https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZDx8GDs-FOs
What kind of person do you want to be at the end of the day is what it comes down to. And this is again why I’m such a Camus fan and the idea that existence precedes essence. I don’t know if I’d say that literally, but the idea that we have, we are, I always use this metaphor and I think it’s very informative where there’s two types of people. You go to the top of a mountain top and you see the blank canvas and a bunch of paints and a certain mentality is like, what is this? This is just stupid. And the other type is like, this is a wonderful opportunity. I can paint this mountainside. I can paint something abstract. I can paint myself. I can paint, you know, just this blade of grass. And that is what life is like. That Camus version of life being inherently meaningless is a great opportunity for any of us to be the kind of person to a certain extent that we want to be. OK, so this is very, very exciting because we’re not really taught. I mean, you’re taught in school that you could do anything you want, and that’s kind of a lie. But in terms of you can be the kind of person you want to be morally, that everyone does have that capacity to be. And we’re all going to make mistakes. And that’s what restitution is for. OK, so let me ask you why you conceptualize that as meaningless and why it is that because it sounds to me like the meaning of what you mean by meaningless is something like the freedom to choose the direction. Yes, correct. But you’ve already made it clear that you don’t regard that. OK, so back to the Exodus story. I’ll tell you something that also that happens in Exodus. Very interesting. So when God enables Moses to stand up to the Pharaoh, he informs him that there are certain words he should use. He says, let my people go. Right. Was very famous phrase, but that’s not what he says. He says, let my people go so they may worship me in the wilderness. And that’s that’s very much relevant to this issue of subsidiarity, because what it posits is that there’s a form of escape from tyranny that isn’t well, I would say an archaic hedonism. Let’s try that out. Right. Which is what happens when the golden calf gets worshiped. Right. It’s that everybody. Reverts to immediate gratification and everything descends into hell. It’s an ordered freedom. And that’s a vision of ordered freedom. That’s the proper worship in the desert. And that’s the alternative to tyranny and slavery. And that ordered freedom seems to me to be something like the service of the principle that allows for voluntary ascent across the broadest possible range of circumstances. Right. And that would be a very good. Is there a difference then in your argument for anarchism and the libertarian argument for a radically restricted government? Like dovetail? Yes. Six months. OK. So what do you mean? Meaning this minarchist delusion is completely incoherent. There’s no such thing as a minimal government. And we’ve run this experiment. The Constitution was designed to create the smallest government possible and ended up creating the largest government that’s ever existed. So if you’re going so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Talking about Plato versus Aristotle. So you think it’s inevitable that the government just. I don’t think so. That’s what the data tells us. So, you know, one of the things that happens in the old test. And by the way, before the ink on the Constitution was dry, people were going to jail for violating the first for free speech. So it didn’t even last five years before the sedition laws were being passed. Well, no, in the Old Testament, the Israelites, once they escaped from the Pharaoh, call out to God continually for a king. Yes. And God says, no, you don’t want a king. And the Israelites say, yeah, we really want a king. And God says, no, you actually don’t want a king. What you want to do is take responsibility for your own lives. And the Israelites go, no, we want a king. Right. And so so so that’s your point. Clean your room. Yeah. Well, the thing what I’ve realized more and more clearly, too, is that part of the reason that you and this is an ethical requirement, I would say, and this is part of why I was struggling with RAND’s conceptualization, but is that every bit of responsibility that you don’t pick up for yourself. Tyrants will take it. Oh, yes. That’s like one hundred. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So that’s also that’s really the core problem with the utopian delusion is that because you could just imagine, you know, you can hear you can see. I’ve seen whiny tiktokers bitch about the fact that they have to go to work and their complaint is, well, why doesn’t the government we’re rich enough so I could be provided with a universal basic income? And I think, well, if you don’t have the imagination to see that if the government made you so dependent or encouraged you, enticed you to become so dependent that now you’re dependent on that universal basic income. If you can’t see that as the door opening to a tyranny so absolutely pervasive, you could hardly imagine it. Then you’re just not thinking because of course that would happen. Right. But a lot of people don’t want to be free. They want to be in that cage. We see it nowadays where people are desperate to have covid restrictions back and they’re wearing masks. Yeah, well, that’s a false security. Right. Yeah. It’s also a cue that you’re part of the in-group. It’s a very clear visual signal that you’re one of the good guys because I’m wearing. Yeah, well, that’s a form. That’s a form of security, too, in a form of unearned moral of an unearned moral virtue. 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They don’t care about status. They don’t. OK, that’s fine. That’s fine. You can imagine some people would concern themselves with security and other people. Yes, correct. That’s fine. That’s fine. And both of those could be illusory and unearned. Correct. OK, so obviously there’s an orientation that isn’t that right. That’s an alternative to that that you would find admirable. Yes. OK, so here’s one of the things that I’ve been deriving. I’m writing this book on the on the biblical corpus called We Who Wrestle with God, and I’ve been trying to understand the nature of the ethos that’s being presented. OK, so one of the things I would say, there’s two elements to the ethos. One is that you sacrifice the short term for the long term. Right. So that’s a time preference issue. Yes. In fact, that’s the definition of sacrifice. So part of what the Old Testament is about is an inquiry into the form of sacrifice that’s most pleasing to God. And it’s clearly something like a long term sacrifice, right, as you put up with the privations of the moment to ensure… Riches in heaven. Yeah, exactly. So it’s actually a time frame that’s extended out into eternity. Yes. Right, which is a very interesting thing. I mean, I’m not even sure what to make of that. Is the proper time frame infinite? Like, is that how you should be regarding the echoing of each of your actions? Because the answer to that could hypothetically be yes. Well, this is a big distinction between Judaism and Christianity, or at least as I was taught in