https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rAnDsVgaQVQ
One of the things that’s emerged, this is extremely interesting, one of the things that’s emerged on the cognitive neuroscience front recently, and the same things happened in the field of AI, is the realization that at the center of all of our concepts is an ideal. That’s actually how we categorize. We categorize just like Plato initially hypothesized. We literally categorize in relationship to an implicit ideal. I think you’re right. To even use the term family, and for that to be meaningful, there has to be an ideal. And the organization that I’ve started working with and helping put together has made it part of our formal propositional landscape that the ideal has to be something like stable, long-term, monogamous, heterosexual, child-centered couples. And now, the problem with the ideal, this is what the postmodernists have shaken their fists about forever, especially the French like Derrida and Foucault. The problem with the ideal is that it marginalizes, right? Because the more distant you are from the ideal, the less you can fit in. And so the question then arises, what do you do with the margin? And that’s also a question that’s so old that that was even dealt with in biblical times, by the way, the problem of the fringe or the margin. And the answer has to be something like, look, everybody falls short of the ideal. Like even a stable, married, heterosexual couple, lots of the times during their, say, 30-year marriage, they’re going to fight, they’re going to wish they were divorced, they’re going to wish they were with other partners. There might be affairs. Lots of people end up divorced. There’s the vast majority of us will never realize the ideal. Well, none of us will in totality. But that doesn’t mean we should sacrifice the ideal. What it means is that we should put forth the ideal forthrightly, but allow the necessary space for deviation from the ideal so that everybody can move forward despite the fact that the ideal has to rule. It’s a great framing. I just want to jump in there for one second to draw even one further distinction, if I may, is first is there’s the sense in which each of us falls short of our ideals, okay, both as individuals and even as a nation. I mean, you could extrapolate this to the American level and, you know, take the critique of America as a nation is that, well, America is hypocritical, right? It had nations, it set an emotion, but there were slaves on day one, ergo the ideals themselves are false. No, in fact, hypocrisy is probably pretty good evidence that you have ideals, right? There’s no sense in which, for example, the Chinese Communist Party could be called hypocritical. You can’t be called hypocritical if you actually are measured against fundamentally nihilism at your core. So idealism and the existence of ideals makes hypocrisy possible. We should be grateful when we see hypocrisy because then we know we have two things. We have both ideals and we have something that is real. And something that is real never matches or rarely ever matches the ideals. So there in a certain sense, we should be we should we should be vindicated. We should feel reassured that we’re doing something right because we have both ideals in reality. And that’s just true at the individual level of anybody who’s in a married relationship knows this. If they don’t admit it, they’re lying to you or they’re lying to themselves. It’s just it’s just truth. Okay. President Trump recently issued this warning from his Mar-a-Lago home. He said, and I quote, Our currency is crashing and will soon no longer be the world’s standard, which will be our greatest defeat, frankly, in 200 years. There are three reasons the central banks are dumping the U.S. dollar. Inflation, deficit spending and our insurmountable national debt. 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And there, I think some of this relates to not just a failure of an individual temporally over the course of a lifetime to depart from the ideal, but some ways in which a certain person cannot themselves be part of the ideal ever because their genetics are real. Right. The what brings us into this world is real. The gender, be it sexual orientation, be it other attributes that that make one successful or not in a system that’s set up in a certain way. There is literally a reality of permanent marginalization for some, even according to an ideally structured system. And so I think it’s important to take that seriously. But the problem with the modern left, the modern radical left, is it turns that exercise of interrogating the question of what we do at the margin and makes a whole new system out of it. Right. What began as a challenge to the system on behalf of the marginalized becomes the new system. That is the essence of the woke cancer. Actually, I didn’t mind it when it was an idea in the halls of a liberal arts academy to think about at least debate how it is we accommodate the people who are marginalized in a system that is still an ideal system. That’s an open conversation that at least under parameters of free speech, which, as you said, is an intermediating mechanism between kind of the creative liberals and the and the you know, what was the juxtaposition to creative? Conscientious conservatives. That’s great. But as long as you have free speech. But the problem is when that challenge to the system becomes the new system, we’re then heading to a very different place than even the ideal that pro marginal camp would have argued for. OK, well, so we can lay that out a little