conversation.

It's it's the intent is to have the kinds of conversations that I think I think we need to have that we've gotten away from uh because the internet incentivizes fighting. So we're gonna be talking about liberalism tonight. Before we get into the first proposition, we're gonna define things a little bit because a YouTube commenter said we should do that, and I read the comments. Uh so let's let's define a little bit before we get into all these propositions on liberalism. And we have uh a live studio audience. The audience answered all these questions as well as people online answered them, and so we have some sort of data around where people stand, but let's let's define things a little bit. You know, what is liberalism? You you've written a book on it, I believe. Uh, you know, obviously, this is something with a lot of definitions for the modern, you know, liberal, it's about trans and kids and opening the borders.

This has nothing to do with John Locke, obviously. These are kind of radically different things. Uh, I think I don't have to explain to people in this room that classical liberalism is something very distinct, and I think most classical liberals understand themselves as creatures of the enlightenment. Uh, this idea that kind of previous systems that were tied to maybe divine right or other uh constructions of authority uh were kind of passing away. And so I think for a lot of people, liberalism is uh kind of grounding itself in this idea of natural rights, uh, the ability of people to maximize things like property rights and these type of things. Uh uh in many cases, liberalism is as much an economic invention as it is a uh political invention, and you know, kind of intended to put a lot of these existential questions about uh higher things, uh, you know, what is the good, who is God, who do we serve, who are we as people.

Uh, that tends to be kind of moved into the broom closet so that we can have uh this wider ability to uh cooperate on economic concerns and political concerns. Uh I'm sure we could go, you know, you literally can write a book about it, as you say. Uh, but uh that that would kind of be my uh back of the book definition. Yeah, that's that's fantastic. Uh, I don't I don't think I have too much to add, so let's get in to our first proposition. Again, being uh anti-drama, I've actually chose to start with what I think was uh the most universally agreed. Now, you know, the funny thing is I don't know that liberals would agree with this proposition. So maybe it shows uh where our audience is at here in the Free State Party. But our first proposition was every state imposes somebody's values. The only question is whose.

Uh, you know, because there is this idea that we can have a state, we can have a government, and and I think I you know the even the founders of America, I think to some degree, uh attempted to create, you know, a nation. We talked about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, this idea that uh you know we were gonna have a government that wasn't gonna take sides, and here we are 200, the 250th anniversary, and 97% of our audience uh says you can't do that. Uh you can't have a government that doesn't take sides. And I you, of course, I think you agreed with this proposition. I agreed with this proposition. So tell me in your words, you know, why it why is it not uh possible to have well I I think this is probably where Carl Schmidt's uh you know incisive criticism of liberalism is so powerful.

He talks about the idea that there can be no neutral institutions, that we always have some kind of agenda, we always have some kind of priority baked into any action, whether it's actions of the state, business, church, whatever it is, there's always a belief system, there's always a friend, there's always an enemy, there's always someone's side that we're taking. And so one of the critical failures of liberalism, I think, which is ironic that both of us agree on this, even though I think you probably identify yourself as more liberal than me, uh, that ultimately one of the critical failures of liberalism is this idea that we can set up a neutral state, that we can have these institutions that don't take any given side. And I think it's important to recognize that that sounds good until you contextualize it.

So, for instance, John Locke didn't believe atheists should be able to run for office because they were untrustworthy. And he's right, right? Like, obviously. Um, and and so there's one of those scenarios where even the father of liberalism would disagree with pretty much every liberal today on this idea of what liberalism is. So we have to remember that even when we're talking about the American founders, the context of everyone should be neutral, what they meant is the state should be neutral when among Protestant Christians. Like that's that's it. Like they they didn't even let Catholics run for office in most of the states until the 1840s. So their conception of this kind of neutrality was very much bound in their time and place. They didn't really imagine a liberty that included Hindus building, you know, statues to demons in Texas.

It just did not make sense to them. So I think that when we talk about liberalism, I don't want to throw the founders under the bus on this. Because I think if we contextualize their liberalism properly properly, we would find those natural boundaries that I think existed among Englishmen at that time that today we completely throw it by the wayside because we want to universalize that liberalism instead of having it, you know, bound in a specific specific position or a specific tradition, a specific people, a specific place and time. Yeah, I uh I we I don't think we're gonna have too much to uh disagree on here. It is funny to go back and you'll read the writings of the founders and they sound like reactionaries in some capacities, you know, under today's standards. I do, you know, of course, though, you know, you have people like Curtis Yarvan, you know, who who who does argue that the um you know the founders were um uh foolish uh liberals who had uh who had bad ideas uh you know uh about human nature, you know, all the way back uh in the 18th uh century.

And of course, this is uh a controversial um idea. And I mean, I I don't want to spend too much time on this because I do think the types of people who are listening that to the show are kind of already there. It's an interesting phenomenon though, because I think a lot of the people who are listening to this who are interested in these kinds of conversations, they are kind of in a way constitutionally liberal in the sense that they are open-minded, they want to consider ideas, they like directionally some of this stuff, but like good liberals, uh, and I by the way, I'm gonna play the liberal in this conversation, which is funny because in most conversations I'm arguing with liberals and being like the post-liberal or the reactionary, uh, but uh I'm gonna play the opposite role uh here tonight.

Uh, you know, uh, but it's like the types of people who have actually been the quickest to recognize some of these failures of American ideals, some of the excesses of liberalism are in my view kind of constitutionally liberal in the sense that they are open-minded, they want to consider ideas, they want to be um, you know, they're they're not, they didn't get to criticizing liberalism by being uh, you know, sort of naturally uh, you know, hidebound or or naturally reactionary, they became that way through their own open mindedness. Uh and I I you know these are some of the people who I actually find the most interesting, and I don't mean to put you in that category, you can put yourself in that category if you think you belong there. I'm certainly in that category where you know, I liked the idea of the state being neutral, and then I learned it wasn't possible.

And now I'm like, well, where do I go from here? Uh and you know, that's that's certainly part of what we're what we're figuring out in New Hampshire. Um, do you have anything else that you want to add on this one or should we go to the next one? Uh I would just say that I I think many people find themselves in that position. You know, I think one of the most uh uh I think I've said this to you before, one of the most Anglo traits in the world is you know, is feeling like, oh, I wish we could construct this entire uh uh uh neutral state uh in con in in contract law, and then finding out that it actually just doesn't work outside of that community. Right. And so that that's the the difficulty. You know, I I think of someone like Plato Socrates, and Plato Socrates obviously was very interested in uh interrogating the good, challenging things, having open discussion.

But at the end of the day, he still had a very hard view of the good, right? That there was still a very real sense in which he existed a moral framework. So the discussion was allowed, but the disc but the the way we should live was final. You know, the the it even for him, the you know, the the liberty that he wanted to experience was one that was contextualized with the good for his community and his people. And so I think that's really critical. It's not the it's not that we can never have a discussion or a debate. Uh that you know, if we want to assign that the quality of liberalism, then fine. Uh, but I think pretty very many pre-liberal people had that inclination. Uh so I I think it might be uh a very modern imposition to say that that trait in and of itself is inherently liberal. Uh if you want to, you know, uh uh assign that that's fine, but I don't think ultimately that that could lead us to a certain level of uh confusion we're trying to use terms.

So we're gonna talk about since we're talking about history, we're gonna move on to liberty depends on preconditions that liberty cannot create. You know, how did we uh you know, how did we get here? I suppose it's questionable whether we have liberty today, although I think even by history standards, we have more liberty uh, you know, today uh than we have for much of human history. I I believe you agreed with this one. Yes, yes. Okay. Uh so tell me about your tell me about your thoughts on this proposition. Uh well, I I agree with Machiavelli on this. A lot of people think of Machiavelli because of the prince as a monarchist, but that's not actually the case. Uh Machiavelli was actually a fan of uh republicanism, which you'll find if you read his discourses on Livy, uh, which is a less read work of his.

Uh, but his point was ultimately that uh in order to have liberty, you need a virtuous people, and this is true all the way back to someone like Aristotle, they'd agree on this, or you can move all the way up to the American founding fathers and find Gil Adams talking about how we need a virtuous people uh who believe in God, follow the Ten Commandments. That's the only way that you can live under the American Constitution. And so liberty, I think is something that proceeds from that virtuous population who's able to care for themselves, not because caring for yourself is in and of itself the good, but because it's a product of being good, of being virtuous, of doing that which needs to be done, filling the roles in your community. If there's one criticism I usually have about kind of ideological libertarianism, it tends to be focused on the system and less on the behavior of the people, less on building those communities that allow for freedom, allow for liberty, and understanding it more as of a function of the contract rather than a function of the people and the way they behave.

And so Machiavelli said that if you don't have that virtuous people, they'll have to be ruled by a king, they'll have to be ruled by someone who can actually force them into that behavior. And so if you want to maintain a republic, if you want to pretend uh maintain a self-ruled people, the only way to do that is that they have mastered themselves. It's not about doing whatever you want, it's about do it pursuing the good in your community, and once everyone is doing that implicitly, you don't need a top-down sovereign in order to dictate that. That's what generates liberty. Yeah, I've I've spent an incredible amount of time talking to libertarians, and I love them, and I'm going to defend them, of course, here in this conversation. But one of the certainly problems that I you know encounter is uh it's sort of like the libertarian breakfast question.

