https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=M1ieymZMs5g
When I look at what’s going on in this country, I think that the backbone of any society is the family. I think that’s the strength of any society. And when I say it’s under attack, I think it’s under attack in part unintentionally by technology and in part because there are people that are pushing narratives in current society that have nothing to do with reality, have nothing to do with science, have nothing to do with fact, nothing to do with history. They’re just running an agenda that’s very self-referential and it is not in our best interest at all to sit silently by and allow these people to hijack what’s going on, the narrative of this country. And I’ll tell you further that I believe that if we don’t speak up this, I call it the tyranny of the fringe. I think if we don’t speak up, they’re going to hijack and start taking over. They’re gonna take over language, they’re gonna take over priorities and how those priorities are pursued. And I hear I’m talking about things that I think could absolutely undermine society, like this equality of outcome concept. To me, I can’t think of anything more destructive to a society than teaching everybody that we’re going to work towards an equality of outcome. That’s been tried. We’ve got 100,000 corpses to prove that doesn’t work. And so I think that we’ve been just same in America and in Canada has been built on a meritocracy where hard work was rewarded, talent was rewarded, added value was rewarded. And now all of a sudden we’re violating some of the most fundamental principles of the psychology. Just simply don’t reward bad behavior. Don’t support things you don’t wanna see more of. This is Psych 101, but it seems like people skip that course. It seems like those that are trying to run some of these agendas don’t understand that you have to have an insight into how people are motivated, what gets them passionate, what gets them moving forward. And when I see these things happening, I say, well, somebody’s gotta step up and call this out for what it is, which is lunacy. And, but people are three times as unwilling to speak up now as they were in 1950. I mean, the number of people unwilling to take the risk is tripled since 1950. Okay, so let me walk through these things again. I’ll lay out a bit of my understanding and then if you could push back and elaborate on that, that would be helpful. So it seems to me with regard to family, so human beings are unique biologically because of the unbelievably extended dependency period of our children. And so we have a particular reproductive strategy. Other creatures have that reproductive strategy to some degree, but we are the ultimate exemplars of low reproductive rate, high investment strategies. And it seems to me that the corollary of that is that raising children is sufficiently challenging and difficult and also important that one person can’t do it well on average. And so the rule seems to be both morally and perhaps arguably biologically that the nuclear family is the necessary minimum of social arrangement that allows for propagation. It’s something like that. And so if we fragment the family below the level of the nuclear, then things fall apart. Now, maybe the nuclear family is also too fragmented, but we can start with it as a minimal basis. And so any attempt to, for example, put forward the claim that all familial structures are of equal value is counterproductive if it’s the case that raising children is so complex that a minimum of two people have to engage in it. So that’s on the family side. On the free speech side, I don’t think there’s any difference between free speech and thought fundamentally. Thought can be awkward because critical thought requires that people dispense with their foolish ideas and that can be painful. And people who push the no offense agenda would like to believe that we can think and we can think critically without any emotional consequences. And I don’t think that’s true because it’s actually painful to have your ideas exposed as foolish and then to dispense with them. And so we seem to have entered a situation where compassion for short-term consequences means that we’re willing to allow foolish things to propagate even though that will cause long-term catastrophe. And there’s a technical description of morality in there too, which I think you kind of point to when you talk about your working principles. Don’t reward bad behavior, support conduct. You do not value, for example, that’s an injunction not to let foolish things occur in the present even if stopping them causes some emotional disruption because then worse things will happen in the future. And then the last one is faith. And faith is a hard thing to defend in some ways because people say faith in what? But my sense is that we have to move forward in faith because we’re ignorant. And that means that we have to bet on some things rather than others. And so the question there starts to become, what is it that we should bet on? And so with regard to faith, how do you negotiate that? You’re a scientifically oriented thinker as well. And so when you’re making the case that if faith is under attack, we’re in trouble, how do you justify that claim? Well, for me, I think there are some things that we know, there are some things we don’t know, there are some things that we can’t know, and we have to kind of sort those out. And that’s where faith comes in. I think back, scientifically, there was a time that we didn’t have the instrumentation to see a molecule. That didn’t mean it didn’t exist. We just didn’t have the instrumentation to observe it. And I’m the same way about what you were saying about thoughts. I guess if I was gonna categorize myself value-wise from a professional standpoint, it would lean more toward cognitive behaviorists than anything. And in cognitive behaviorism, we treat thoughts as behaviors because they are