https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZoO3e05lPtA
It’s quite clear that we need a story along with our politics. And that’s because the human heart demands an adventure. And that’s especially true if you’re young. You know, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who’s a genius, a recognized genius, he has a stage of development. He posited the last stage of development in adolescence as the messianic stage. It isn’t talked about much in developmental psychology literature. I mean, Piaget was actually trying to reconcile religion and science. That was his life’s work. And he investigated the development of ethics empirically in an attempt to bridge the gap between the is and ought. And he was very, very serious about that. It drove his whole enterprise. In any case, he pointed out that there is a stage of development in late adolescence that he called the messianic stage, where people are looking for, I suppose, they’re catalyzing their identity at the broadest possible level, which we would describe as religious. I don’t care if you’re religious or not. That’s irrelevant to this discussion. At the highest level of generality, your identity, the best language to describe your identity, happens to be religious, which is why we have a religious language, speaking purely from a psychological perspective. And what that means is that there has to be a call to adventure in order to keep people motivated to move forward in their life, both as individuals and as members of society. And look, George Orwell really knew this about the fascists, for example. Orwell was a profound anti-fascist. I mean, profound in the emotional sense and also in the analytic sense. But he recognized very early and had the courage also to point out that the Nazis had conjured up a mythos that was unbelievably powerful and that the rationalist West had nothing in its armament to contend with that. And fascism, in some senses, it’s more difficult to mount a rational defense against than communism because the fascists do use nonverbal appeal and Hitler used fire and imagery and fashion and architecture and art and culture in the broadest sense to move his political platform forward. The leftists, especially in the US, are quite good at the dramatic end of politics. You know, and the Antifa riots, that sort of thing, the Black Lives Matter protests, they’re appealing to young people. And you can imagine, I always remember, I saw this kid in Montreal once, he was about 17, and he was dressed in punk clothes, he was a big kid, six foot five, like a big, powerful kid. And he was standing on the corner of this outdoor shopping mall with two pink shopping bags in his hand. And he looked like a fool, and it was partly because he felt like a fool, because there he was, this monster, standing there with these pink shopping bags. And I looked at him and I thought, geez, you know, if you went and offered him an overseas adventure, a warlike overseas adventure, he’d drop those damn bags and he’d be gone in a second. And no wonder. And so it’s incumbent on us to realize that that call to adventure is necessary and that it has to be built in some manner into our political thinking. And the left is very, very good at that. They’re much better, the radical left, they’re much better than the left centrist, and they’re much better than the centrist right. Now, Trump managed that to some degree with his populism, but not to the same degree as the intellectuals, the dramatic intellectuals on the left. I think that this points to some serious problems at the heart of sort of classical liberalism. And I consider myself a conservative socially and a classical liberal when it comes to the role of government. But it does point to some real problems with the heart of classical liberalism and the rationalist enlightenment side of the argument that there is no greater appeal to the human heart other than sort of what works in pragmatism. And there has to be something on the other end of that. I want to ask you about that, the sort of lack of meaning that people are looking for, particularly young men. And it really is a big thing that young men seem to have lost meaning. Postmodernism killed the scientific rationalist world. And the postmodernists have decided to substitute for that a certain utopian vision of the remolding of American society in terms of what they call equity, but really amounts to tribal dynamics. And you see this over and over, the radical left pushing its own version of utopianism. Classical liberals have been wrong-footed, I think, by the need for something more fulfilling, which is why classical liberalism always relied on an unspoken assumption that you were going to find meaning in your family, you were going to find meaning in religious community, you were going to find meaning in bettering your social life outside of government. But when that unspoken understanding just dissipated, when religion started to fall apart, all that was left was, well, let’s just be rational with one another. There’s not much inspiring there. And I think that’s why you see that across the board, a drive toward irrationalism, a certain level of romanticism dominating the society to the point where irrationalism is much more prized than rationalism. If you make a rational point, if you cite data, very often this is now considered not only impolitic, but damaging and dangerous. The other thing that ideology does, and the radical leftists are also very good at this, is that it provides you with a convenient locale for the existence of evil. And so if you reflexively identify the patriarchy with evil, well, first of all, that’s a powerful idea. It’s independent of its broad merit. It’s true. Now, it’s not the only truth and it’s not the complete truth, but it’s true. The reason it’s true is because every hierarchical system, hierarchical system degenerates, tends to degenerate in the direction of power. And all hierarchical systems are less than they could be. And that’s partly because of the possibility that power and deceit will corrupt them, but also partly because we’re willfully blind and deceitful in our own personal lives. And so when you tell young people that the cause of the trouble they see around them in the world, and maybe even the disquiet in their own heart, is the malevolent inadequacy of their society, that rings true. And they don’t hear the rest of the story. And it’s the rest of the story that I’ve been trying to tell. They don’t hear the story that, yeah, don’t forget about the evil and corruption that exists in your own heart. And don’t forget about the fact that nature, this wondrous goddess as portrayed by the anti-human environmentalists, and by that I don’t mean all environmentalists, by the way, that wonderful goddess nature is also trying to make you ill and kill you at all times. But the story that corruption exists in hierarchical structure, and that that’s a consequence of the malevolent use of power and deceit, that’s true. So it’s very motivating, especially if you’re young and you’re looking for an adventure. Now, it’s also too convenient, which is one of its tremendous dangers, because unless you’re taught to look within and identify the malevolence there as the primary moral obligation, then you now have an excuse and a moral justification to take out all of your negative emotion, your hostility, your resentment, everything about you that’s unexamined on the demonic enemy. And of course, that degenerates with extraordinary rapidity, as we’ve seen over and over and over. So it’s up to the centrists on both sides to deal with it.