https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6SRyuvm4tRk
What seems to provide people with stabilization in their life and hope is the fostering of a hierarchical network of social interactions. So that it’s pretty hard to be sane and to have a functional identity without being married or the equivalent if you’re an adult. You need someone who’s a long-term partner because otherwise your life is a mess of loneliness or short-term chaotic relationships and it’s very difficult to be sane and happy when that’s happening. It’s very hard to maintain your equilibrium unless you have at least some family, right? Some siblings, parents that you have a bonded relationship with, that you’re in interaction with, that you have joint projects with. You have to have friends. You should be involved in a network of economic exchange. You should be pursuing some civic responsibility. Maybe you have a religious obligation that’s a different way of thinking about it than than a religious faith, right? Is that you have an obligation to pursue and participate in some spiritual tradition and it has to be a tradition too because otherwise it just spirals off into a kind of new age insanity. And it isn’t obvious to me that people can live happy lives because people say they want to be happy which I don’t really think is also true. I think people want to have an adventure and they don’t want to be miserable and that’s not exactly the same as being happy. But I don’t think that you can pursue any of that stably without being embedded in those in that multitude of hierarchical social relationships and that’s all dependent on responsibility not on short-term self-gratification and a kind of atomistic hedonism. And if you explain that to young people they figure it out right away especially if you ally that with the idea of developing the kind of embeddedness in the social community that helps sustain you in the face of tragedy because what do you have when things go wrong? You’ve got the people you love and who love you. You’ve got your friends. You’ve got hopefully your career and maybe your creative your creative endeavors. You have the service you can provide to others at the level of civic responsibility and all of that none of that’s been discussed in some real sense for about 60 years and all of that’s core to the kind of identity that stops people from being absolutely anxiety-ridden and hopeless and conservatives really have all that within their grasp if they wanted to take it and it sounds like that’s the sort of thing that you’re working on pursuing. That’s exactly right and I think we do need to take it and I think that there’s a vacuum created and it should be filled with what I regard to be very simple truths. I mean I think this the simple truths are the most profound and what you just articulated there is is exactly right. I believe it’s impossible by the way to divorce it from a religious worldview let’s say the Judeo Christian worldview for example because that is where we find our meaning. I think what you just described is God’s created order for things for the individual for the family for society. I think we are made in the image of God. The founders of this country believe that and in fact indeed in our declaration they proclaimed it to be a self-evident truth something that you cannot not know that God is the one that created us and he gives us all the same rights and God created us to serve. We find our greatest meaning. I mean that the Bible is filled with this admonition that if you are to be great you are to serve and the greatest is the greatest servant and so that’s where you find your value. He intended the family to be for obvious reasons the first unit of community and upon that we build a healthy and vibrant society. You know I listed human dignity as the seventh of the core principles but I say in the book that I’m finishing up that that really could be the first it is the foundation of it all because it goes back to the beginning that we really are of individual value and worth and that is because God gave us that worth. By the way your value is completely unrelated in any way to the color of your skin or what zip code you live in or where you went to school or where your talents are. Your value is inherent because it’s given to you by your creator. Well I was just going to say Chesteron famously said that America is the only nation in the world that was founded upon a creed and it’s listed with almost theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence and that is our creed and in short summary it’s the second paragraph of the declaration and that our nation was built upon that idea. As you note rightly we began to deviate from that idea about 50 or 60 years ago or so a little bit longer and that is why we’re at the hopeless result that we are so I believe we have to get back to those founding principles because it’s good for everyone. Well I also think that conservatives have done a pretty poor job of defending that so you see this vitriolic accusation arising from the radical left that the West in general and the United States perhaps in particular was founded fundamentally on a doctrine that was akin to the promotion of something like oppression and slavery. Now that’s a typical leftist trope because the leftists think every form of social organization is founded on nothing but exploitation and but what disturbs me about that is that it’s also counterproductive in relationship even to the stated goals of the leftists because the way I look at things and I can’t see how this is wrong is that the careless self-axiom at the careless self-evident axiom of human social interaction is something like if I can force you to do something I have the right to do it which is well if I’m more powerful than you and I can compel you to do my bidding why the hell shouldn’t I and that means that as Hobbes pointed out let’s say the philosopher Thomas Hobbes rather than Jean-Jacques Rousseau that that vision is predicated on an idea that in the state of nature human beings aren’t noble savages it’s more like life is nasty brutish and short and you know I don’t believe that Hobbes was 100% right nor do I believe that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was 100% right I think we have an implicit capacity for evil and an implicit capacity for good and that we’re battling between that all the time but I cannot read the history of the West Great Britain in particular and then the U.S. emerging out of that context as anything but the struggle of the idea that all men have intrinsic all human beings as you said regardless of creed or color or ethnicity or intelligence or any local attribute whatsoever that because of that intrinsic dignity the anything that smacks of slavery and compulsion is in fact fundamentally ethically wrong and you know atheistic types who go after the idea that the dignity of human beings are is predicated on something like their formation in the image of God still have the problem of trying to sort out then what is it that gives people that intrinsic dignity and worth because if you abandon that as a self-evident principle so that would be as a fundamental religious or sacred principle that’s in some sense independent even of your religious belief it’s still a deep and foundational principle that presumption of intrinsic value that fights against the very institution of slavery and as far as I can tell that’s exactly the reason why slavery was eradicated despite essentially despite its unbelievable prevalence throughout the entire course of human history so the leftists in some sense decry the use of power and corruption and claim that the west and the united states are fundamentally slave predicated oppressive states but what they fail to contend with and what conservatives haven’t done a good job of defending is that that’s not only a lie it’s the opposite of the truth is that these are these western democracies that privilege human dignity are the only societies in the entire history of humanity that have ever managed to make a moral case against the principle that might makes right