You know, what would you do if everyone was not a libertarian? Right. But I am a libertarian. Uh, you know, and it and and you know, because I do think the people inclined to libertarianism would thrive with more liberty for the most part. Some of them, maybe not. Some of them would have heroin. Well, but certainly the the people in this room. Uh, you know, uh, and and like I am, of course, part of the reason uh I I will admit I'm uh I I'm I'm completely selfish here. That like part of the reason that I want liberty is I'm I'm frustrated by the degree to which you know uh laws and so on constrain my ability to build things and and make things and and do what I think is is good, and and these laws are you know ostensibly to you know protect other people, uh but my feeling is that you know they're in the way, and they're uh and uh and so you have this tricky problem where um we are in a situation where we've you know we've extended the vote to everyone, uh we have mass democracy, uh, you know, and sort of the system is fully legible, it's fully exploitable, and now we started with liberty, we've created this system that doesn't seem to be capable of maintaining it.

And I think a lot of the people here, you know, we want to get back to that. Well, how do we get liberty again? How do we get back to those, you know, uh preconditions? And it doesn't as much as I want liberty, as much as I want a pretty libertarian or even a radically libertarian society, it's not clear in our sort of current climate how you know how we could even produce that, because uh it's it's largely citizens of America, uh, well, uh residents of America. People subjects there too of the jurisdiction of you know uh and because libertarians often like to focus their eye on the state, but it's like, well, no, this is the we we had liberty, we we and we created these situations, and now we don't have it anymore. Uh and so that that's sort of why this this proposition is is true to me. One of the things I think would be very helpful for people to consult is really just history.

Uh, we look at Polybius' cycle of regimes, right? You start as a kingdom, uh, you move to a republic, uh, but then once liberty has been taken, uh, you tend to see the rise of a strong man again, right? The we cycle through these different stages. Uh the democracy leads us back into uh a sovereign who has to rediscipline the people. We can look at something like Rome. It begins as a kingdom, it moves into republic phase, but once republican virtue has fallen and you expand too far into empire, which we'll probably get to a little more, uh you would eventually import too many foreigners, you try to spread yourself too thin, and you eventually have to collapse back into a strong man in order to keep uh you know uh the to keep order there. And so I don't think um I think again one of the problems that uh we we tend to do when we live in theory land, even though I'm referencing a bunch of philosophy here.

I think one of the problems when we completely disconnect theory from history is we don't pay attention to these preconditions. And so if you don't notice that the form and uh is not matching the ideology, uh then you can sit there and say, oh, well, if I just properly align the laws, I'll create these issues. And it's like, no, actually, you really have to pay attention to what's happening to the people, what's happening to the beliefs of the people, the quality of the people, the way they live their lives. If you don't have that piece down, then all the contracts in the world are not going to produce the liberty that you're seeking. Okay, we're gonna pivot. Uh we've been agreeing too much. So I think it's time that we disagree. Fair, fair. Uh this is natural rights are a fiction. And I disagreed with this.

The audience disagreed with this. And so you're out there on your own. Fair enough. Uh, yeah, I think this is one of those scenarios where you know, not to get pedantic, but we have to uh talk about what we mean by natural rights. Uh, but ultimately I think that traditional societies tend to be duty-based. They tend to understood that first and foremost it's about this roles that we're fulfilling in the society and what we're creating. If you go back and read something like Fastel de Collange's uh uh The Ancient City, one of the fascinating things about that book that he talks about is the emergence of property rights in Indo-European cultures. And what he says is that the reason that you got property rights was not that there was some idea that you had the right to economically exchange your land.

In fact, it was exactly the opposite. The reason that property rights emerged was that the ancient burial rights were based on this ancestor worship before the Romans adopted the pantheon. And the idea of ancestor worship was you had this plot of land, and when your parents died, you buried them there, and you had to bring them food and water and other sacrifices. And if you didn't, they would just like waste away in the afterlife in misery. And so the reason you had property rights is you needed to be able to go back to that plot of land, because if you didn't go to that specific plot of land and make that specific sacrifice, your family would waste away in the afterlife, and that was your duty. And so the right of property emerged from the duty of religious worship and flew uh piety. And so if you do not have that precondition of duty, then the rights don't emerge.

So it's not that I don't think rights exist, but the idea that there's a universal right, that there's a universal human right, is a historical. Those rights are grounded in specific specific societies and traditions. That's where they emerge from. And when we remove them from that binding, we end up in, I think the universal, you know, liberalism we find ourselves in today, which is so dangerous. So I think rights exist, but they exist in a very specific bounded context. And I think they tend to emerge from duties more than some kind of abstract imposition, you know, some metaphysical existence of the right by itself that applies to every human everywhere. So I can understand that perspective. You know, I was very torn on this answer myself, actually. And part of why I said that I ultimately, you know, disagree with this, it's it's kind of maybe a weak answer, but maybe it's also the strongest answer, which is I just feel it in my gut that it's true.

Uh, you know, and came to you in a dream. It came to me in a dream. Yeah. Well, it's like uh I I I don't remember. We had one of our our our previous speakers, it was probably Travis Corcoran gave the quote, which I'd heard before, you know, that that you know all models are wrong, but some are useful. That's right. And I, you know, that's sort of how I I feel about this one. You know, are natural rights real? You know, I I can kind of see both sides of that one, but I sure want to believe that they are. You know, like I feel better when they are. Uh, you know, I seem to, you know, this idea that, you know, I that because you know, I I and we'll and we'll talk about your you know, free speech and voluntary exchange and some of these things that people you know regard as natural rights. And and I agree that, you know, what's a right can get fuzzy.

To me, a right is like something like a a universal, universalizable moral ought, you know. Um, and so therefore, uh, you know, um uh it's uh well therefore you have to return the shopping cart. You know, it's just it's you're not you have a natural right to the only problem is that Kant is wrong. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I this this this does rapidly sort of get like metaphysical, uh, you know, what does it mean for for something to be real? But to me, uh stripping away the idea of natural rights and encouraging people to believe that they're fictional fiction, uh even as someone who has atheistic tendencies, it feels a little bit like encouraging atheism where it's like, well, this isn't gonna make anything better. And now you can't run for office. John Locke was very clear. Oh, I've never, I'm already I'm already bugged for it.

Especially this channel. You yell at too many FBI agents online. That's right. I just influenced the elected officials through podcasts. Uh, which is why they're all in the audience. Uh so uh yeah, I you know, I just I think I think society is better off. And maybe I'm making a consequentialist argument here when when this is a uh we're asking about realism, but like I do, I just think we're better off. And yeah, we do say that the they are real, you know. Uh and and can I prove that they're real? No. But but when I but they are, you know, we're just like again, I'm not I'm not making probably the best like epistemological argument here, but like I do think this is kind of the best argument. It's like, yeah, they're real. Uh prove it. No, they just are. So again, so the funny thing is I agree with you as long as we are contextualizing it in our society, right?

When when when Thomas Jefferson says all men are created equal and endowed with these rights, and like this is self-evident, is it self-evident to like random guys hiding in caves in Afghanistan? Yeah, no, right? It's it's it's it's self-evident to people of a particular uh tradition. So it is in no way surprising to me that you just feel that it's because those are the rights of an Englishman. When we're talking about is the rights of an Englishman, the rights that were in the English uh Bill of Civil Rights. That's what the American founders were fighting for. They were not fighting for some abstract, universal uh French version of rights. They were fighting for a very specific right they felt they were due because of their heritage, their lineage, their beliefs, right? And so I I'm not I'm not saying there are no rights.

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm simply saying that those are historically contingent, they are bound in a tradition and a people and a way of life. And so I would never I I agree with you 100%. It's better if we as Americans walk around and say we have a right to the Second Amendment. We just do. And you know why the Second Amendment is the is probably the most defended right in America? Because it's the one we actually practice. It's the one we actually insist upon, no matter what people say or do. It doesn't matter what laws get written, we have a second amendment right and we believe that deep in our souls. That's what makes it a right. It's not it's not some transcendent right that's gifted to people in China. Good luck, right? It's a right here in America because we are Americans.

It's our right, it's not a universal human right. It's Americans' rights. And they're real, but they're real in the American context and the American tradition. Yeah, I I uh I'm I'm gonna take uh you know moderator privilege here and get the last word because I'm about to say uh but it does feel like you know and part of the reason I I I I want to believe the real is well, if they're not real, where do they come from? Because the the other alternative starts to, you know, rights come from the government, and I think that's also you know the idea that my the I only have a right to bear arms because of the American government or because of the Constitution, uh you know, I think that's like a questionable it it's not clear where we get to you know through that kind of lens and that we get to you know that we get to a better place.

