https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nPYIo2Pro7c
Became aware of the existence of a fundamental problem a Philosophical problem Over the last 30 years or so and I want to familiarize you with it a Bit because you need to know this it’s really important. It’s complicated But it’s really important because if we don’t get this right, we’re really in trouble And we might your country in particular you guys have such a day such a remarkable capacity to do the right thing eventually that Well, it’s something man, it’s that’s a lot better than not doing it at all And I think if people understand this the more people understand this clearly The more likely it is that nothing too terrible is going to happen Because things fall apart that shouldn’t fall apart What I have been studying for 40 years really I’ve always been obsessed in some sense with the motivation to commit atrocity in the service of belief and I wanted to understand that motivation primarily because I thought if I understood it I might be able to understand the counter to it You know because I always believe that if you understood something a problem You could work towards a solution 90% of the solution to a problem is clear formulation of the problem and so I became convinced that One of the pressing issues of the modern age if not the most pressing issue was The proclivity of states to degenerate into these hellish Regimes that motivated people to do the worst things imaginable and I regarded the fact that that happened as an unassailable fact Right a bedrock fact and it’s it’s an interesting kind of fact because what it meant for me I would say is that I became convinced that Convinced of the reality of evil and that’s what I was convinced of The reality of evil and that’s an interesting thing to become and you might ask yourself if you’re convinced of that and You might ask yourself in two ways Are you convinced or are you not convinced because both those have consequences if you are convinced Well, we’ll talk about the consequence of that in a minute, but if you’re not convinced, it means that well What’s your stance in relationship to? Mao or Stalin or or Auschwitz? Is that okay? Just another way of organizing a state. Is there no fundamental moral reality that such People and such systems violate Is that all just a social construction an arbitrary social construction is history only written by the victors? Etc, etc. That’s one concept. So you don’t take that seriously Don’t take the idea of evil as a fundamental reality seriously. That’s where you have to go intellectually ethically If you do take it seriously, well that presents another conundrum, which is What do you do about it maybe nothing I think nothing’s the wrong answer though