bit, too. What happened to Nicola Sturgeon is a perfect example of that. The Prime Minister of Scotland, who just resigned. Because here’s the problem with the fringe. OK, so the the ideal in the center is a unity. It’s a single thing. The fringe is a multiplicity. Now, the problem with the fringe is that because it’s a multiplicity, it can’t occupy the center without destroying the ideal. And that just brings the whole category to collapse. The fringe of the fringe will destroy the fringe. That’s right. So we can’t do without the ideal, even though I love I love I love what I mean. The fringe defines itself in relation to the ideal. Right. In a sense. Well, it has freedom. It also has freedom because exactly it’s like the freedom of being at the margin because because there’s many versions of being at the French kind of like that lost bat analogy. You send your sonar signal and bounces back and says this is where you are. It’s like planets orbiting the sun. All right. Once the sun’s gone, you’re just you’re you’re just going to be a whole new there’s going to be a whole new structure around you. That’s exactly what happens. And sometimes I think conservatives, that’s they’ll use this phrase. They’ll come to eat their own. Right. And I think that there’s a point to that. But it’s low resolution. I mean, the essence of what’s going on is actually what you described, which is that once you’ve destroyed or invaded the ideal itself, by definition, the being on the fringe is sort of nihilistic at its core. And so at that point, it’s a free for all, which is to say that, OK, well, you thought you were on the fringe as being gay. Well, guess what? You know, or even if you do the feminist, you ain’t seen nothing. Yeah, you ain’t seen nothing. You could see the feminist version of this to Title 9 women’s sports. You know, women are on the fringe. Well, then when that itself becomes the center of the story, you just wait till you just say that the men become the women that actually through the back door decimate the existence of women’s sports, not because they weren’t funded pre Title 9. But even after funding, the essence of it is gone if biological men are competing as women. Same thing with respect to the with respect to being gay. All of this time to sort of accept somebody who is attracted to someone of a different sex at birth by saying that the sex of the person you’re attracted to is hardwired at birth. Right. That was the premise of the gay rights movement. And I think there’s a lot of truth in it, too, is completely undercut by a new movement that says your sex itself is completely fluid over the course of your lifetime. Yeah. So it isn’t quite what some people will say was they will eventually eat their own. It’s the fact that they’ve itself lost the structure against which they at least had the liberty to be on the fringe of. Right. And so that’s not to say that we shouldn’t have conversations for disabled people or whatever. In the American Disabilities Act context, that’s what it comes up in a political context. There’s a whole discussion to be had about how we deal with this problem of the fringe, how we deal with accommodation against the backdrop of ideals. And I want to be really clear. I don’t dismiss that conversation. In fact, I think that should be the product of dialectic. I think free speech can actually be a mechanism for sorting out those kinds of questions, and I don’t reject their importance. But I think that what’s happened right now is the obsession with the fringe has has eviscerated the ideal itself, which leaves both those who espouse the ideals and even those who identified themselves as one time being a member of a fringe all worse off in the end. And that’s exactly where we are. And that’s a failure of the conservative movement. It’s a failure of the conservative movement. We can blame the people on the fringe for getting us there. They were just the agents in the pawns who moved it. But it’s the it’s the role of the conservative movement to keep that structure intact. And I think the absence of to make a case for it and to make a case for it. And so and so so then what happens in the evolution of time now? Right. So now we’re in a moment where the discussion that you and I have already are talking about, that ship has sailed. The structure itself is gone. What does that require? That’s what makes this so difficult. And I think that in some ways you’ve made a more powerful philosophical case for my candidacy that in my first week I have yet to do yet, which is that it requires defying the odds of having somebody who is both conscientious, conscientious conservative, as you noted, but who has the capacity for being visionary in having the vision of recreating that structure, that solar system around which the rest of the fringes can orbit. And that’s inherently an unlikelihood. But you said by the psychological nature of creativity and conscientiousness, those are not supposed to coincide. That’s what sets a really high bar. It’s also what calls me into this race, because it is what our moment demands, because we’re not starting from neutral territory. We’re starting from the state of of entropic chaos that you highlight in the desert. Not we’re not who are starting from being lost in the desert. And so thank you, because you have in a philosophical, in a deeply philosophically grounded way, made the case for my candidacy and why I am doing this, whether I will not, I will deliver or not the next year and a half remains to be told. But that’s at least the challenge I’m setting out to take on. And thank you for laying that out.