https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ApAAkM19DNg
conservatives keep losing the left controls media universities and government how can conservatives be effective and how can they win they have tell better story fundamentally that’s it or and then I think not only do they have to tell a better story they have to act out a better story that’s the same with religious believers it’s like you want your God to win it’s like get your act together right you be a shining light on the hill for your faith and then that’s how you win you know and we shouldn’t even be thinking about winning in some real sense we should be thinking about how to make things better and so the conservative question is how how could we be more effective at making things better than those who don’t buy abide by the traditions we regard as valuable and that’s a real question it’s it’s very very difficult to sort that out one of the things I didn’t know that I was a conservative before everybody started telling me that I was but but apparently I am so and one of the one of the benefits of that is that there are conservative stories that are quite compelling and and they haven’t been told well for quite a long time and one of the maybe the core story that’s compelling on the conservative side is something like that meaning and responsibility are integrally linked and that’s not a story that’s been well told in our culture for at least at least since the mid-60s it’s just not told at all and I’ve noticed that that story has a universal impact on the audiences that I’ve been addressing to walk people through the notion for example that if you find yourself in dire straits at some point in your life that one of the arcs that you might have managed to build yourself will be constructed of the social relations made possible by the people for whom you took responsibility and everyone understands that as soon as you lay it out it’s like well of course that’s going to be the case obviously if you have been a credit if you have conducted yourself credibly in the eyes of the people you’ve interacted with the probability that they’re going to be hungry for the opportunity to reciprocate is very very high and so one core conservative message is something like meaning through responsibility and that’s a very very deep message I mean that’s that’s the idea of bearing your cross it’s the same idea it’s that the deeper the responsibility the more radical the meaning radical in terms of its capacity to transform and sustain and I think that’s just that’s just true it’s sort of it’s as soon as you think it through you understand it’s true and it’s quite the it’s quite the crazy idea know that your life would deepen and broaden in precise proportion to the degree that you were willing to take radical responsibility and that’s something you can experiment with and that’s something that’s a message conservatives should and could and should deliver but also more importantly act out that’s the fundamental issue is the acting out and I think that young people are they’re literally dying for that message because we are in a meaning crisis in some real sense cataclysmic consequence of the death of God let’s say what should orient you in life well certainly the the willingness to dare to accept radical responsibility that’s a good that’s a good answer to the question of how do you find meaning in life you could try just doing the best you possibly can for other people and I don’t mean in a sense of bitter self immolation you know that’s just not that’s not going to sustain itself it’s not a good strategy but you could just try that and see what happens like and you kind of know what’s going to happen because there’ll be people who take advantage of you but they even might learn with time anyone capable of shame is certainly going to be shamed by the realization that they’ve betrayed someone who’s been good to them insofar as there have any capacity for shame whatsoever even the worst of people can find a pathway to redemption through that kind of shame but that won’t even emerge unless there’s been someone who was good to them that they that they could betray now and one of the things that struck me from reading Carl Jung again like Swiss psychoanalyst who was a stunning genius he believed that he was very obsessed with what had happened in Germany in in the 1930s and 1940s and and then also with the emergence of the potential for nuclear annihilation after the Second World War and his hypothesis was something like we have to become as good as we are technologically powerful and right now we’re more technologically powerful than we are good and he believed that was in part because our technological enterprise had expanded in some sense exponentially since the since the dawn of the Scientific Revolution but that our ethical wisdom had stagnated or well stagnated is good enough and that’s not acceptable because as you you become more powerful you better become better because otherwise that power will your foolishness will you’ll be unable to control the power that you’ve developed and it will turn against you as a consequence of your own sin that’s a perfectly good way of thinking about it and so that struck me as highly credible especially after I’d read a lot about totalitarian states and the fact that the reason totalitarian states can maintain themselves so that would be definitely the use of power against our own power against ourselves the totalitarian state the reason those states sustain themselves is because every individual in those states lies about everything all the time so it’s a direct consequence of individual sin now that’s not all it is but it that’s that’s a lot of what it is that’s for sure and so I felt that the pathway forward into the world of unlimited human technological ability was through the radical renovation of the individual psyche as radical renovation as the technological renovation itself and we’re playing that out now we’re gonna find out probably in the course of most of our lifetimes whether or not we can manage that and we’re pretty technologically powerful and we’re getting more technologically powerful all the time and very very quickly and so that means we better get better fast at the same time and yeah and on the hardening thing I would say the hardening thing in that is that you know that’s not a matter of just constraining yourself because people think well you know how dull it is to be good there’s all these things that I would like to do that I no longer can it’s all constraint and walls it’s all regulations and rules and conservatives can come across as people who promote that viewpoint it’s all about constraint but that’s not right because there isn’t anything more adventurous than being good and there isn’t anything better than adventure and you might say well why is being good an adventure and one of the answers to that as well it’s really difficult and so that’s a plus it’s difficult in a voluntary sort of way it means you have to take yourself in hand right and that’s that’s a challenge but maybe you want a challenge it seems that you want a challenge and you might say you might observe that part of being good is saying what you believe to be true and you might say well why is that an adventure and the answer is well you don’t know what’s going to happen if you tell the truth right whatever happens when you tell the truth is whatever’s going to happen when you tell the truth you have to let go of the outcome you have to it’s an act of faith you have to presume if you’re going to tell the truth this is a very strange thing if you’re going to tell the truth you have to presume axiomatically that whatever happens when you tell the truth is the best thing that could have possibly happened sort of regardless of what happens and because sometimes you get in trouble for telling the truth in fact that’s why children lie right almost always they’d lie because they don’t want to get in trouble and then you might say to them well they might object well why shouldn’t I lie because I just get in trouble if I told the truth it’s like well the answer is because you’ll get a lot more trouble if you lie it’ll just take a lot longer to manifest itself but when it does it’ll be way worse and so you might as well take your lumps well well the hand that’s delivering the blow is still relatively mild rather than store it up and wait for the crushing blow that will definitely come for you if you stack up enough lies and so you tell the truth because you presume that whatever manifests itself as a consequence of the truth is the habitable order that is good that’s also a an axiom of the belief in the logos is that truth sets you free and the alternative to believing that is that to believe that falsehood sets you free it’s like fine you know try it out well what you see what we saw in the 20th century is that if falsehood rules then you have a totalitarian state that’s the definition of a totalitarian state everyone lies about everything to everyone all the time and that’s hell and you might say well I don’t believe in hell it’s like well have it your way visit North Korea and see if it’s real it’s real enough and you might say well it’s not eternal it’s like well you feel like it was if you lived there so and I’m not so sure it’s not eternal in some in some more fundamental sense as well because it’s always a place we could go and so and it’s always there as a possibility so and I don’t know what that means in the final analysis but I know what it means practically and politically you know in a tangible sense so