https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4FYKk0dPuj4
conservatives are reacting to when they see what the Marxists are trying to build is that you’re trying to grab everything for your group, whereas a traditional conservative society says, no, the just balance of honors among the different groups, that’s what makes people feel good. That’s what makes people loyal to the system. Otherwise, there is no loyalty to the system. There’s just oppression. Yeah, well, the Marxists also have the advantage that I would say they have a twofold advantage. First of all, they can appeal to envy, and they’re unbelievably good at that. I mean, I think the fundamental motivating force of Marxism is envy. Now, it’d be a close race between that and desire for untrammeled power, but we could certainly start with envy. And it’s very easy for people to be envious of anyone who has more of anything than they do. And one of the things that I’ve really been struck by on the left is the constant presupposition that if someone has more than me, they got it because they’re using power in oppressive way. It’s always the cutoff between the oppressor and the oppressed is whatever status I happen to have as a left wing intellectual, because I got what I have, honestly, and through hard work and diligence. But anybody who has more than me obviously took it from the people who are lesser than them. And so that’s definitely an appeal to envy. But there’s something underneath that, I think, that is more powerful, which is that, and this is a criticism that conservatism is susceptible to, is that hierarchies do tend to degenerate in the direction of arbitrary power when they degenerate. And every hierarchy is degenerate to some degree, right? Because there’s a bit of corruption in everything. And so then the Marxists can point to the corruption, especially if they’re appealing to young people, and they can say, well, look at that person in that position of authority and the awful things they did that were oppressive and improper. Obviously, everyone who holds any position of authority is corrupt in some fundamental way. And then obviously, the whole system is corrupt. And that’s given that that critique of corruption has warrant in some sense, it’s not easy to differentiate and to say, no, look, guys, you got to think this through is that human institutions aren’t perfect. And you have to be awake all the time to make sure they don’t degenerate entirely. But that doesn’t mean that they’re fundamentally corrupt, you know, which is the claim, for example, that America was predicated on a positive view towards slavery. It’s like, well, obviously, when America was founded, slavery was thriving. And so there was a pro-slavery ethos that was part and parcel of the American project at that point. But the fundamental drive of the system, and all of the traditions upon which it was founded was that all men are created equal, men and women are created equal before God. And that was the principle that eventually won out. And it’s hard to teach young people, I think, to separate the wheat from the chaff when it’s so easy just to throw everything out, especially if there’s no immediate consequences, especially when you’re lauded for doing so and all your idiot teachers are telling you that’s the right thing to do. While today’s cups of coffee often come with hints of soy and social justice, our new coffee sponsor delivers an entirely different experience. It’s bold, strong, delicious, and overall as good as the causes it supports. I’m speaking, of course, about Black Rifle Coffee. Many of you know about Black Rifle already. 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Look, the reason that I bothered with the historical chapters in the conservatism book is because I think there’s a widespread misunderstanding about conservative thinkers, about Fortescue and Seldin and Burke, and for that matter, Washington and Adams and Hamilton. There’s kind of this assumption that if you’re conservative, then you just think that whatever exists is fine and it doesn’t need to be repaired. When you actually read these sophisticated conservative thinkers, what you find is that none of them think this. The actual view is something much more like what you were describing, that there’s corruption in everything, but more than that, every good system decays, every good system runs down. This is an integral part, you just see this over and over again in Anglo-American conservative thinkers, is every system runs down, every system decays, and that’s just the way human societies are. The principal job of the conservative is not to hold on tight to whatever exists, it’s to look for restoration, it’s to identify what has become corrupt and decayed, and to look for a model either earlier in history or sometimes even just looking at the neighbors, the way that during the Polish revolution they looked to the British constitution for a model. The word restoration, it’s a lot like the word repentance. Restoration is kind of a national political repentance where you look at something and you say, look, this is decayed, we’ve gone off course, or there is an inherited evil that can no longer be tolerated and we have to fix it. The conservative’s job is to find a way to make that repair while strengthening the entire system as a whole. The example of slavery, I think, is always on a lot of people’s minds and I think for good reasons, but it’s important to notice that Britain succeeded in eliminating slavery on the basis of the common law in the 1770s without a revolution, without a civil war. What happened is that Lord Mansfield looked at the integration of the mercantile law over the previous century into the common law. In a lot of ways, that was very good, that’s what made it possible for Britain in a lot of ways to become a modern economy. But the idea that human beings could be bought and sold as slaves was imported into the common law by the mercantile law at the end of the 1600s. At a certain point, the jurists, the judges in Britain looked at this and said, what’s happening is we are corrupting ourselves, we’re corrupting our tradition by allowing this institution of slavery to be brought into our country. They eliminated it on the basis of British tradition, the English tradition. They said English common law does not uphold slavery. A person who is enslaved in England is always enslaved unfairly. Now the interesting thing is that the Americans, an important part of the Federalist Party’s platform during the American Revolution was bringing the English common law in as the law of the new national federal government. Jefferson opposed it, Madison opposed it, but the Federalist Party, the conservatives, they thought that they needed this common law inheritance. And America, in fact, does still have that common law inheritance until this day. Now, why is it that if the English could get rid of slavery without this abstract declaration that all men are created equal? Why is it that the Americans couldn’t do it? And I think part of this is an optical illusion. I think that the Americans could have done it, but the strength of liberalism in America’s founding and going forward comes from the fact that while Washington and his party were genuine conservatives, the American Constitution of 1787 is basically in many respects a restoration of the British Constitution. That’s what Washington and his party stood for. Jefferson and his party, Tom Payne, these really were enlightenment liberal radicals. And Jefferson is famous for saying things like repeatedly that one generation is a foreign country to the preceding generations, meaning that each generation owes nothing to the past. Each generation receives nothing from the past that can’t be simply overthrown and revised. And I think this brings us to the heart of what we’re facing today. You know, I just read a very interesting scientific paper that’s oddly relevant to this. It’s really revolutionary. I think it was published in Nature. And it showed, no, there’s this idea that’s common currency among evolutionary biologists that mutations are entirely random. And this turns out not to exactly be true. And so there’s a hierarchy of genetic stability. And the older the genes are that code for the properties of a given organism, the more likely those genes are to be restored to their original condition if a mutation does occur by DNA repair mechanisms.