You want to do free speech or the constitution next? Uh dealer's choice. Dealer, all right. All right. Uh well, since I just mentioned the Constitution, we'll do this one. This was uh this was one of our closest to 5050 uh propositions. Uh the constitution has failed, and energy spent trying to restore it is fruitless. Although once again we agreed with each other, uh, but the audience was very close to 5050. Uh so this one's a little difficult because I the the framing was hard for me to exactly nail down, but you have to keep it. Telling me the propositions are difficult is a compliment, by the way. So you're not absolutely so the the answer is I think the Constitution is valuable. I think the Constitution is absolutely critical to our way of life. However, I think that the Constitution, as I argue in my book, The Total State, uh, is an emanation of the way of being of Americans.

It is not the Constitution that made Americans, it is Americans that made the Constitution. And so when we say the Constitution failed, what we really mean is Americans failed to maintain the spirit of the Constitution. And without that spirit, the words on the paper mean nothing. The social contract is a lie. There is no social contract. There are no objective ways to enforce that contract. There's only the continued practice of the people and their tradition. And so if we as a people continued the constitutional action, if we governed ourselves in that way, which by the way is impossible after the 14th Amendment, if we want to get into that. But we have slowly but surely amended our Constitution away that basically strips away all of the virtue and individuality that was baked in the Constitution in the first place.

And so did the Constitution fail us? Did we fail the Constitution? I think the easier way to understand this is that the Constitution is always and only a reflection of the people who live in the nation. And seeing as we have fundamentally changed our nature as people and imported a bunch of people who don't give one crap about our constitution or our traditions or our beliefs, we have then thereby changed the nature of the Constitution, whether we wrote down those changes or not. In some cases we did, but you know, 14th Amendment is a massive change, but look at the Civil Rights Act, right? That completely rewrites the American experience, the idea of free association, rights that were inherent to Americans, and we didn't write a single constitutional amendment to change that. And yet the legislation completely rewrote our constitutional order.

So I think that's the issue. Okay. Well, I did agree. I'm I've been moved by the spirit of the Constitution to now disagree with you. Fair. Uh also it's more entertaining that way. Uh, you know, so yeah, I I my you know, my my agree answer would be w where we are today, the Constitution got us here uh to a decent degree, and so there's not this clear ability to, you know, reset it, and I think we have to learn from that failure, and I would agree with your analysis there where uh you can't and and and this is often a tricky one to get the libertarians to understand there's there's just no set of words that you can write down that will bind the future, they'll be interpreted the same way by people different than you, and so you ha it you you can write these things down, you can create a constitution.

If that constitution isn't being read by people with a similar spirit to yours, you're just not gonna get the same outcomes. At the same time, there are aspects of the Constitution, there are propositions in the Constitution and extending into the Bill of Rights and associated things, where you know Americans are drilled to believe these things, and it does seem to work better than not, you know, like if if if if the second amendment was not a part of the Bill of Rights, you know, would we have the rights, you know, to bear arms that we do today? You know, if the f and we have a free speech topic that, you know, free speech was not the first amendment, you know, would that be would Americans believe in it to the same degree? Um, you know, Michael Humer, uh, who's uh a philosopher I like, uh, you know, has also made the point that uh one way the Constitution has clearly worked is it's worked procedurally.

You know, we uh we elect a president every four years, and that transfer of power is remarkably clean by historical standards. You know, if you went back in time two thousand years and you're like, well, uh whoever controls the military is just gonna listen to the next guy who's in charge. Uh and you're just gonna do whatever he says, that'd be a preposterous idea, right? You know, and and nonetheless, like that actually works. It's kind of crazy to me that this still works and and maybe it won't work. Maybe this will be maybe it's like not gonna work for much longer. But it is like it's kind of crazy, right? Like like we we we ha America has a remarkably powerful military and they respect and follow you know whoever is elected. I mean I think that's an interesting thing to assert from New Hampshire, but now it's out you know uh the people of Arkansas learned something very different about the American military.

Well sure sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. And of course we've seen the military subverting Trump uh in various ways and other things. So I I'm not gonna say it's like a flawless system. But it it really does seem like like the idea that 'cause well could sort of the other side of this argument is, oh well it's just about the people. And if we just had the right people, it wouldn't we would we don't need the words I I don't think that's true. I think you need both. I think you need both. I think I think you need the words and the people. And so the Constitution has failed insofar as we've drifted from the types of people who are doing the interpreting, but I think that uh you know if we didn't have those words at all, I I you know it's not clear I I think we'd probably be worse off, you know.

I mean there's a case to be made for that. Uh you know there's the the battle between written and unwritten constitutions is an interesting one. I think ultimately Joseph DeMestra was right that no no human has ever written a constitution, that ultimately constitutions are written onto man's heart by the divine, and that's why they end up uh, you know, c kind of being constructed in the way that they are. Uh the people have to live that constitution first, and then it gets codified into uh something written. If that's good, and it probably is in certain, you know, scenarios, then fantastic. Uh, you know, the the anti-federalists uh were obviously fighting for a bill of rights. The Federalists said if you write down a bill of rights, people think it's limited only to those rights, and so therefore, uh, you know, going ahead and codifying those rights is a mistake.

We can quibble over that. I mean, ultimately I think the most interesting way to insta to interrogate this is to just to look at the most recent Supreme Court ruling when it comes to birthright citizenship. We just had a conservative Supreme Court full of originalists say that the 14th Amendment actually applies to every Chinese birth farm uh, you know, i in the United States. So is that the originalist understanding of the 14th Amendment? I mean, I can't imagine a world in which it is, but that's what we're being told. And d how did the words on paper, you know, defend us against that? Not at all. But again, the 14th Amendment is deeply flawed in many areas. I've already made that case. Uh so I won't sit on that hobby horse too long. Uh, but all that to say, I I don't think there's anything wrong with writing things down in a constitution, ultimately.

I think it serves some level of function. I think we should be loyal to those beliefs. I just think believing that that is sufficient, that pointing to the constitution and saying it's written down over here, uh, thinking that that ultimately solves your problem is obviously proving itself to be uh, you know, uh not correct at all. Well, yeah, I completely agree with that. Let's talk about the First Amendment a little bit. So, and you know, I I write these propositions and I like to uh pride myself in dividing people. It's like a talent. And uh I did a bad job here. Uh, you know, people uh I only had a couple of really divisive propositions that I uh that I came up with. And so here we have another one where uh although you're gonna take the unpopular position, which is good. Which is good.

Uh but the proposition here is free speech is worth upholding even for our enemies. And I I did agree with that. You disagreed. So let's hear it. So obviously there's another one that requires a good amount of context, right? Uh I think that freedom of speech is one of those things that exists inside of morally uh you know, kind of homogenous polities. Uh so when you have uh a very small amount of space between you and the guy next to you, disagreeing is not really a life or death issue, right? Uh if one guy says, hey, we should have 5% taxes, and when the guy says we should have 7% taxes, we probably don't have to shoot it out. Though maybe, you know, the American Revolution was started on something similar. Uh but that said, I I think that when we have these issues that ultimately we're relatively close on, freedom of speech makes perfect sense.

Uh once we get to the point where the question is uh should we mutilate children and should you go to jail if you refuse to mutilate a child, uh then the question of free speech gets pretty far away, right? Now all of a sudden the state's uh actions are no longer one of small differences, they're one of existential differences. They're one that will more or less decide who lives or who dies, who's allowed to live as they would, as they would naturally, and those who will be oppressed uh directly. And in those moments, obviously there's some level of uh speech that becomes so volatile that it creates a rift in society that will tear it apart. Uh that said, I'm generally, as we kind of discussed previously, inclined towards liberal debate. Inclined, you know, even if I don't think that's the best word for it, I mean uh uh in that exchange.

You you actually had a a reasonable defense of free speech in your book, I believe. Uh around the that free speech was necessary. Uh uh, I think it was around the ability to criticize corporations. Uh you wrote the book, so you shouldn't immediately know the references. Okay. Um, well, so I did uh I did agree with this one. I think at least in terms of, and we also may not want to live in the same kind of society. This is a this is also an important difference. You know, I think something that uh one of the reasons I think you know we have some alignment is I think we very much recognize the enemy. We very much recognize the problem. And I think we see that nearly universally agreed. What we want on what we might want on the other side, you know, might not be the same thing, which is of course perfectly fine.

It's a large planet. Uh, you know, but for me, I think free speech, free speech to me is is is one of my you know most deeply held beliefs. It was a big part of my previous work attempting to allow very unpopular speech to continue to be distributed. You know, it once you adopt you look, again, uh, you know, my my my company was was keeping a bunch of unpopular speech about you know COVID online, uh, you know, and so those those people were enemies. You know, the people who you know wanted to fight against the vaccine mandates or the people who uh you know uh thought that you ought to be able uh you know uh to to go outside regardless of the uh of a potential pandemic. You know, those those people were enemies of the people who were elected. And so if you don't have a principle where people can continue to speak in as many situations as possible I you know I I think it's tough because I think I think I you know power is real power will cement itself power will critique dissent power will attempt to quash descent maybe is a better way of putting it and so if you don't have a principle by which people can say unpopular things and so on I you know I I do think that trends towards you know something relatively dystopian the one thing that I would say here is I I I would at the same time agree that you know people could say words I'd be like well I don't want you in my neighborhood right I like I do I you know I do I do agree with this and I think it does also get fuzzy you know at what point um speech becomes a threat or becomes a promise you know I'm I'm very libertarian and so I definitely get the idea of you know hey if someone's saying like hey we want to seize all these people's property is that speech or is that a threat you know I think that can get fuzzy from my perspective but this is one that I definitely want to hold on to because I I all of my views they very much come from seeking the truth from trying to understand what's true about the world and I think that that involves people being able to say unpopular thing.