observable to a public of one. And so the fact that it is an observable event, even if to just a public of one, I tend to treat those as behaviors. So I think we have to look at what our thoughts are and think about, okay, we see this. Are we being rational in our thought? Are we not being rational in our thought? And to me, it’s not irrational to recognize that we are not all-knowing. We are not the repository of all knowledge. And to assume that just because we can’t show you faith on an X-ray, just like we can a broken leg, is the same thing about depression. People don’t understand how psychometrics work. They think we’re measuring depression. And in fact, we’re not. What we’re doing is saying, we’re gonna give you these psychometrics. And what we’re gonna do is tell you that you have an awful lot in common with people who have been observed to be depressed. They have higher suicidality. They spend more time crying. They spend more time with flat affect or whatever. So we can’t tell you you’re depressed, but we can tell you you answered these items consistent with an awful lot of people who are depressed that we have observed. And so, again, there’s a certain extrapolation from that that we have to rely on. We can’t measure it like we do with an X-ray or an MRI with a brain scan. And it’s not a big leap to me to say that I do have faith. I mean, I am a Christian. I’ve never seen a conflict between that and my approach to science. I just look at this as something that we don’t yet have observable measurement for, just like we didn’t for the molecule or other smaller units of function. So I don’t have trouble reconciling that, but I guess I take it on faith, which is kind of defining something by itself. And I know that’s circular in nature, but it works for me. And I think an awful lot of people find comfort in the belief system that there is a higher power that I choose to call God that is kind of involved in our lives on as active a basis as we want to acknowledge. And I’m one of those Christians, Jordan, that believes in pray to God, but row for the shore. So that’s why I don’t see it as conflict. I’m still going to do everything I can do. I’m still gonna work as hard as I can work. I’m gonna do everything because I believe that if there is a God and I believe there is, then I think I’ve been given certain gifts, talent, skills, abilities, and free will to do what I can and will do. So to me, I don’t see that there is equity in creating a conflict between science and faith. So I’m gonna elaborate on the faith idea here too, because you pointed out that because we’re ignorant, we have to rely on our judgment to move forward. And we’re permanently ignorant because we actually can’t predict the future. The future is actually not predictable. The world is not deterministic, and we know this for a number of reasons, many of which are scientific. So we have to move forward in faith. And so the monotheistic hypothesis is that there’s an ultimate unity, and also that that’s what we should have faith in. And so I wanna run something by you and you tell me what you think about this. So there’s an autobiographical account in the gospels of one of Christ’s reactions to a particular question. And so he’s being tormented by the scribes and the Pharisees and the lawyers. So nothing’s really changed. The Pharisees are hypocrites, the scribes are academics, and the lawyers, well, they’re still lawyers. And what they’re essentially trying to do continually in the gospel account is to trap Christ into making a heretical statement so that they can have him arrested and destroyed. And so they’re attempting to reputation savage, essentially. And so at one point, this is a very famous scene, and I’m sure you know it, one of his opponents challenges Jesus to describe which of the commandments is the primary commandment. And the hope there is that he’ll pick one, and by picking one will denigrate the others. And because he’s denigrating the others in comparison, they can bring them up on charges of heresy. And he says something quite remarkable. He says that the 10 commandments are manifestations of an underlying unity of moral conceptualization, and that they circulate around a particular theme, and you can express the theme quite concisely in a two-fold manner. You should aim at what’s best, God. You should align yourself with the highest possible aim. That’s number one, so that orients you. And then number two, you should treat other people as though, as you would like to be treated, you should put yourself in their position and work for that harmonious unity that would emerge if you treated other people the way you would want to be treated if you were treating yourself properly. So it’s interesting. So really what he’s doing, it’s so interesting. He’s taking a cloud of conception, which is the 10 commandments, which were themselves derived from an analysis. It’s an analysis, like you said, you conducted in some ways by listening to the tens of thousands of comments that you’ve received from the people who’ve been watching and listening to what you’ve been doing. You accumulated all of this cries from the people, let’s say. You derive a set of principles as a consequence of that. But those principles themselves orient around something that’s central. That central point of orientation, I think, is equivalent to God, and it’s also equivalent to what we should have faith in. And so I would say, you tell me what you think of it. This is where the question is. Now you outlined a set of problems, attack on free speech, faith, and family, and then you identified 10 working principles. So what do you think of the idea that that which you have faith in, I’m speaking personally here, that which you have faith in is equivalent to the spirit that all of these principles point to. You see what I mean, that there’s an underlying unity there that makes those principles coherent. Does that strike you as plausible?