Yeshiva, where we were taught that this whole… When I went to church for the first time with a bunch of friends in the Midwest, they’d never met a Jewish person before, so they started interrogating me. I didn’t have a lot of the answers. And one of the points is Judaism is not at all thinking about the afterlife, because the way we’re taught is this life is a beautiful gift from the Creator. And if you’re looking… If he’s giving you this amazing meal and you’re like, what’s for dessert? It’s almost spitting in his face. So appreciate this gift you’ve given and do the most you can with it in accordance with his witness. And let him worry about the dessert. He knows what he’s doing. Right. Well, William Blake would have a good objection to that idea, I would say, because his transcendent vision was to see eternity in a great of sand, right? So that instead of replacing the present with the forestalled and suffering, the error that you just described is you integrate the eternal into the moment. Yes. Right. Right. And then, well, you see echoes of that in the gospel insistence that Christ has, that the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, but men will not see it. Right. So it isn’t something… Like it’s ambiguous because it’s also what happens in the infinite future. But it isn’t only that. It’s what happens in the infinite future that’s infused into the current state. There’s very different kinds of Christianity and how they approach it. Right. Right. Right. Well, and it’s a complicated problem because, you know, one of the things we’ve talked about today is the notion of time frame. And the fact that as you mature, and this is actually the definition of maturation, is that your time frame expands, right? So that you’re trying to calculate the proper path across the broadest possible variety of iterations. But I just also feel very, very strongly that this is this life as we have it, no matter what your religious view is, not a dress rehearsal. Right. And don’t take it lightly. And no matter what your faith is, God put you on this earth for a reason. And don’t just be like, whatever, I’ll worry about it, you know, after. In the afterlife. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can see that the exaggeration of that viewpoint leads to the Marxist criticism that religion is just the opiate of the masses, as you can suffer all you need to now because your reward in the afterlife will be infinite. Yeah. Well, I… Right. No, no, it seems to me that it has something much more to do at a more profound level with this notion of infusing the moment with eternality is that… and Nietzsche kind of caught on to that to some degree, right? Because when he was trying to work out what you would be motivated by, if you actually, what would you say, express what he described as the will to power properly, that you would try to live every moment so that if you were destined to have to relive that moment for eternity, you would say yes to it. Right. So, yeah, yeah. So that is a constant. You see, and you see this in the Sermon on the Mount too, though, because what Christ basically says in the Sermon on the Mount is that you should orient yourself towards the highest possible good, both transcendentally and communally, but then you should concentrate intently on the moment. Right, right. And then that brings eternity into the present moment. Yes. Do what you can with what you have. And you have that opportunity every single day. Right. And that’s what presents… Well, and I actually think that that is the reality that presents itself. Yes, I agree. What we see, your metaphor of being on a mountain with the easel in front of you, is a metaphor that if… So you climb the mountain, now you can see everywhere. Right. So that’s a transcendental place. And so your metaphoric claim in that imagery was that if you climb to the place where you can see everything, that what presents itself in front of you is something like a blank canvas. Now, you associated that with meaninglessness, but that’s a strange association because I would associate that with the deepest of all possible meanings is that you have the ability to participate in creation itself, essentially. So why do you… Why does it… Because the canvas is blank and there’s no wrong answer per se. Well, there might be an answer that violates the principle of voluntary ascent. Sure. And it might be that you’re going to draw a painting that looks like complete garbage. Right. But the point is, this is an opportunity and this is an opportunity that’s uniquely yours and this is not something to take lightly. OK, so but still, why meaningless? This is Camus’ word. Right. He says life is inherently meaningless, meaning this idea that you have to live for the sake of society. Right. OK, I see. So you see that as a rebellion against an arbitrary moral code, essentially. And that’s one of his books is called The Rebel. So, yes, yes. Yeah. OK, OK, OK. So that’s right. All right. So I would see that as a variant of what the insistence that you should follow the spirit instead of the dogma. Yes. You don’t substitute dogma for spirit. Correct. OK, OK. Look, that’s a good place to end, actually. And unfortunately… You never said the second thing. You said there were two things. Oh, yes. Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, yes. So sorry. Absolutely. OK. Well, so so the sacrifice there has… See, the question that emerges in the Old Testament corpus is what’s the nature of the optimized sacrifice? Right. And it is it’s something like it’s something like we’ve discussed already. It’s the sacrifice. It’s the ultimate sacrifice of the narrow self to the transcendental self. And this is where I was having trouble with Rand because I wasn’t sure how she organized the transcendental self. We’ve already defined it like the transcendental self is the self. One of the ways of thinking about it is the self that enables you to establish a voluntary relationship, even with yourself across long spans of time, while simultaneously doing that with other people who are also voluntarily doing it. Right. There’s a pattern there. This is why the meaningless thing got me a bit, because if there’s a pattern of voluntary assent that’s optimal, which is what you’re striving for in this anarchism, then it then that’s not meaningless. It’s just structured in a very complex and sophisticated way that can’t be reduced to a simple dogma. Correct. And also it starts to be transcendental. We’re still talking about her 40 years after she died. So her mission has been accomplished. Right. And getting her works and engaging. Right. Well, that’s that’s the thing about, you know, if your work is infused with something approximating eternal truth, right, which means that it would highlight certain archetypal realities, those be objective realities in her phraseology, then it’s going to last because it’s part of the tradition that lasts and the tradition that lasts is a reflection of games that can be played iteratively and voluntarily. Yes. OK. OK. OK. So that’s even a better place to end. OK. You are welcome. All right. All right. So it turns out that we agree. That’s very, very annoying. I love being annoying. It’s my brand. All right, sir. Very good to talk to you.