You know as a young kid one of my heroes was in this the whole story's fake it was all political but as a kid, I really liked the story of Galileo. You know, this idea that uh this man had discovered this truth about the world that was unpopular and he would he was nonetheless correct, you know. And so I I do I to me that's part of why this one is important to me, that we want to allow people to say unpopular things because that's part of seeking the truth to allow people to express a very unpopular uh you know opinion. And so that's why I ultimately uh agreed on that one, which by the way, again, uh the audience uh agreed with me. So you're obviously right. We all you know we all know democracy is so I know it's it's uh well democracy is wrong when I disagree with it, and when I'm right, uh democracy is populism or democracy.

What do you mean? Yeah, okay. Well, all right, all right, uh now uh we're gonna jump. And this one had the word democracy in it, so I just went to it. Uh American and this this one is shocking because it's like I I was like, well, yeah, where is our audience at? And it shows that uh, you know, they're very much kind of with us in general, but America would be better under a king than under universal uh democracy. Both you and I agreed, and the audience was at something like 77%, I think it was. So uh obviously we can just move on, I guess. Right, yeah. I mean, we're we're all good hoppians here, right? Yes, okay. So if you've ever read Democracy the God That Failed, and I imagine many of you have, uh, the thing you want to know about Democracy the God that failed is that as much as I love Hopp and I respect him, he is the very best libertarian, uh, but he is directly ripping off a guy uh who I absolutely love named Bertrand DeJuvenal in his book on power.

Um the first two-thirds of that book are basically him kind of photocopying, photocopying on power and then kind of putting some libertarian stuff in there, which is good. I like I like the time preference stuff, that's a good update to it. But ultimately, the reason he's the best libertarian is he understands the construction of power. He actually has a theory of power that many libertarians do not have. And uh so when we talk about democracy, we know that one of the things that allows is for the scaling of the state. Uh ultimately the idea that the people are speaking, that there is the consent of the governed, did not limit the power of the state. It grew it. Because you might not like the king, you might even oppose the king. It might be dangerous to oppose the king, but it is forbidden to oppose everyone.

Your neighbor. That's their public idea. That's their idea as a uh you know uh uh constituted people. And who are you to ultimately fight back against that? And so uh both both Hoppe and uh and Bertrand DeJuvenal walk you through how the growth of state has also uh been synonymous with the grow the growth of popular sovereignty. And so uh, you know, I don't want to rehash all those arguments here. If you want me to do that, I do it in my book. Uh but uh ultimately I do think that uh that they are both correct about this, that democracy is the enemy of freedom. Uh, you know, not to reference Peter Peter Thiel here, but you know, you're not wrong. That that ultimately democracy is an enemy of liberty, not the other way around. Yeah, I yeah, I mean, so well, I think democracy is an enemy of liberty.

I don't think that necessarily leads to the conclusion that a king is better. I actually still find this one still a little bit dicey. Um, you know, the thing that ultimately makes me feel that a king is better is like, well, most of what I don't like is produced via democracy, whereas the entities with kings, you know, uh, for example, we we ordered a bunch of sandwiches uh tonight from Nadu's sandwich shop. Nadu sandwich shop has a king. It's uh he is unelected. Uh and he runs the entire place by diktat, and no one has any vote at all. There's no democracy. Uh, you just choose whether you go into the restaurant or not, you know, and and uh uh this to me is probably I'm not a utopian, uh, but it's probably the closest we can get to utopia, you know. Restaurants treat me a lot best a lot better than the government does, you know.

And so I you know, David Friedman has a quote uh that uh you know the ideal form of society is where you have uh you know no say on what's on the menu, but every say on where you eat. Yes. And now that may be a little untethered for you, uh, but uh this I I think uh competition and choice are a far better check on misabused power, uh, you know, or tyranny or whatever you want to call it than democracy uh is just democracy just does not appear to be able to check these things. Democracy, uh I call it the scariest graph of uh, you know, in the world, which is the graph of percentage of GDP that's controlled by every Western democracy, and it's just nothing but a straight upline for a hundred and twenty years of of history, uh, to the point that every Western democracy, you know, more than fifty percent of our lives, of our work lives anyway, are controlled by the government.

We could debate what portion of our private lives are controlled by them. Uh and so, you know, democracy just it it doesn't create freedom to me. That doesn't mean that I want a king, you know, as uh something at the Free State Party we call ourselves uh, you know, we're we're performing these governance experiments. I don't think king or democracy are necessarily the choices. I would like to believe that there's something better than either of them, but democracy is clearly not the answer, and uh, you know, I would try a king at this point. This is why the libertarian pipeline always ends in neo-reaction. You know, the the final step of every libertarian is realizing that you actually just need totalitarianism on the outside so you can have libertarianism on the inside. And so this is why Curtis Yarvin famously came up with this construction of the patchwork idea, right?

Where you would have infinite amount of exit but no voice. You don't get to vote. There is always a king, but you get to decide where you are. You get to decide what system you get to involve yourself with. Now that's a there are problems with that as well. We don't have time to get into all that. But long story short, I'm just saying it's a it's a natural evolution to recognize that ultimately once once you grasp that the people are never sovereign and that there is always an elite, then there has to become a certain set of choices that you make if you want to maximize liberty. And none of them involve democratic process. Okay. Uh I don't know if this is the most natural segue, but I thought this was one of the most interesting propositions. Whatever emerges from voluntary exchange is presumptively good.

And I agreed with this. You disagreed. I will again let you go first. Uh again, I I I have a really Aristotelian construction of the good. I think the good is something that is determined by the society you're in, the position you are in, the roles that you fill in that, the tell us of your life and uh what you know what you should be pursuing. Uh, and so to the extent that voluntary interaction produces those, and in a society with a general understanding of the good, where you are generally oriented towards the same idea of the good, most voluntary exchanges will do so. And I would like to maximize voluntary exchanges. I am actually not a big government guy, despite being somewhat more authoritarian than many people are comfortable with. Uh the the ultimate point is to reduce the amount of time the government needs to spend enforcing virtue.

That virtue would be self-reinforcing, and so that voluntary interactions would produce virtuous situations. If voluntary interactions are producing heroin addicts, you're not producing liberty. You're producing slavery. And so those are not inherently good interactions. I don't care if you freely chose heroin. It was the wrong choice. I don't care if someone voluntarily sold you the heroin, they should be hung. Uh ultimately, the point is not to produce liberty for its own sake, but that virtue will create the liberty, will follow after you have a virtuous society. And so to the extent that these voluntary transactions are regularly producing virtuous societies, producing the good, then they are themselves good. But if we have degenerated, as you have noted, to the point where virtue is difficult and the society is degrading, then these kind of voluntary interactions are no longer good.

We now have companies who spend insane amounts of money making sure that they can dopamine trap your children into addictive behavior before they ever have control or function over their own mind. How is there any voluntary interaction there? At some point there is no longer voluntary interaction until we impose our will upon those who would peddle that, voluntary interaction is no longer available to us. So the I can imagine voluntary interactions that are bad. The key problem to me here is accepting that, how would you ever produce a system that polices them? Because people want to come up with all kinds of excuses to constrain each other's behavior. And a lot of those times it's not good why they're doing that and so I I think it makes a lot of sense to have a again it it's it's not always good it's presumptively good and I think it makes sense to have a strong presumption that if two people are agreeing to do something that they ought to be allowed to do it.

And any exceptional case to that should be pretty extraordinary. You know I I I tend to not like bright line rules. I think there are like almost always exceptions. So I'm sure both of us could imagine and you've already named some cases of voluntary interaction where the outcomes appear to be bad but I think we have to take that to the next level and think about well what kind of system could police the bad stuff without policing the good stuff. And this may be maybe the heart of and we have a lot of agreement but this may be maybe the heart of of the disagreements that we have is well how would you produce a system that stops the bad stuff without stopping the good stuff you know I and this may be a trivial example but it's one that's been on my mind. I use AI a lot. In fact a lot of this production uh was was made you know via AI and the Trump administration which I'm often a defender of you know curtailed my ability to have a voluntary interaction you know with uh with companies making this you know this product and so I can totally accept that there are voluntary interactions that are bad, and I would like to find ways of of you know, yeah, I think I think people get addicted to gambling or you know, prostitution or drugs or whatever and this stuff is bad.

Uh but it's very tricky and not clear that it's possible at all to stop the bad without stopping a bunch of good stuff. And so if we hew much closer to voluntary stuff should be accepted, yeah, we'll get some bad outcomes, but people like you and I and the people in this room can avoid those. And if we accept that, you know, it's perfectly normal to circumscribe voluntary interactions, then we're gonna get a lot of otherwise good stuff, you know, stopped because there's no way of getting, you know, one without the other. Uh so you can s sell all of the drugs you want in most of Detroit. Uh you can not sell them in Singapore, they will kill you. Where would you rather live? Where would you rather lay raise your children, right? These are easy answers once we really look at it. Now, this is not to say that Singapore is the answer.

