https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uMrx-euOgwU
What’s your best advice for Millennials slash Gen Z’s who want a better future? But it seems like the majority of people our age want communism. I don’t, you know, I don’t think the majority do. I don’t think that’s right. There is definitely a strong tilt among young people towards a kind of utopian egalitarianism. And there’s a very powerful set of ideas that pushes that notion forward. That’s kind of a pastiche of envious corruption and postmodern philosophy, both integral and corrupt and a very careless kind of Marxism that produces a unidimensional explanation for all the ills of the world. You know, it’s power rules all human relations. That’s the first axiom. And history is best read as an eternal combat between the victimizing oppressors and the victimized oppressed. And you can read your relationship in a marriage through that lens and your relationship with your friends and all commercial enterprise and every aspect of political striving and all religious, the entire religious enterprise and all literature. It’s like, you know, you got one cognitive trick, which you were taught by half wits in 15 minutes. And now, you know, you got a lever to change the whole world. That’s pretty sad. But it’s attractive, you know, and how do you get people out of that? Well, if you’re trying to get out of that, then you should get educated. You know, that’s what education does. It gives you a more sophisticated view of the world. It replaces your old low resolution, one size fits all theory with a more differentiated and noble vision. That was the whole purpose of a humanities education. That was the purpose of religious education. That’s the purpose of a literary education. So read great books. And you might say, well, great books are just people who decided what the great books were were just those in power. It’s like, that’s a stupid theory. I mean, it doesn’t even make any sense on the surface of it. You think there was some conspiracy back in Davis in like 1750 where a group of like white patriarchs sat down and said, well, I’m going to go to the And all these other authors know we won’t let anyone read them. That isn’t what happened. What happened is that some books became disproportionately influential. And those were the ones that rose to the top and all the others disappeared, just like some great works of art emerged as memorable and sanctified. Those are the ones we have in our museums. And most of the draws just stripped away. And you know, that’s the whole point of the whole thing. It’s a collective manifestation. It’s a manifestation of the collective human spirit driven by I don’t know what an orientate orientation towards peace and truth and justice and beauty, something like that. Just like the claim that the U.S. was established on the principles of slavery is you couldn’t come up with a more preposterous theory than that. Of course, the U.S. Like most societies was contaminated by tyranny and the proclivity to exploit other people, obviously, but every society has had that proclivity and very few have ever managed to transcend it at all. And you’re living in a country where that was mostly transcended. You know, that’s something. And it was it was a system of the world that was going to be the most You know, that’s something. And it was it was it was the spirit of what would you call the spirit that proclaimed the divine integrity and worth of the individual, regardless of social status that that that that most properly founded the free countries of the West. And that’s a viable. And laudable spirit. And you need to learn about that spirit and you lean. You need to learn what it means to learn about it and how to live that. And then then you won’t be interested in anything as pathetic as Marxism. Jesus dismal, not to mention, you know, genocide Lee murderous. So I think we can do better. What do we do with millennials? Well, you have to tell people a better story fundamentally, you know, like I know that Florida, for example, is trying to ban critical race theory. And I’ve spoken with Christopher Rufo and who’s kind of leading that charge and also with Ron DeSantis. And the concern I have about that is. How do you ban something you can’t define? You know, it’s like trying to nail jello to the wall and you might be able to, you know, stop people from having drag Queen story hour, let’s say. And perhaps that should be stopped and and perhaps not. Like, maybe the stupidity should just play itself out. But well, you never know. Right. Because things that can’t last won’t. And so although they can do a lot of damage in the meantime, the problem with the the banning approach is that it easily degenerates into a censorship. And I can’t distinguish CRT from Marxism. So we’re not going to let people discuss Marxism. And then it’s kind of that shades kind of into a utopian socialism. And so then what? But we’re not going to talk about anything left wing. That doesn’t seem like a very good idea. You know, and so what will happen, I think, is that that attempt to censor and ban will just produce a host of associated tyrannical problems on the right instead of the left. And you have to battle these things out in the spiritual domain, let’s say, in the domain of ideas. You defeat bad ideas. You defeat a bad story with a better story. And you invite people to participate in the better story. You don’t impose it on them. You say, look, that’s one way you can look at the world. And, you know, it explains some things because it’s certainly the case that corrupt societies and corrupt relationships are based on power. And so the notion that you can use power as an explanatory principle is a valid one. Just like Freud showed, you could use sex as an explanatory principle. You can get a long ways with one principle, but you can’t get all the way. And plus it produces a pretty damn dismal world. If that’s the whole, what would you if that’s the whole spirit is just power and try acting that out and see how it goes. You know, try just using nothing but power in your marriage and see how popular that makes you. And so you have to tell people a better story, you know, and you want to tell them the greatest story that’s ever been told in truth. That’s really what you need to tell people. And then if they hear that and understand it, they’ll think, oh, I’d way I’d much rather do that than wander down into totalitarian hell, you know, blindly and maybe vengefully. You know, because people would. Bitter people would accept totalitarian hell if they could watch their neighbors roast. So and you know, that’s pretty harsh. But you know, 30 percent of East Germans were KGB informers. And if you had your eyes open a bit in Canada over the last two years, you saw pretty quickly that pretty decent percentage of your neighbors would wear masks for the rest of their lives if they were able to engage in the perverse delight of turning in their neighbors for their crimes. So.