https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GH51mnNoua8
I’ve gone around and spoken a large proportion of my audience as being young men, you know, under 30, something like that. And I’ve spoken to them a lot about responsibility. And what’s so odd about this is that of all the things that I’ve spoken about, because I can see the audience and I can feel how the audience is reacting, because I’m always paying attention to all of you insofar as I can manage that. So I get some sense of how what I’m saying is landing, you know, which you have to do if you’re going to speak effectively to people. And what happens is if I talk about responsibilities, everyone is silent, just like they are now. Silent and not moving, right? Focusing, attentive. Say, pick up your responsibility, pick up the heaviest thing you can and carry it. And the room goes quiet and everybody’s eyes open and I think, that always makes me break up. I was… I don’t know why I was speaking to an English journalist today. He was going to write an article in Spectator magazine and I was talking about this. And at the same point in the discussion, the same, I had the same emotional reaction. I don’t really understand it. I think it’s something, there’s something about it that’s so crucial because, you know, we’ve been fed this unending diet of rights and freedoms. And there’s something about that, especially, there’s something about that that’s so pathologically wrong. And people are starving for the antidote and the antidote is truth and responsibility, right? It isn’t because that’s what you should do in some, you know, in some… Some I know better or someone knows better for you what you should do since. It’s that, it’s that, it’s that, it’s that that’s the secret to a meaningful life and without a meaningful life then all you have is suffering and nihilism and despair and all of that and self-contempt. And that’s not good and so the man, it’s necessary for men to stand up and take responsibility. And they all know that and are starving for that message. And the message is more that that’s also a good thing to stand up and take responsibility because you’re cursed so much now from when you’re young with this notion that your active engagement with the world is part of what is destroying and undermining the planet and adding to the tyranny of the social systems. It’s like, how about not so much of that, hey? Because it’s too soul-deadening. It’s anti-human right to the core. And my sense instead is that, you know, if you were able to reveal the best of yourself to you in the world that you would be an overwhelming force for good. And that whatever errors might be made along the way would wash out in the works. And that’s the other thing that you see in the Abrahamic stories because Abraham is not a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination. He’s a real person and he makes mistakes. But it doesn’t matter. The overarching narrative is, you know, maintain your covenant with God and despite your inadequacies, then not only will you prevail, but your descendants will prevail. It’s like, great. That’s really good news, you know. So it’s been really something to see that in the stories. Thank you.