But people move to sing Singapore voluntarily. Singapore is mostly. That's that's absolutely true, right? But but once we're there, what is the best way to govern it? And I think we've already agreed that ultimately the best option would be exit, but not voice, right? That that that being able to voluntarily choose into that system, and and I want to make it clear once again, I think the most important frame shift I want to encourage libertarians to engage in is not how do we design a system. That's the wrong way to get it. You don't. You don't. That's not how societies work. Plato's Republic is not real, okay? Where do societies come from? That's not what happens, right? What happens is they emerge from the ways of being of people. They come from traditions, religions, identities, families, ways of life.

Where did the freedoms come from that you love? They didn't come from the Constitution. They didn't come from abstract principle. They didn't come from natural rights. They came from people who lived as virtuous Protestant Christians out of the English tradition. That's where the things you love came from. And so when we understand that, we understand where those positive interactions come from. And when we have a system that's dominated by that value and that culture, then we can make all the voluntary interactions we want, and they will generally yield good outcomes. And the few that don't are acceptable because they still exist in that framework. So I really encourage people again to just don't think about building systems. Think about building communities. And if you understand the function of those communities, then the freedoms will be built into the systems that emerge from that community.

Okay, well, there's a natural segue here. Liberty can exist without Christianity. And we actually both agreed. I will, I predicted all of your answers. I got this one wrong. Yeah, I imagine. So while we both agreed, so I guess there's nothing to talk about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, once again, this is a scenario of, you know, if if you ask me personally what is true liberty found in, I believe it is in following Christ. I believe it's in living as much as you can in accordance with uh his teachings, with his truth, uh, by worshiping God and following his word. I want to make that clear. That said, uh I'm I tend to hold again towards the Aristotelian understanding of liberty, which is that we are oriented towards the telos of our society. And so I do think that there can be liberty in societies that are not Christian.

They wouldn't be the way I want to live. I want to live in a society where liberty is oriented towards the Christian good. But I can recognize other societies could produce good outcomes. I can look at Japan and recognize that while that is not my culture, and ultimately I would probably not find myself comfortable in that society. It has produced a good, right? It has produced a society that I've and maybe some people would say that well that's not liberty, but I think for the Japanese it is. But that is again because I have this more uh particular and contingent understanding of liberty as opposed to a universal standard. And so I do think that other societies are able to achieve liberty outside of Christianity, even though I would prefer Christian liberty to others. Well, that's interesting.

And that and again, I am uh just so naturally an arguer that I'm now gonna disagree with you. Uh well, uh, you know, and I I do I do ultimately agree with the premise, but like it's not clear to me that Japan is a uh ha you know has a lot of liberty as a nation. I think Japan's a wonderful nation from everything you know I can tell. Um, you know, from a lot of the metrics that I and I look at all these graphs and and data and stuff, like Japan is an exceptional country, it's incredibly safe, it's incredibly trustworthy. It it is not, and this is one of the differences between sort of East Asian nations and Western European nations, which might otherwise share high economic output and low criminality and a decent amount of social trust or whatever, although this can vary depending on where you are in Asia, Japan being particularly exceptional.

They don't have individuality. Individuality is a specifically Western Europe. Specifically Anglo. Yeah, actually. Yeah. Like, oh yeah, yeah, you have to be very fine. It's uh the Hajnell, you know, kind of map or the those lines of uh, you know, it's it's this this sort of tolerance for uh, you know, a variety of lifestyles and and and so on and so forth, which uh I do think is part of liberty. It doesn't mean you have to approve of them, uh, but you're not circumscribing them. This this is it really is a a uniquely Western European uh phenomenon. I would ultimately say that liberty can exist without Christianity because I think a lot of people from those areas, even if they're not actively practicing as Christians, do nonetheless seem to hold these beliefs, so it's not clear to me that it specific specifically requires Christianity.

I see Christianity as having had a very positive force, you know, in in producing liberty. Uh, but living here in New Hampshire, you know, I've met a lot of people who are pro-liberty, who are good people, you know, who return the shopping cart, etc., who would not, you know, who are not practicing Christians. And so I don't see it as a requirement. I see it as something that is very aligned. It's less common to find these beliefs outside of it. But I I ultimately uh agreed with this because it does exist outside of it. Um, but I but I but I wouldn't it well, it's not clear to me that that Japan has liberty, though. I would again it it really you have to define your liberty, and I think you're doing it in a very specific, grounded way, which I by the way, I agree with that construction. I would say that your construction of liberty is almost entirely based on Protestantism.

Uh you what you're looking at is the freedom of conscience that is inherent in Protestant understanding. If you look at someone like Alexis de Tocqueville talking in in Democracy America, he actually says that American uh individuality is a problem. And he says the only thing that's gonna save American f America from its individualism is the free associations. The fact that the Protestant idea is that you create these churches, these community organizations, everything else that will bind society together, even though you're hyper-liberal. And so the idea is actually that this liberty cannot exist without those very Christian communities that allow it to bind together. Of course, he's a Frenchman, so even though we think of Western civilization, to him, the Anglo construction of freedom was very different from the French construction, and one worth criticizing.

So remember, when we're again, like the particularity of uh the tradition is what matters here. And I think when we talk about the very particular American understanding of liberty, I think it is actually almost entirely grounded in Protestant Christianity, which doesn't mean every person has to ultimately follow Protestant Christianity. There are some founders who were iffy on that one, right? But ultimately they were all deeply uh influenced by what is it? Uh Christopher Hitchens, or no, not Christopher Hitchens. Uh what's the other insufferable horseman? Um Dawkins. Yeah, Dawkins. Uh Dawkins just uh said, Well, of course, I'm a Christian atheist, right? Yeah, and it's it's funny, but we all know what that means. Well, okay, we all know what that means. So, okay, I'm uh I'm a Dawkins fan, so I'll defend them a little bit.

I'm just gonna unmike here, you guys have a okay. The selfish gene is a great book. You don't have to endorse all of his atheism. Understanding a gene-centric view of evolution, I think is a very valuable view, which Dawkins deserves a lot of credit for. And Dawkins, like a good liberal, uh, he he corrected himself. Like he, I look, I think he sees himself as having made a mistake. Uh, you know, he he sort of saw how the way that that Muslims were coming into England, he's like, Oh boy, maybe this wasn't all such a good idea, you know, and like he It turns out that maybe his liberty is no longer available if he doesn't live in a Christian society. And much to ponder there. Okay, and so and okay. But so you can still uh say, hey, he got that wrong, but like a lot of people who get something wrong will never admit it.

And he at least kind of did. Uh, you know, and so to me that's I respect that. Uh the cupflower's morality is a little difficult to forgive. I'm glad he figured it out at the end, I suppose. I wish he would just go the rest of the way. Well, he figured it out more, yeah, more than more than uh, you know, more than a a lot of a lot of people. He even uh uh I saw a funny interview with Dawkins where he was asked about um uh uh the sort of Voltaire quote about like um uh you know, I don't believe in God, but I hope my maid does. Right. Uh and and uh he was asked that uh and he really uh struggled with it. I'm getting off topic. Um okay, uh we've got we're gonna do uh we're gonna do two more. Uh let's do liberal universalism. Liberal universalism leads to endless war. And we both once again agreed.

Although I wonder if we agree for the same reasons. Uh well, as I kind of point out in again in my book, The Total State, uh, the natural desire of kind of this liberal universalism is to bring everything under its control, right? If if people are fungible, if there are these universal principles that apply to everybody, uh, then we don't have to think about cultural particulars. We don't have to understand the traditions or beliefs of people, we don't have to take into account their heritage or beliefs or traditions. We can simply you know you know universally bring them under one idea. And to be fair, this is again, I think an extension of an economic understanding of liberalism before it's even a uh moral understanding of liberalism. We need to bring under everybody under the same form of contract law before we can actually like trade with people in East Asia, right?

Like we need to have this universal understanding of time zones and uh you know how we conduct business and how we do exchange. Things are entirely foreign to other nations, and so we have to bring them into this kind of universal economic system to ultimately create uh you know the this this exchange. And I think the same tends to then flow from the idea of morality. People look at the morality and it can be extended to all these places in all these times. The problem is, of course, that doesn't work. It turns out that history was not over. Francis Fukuyama was wrong. Uh liberal democracy will not reign in perpetuity, and actually different peoples will reassert their way of life and their beliefs. And so if you want to keep everybody under this liberal hegemony, if you want to keep everybody locked in to this idea of universal human rights, well, you basically have to go to war all the time.

You have to force everyone into these systems, you have to compel them in order uh to get them to participate in these systems in the exact same way. It won't just be voluntary exchange. Uh, and so that's why you end up in this constant struggle. Uh but yeah, that's that's essentially where I'm at. Like if if you see liberal universalism as correct, then everything and everywhere has to be liberal universalism. Like, if you see your views as more parochial and uh more specific to a people or a place, then you don't feel this need to make them exist everywhere. You know, it's it's funny to to think that, yeah, like George Bush and the war in Iraq was part of liberal universalism, right? You know, and and that's actually one of the distinctions between you know Trump foreign policy, which I would have my own problems with to some degree, but you don't you don't see any of that.

You know, he has no desire to uh you know push or val push liberal values or make them behave in certain ways, you know, and and to me that's clearly clearly creates better results. We got we got a few words about liberating the Iranians, but up until that point at least. Yeah, you know, liberals can't help themselves. You know, it's it's well it's that's it's so funny. And that that's this maybe gonna i i i it's part of it's something I struggle with because it's it's it's part of the nature of the constitutional liberal to be constitutionally liberal. Yes, you know, and and and and so there's this odd phenomenon where the people who it to some degree embody some of the spirit and essence that I actually like the most find it the hardest to see because their constitution is such that, well, of course everyone would be this way, you know.

Like and again, uh liberal versus libertarian, these are different terms, but I see with libertarians, I see a lot of really good libertarians who are like, oh, well, like, you know, of course this would work for everyone, like why wouldn't it? You know, and that's that that universalistic tendency makes you believe that the way that you are, everyone else could be that way, and it takes a certain amount of you know, emotional maturity or just life experience, or some people never get there to recognize these kinds of differences, and if you don't see those differences, then you're actually more inclined to feel this desire to push them is you recognize the differences, and I think people in New Hampshire tend to recognize that there's some differences about us, then you constrain your vision and you shrink it because you realize, oh, this isn't for everybody.

Right. Uh and and that's oddly less threatening, which is a weird kind of set of facts to wrap your head around all that. You could say libertarianism, but in one state. That's right. That's right. Okay. Um I was gonna close on on uh bait from me and to dunk on you. Uh but I did want to get this one in. Uh um I don't know. Well, we'll just we'll just do it because I think this is an interesting topic. Uh uh a Christian America would still be safe and welcoming for Jews. And we both uh agreed with this one, but this is I think an interesting topic that a lot of people are talking about. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how to expound on this one too much other than to say, you know, obviously there have been Christian societies in which uh more or less active Judaism is tolerated. I think due to the you know relatively phylosemitic uh understanding of you know American Christianity, uh, I can't see a even stronger Christian America completely rejecting the existence of you know Jewish people in the United States.

I do think there might be a certain level of base understanding that would be reasserted, but I think that should always be true about any dominant uh you know uh majority in a country, they should have a preference for their beliefs, their way of life. Uh, but I think that America, due to again that Protestant construction would always have some level of uh, you know, um freedom of conscience to allow the practice of Judaism inside of it. I don't see that significantly changing no matter how loud people get about it online. Yeah, and I will admit I I partially put this in because people get loud about it. Yeah. On, you know, online. And so it was uh interesting to see that this was, you know, overwhelming, uh, pretty much audience uh uh you know agreement. I I actually this isn't one I spent have spent you know much much time thinking about.

I will say, you know, my impression of of history is that Christians have been, you know, more tolerant and more accepting and kinder towards uh ethnic minorities, religious minorities, you know, whatever type of minority, you know, that may exist. So I was inclined to agree because it's like, well, where have they done better? Uh you know, it's it's mostly in it's mostly in Christian nations. I I will say I and it ties back to the previous, you know, question about, you know, Christianity, like I'm very much a realist about the world. There aren't atheist societies to point to. There are Christian societies to point to that that seem to you know reify and and reflect my values. And um and so you know that seems to be the that seems to be the best that we can do. And so Christians will be uh tolerant towards minorities, unpopular opinions.

The real threat is uh if you if that quantity gets too low uh you know you know then you're then you're in trouble. But we do see movements uh and I'm not saying you're of course a part of any of these that that are trying to be exclusively you know, Christian. I don't know how real various Christian nationalist movements are versus they're just kind of an online, you know, uh uh phenomenon. And to me, you know, I and again, I'm not a practicing, you know, Christian, so I don't want to uh lecture other Christians on what on what they believe, but it seems to me a little bit getting away from, you know, I I would be like, well, we need to make sure we're like 80 to 90 percent, you know, and not and that if we're at that percentage, we can have some of the benefits. So because there are benefits of all kinds of minorities, not just uh Jews.

I had someone suggest that we include other I was someone told me it's like it's like you should make it say Jews and gays. And I'm like I'm not I'm not sure that would make the question better. Yeah. Uh I uh uh but it is i it it's this weird it's this weird phenomenon where uh you know even it like I Christians have been the most tolerant of of pretty much any uh religion. I think that's a testament uh uh to Christians so long as they don't lose it and and and so ultimately I agree with this. Yeah I don't find tolerance to actually be a particularly high virtue. Yeah it's an insult. But that said, um I I think the key is as you were pointing out the percentage there uh which is you know why many organizations, maybe say the ADL who spend a lot of time trying to force Christianity out of the square as much as possible are suddenly finding themselves wishing desperately that they had not made that play.

Uh so l little bit of uh you know learning experience there. Perhaps the idea of diluting a Christian society because it will become more welcoming to minorities was exactly the inverse of what you should have been doing. Yeah well I will say Jews uh have done that too. Uh you know, like I I have Jewish family, and they're like they're not scheming behind the scenes. Like they tend to be like genuinely like multicultural, you know, believers. They're in the they're genuine genuine liberals, and they're now, you know, uh reaping what they've sown. Yeah, turns out they want to be Christian too. Yeah. Okay. All right, we're gonna go to the uh last prompt. Although if we're set up to do audience questions, I'm happy to do a couple. Uh so this is the last one. Uh Libertarianism is as wrong about human nature as communism.

And I disagreed. You agreed though. Yes. Uh so you're gonna have to you're gonna have to go first again. Uh yeah, uh again, I I obviously am far more sympathetic to libertarians than communists. If we ever need to run the Reds out, I know I can, you know, count on all of your helicopters, and I appreciate that. Um, but but I do think that there is a fundamental flaw that exists at the core of I I should, you know, of course, libertarianism, as you know, I've I've argued with Dave Smith and you and many other people, it's too broad of a term. I really need you guys to get together and have like break the base libertarians into something. Call anything, I don't care. Hoppy and whatever. Free standard perfect. Just not libertarian, because I'm sorry, but you and Bill Amar are not the same people, okay?

Uh so the the but uh ultimately I think the problem with many libertarians, not all, not all, the many fine people, uh, but the problem the problem with uh the the libertarian ideology is it tends to be fundamentally materialistic. It tends to treat economics as the be-all end-all of human behavior. It takes something that it is very right about, which is generally Austrian economics, and then try to turn that into a system of everything. And that is always a a mistake. Universal systems are always a failure. The attempt to yeah, kind of put this under one universal understanding that flows from economic interactions is always an issue. And so I think that this creates problems. Libertarians often assume things that are just fundamentally incorrect about human nature, like the idea that everybody values liberty, everyone can live.

You know, the fact that the free state is understanding you actually most people don't live this way is in fact a rejection of what libertarians have often spoken about for a long time. So in the sense that you guys are doing this now, you're correct. But that is a fundamental rejection at some level of this idea of a universal understanding that can be uh kind of put under the mis m materialist rubric. And because both communism and uh libertarianism are kind of these economic theories that try to expand themselves into the understandings of sociology and morality and you know metaphysics and everything else, this is where they fail. It's not that libertarianism libertarianism is wrong about everything, it's not that it you know makes mistakes about everything or even most things, but it's it does fail, I think, pretty importantly in its anthropology.

And when you have bad anthropology, other mistakes flow from it pretty regularly. Well, this is unsurprisingly the strongest disagreement that I'll have with you, although still be nice about it. Uh, you know, I think I think, and of course, it depends on what you mean by libertarianism. Sometimes people even ask me why I still consider myself a libertarianist, because they see me as like having drifted in some ways, although I don't think I have having read the literature. But the key thing that libertarians get that I think too much of the right, the dissident right, the neo-reactionaries, whatever, don't always get, although I will say a lot of the neo-reactionaries get it, is markets. Uh, the power of markets, the power of voluntary exchange. Markets have done more for the world than any government, than practically anything.

The fact that we're having this podcast, you know, how many uh thousands, millions, tens of millions of people, you know, went into producing all of the things in this room, you know, that sort of I pencil type of argument of all of all of the countless voluntary, bottom-up interactions that produced all of this stuff. And so as someone who, despite having problems with modernity, appreciates a lot of it. I'm never gonna starve to death. My children aren't gonna starve to death. I don't have to fear death from an animal. I can go into my air conditioned house. I I don't live in Europe. Uh, you know, and they it's m it's markets that have produced these things. And to me, markets are one of the most beautiful things that and uh, you know, uh that that sort of exists in in the world to me. Markets are very beautiful kind of thing in that bottom-up uh way uh that that of what humans can make and what we can build and what we can produce when we voluntarily associate and we do that in this bottom-up way.

And to me, that's libertarianism. There's not another political philosophy that really gets to lay claim to that idea. And communism done nothing. It's done fuck all. Uh, this is my podcast, so I can swear. Uh, there uh there's it's it's done nothing. It's very it's impossibly wrong. It's fundamentally wrong. Whereas libertarianism, I think there are excessive versions of it, but but they really do deserve that mantle of of being the political philosophy of voluntary association and markets, and those I those ideas are remarkable, are are responsible for so much of human progress. And uh and I think libertarians don't get enough credit. I think the and I think the right needs to like i if I could like pick up and like shake the people on the right that I disagree with, I'd be like, read Hayek and understand Hayekian knowledge, you know, because this is the idea that I think is the most missing among the right who is disdainful of libertarians who who believes that they can produce these outcomes in in these sort of top-down ways, and and it and it's just not possible.

And uh so that's my sort of defense of libertarianism for uh you know, for the right. Well, I don't believe in progress, so that's a problem. But uh and and of course you're right that well, go live in a cave, have we ever uh but uh don't tempt me. Um but but I think the you know one of the issues that kind of loops back to one of our previous propositions here was the preconditions required for liberty, right? I don't think markets create liberty, I think particular traditions created markets, and those markets are very effective operating inside those traditions. The farther they get outside of them, the more sideways they get, right? Like ultimately is China gonna end up proving to be you know more dynamic under its, you know, let's be frank, fascist understanding of markets than America under what I guess we could say is a you know severely botched understanding of free markets.

That's a good question. Can we maintain markets without those preconditions? Are the markets themselves the miracle, or were the people who made markets available the ones that are ultimately necessary for that? And I also think, uh, you know, I don't want to get Nick Landian on us here. Uh, but there's also the the problem that markets are themselves really a feedback loop of uh intelligence. They they are their own form of intelligence gathering information over time. And it's a powerful force, but it also makes us slowly less human. It starts to deprioritize uh human concerns for uh uh concerns of independent systems. Um but that might we might be getting far too too deep into the weeds on that one, so perhaps that's a whole nother debate. Yeah, well, you'll well you'll have to come back.

Yeah, yeah. Uh at which point we're gonna talk about that more. I think we're gonna do audience questions. Does the audience have questions? Are the people have questions for either of us? Procedure. Uh Stephen Nass is walking around. All right, so Stephen Nass is walking around at the microphone. Keep your keep your questions uh short, no speeches. Um you mentioned Singapore and its successes. One of the things that Lee Kwan Yu failed to do was change fertility rates in his population. Yes. Do you have any idea how to fix that problem? So that's a huge problem. And that one is that is a problem not just of Singapore, but most modern nations, right? We call this the IQ shredder problem, uh, where you dedicate more of your time as your IQ increases, you dedicate more time into making money, financialization, these kind of things, than like having sex and producing children.

Uh, and this is not something that's just happening in Singapore, but because Singapore specifically selects for high IQ uh high age uh agency capitalists, it produces this outcome. And so we have a real this is just a problem of modernity. Uh, but the the more we select for these kind of people, the more we actually battle back against those those natural impulses to produce, right? The less advanced a country is, the more they're having families of eight children, the more advanced they get, they have two, one zero. And so that is a problem that has been accelerated more in Singapore. We could make several uh you know attempts to address that. But one of the issues, of course, the thing that holds Singapore together, despite it being very, you know, ethnically and religiously diverse, is that semi-authoritarian government.

The problem is that that doesn't solve your fertility problem because as Robert Putnam, you know, understood uh in bowling alone, diversity actually reduces social trust and it reduces the desire people to have children and bring in the next generation. So because Singapore is treated more as an economic zone than as an actual homeland where people live and want to carry on a way of life, they produce fewer children. And so what you really have there is more than anything a social sickness. He solved the problem. He this is one of our key issues, right? Systemically, he solved the problem. He created the system, but did it long-term solve the issue of community? It didn't. And so that's why I'm encouraging people to think more organically and communally rather than just systems-based, even though I have a lot of admiration for the fact that Liquan Yu was able to bind the society and bring it into this incredible revolution and advancement that he did.

Yeah, I'll just quickly say this is a very unsolved problem and and kind of an unsolved mystery. I mean, fertility has been declining in every nation, in every place for 120 years, 150 years. We have like a brief blip around World War II, but it's everywhere. And so this idea that there is this sort of one cause, I'm somewhat skeptical of. It seems like a very complex uh, you know, phenomenon. I'm ultimately an optimist because it seems like a self-correcting uh uh problem. Uh I do think it's primarily uh, you know, sort of cultural. I think it has to be cultural like so many people have enough money and time and space to have children by historical standards and they're not and so why aren't they I don't see to me that has to sort of be a cultural answer that that you know I I don't know what is going wrong but it it's not it's not a matter of resources it's a matter of culture.

Yeah Oswald Spangler spoke really well of this I have a video on it on my YouTube channel if people want to watch it. I don't have time to recapitulate it here but if you want to I think what is a very good answer to this question he does a great job with it. Great climate for having kids here in New Hampshire I will say we have a bunch of kids in the other room uh playing during this event. So you you brought up more than once the sort of uh constitutionally liberal constitutionally liberal um and uh I I would frame that as so I I bring this up to say libertarians and what the cultural right in general highly overindexes what I would call uh low openness highly disagreeable guys um what what do you see as the place for the the highly open agreeable like interested in ideas types um who might not fit in that same that same paradigm.

Yeah well I'm high openness and highly disagreeable. That's my uh which is a common uh well not that common but it is an archetype that exists uh you know I think and this is a this is a tricky uh you know problem you know agreeable agreeable people will be agreeable. You know, they they will go along to get along. Um whether they're high openness or not, like highly agreeable people are the glue of our society. I don't I it's not clear to me that you could produce a great society when every you know every person was was very high in in disagreeableness. Uh you know, I think um you know you can't exactly plan your uh society or your nation, so it's a tricky, uh, you know, tricky problem. Uh but there's nothing wrong with being agreeable. Uh, you know, being high openness is generally good.

High openness is very correlated with intelligence. I think it can lead you astray. And so, you know, if we don't have the right institutions or cultural structures to, you know, I can see high openness leading people down bad paths. I have high openness friends who I feel have gone down uh, you know, bad paths, but high openness means you're gonna be the future is gonna continue to change, the world's only changing more and more, the future's gonna be weird. I think being high openness is is generally gonna be adaptive because you're gonna be able to, you know, integrate things like AI or or whatever new things, you know, uh might might come. Um and so um I I I think high openness, high agreeable, that's like a great place to be. I think those people are gonna do well in in practically any society.

So maybe I'm missing the thrust of the question. Maybe the thrust of my question is on the right, on the cultural right, in this sort of space, uh, what's the place for those people? Uh I mean, if you're highly agreeable, I think it's tough to be a leader. I you know, I think a highly agreeable person by their constitution is is going to be driven by the group mentality. And so if we're in a place when we need change, when what we're doing isn't working, it's not gonna be the highly agreeable people. But those highly agreeable people are a glue. They're a huge part of anything that you do. And so this idea that they wouldn't have a place. I mean, of course they would have a place. Do you want to say something on this? No, I think you got it covered. Okay. Hi. At multiple points throughout the conversation, Arn had pointed out that the liberties that we enjoy in the American context come from a particular culture and people, the um Anglo historical continuum.

What is the libertarian solution in dealing with demographics that are openly hostile to or disregard those ideas that we currently have in the society we're sharing with right now? Sure. So my read on this is that while liberty as I would conceive it disproportionately comes from one place. It's not like people from those places are the only are are universal believers in it, right? I don't think there are very many Americans, especially you know, right-wing Americans, who are looking at what's happening in England or what's happening in France and approving of it. And you know, so this idea, I like uh it's like the all sons are stars, but not all stars are sons. You know, uh it it's not I I believe that a a liberty-minded place, a libertarian place, it's going to be disproportionately Western European, but it's not sufficient.

If you simply have Western European people. I do not believe that you inevitably get these things. I think that the beliefs in liberty are rare. I believe that they I believe that they, and again, this will make me maybe more liberal than I I think they exist among every people, just at vastly differing rates. I don't think there are zero people in Nigeria or wherever who would share my values. I just think there's a lot less. And if my values are rare, so you know, maybe 30, 40, maybe maybe 30% of Anglos hold them, and you know, maybe one percent of people from East Asia hold them. Like, I would rather be, I would rather be uh, you know, selecting for values. I do believe those values exist among all kinds of people. I just think they're not evenly distributed. And so I think if I select for those values, I'm gonna end up in a place that's disproportionately Western European, but I don't believe I would inevitably get those values just by selecting for Western Europeans.

That's sort of how I see it. Uh yeah. Great talk. Thanks, guys. Um, so my question this is more the way I'm gonna frame it's more for Jeremy, but obviously both welcome to chime in here. So on the last proposition, libertarianism is as wrong about human nature as communism. So if communism has a worse understanding of human nature than libertarianism, then my question is why are there so many commies and so few libertarians? Well, okay. This I could give like a 15-minute answer to this question, so let me see how tight I can I can get it. Uh Orin asked me if I was ever gonna write a book, and like this is borderline what my book would be about. Uh, you know, I I communism, and this is actually something that the libertarians, including Hoppe and Rothbard, in my opinion, get wrong. It's one of the few places I would deviate from them, is that the state of human nature is communism.

Like Kamala Harris represents an elite throughout human history, like far more than Elon Musk does, actually. Um I'm serious. Like human history, for most of human history, humans lived in egalitarian bands where the most able hunter or most talented person was to a significant degree constrained by the group that he was born into. You this is why we have, you know, even in like the Nordic countries, you have the law of like Jante, where you're supposed to constrain yourself and not h and like hide your abilities, even if you're talented. This is human nature. This is this is the way that we lived. It was actually only uh, you know, sort of post um farming uh and building human societies in scales much larger than egalitarian bands, where we started to form stronger hierarchies and where we started to actually get free of this sort of crabs in a bucket mentality.

And it was this is actually part of why the the psychology that appreciates markets that the the um I posted on this about X about this idea of whims, uh, you know, white hierarchical individualistic males, uh, which is this research from this guy, uh Dan Cahan at at Yale, uh, you know, finding this relatively unique archetype of almost exclusively men, almost exclusively white men, not exclusively, but predominantly white men who were willing to you know form hierarchies work together in large groups essentially to conquer you know other places which is what it means to be in a corporation right corporations and markets have replaced uh you know warfare and so I think this mentality is rare I think communism is much closer to human nature this is why when we import the third world we become the third world because this mentality is far more predominant this sort of uh uh mentality is far more predominant outside of of of of Western uh of Western Europe um and so uh yeah libertarians uh free market libertarians are uh the ubermensch uh they were created through an evolutionary crucible uh predominantly in western Europe and you are all supreme beings if you're listening uh I just I just appreciate you finally agreeing that you were wrong about this proposition um but uh but but no I think there's a lot of truth to this to go back to my uh my a the ancient city uh example one of the things Cologne says is that you know the like I said the Greeks and the Romans produced this idea of property rights due to their religious rights and the only reason that's different from the Germanic tribes well the German tribes all just rotated the land right like e everybody got a new plot of land every year that way everyone got a fair shot at what kind of farming you would do.

The reason that was broken inside of uh you know these these Greek societies is because of their religious beliefs when it came to ancestor worship. And so we might not recognize the origin of these rights, but those are again actually grounded in cultures and ways of being and people. So I think Jeremy's correct that there is a very specific group of people who live in this way. The problem, the reason libertarians were wrong is they tried to universalize that, right? And that's why they make as many mistakes about communism uh about human nature as communism. I would still prefer to live in a libertarian society ten times out of ten. But that the the fundamental question is, were they wrong about that universalization? And the answer I think very obviously, as Jeremy just pointed out, is yes.

The universal answer is communism, right? That's that's the real universal for the most part. Yeah, I agree that libertarians are wrong about universal. So we we agree with that. All right, so I want to go back to Singapore. So you mentioned earlier in the discussion that the heroin dealer should be hum. I don't know what your opinions are on alcohol, alcohol prohibition, but I think that there's something in this question that kind of gets at the difference between somebody who's a free stator or libertarian or somebody that's new right or whatever label you want to choose. I want to understand more. So libertarians are very thinking we can be very black and white, people make fun of them for being autistic. They want to understand the deep underlying principle. And so we don't look at the heroin dealer any different than we look at the 20-year-old person working at the grocery store that sells you the fifth of vodka.

And I want to understand more your perspective of where's the line, like would alcohol have to be twice as addictive or twice as poisonous to where you would think that they should be hung, and would heroin have to be half as addictive, etc. Like I don't have a super pointed question here, but I think that there's something here drawing the line between this question of liberalism. I think you're right. And the difference is I don't think there's an a priori principle that we generate that dictates to us how to address addictive substances. The answer is it's contingent on your culture. The reason that alcohol is more acceptable is we came from alcoholic cultures, right? The reason that Americans could get, you know, drunk, blind drunk at, you know, the the everyone's all seen the founding fathers bill for the you know the the bar tab, right?

It's insane. It's like each one of them got liver poisoning that night, right? Um, but the reason we look at that and we don't blink, and we kind of chuckle a little bit, but everybody freaked out when marijuana showed up is not that marijuana is somehow specifically more dangerous in every instance. It's because it's foreign, it's because it's alien, it's because it's not what we grew up with and what we understood. That doesn't mean that alcohol consumption is ultimately good for you. It doesn't mean that you know free consumption is, but it does mean that there's a certain level of permissibility around that because we grew up with it, because it was built into our culture, and that's okay. We don't actually need some kind of objective reason why we accept that and not heroin. Though I can say pretty confidently heroin is more dangerous for you, actually.

There's a reason that the British had to go in and basically force China, you know, to at gunpoint uh to adopt it. Uh, but I I think the answer to your question is it's culturally contingent. I don't have some objective reason that you could only allow alcohol and nothing else. It it is because it is what is acceptable in our society, it's what most people understand how to limit themselves with, though obviously there are a thousand examples of alcoholics that prove that to be incorrect. Yeah, I don't know how much I had to add. My objections would be more around how like the impossibility of getting the good outcomes without the bad outcomes. Like, I don't care about heroin. I'm not interested in fighting for legal heroin. I mean I would like to have zero dollars involved in policing heroin or defending the people who want to do heroin.

You know, I the tricky part to me is we already live we live in an America where heroin is illegal, as well as, you know, a whole bunch of peptides and novel drugs and all kinds of things that I would regard as positive, not necessarily every instance of them, but that idea of like people trying to figure these things out, people trying to do new things. I like that stuff. I don't care about the heroin. If if we could if I could push a button to like only ban heroin, honestly, I would probably push it because it seems to have like zero positive impact whatsoever, but you can't clearly police, you know, heroin without the other. If i if you have a you know a proper competition for polities, then polities could make their own subjective decisions and uh, you know, and a lot of polities would probably choose to ban heroin and people would live there voluntarily and so on and so forth.

And I think that direction is again much better because then all the heroin users can go live in heroin town and like have a very unpleasant experience there living among their other heroin addicts. And like that that to me is like there's a great thought experiment about well, like, well, what if we just like had murder or islands, you know, it's like, well, if you think murder should be you know, yeah, exactly. It's like I I think this is to me, and again, this maybe this makes me constitutionally a liberal fundamentally, but like I think it's so much better to let people sort themselves out. I don't want heroin user on my blood. I'm happy to police stuff on my block. You know, I don't want prostitution on my block. I don't want heroin public drug use on my block. You know, I don't care what happens a thousand miles away from me.

This I just have zero moral concern. I'm a I'm a left heat map kind of guy, you know, or right heat map, whatever, however you want to think about it. But like I, you know, I just don't care. And so I'm I'm there are things that I'm willing to police locally that I'm not not interested in policing at this larger uh scale. I think I saw at some point you had a tweet something like, I don't care if you do heroin at home, but if I see you doing it in a public park, I should be able to shoot you. Uh no, Judge Dredd should show up and execute it. Right, right, right. And yeah, I can combine that. Like that's I think that's a reasonable compromise. Yes, that and that that is my comrades. Like, yeah, like because again, this is a like there's like probably like one percent of heroin users who are like responsible heroin.

We don't want to throw out the baby with the heroin. We don't want the functional heroin users like a well even say, like, okay, I see a lot of people on the right who don't like marijuana. I Scott Adams was a daily marijuana user, you know. I've met I've met in the tech industry through the amount of like crack programmers who smoke marijuana nonstop. It's like it's a remarkable, not saying it's all of them, it's a minority, but like I met plenty of people who are very productive people while smoking marijuana. And so it's like I don't have any desire to circumscribe, you know, that I can understand objecting to the smells, I can understand not wanting it in certain places, but it's like this is it's just it's it's not something I'm interested in, you know, policing. Um, if that's your name, uh mentioned several times about uh the community has to change before the government or all of society can.

Uh and I totally agree, a constitution only works for people who are in that same spirit. Um would would you say that there's no such thing as a a discontinuity caused by a single individual? Or is it more that um when society is ready, the actor will appear? Uh, you know, there's always the question of uh great men of history versus trends and forces, right? Like it does it take one man of action, or do circumstances build into this moment that um uh ultimately creates this tipping point. And I'll cop out by saying the answer is yes. Um I think that you know great men are necessary to take certain actions. I think that ultimately uh you can have the conditions for something to change arise, but without that leadership, that galvanizing force, that elite that ultimately drive it, you might lose that moment.

At the same time, I don't believe it's entirely possible top down to completely change something all by yourself in general. There are a few examples where that's possible, but oftentimes you need that moment to meet and arise. And so I think that we I think you know the the correct answer is something that I encourage with a lot of a couple of my guys here uh with the old glory club. They're fantastic guys and are uh you know big actors in their community, and they understand the need that you know they have to grow their community, they have to be a part of it, they have to change that, but they also have to be leaders, they have to be elites in that society and bring that about. And so I think uh, you know, you you have to work on both levels, and I think the problem is that we tend to just lean into one or the other.

A lot of people will say, oh, well, eventually the the culture will just shift it one all by itself, or we'll just get some guy into office and he'll he'll fix everything. I think the answer is ultimately you have to meet both of those forces if if that properly answered the question. That's right. They're intertw they're intertwined. Okay, I think that's gonna be our final question. So I think we're gonna kill the live stream. Thank you so much for tuning in.